Tokyo knew what to do with American leftovers—denim, camo, cartoons, rap-video fits. In Harajuku, kids picked it up, studied it, and hung it under glass with a price tag attached.

DISCLAIMER:

• This article constitutes opinion, cultural commentary, and criticism.

• French and Japanese translations are unofficial and non-authoritative.

• Heavily inspired by Ametora; can’t recommend it enough.

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NIGO & P

In the early 2000s, before the two launched BILLIONAIRE BOYS CLUB, Pharrell Williams walked into NIGO’s personal archive in Tokyo.

NIGO had already helped launch KAWS’s breakout “Kimpsons” series at Shibuya Parco in 2001, packaging American childhood back to itself before most of America noticed it was happening.

Jacob the Jeweler had introduced them. For months, Pharrell and NIGO had been orbiting each other through a jeweler’s catalog: NIGO would thumb through photos of Pharrell’s commissions and ask Jacob to remake each one in different gold colors.

Pharrell, GQ, 2019—

Up until meeting [NIGO], my greatest references—the guys that garnered the most respect—were the guys with the big Bentleys. My big brother Jay. Big brother Puff. […]

He just bowed all the time.

NIGO described BAPE’s secret sauce to WWD JAPAN in November 2002—

デザイナーになろうと思ったことはない。僕が得意なのはディレクション。振り屋。ヒップホップの影響が大きいから、サンプリング手法と同じで、壊さず、そこに新しいものをつけて出す。

I never set out to become a designer. What I’m good at is direction—being a furiya (振り屋), a sender, a router. Hip-hop is the big influence, so my method is the same as sampling: you don’t destroy the source, you graft something new onto it and put it back out.

NIGO took this technique, and applied it to varsity jackets, sneakers, cartoons, and American sportswear, all while controlling it from the top down, starting with the factory. The boxes started arriving in Virginia Beach two years later.

Japan invented little of the raw material—denim, workwear, military surplus gear, and hip-hop all crossed the Pacific as American imports.

The mills in Okayama wove selvedge on old Toyoda shuttle looms—domestic frames once used for sailcloth, per Ametora. Men’s Club in Tokyo did similar for Ivy League clothing, documenting every detail of a dying American style with architectural precision before building an industry around preserving it.

The Osaka 5—Studio D’Artisan, Denime, Evisu, Full Count, and Warehouse—mastered American denim on thrown away equipment. Earlier still was Lapine, the Osaka deadstock-Levi’s import shop. Projectile looms weave faster and wider, and American mills switched to them in the 70s for the efficiency. The old narrow shuttle looms left slubs, an uneven selvedge edge, unique texture that vintage denim carried. Japanese mills like Kurabo repurposed their own shuttle frames and revived the selvedge the U.S. industry had stopped bothering to make.

Kensuke Ishizu spent the war years in Tianjin and came back to a scorched Japan, where American GIs walked down the rebuilt boulevards of Ginza and Yokohama. The American style was obvious: broad shoulders, natural waists, cotton that breathed, a posture that carried the body easily. Ishizu studied all of it.

He founded VAN Jacket in Osaka in 1951, moved it to Tokyo three years later, and grew it to a peak of ¥45.2 billion (per W. David Marx’s Ametora) by treating American style as something worth studying. VAN published its own magazine, Men’s Club, beginning in 1954; it taught collar construction, loafer welt types, sack-suit cut, penny placement, button spacing, and intricacies other sources rarely did.

A Japanese teenager in 1960 who wanted to look American could open Men’s Club and study the rules; an American teenager had only his father’s closet to copy.

Eventually, this produced the Miyuki Tribe. Weeks before the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, Japanese teenagers in VAN’s Ivy uniform loitered on Miyuki Street in Ginza every weekend. Tokyo police swept the street and hauled off about 200 of them, processing 85 at Tsukiji. Take Ivy ran in Japanese that year and didn’t reach English until 2010. The team aimed at all eight Ivy League campuses and made it to six, skipping Cornell and U. Penn.

