How 88rising Is Making a Place for Asians in Hip-Hop

With artists like Rich Brian and Higher Brothers, Sean Miyashiro’s company is an authority on how to create pop-culture crossovers.
8220This is a global culture whether anyone likes it or not8221 Sean Miyashiro said.
“This is a global culture whether anyone likes it or not,” Sean Miyashiro said.Illustration by Kristian Hammerstad

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A few years ago, Kris Wu decided that he wanted to be known as a rapper. Wu, who is twenty-six, grew up in Canada and in China, where he is famous as an actor, singer, and model. In middle school, he had become a devotee of N.B.A. basketball and, subsequently, of hip-hop. After a stint in the Korean pop group EXO, he became a judge on “Rap of China,” a hugely successful reality show about aspiring rappers. (His catchphrase, delivered in Mandarin, was “Do you even freestyle?”) Like many Asian superstars, who are mobbed at home yet walk around Manhattan in relative ano­nymity, he wanted to measure himself against American artists.

In February, 2016, Wu played in the celebrity game at the N.B.A.’s All-Star Weekend, in Toronto. There, he met Sean Miyashiro. A few months earlier, Miyashiro had raised money to start 88rising, a company that he pitched as “Vice for Asian culture.” For decades, hip-hop has been central to young Americans’ understanding of what is cool, and Miyashiro knew that, increasingly, this was also the case in Asia. He wanted to document that culture, but he wanted to make things that shaped it, too. That summer, when Wu was working on music in Los Angeles, Miyashiro connected him with the Houston rapper Travis Scott. It wasn’t hard to persuade Scott to work with him. “This motherfucker right here,” Scott recalled, referring to Wu, “called me from a long-distance number and was, like, ‘Ayo, I got this joint for you.’ And I was, like, ‘Ayo, motherfucker, I seen you in like a hundred movies.’ ”

Last October, at the 88rising offices in New York, Miyashiro and Wu were preparing for the release of “Deserve,” the result of the collaboration. On the track, Wu and Scott list the various forms of attention that their women warrant, including a spot on a club’s guest list, a French kiss, and the song itself. Wu adopts Scott’s signature style, which is melodic, sleazy, and heavily reliant on Auto-Tune. Miyashiro was anxious to see how the single would be received. “It’s how to sell a thought,” he said, of promoting the song. “A new perception. That’s the opportunity for Kris, and for us as a company.” Asian fans rarely see their stars venture outside their regional hip-hop ecosystems, let alone stand alongside an established figure like Scott. “But, if they see someone that looks like them do it, then it changes the whole perception, just like Obama did for African-Americans,” Miyashiro said. “Now you can really be fuckin’ anything.”

Against a backdrop of twentysomethings draped in minimalist streetwear, Miyashiro, who was wearing a fitted shirt with a dark floral pattern and a baseball cap with a fluorescent stripe, looked only slightly more adult. He’s thirty-six, but his wispy mustache and sideburns make him look much younger. As he moved around the office, he stopped to peer over the shoulder of an employee who was experimenting with a logo typeface. “I want that to look like a hologram, like on New Era caps,” he told him. Everyone was praised as “fire,” a “badass,” or, occasionally, a “genius.”

In just two years, 88rising, which also has an office in Los Angeles and a small team in Shanghai, has become an authority on how to create Asian and American pop-culture crossovers. The company understands how to sell Asian artists, like Wu, to American audiences. Similarly, it offers a vision of Asian cool to industries—music, advertising, fashion, television—that are desperate to be cool in Asia. Jonathan Park, a Korean-American rapper who performs as Dumbfoundead, has been associated with 88rising since its beginning. “Everybody wants to get into Asia,” he told me. Miyashiro, he added, had been “pulling that card early on and selling people on that Asia dream.”

“There’s this kind of contagious optimism about his vision,” Jeremy Erlich, an executive at Interscope Records, told me about Miyashiro. “I think, to a large extent, Western music companies see the huge potential in China and are really focussed on cracking the code.”

