Got Rice?

I was culling my digital music collection on a solo Friday night which probably influenced which songs and genres got cut. That is, I was veering towards R&B and loud rock music. I gave my last few ‘rave’ songs a listen and ditched them all.

Then I came across Got Rice?, that MP3 that spread like wildfire in the Asian-American online community in the late 90’s (1998?). Omigosh, all those memories of AsianAvenue.com come back in a rush. I looked up the song on Wikipedia because that was my source for verifying my music collection information, but came away dissatisfied with their entry: who wrote the song and when was it released?

So I had to go to the general Google search results and get exposed to stuck-in-the-90s/early-2000s “pimpin'” websites. The 1:43 rap tune to the same melody as Tupac’s 1998 “Changes” is penned and rapped by an anonymous rapped going by “Azn Pride”. A few suggestions that Jin was behind it are quickly snuffed out by people in the know it’s not at all his sound or musical standard.

I like to think the song thus belongs to the 90’s generation Asian-Americans, my coming-of-age years. The activism that propagated down to little people like us and paved a new way to the world where the new generation do not have to live so self-consciously.

[wpaudio src=”http://www.catchstargirl.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/rap-Asian-pride-Got-rice.mp3″ alt=”Got Rice? MP3″ text=”Azn Pride – Got Rice? (1998)” dl=”0″]