The Fil-Am Invasion

{mosimage} A pimpin’ young MC wearing a black hoodie and jeans hanging so low he could get a citation lies in wait just outside the door of Zentro Bistro, a homogenized faux-Parisian club and restaurant just across the street from the garish fete of multiethnic consumerism known as Los Cerritos Center. Big bass whumps shake the glass of the flossy suburban establishment in middle-class Cerritos, CA. Mixtape in pocket, the MC scans the throngs of Filipino-American hip-hoppers bottlenecked at the entrance.

Once you understand the history and geography of the movement, it makes sense for a young blood to prowl Zentro, where the elite old guard of Fil-Am hip-hop are known to gather. Just down the street is the mecca, Stacks the Vinyl Authority, owned and operated by one of the founding fathers: DJ Icy Ice.

The young man lying in wait is an upstart representing from Long Beach called Gee Cee. He fashions himself one of the new faces of the movement. The logo on his MySpace page — an interlocked G and C with the G backward — looks like the emblem for the House of Chanel. Gee Cee is a stalker. He’s waiting for a window of opportunity, which is about to open as DJ Rhettmatic — an OG on the scene who appears to have commandeered the chin whiskers of a Tibetan monk — emerges from Zentro. Gee Cee tentatively approaches Rhettmatic. Submissively shoe gazing until the moment is right, he then moves in for the kill and slips him the disc, which Rhettmatic semireluctantly pockets.

It’s a scenario almost as old as the Furious Five’s “The Message” itself.

{mosimage}A stone’s throw from Zentro Bistro in a nondescript strip mall, Stacks is a sort of unofficial hub of the scene. Everybody knows Stacks. Inside, kids flip through vintage vinyl and new releases in fresh fits (clothes). Turntables sit on a raised platform in front of a graf mural. Though the next generation of the scene may express itself in clubs in Hollywood on weekend nights, the spark of the flame is still burning in the stacks at Stacks, where demigod DJ and Stacks proprietor Icy Ice watches over his flock.

Like a lot of legendary underground, Fil-Am DJ types, Icy Ice, a.k.a. Isaiah Dacio, is an enterprising archivist, a historian and a hip-hop aficionado. He’s a serious 30-something operator in a graffiti T-shirt and jeans. Sidekick in one hand, mouse in the other, he sits in front of the computer, expediting. He picked Cerritos for Stacks back in the day because it was centrally located to Fil-Am hubs such as Carson and Long Beach. Before Stacks you had to drive to downtown Los Angeles to find a good record store.

Icy Ice breaks down the rise of Fil-Am hip-hop like this: As hip-hop migrated west in the ’80s, Filipinos in California already had a thriving funk- and R&B-based mobile-DJ scene going on. With infrastructure intact, the Fil-Am party scene moved out of the garage and into the clubs in L.A., San Francisco and Southern California, where the voice of disenfranchised ethnic America resonated with these first-generation Cali teens — who, though many in number, felt outside the American mainstream. The time was right for a full-scale teenage hip-hop revolt. Fil-Am DJ crews emerged all over Southern California.

{mosimage}Icy Ice has been around since the scene fomented at hotels in and around L.A. He was still a kid when emerging club promoters first began carving out a very specific niche in the already fertile Filipino party scene. Promoters with now infamous names like United Kingdom, Legend and Spectrum led the charge.

“The Hyatt Hotel in L.A. was the big spot where they threw the big Filipino parties,” Icy Ice remembers. “United Kingdom was the first to take it into the nightclubs. Legend was the first to take it multicity, from San Francisco to San Diego, doing live artists like Rodney O and Joe Cooley, and Yo Yo, when she came out with Ice Cube. We did [compilation label] Far Side when they were first fresh.”

The original core players were DJs from different crews who sometimes overlapped, with some in more than one crew. Only a true devotee would be familiar with the personalities and their respective allegiances, so the oral history is a bit of a mind-warping endeavor... but try to keep up:

“J Roc [from Orange County] and DJ Curse formed the Beat Junkies,” says Icy Ice, referring to one of the most visible DJ crews to date. “Beat Junkies spawned from the Filipino scene. [DJ] Curse and Dj “wHat?!” came from [DJ crew] Public Image. [DJ] Rhettmatic came from Double Platinum. Mellow D came from Modern Muzike. I came from Legend. J Roc and Babu came from their crews. Shortcut and D Styles came from crews in the Bay Area. Curse, Dj “wHat?!” and Rhettmatic all came from United Kingdom. In the Bay [Area] were the [Invisible] Scratch Piklz; they were huge. Smaller crews made their mark and then disappeared.

J Roc in action

“Hip-hop has been our platform,” he continues. “That’s the only area we have really shined in... that one area. We’re like Latinos in the ’70s. They really cracked into the industry in the ’80s... got on TV, got into their own TV shows and in the ’90s there was an explosion. The Ricky Martins and Jennifer Lopezes — they got mainstream. We had an affinity with the hip-hop movement because it was a struggle. It was underground.”