Ametora (アメトラ: “American traditional”) is the label, but the romantic translation undersells the business Ishizu was running. His expansion through Daiei and other Japanese supermarket chains had hollowed the brand out; cheapened it in a way. VAN filed bankruptcy in April 1978.

Hiroshi Fujiwara, who would later mentor NIGO, was 14 when VAN collapsed, with NIGO then 7 and Jun Takahashi, who built Undercover, 8. The generation that founded Ura-Harajuku had watched the most successful Japanese menswear brand in history die of abundance, and they built their own brands starting in 1993.

By the late 1980s, a generation of Tokyo teens had grown up wearing American brands as the norm: Brooks Brothers, Levi’s 501s, and moccasins remixed into a Shibuya style called shibukaji.

Sociologist Kōji Namba, quoted in Ametora, 2015—

All the fashion items in shibukaji were American, but “America” was not something that existed above them. It was something on their level.

Ishizu’s VAN crowd in the 60s had thoroughly studied and understood American style. Ura-Harajuku’s future builders came out of this scene.

Kojima, at the bottom of Okayama Prefecture, had turned out 90% of Japan’s school uniforms since 1937; by the 1970s it made almost all the country’s jeans. When 3,000yds of American denim landed at Maruo Clothing’s Kojima factory in February 1965, the women sewing it couldn’t get a stitch into the starched cloth.

W. David Marx’s Ametora documents that exact scene literally, and names the machine brands—Mitsubishi and Juki.

Nobody’s Home

With Tokyo rebuilt, the Shinkansen (bullet train) line opened. The Miyuki Tribe arrests were a largely overlooked wrinkle in that presentation. When the Olympic cauldron was lit on October 10, the style had drifted from Ginza to Shibuya, then over the hill to Harajuku. A generation of young designers began colonizing those backstreets in the mid-90s.

Where Paris’s Chambre Syndicale de la Couture had, since 1868, kept control, Ura-Harajuku—literally “behind Harajuku”—folded all aspects into a half-mile radius and handed them to 20-somethings.

Hiroshi Fujiwara was a charter member of the International Stüssy Tribe [IST] alongside Goldie, Mick Jones of The Clash, and Luca Benini of Slam Jam—Shawn Stüssy’s hand-picked circle of DJs, designers, and shop owners who moved product for each other across Tokyo, London, Milan, and New York. The inaugural IST meeting was held in Tokyo. Sarah Andelman opened Colette at 213 Rue Saint-Honoré in 1997, the Paris shop where European eyes first saw BAPE, Supreme, and Stüssy alongside Hermès and Prada.

James Jebbia opened Supreme on Lafayette Street in 1994, and Fujiwara’s influence on Tokyo’s broader scene shaped how the brand was received in Japan. Jebbia had been working the downtown New York scene for years before Supreme, and when he opened, the model was already in his hands: one storefront, limited runs, no wholesale, and a clientele built on plugs. NIGO and Takahashi had opened Nowhere on a Cat Street backstreet in April 1993 on the same terms.

VF Corporation paid $2.1 billion for Supreme in 2020. Rei Kawakubo and Adrian Joffe opened the first Dover Street Market in Mayfair in 2004, selling Supreme and Nike on racks beside Prada and Balenciaga.

Fujiwara for Numéro Tokyo in July 2018—

90年代の裏原のブランドが始めるまで、ファッション業界でブランド同士が一緒にものづくりをすることは世界にも類がなかったんですよ。その一度で二度おいしい感覚をハイブランドも気がついたのかも。

Until the ura-Harajuku brands of the nineties started doing it, there was nothing like it anywhere in the world—labels making things together. The luxury houses eventually caught on to the two-bites-of-the-cherry logic of it, I suppose.

Neighborhood × WTAPS and BAPE × Undercover preceded Louis Vuitton × Supreme by 20 years.

Hypebeast and Highsnobiety, both launched in 2005, turned drop calendars into a real-time news category, before social media existed in the capacity it does today. A Tokyo release on a Saturday morning was on an American reader’s feed by Saturday night. It meant anyone with an RSS reader had the same information the inner circle did, which changed the nature of the scarcity without dissolving it. The 50-shirt drop NIGO had sold in a single Harajuku storefront became a global lottery managed through a virtual app.

