Category Archives: music

School district officials object to valedictorians speaking Vietnamese

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I know I still need to blog the JANM conference, but I had to write about this: Officials at a Louisiana school district are trying to prevent students from including foreign languages in their graduation speeches.

The brouhaha was sparked by Vietnamese American cousins Hue and Cindy Vo, who were co-valedictorians at Ellender High School’s graduation in Houma, Louisiana. Cindy Vo spoke one sentence in Vietnamese dedicated to her parents, who don’t speak fluent English, from the podium.

“Co len minh khong bang ai, co suon khong ai bang minh,” she said, and explained to her English-speaking classmates that the sentence roughly translates as “always be your own person.”

Her cousin Hue gave more of her speech in Vietnamese, but again, the point was to pay homage to her parents.

At least one member of Terrebonne Parish school district, Rickie Pitre, took offense to the Vietnamese passages, and he says that all graduation speeches should be given in solely English, or that passages can be paraphrased in foreign languages — but only after they’re spoken first in English.
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A musical perfect storm: U2 live at Red Rocks

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I know exactly where I was the night of June 5, 1983: I was freezing my butt off, soaked to the bone but ignoring my discomfort because I was in musical heaven, surrounded by huge sandstone rocks on both sides, a stormy sky above and a hungry young band called U2 just hitting its stride in front of me, its members playing their hearts out despite the crappy weather.

That concert was captured on an EP (for you post-CD fans, “extended play” releases were vinyl records with fewer songs than a full album but more than just a single with a flipside) and a video, both titled “Under a Blood Red Sky.” The audio recording was actually a compilation of tracks recorded at Red Rocks and elsewhere during the same tour; the video was all filmed in Denver.

The combination of the two established U2 as world-class big-time rock stars, not the scrappy new-wavers who played clubs and small theaters. MTV loved the energetic performances amidst the dramatic, almost otherworldly, setting. Radio stations caught on to the band’s talent, and U2 hit their stride. In the years since, the concert was hailed as a seminal moment not just for U2, but for pop music: Rolling Stone magazine named it to its list of the “50 Moments that Changed Rock and Roll.” Continue reading →

Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, the Sitar, George Harrison, The Concert for Bangladesh and Me

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I’m a born-again Asian American. Most of my life, I was oblivious to my rich roots and Japanese heritage. I was a banana — yellow on the outside, white on the inside. So probably more than some Asian Americans, I like the idea that May is officially “Asian Pacific American Heritage Month” in the U.S.

There’s a part of me that finds it irritating that APAs get noticed once a year and we’re practically invisible the other 11 months. But I’m glad that former transportation secretary Norm Mineta drafted the legislation to establish this month-long celebration when he was a Congressman. I’m pretty immersed in the APA community now — not just Japanese American, but also the dozens of other Asian ethnic cultures and how they’ve evolved as they’ve become established in the U.S.

APA Heritage Month makes me think of times when I was less connected to my own roots, and not interested in the vast wealth of culture throughout Asia.

When I was a kid, I was into Japanese and Chinese (or more correctly, Chinese American) food. That’s what my family ate when we weren’t eating hamburgers, steak, spaghetti and pizza. This was before I developed my voracious appetite for Indian, Vietnamese, Korean, Cambodian, Singaporean and Filipino food. It was pre-dim sum. And, it was way before I grew to appreciate all kinds of Asian music, both traditional and Asian American.

(Note: For those of you non-Asians who are Asiaphiles, I want to make the distinction that though we Asian Americans appreciate our heritage and understand how we’re steeped in traditional values, we’re all about the mix of being both Asian and American, or perhaps more accurately, being Asian in America.)

One very clear example of my growth and awareness of Asian culture today as opposed to when I was younger, is my appreciation for one particular track in George Harrison’s landmark recording, “The Concert for Bangladesh.” The track is the Indian music performance, “Bangla Dhun,” by the sitar master Ravi Shankar. Continue reading →

Listening to oldies when they were new

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“Time-shifting” is a new media term for the ability of technology to allow us to consume media — whether it’s video or music or text — at any time. The most obvious example is people recording TV shows on the DVRs to watch later, at their leisure.

You can hear a teleseminar via podcast any time after the fact (for instance, on a plane flight to SF, which is when I listened to a class on my iPod).

And this morning, I’ve been both time- and PLACE-shifting, by listening to an archival re-broadcast of Casey Kasem‘s “American Top 40” radio show, which was originally broadcast on April 14, 1973. It’s kind of spooky because it’s very possible I was listening to Casey Kasem’s affable voice that Sunday morning, and yet here I am, “tuned in” to hear the show all over again, in a San Francisco hotel room but hearing a stream from Denver oldies radio station KOOL105. All I need is the newscasts and commercials of the time, and I’m a 15-year-old kid all over again. Continue reading →

Cambodian pop meets psychedelic rock in Dengue Fever, coming to Denver

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Around the turn of the century (man, it’s still weird to use that phrase in 2008), I started reading about a bootlegged series of cassettes making the rounds, of Cambodian rock and soul recordings from before that country’s dark, post-Vietnam war years under despot Pol Pot. These recordings, I read, were all that were left, like audio archeology, of musicians who had absorbed Western pop and soul and rock during the 1960s and early ’70s, and both covered those songs enthusiastically in their own language, Khmer, and wrote original songs using those sonic elements as their foundation. These musicians had all been slaughtered in Pol Pot’s killing fields, the stories went, and these three-decades-old echoes were all that was left of that creative explosion.

I finally got a hold of some of these recordings (some are now available via legitimate avenues including Amazon.com, no doubt cleaned up and sounding much better than many of the tinny recordings I got). They were exciting, and fun to listen to, but spooky when you realized all the artists were killed within a few years of the recording sessions. Sometimes they were faithful recreations of familiar songs — until the lyrics came in. But whether they were covers or original, the playing and singing had an irrepressible and irresistible spark.

Those recordings were enough to inspire a pair of California brothers to pursue the sound and make their own fresh echoes of long -ago Cambodian pop in a unique group called Dengue Fever, which has over the years evolved from re-creating the sound of the old Cambodian scene to integrating those sounds in a fresh take on world pop. Continue reading →