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"Can we, as a country, all
agree
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xmag.com
: May
2002: Like WOW!
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Once
in a while, in the ordinary lifetime of an ordinary man
such as I, a musical artist emerges who oozes such talent,
personality, and GREAT
HAIR that one is stopped dead in one's tracks and forced
to say, "Like, WOW!"
Y2Khai
is just such an artist.
He
dresses like Elvis. He looks like a Chinaman. He sounds
like a retard. His lyrics are disgusting, with rampant
references to poop and STDs. He raps about his tight,
sweaty balls and about sucking on his girlfriend's dirty,
stinky toes. He is Y2Khai. He is, quite simply, my favorite
modern American musician operating within an urban-contemporary
format.
His
website, y2khai.com, is the funniest site in the
world. And in a wistfully poetic way, it's fitting that
what is perhaps the greatest website of our time would
also feature what is undoubtedly the greatest song of
the modern era, Y2Khai's "Wow." I have watched the video
for "Wow" at least nine hundred times. "Like, WOW! Like...WOW!"
That's all you can say after seeing this short Flash video
featuring, among other things: a girl in legwarmers; a
tranny who let Khai live at her condo and used "to have
a ding-dong"; Khai eating a Big Montana sandwich at Arby's
and dripping steak sauce on his underwear; and Khai pulling
up in his bumpin' vintage Impala to the local high school
and getting surrounded by "a gang of bitches" before he
turns "the ugly hoes away" and peels out. "Like...WOW!"
That's all you...and your friends...and all of their friends...will
say for weeks and weeks after seeing the video for this
maddeningly infectious song, and, frankly, it becomes
tiresome.
 If
his website is to be believed, Khai haunts the mean streets
of California's San Fernando Valley (or as Khai calls
it in his charming street argot, "The S.F.V."), spending
most of every day smoking da chronic,
driving around in his Impala, and playing bitches for
money and sex. Y2khai.com features MP3s and videos for
a mere seven songs that total barely eight minutes, which
I'm assuming is pretty much all of Y2Khai's recorded canon.
Almost all of the songs are short, crude, hilarious remakes
of Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, and Eminem records...well, they're
not really even remakes. It sounds like Khai used the
actual backing tracks from the originals, so the overall
effect is more like karaoke wherein the singer improvises
lyrics about poop and transsexuals.
Khai's
English-as-a-Second-Language, soft-enough-to-be-a-fag's
voice clashes hilariously against the hardcore-rappa persona
he's trying to
project, but maybe it isn't so contradictory after all.
Actin' like a ree-tard has a long, noble, curious tradition
in hip-hop, dating back to Humpty Hump in the early 90s
and Dana Dane before him. Through some weird, mystical,
Coptic ritual inversion, if one acts REALLY uncool, unfunky,
and unsexy, they suddenly become the coolest, funkiest,
sexiest jibber-jabber in the whole hip-hop Biosphere.
Khai's site has photo galleries featuring pix of topless
or almost-topless girls who've scrawled "Y2Khai" onto
various body parts, as well as a
disturbingly large section of Fan Art wherein Khai's
sunglass-wearing,
Elvis-bewigged head is Photoshopped onto the bodies
of pop icons such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael
Jackson, and Bigfoot. The
site also hawks Y2Khai T-Shirts and promises a "new
Hip-Hopumentary video on Y2Khai coming soon" which I
predict will be the best music-related film since Vanilla
Ice's Cool as Ice. The site also host several
lively discussion boards, but I never join groups except
to
spy on them.
For
a week or so after discovering Khai's website, I felt
happy. I felt energized. There was a spring to my step
and a song in my heart. I felt hopeful for the first
time in years. I felt fully alive for perhaps the first
time in my life. I took a deep breath and pondered the
possibility that my childhood premonitions about my
life ending in disaster were wrong. And the reason for
my startling psychological recovery was Y2Khai, and
Y2Khai alone. 
And
then, to my severe karmic horror, I began reading Internet
rumors that there is no "real" Y2Khai at all, that the
pictures of the Asian lad in the Elvis outfit are all
photos of some obscure Asian singer from... y'know...
Asia...and that the entire site was concocted
by some bored, potty-mouthed computer nerds looking
for a cheap laugh and a fast buck, a bunch of cold-hearted
sharks who don't care about shattering the admittedly
delusional dreams of unstable persons such as me.
My
dismay grew deeper after I e-mailed
"Khai"
asking for a phone interview and received this response:
This
is Y2khai. Sorry I don't do phone interview. But,
you can sent me the questions and I will try to answer
them. thanks
This
is where I started getting REALLY suspicious. Why
wouldn't he do a phone interview? It's a lot easier
to do than e-mail. And come to think of it, no REAL
Asian would drop the 's' in the word 'interviews'
like that. Neither would a REAL Asian write, "you
can SENT me the questions." He might say it,
but he wouldn't write it that way. Suddenly,
something seems highly fake about it all to me. It's
almost as if he had written, So solly about you
ruck--you rikey flied lice?
Come
to think of it, y2khai.com features ubiquitous banner
ads for some dorky-looking white musician dude named
John Patrick Foshee, so maybe that's the White Guy
Behind Y2Khai, the white guy who burst my bubble and
broke my heart.
Or
maybe I'm overreacting. I'm good at that.
But
I began sweating. I started pacing. Beads of sweat
began forming on my head like Turtle Wax Car Polish.
My heart went thumpity-thump in the night. I was afraid
to ask any more questions, because I really couldn't
bear to hear that there was no Y2Khai. I wanted to
believe in him, and so I did. I fell into a state
of cognitive dissonance; the more evidence I had that
there
was no Khai, the more I believed in Khai. When I heard
the mere suggestion of his nonexistence, I didn't
want
to believe my ears and wished misfortune upon those
who would dare suggest such a thing. I had fallen
in
love with Y2Khai. I wanted there to be a Y2Khai just
like I wanted there to
be a Santa Claus. And
I would get my wish, even if I had to hurt people
in the process.
•
He talks about ass and feces even more than I do.
•
As opposed to most rappers, who tend to be muscular black
males from the inner city with an apparent chip on their
shoulders, his goofy Asian persona is sexually non-threatening
to me.
•
He has trouble pronouncing past-tense forms of
English verbs and will add an unnecessary syllable at
the end. For instance, he'll say the word boned like
"bone-did," and he says checked like "check-id."
He also pronounced settle like "shettle," which
is mildly charming.
•
He flaunts an unashamed
proclivity for underaged girls, as evidenced by
the lyrics, "All of my girls are in Junior High/They all
ask why Khai is so fly" and "Khai creepin' up to the high
school like
a Chester."
•
He keeps referring to California's San Fernando Valley
as if it were a crime-ridden urban 'hood rather than the
home of child-loving pop star Michael Jackson.
•
In the song "The Khai Episode," he has the guts
to tell his chubby girlfriend she's been eating too much
pie.
•
And yet, despite that, he shows an empathetic side
in the song
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