Fujiwara even hid his own name from GOODENOUGH. He explained to biographer Masayuki Kawakatsu why he kept his involvement anonymous.

Fujiwara in 丘の上のパンク (Shogakukan, 2009; English via Marx’s Ametora, 2015)—

僕がやってると言うと、服本来を見てもらえずに、買ってくれる人たちは買ってくれるし、嫌っている人たちには無視されそうだから、それをなくしたくて、名前を出さなかったんです。

If I told people that I was doing the brand, no one would actually look at the clothing. People who were going to buy it would just buy it, and people who hate me would ignore it.

Fujiwara for HILLS LIFE, October 2018—

その”裏原宿のカリスマ”みたいに言われるけれど、当時の感覚としては、”結局、相手にされていない”って感覚でしたよ。もちろん、雑誌で僕の記事を読んでくれていたような若い人たちは僕を支持してくれていたけれど、いわゆる”業界”の人からは、相手にされていなかったし、理解もされていなかったと思う。それは、実は今もそう思っているんですけどね。

People call me an “icon of ura-Harajuku,” but the feeling at the time was, frankly, that nobody was paying us any attention. The young readers who followed my magazine columns supported us, sure—but the so-called “industry” didn’t take us seriously and didn’t understand us. To be honest, I still feel that way now.

Fujiwara founded Fragment Design (2003), a studio that doesn’t sell its own product but applies a double lightning-bolt stamp to everyone else’s.

Nike paid for the 3% edit, as did Louis Vuitton, Moncler, Rolex, UNIQLO, Starbucks, and a long list of others. Strangely, Fujiwara did not enter through fashion. He entered through records, and London came first: Punk first, then London, then McLaren, then Afrika Islam at The Roxy.

Fujiwara recalls his first encounter with Sex Pistols to seventh grade in Mie and told Tokyo Art Beat in December 2024. He brought records back in his luggage, and Tiny Panx opened for the Beastie Boys on the 1987 Japanese tour and cut among the earliest Japanese-language hip-hop records. Major Force, the label he co-founded in 1988, released Major Force West compilations through London distribution; Masayuki Kudo and Toshio Nakanishi (Tycoon Tosh) ran the West operation out of the Mo’ Wax building after Kudo relocated from Tokyo in 1992, stitching James Lavelle’s record label to the Tokyo source.

From the July 1987 issue of Takarajima, he and Kan Takagi (his Tiny Panx partner) ran a monthly column called “Last Orgy” that catalogued the music, films, and clothing arriving from London and New York for a Japanese readership.

Fujiwara spotted Eric Haze’s graphics at Keith Haring’s NY Pop Shop in the mid-1980s and commissioned GOODENOUGH T-shirts via Michael Kopelman of Stüssy UK.

Simiarly to Fragment’s approach, Off-White designed its own goods, but Abloh’s collaboration calendar (Nike, Ikea, Rimowa, Evian, McDonald’s, Mercedes) treated the in-house line as one editorial stamp among many rather than the center of the operation. Abloh was elite at building rooms around the subject:

Two protégés emerged from Fujiwara’s circle: Jun Takahashi and Tomoaki Nagao.

Tomoaki Nagao arrived at Tokyo’s Bunka Fashion College intending to become a fashion writer. Nagao told Mebuku, the Maebashi local paper, that on July 21, 1984—the first day of seventh-grade summer vacation—he had walked into Atsumi Records in town and bought the Checkers’ debut album Zettai Checkers together with a copy of Olive, Magazine House’s girls’ fashion title, that featured the band. Nagao bore an uncanny resemblance to Fujiwara, and the nickname Hiroshi-ni-gō—Hiroshi #2—stuck.

Nagao became Fujiwara’s assistant, then later, became known as NIGO.

NIGO and Takahashi extended the franchise into “Last Orgy 2”—Fujiwara joined them in “Last Orgy 3” in Asayan, a three-author monthly that doubled as a promotional channel for BAPE, UNDERCOVER, and GOODENOUGH at the moment all three brands were fighting for identical readers.

