#4 Post-'92 Black/Korean LA rap

[On Music] ”Look at them flames lighting up the sky/Ain’t never seen fires shooting up so high“ — The Watts Prophets

On April 29, 1992, a jury acquitted four LAPD officers for the beating of Black motorist Rodney King. Upon hearing the verdict, South Central Los Angeles blew up in crowds of angry, aggrieved protestors who stormed the streets. The protestors moved north to Koreatown, home to the largest concentration of Koreans outside the peninsula, where relations between Black Angelenos and Korean Americans were fraught. The year prior, on March 16, 1991, Korean shop owner Soon Ja Du had shot and killed a fifteen-year-old girl, Latasha Harlins. Du had accused Harlins of shoplifting orange juice that cost $1.79, and Harlins died with $2 in her hands. Du was not given jail time, but five years of probation, community service, and a $500 fine.

Building on the sediment of existing tensions and racial injustice, angry protestors looted businesses and set fires in the city of Los Angeles. The LAPD did not respond to the scene or calls for help from civilians in K-town, and instead, cut off traffic to protect neighboring wealthy white neighborhoods, Beverly Hills and West Hollywood. The uprising lasted six days and resulted in $1 billion in damages.

While newspapers covered the riots as a Black-Korean conflict, in which the Korean immigrants were the sole victims of targeted violence, this was not only a Black-Korean event. One-third of those who were killed and one half of those who were arrested were Latino. Between 20 and 40 percent of the businesses that were looted were owned by Latinos. (Many of whom were recent immigrants who did not speak English.) And of course, mainstream newspapers neglected to introduce an important orchestrator in this destructive race drama: the LAPD.

A burning car at the intersection of Florence and Normandie avenues on April 29, 1992. (Credit: Steve Grayson/WireImage/Getty Images)

That was a bit of a history lesson (I can’t stress enough, though, it’s heavily incomplete) because time is evidence of how quickly we can forget. The 1992 LA riots occurred less than thirty years after another violent uprising, the Watts Rebellion in 1965. At a traffic stop on August 11, a white California Highway Patrol officer pulled over Marquette and Ronald Frye in a predominantly Black neighborhood. As it escalated into an urban riot fueled by repeated instances of police brutality against Black residents, the Watts riots culminated in 34 deaths (the majority of whom were Black protestors as “justifiable homicides”).

In a review of Mike Davis’s book Set the Night on Fire, Sean O’Hagan aptly expresses, “Los Angeles’s recent past […] makes America’s present seem somehow less surprising, but no less depressing.” Davis, in “The LA Inferno” writes how fuel for the 1992 Los Angeles uprising had been festering in unresolved problems of economic and class divide in the inner-city; with the rising capital of East Asian overseas investors and factory owners, and the growing powerlessness of disenfranchised citizens who found they would only be taken seriously when disrupting the streets.

Mike Davis talks about the historical record of economic changes, which certainly suggested a volatile, inevitable insurgence. But adding to the “official” historical archive, we can look to another source of reportage and record—of a different, cultural, musical kind—that also predicted an explosive uprising in Los Angeles.

LA “Gangsta” rap.

In 1980s Los Angeles—with its rich history as “the carceral city” of America, deindustrialization, and urban gang activity—young Black men remapped rap and hip-hop. It began with LA-based rappers like N.W.A. and Ice-T filling verses with images of street culture and gang and police violence, a way to express the ills of living in Los Angeles, which had been described as the “Black promised land” (even by the likes of W.E.B. Du Boise). If rap music was the only way that Black youth could be heard in the country, then why not use it to articulate truth?

N.W.A. Members DJ Yella, Dr Dre, The DOC, Ice Cube, Eazy-E and MC Ren pose with Laylaw during their Straight Outta Compton tour (Credit: Raymond Boyd/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

Eric Harvey for The Ringer writes about how some rappers contest the label of their music as “gangsta” rap. Their aesthetics might be part of the “gangsta” zeitgeist for some, but it’s reality for those who live it:

“I don’t know which writer is the one that called it ‘gangsta rap,” [Ice] Cube told one interviewer. “I still call it reality rap … to me, it means a network of information.” In his memoir, Ice-T called his music “street level journalism,” a description echoed by Eazy-E, who said N.W.A was “giving them reality. We’re like reporters.” Snoop Doggy Dogg agreed: “The situations I deal with on my albums is reality. The same things the news is bringing you,” he told Arsenio Hall in 1994. “But I’m bringing it to you live and direct like the news can’t give it to you, ’cause I know it.” [emphasis mine]

