The “home” I intend to write about is nostalgia. I’m approaching the idea of thinking of “home” as a more metaphorical feeling as opposed to a place. This is because I experience “home” through things that have a past significance to me. When I experience the feeling of nostalgia I am transported to a place/time when I felt happy, safe, warm, and all those other feelings people associate “home” with.
So I came to the conclusion that the way I was going to connect this back to APIA pop culture through this feeling of nostalgia (and this is where it gets messy) is through music. Specifically, Iam focusing on a revival of a genre known as “Lo-Fi Hip Hop” or sometimes it’s referred to as “Chillhop”. I think the best definition of “Lo-Fi Hip Hop” is from Urban Dictionary which reads
“A subliminal sub-genre of conscious hip-hop that is characterized by the high-utilization of elements such as introspection and seeks to engage with elements of human emotion. Elements such as high distortion as well as mellow sounds are more prominent features of any lofi hip-hop soundtrack.”
There’s two reasons why I decided to settle on this topic: 1) it’s basically an analogy for how I identify culturally. I come from both African American and Asian American descent and I consider “lo-fi hiphop” as intersection between those two cultural identities and 2) because I believe the revival of this genre can be linked to Asians and Asian Americans.
My objective/purpose for this creative essay is to be able to bring people into my experience as someone who is APIA and how that connects to my chosen topic. I hope to tell a story about my life, and my identity, and this history of “lo-fi hip hop” and it’s connection to the Asian American experience. I hope my readers will come out of this having a better understanding of the APIA experience and how complex it is and how the “hybridity” of culture doesn’t just exist in a piece of media but also in the body and the soul.
My guiding research questions for this essay are along the lines of: how did the origins of hip hop influence it’s newest incarnation, “lo-fi hip hop”? What is the extent of the overlap between African American culture and Asian American culture? The extent of Asian/Asian American influence on “lo-fi hip hop”? Is “lo-fi hip hop” pop culture and what other forms of pop culture influence it? And I’m sure as I research more of this, more questions will arise.
In terms of how I plan to structure this essay I want to have pieces of scenes from my life incorporated with the research that I do for this topic. Before I enter a specific topic within the essay, I hope to be able to start with a personal anecdote (written creatively, “Tell It Slant” style) and use that to transition into the more research-based and analytical parts of the essay. I hope at some point I will find some common thread that links it all together. I know that sounds abstract but I think it’s something only I can feel and it would help me feel satisfied in my completion of this essay. I hope to use the sources I find to bolster my essay but also give me a more in-depth look at my experiences and my topic.