Faithless
03-11-2005, 10:23 AM
http://www.thestar.com/images/thestar/img/050227_akenz_nguyen_250.jpg
Rapping against Jane-Finch's bum rap (http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1109373907103&call_pageid=970599119419)
Feb. 27, 2005. 01:00 AM * JORDAN HEATH-RAWLINGS * STAFF REPORTER
Paul Nguyen decided it was time to do something about his neighbourhood's image when his new girlfriend refused to meet him near his home.
"You hear them say, `I don't want to come to Jane and Finch to meet you. It's so dangerous,'" the 24-year-old sighs. "It gets a bum rap, honestly. I hate explaining to people that it's not that dangerous."
If that's the case, he's got an odd way of dealing with it.
What Nguyen — a graduate of York University's film program and a 15-year resident of the Jane-Finch neighbourhood — did is both contradictory and controversial: He made a hip-hop video that glorifies racial street violence in the area.
Ten months later, the video for "You Got Beef," by local Vietnamese-Canadian rapper Chuckie Akenz, is a bona fide Internet hit, and Nguyen's website, jane-finch.com, is reaping the rewards, soaring from 30 hits a day to 3,000.
But Akenz and Co. could be inviting trouble with a video that depicts a racial dispute between the Vietnamese and two heavily outnumbered African-Americans. The scenes, filmed last March, are eerily similar to a dispute over a basketball and cellphone calls to organize retribution that Filipino youths in Scarborough described as leading to the police bullet that killed 17-year-old Jeffrey Reodica in May.
While some of the reaction on the more than 100 online message boards featuring discussions of Chuckie's raps has been positive — "That was a beautiful show of Unity!" wrote one Vietnamese-American of the swarming of two black men by Chuckie's Vietnamese crew in the video — the fine line Akenz and Nguyen are walking between street credibility and real life drama worries many.
"I don't see how this video could help the community at all, all this violence over a basketball?" asks ChineseMan, posting on a forum in Germany. "So what's next — if some guy steps on your shoes you shoot him in the head?"
Akenz can't resist posting occasionally about his motives.
"In regards to the people who (are) calling me a racist," he wrote recently, "I am anything but that. A lot of my homies are black fellas. All that racist s--- was jokes.
"I live at Jane and Finch, which is a black community ... If I was really racist, I would have a bullet in my head."
Nguyen, meanwhile, laughs at hints of racial undertones. His video short won the MuchMusic Stop Racism competition in 1999, and he now wants to get Akenz performing at local schools to put out an anti-racist, stay-in-school message.
But if it takes gangstas, guns and violence to draw attention to their neighbourhood and the cultures that live there, that's fine with Nguyen and Akenz.
"I was always interested in the history of (this neighbourhood), and one day I decided to Google Jane and Finch and I realized there's nothing there except for the crime you get in the news," says Nguyen. "I wanted to make it into a resource for Jane and Finch people to learn about their area."
When visitors start to surf the site, Nguyen figures, they'll stumble on the history of the neighbourhood, drawings, and more than a dozen music videos from others in the community.
Those videos, while mostly in the hip-hop and R&B genre, run the gamut from sensitive odes about growing up poor in housing projects to vitriolic rhymes about racial violence and confrontations with police.
But it's "You Got Beef" that provides an unsettling glimpse into the most pervasive culture in one of Toronto's most notorious neighbourhoods.
"In every different school/Or place for jitz and pool/Don't f--- with the Gooks/That's the number one rule," Akenz rhymes in the song. (Jitz is foosball.) He wrote it at 16, he says, after watching Vietnamese youths being picked on because of what he says was a perceived lack of toughness and solidarity.
The rapper has lived in the Jane and Finch area for all 18 years of his life. He has grown from a boy who struggled with a broken home and friends who were into gang activity, into a performer with 8,000 CD sales.
"The song is all about Vietnamese pride," says Akenz. "We used to get picked on all the time, Vietnamese youths as a whole, because we never really had a culture that we could get with."
Nguyen echoes that comment, saying that, in an area where hip-hop is the predominant culture, anyone who isn't a part of that ends up marginalized, regardless of his or her race.
Meanwhile, Nguyen is quickly making plans to capitalize on the video's popularity. He's busy trying to line up financing to shoot a feature film, You Got Beef: The Movie, with Akenz and his group, V-Unit.
He's also writing and interviewing as fast as he can to get more content onto the website, as well as shooting a documentary about a Vietnamese seniors group that he hopes to sell to the Life network.
He and Akenz also plan to start making "You Got Beef: Part 2," as soon as the snow melts. They tried to film it last fall but gave up after having their shoots stopped twice by the police, who, on the second visit, confiscated the replica weapons they were using as props.
"You don't even want to talk to me about the police, man," Akenz laughs.
