Dressed in a black Deus Ex Machina baseball cap, half-zip Nike jacket, and Balenciaga slides (with socks), Sean Miyashiro was hunkered down on an early February afternoon in the common room of his apartment building on New York’s Upper East Side. The 38-year-old cofounder and CEO of the Asian-focused record label and media company 88rising has an actual office in the label’s Chelsea neighborhood headquarters. But he was using this room as a makeshift control center while he and his team met to hash out plans ahead of the annual Coachella music festival, which was scheduled to take place in mid-April. Also, the space made a sleek backdrop for the cameraman who was recording their discussions.
This year, Coachella was planning to hand an entire stage to 88rising, the first time the festival was giving such curatorial control to a label. Miyashiro, who is of Japanese and Korean descent, was planning to bring a number of his label’s hip-hop and R&B artists from around the globe to the California event and fill the stage with interstitial cultural programming. He was also producing a behind-the-scenes documentary about 88rising’s appearance at Coachella, in the vein of Beyoncé’s Homecoming, which aired on Netflix and detailed all the elements of black culture that framed her now-iconic performance. “Our Coachella show,” Miyashiro said as the cameraman steadied a shot, “is trying to celebrate the best of Asian music, yesterday and tomorrow.”
Since it launched, in 2015, 88rising (the 88 is a nod to the Chinese character for double happiness) has become a vital artery connecting Eastern youth culture to Western audiences and beyond. In 2019, its artists—including Indonesian rapper Rich Brian, Japanese R&B star Joji, and the Chengdu, China–based trap group Higher Brothers—generated more than 7 billion streams and 3 billion video views. The label also pulled in more than 20,000 attendees to its music festival, Head in the Clouds, which was held in Los Angeles in August. (Another Head in the Clouds was scheduled to take place in Jakarta, Indonesia, in March, but was postponed due to COVID-19.) Later this year, 88rising will debut its own channel on Sirius XM, becoming the first major Asian radio channel in North America.
Though Coachella is now a dream temporarily deferred—Goldenvoice, the organizer of the annual music festival, has (perhaps optimistically) pushed the event to October. But the postponement has done little to diminish Miyashiro’s Beyoncé-size ambition for his company: to inject Asian artists into mainstream culture. “At the end of the day,” Miyashiro says, “we just want to show the world that Asian people are fire.”
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