One concert was all it took to spark the idea of the Asian arts collective 88rising overseeing the soundtrack for one of the most hotly watched action movies of the year.
It happened in early 2019, when Destin Daniel Cretton, the director of the forthcoming Marvel Studios movie "Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” caught an energetic Los Angeles gig by Chinese hip-hop group Higher Brothers. "I’ve never been to a show that was primarily made up of Asian Americans who were all just owning themselves,” Cretton says in a recent interview. "Nobody felt like an outsider; I don’t know if you want to call it a punk rock mentality, but everybody was so pumped to be there.”
Sean Miyashiro, the 40-year-old founder of 88rising (which includes Higher Brothers on its roster) was there, and when the two met backstage, Miyashiro didn’t need a formal pitch to convince the director of what his artists could do. Cretton "looked like he was hypnotized,” Miyashiro recalls. "He told me he’d never seen a bunch of Asian kids just wilding out like that — thrashing and jumping in the mosh pit. That really stuck with him.”