When was the first time you realized that making music was something you absolutely had to do?

Growing up in my dad’s store in downtown Los Angeles, he was next to an electronic store that played a lot of hip-hop all day, so I grew up listening to hip-hop since I was very little. When I was like 14 years old, around the end of middle school and into the beginning of high school, I was doing a little bit of everything: DJing, graffiti, breakdancing. But I realized that emceeing was really the main shit I wanted to do because I was really like a class clown and I was good with my words.

As a Korean rapper, do you feel obligated to represent your heritage in your music?

ADVERTISEMENT

I don’t think anybody should feel obligated. Everyone has their own reasons why they make music and I don’t make music just because I want to just talk about Asians or whatever. If somebody asks me why I started rapping, I’d be bullshitting if I said, “Oh, it’s because I want to be the voice of my people.” I wanted to start rapping because I wanted to get bitches at first. [Laughs] All the cool people in my high school were rapping, and the girls were impressed. Eventually it grew into something deeper and I became more passionate about it.

I realized that it was a powerful tool for me to talk about certain things and stories that weren’t being told. I didn’t grow up with a lot of Asian kids, so I definitely had my own identity issues and I wasn’t necessarily repping my people extra-hard or anything. That’s something that I later on realized is something that’s important to me. Now, I definitely feel like me, specifically as an artist. I definitely want to tell the stories of Asian-Americans and really kind of be the voice and represent, you know? Now I do feel obligated.

Your video for “Safe” blatantly addresses the lack of Asian-Americans featured as lead roles in Hollywood. Can you speak more about that message?

There’s the obvious underrepresentation of people of color in Hollywood. I think more than that, specifically, the word “safe” comes from — as an Asian-American in this country, a lot of times we become the punching bag of America. It’s always easy for all types of ethnicities to poke fun at Asian-Americans because they feel like we don’t speak up for ourselves or there’s no consequences. I think that’s where that word “safe” comes from. I feel like everyone perceives Asians to be very safe. And I wanted to come at it very aggressively. I wanted to change the perception of what it is to be Asian in America. Obviously there’s this discussion of white-washing of Hollywood, and I just kind of flipped the script and “yellow-washed” the white male leads in classic, iconic Hollywood films.