On the floor of Miyashiro’s office is a neon 88rising logo, which features the number 88 and the Chinese characters for “rising.” In Chinese, eighty-eight means “double happiness.” (To neo-Nazis, the number has come to stand for “Heil Hitler.”) His glass desk is so long that it barely fits in the room, but there are no papers on it. (“Why would we need paper, bro?” he said.) On the walls are framed photos of 88rising’s core roster: Joji, a Japanese-born singer whose graceful and heartbroken music belies his past as a hugely successful YouTube comedian; Keith Ape, a Korean rapper known for his rowdy, shrill style; the Higher Brothers, a streetwear­-obsessed rap group from China who named themselves for the Chinese electronics giant Haier; and Brian Imanuel, an Indonesian rapper known as Rich Chigga. Though Wu was probably more famous than all of them put together, it was a world that he wanted to be a part of. “Where’s my picture, bro?” Wu asked politely, as he squeezed behind Miyashiro’s desk. He was dressed casually, with only subtle allusions to his trendy tastes—a Supreme x TNF baseball cap, rare Nikes—and was accompanied by his mother, his manager, and a couple of friends.

Miyashiro believed that Wu had a rare chance to penetrate the American rap charts, as long as he was careful. Wu’s team had initially wanted him to appear on shows like “Good Morning America.” Miyashiro told me, “I’m, like, ‘Bro, that’s not gonna mean shit. That’s not gonna do a goddam thing for you, bro.’ ” Instead, he had a strategy for getting Wu all the “dope press looks” at hip-hop-oriented outlets like XXL and Complex.

“Deserve” was scheduled to première on Zane Lowe’s show on Beats 1, Apple Music’s streaming-­radio service, and Wu began to record videos on Instagram to promote the song. He looked at himself in his phone’s camera and tried to find the best angle. He recited the script, throwing in his own ad-libs. (“Ye-e-eah,” “Love, love.”) It felt a little stiff, so Miyashiro ran through the lines a few times, and Wu mimicked his swaggering intonation.

The next day, Miyashiro sat in a small conference room with a few employees. His assistant projected her computer onto a screen. There were about thirty tabs open. Miyashiro wanted to see the rate at which people were tweeting about the song, which Lowe would be playing in minutes. “Does anybody have Apple Music?” he said. “Where does Zane Lowe play?”

Hip-hop Web sites began posting about the song. “Oh, shit,” Miyashiro said. “Pitchfork just fuckin’ posted it. That’s wild shit. God damn.” It was twelve-thirty. They waited for Travis Scott to wake up, so that he could tweet about the single.

Wu, his mother, and his manager monitored the song’s progress on their phones between promotional appearances. They were in an Uber when it reached the top of the charts, and they looked up and screamed. Wu was the first Chinese artist ever to top iTunes’ rap charts, and the second Asian, after Psy, whose “Gangnam Style” was a novelty hit in 2012. Wu also became a top trending topic on the Chinese social-­media network Weibo.

At 88rising’s offices, Miyashiro was too exhausted to bask in this new success. He was overseeing the song’s global distribution, its promotion across a range of social platforms, and an arsenal of related memes. He flopped down on the couch in his office and tried to post a picture on 88rising’s Instagram account, but it wasn’t working. It was strange, he said, because Instagram had verified the account that morning. He found the e-mail and showed it to me. I pointed out that it was a phishing scam; the account was being controlled by a hacker. “It’s fuckin’ up my whole vibe right now,” he exclaimed. As some no-name rappers from the Bay Area diverted 88rising’s Instagram traffic to their own account, I asked if 88rising had any cybersecurity protocols. “Shit,” Miyashiro said, lightening up for a moment. “We’re too hip-hop for that.”

