Soundscapes: DJ Phatrick

An educator and DJ talks about music, activism and why Los Angeles is fresher than you think.

There are two subjects that Patrick Huang can talk about endlessly: soul music, and educational pedagogy. The 26-year-old, known universally as DJ Phatrick, has a foot planted firmly in both worlds.

He burst onto the national scene as the DJ and producer for Native Guns, a popular political hip-hop group. Still fresh out of college, Huang co-founded the Bay Unity Music Project (BUMP), a youth record label and development program that works with aspiring musicians in West Oakland. Three years later, he left, frustrated with institutional bureaucracies. He returned from a trip to Southeast Asia in 2007 and soon after started a bi-weekly soul music party called Devil's Pie.

Huang began DJing in his hometown of Sugarland, Texas, a Houston suburb. He grew up in an upper middle-class, Chinese-American family. He says he later realized how much suburbs work to "deaden differences." After his parents sent him to an exclusive Houston-area private school (where the movie Rushmore was filmed) he developed an admittedly uncritical "fuck whitey" complex. Later, as an ethnic studies major at the University of California, Berkeley, he finally found activism he could get down with. After earning a strong reputation in the Bay Area's hip-hop scene, Huang recently took his talents to Los Angeles.

Last spring, he released a mixtape called Asian American Hip-Hop for Dummies, which showcases a spectrum of politically infused Asian Pacific Islander (API) artists. While he fears being typecast as "that Asian American hip-hop DJ," the former Mohawk-sporting, James Brown-loving dude, with a tendency to geek out, is anything but typical.

Huang sat down to talk with us about music, activism and why Los Angeles is fresher than you might think.
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