In this way, these rappers didn’t just seem themselves as cultural connoisseurs with street cred, but as on-the-ground reporters. They were the counterflow to the mainstream media reportage, “live and direct,” a testimony of the person living the news story rather than broadcasting from afar. Hip hop group, and early founders of the gangsta rap genre, N.W.A’s song “Fuck Tha Police” (1988) was written after the group members were forced to lay face down on the ground with police pointing guns to their heads. Who better to write a song about f—ing up law enforcement? The song “takes the form of a trial against the LAPD, with Dr. Dre, MC Ren, and Ice Cube as judge, court officer, and witness.”

Fuck the police comin' straight from the underground / A young n— got it bad 'cause I'm brown / And not the other color, so police think / They have the authority to kill a minority / Fuck that shit, 'cause I ain't the one / For a punk motherfucker with a badge and a gun / To be beating on and thrown in jail / We can go toe-to-toe in the middle of a cell / Fuckin' with me 'cause I'm a teenager

An inflammatory song about the group’s open hatred toward law enforcement led to a national effort to censor gangsta rap for inciting violence; the FBI even wrote a letter to the record label, Priority Records. This was a clear attempt to censor which truths would reach public ears, ensuring that images of police brutality and violence against Black communities would not embed themselves into the national narrative. Although, prescriptively and truthfully, they already were and would be.

After the murder of Latasha Harlins in 1992—and the subsequent trial that led to barely any punishment to her murderer—rappers responded to the tragedy of her death and the warranted change that never happened. 2Pac in “Hellrazor” (released posthumously in 1997) pleads: “Dear Lord if ya hear me, tell me why / Little girl like LaTasha, had to die / She never got to see the bullet, just heard the shot / Her little body couldn't take it, it shook and dropped / And when I saw it on the news how she bucked the girl, killed / Latasha / Now I'm screamin' fuck the world, in the end.”

The coining of “reality rap” is not limited to street or material culture, but also the interiority of the rapper. In “Hellrazor,” 2Pac expresses his helplessness to the growing list of Black victims to racist police and gun violence. But as much as rap is used as an expressive tool, it’s also a powerfully condemning one, where lyrics can rewrite one’s wishful version of justice when that justice has not been achieved. The mass circulation and consumption of rap allows a broad platform for the rapper to speak, and condemn, communities and systems larger than themselves. In Ice Cube’s “Black Korea” (1991), he targets the Korean shop owners acting on their racist stereotypes:

Every time I wanna go get a fuckin' brew / I gotta go down to the store with the two / Oriental one penny countin' motherfuckers / That make a nigga mad enough to cause a little ruckus […] Look, you little Chinese motherfucker / I ain't tryin' to steal none of this shit / Leave me alone! / (Mother fuck you, yo, yo, check it out) / So don't follow me up and down your market / Or your little chop suey ass'll be a target / Of a nationwide boycott / Juice with the people, that's what the boy got / So pay respect to the Black fist / Or we'll burn your store right down to a crisp / And then we'll see ya /'Cause you can't turn the ghetto into Black Korea.

Ice Cube writes about the prejudices of Korean grocers and liquor store owners in a frightfully knowing tone. He doesn’t distinguish Soon Ja Du from other Korean shop owners; to him, they are one-and-the-same in the way they follow Black customers around and suspect them of stealing. He directly addresses them, “Pay respect to the Black fist” and alludes that the destruction of Koreatown from the riots was a long-time coming revenge: “We’ll burn your store right down to a crisp.”

While Ice Cube’s rap did not incite the riots—although many retroactively accused him of it—”Black Korea” does show the undergird of emotions that the riots were inevitable symptoms of.

As part of his incendiary album “Death Certificate,” the song “Black Korea” is one of Cube’s many frustrated critiques. Gerrick D. Kennedy in The Los Angeles Times writes, “Everyone was subjected to Cube’s venom on the album: Whites, Korean grocers, police officers, gays, President George H.W. Bush, Jesse Jackson, and blacks.” There’s no wonder why Ice Cube was buried in backlash upon the release of the album, accused of being racist, homophobic, and antisemitic. This isn’t meant to judge or evaluate Ice Cube as a rapper or misguided person, it’s meant to show how the anger and reality he reproduces in his rap is another layer to the overlapping fabric of Black-Korean Angelenos.

