The first sound you hear is a bright, solitary trumpet. Then comes a rumbling tuba, rattling drums and the familiar refrain of John Philip Sousa's Stars and Stripes Forever. A behemoth of a guitar riff lumbers in with a flurry of banjo, a skirl of bagpipes, a battery of percussion and squeals of brass overlaid until they sound like a stampede of panicking elephants. And on it goes, like the devil's own mix tape.
in could be hip-hop's first Asian-American star -- if racism doesn't stop him. ''For the most part people think I'm like a myth, not a real person,'' he says. He talks to Dorian Lynskey in New York.