of a departure. "You get to a certain age where you think you've said enough about your experience," Chee tells me in our interview, explaining how his work with incarcerated youth in Los Angeles served as the inspiration for each track. Chee was gracious enough to talk with SAADA about the process of putting together the album, his work in L.A., and the connections he saw between the U.S. and South Asia when he first arrived in the 90s.MD: I thought I'd start with your latest album. What inspired The Beautiful, Rowdy Prisoners?
CM: I've been doing youth work for the last 4-5 years, mainly in juvenile detention camps and in South Los Angeles high schools. After these daily writing workshops and numerous retreats, I would find myself coming home and processing what I saw, heard, and felt. It was an organic thing that developed from a few songs into a full-blown album. I was facilitating a lot of workshops and having profound experiences with these young people. The album started as an exercise for me to better understand myself, and the circumstances that push entire communities towards the margins of society. This album was inspired by the youth I’ve known.
My producer Scott had been bugging me to work on a more narrative-based album for some time. It just started out as a song or two, and I thought, maybe I can do an album that is not about me, per se.
MD: I'd also noticed that this album is especially narrative-based, much more than the earlier records. I wondered if the songs were sequenced in a way to reflex that broad life arc. Did your interest in fiction and narrative worked its way into the album?
CM: I think it did, man. I don't know how conscious I was of it, but I'm sure it did. The album starts off with Teju Cole reading a passage from his book Open City, and I felt that deeply—that passage.
I also wanted to find a way to reflect that continuum, where you start off with big picture things and then delve into the nitty gritty of what it's like on the ground on a daily basis. I look at fiction the same way; there's an arc there. I didn't want to leave the listener hanging, or myself hanging. How do you close out an album? How do you follow a thread? That's something I find to be true of about my favorite albums and books. How they become self-contained universes. That was informing how I wanted the record to live.
MD: Going back to the question about narrative and storytelling, you mentioned how the album begins with a quote from Teju Cole. Even on the last record, there's Amitava Kumar's narration. It seems like you're pulling together all kinds of genres of literature into your music.
CM: Yeah. Hip hop is about sampling different sources. You know, you take a snare from this record, you take a sample from there,
you borrow an idea from there and you make something new. It’s not just literary ideas but also musical ideas that you want to include—certain flows, structure, etc. But also it’s about being in conversation with artists and their art. This isn’t done just to do it. I try and take great care with what I want to include—Amitava and Teju are actively engaged with the world and in doing their own work, they are engaging me with their art and it inspires me to do the same.
I think it's only natural in art to dialogue with artists you admire. As I get older, I discover new things that I want to know more about. This discovery process becomes a part of own work as a constant process of exploration and understanding. It is through writing that I learn. When I read other work I try and really immerse myself in it—for things I can learn about myself.
MD: You're working on a novel. Is it a different process than putting together an album for you?
CM: There are limitations of what I can do as an emcee. You have a certain amount of space and time to tell a story in rhyme. Fiction allows me to tease out certain experiences that I don't know yet how to translate into rap music. I grew up in India. I personally don’t know if I could make a rap album that is about my childhood experiences. My American narrative is so deeply rooted in hip hop culture, but then there are those early years in India—before I knew hip hop existed and for me to explore that requires me to do a different sort of work I think. And it requires a different form.
MD: So the novel starts from your childhood experiences?
CM: Well, yes. I draw from autobiographical experiences. I think all first time fiction writers probably do that. The book is rooted in India, at the tail end of the License Raj.
MD: I was really interested in the connections you were drawing in your music between America and South Asia. In an essay you wrote a while back for The Ellis Report, you'd mentioned how you were drawing connections between the racism you saw in the States and the larger forces of colonialism, or even between race riots and communal riots. Are those connections you continue to see?
CM: Many people not familiar with India think that is a homogenous society, and it's not, as you know. Before I moved America, I had a similar vision of the US as only peopled with White folks and I held all these other fantastical images of the place that were informed via magazines and things I’d seen.
The Rodney King riots happened soon after I moved and I remember we had a walkout in my school. Folks were really surprised by this, by the walkout, and the stuff that ensued with the riots. I wasn't shocked by it. Only later did I realize how big a deal in American race relations the riots were, at least for my generation. For me, seeing sectarian violence was just a part of Indian life. It happened all the time. There'd be a strike, there'd be Hindu-Muslim violence, even the stuff around Indira Gandhi's death, the anti-Sikh violence that ensued. So the LA riots felt familiar to me. I wasn't shocked by it.
It was really through hip hop music that I was getting a sense of the racial and socioeconomic hierarchies in the country. So I did see a lot of parallels, but i probably wasn't able to articulate them at the time. It made me think that the Black experience might not be so different than that of a marginalized people in India. I don't know if that answers the question?
MD: Totally. It seems like what you're saying is that hip hop gave you the language to make a certain sense of racism in the States for the first time. Who were some of those artists that inspired you during that time?
CM: Ice Cube was one. Public Enemy. There was a rapper named Paris in the Bay Area. The Coup. Their raps weren’t just about bragging, or girls, there was a certain urgency of delivering history on those records. I soaked it in. I really didn't even understand the Black and White racial binary, because I grew up in a multicultural neighborhood. There were Black kids, Latino kids, a few Asian kids. I had no sense of American history at that point. So even with slavery, I didn't really understand it. I knew about it, but I didn't understand its legacy. Only after I started listening to hip hop, I was making the connections between what some of these guys were talking about. This was deep, this was some shit, and this is the country I stepped into. So it became important to me to think about what this history meant for me as an immigrant. I wasn't Black, I wasn't White. I certainly related more to Black culture than mainstream White culture.
MD: It's interesting, you know. I was interviewing Hari Kondabolu for SAADA, and he said how it was only after listening to Paul Mooney that he began to discover his own voice. It seems like for a lot of us, we gravitated towards African American art forms to make sense of South Asian American identity, even though, obviously, those experiences are very different. I don't know if that makes sense.
CM: No, it really does. In America, we're dealing with what was and probably still is, to some extent, a Black-White binary. So, how do you articulate a narrative of you and your community that fits into the larger American narrative? For me, it's impossible not to think about the African American experience and the arts as an entry point.
I mean, we're still a young community in this country. Our history is very, very different than the history of the African Americans. But I also recognize that I benefited directly from that history, and people in my community have as well. So I feel an allegiance to that experience and community.
MD: Are there artists who are coming out now who inspired you?
CM: Actually it's probably a lot of young kids I work with. I'm really inspired by them. There's just a level of honesty and ability to dive into their own wounds and trauma, and to be able to express it that encourages me to keep going. You get to a certain age where you think you've said enough about your experience. Working with them is a reminder there are still stories to be told.
MD: Have the kids you worked with listened to the album?
CM: Yeah, a lot of them have. A lot of them have. It's amazing to see their feedback. They really appreciate it and they see themselves reflected in my work. That's part of my work—to be a mirror. I have to share myself, and part of that means sharing my own story, my music, my writing. They've been a part of this process for the last 4-5 years. They were a huge part of it.
Manan Desai teaches at Syracuse University and serves on the Board of Directors for the South Asian American Digital Archive.