NIGO, Sabukaru, April 2026—

I think the two of us were looking beyond Japan. We had many friends abroad, and generally, it’s difficult to get Japanese people to acknowledge you unless you’ve already been recognized overseas. None of it was calculated; it feels more like we were editing things based on intuition.

Cold Bath Water

The Nikkei lost nearly 60% of its value between 1989 and 1992. Commercial rents in Tokyo dropped by roughly 1/3 over the next few years. The conglomerate escalator that a generation of design-school graduates had expected to ride up to Mitsubishi or Sony, froze. Archivists, who four years earlier would have been tailoring salaryman suits, found cheap alley frontage on backstreets priced out of reach during the Bubble years.

NIGO and Takahashi co-founded Nowhere in 1993. They opened it on a budget of just 400,000 yen (roughly $4,000)—an amount that, years prior, wouldn’t have gotten a month’s rent in Ginza—and split the cramped space with literal wire netting: Undercover on one side, NIGO’s venture on the other.

A Bathing Ape took its name from a Japanese idiom—an ape sunk in a warm bath, too comfortable to move (in some translations, ‘lukewarm water’): postwar Japan’s stock jab at complacent youth who had everything, moved through soft comfort, and understood nothing about the struggle.

The first BAPE shirts were Ralph Lauren blanks, an Ape Head hand-screened onto them in the back of the Cat Street joint. He kept most of those early prints in deadstock condition; now a rare collectors’ item, worth ¥100,000 to ¥200,000 each. Two decades later, Virgil Abloh would do it with deadstock Ralph Lauren Rugby flannels, a $40 blank sold at $550.

When asked whether Nowhere had launched Ura-Harajuku, NIGO’s framing was that the two of them just happened to be the earliest.

The backstreets filled fast with more labels:

• Neighborhood opened in 1994 under Shinsuke Takizawa

• Bounty Hunter opened in 1995 under Hikaru Iwanaga

• WTAPS opened in 1996 under Tetsu Nishiyama

Acting as muscle tissue was SK8THING—Shinichiro Nakamura—the mythically lowkey and reclusive design legend who taught himself graphic design on a Mac in Fujiwara’s studio. A large share of the streetwear logos hip-hop wore from 1993 to 2015 are courtesy of SK8THING.

Reportedly, he and NIGO sat through a five-hour Planet of the Apes marathon in 1993; SK8THING had sketched the Ape Head logo. Kazuki Kuraishi worked next to him on BAPE graphics before moving between Neighborhood, Fragment, and adidas Originals by Originals—the designer who eventually carried the Ura-Harajuku method into Kanye’s adidas era.

Neighborhood sold BAPE, BAPE sold WTAPS, all close enough so a customer could walk the entire Ura-Harajuku scene in 20 minutes and leave with product from 5 brands none of which directly competed.

It was 2004, and American streetwear was trying to reverse-engineer the model and failing, because it required knowing both Takizawa and Nishiyama personally, and knowing meant having been around long enough that nobody needed to explain what WTAPS was or why Neighborhood was carrying it.

BAPE pulled from hip-hop, sportswear, and American pop culture all at once: Nike on your feet, Charlton Heston in the monster movie playing on cable, hunting camo at the Army-Navy surplus store.

Iwanaga introduced KAWS to Medicom Toy founder Tatsuhiko Akashi in the late 1990s, and by 2000 KAWS had licensed his Companion figure into vinyl with Medicom. The Japanese toy industry treated KAWS as a fine artist while the American gallery circuit was still treating him as a graffiti kid. NIGO, running BAPE at peak velocity, bought KAWS paintings and commissioned collaborations.

Sotheby’s Hong Kong sold KAWS’s 2005 painting The Kaws Album—a Sgt. Pepper’s cover reworked with KAWS figures in place of the Beatles—for $14.8 million against a presale estimate of $1 million.

