Next Great Thing

Seattle’s Asian American Hip-Hop Duo Earn East Coast Cred at CMJ

At the Tuesday night opening party for the CMJ Music Marathon, Blue Scholars and Q-Tip (along with Eldar) defiantly asserted that hip-hop is definitely not dead. It might be “malnourished and underfed,” Blue Scholars rapped–but that night, they revitalized hip-hop with the voices and power of “everyday people,” presenting an alternative to the hip-hop sanctioned by corporate media that often muffles those voices.

But wait– you’re probably wondering who the Blue Scholars are and why they even deserve to be discussed in the same paragraph as Q-Tip (like much of the audience).

In short: Blue Scholars is a duo (MC Geo and DJ Sabzi) that has won hip-hop hero status and cult-like admiration in both the Seattle music scene and national Asian American youth circles. The combination of rhymes–Geo’s nuanced socio-political commentary, poetic intensity, contained fury, and odes to community empowerment, and beats–Sabzi’s perfect complement to the rhymes that make you move your body, have propelled many APA students to a deeper, more passionate sense of political consciousness. Students also admire Geo and Sabzi for their experiences as intellectuals, community and youth organizers, and sons of working-class immigrants. The blend of all these factors in a soul-stirring music has helped Blue Scholars organically build a fan base over their past three album releases, all without signing to a huge label. (They started their own instead: Mass Line Media).

Yet they are still relatively obscure on the East Coast, having just played their first show in New York City this past year. Opening for Q-Tip on Tuesday night presented a significant test: would Blue Scholars prove themselves as worthy torch-bearers of alternative hip-hop, as the legacies of legends like A Tribe Called Quest? Judging from the reaction of the audience, which was won over from skeptical aloofness to a mood of simmering and palpable energy, they succeeses. They performed a selection from all three albums, covering a broad range of topics: those repping a raucous pride in their native Seattle (”The Ave.,” “North by Northwest”), to the contemplative portraits of everyday struggle and resistance of working class people (”No Rest for the Weary,” “Joe Metro”) to the angry, collective-fists-in-the-air anthems of resistance (”Southside Revival,” “The Long March.”)

After an interlude during which a DJ spun classic hip-hop, Q-Tip took the stage and kept the energy all the way up. Backed by a live band and DJ Scratch, he pleased an ecstatic crowd by performing Tribe favorites, but the most memorable part of the night was when he stopped “Check the Rhime” and brought up a female fan from the audience to rap Phife’s part. After asking if she could “get sexy wit it,” the fan tore up the crowd with her perfect recitation and injection of her own rhymes–a perfect encapsulation of the voice of the people being spoken and heard that night.

Although hip-hop’s promise of liberation is certainly complicated by the politics of consumption, culture, race, and class, Blue Scholars and Q-Tip gave us a reason Tuesday night to be justified in optimism, both about the state of hip-hop and the state of political consciousness. That such an eclectic crowd made up of all different ages and races presumably found their own voice amplified by the music on stage is certainly a sign that hip-hop continues to make “fire for the people.”

-Contributed by May Lin