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Long way home

Shingo brings a Japanese sensibility to the American hip-hop he grew up on.

By Mosi Reeves

MIDWAY THROUGH AN interview with Shingo "Shingo2" Annen, the hip-hop producer and MC casually mentions that he's also an illustrator. "I can show you some stuff. You wanna see some?" he asks quietly before walking to another room in the two-bedroom apartment he was sharing in El Cerrito with Hiro Matsuo, a sometime producer and U.S. representative for Japanese label Mary Joy Recordings. Moments later he returns with two three-ring binders tucked under his arm.

When he flips them open, I immediately recognize many of the drawings: illustrations featured on the covers of UHB (Unsigned and Hella Broke), the late, lamented '90s zine run by Mystik Journeymen; album artwork for the Grouch's 1995 cassette-only debut, Don't Talk to Me, and for Murs's 1997 CD F'Real; and logos for Del the Funky Homosapien's Deltron character, Z-Trip, and Kirby Dominant. Momentarily stunned, I relearn a familiar lesson: everyone has a history that makes them who they are. For Shingo – who's worked with indie stars including El-P, Murs, and Yeshua DaPoed ("A Day Like Any Other") and Dose One and Kirby Dominant ("Confessions of Three Men") – that history includes a journey into the belly of underground hip-hop culture, across three continents, and back to his native land.

School daze

Born in Tokyo, Shingo moved frequently with his father, an executive for Mitsubishi, spending time in Britain and Tanzania before settling in Menlo Park at age 15. "I had never been to the States before, and all I had pictured was New York. Suddenly, you come out to California, and it was a different world," he says.

Shingo's relationship with hip-hop culture began in the early '90s when he was working on an engineering degree at UC Berkeley. "I didn't really enjoy that too much," he says, adding that he got the degree "since math was so easy." He decided to take some Japanese literature courses for a change of pace. "I was writing essays on comparing the traditional haiku and MCing, writing poems with freestyling, and stuff like that. At first it seems like an absurd connection," he admits, "but if you get a similar type of inspiration from these two different things, you can put it together. That was fun for me."

Meanwhile, the Bay Area hip-hop scene was in the midst of a renaissance. Local heroes Too $hort and Digital Underground were at the height of their notoriety, and radio DJs Sway and Tech were building a formidable audience with their weekly Wake Up Show on KMEL-FM. Groups like Souls of Mischief were championing completely improvised freestyling. In years past, freestyling had simply meant spitting your best written rhymes in an unplanned order; now, this integral aspect of hip-hop culture was gaining new life through heated ciphers and competitions like the Hieroglyphics' infamous battle with Saafir's Hobo Junction on the KMEL show.

"It wasn't so much about performing or recording; it was just listening to how creative they were," Shingo says of the freestyle culture. "That was something I was watching and wanted to be a part of. Especially being in Berkeley and having Hiero and Hobo – like, wow, you know?"

Shingo took in all of those influences and made something completely different. Simply put, he rhymes in his native language and produces tracks with Japanese musicians. However, his music is more than just novelty raps; it's a transmogrification of American hip-hop into something far more complex and provocative.

My nation

Early on, Shingo participated in the local hip-hop culture by freestyling in ciphers and making flyers and illustrations. He started a graphic design company, empire22 (www.e22.com), designed T-shirts and album covers, and helped form a now defunct crew, Cooltempo. Inspired by some of the graffiti he saw around the Bay Area, he also adopted the stage name Shingo2.

Shingo's initial attempts at making music were tentative, however, until he hooked up with local MC and producer Bas-1 and DJ Shin to record the cassette-only Evolution of the MC. On the trio's first effort, "Japan," Shingo peppered his battle rhyme with references to Akira Kurosawa's Ran and the Yonaguni ruins, an ancient castle submerged on the coast of Japan's Yonaguni Jima island. Though neither "Japan" nor Evolution of the MC was ever released, the 1995 sessions did yield two 12-inch singles, "Empire" and "Gigabyte," and inspired Shingo's first attempts to write raps in Japanese.

"For me, it took a turn when I was like, 'OK, why don't I do it in Japanese?' " he recalls. "I always liked reading comic books, reading books, or watching movies in Japanese, and then I knew what was cool from my perspective. So when I started applying what I learned from hip-hop into dope things that were common to all these different things in Japan, I could paint a picture for myself."

"Japanese is based on syllables more than language, so you can play with the words more [than you can in English]," he continues. But "no one was going deep in Japanese – I mean, c'mon, Japan has a history that dates back to 3,000 years. There's a whole lot of stuff that you can do within that." He says that J-rap acts like SDP (who appeared on De La Soul's Buhloone Mindstate) and East End X Yuri were talking about "Mother Goose stuff," spouting monosyllabic rhymes reminiscent of America's own old-school era. Much like Hieroglyphics and the Living Legends were forging a new, vocabulary-rich alternative to mainstream rap in the United States, Shingo wanted to make music that resonated with literary themes and political commentary.