Shoichi Aoki founded FRUiTS magazine in Tokyo in 1997 after walking Harajuku’s Jingu Bridge on Sundays for five years and photographing the teenagers who gathered there. The bridge, closed to cars on weekends, functioned as a runway for obsessives assembling outfits from the backstreet boutiques. A Tokyo teenager in a hand-sewn Gothic Lolita dress mixed with Margiela tabi boots. A boy in a BAPE hoodie, Neighborhood cargos, and a hunting hat made from his grandfather’s pheasant feathers. The magazine ran 233 monthly issues until Aoki folded it in 2017, citing that the Jingu Bridge scene had naturally disappeared.

FRUiTS was to Harajuku what Men’s Club had been to the Miyuki Tribe. The subjects were not models, wealthy, nor credentialed. Merely teenagers, who had assembled outfits from brands whose workshops they could walk to in 20 minutes. A Paris editor leafing through FRUiTS in 1998 saw the exact product the backstreet brands had built, worn naturally, as the designers intended. It was raw, gritty, and above all, authentic.

Popeye made it work in 1976, a glossy men’s magazine whose subject was not celebrities or collections but the anthropology of a style, filing its first issue, “Surf & Skate”, from California and giving its second to Ivy League campuses. American writers were still citing Popeye back issues 40 years later as a primary-source record of American collegiate style from the 1970s through the 1990s.

Hypebeast and Highsnobiety would later try to retrofit the editorial half, 15 years late.

Ralph Lauren’s polo ponies went even further, where the line references the sport, and the sport references English aristocracy.

Nike’s Air Force 1 is still visible in every BAPESTA—Swoosh swapped for a shooting star, “AIR” swapped for “APE,” patent leather and psychedelic prints replacing Nike’s white tumbled grain.

Jay-Z and Kanye cleared the Otis sample with the Redding estate directly (the estate agreed to a “featuring Otis Redding” credit on Watch the Throne) because the whole point was that you’d recognize it. Planet of the Apes (the original 1968 Charlton Heston version, not the remakes) became BAPE’s entire identity.

The ape head was lifted straight from the franchise. WWII fighter plane nose art became the Shark Hoodie—a full-zip design where the teeth close over the face when you pull up the hood, “WGM” patches standing for “World Gone Mad.”

NIGO’s message for the 2022 Bunka Gakuen Costume Museum exhibition The Future is in the Past—

展覧会のタイトル、未来は過去にある “THE FUTURE IS IN THE PAST” は、僕のモノ作りのテーマそのものです。

The title of my exhibition, The Future is in the Past, has always been the theme for my creations.

Virgil Abloh called BAPE “his generation’s Chanel” in a January 2018 Hypebeast interview, two months before LVMH offered him the Louis Vuitton menswear chair.

IYKYK

NIGO had pulled BAPE out of ~40 wholesale accounts in the late 90s and funneled all sales through a single Tokyo flagship. If you wanted BAPE, you went to that store and waited in line, encountering a designed space—lighting, music, staff uniforms, sneakers under glass like museum loans—so that buying something was an adventure, if not a fantastic excuse to visit Japan. Production runs were sized to fulfill roughly 10% of demand by design.

NIGO, CNN Style, April 2026—

When I started making clothes I didn’t have any money, so I could only make 30 T-shirts at a time. I’d sell them and then make the next lot. They were automatically limited edition.

NIGO had taken a stylist and editor post at Popeye before BAPE existed, and he used the magazine’s wardrobe credits as the placement engine: he styled Cornelius (Keigo Oyamada) and the hip-hop trio Scha Dara Parr for free, dressed them in BAPE on stage and in shoots, and ran them as the brand’s first walking advertisements. Similar to Nujabes’ self-promo of his own work, next to Nas vinyls at his record shop.

In 1997, NIGO launched a UK-only diffusion line called Very Ape—the only piece of BAPE distribution NIGO let out of Tokyo for years.

NIGO, Sabukaru, April 2026—

In the era of print, there was no real-time information; you had to go out and find things yourself. Everything was “limited” by default back then. By releasing these items only in specific locations, I wanted to revisit that old-school approach where you can’t buy it unless you actually show up.

NIGO ran the quality control himself. By the early 2000s, BAPE was Japan’s dominant streetwear brand, with multiple flagships in Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya, a domestic customer base that dwarfed any American interest.

