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Mike Park

Korean American musician and activist

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
People and ideasInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 21, 2026
Entity authorityQ113138 ↗
Source-derived summary

Michael Brian Park is an American Korean musician and progressive activist. His musical ventures include Skankin' Pickle for whom he both played the saxophone and sang, The Chinkees, The Bruce Lee Band, Kitty Kat Fan Club, Ogikubo Station, as well as an acoustic solo project under his own name. After his time with Skankin' Pickle he went on to found Asian Man Records, a label which he has run out of his garage in California since 1996 with only help from his parents and friends. Asian Man Records supports mostly ska and punk bands. Park has used Asian Man Records to release his own music, in addition to providing a start for smaller bands to allow them to grow, including Less Than Jake, Alkaline Trio, and The Lawrence Arms. In 1999 he formed the Plea for Peace Foundation an organization whose aim is "to promote the ideas of peace through the power of music", something which Park has been trying to do with his own bands and with the help of other groups.

Park was the impetus behind the Spring 1998 "Ska Against Racism" tour. The goal of the tour was to promote awareness about racism and raise money for anti-racism organisations such as the Museum of Tolerance. The national tour included The Toasters, Less Than Jake, the Blue Meanies, Mustard Plug, Five Iron Frenzy, MU330, Kemuri, and Mike Park himself.

Plea for Peace Foundation

The Plea for Peace Foundation was founded in 1999 by musician and founder of Asian Man Records, Mike Park.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Mike Park” is korean American musician and activist. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Mike, Park and Korean, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA productive starting point for separating a subject’s documented career from later reputation and commemoration. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1996, 1999, 1998—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1967-03-26. For this dossier, Mike, Park and Korean is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “korean American musician and activist” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q113138. VIAF identifies the subject as 44119231. The Library of Congress control number is no2008130938. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1996, 1999 and 1998.

Critical limits

Public reputation and documentary evidence do not always develop together; absence from a summary is not evidence of historical absence. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
Verify next

Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Mike Park”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Mike Park primary sources, Mike Park archive and Mike research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Mike Park”?
  2. Which primary records establish identity, chronology and institutional ties?
  3. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
Subject index

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Mike Park” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.