How keshi Influenced a New Generation of Asian American Artists

keshi’s music has never fit the mold for Asian artists. Now, with his second album on the horizon, a new generation is following his lead.

It was the first week of March in 2022 when keshi released a track that would almost instantly polarize fans. “GET IT”, the second single off his debut album “GABRIEL”, put the singer on the offensive and quickly divided OG keshi fans, who loved the singer for his intimate music, and the new fans, who were just beginning to see what a magnetic force the singer was.

“No one expected this sound from him,” brynne, a 19 year old Filipino American singer based in Los Angeles, told me over discord one spring night. Two years ago, when the song first premiered, brynne had just begun to make his own music. Like keshi, he is drawn to experimental production that highlights his falsetto, and their sound has been on a strangely similar trajectory. In June when brynne released “CPR”, his brightest pop track yet, it foretold the pop direction keshi would take with his new lead single.

But back in 2022, the new keshi who talked his shit, the major label keshi who was making millions, was a jolt to longtime fans. Compared to the acoustic, stripped down music that made keshi beloved by listeners like brynne, “GET IT” sounded akin to selling out. It was loud, aggressive music that verged on trap or hip-hop. “Got my bag right, on my own time/ Now these bitches tongue-tied trynna get on this side,” keshi brags in the first verse. This keshi was bawdy and cocky; running his mouth like a kid ready for a punch. He was, as I saw it, quick to remind you that he created this scene. Rightly so. 

“A lot of people were confused by the song,” brynne continued, “but I always understood the vision.” 

Most keshi fans would come around to “GET IT”. “This is a direction I did NOT expect keshi going WHATSOEVER,” a fan wrote on the YouTube comment section for the video. “I AM ASTONISHED.” By the time the full album “GABRIEL” arrived three weeks later in March, most fans had lined up behind brynne. They got the vision too. 

Over the next two years, keshi rose from an R&B underground legend to a singer who a new generation of Asian Americans revere and love. His influence is vast and has opened the door for new indie acts like starfall, hojean and bixby to find audiences. Yet despite how fast he sold out his past tour and how impressive his streaming numbers are, keshi is still most well-known in Asian circles. To date, keshi has received no profiles in publications like Rolling Stone, The New York Times or Billboard or Variety. He has not been invited to perform at Saturday Night Live or a music awards stage. 

But the machine to make keshi a star is in full grind right now. The singer’s second album “requiem” will be released on September 13 and to make him an icon, keshi has released “Say”, the most accessible song of his career. It’s a breezy, light pop track that goes down easy. There are no sad boy lyrics that delve into trauma or pain. In fact, “Say” is a love song. This is a calculated move by keshi and his team: By taking the widest swing possible, he is also aiming to rise above the subculture that he created.

The biggest test of keshi’s career will come in October when he begins his world tour. For the first time, keshi will play arenas, including New York City’s Madison Square Garden which holds over 20,000 seats. As I scrolled through keshi’s massive tour dates and watched the music video for “Say”, I wondered: Could keshi reach a pinnacle of fame that is not reflective of his identity and ethnicity? And if he did, what would this breakthrough mean for Asian artists like brynne who only have keshi as a blueprint? If history tells us anything, I thought, it is that keshi will not just have to shatter a glass ceiling. He will have to knock the entire damn glass house down too.  

Back when keshi was still working as a registered nurse and uploading music to SoundCloud, he was flown out to Los Angeles for his first concert. Born Casey Luong and hailing from Houston, keshi remembers performing a bad set at that show. The experience shook him and eventually, as he told “From the Intercom”, was a revelation because he realized just how much he needed to improve to compete with other artists.

 For a while, he thought about quitting music. keshi had hit what he described as a crossroads, and he chose to work on his craft. “What happened was around that time was when lo-fi started to boom a little bit. I was listening to other artists and I loved how Tomppabeats, In Love With a Ghost, and Joji used these unconventional sounds to create this soundscape-–an ensemble of glass, and water and marble,” he remembered. “I thought it was the coolest thing ever. It had this diversity that standard, conventional music didn’t have.”

After the traumatizing LA show, keshi pushed to reach new fans. He released tracks like “if you’re not the one for me then who is?” and began to write hauntingly personal tracks that explored his loneliness and isolation. EPs like “THE REAPER” and “bandaids” were what really brought new fans to him.

“I see keshi as a very concentrated part of me. A lot of them are very moody lyrics. I have a fear of being alone, so if you look into the lyrics for all the songs, you can definitely see that there,” he said in the same interview. “I really enjoy the dichotomy between being really vulnerable with the one that you love the most, but that also gives them the ability to hurt you the most.” 

By 2022, keshi had signed to Island Records and was on the verge of releasing his debut album. “I want to be known as an album artist,” keshi told Teen Vogue. “It felt like the right time. My fans were waiting for it, and I was waiting for it. It was time for me to really challenge myself. And I've been putting it off for a long time because it's really daunting.”