Nike cleverly weaved the 1985 Jordan ban into marketing. Hermès kept the Birkin waitlist as theater, an managed by store staff who decided which customers had earned the right to buy. Supreme ran a weekly Lafayette Street queue and an online countdown that released the bots, while BAPE elected to test scarcity as a production fact: the factory shipped 50 shirts a week, the Tokyo flagship was the only retail point, and the first generation of American fans (Pharrell, Pusha, Kanye) found the brand because they knew the designer. For most (almost all) of the American audience, the product didn’t exist.

The earliest American rapper photographed in BAPE was the Notorious B.I.G.; NIGO and Mortensen later co-curated a December 2002 BAPE Gallery photo exhibition where the image was printed onto tees in runs of 50.

BAPE caught the audience hip-hop already owned—young, sharp-eyed, the kind of people who didn’t need a price tag to tell them something was exclusive. Pharrell started wearing it across every video, red carpet, and studio session in 2003.

Pharrell appeared in the “Frontin’” video, then on the Today show, then at the VMAs, always in camo, always in a shark zipper, always in something not found in any American store. The Shark Hoodie reveal came out of Fabolous’s 2004 “Tit 4 Tat” video. Kanye picked up the shot two years later in The Game’s “Wouldn’t Get Far”, unzipping his own shark.

Streetwear is Dead, Long Live Streetwear

On November 28, 1973, five American designers (Halston, Oscar de la Renta, Bill Blass, Anne Klein, and Henri Bendel’s Stephen Burrows) faced five French houses (Saint Laurent, Dior, Cardin, Givenchy, Ungaro) at the Grand Divertissement à Versailles, a fundraiser staged by Eleanor Lambert for the palace’s restoration. Of 36 American models, 10 were Black:

• Pat Cleveland

• Bethann Hardison

• Billie Blair

• Alva Chinn

• Norma Jean Darden

• Jennifer Brice

• Ramona Saunders

• Charlene Dash

• Barbara Jackson

• Amina Warsuma

Hardison co-founded the Black Girls Coalition with Iman in 1988 to keep working the modeling exclusions.

Karl Lagerfeld remembered Hardison at Versailles 40 years later—

Elle avait cette sauvagerie, cette attitude impériale… Elle a jeté à un parterre de têtes couronnées le regard le plus noir. Ils étaient terrorisés.

She had that savagery, that imperial bearing. She cast on a parterre of crowned heads the blackest of looks. They were terrified.

Christelle Bakima Poundza, author of Corps Noirs, told Bondy Blog that Versailles is not part of the French fashion curriculum, and that French casting culture still runs the line fille black, mais pas trop—Black, but not too much.

Patrick Kelly moved from Mississippi to New York, then to Paris, and in 1988 became the first American admitted into the Chambre Syndicale du Prêt-à-Porter—the Paris system that had been deciding who counted since the 19th century. He died in Paris on New Year’s Day, 1990, at 35. What remained got divided between museums and private collections.

Jay Jaxon cut for Saint Laurent, then Dior under Marc Bohan, then Jean-Louis Scherrer, where he was running the atelier before 30. Paris finally gave him a museum exhibition in 2018, more than a decade after he died.

Brazzaville’s Sapeurs built their own answer to Paris from the other side of the Atlantic. The Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes—the Afro-Congolese tailoring movement that crystallized in the 1970s and split into rival Brazzaville and Kinshasa schools through the ’80s—studied Parisian and Italian luxury with religious precision: Yamamoto, Versace, Gaultier, obsessively coordinated in cities where almost nobody could reasonably afford any of it. Daniele Tamagni’s Gentlemen of Bacongo finally forced Europe to notice something Brazzaville had already understood for decades.

Daniel Day AKA Dapper Dan, opened his Harlem boutique on 125th Street in 1982 after discovering wholesale houses would not sell to him because he was Black. Years earlier, on a 1968 trip to Africa with the Urban League, he sold the American clothes he’d brought and came back in tailored African suits instead.

Dapper Dan, Made in Harlem, 2019—

They fit me better than anything I’d ever bought or shoplifted from a store in New York.

