NAVIGATING

THE BRAND NEW WATERS:

THE STORY OF

SOBAE (소베) It was all according to plan: Sobae graduated from Northwestern with both a Bachelor's and a Master's before landing a steady job in South Korea. So why did she leave it all behind and jump into a music career?

It's a cool 60 degrees Fahrenheit night in Tampa, Florida on April 12, 2018. As concertgoers start to pack into The Opheum, a small music venue in Tampa’s Ybor City entertainment district, it certainly feels warmer.

They’re here for theNorth American 20-city tour headlined by two of South Korea’s biggest rap stars, Mad Clown (Jo Dong-rim) and San E (Jung San). Before they grace the crowd, though, a tall, lean figure emerges from the stage’s shadows. Below her long, dark brown hair, she dons a cut-offcrop top, slim black jeans, a bag fashionably clipped by its chain to a belt loop, and shiny silver heels. She starts to sing.

Everyone loves a good anthem

But there was one that was missin’

So you know I jump right on it

On it, own it, baby

Her name is Kristin Kim, or, as she is known professionally, Sobae. She’s billed as a featured performer on the tour, having been selected by the two rappers over several other female Korean-American vocalists despite having officially released only two tracks at the time. “If I were in their shoes,” Sobae muses, “I don’t know if I would have gone with me.”

And yet, her smooth and confident voice fills the room with her singlefeaturing popular South Korean musician Exy, member of the girl group. With every line, a feeling starts to pervade deeper and deeper for those in the crowd: a feeling that they can connect, a feeling that they actually reallyher. Screams and cheers burst out like confetti. Slowly but surely, they join in.

This one’s for the homegirls, homegirls

The ones that do you wonders, wonders

We don’t let you down, oh no no no

When you see one better know know know, uh oh







DJ Juice, Mad Clown, Sobae, and San E during their stop in Tampa, Florida for the We Want You tour.





AS SUCCESSFUL AS IT WAS, the tour was not a culmination of Sobae’s career—much less an establishment of a new status quo as a star. To truly appreciate Sobae, one needs to consider her unlikely and uncertain path to the stage she performed on. A mere two years before the tour, she spent the majority of her time at a desk as she worked in South Korea at a climate change foundation. “I was doing work that was fulfilling,” Sobae tells me over a KakaoTalk call from Korea, “But it didn’t feel complete.”

“I call it the millennial paradox … we've graduated from college, we've been at a job for a couple of years, and we feel like we're headed in the right direction in terms of our our careers,” she says. “But I’ve found that a lot of people don’t really feel fulfilled. They feel like they’re gonna work the rest of their lives, pay off their student loans, and that's...it.”

After work—the source of what she calls the “deadening 9 to 6 pattern”—she would hurry home to record and create demos and tracks. “I never received any formal musical training other than playing the piano and the flute,” Sobae says, adding that she taught herself how to play guitar and how to produce and mix by using programs like Logic, her current music software. “YouTube was my best friend,” she laughs.

When the songs were finished, she would excitedly post them to SoundCloud, a popular music streaming platform known just as much as a launchpad for independent music careers as a graveyard for aspiring “SoundCloud rappers”, a term usually made in jest. It was never her intention to enter the entertainment industry, Sobae maintains, so the music was more of an outlet for her inner creative desires rather than striking it big.

One day, an e-mail popped up in her inbox. She hadn’t seen one before from this sender:. She opened it, not thinking too much—after all, there are many Eddie Shins in the world. It turns out, though, she knewEddie Shin; in fact, she knew his music. He had been a member of the Korean-American three-man hip hop and R&B trio(“likethe second”, Sobae explains), which signed an unprecedented $11.3 million deal with record label Cash Money Records. Shin, along with his brother Alex, had just founded a creative collective named ILZO & CO., and he had a radical offer for her: pursue music full-time. Everything around started to spin.

“I’m pretty motivated by the fear of regret,” Sobae says. “So … I was like, '.'”

“YOU’RE LOOKING PARTICULARLY GOOD TODAY!”

The words, as they did every week, came out like music notes dancing in harmony before smoothly transitioning into lively jazz. The tagline became synonymous with its radio show,, a jazz program on Northwestern University’s WNUR 89.3 FM run by Sobae and her best friend at the time. Broadcast not only on campus but across the state, the show was proud to maintain what Sobae describes as a “cheesy and positive” outlook; in between the songs carefully selected by the hosts from a vast library of records and CDs, topics ranged anywhere from emotional vulnerability to post-Halloween recovery to the definition of character. “Every morning when we were in that studio, it was like a time of healing for me,” Sobae reminisces. “We would just go in and pick whatever we want and say whatever we want.”

In addition to the jazz which continues to flow through her bloodstream, Sobae came to love the interactive nature of the show; fans, drawn to segments such asand, would tune in and call in every week. “People think radio is sort of like an outdated medium,” she says. “It’s got a charm—it makes you feel connected with listeners that we don’t really feel with any other outlet.”

, as it turns out, was just one of many extracurricular forays for Sobae. Born in Madison, Wisconsin (“random”, she laughs, noting that her father went to school there) before moving to Korea as a toddler, the question becomes whatshe do? Throughout her life, her list of activities include the musical club, school plays, choir, Model United Nations, debate and forensics, open mic nights, and a K-Pop dance crew. Sobae eventually made her way back to the states as a Communication Studies major at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, staying at the school for a master’s degree in journalism. As part of the program (widely considered to be one of the best in the country), she served as a news reporter in Chicago and Washington, D.C.; interviewing a wide variety of characters ranging from politicians (she vividly remembers then-President Obama's somber post-2014 midterms press conference) to the homeless to former gang members became part of the routine.

Sobae during her childhood in South Korea (courtesy @hey_sobae).

Nevertheless, life as a reporter and journalist would prove to be short-lived—not for a lack of talent—and Sobae returned to Korea. The purely objective nature of the job—one that inherently requires a distance from its subjects—clashed with her personality. “When I’m interviewing so many people on a day-to-day basis, and some of their stories are heart-wrenching, I couldn’t just pick myself up, report the truth, and move on,” she explains. “I’m too empathetic of a person.”

Those close to Sobae seem to agree with her personal diagnosis; in such a field, her natural ability to connect felt like a waste. “It doesn’t matter if it’s about how well-cooked the meat should be in a good burger or why certain governments are better at creating economies that serve all sides of the income spectrum,” ILZO & CO. cinematographer Henry Lee says. “Having a conversation with her makes you feel good at the end of the interaction—simple as that.”