But it was important, he said, to challenge his listeners. If his fans wanted the same sad boy who wrote about trauma and broken hearts, he had some curveballs to throw their way. That, he said, is why he recorded “GET IT”. “We really wanted to shake it up with that one,”  he said, envisioning how the 808 production would go off in live shows. But the importance of “GET IT” was for keshi to not feel limited. “I started to get the sense that I was putting myself in a bit of a box [when it comes to] what I could do musically,” he reflected. “There's so many different kinds of music that I love and listen to. And I always shied away from certain genres because I felt like I couldn’t do it.

What he began to sense was that people didn’t understand his artistry. 

Island Records

Perhaps culture has always worked against artists like keshi. For decades in American pop culture, Asian men were often portrayed as effeminate or emasculated. In her study on Asian American representation in film, Tiffany Besana found that the majority of Asian men were depicted as “emasculate, nerdy or timid”. In films like Breakfast At Tiffany’s, Asian characters weren’t even played by Asian actors. Instead, in that film, a white Mickey Rooney wore yellow makeup and performed a racist caricature of a Chinese man. 

Until recently, the only Asian men who even came close to permeating the public consciousness were K-Pop idols. In 2012, when PSY became a global sensation thanks to “Gangnam Style”, several critics argued that his success was due to how little he challenged the designated roles Asian men hold in the media. PSY worked, many critics believed, because he was comedic. 

Eric Nam perhaps came the closest to achieving mainstream success when he left his K-Pop label in 2021 for a shot at cracking the North American market. “Growing up, there was a lack of awareness of Asians, where we’re from and how diverse we are,” Nam recalled in an interview with Datebook. “Once we started, my career goal was always to do stuff and then reverse-engineer it back to the States.”

Nam’s attempts at crossover success never lifted off the ground perhaps because his biggest supporters remained almost singularly women. This is where keshi’s success feels important: His appeal permeates far beyond gender lines. Asian males see themselves in his story as much as women love his music. “I think keshi represents a different kind of Asian male role model,” journalist Samantha Lui of Bunni Pop Newsletter reflected. “He’s attractive, sings well and writes songs about universal feelings. But he has this rebellious vibe and look to him that you don’t often see from Asian men in media.” 

The freedom to be a hot mess has always been a challenge for Asian artists. Writer Phil Yu, who started the blog Angry Asian Men in 2001, remembered how hesitant many Asians were until recently to depict messy emotions in public, much less in their art. “There was this underlying feeling of ‘Don’t air out our dirty laundry, don’t let them see us fighting,’” he told The New York Times in 2023. “It was like, we’ve got to put out something that’s more palatable, more friendly to everybody.”

For the Filipino American artist Pluto Koi who grew up as a huge Ed Sheeran fan, keshi was the first artist he connected to who resembled Pluto’s own identity. Pluto was drawn to the darker, emotional songs in keshi’s discography, tracks like “bandaids” or “us” because of how raw they sounded. “I loved keshi’s sound because he sang with the vulnerability that singers like Ed or Adele would sing with but I don’t think I had heard it from an Asian artist at the time,” he said. “So, I started to listen to more of his music and continued to be more and more amazed.” 

Growing up, Pluto told me, he took for granted the representation he saw in Asian artists like AJ Rafael or Kina Grannis. “Most of the Asian artists I listened to growing up were very niche,” he said. Pluto theorized that he overlooked the need for diverse artists like keshi because of how rare it was to see someone like him. He broke down two reasons for this. “One, because it didn’t happen that often and, two, I feel like there’s kind of a stigma behind it, like you’d probably be made fun of for listening to it. I kind of just got accustomed to that. When I moved to the States, I grew up in a place that didn’t have many Asians there. So I found myself veering away from Filipino practices in an effort to kind of fit in with the people around me.”

It is keshi’s voice that makes him undeniably compelling. It’s that voice that so many Asian artists have tried to replicate: a wispy, high falsetto that can sound seeped in pain. When I asked Pluto why he liked keshi’s darker tracks so much, he brushed the question off with a joke. “I don’t know, maybe I was depressed or something.” But for many fans, that is exactly why they love keshi. He puts their pain into words. 

For brynne, who got his start singing as a soprano in choir, keshi’s range sounded like something he could hone. “I think the biggest thing that inspires me is his choice in vocals. When I was much younger, I always felt more confident in my falsetto than in my chest voice, and being able to hear songs that complimented my style of singing only drew me closer to keshi’s music,” he told me. “Although now I use more of my chest voice, I definitely followed a similar path with keshi’s vocal journey in using mainly falsetto at the beginning of his career, and now mixing between both chest and falsetto.”

brynne found just as much to love in keshi’s musicianship too. “As a person that started making music by playing guitar, I respect his guitar playing. I love watching clips of him shredding the solo on ‘ANGEL’ or his explanation of the chords used on many songs,” he added. “I also respect his work as a solo producer, something that I tried to achieve back when I first started as an artist.”

