Keepsake of the Week: “1975” by No-No Boy
“1975” is the second full-length album from folk artist and Americana storyteller No-No Boy and is this week’s #KOTW.
In this semi-weekly blog series, we post our favorite new or re-discovered releases in independent music, our Keepsake of the Week, or #KOTW.
Roots reach long and deep for Julian Saporiti and the music of his stage name, No-No Boy. The term “No-No Boy” was made famous by the 1957 novel of this name, written by Japanese-American writer John Okada, about the aftermath of the Japanese internment in the United States. Two confusing questions on the Leave Clearance Application Form given to interned men at the time caused many to answer “no” and “no,” hence the phrase “no-no boy.” The musical project’s first album was called “1942,” named for the year internment camps were established. In that album’s song “Dragon Park,” No-No Boy sings, “Je chant en francais / Italian last name / With eyes like the king of old Saiyan / Broken in half / My colonial raft / Splinters and laughs / Like my Japanese friend / Who fronts a country band.” Saporiti’s musical journey is quintessentially Americana, steeped in winding, knotted immigrant roots. Those roots continue to spread in the new album “1975,” recorded by Smithsonian Folkways and named for the year Saigon fell. Here, No-No Boy digs even deeper into his heritage and histories, laying claim to the familiar but largely underrepresented Asian American experience.
No-No Boy is a scholar and activist as much as he is a songwriter, and the skills he has developed throughout his career shine through in “1975,” which features “field recordings from the sites of collective trauma and fragments of Asian American musical tradition” (Smithsonian Folkways 2021). Saporiti is clearly a musician of many skills, but he is ultimately a storyteller, using all his tools to share tales that are near forgotten. The standout here is single “The Best God Damn Band in Wyoming,” which sounds like a storybook reading of how the George Igawa Orchestra was formed inside a Wyoming internment camp, with sound effects including a triumphant trumpet sprinkled in like magic dust. If it wasn’t clear from the “curriculum” page on his website, No-No Boy is a project created to teach us all what the American school systems fail to. (And if you haven’t seen the music video of this song, feel free to stop reading this and watch now.)
The album begins with the recorded voice of Saporiti’s Japanese mother and then weaves through the histories of Asia and Asian America (Vietnam in “Imperial Twist” and “Tell Hanoi I Love Her,” the Philippines in “Gimme Chills,” Angel Island where many Chinese-Americans were detained in “Pilgrims,” Cambodian family history in “Khmerica”). No-No Boy’s music is almost always place-specific—a quality of music I tend to be drawn to, and I especially love what Saporiti calls his “mess of proper nouns”—but “1975” is made more powerful in its wide mapping of places.
Through his travels and scholarly research, No-No Boy has found connection in marginalized American communities of all kinds. In “Close Your Eyes and Dream of Flowers,” he sings of Mexican war history and contemporary border issues in southern Texas. And in my personal favorite of the record, “Where the Sand Creek Meets the Arkansas River,” No-No Boy writes in second person to force listeners to confront America’s bloody history. One of the song’s subjects is indigenous Cheyenne woman known by the Japanese name “Mochi,” whose Colorado camp was attacked in what was later called the Sand Creek Massacre. Mochi fled the battle and became a noted warrior, until she was the first and only Native American woman incarcerated as a prisoner of war. “Open up your eyes / For a minute and give yourself / To a place and a time,” sings No-No Boy in this song, which to me encapsulates the essence of his mission-based songwriting. In music, just as in life, we all need to learn to listen, to let go of our own story and give ourselves to the place and the time.
Stream “1975” everywhere now.
Photo: Julian Saporiti / No-No Boy Bandcamp
