Chow Mane wants to represent a different side of Bay Area rap

Chow Mane, real name Charles Yan, explains that the songs he had been writing for the past few years were anything but rap. Most had topics of love and romance, which he had enough of to fit the theme of his latest album, MOOD 4 LOVE. The album concept started to come together when he thought of Action Bronson’s Blue Chips and Curren$y’s Fast Times at Ridgemont Fly—both named after movies. “These movies are integral to these artists' upbringing or very influential to them. So I started thinking through movies that fit this vibe, but were also integral to me. And I had this idea for MOOD 4 LOVE since I felt like it fit on all accounts,” Mane says.

The cover art for MOOD 4 LOVE is an almost identical homage to the film’s characters, down to the gaudiness, smoking cigarettes, and Mane’s simple suit, with a woman wearing an elegant black dress behind him. Released earlier this year, MOOD 4 LOVE is a collection of melancholic serenades, throwbacks to early 2000s hip-hop, and Mane’s interpretations of laid-back raps. He wrote “Chef’s Selection Freestyle” first, expanding on the cinematic boom bap sound to capture the feeling of being adrift and wanting love again. It’s not all love songs, though, as he draws inspiration from Rio Da Yung Og, and showcases his Ralfy The Plug-type flow on “Juice Lee.”

The 29-year-old rapper is nicknamed the “master chef of sound,” building upon layers of flavor with different ingredients, for a reason. Growing up in Salinas and San Jose, California, he was listening to Bay Area names like The Pack, Traxamillion, and Lil B. His rap-listening habits led him to Outkast, Mac Miller, and Lil Wayne. Wayne led him to do more punchline rap, studying others like Fabolous, King Los, and Childish Gambino. “When I first started rapping, I wanted to do all the punchline stuff,” he says. “As I kept going, I wanted to experiment. Branch out the sound more.”

When he was first starting in 2013, he focused on releasing songs on SoundCloud. During those early days, the AA+PI representation in rap consisted of guys like MC Jin and Dumbfoundead. In the Bay, it was P-Lo. At first, he was compared to Vietnamese Canadian rapper Chuckie Akenz. “I didn’t really hear it,” he says with a laugh. Then, in 2017, when he officially released music under Chow Mane, his approach was to try and do something different than what the Bay Area sound is known for. “I wanted to represent a different side of (hyphy), a different experience where I’m from,” he says. “There are a few San Jose rappers, but none were as big as Vallejo, Oakland, or San Francisco rappers. I felt like our town was where a lot of people went to party, but it didn’t have a lot of representation.”

Then, he linked up with Oakland artist JIG LeFrost (Jordan Garrett) in 2017, who taught him the ins and outs of the music industry. “He’s really the one who put me on. He was like, ‘You should really mix and master your stuff.’ I was like, ‘What’s that?’ Showing me the ropes on how to get on social media and doing all the stuff I was doing back then,” Mane says. “I got to thank him. That really started pushing me in this direction, taking things more seriously, dropping real mixtapes and messing around on SoundCloud.”

During that time in 2017, Mane was living with his dad in San Jose. He recalls working two jobs at the time—in an office and part-time at a clothing shop—and coming home late to work on music, feeling like there wasn’t a lot of momentum behind him. He reached out to friends who were more established in their music careers for advice, read music marketing books, and tried to keep track of new social trends to promote his songs. “When I got to that point, I felt like my life was at a standstill,” he says. “I felt like I had some creativity that I could express, and some of the stuff I was experiencing every day felt like other people around me could relate to as well. So I really started pushing real hard that year on the independent route.”

Mane was labeled as a comedic rapper, but didn’t want to box himself in with his funny punchlines. His first song that went viral was “ABG,” an acronym for Asian Baby Girl or Asian Baby Gangster, which landed him his first investment deal. It wasn’t exactly the big break he wanted at the time. “A few agencies that were reaching out were telling me, ‘Hey, we can brand you as the Asian Lil Dicky,’” he says. “I guess I could’ve gone that route, but it just didn’t feel right. That really wasn’t the goal I was going for. In my heart, I wanted to experiment with different sounds. I want to be more of a broad type of artist.”

A stylistic switch came with his 2017 EP Mooncakes, on which Mane spoke from his perspective as an Asian American as well. He was working with producer Oksami, who showed him Bohan Phoenix’s “Foreign.” “When Oksami sent me that song ‘Foreign,’ that was the first time it clicked in my head that my identity is so integral to me, but I never thought about using it in my music, and it is something that Bohan had done,” he says. “It changed my perception of what can be done in music.”

Mooncakes planted the seeds for Chow Mane fans who grew to like his Asian pop culture references and clever ways to rap about food. “Mooncakes,” the title track, was especially revealing in sharing his family hardships of stuffing eight people into his grandma’s house while they all worked at the restaurant to make ends meet. “Mama she was a hustler, money orientated/My dad came from the struggle, they lost it all in the war/The government took the house and they raided out all the drawers/And every one of em looked at the sky, asked, ‘why lord?’” he raps.

Mane has grown a lot since 2017, swerving lanes with his creativity in the driver’s seat, never letting one path define him. The consistent topic is telling his Chinese American story, collaborating with Jason Chu on protest songs "Crossing the Border" (Chu's song with Alan Z, which Mane was featured on) “Go Back 2 China” that reveal more of his family's refugee background and honor their resilience. Ask him about how his dad's family, originally from Fujian and living in Vietnam, came to the United States, and he'll tell you a harrowing World War II-era story involving pirates attacking their boat, stealing their belongings, and getting rescued by the Red Cross, where they lived on a refugee island—most likely the Galang refugee camp in Indonesia—for years.

It used to be that Mane cared a lot about sharing the Asian American experience with unfamiliar people, but he realized he needed to switch his mindset. “As I progressed as an artist and got these songs out and started working on other things, that started to be less important to me, what other people thought,” he says. “I really wanted to make stuff for myself and for people that this would already resonate with. So instead of trying to expand too far out, I wanna keep them happy, keep myself happy, and make the kind of music that I f*ck with.”