In my mid-twenties, most Fridays after work, I would frequent Asian-themed nights at clubs like White Rabbit in the Lower East Side, mostly because the drinks were cheap and the girl I had a crush on was going to be there. The dance floor was always a little sticky, and it wasn’t unusual to go home at 4 a.m. with someone’s rogue eyelash smushed into your shoe.
Those Friday nights more or less defined one of the weirder transition periods of my adult life—new to New York City; terminally broke; wearing cheap, wrinkle-free work shirts from H&M that probably osmosed microplastics into my bloodstream—yet I remember developing something of a personal ritual whenever the DJ played the song “Like a G6” by Far East Movement, which was everywhere at the time: I’d go outside and smoke a cigarette.
Lest there be any confusion, this was mostly because I was young and stupid and filled with gloomy malaise. Back then, the song occupied a place in my subconscious, lying in proximity to other party anthems like “Let’s Get It Started” by the Black Eyed Peas (sanitized from the original version, “Let’s Get Retarded”) and “Dynamite” by Taio Cruz. Spiritually, “G6” inspired a mild existential spiral in me every time those first few synths caused the floor to wobble, a stark reminder that I was spending eight hours a day sitting at a desk job I loathed, and the only antidote was two-for-one vodka sodas served with too much ice.
The song went to number one on the Billboard pop charts, which was unheard of for an Asian group at the time, especially pre–“Gangnam Style,” pre-BTS. But even at the top of the music world, Far East Movement went largely ignored by the elite players in music media. (Which, in a way, is kind of a fundamental part of the Asian American experience.) Pitchfork didn’t bother to review their album Free Wired, while Rolling Stone said that it was “music designed to make two-year-olds deliriously giddy.” Plenty of music bloggers abhorred it too. One of the meaner-spirited reviews noted that there are “bad songs out there, and then there’s ‘Like a G6.’ It’s as if someone found Ke$ha’s Asian-American extended family, got them trashed on absinthe laced with meth, guided them to a MacBook with GarageBand, told them to write a song that sounds dated already, and put the results on the radio.”
Time, though, has a haloing effect, which is why I’ve since come to appreciate, even love, “Like a G6” like no other guilty pleasure in my life: more than “Post to Be,” “Faithfully,” and anything by Skrillex. It’s just so damn good. Transcendent, in fact. I like to imagine that “Like a G6” is what they play in the seventh ascension of the Galaxy Brain, a tesseract where linear time ceases to exist and the past and future become one.
Part of my initial resistance to the song, I think, was that, as a New York transplant, I was experiencing a latent form of shame about having grown up around Los Angeles, where the foursome were also from. They were having fun, being stupid, going dumb. I mostly wasn’t; I was trying to look smart. I thought of them as over-the-top characters, loud and unapologetic in their big indoor sunglasses and bow ties and high-top sneakers paired with skinny jeans. They were Kev Nish (Kevin Nishimura), Prohgress (James Roh), J-Splif (Jae Choung), and DJ Virman (Virman Coquia)—a Japanese Chinese American, two Korean Americans, and a Filipino American. As far as California Asian friend-group compositions go, Far East Movement was basically my homie group chat.
The song is a study in contrasts—brute maximalism on the surface with an undercurrent of restraint. Its structure is deceptively minimal: a chorus that’s repeated four times (with lyrics borrowed from a Dev track called “Booty Bounce”), a zippy pre-chorus, and verses so simple and monotonous that they sound like incantations for spells. But the thing that actually makes the song hard is how scrappy it is. The melody was a happy accident, as Niles Hollowell-Dhar, a.k.a. KSHMR—who produced the song as one half of the Cataracs—explained in 2012. After he mistakenly dragged a high-pitched bell into the wrong lane of his production software, those crunchy first few bars of synthesizer—the dun-dun-duns—were born.
Necessity being the mother of invention and whatnot, the song also pushed forward new internal rhyme schemes (blizzard with slizzard and sizzurp); new luxury airplanes (the group didn’t even realize that the G650 was a real plane at the time; they were inspired to “make up” the G6 after Drake rapped about knowing “G4 pilots on a first-name basis” in the posse track “Forever”); and new places for Asian Americans to occupy in the collective consciousness.
The foursome knew they had something special in their hands when they first heard the Cataracs beat back in 2008. But it would be another eighteen months before they actually finished writing the song, and not for lack of trying.
What took so long? Well, as they tell it, they made the perfectly understandable mistake of trying to rap over the beat: to write lyrics that meant something. “We came from spoken word and all this other stuff,” Nishimura told me, when I met the group on a Zoom call recently. “But we’ve been in the clubs enough to know that, especially in the 2010 era, if it’s too wordy, the DJ is not playing it. They’re playing Lil Jon. They’re playing all this crunk stuff.”
So the group went dumb, then dumber, then dumbest—i.e., rhyming Three 6 with G6—until the song was stripped to its essential components. Pure id. Ultra instinct. As with all enduring works of art, “Like a G6” is a product of relentless self-editing, a paring down that would make Strunk and White proud. (I’d also argue that one of the song’s brightest spots is the elegant inversion of the typical club trope where drunk groupies are treated like some sort of weird prize: “Sober girls around me, / they be actin’ like they drunk.”) The group says the song was a pretty faithful representation of their lives back then too. “I don’t feel like we were even being loud versions of ourselves,” said Roh. “That’s who we were, bro! We were club rats. The only difference is the girls we were hanging out with might not have been as hot as the girls in the video.”
In some ways, it’s easy to trace the through line from “Like a G6” to Crazy Rich Asians, to the record label 88rising, to a Marvel franchise about a C-tier superhero who happens to be Chinese. (While researching this essay, I was lightly shocked that the song was never actually in a Fast & Furious movie—my own personal Mandela effect.) I’m not saying “G6” made all that other stuff possible, but it did open the door, just a crack, for Asian diasporic art to be crude, silly, and maybe even a little obnoxious. Sometimes you fly high so there’s less resistance.