"The cops always assume the worst. They see a gang of guys, they don't even want us to explain what's going on."
Rapping against Jane-Finch's bum rap (http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1109373907103&call_pageid=970599119419)
Feb. 27, 2005. 01:00 AM * JORDAN HEATH-RAWLINGS * STAFF REPORTER
Paul Nguyen decided it was time to do something about his neighbourhood's image when his new girlfriend refused to meet him near his home.
"You hear them say, `I don't want to come to Jane and Finch to meet you. It's so dangerous,'" the 24-year-old sighs. "It gets a bum rap, honestly. I hate explaining to people that it's not that dangerous."
If that's the case, he's got an odd way of dealing with it.
What Nguyen — a graduate of York University's film program and a 15-year resident of the Jane-Finch neighbourhood — did is both contradictory and controversial: He made a hip-hop video that glorifies racial street violence in the area.
Ten months later, the video for "You Got Beef," by local Vietnamese-Canadian rapper Chuckie Akenz, is a bona fide Internet hit, and Nguyen's website, jane-finch.com, is reaping the rewards, soaring from 30 hits a day to 3,000.
But Akenz and Co. could be inviting trouble with a video that depicts a racial dispute between the Vietnamese and two heavily outnumbered African-Americans. The scenes, filmed last March, are eerily similar to a dispute over a basketball and cellphone calls to organize retribution that Filipino youths in Scarborough described as leading to the police bullet that killed 17-year-old Jeffrey Reodica in May.
While some of the reaction on the more than 100 online message boards featuring discussions of Chuckie's raps has been positive — "That was a beautiful show of Unity!" wrote one Vietnamese-American of the swarming of two black men by Chuckie's Vietnamese crew in the video — the fine line Akenz and Nguyen are walking between street credibility and real life drama worries many.
"I don't see how this video could help the community at all, all this violence over a basketball?" asks ChineseMan, posting on a forum in Germany. "So what's next — if some guy steps on your shoes you shoot him in the head?"
Akenz can't resist posting occasionally about his motives.
"In regards to the people who (are) calling me a racist," he wrote recently, "I am anything but that. A lot of my homies are black fellas. All that racist s--- was jokes.
"I live at Jane and Finch, which is a black community ... If I was really racist, I would have a bullet in my head."
Nguyen, meanwhile, laughs at hints of racial undertones. His video short won the MuchMusic Stop Racism competition in 1999, and he now wants to get Akenz performing at local schools to put out an anti-racist, stay-in-school message.
But if it takes gangstas, guns and violence to draw attention to their neighbourhood and the cultures that live there, that's fine with Nguyen and Akenz.
"I was always interested in the history of (this neighbourhood), and one day I decided to Google Jane and Finch and I realized there's nothing there except for the crime you get in the news," says Nguyen. "I wanted to make it into a resource for Jane and Finch people to learn about their area."
When visitors start to surf the site, Nguyen figures, they'll stumble on the history of the neighbourhood, drawings, and more than a dozen music videos from others in the community.
Those videos, while mostly in the hip-hop and R&B genre, run the gamut from sensitive odes about growing up poor in housing projects to vitriolic rhymes about racial violence and confrontations with police.
But it's "You Got Beef" that provides an unsettling glimpse into the most pervasive culture in one of Toronto's most notorious neighbourhoods.
"In every different school/Or place for jitz and pool/Don't f--- with the Gooks/That's the number one rule," Akenz rhymes in the song. (Jitz is foosball.) He wrote it at 16, he says, after watching Vietnamese youths being picked on because of what he says was a perceived lack of toughness and solidarity.
The rapper has lived in the Jane and Finch area for all 18 years of his life. He has grown from a boy who struggled with a broken home and friends who were into gang activity, into a performer with 8,000 CD sales.
"The song is all about Vietnamese pride," says Akenz. "We used to get picked on all the time, Vietnamese youths as a whole, because we never really had a culture that we could get with."
Nguyen echoes that comment, saying that, in an area where hip-hop is the predominant culture, anyone who isn't a part of that ends up marginalized, regardless of his or her race.
Meanwhile, Nguyen is quickly making plans to capitalize on the video's popularity. He's busy trying to line up financing to shoot a feature film, You Got Beef: The Movie, with Akenz and his group, V-Unit.
He's also writing and interviewing as fast as he can to get more content onto the website, as well as shooting a documentary about a Vietnamese seniors group that he hopes to sell to the Life network.
He and Akenz also plan to start making "You Got Beef: Part 2," as soon as the snow melts. They tried to film it last fall but gave up after having their shoots stopped twice by the police, who, on the second visit, confiscated the replica weapons they were using as props.
"You don't even want to talk to me about the police, man," Akenz laughs.
"The cops always assume the worst. They see a gang of guys, they don't even want us to explain what's going on."