But I see the biggest reason that keshi appeals to so many Asian Americans is that his image smashes the model minority stereotype. Messy, complicated emotions are welcomed in his music. On “THE REAPER”, keshi languishes over unrequited love: “She don’t want me but I burn inside/ She don’t wanna keep this heart of mine.”

Sex, too, is also explored frankly in keshi’s music. “All we ever do is have sex anyway/ Come home, fight, fuck that’s every day,” he sings with a hint of boredom on “xoxosos”. On “summer”, keshi fronts a harder persona. “Feel like summer and I don’t wanna miss you/ If we don’t touch lips not an issue,” he sings, although you know deep down, that’s all he really wants.

As Lui saw it, keshi’s rise was bolstered by Asian Americans who were hungry for alternative viewpoints in media. “I don’t know how I would properly describe this but in Asian circles, they have this image of who a keshi fan is: Asian baby girls and Asian baby boys,” she said. “Some people joke it’s like music for your toxic ex. But I don’t necessarily think keshi aimed for that to happen.”

Whether he intended to or not, what keshi has created is an army of fans who ride or die for him. These listeners wield real power: They sell out his tours, rack his monthly Spotify listeners up to 7 million and have made him feel, at times, larger than life. 

But there is perhaps no fan more influential in keshi circles than keshiupdates, an Instagram account with over 37,000 followers run by a stan named Joshua. “I’ve always wanted to create a fan account for an artist but at the same time I want to be an advocate for the community,” Joshua told me. As the account grew in popularity, Josh was surprised when it got keshi’s attention. “He mentioned that he often comes to my page to see the updates that I’ve been doing.” Then he added with a laugh, “Yes, even keshi himself needs an update.” In 2022, Joshua met keshi when the singer came to his country for his HELL/ HEAVEN Tour. And yes, Joshua affirmed, “He’s the sweetest person ever.” 

Since the beginning of keshiupdates, Joshua has been keshi’s biggest defender and cheerleader. Long before the rollout for “Requiem” began, Joshua shared memes that counted down the days since keshi last dropped music or that chronicled how much he missed new keshi music. These posts are funny but also incredibly sincere. 

The keshiupdates page doesn’t just breathlessly chart some of keshi’s biggest accomplishments though. Joshua also highlights Asian artists who are following keshi’s lead. In this way, keshiupdates has become a platform for all singers in the keshi metauniverse. This, I would argue, has been keshi’s most noteworthy influence: the keshi clones. 

The artists who fall under keshi clone territory are all young male Asian artists who have taken keshi’s lead by making vulnerable, sad boy music. They dress in all black. They often wear chain necklaces and they might have a mullet. They prefer leather jackets and to strike an image of machismo and toughness. They get by with an air of mystery. Some, like brynne, have made it part of their own brand. 

But the majority of keshi clones never take off on streaming. That’s why, as many fans told me, they stay labeled as clones. The biggest criticism lobbed at keshi clones is that keshi in aesthetics only and that they forget what made keshi so original. This “It” factor, I was told time and time again by keshi fans, is his vulnerability. 

But Pluto Koi doesn’t think the term is fair. “I don’t think a lot of these keshi clones are trying to be keshi. I think boiling them down to keshi clones undervalues the talent and effort that goes into making the music in the first place,” he told me. “It also overshadows all the things that make these artists unique in their own way. We all wanna have our own thing going on.”

I wondered, then, if maybe the keshi clone term struck at something trickier to answer. Maybe the reason there are so many keshi clones is because there are no other artists like keshi receiving major label support. Asian American acts are far less likely to be signed to major labels than K-Pop idols, which makes keshi’s success sadly unique. In a study on the lack of Asian American representation in music, Victoria Noriega found, “Asian artists in the Pop music genre are foreign-born Asians, mainly consisting of K-Pop groups, with 7.45% compared to 1.06% Asian-Americans.” There is almost no comparison to their white peers. 

This kind of pressure is likely too much for one artist like keshi to bear. He never became a musician to speak for all Asian Americans. Often, he was just trying to survive and make sense of his feelings. I thought about this as I listened to “LIMBO”, the most revealing track on “GABRIEL”. “I am a fraud, I am the shit/ Hoping that nobody notices,” he sings, leaning into a dichotomy that many Asian American artists have told me that they feel. These words echo a line from Charles Yu’s book “Interior Chinatown”: “Take what you can get/ Try to build a life/ A life in the margins/ made from bit parts.”

Even after signing to Island Records, selling out a tour, and by all accounts, making it, keshi still feels like the sensitive boy from Houston who was shattered by a disappointing debut performance in LA. Maybe keshi doesn’t quite believe that this industry was made for boys like him, and perhaps that is why his success is so vital.