Miyashiro has a hard time explaining what, exactly, 88rising does. We were eating curry at a Japanese restaurant around the corner from the office. “C.A.A. has talent,” he said. “They’re an agent business. Vice has a great media platform.” Before finishing his thought, he looked down at his phone and laughed, and asked if he could take the call. The screen read “Migos,” the popular Atlanta rap group. After a short conversation, in which every sentence was punctuated with “bro,” he switched back to cogent C.E.O.-speak. “People from the business world say, ‘Hey, Sean, you should start positioning your company as this new hybrid media company that can play in these different mediums and make it work together.’ I’m, like, ‘Yeah, that’s what we’re doing.’ ”

Miyashiro’s ascent is a symbol of the current tumult in the music industry. Recording sales are on a permanent decline, but there’s still money to be made from catchy songs, particularly if you have a vision for whom to collaborate with, or how to reach new markets. Like a traditional talent-­management company, 88rising oversees the careers of a few rappers and singers, and, like a rec­ord label, it releases and distributes music. Like a media startup, it produces video content for its artists and other clients. These videos are inventive and polished, ranging from short, viral memes and commercials to music videos and feature-­length documentaries. They do basic things in a clever way, from interviews in virtual-­reality settings to live performances in Koreatown karaoke bars. (One of the best features the rapper Lil Yachty trying to freestyle over a song by the K-pop group Big Bang.)

Miyashiro was raised in San Jose, California. His father, who is Japanese, worked as a mechanical engineer, and his mother, who is Korean, mostly stayed at home. Miyashiro went to the type of Silicon Valley high school that has a sizable and competitive Asian-­American population, and where most students go on to four-year colleges. But he lacked focus. He spent a lot of time hanging out with friends whom he describes as “wannabe” Asian gangsters, looking tough in the parking lots of bubble-tea cafés.

Miyashiro enrolled at San Jose State University, but he would often drive to campus, circle the parking lot, and, if he couldn’t find a space, go home. One day, he realized that the university’s student clubs staged concerts. He visited African-American fraternities and Asian Christian groups, and began putting on the shows they wanted to see. He also started to throw warehouse parties in Santa Clara. He stopped attending classes, and he turned his work as a campus promoter into a string of marketing jobs in the Bay Area, including one for what he describes as a “social network for hipsters.” Eventually, he helped to launch Thump, Vice’s onetime electronic-music site, where he brokered deals for corporate sponsors eager to align themselves with dance culture.

In 2015, Miyashiro left Thump, looking for his next challenge. One day, Jonathan Park, whom he’d begun managing, showed him the video for Keith Ape’s “It G Ma,” an appealingly jagged and raw rap song. Miyashiro and Park got on FaceTime with Keith Ape, who was in South Korea, and persuaded him to come to the South by Southwest talent showcase, in Austin, Texas. Soon, Miyashiro was Ape’s manager, too. Miyashiro drew on his industry contacts and, for a little less than ten thousand dollars, got Waka Flocka, A$AP Ferg, and Father to record a remix of “It G Ma” with Keith Ape and Park. Around this time, Miyashiro told a friend over dinner at Quarters Korean BBQ, in Los Angeles, that he wanted to build something. That night, the friend connected him to Allen DeBevoise, of Third Wave Partners, who became his first backer. “It was mad easy, bro,” Miyashiro told me. “It was easy as fuck. I’m being dead serious.”

DeBevoise shared Miyashiro’s belief that a portal for Asian culture could serve both a long-ignored audience and the mainstream. “I heard his vision, and I said, ‘This is it,’ ” DeBevoise recalled. “I was sold, probably, in twenty minutes.”

“One of Sean’s strongest qualities is selling the dream,” Donnie Kwak, the 88rising Web site’s first editor, recently told me. Kwak had worked at traditional media companies such as Complex and ESPN, and the idea of devoting himself to something Asian was appealing.

The new company had money, but for months Miyashiro, Kwak, and a handful of employees couldn’t decide where to devote their resources: videos or essays, short form or investigative features, content production or artist management. They built a couple of Web sites but didn’t publish them. Miyashiro was now living in student housing in the Bronx with his wife, a graduate student in virology at Einstein College. He worked out of a Dunkin’ Donuts nearby, and took meetings in his car. “It was f— I was about to say it was fire,” he told me, growing solemn. “It wasn’t fire. It was what it was. We didn’t know what the fuck it was going to be.”

