The music company 88rising was barely into its third year when founder Sean Miyashiro announced in 2018 that in addition to all of its other work — running a record label, doing video production, managing and marketing artists — it would launch a festival, too.
“It always felt like part of the road map, and you know, we have always been really ambitious with what we are aiming for,” says Ollie Zhang, 88rising’s chief of staff, who joined the company in 2016 one year after its birth.
“I think that’s part of the nature of how we’ve gotten to where we are,” he says. “Just reaching high, working really hard to make it happen.”
After going dark in 2020 for obvious reasons, Head In The Clouds Festival returns for its third installment on Saturday and Sunday, Nov. 6-7. After two years at Los Angeles State Historic Park, it moves this year to Brookside at the Rose Bowl.
The lineup represents some of the biggest stars and most promising newcomers in Asian and Asian American music, with headliners such as Joji, Saweetie, Rich Brian, NIKI and CL, as well as rising stars such as Japanese Breakfast, Beabadoobee, Audrey Nuna and Luna Li.
For 88rising, the success and growth of Head In The Clouds is proof that the bet made by Miyashiro and the rest of the 88ers — that the United States and the world were ready for a boom in Asian-based music and entertainment — has paid off.
A movement rises
It’s easy to forget today how much has changed in just a few years. The K-pop boy band BTS is one of the biggest acts on the planet. The South Korean Netflix series “Squid Game” is the breakout TV show of the fall. Marvel’s “Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” was a late summer hit, and in 2020, the South Korean film “Parasite” won the best picture and best director Oscars.
“From the very beginning, Sean, his vision was to build truly a platform for Asian creativity, Asian youth culture and expression, and bridge that gap between East and West,” Zhang says. “He felt there was a really wide space for something that was covering and highlighting Asian culture, and so he set out to build 88 as that platform.”
Compared to his teen years in Diamond Bar, the 31-year-old Zhang says it’s startling to see how much has changed.
“In high school I loved music, but I loved Swedish melodic death metal and, like, classic rock,” he says. ‘Music that was definitely not Asian American, or mostly not Asian.”
When Asian American musical artists with backgrounds similar to his surfaced, such as rapper MC Jin or the hip-hop group Far East Movement, it was exciting even as they felt like outliers in the broader music world.
“They’re amazing artists and trailblazers, but it felt like more of a phenomena than a wave of artists that were building a community with each other, and feeding off each other, and propelling different themes around the world,” Zhang says. “It felt more disconnected.”
In the middle of the last decade, though, Zhang says things changed.
The South Korean rapper-singer G-Dragon, a performer so loved he’s widely known as the King of K-Pop, found solo fame outside of the boy band Big Bang that had first made him a star. A few years later, the rapper-singer CL followed the same path, leaving the K-pop girl group 2NE1 to become the first female solo Korean artist to chart on the Billboard 100 in 2016.
“You really felt they were crossing over in a way that was unprecedented at the time,” Zhang says. “It felt like they were on the cusp of something really big.”
At 88rising, Miyashiro & Co. started working with newer artists who hadn’t been launched from the springboard of K-pop, rappers such the South Korean Keith Ape and Dumbfoundead, an Argentine American of Korean heritage.
At that point, Zhang says, the diversity of the scene — glamourous K-pop solo artists, gritty hip-hop artists, and eventually indie and pop acts, too — signaled a kind of critical mass in Asian pop culture.
“I think there’s just so many more artists that you can point to now,” he says. “Regardless of where you might be, where you might have grown up, and what type of music you like, you can find an Asian or Asian American artist that can speak to you.”
At the festival
The lineup for Head In The Clouds features a mix of established and up-and-coming stars. And if you’ve seen “Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” you’ve heard at least nine of these musicians, thanks to their contributions to the 88rising-produced soundtrack.
The performers come from around the world. NIKI and Rich Brian, two of the biggest acts, both are Indonesian. Joji is Japanese Australian while CL is Korean. Saweetie was born in California to a Filipina Chinese mother and African American father.
Those are stars who already have large followings, Zhang says, and strong relationships with their fan bases.
“Joji is already a living legend in terms of the music he puts out that connects with fans in a way that transcends race and ethnicity,” he says. “(Rich) Brian, a very different artist from Joji, but he’s an all-around artist that fans really love and cherish.”
Also on the bill are artists such as the Filipino British indie rocker Beabadoobee, who has toured with The 1975 and been picked as a breakthrough act in a BBC poll of music critics, and Japanese Breakfast, the stage name of singer-guitarist Michelle Zauner, whose memoir, “Crying in H Mart,” was a critical and commercial success earlier this year.
Less familiar but equally exciting to fans seeking the newest thing in music are festival performers such as Korean Canadian Luna Li, who recently toured as the opening act for Japanese Breakfast, and Atarashii Gakko!, whose music and performance style should win over fans in their U.S. debut, Zhang says.
“I think that they’re an artist you can’t miss,” he says of the four Japanese women in Atarashii Gakko! “It’ll be a spectacle. The music is so strong, and it’s got a Beastie Boys energy to it that I feel is so transfixing and just completely unique.”
Head In The Clouds 2021 should be the biggest yet, he says, and after pivoting to livestreaming in 2020 during the pandemic, will give 88rising a chance to showcase the best in Asian and Asian American music to fans in person.
“There’s just something irreplaceable about the energy of music and bringing people together, especially at a festival where it’s over a long period of time,” Zhang says. “It’s an irreplaceable thing.”