Day ran every layer of it himself, stamping Gucci, Louis Vuitton, MCM, and Fendi monograms onto the leather by hand, sampling the houses’ logos directly. Eric B. & Rakim, Salt-N-Pepa, and Mike Tyson before title fights all wore custom pieces, sold direct.

What he couldn’t do was sew—“I can’t sew at all,” he wrote, “I’m an observer and a people person.” The garments came off a night crew of 11 Senegalese tailors in a 2,000-square-foot room on 120th Street, machines running dusk to dawn. His best tailor was Sekou—“Big Sek”—whom customers kept mistaking for Dapper Dan himself; Big Sek would send them back across the room: “There is the couturier.”

Around 4:30AM on August 23, 1988, Tyson walked in to pick up an $850 leather jacket stitched with “DON’T BELIEVE THE HYPE,” walked back outside, ran into Mitch Green on the sidewalk, and shattered his hand on Green’s face.

Before she reached the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor was a partner at Pavia & Harcourt handling Fendi’s anti-counterfeiting cases. By the early ’90s, a pileup of lawsuits and coordinated luxury-brand raids finally shut Dapper Dan’s shop down.

Day’s clientele put him outside both the white luxury establishment and the Black bourgeois press. He told W in 2017 that Jet and Ebony covered the era’s other Black designers and refused to cover him:

It broke my heart… My whole life was about bucking the system. You ain’t gonna let me in? Bam! Here I come.

Dapper Dan, Made in Harlem, 2019—

We created this universe of culture that came out of Harlem, and it was parallel to this universe that was coming out of Europe.

Willi Smith’s WilliWear was generating over $25 million annually before his death in 1987 at 39. The Cooper Hewitt began corrective work in 2020.

Bobby Garnett ran a warehouse in Lynn, Massachusetts, stacked with tens of thousands of pieces (1920s workwear, 1950s denim, Savile Row suits), all bought by purchasing entire failing department store inventories at once. Ralph Lauren’s design team sourced inspiration from Garnett’s archive for decades; so did Tom Ford and Marc Jacobs. The Times ran his obituary in the “Overlooked” column.

FUBU hit $350 million by 1998. Cross Colours cleared $80 million in under two years before a retail partner’s bankruptcy dragged it under. April Walker debuted Walker Wear in 1992, dressing Method Man, Tupac, Biggie, and Queen Latifah directly out of a Brooklyn storefront.

Cross Colours closed $40 million in its first year on Afrocentric sweatsuits with a “Clothing Without Prejudice” tag; Walker Wear worked the post-Rodney-King, pre-O.J. moment when Black male style had just become the most photographed aesthetic on earth. In 2021 she sued Virgil Abloh’s Off-White, alleging a $2,234 monogram bomber had lifted her overlapping ‘WW’ mark; it settled in 2022.

The CFDA wouldn’t give its Geoffrey Beene Lifetime Achievement Award to a hip-hop-era designer until 2021, when Dapper Dan became the first Black designer to receive it—29 years after Walker Wear debuted in Brooklyn and 39 years after he opened at 125th and Lenox.

Virginia Beach: Something in the Water

A conservative military town at the mouth of the Chesapeake produced Pharrell, Timbaland, Missy Elliott, and the Clipse within a 15-mile radius, outside the orbit of Atlanta bass, New York boom-bap, LA gangsta rap, and Houston chopped-and-screwed.

Hampton Roads was a military and shipyard region with a Black middle-class population that had been going to church one Sunday and the roller rink the next since the ’70s. Every kid inside that radius grew up on those records—go-go drifting down from D.C., bass floating up from Miami, gospel from the church choirs, and whatever was spinning in the barbershop that week. The Neptunes sound came directly out of that overlap: percussive, sparse, funk-informed, rhythmically strange to anybody raised on East Coast boom-bap, so that half the industry thought the drums were unfinished.

Teddy Riley moved from Harlem to Virginia Beach in 1990 and opened Future Recording Studios. He discovered The Neptunes (Pharrell and Chad Hugo) at a high school talent show in 1992.

