Michelle Zauner, the front-woman of Japanese Breakfast, is a songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, best-selling author, and director. She’s been nominated for two Grammys and her book Crying in H Mart (2021) has passed one continuous year on the New York Times bestseller list. She was named one of Time’s Most Influential People on their 2022 list. She is also a Korean-American daughter of an immigrant parent who relocated to the States when she was nine months old.
There’s an Interview magazine piece that I think about at least once per week in which Michelle Zauner tells Karen O that she inspired her to pick up the guitar and become a musician. Michelle Zauner said in the conversation that she couldn’t have imagined prior to discovering the Yeah Yeah Yeahs that someone of their cultural background could become a rockstar. They talk about what it means to see yourself onstage for the first time, to fight to swim through the homogenous sea of alternative music.
The Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ iconic debut full-length record Fever to Tell came out in 2003, a year in which every single person nominated for a Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album was a white man. Karen O got asked frequently in interviews at that time about being a woman in rock, but very rarely about being Korean; the music industry could only focus on one marginalized identity at a time. She has said that she can’t remember any Korean rockstars that she idolized when she was coming up; she blazed that path.
Michelle Zauner is younger by ten years, and Karen O’s influence had reverberated through the industry by the time Japanese Breakfast started gaining traction. Her first tour was as support for Jay Som and Mitski, two Asian women. That experience seems to have made an impact on Michelle Zauner; she’s since toured extensively with Asian women support acts like Luna Li, The Linda Lindas, and SASAMI.
Every time I go to a Japanese Breakfast show, I’m struck by how much it impacts me to see Michelle Zauner onstage. She looks like me, she plays the same guitar that I do. She and Karen O and I share experiences of being half-Korean—it feels almost reductive to mention this metric, but I knowing that they know makes their music more impactful somehow. Neither Japanese Breakfast nor the Yeah Yeah Yeahs deal directly in their lyrics with anything as blunt as racism or belonging, but their understandings of love, duty, and grief are surely impacted by their Asian identities and upbringings.
I wish we were living in a post-racial world, but representation is still important. beabadoobee is a Filipino-British alternative rock musician making waves in the indie scene. I love her commitment to her aesthetic: thick black eyelashes, leg warmers, short pleated skirts, shirts with thumb holes. She’s absolutely a blast from the past, a fairy descended upon rock music to wreak havoc and flit away. The Bike Lane song “Holy Roller” is heavily inspired by “Worth It,” the lead single off her album Fake It Flowers (2020). I was obsessed with the idea that she was so loud and young and intense and honest—she was unapologetic in a way that Asian women are not usually allowed to be.
SASAMI tweeted once that she’s accepted that one day a white woman will do what she did on Squeeze (2022) and receive the praise she deserves. Unfortunately, I think we’ve all accepted that kind of marginalization, to some extent. I am so inspired by her willingness to continue to make brilliant music in the face of the brutally unforgiving landscape of indie music, but also hope that her record is noted as a groundbreaking fusion of metal and alternative sounds.
I’m proud of these women, despite not knowing them personally. I know what they had to go through to make it to these stages, and I’m grateful that they persevered so I could see them up there, living our shared dream.