If you happened to walk into the right Jakarta mall at the right time in the early 2000s, you would have been able to see Brian Imanuel’s first public appearances. From age 6 to about 10, he played drums in his family’s Christian rock cover band. The group performed almost exclusively in malls. This is even less likely than it seems: Christians make up a mere 10 percent of all people in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country.

For the first decade of his life, Imanuel lived near a goat farm in a modest neighborhood of Jakarta. After that he relocated almost entirely online. His family is ethnically Chinese, although he’s not quite sure how they ended up in Indonesia several generations ago. Their family band’s blend of novelty (a 6-year-old holding down the beat!) and familiarity (Christian covers) seems to have seeded Imanuel’s subsequent interest in meme culture, which operates along similar lines, albeit in a radically different context.

Imanuel was homeschooled from the second grade; after a year, his parents stopped assigning homework, which freed him to surf the web for hours a day. “I felt guilty for a while, thinking I’m such a lazy piece of shit,” he recalls. “Turns out I learned a lot of things from being on YouTube all the time.”

A pre-teen obsession with Rubik’s Cube solution videos was his entrée to a world of online tutorials. When he was 11, Imanuel discovered a love for the English language. Crucially, it wasn’t the blandly functional international English that attracted him. He was hooked on the slang-filled, hyper-referential dialects of his long-distance American friends on social media.

Imanuel chides his mother tongue of Bahasa Indonesia for being so inflexible that people are reluctant to say “I love you” or “sorry”—the former too romantic, the latter too formal. Language gleaned from Twitter and rap offered another world entirely. “I learned a lot about American culture by listening to rap songs,” he explains, describing how he looked up every unknown reference on Childish Gambino’s 2012 mixtape Royalty. Imanuel would speak English with himself to practice. One day, he realized that, even without an IRL interlocutor, he had even begun thinking in English.

Though it seems like he absorbed internet culture with ease, throughout our conversation it becomes clear that his meme-making fluency in American pop sensibilities is hard-won. We Americans irradiate the world with our movies, music, and economic policies. Yet the uniquely American mix of underinformed optimism and over-armed aggression simply don’t make sense to much of the globe.

“It took me a while to figure out the U.S. sense of humor, a lot of trial and error,” he says. “I would write down jokes to casually tell my American friend over Skype to see which ones he’d laugh at.”

He used his virtual buddy as a focus group in order to make stuff for YouTube itself, and not for his few friends in Jakarta. Imanuel understood the site’s true power as a machine for reinforcing Anglophone, white American sensibilities.

Case in point: Grammy-winning white rapper Macklemore is the origin figure for Imanuel’s potent strain of black-identifying Asian hip-hop. “I started listening to rap when ‘Thrift Shop’ came out,” says Imanuel. “Everybody on Twitter was talking about it. It became a meme for a second, and I was like, Yo, what is this? This is interesting. What if I learn how to rap this song?” That a white guy from Seattle served as his initial inspiration points to the genre’s rowdy global spread.

Now is an incredible time for hip-hop worldwide. French rap duo PNL’s cinematic cloud-rap globalism emanates from some undisclosed Parisian suburb; Germany’s RIN explores Auto-Tune emotionality; Ghana-based singer Mr Eazi’s light vocal touch makes his exquisite Afrobeat-dancehall slowdowns go over, well, easy. The picture widens even further when you consider frequent rap collaborators from adjacent scenes, like nervy Barcelona flamenco vocalist Rosalía. To top it off, the aggro sonics of trap have landed pretty much everywhere, primed by EDM. Against this varied tide, Imanuel’s pursuit of American fidelity is striking. But if meme is your medium, then you’re bound to follow the largest crowds.