In the new landscape of LA rap—scarred by fires, rebellion, and disenfranchised communities—rap became an opportunity for those Angelenos to voice their realities. And Los Angeles’ rap and hip hop scene, which was inextricably tied to Black culture, found new artists who would use it to articulate their own lived experiences.

Korean American rapper Dumbfoundead (née Jonathan Park) grew up in Koreatown. He was six years old during the 1992 uprising, an event that became permanently marked in Los Angeles’s collective Korean American memory that many of the older generations never recovered from. (I know because my parents haven’t, reminding me and my brother of the riots and looting every time we take the six-hour road trip down to LA.)

When Dumb was 14, he began freestyle rapping at the famous LA open-mic workshop, Project Blowed. In his early battles, Dumb remembers facing snickers of “Jackie Chan” and “Bruce Lee,” but he affirms, “I never looked at it like, ‘Oh shit, Asians have it the hardest.’ Everybody has their own struggles, that’s what battling as actually taught me the most, […] you realize that everybody has something they’re going to get attacked with.” Rap culture had and is always indebted to Black culture—which Dumb doesn’t forget to address in interviews about being an Asian American rapper.

And perhaps the reality rap that LA rap’s scene championed is also what drew other non-white Angelenos to it. In the aftermath of the uprising, the Associated Press reported:

“Many friends were like ‘forget rap music’ after the riots,” said Sonny Kang, 31, a Korean actor who stood guard outside Korean stores during the rioting. “Then when Dr. Dre dropped ‘The Chronic’ album in the summer of '92 it was like ‘Wow, this album is so good we can forgive anybody.’”

I can see why people would want to see music, specifically LA rap, as a potential site of healing for Black-Korean youth. We also can’t stress enough, though, that forgiveness must be mutual. While race relations cannot be remedied by a few rap songs and collaborations, they can be a gesture of historical remembrance, a bridge more than a further divide.

For rapper Dumbfoundead, his song “P.A.A.C.” (which stands for Protect At All Costs), alludes to the makeshift militia of armed Korean men—memorialized as the “rooftop Koreans”—who had lined the roofs of Koreatown buildings. With the police’s failure to ensure the safety of the community, these men decided to protect theirs at all costs. Dumb raps, “Protect all the youth / Don’t push they’ll shoot / Off of the juice '92 / Riots got gooks / On the top of the roof.”

On this freestyle verse for Power 106 FM, Dumb raps:

The riot baby, the fire raised me in ‘92. / All the homies told me, fuck the police, we should go and loot. / But my father told me, but if they get too close then you should shoot. / I was conflicted. / What’s a little soldier supposed to do?

In the child-version of himself, Dumbfoundead expresses the confusion of the “side” he’s supposed to take. Should he follows his homies, mostly Latinos in Koreatown, to the streets to protest racial profiling by the police? Or follow his father to defend his community’s businesses? The rap alludes to the futurity of the Korean diasporic memory: When the Korean American child inherits a generation’s trauma, then where do they go from there?

In 2015 Korean Canadian rapper Tablo and Brooklyn rapper Joey Bada$$ collaborated on a song called “Hood” that listeners have described as a “weird collaboration.” The song pays homage to their shared experiences in growing up in their communities, with hardships and family sacrifice.

There are differences, too. Tablo opens the verse with an image of the backbreaking work of his immigrant father and his family’s sacrifices for the new generations. Joey Bada$$ starts his verse honoring the “the dead and gone.” Maybe this

Nevertheless, when Tablo and Joey Bada$$ join in together for the hook, they do find contingent histories in their community being a source of pain and love: “Born from the same pain, shed alike tears, yeah / Some call it pain, we call it “사랑” [transl. love] man / Middle finger to the hate and the broken minds that can't relate, yeah.”

---

Additional readings xoxo:

• A Love Song for Latasha dir. Sophia Nahli Allison (2019)

• Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation by Jeff Chang (2005)

• City of Quartz by Mike Davis (1990)

• LA 92 dir. T. J. Martin, Daniel Lindsay (2017)

• Lynn Stransky’s penned “In the matter of Latasha Harlins: A Regrettably Late Apology” (2022)

• SA-I-GU dir. Dai Sil Kim-Gibson (1993)

• Your House Will Pay by Steph Cha (2019)