In early 2016, Brian Imanuel, as Rich Chigga, released a video for a rap song called “Dat Stick.” Over a menacing, squelching beat, Imanuel, a scrawny Asian with an exceptionally deep voice, fantasizes about driving a Maserati and killing cops. The song went viral, in part because of how incongruous (in the video, Imanuel wears a pink polo shirt and a fanny pack) and outrageous (he uses the N-word) it was. Imanuel, who was homeschooled in Jakarta, says that he learned English by watching YouTube videos. Miyashiro and Park, who had been following Imanuel on Vine, called him and offered to fly him to South by Southwest to perform. Imanuel said that he’d have to ask his mother—he was sixteen years old. She agreed, but he was unable to get a visa.

At the festival, Miyashiro, Park, and some 88rising employees set up a “shrine”—decorated with plants, Chinese guardian-lion statues, and candles—in an Austin warehouse, where they booked a string of up-and-coming rappers to perform and be interviewed. Behind the camera, Miyashiro asked them about their favorite anime characters, their impressions of Asia, and their reactions to a series of videos by Asian rappers, including Imanuel’s.

88rising uploaded its first video to YouTube in May, 2016. It was a clip of the Brooklyn rapper Desiigner’s “Panda,” filmed at the shrine, with Chinese subtitles—a cute, if self-exoticizing, way for 88rising to emphasize its Asian identity.

When “Dat Stick” went viral, it seemed like a testament to how easy it had become to make vaguely authentic-­sounding rap music. Fans saw it as either a well-executed novelty hit or a well-aimed prank. Though Imanuel was a fluid, nimble rapper, the song didn’t fetishize black culture as much as it frolicked within an outlandish, sex-and-violence-obsessed version of it; it ended up feeling like mockery.

But Miyashiro believed that Imanuel was a kid from the other side of the world who didn’t know any better. Imanuel had joined Twitter when he was ten, and he had always been drawn to irreverent humor. As the song grew more popular, he became apologetic about his use of the N-word, which he eventually promised never to use again, and also about his name, which he felt stuck with. Miyashiro did not dismiss the idea that people would find the name Rich Chigga offensive—some of them were on his staff—but, he told me in an e-mail, “this is a global culture whether anyone likes it or not and nobody can stop someone from loving something.”

For his follow-up, Imanuel wanted to release a song called “Hold My Strap.” But Miyashiro was afraid that another dose of gunplay make-believe would permanently entrench him as little more than a meme. Miyashiro felt that it would be smarter to release a video, made to address the “Dat Stick” controversy, called “Rappers React to Rich Chigga.” While people on Twitter argued about whether “Dat Stick” appropriated black culture, the reaction video posed a complicated question: What if other rappers liked “Dat Stick”? When the video begins, many of the rappers seem confused, even speechless. “He even found a way to say ‘nigga’ without saying it,” Meechy Darko, a member of Brooklyn’s Flatbush Zombies, says. “They dead-ass serious?” 21 Savage asks, as Imanuel and his friends wave guns and mug at the camera. But, by the song’s end, they welcome him as a colleague. “This shit is fire,” Meechy Darko says. “I see the comedic side,” Cam’ron says, but “what he was spittin’ was dope. His flow was tough.” Ghostface volunteers to do a remix with him.

There are other businesses trying to mediate between Asian and American music culture. Zhong.tv, a media company focussed on China’s “urban millennials,” offers a more direct portal into Chinese hip-hop. The recently launched Banana Culture is an experiment in merging traditional K-pop management with a media company, and it is linked to the Wanda Group, one of China’s largest entertainment conglomerates.

But 88rising is distinguished by its idiosyncratic tone and its up-to-the-nanosecond appreciation of hip-hop’s youthful, Internet-driven trends. In the year and a half since “Rappers React to Rich Chigga,” the company has gone from documenting these underworlds to becoming a part of them. The staff began collaborating with new rappers such as XXXTentacion, Ski Mask the Slump God, and Killy. This was good business, and it also lent 88rising, as a predominantly Asian company in hip-hop, a kind of credibility. Its artists often borrow from the idioms of black culture, but in a way that’s increasingly detached from the music’s originating streets and struggles. Instead, their sensibility celebrates the free flow of the Internet, in which cultural crossovers should be fast, frictionless, and shorn of historical context.

