Audible.ca releases hip-hop industry insider Sophia Chang's The Baddest Bitch in the Room
Credit to Author: Stuart Derdeyn| Date: Sun, 29 Sep 2019 18:00:01 +0000
When: Sept. 26
Where: Online
Tickets and info: $14.95 a month. First month free at audible.ca
It’s hardly news that the music industry is still white-male dominated and minorities, particularly female, are barely represented in its ranks. When she moved from her hometown of Vancouver to New York in 1988 to pursue a career in music, Sophia Chang didn’t give that a single thought. The city was the heartbeat of hip-hop. The 23-year-old Korean-Canadian was enchanted by the genre ever since a classmate at Prince of Wales mini-school spun Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s breakout release, The Message.
Chang planned on taking a big bite out of Big Apple rap. She did that and a whole lot more, becoming a major music biz player privately as well as producing runway shows for Vivienne Tam and the Project Runway All Stars, and writing a screenplay for HBO.
In her audible.ca memoir titled The Baddest Bitch in the Room, Chang tells the tale of how someone who grew up in super-safe suburban, white Vancouver became an A&R (artist and repertoire, talent scout) for the enormously influential label Jive and moved in the grittier circles of Staten Island backroom recording studios hanging out with Wu-Tang Clan founder RZA and opening up her Manhattan apartment to a who’s who of hip-hop legends to crash in. While she may not be a household name, Chang’s name is familiar to any in the music industry during rap’s golden age and the journey she details in her audiobook comes across like a script for a biopic that is coming to a streaming service near you.
Her memories of life in Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the heyday of hip-hop, New Wave, the loft scene and more is loaded with sharp insights into what life was like in the days before gentrification and development turned the Bowery into a boutique. No, it wasn’t always wonderful, but it certainly was real.
“I didn’t know that the Message was what I wanted to hear more than anything else until I heard it, I couldn’t identify that missing thing until I heard it and it was so real,” said Chang. “We were listening to the Jam, the Clash and the Pistols a little bit, with this urgency and antiestablishmentarianism. Then there was this hip-hop with all of that and this phenomenal storytelling like nothing I had ever heard before, plus that incredible beat.”
Naturally, her guitar-playing boyfriend at the time said it wasn’t real music. This tired-out line is still trotted out by unoriginal musicians everywhere who resent talented turntablists and MCs making music that matters rather than trying to reformat Foghat for commercial rock radio. Tied into this whole attitude, which goes back to such loathsome acts as Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park, Chicago, on July 12, 1979, are elements of racism, homophobia and class bias.
“I worked closely with Nile Rodgers (Chic) who was huge in the disco era and in his phenomenal biography, The Freak, he talks about how the music came right out of the black-and-brown queer scene in the New York underground in the ’70s,” she said. “And a lot of that opposition to disco came from racism and homophobia and a lot of the resistance to hip-hop, for sure, had to do with race. I absolutely think that if rap had been coming from white men, there wouldn’t have been that pushback.”
As she notes in the book, there was a point where that opposition to hip-hop as a musical force became tilting at windmills. Soundscan’s sales chart couldn’t be denied. The genre was exploding on vinyl, on select radio stations, on MTV and in concert. Sales figures for albums like the first NWA or Wu-Tang Clan’s Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) mirrored those of breakout rock bands. Working with artists finding a way to describe their culture in a powerful voice led Chang back to her own issues of cultural identity and belonging.
“My mother and father literally risked their lives to get out of Korea and I was raised with a serious amount of, what I’ll call, their intrepidity, and I knew that I was smart, that my opinion mattered and I didn’t take it much further than that,” said Chang. “Coming into a genre that was so clearly defined by gender and by race was daunting for me, but hip-hop embraced me so completely. I came to proclaim that, ‘My name is Sophia Chang and I was raised by Wu-Tang,’ because it was so.”
She spent decades working with Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA, GZA and ODB and was involved with A Tribe Called Quest, Raphael Saadiq and D’Angelo as well. Through this continuing connection, she had what is described as a “transformational odyssey,” coming to a point where she took what she learned from her dear friends and applied it to her own life. Along the way, she would take up Shaolin martial arts and have children with an actual practising monk, move up the ranks of record label board rooms and come to define her role as an Asian woman in the entertainment business.
“One of the best things about this job has been that I’ve been able to not only work with these artists, but also to come to experience their humanity and learned from them,” she said. “For years, people have been saying that I should write a book about my ‘crazy life’ and I bristled at the idea because it would be me writing about hanging out and working with famous people and who gives a s–t. But when I started working at Universal Music Group in 2014 and was mentoring a bunch of really young women, that I realized that telling my story and relating my experiences could be in service of others trying to make it in this business.”
Chang says that working with Paul Simon made her acutely aware of the price that people pay for fame. Her late mentor Sonia Chang told her to fiercely protect her anonymity for both longevity and sanity. By bringing her life out of the boardroom and into a book, Chang bares it all, warts and everything, proclaiming, “I am the fearsome empress on the throne, to whom you bend the knee and whose bling you kiss.”
The Baddest Bitch in the Room is 54 now. She says that releasing an audible original was an obvious choice in storytelling for someone who has held onto microphones for decades. Chang is currently developing film and TV properties, raising her children and trains kung fu seven days a week.