October 9, 2002

By Mosi Reeves

'EARLY 20S IS no joke!" Dennis Kim exclaims. The 23-year-old rapper, singer, and spoken-word artist who raps under the name Denizen Kane, has just finished eating a homemade burrito, and plates containing lettuce, tomatoes, and other fillings still lie around the living room floor as he paces around barefoot in his small apartment in Oakland's Fruitvale District.

It's mid afternoon, and sunlight filters through the partially closed shades as Kim, a full-time musician, sits on the floor and explains how he relocated from Chicago to Oakland earlier this year to be near his girlfriend, singer and spoken word artist Golda Sargento.

It's not the only major change in Kim's life. Shortly after he arrived in east Oakland, he and Golda had a baby boy, Micah, whom they now take care of while supporting themselves as artists. Being in California keeps him away from his two groups: Typical Cats, a five-man hip-hop group, and I Was Born with Two Tongues, a poetry quartet. Typical Cats have built a reputation on the hip-hop underground scene as one of the better-known acts from Chicago and as the flagship artists for fledgling indie rap imprint Galapagos4. Three years into their existence the group released a self-titled full-length on the label in 2000.

But in the Bay Area, Kim is best known for the pan-Asian I Was Born with Two Tongues, who have performed at local venues such as Bindlestiff Studios in the past two years. The members – including Marlon Esguerra, Emily Chang, and Anida Esguerra – met one another while attending open mic nights at various clubs around Chicago.

"Chicago had an ill fucking poetry scene," the soft-spoken Kim confirms. "The scene that we were in was mostly black. It was cool. It was all love, but you have those occasional moments where cats make it a point to let you know you're a guest in their house." By bonding together, the four Asian poets, along with musicians like bassist Darius Savage and drummer Jay Monteverde, were able to create their own support system apart from the scene's politics.

I Was Born with Two Tongues, Kim says, made a national impact partly because they were considered a novelty on the spoken word scene. Their subsequent 1999 album, Broken Speak (which was just rereleased by the San Francisco-based organization Asian Improv Arts), earned plaudits from the press and the spoken word community for its confrontation of racial issues, the constant appropriation of Asian culture (which Chang and Anida Esguerra decried on "Not Your Fetish"), and sundry political topics in modern American society. Kim, for his part, wrote about "the hungry scent of sorrow on the skin of my people" in "Han," one among a handful of solo pieces he contributed.

At the same time as he was performing with I Was Born with Two Tongues, Kim was working with the multiracial Typical Cats crew. More of a straight-ahead hip-hop group, Typical Cats rhymed about battling and commercialism over jazzy bebop riffs on their debut album. Still, ever the social analyst, Kim found time to satirize starstruck rappers – and, not coincidentally, comment on his own growing notoriety on "Live Forever," asking why "the TV is the only place I can see my lonely face and these mirrors won't accept my reflection."

In Oakland, life is much quieter for Kim. However, Kim says he still represents Chicago "to the fullest": his recent solo debut as Denizen Kane for Galapagos4, the EP Tree City Legends, is part homage to the Windy City. Tree City Legends' cover art features his friend Josh-Oscar-Sayre's illustration of a small forest sketched on top of an overhead snapshot of Chicago. For Kim, the myriad branches jutting out of Tree City represent the "branches" of Chicago's geographical grid as well as his metaphorical home, a resting place he can return to no matter where his physical body resides.

"In terms of our people, Asian people, I think that longing for a sense of homeland and stability has always been there," he says. "Not that we don't have places – we have every Chinatown in every city you can go to, and every J-town, and every Koreatown. For me personally, creating a mental homeland is the first step. At least I can be at home in my mind."

This wistfulness is reflected in the lyrics of Tree City Legends, but the EP is not simply a love letter to Chicago. Equally present is its tribute to Kim's brother David, who passed away early last year. "It was March 8, 2001," he whispers, hesitant to discuss the circumstances surrounding his brother's death. Meanwhile, a childhood photograph of Kim and his brother is tucked in the left margin of the cover art, with shiny black crowns drawn over their heads.

More varied than the whimsical Typical Cats album, Tree City Legends ends, surprisingly, with a folk song, "Lost Found Nation," that addresses Kim's commitment to God and spirituality. Its eclecticism stems from the evolution taking place in Kim's life as he matures from a carefree wordsmith and college student with a love for hip-hop culture to a father and full-time musician.

Far from the world of a stereotypically "conscious rapper" – "nobody wants to live in a box," Kim asserts – his views on life in general, and race in particular, are evolving into something more reasoned and complex than the "chip on his shoulder" that he wore proudly on Broken Speak.

Korean identity still informs much of Kim's art. "I'll say it once," he begins. "I don't think there's any people on this continent who experience such a unique blend of total commodification and total invisibility.

"Every people has their story, and it's not about comparing your oppression," Kim continues. "I'm talking about total consumer awareness: eat what I eat, wear what I wear, get my shit tattooed on you. All kinds of shit. It can get even deeper, to where you can marry my sister, you can order her off the Internet. But as opposed to knowing who I am, or who she is, or what we need, or what we want, nobody knows."

Then he quietly adds, "Before, I was probably more prone to speak on it in a really heated moment. And now ..." Sitting on the floor, he drifts off for a moment, and he takes a look around his small, comfortable apartment, then at Micah rolling around on his couch. "I don't know. I'm at home here."

In Oakland, Kim hasn't done much besides work on his music, focusing on his work with Typical Cats under his Denizen Kane persona. Like many people his age, Kim is in transition, and many of his days are spent playing guitar with his friends and reevaluating his work. He has trouble remembering the last show he went to, and his ears perk up when Golda casually mentions that Raekwon from the Wu-Tang Clan is performing in town later that night.

As for I Was Born with Two Tongues, Kim says, the group is on hiatus: Anida Esguerra and Chang are mounting a play titled Sisters in the Smoke, and Marlon Esguerra is teaching at various alternative schools.

Kim admits he hasn't been writing much poetry lately. When I subsequently point out that two well-known spoken word artists, Saul Williams and Mike Ladd, seem also to have abandoned poetry for music, he concurs. "I don't think there's anything as powerful as music. I don't think there's anything as visceral an experience.

"There's a level of involvement and intensity that I can't accomplish in poetry," Kim continues before he turns around and qualifies himself. "I'm not going to dis myself; I'm a pretty dope poet. But I'm not going to lie and be like, 'I am the one.' "

For him, MCing is more fun anyway. With spoken word, he felt he had to live up to his own high expectations. Also, he says, the spoken word scene is so small in comparison with the music world, and I Was Born with Two Tongues would eventually "hit the edge of the pond."