Hip-hop is 88rising’s core, but its periphery is always changing. Despite the global popularity of Japanese anime, Korean pop music, and Korean e-sports competitions, 88rising has been judicious about how it interacts with these preëxisting markers of Asian popular culture. Its early videos featured Asian beauty vloggers, electronic-dance-music d.j.s, and a radiantly weird philosopher-bodybuilder named Frank Yang. There are hypnotic videos starring a renowned Japanese mixologist whose cocktails resemble tiny terrariums, and a series in which a sushi chef makes onigiri—rice balls—that resemble the rapper Lil Uzi Vert or the K-pop star G-Dragon. Recently, 88rising began chiselling away at its dude-­centric world view, hosting videos featuring the Korean-American dance producer and singer Yaeji, the Korean-American rock musician Japanese Breakfast, and the Japanese pop singer Rina Sawayama. This year, Miyashiro began managing the R. & B. singer AUGUST 08, the company’s first non-Asian act.

Miyashiro said that the harshest critics of 88rising are often Asian-­Americans. “Asian-Americans my age are typically scared,” he told me. “And when something starts to penetrate, like we are, for whatever reason, the Asian-Americans are most skeptical.” Given the relative scarcity of Asian-­Americans in popular culture, it’s understandable that expectations fall on those with some degree of clout—witness the anxieties that surrounded the success of the comedian Margaret Cho, in the nineties, or of the rapper Jin, in the two-thousands. Both were scrutinized by fellow Asian-­Americans, many of whom were worried that they would bring negative representations to a broader audience. Miyashiro said, “They’re, like, fearful of making sure that we don’t offend anyone. Making sure that we’re staying safe. Making sure we don’t appropriate anything.”

He mentioned Niki, an Indonesian R. & B. singer who knew Imanuel in Jakarta. In a video that she had collaborated on with 88rising, the object of her affection is white. “There were these Reddit threads about this guy,” Miyashiro said. “Being, like—I’m not joking—‘What’s up with 88rising having this white-male-Asian-female-type fetish shit?’ Some wild shit, bro.” Miyashiro said that, at the 88rising offices, the controversy reminded staffers of the power they had to shape perceptions of Asian people. But he noted that some of the Asian­-American men in the office argued that it was up to those who felt emasculated to, as he said, “do something about it and be fuckin’ fire.”

Miyashiro’s assistant, a twenty-three-year-old from Queens named Cynthia Guo, told me, “I think, growing up, I was always made to feel that Asian culture wasn’t cool.” On her desk was a stack of classic Asian-American history books, including Ronald Takaki’s “Strangers from a Different Shore” and Helen Zia’s “Asian American Dreams,” which she had read in college. When she found an internship posting for 88rising, she said, it was “like a dream come true,” adding, “There was no one brand I could pinpoint as this really cool Asian thing until 88rising.”

Phil Chen, an adviser at Horizons Ventures, an investment firm in Hong Kong, was one of 88rising’s early backers. He told me that he had been initially skeptical of the company, because of its narrow focus on Asian and Asian-American culture. “I think the goal with assimilation, or trying to fit into the dominant culture, is you don’t try to marginalize yourself,” he said. But, after Keith Ape and Rich Chigga were embraced by non-Asian audiences, he began to see things differently. Maybe 88rising could help Asians feel less “inferior,” he said, about their peripheral status in Western culture. Whenever he finds himself in an Uber in the U.S., he enjoys playing the driver songs by 88rising’s artists. “They flip out,” he says. “It’s just so fun for me, as an Asian, to see an Asian voice being celebrated.”

