“When you’re a figurehead for something like this, you receive all the criticism.” “It was so much work, it was so much stress,” she says. “I’m very much aware of my Korean background, and I embrace it in my music,” he says.Ĭhoi acknowledges that launching the AIR tour hasn’t been easy. Likewise, Park’s songs often address issues related to his ethnicity, including racism on “From Korea” (“my eyes are small, but your eyes are closed”) and his family’s reaction to an interracial romance on “Korea’s So Far Away” (“she’s not so different from you”). “Until people are fine about the Asian-American voice, I do feel a responsibility to bring it into the forefront,” she says. “We’re not exactly Asian, and many of us have experienced racism covertly or overtly, where we don’t feel American.”Ĭhoi grapples with her background, identity and place in society in her music, reflecting on the quiet strength of the women in her family on “Coarse” and protesting having to listen to I’m-not-racist declarations on “The End,” a song from her forthcoming CD. I’ve seen it with friends - the parents are constantly on them every day, when are you going to go back to college, when are you going to get a real job.”Ĭhoi says that the pressure within the Asian-American community to succeed - which is defined in part by assimilation into white America - also makes it difficult for young people to define their cultural identity. The kids are living their dreams for them. Whereas for the parents of white America, rock is in their blood. My parent’s generation - though my mom did see the Beatles, which amazes me - they didn’t grow up listening to rock music. “There’s not support from parents in choosing that profession,” Park confirms. “Back then, it wasn’t respectable for a Korean woman to be into that kind of music.” “She thought it was really impure and I was dirtying my talents as a classical pianist,” Choi explains. She would destroy Choi’s homemade tapes of her songs and became angry if her daughter played pop songs on the piano at home. For Choi, the Chicago-born daughter of Korean immigrants, her childhood love of pop music put her at odds with her mother, a piano teacher who wanted her to play classical piano.
The scarcity of role models adds to the discouragement that many Asian-Americans experience from their own families. Local acts Please Please Wait, an electronic pop duo, and Wanamaker, a spinoff of the female rock group Kim, will play in the Chicago show. Choi will be joined by singer-songwriter and Asian Man Records label owner Michael Park at all the dates, and an assortment of other artists also will perform at each stop. Emulating the do-it-yourself methods of her hero, folk-punk singer Ani DiFranco, Choi initiated the AIR tour and has self-released three records, including her most recent CD, “Postcard Stories,” a collection of alternately dreamy and driving piano pop.Īfter an inaugural tour last August and a second jaunt this spring, the third AIR tour begins Saturday at the Fireside Bowl and continues for two weeks on the East and West Coasts. “The Asians in Rock tour is trying to find that voice and create that community where it’s OK for people to make rock music and to make loud music,” the 26-year-old Choi says. The tour aims to broaden the image of Asian-Americans beyond the perception as what Choi calls the “silent model minority” and encourage young Asian-Americans to express themselves in ways that are true to their heritage and culture. This sort of resistance to the idea of Asians playing rock ‘n’ roll is what motivated Choi to organize the Asians in Rock tour in the first place.
And when Choi was assembling the first Asians in Rock tour last year, a booking agent told her that the concept didn’t have enough appeal to fill her San Francisco Bay area club - despite the region’s large Asian-American population. When record companies began wooing her while she was attending the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, one label representative suggested she not use her last name because it sounded too ethnic. When Jenny Choi first began performing her songs in Chicago coffeehouses in her early teens, she hid what she was doing from her parents because she knew they’d disapprove.