Shingo eventually assembled the Terracotta Troupe, a backing group composed of guitarist Capital, bassist Mr. Buckner, DJ Nozawa, and himself on production (as Vector Omega, or "the Final Force"). The resulting 1999 debut, Homo Caeruleus Cerinus, was made up of tracks Shingo had worked on for three or four years, "trying things out." A striking example of Shingo's ambitions is "The Little Prince," a retelling of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's classic children's tale. Its music is warm and comforting, setting the mind at ease with a midtempo beat – inflected by acoustic guitar – that Terracotta Troupe built around a sampled performance of Igor Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring. For 11 minutes Shingo narrates the story of the prince and how he "goes to all the different planets in the solar system. At the end, he finds out he wants to go back to earth, but by then the earth is burning. It's a story about the environment, but it's also a spiritual journey." "The Little Prince" is so remarkably graceful that it crosses language boundaries, making it easy for English speakers to lose themselves in Shingo's calm, insistent storytelling, much in the way foreign-speaking peoples are drawn to the vocal tones and accents of American rappers, becoming so inspired that they learn the words phonetically without necessarily understanding their meaning.

In contrast, the 1998 Pearl Harbor EP found Shingo and guest MC Bas-1 appropriating Japan's 1941 attack on the United States. Released in Japanese- and English-language versions, the single "Pearl Harbor" featured Shingo passionately rapping through the eyes of a Japanese pilot "dropping bombs on American soil / My blood is getting so heated it's ready to boil." A verse later, he raps in Japanese that he's "engaging in battle, perfect composure," implying that he's the modern-day equivalent of a kamikaze pilot. "I think globally and rap locally / The freak Asian breaking down the equation / E=MC squared? / Nah, me equals MCs scared because I explode atomically," he raps.

The artwork for Pearl Harbor – a photograph of a U.S. battleship enveloped in fire and smoke – was banned in Japan, forcing him to release the EP in a plain white cover. "There were certain things that were on my mind that I had experienced up until that point, even throughout high school and college," he says, subtly referring to racist attitudes he encountered as a teenage immigrant. Shingo was using "Pearl Harbor" as a method of attacking the stereotype of Asians as nonthreatening and accommodating. "I wanted to connect hip-hop to that struggle of trying to find yourself," he says. It was his way of telling Japanese hip-hoppers, "Don't act like you want to be American or look black. Just be yourself."

Look homeward, b-boy

In 2000, Shingo returned to Japan, where he now lives. There he studies Japanese literature and different religions, practicing Christianity while incorporating teachings from other faiths such as Rastafarianism and Buddhism. He's also "doing the work," performing shows and slowly building a Japanese fan base. Last July, Shingo returned to the Bay Area for a week, only to set off again for a tour of Europe and Asia.

Partially as a result, his new album, 400, released last February, is available only on import through Mary Joy Recordings, though the label has arranged for it to be sold at Amoeba Records and says it is scheduled to be domestically released in a few weeks. The album's title refers to splitting the world in half and dissecting its contents. "The science behind 400 is that "800" is an expression that was used by Japanese people centuries ago," Shingo explains. He says "800" carries a significance on par with the number 7 in Christianity or 10 in Judaism. "Back then, '800' pretty much meant 'a million.' So they would use the term '800' to describe the whole world. For example, if you said an '800' store, you meant a store that sold everything." According to Shingo, the cover art for 400, a collaboration between Shingo (who drew the illustration) and Hiro Matsuo (who painted over it) depicting an erect penis inserting itself into a brain, is an extension of this philosophy. Shingo says it's "stimulation to your brain. It's nothing sexual."

Shingo, who coproduced the album with Matsuo (a.k.a. Cosiner) says 400 is "a lot better sound-wise, rhyme-wise, delivery-wise" than Homo Caeruleus Cerinus. While Cerinus is muted and bass-driven – a trend marked by other popular indie hip-hop albums at the time, such as Mystik Journeymen's The Black Sands ov Eternia and Aceyalone's A Book of Human Language – 400 is raucous and ecstatic, prominently featuring live taiko drums and bass by Japanese musicians Ayo and Heavy.

Concurrently, by making music in his native language, Shingo has felt comfortable enough to start rapping in English again, resulting in singles like "My Nation" and "Luv (sic)." As with his Japanese-language works, it's difficult to quantify their appeal: his rhymes often sound awkward and frequently fall off-beat. But the words he speaks and the sincerity with which he renders them can't be denied. " 'Cause your beat plus my melody makes me speak of l.o.v.e evidently so eloquently," he raps on the chorus of "Luv (sic)." In his delivery the emotions are palpable and can't be measured by technical standards.

"By going through these types of phases, I was able to get them out of my system, where I could finally sit back and figure out what I wanted to say in English," Shingo says. "Before, I would care more about trying to say something really complicated, or try to be a dope MC. But as time progressed, I started caring more about trying to make good songs." This allows him to communicate with more people. After all, he points out, "You can't go in front of a crowd that doesn't understand hip-hop and all of a sudden do a battle rhyme. They don't understand where you're coming from."

For now Shingo plans to remain in Japan. "Even if I got all the inspiration from America," he says, "I found that there's a big purpose in trying to send music out there, not only because I'm Japanese, but also the fact that the hip-hop market is so big, but at the same time people don't really know what they're looking for." Therefore, he's targeting the Japanese audience because, he says, "they really need it." Only time will tell if Shingo will return to his adopted land, though he did hint at a weariness of Tokyo's "congestion" and lack of space. He is more than welcome here, because in spite of this country's "library full of dope albums," as he put it, our nation needs his passion for hip-hop culture and his ability to cross cultural boundaries.