Before I started hanging out with Miyashiro, I had never truly understood what it means for “creative” to become a noun. Creatives can make a piece of art or an advertisement, but it’s all the same, as long as it makes culture. They work toward outcomes rather than from intentions. (There was a moment when someone mentioned Breitbart, which Miyashiro had never heard of. He was interested in learning if its Web site did video in addition to written pieces.) As much time as I spend on the Internet, I had never felt so attuned to its whims as when Miyashiro would describe an idea so good that it was obviously destined to go viral. And the next time I visited it would have happened—it would be part of the culture.

In late October, Miyashiro was at the office, preparing for the company’s annual board meeting. It was dinnertime, but everyone was working late on his presentation. Miyashiro said, “I can’t decide whether to come professional or swag the fuck out on them.” He had news: he had just returned from Los Angeles, where he had discussed a partnership with a major rec­ord label that would insure much of his company’s autonomy. “It’s so sick,” he said. “It’s the sickest deal ever.”

I asked if 88rising was a profitable business. Miyashiro thought about it for a moment. “In this game, it’s more value-based or projection-based,” he said. “I don’t even know if profitable means much in this shit anymore. Are you making revenue? Are you scaling your audience?” 88rising’s fans are a constant preoccupation of Mi­­ya­shiro’s. “They take ownership,” he said. “No one’s going to walk around and get a Complex tattoo, or a Vice tattoo. People are getting 88rising tattoos. On their body, bro. That’s how we’re different.”

Around the time when Miyashiro and his team were working on Kris Wu’s single, another 88rising artist, Joji, who was born George Miller, appeared on “Hot Ones,” a popular Internet interview show in which guests answer questions while eating increasingly spicy chicken wings. Within a day, and with minimal promotion, it was one of the top trending videos on YouTube. Joji was formerly a YouTube skit-and-prank comedian famous for his characters Filthy Frank (a squawking, anti-­P.C., antisocial nerd with a self-destructive streak) and Pink Guy (a sex-positive Lycra-clad alien with the same predilection for destruction, only he rapped, too). Joji was perhaps best known for his “Harlem Shake” meme, from 2013, which is set to Baauer’s song of the same name. The thirty-­five-second video begins with Pink Guy and three costumed friends thrusting their hips robotically, as the song rises toward a wobbly climax. When the beat drops, everyone begins dancing wildly, as though trying to convulse out of their clothes. At the height of the popularity of “Harlem Shake,” more than four thousand tribute videos were uploaded to YouTube every day. Ethan Klein, who runs the YouTube comedy channel H3H3, described Joji as the best YouTuber of all time.

But, for the past two or three years, Joji had just been going through the motions of his clownish career, turned off, he said, by the increasingly “toxic” Internet. He had begun recording music that was languid and uncontrollably sad, somewhat reminiscent of the British singer James Blake. But he occasionally wondered if the closest he’d come to committing to a music career were the novelty rap albums that he recorded as Pink Guy.

“Sean pulled me out of that slump,” Joji said. He had come to 88rising to discuss making viral videos, but when Miyashiro heard his demos he suggested that they focus on Joji’s music.

Last fall, Joji and Miyashiro were at a studio in Brooklyn, working on a new song, tentatively called “Rising,” featuring Wu, Imanuel, Baauer, and the rapper Trippie Redd. “Bro, it’s inspiring shit,” Miyashiro said. But Wu had recorded a new verse for it, which took up nearly half the song, and they had to figure out how to work around it.

Joji’s début EP, “In Tongues,” was scheduled to be released the following day. As Miyashiro and the studio engineer discussed ways to restructure “Rising,” Joji bounced between his social-­media accounts unconsciously, like an ex-smoker with permanently fidgety hands. “When I was heavy on the Internet, I was checking everything,” he said. “Stats, everything. Because in that world your value is determined by your numbers.” He was earnest, gracious, polite—qualities that his YouTube personae might have mocked.

Joji and Miyashiro brainstormed ideas for viral content to promote “In Tongues.” “When something blows up, and you made it, it’s fucking ful­filling,” Miyashiro had told me. One of Joji’s ideas for a meme involved a car full of tough “hood dudes” who are sobbing as his latest single plays. “Let’s do that,” Miyashiro said. He called a professional meme-maker, who suggested synchronizing the music to short, repetitive clips. “I just need you to tell me your concept for the meme,” Miyashiro said to Joji, covering the receiver. Joji thought about it for a second. “Hard falls. Funny crying. Punching.”

