Mike Shinoda spoke to Noisey about Fort Minor, his family, art school and wanting to be a rapper, and more. We have a preview of the interview below, you can read the interview in FULL here.
Shinoda grew up in Agoura Hills, California, about an hour away from Los Angeles on the 101. It was there he was chauffeured by his friend’s dad to watch hip-hop groups like Public Enemy swing through their setlists. In high school, he and his friends would shoot the shit at lunch time, chopping it up about who they were into, what was interesting. “First and foremost I grew up on NWA and Ice-T,” Shinoda told me over the phone recently. “I remember half of our school getting bused in from downtown and we were up the San Fernando Valley, so half of my friends were from downtown and they would bring in cassettes of stuff that they had taped in their boomboxes or off the radio. It was like KDAY at the time? And it was like Ice T and King T and NWA, stuff like that. So, they were, and stuff that wasn’t from LA too, like 2 Live Crew came out at the time, a few things from New York, but I think the LA sound was more of what everybody was into. And they introduced it to me back then, and we were all listening to that.”Agoura Hills is the place that informed Shinoda’s racial identity and shaped the perspective he would later draw from in his art. He was born to Muto and Donna Shinoda in 1977, a half Japanese-American kid in a suburb made of 80 percent white people. At age three, Muto experienced firsthand the horrors of the Japanese internment camps.“My dad’s family is Japanese-American, born and raised in California and interned during the Second World War after Pearl Harbor,” Shinoda explained. “They were put in camps in Arizona. Even Americans don’t really know the story, how they took the people out of their homes, gave them no time to pack anything up, and made them put stuff into two suitcases or two trash bags and they carted them off. They put the Japanese in horse stalls in some cases. The Santa Anita Racetrack was like a holding ground for Japanese Americans at the time. They stuck them in the horse stalls with the shit and the hay, until the camps were ready. And then when the camps were ready they stuck them in with barbed wire and towers. Guns pointed inside instead of outside. And kids were growing up there, my dad was three years old when that happened. He was literally growing up looking around going, ‘This is what reality is.’ They got out. They went back to their homes and their homes were trashed. Everything was broken and ransacked basically. If you were Japanese-American you also couldn’t buy a piece of property, then they’d get discriminated against in every time. In their schools, at their jobs, it was crazy. And you know, we all grew up understanding that reality.”Against this history, Shinoda would also feel a disconnect with other kids around him at a young age. “When I was a kid, [other kids] just knew I was mixed. They didn’t know what I was,” Shinoda said. “A lot of people thought I was Hispanic. Some people knew I was Asian, but they didn’t know what… I remember having a friend over my house one time and he made some weird comment about my gardener, and I was like ‘That’s not my fucking gardener, that’s my dad you asshole.’ And it was like always a thing. I was like this undercover minority.” This type of prejudice followed him for a long time: When Shinoda submitted the original logo for Hybrid Theory to Linkin Park’s record label, for instance, it was shot down by an A&R for appearing “too Asian.”
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