Watching Sean Wang’s new dramedy Dìdi feels a little like flipping through an old photo album. Starring Izaac Wang as Chris, an alternately disaffected and loving teenage boy coming of age in a Taiwanese American family in 2008, it’s rife with grainy YouTube skate videos, chats with AIM’s SmarterChild bot, and MySpace “Top 8” ranking pages . But it’s the film’s precisely curated period music (hello, Hellogoodbye) that makes Didi feel especially immersive.
Vogue spoke to Didi music supervisor Toko Nagata about putting together the perfect Dìdi playlist, taking inspiration from Wang’s friends’ music tastes, and the recent increase in representation of Asian and Asian American musical artists. Vogue : How did the earliest conversations about the music in Didi go? Toko Nagata: I’m good friends with the director, Sean, so I’ve been hearing about this script for a long time. A lot of people in LA are like, “Oh, I’m making a movie.
Do you want to work on it?” And you’re kind of like, “Sure.” But then Sean was like, “Here’s the script, we’re going to shoot it.” We definitely had a lot of conversations before shooting about what the sound would feel like; it’s semi-autobiographical, and Sean was this age in 2008, so it’s like, okay, what was Sean listening to? A lot of characters are loosely based off of people in his life, like Vivian, the older sister, who was in that pop-punk world.
The real Vivian and Sean grew up together around Warped Tour stuff, and it was really helpful that Vivian’s one of my best friends, because we had a brainstorming session where we were all just sitting around the house throwing out song ideas and adding them to a playlist. Early on, I reached out to Future Islands, who were super involved in skate culture. They were like, “Oh, yeah, you can use this album,” which was cool, because they’re huge and it’s an indie project, so it’s hard to get bigger bands on board.
But when I told Sean Future Islands said we could use this album, he was like, “Oh, awesome, but that was released in the fall of 2008 and we’re in the summer of 2008.” I think he did that in all aspects of the movie, which really cemented the authenticity of the project. I felt like it was almost a documentary snapshot into this specific experience.
I love all the aughts references, from iPod Nanos to Chris changing his ringtone to “Touchdown Turnaround (Don't Give Up On Me)” to impress a girl. What do you think is so compelling about Warped Tour-core onscreen? I think especially at that age, that genre of music really resonated with people because you’re figuring things out, you have a lot of big feelings and big emotions..
.and obviously that genre is making a comeback now. I think it’s also about people that are around this age range being nostalgic.
I can’t remember who it was, but someone told me that most people don’t actually move past their high school and college music tastes, and I think that kind of music is just such a comfort and something to resonate with for people who remember 2008. Do you have a favorite needledrop in the film? You know, there are so many different personalities and groups in the movie, because Chris is trying on all these different hats and trying to find his identity. Around that time, I think a lot of teenage girls were very into skaters, and that was 1,000% me.
I was, you know, a wannabe skater groupie. [ Laughs .] I love the atmosphere songs and the hip-hop that we play going into the skate party; that’s kind of my wheelhouse within this movie.
You’ve been the music supervisor on other Asian-American coming-of-age films, including Joy Ride and Always Be My Maybe. What role do you think music can play in telling that kind of story? In Always Be My Maybe , a lot of the music was ’90s or early 2000s because the characters were young in that era; Randall Park’s character is in a hip-hop group and he’s kind of stuck in the Bay Area, not moving past San Francisco. Everyone’s experience is so different, but in my own experience, I feel like I didn’t really have a ton of Asian American artists to look up to.
They were definitely out there, but now there are just so many people doing so well. In Joy Ride , which is set in the present day, we really got to celebrate Asian American culture—it was like a celebration and a discovery of identity through 25 different Asian artists around the world. I think for a lot of immigrants in general, their parents really want them to do certain things because it’s been such a struggle even to get by when you first come to America.
They don’t want their kids to struggle. But the presence of Asian American artists and the rise of K-pop and so many big Asian acts around the world creates role models for those kids. This conversation has been edited and condensed.
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