A few nights later, Joji headed to Irving Plaza, for the New York date of Brian Imanuel’s first American tour. Imanuel’s upcoming single, “Crisis,” featured the grim, deadpan Atlanta rapper 21 Savage, who had been one of the more skeptical voices on “Rappers React to Rich Chigga.” 21’s music is fierce, lumbering, and largely joyless, the seeming opposite of Imanuel’s bouncy, Internet-honed sense of wit. Now 21 was dancing alongside Imanuel in a video, appearing to enjoy himself. “21 is cool, bro,” Miyashiro told me. “He genuinely likes Rich and us.”

In the first year that Imanuel and Miyashiro worked together, they mostly talked on the phone, which was complicated by the twelve-hour time difference between Jakarta and New York. They finally met last May, in Miami, where Imanuel performed at Rolling Loud, one of the biggest hip-hop festivals in the world. Backstage, Imanuel surprised the rapper Post Malone with a mariachi band that he had ordered using the mobile delivery service Post Mates. The band performed a buoyant rendition of Post Malone’s single “Congratulations,” and soon a video of the stunt was trending on social media. Miyashiro told me that the clip initially grew out of a discussion with Post Mates about making a short video featuring Imanuel using the company’s app to book the band. But someone standing nearby had captured the entire thing on his cell phone and uploaded it himself, thwarting the plan.

From politics to the pop charts, one of the conditions of contemporary life is our inability to distinguish organic popularity from movements that have been carefully engineered. The work of making something go viral is largely invisible. The entertainment business has always worked this way—an illusion of popularity can beget actual popularity. But, in the Internet age, the velocity of change outpaces our ability to process and reflect on it. When you’re constantly dealing with effects, rather than nursing skepticism about causes, the stakes seem much higher. The amateur video had accomplished the initial gag’s aims: it got people to think about Post Mates, and it made Imanuel seem like a sweet, endearing kid.

At Irving Plaza, fans arrived six hours early to be the first ones inside. The crowd was young, jubilant, and diverse, heavy on college students in a range of streetwear trends, from futuristic, utilitarian chic to vintage rap T-shirts older than they were. They chanted “Chigga! Chigga!” before switching to “Brian! Brian!” “These aren’t K-pop pretty-boy motherfuckers,” Park told me, about 88rising’s artists. “These are all the outcast, weirdo dudes. I think that’s kinda refreshing, because I think every Asian’s kinda felt like that, especially in America, whether you’re an F.O.B. or a nerd, a weirdo, all these different things.”

Imanuel sat in front of a mirror in his dressing room, flanked by Miyashiro and Joji. He stared at his reflection, dancing and rapping along to the d.j.’s music. He seems comfortable in his own skin, like someone who grew up making faces on Snapchat and Vine. He said that he was feeling a little homesick after being on the road for so long. “When I was thirteen, I was super obsessed with this country,” he said. He had been in awe of the actors in the Indonesian action film “The Raid,” who parlayed its success into playing bit parts in Hollywood blockbusters. He spoke with a soft deference, as though this were the voice he reserved for adults. “I’ve always wanted to come here. I’ve seen everything on the Internet, really. It feels like a second home.”

Miyashiro, Joji, and Imanuel had a clubby rapport. The d.j. played Drake’s “Know Yourself,” and they began talking about how the chorus—“Runnin’ through the 6 with my woes”—had been a perfect impetus for viral videos involving Drake’s woes, or running. They discussed memes in the way that a previous generation might have dissected movies or an episode of a sitcom. When Imanuel was ready to take the stage, he removed his hoodie, revealing a T-shirt that featured an illustration of himself. The crowd sang along to all his lyrics and knew all his ad-libs. An audience member held up a framed photograph of Imanuel as if it were a devotional offering. As Imanuel danced and leaped across the stage, his small frame seemed to expand. He had recently turned eighteen, and a few members of 88rising’s staff stood in the wings, ready to wheel a giant cake onstage. Joji, wearing a Limp Biz­kit baseball jersey, came out and sang a couple of songs from his EP. It had been out for only a few days, but the audience sang along to his songs, too.

Shortly before the holidays, I met Miyashiro at his home, in a part of the Upper East Side where someone wearing a leather jacket with the words “Road to Nowhere” across the back, as he was, really stands out. We waited in the lobby of his apartment for one of his employees to deliver a Christmas tree.

Imanuel, Joji, Keith Ape, and the Higher Brothers were at the end of an Asian tour that had sold out quickly. Miyashiro wanted to do big things in 2018. 88rising had already sold out concerts in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. The staff were developing a television series. They are also working on a crew album called “88 Degrees and Rising,” which Miyashiro described as their version of Puff Daddy and the Family’s “No Way Out,” from 1997, which featured the Notorious B.I.G., Lil’ Kim, and other artists on the Bad Boy label. 88rising also wanted to look into curating its own festivals, including one in China. Miyashiro was no longer managing the company’s social-­media accounts himself.

We ended up at a nearby Italian restaurant. “It’s so fire, drinking hot soup with you,” he said. He thought that, because I was from San Jose, too, I could appreciate the unlikeliness of his trajectory. “This is some New York shit.”

Another translation of the Chinese homophone for eighty-eight is that it means “fortune and good luck.” I asked Miyashiro how he would know if 88rising had succeeded. “I never have to be filthy rich,” he said. “That’s not why we’re doing this shit. It’s more about: How do we contain this purity of the brand?” 88rising had become an expression of Miyashiro—his style, his taste, his sense of humor. He didn’t promote himself on a personal Twitter or Instagram account. Instead, he poured himself into 88rising. “I’d rather die than not continue this,” he said. “I feel like I’m high all the time, even though I’m sober.”

Miyashiro spent New Year’s Eve at home. The next day, at 1 p.m., he posted on 88rising’s Twitter account that Imanuel had changed his stage name to Brian. There was a link to an introspective new song called “See Me.” I talked to Miyashiro about an hour later. In late December, Imanuel had announced that his début album, “Amen,” would be coming out in February. The criticism around his name was fiercer than ever. After months of discussion, “he hit me up one morning,” Miyashiro said. “He was, like, ‘Yo, I want to change my name.’ This was after we had had a million conversations. He sent me some screenshots of things that really got to him on Twitter. It finally made sense to him.” A couple of days later, Imanuel changed his name again, this time to Rich Brian.

In mid-January, 88rising was finally ready to release the single showcasing Imanuel, Kris Wu, and Joji, alongside Baauer and Trippie Redd. It was now called “18.” In the days leading up to its release, however, 88rising got caught in a social-media war among rabid pop fans in Asia. One of them had circulated an old 88rising image featuring a row of Asian flags, including that of Tibet, as a way of suggesting that the company was somehow anti-Chinese. It was a reminder of the cross-cultural knowledge required to credibly enter any Asian market. Around this time, Chinese censors began cracking down on rap lyrics, targeting some of the contestants who had been made famous by “Rap of China.” Miyashiro decided that “18” wasn’t worth the potential drama. He released the single quietly, with only light promotion. Wu and 88rising have not worked together since.

Miyashiro turned his attention to Imanuel’s album, and, on February 2nd, “Amen” became the first album by an Asian artist to top iTunes’ hip-hop charts. Given the novelty of “Dat Stick,” few listeners could have anticipated the charm of “Amen,” which is filled with moments of teen-age innocence—one track is about Imanuel losing his virginity—and earnest contentment. But Miyashiro had seen it all along. “Brian’s a musical genius,” he had told me the first time we met.

Just before the 88rising show at San Francisco’s Warfield Theatre, Miyashiro texted to tell me that the reception to “Amen” was “a turning point for us.” A few seconds later, he texted again: “Or another one.” ♦