Hugo was the invisible half: a multi-instrumentalist who could voice a chord six different ways and build arrangements that sounded simple on the surface but contained layers that revealed themselves on the fourth listen. The Neptunes’ signature was Hugo’s as much as Pharrell’s melody.

Hugo stayed behind the boards while Pharrell became the face. They co-founded Star Trak together in 2001.

N.E.R.D. (Pharrell, Hugo, and Shay Haley) gave Pharrell a visual platform that session production never could: a band to stand in front of, a stage persona, and an aesthetic identity. Every N.E.R.D. video and tour was a surface for the clothes (the BAPE, the BBC prototypes, and the Icecream sneakers), all of it debuting on N.E.R.D.’s body before it debuted anywhere else.

Pharrell’s solo debut single “Frontin’” featuring Jay-Z peaked at No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 in summer 2003.

Pusha T, 2015 VIBE interview—

I just started getting boxes of clothes at my house in 2002 because Nigo was a fan of a record called “Grindin’.” Some kids he didn’t know from Virginia making 100% dopeboy music—he just liked it.

The Clipse were Pusha T and his older brother Malice, born in the Bronx, raised at the mouth of the Chesapeake, trafficking in the mid-Atlantic corridor between D.C. and Norfolk where cocaine economics in the late 1990s ran through strip-mall barbershops and highway motels. “Grindin’” dropped on Star Trak in March 2002, a drum-heavy Neptunes beat built from a lunchroom-table knock pattern, Pusha and Malice trading coke-rap couplets in a dialect so specific to the Tidewater.

NIGO heard it on a CD someone had pressed him in Tokyo, and though he did not speak Virginia Beach English, what came through was a scene refusing to speak to anyone outside it, and a hit record built around that refusal.

Fujiwara carried the Bronx into Tokyo by hand. Two decades later, NIGO was moving Virginia Beach the other way, box by box.

Pusha’s boxes shaped Clipse merchandise for a decade. The Re-Up Gang launched their own label in 2006 with T-shirts drop-printed in limited runs and priced at the high end. Hell Hath No Fury arrived delayed through the Jive labyrinth and sold 78,000 copies its debut week despite the label refusing promotion. The delay trained Pusha in the politics of label ownership as he watched his brother’s career get hostage-held in contract paperwork. His 2022 It’s Almost Dry split its sides between Pharrell and Kanye, the two producers NIGO had dressed for two decades, each taking half a record.

In 2023—3 years ago today—Pharrell cast Pusha in his Louis Vuitton debut, and a Virginia Beach coke rapper walked the Pont Neuf in a damoflage coat.

Don’t Blink or You’ll Miss It

Pharrell and NIGO co-founded BILLIONAIRE BOYS CLUB and its sister sneaker line Icecream (2003). Over dinner, Pharrell explained his vision to NIGO and Toby Feltwell, NIGO’s chief of staff. NIGO agreed immediately with one condition: he wouldn’t do it for anyone else, which meant giving up the methods he’d built alone and never shared. The first Icecream sneakers shipped through a licensing deal with Reebok—the Board Flip launched in 2005 as the shoe for BBC’s mostly-Black skate team, after a $4 million lawsuit against Reebok over quality control forced a 2005 settlement.

That night, SK8THING sketched the astronaut logo—the helmet-headed spaceman that would land on every BBC tee for the next two decades.

BBC’s motto:

Masamichi Katayama, the Wonderwall founder who’d designed NIGO’s BAPE stores in Tokyo, built BBC and Icecream’s retail spaces after NIGO made the introduction.

Katayama, Places and Spaces I’ve Been, 2012—

A 2-D expression within a 3-D space, creating a provocative experience that feels neither ordinary nor extraordinary, as if you have stepped inside the world of manga.

For a decade NIGO had refused collaboration requests, and Pharrell walked in and got it all. BBC changed BAPE’s craft discipline into an American hip-hop palette. Play Cloths, Pastelle, and Golf Wang followed.

Everybody Was Recycling America

NIGO founded a record label and assembled the Teriyaki Boyz—five MCs from across Tokyo’s hip-hop scene, recruited by a fashion designer who couldn’t rap. Beef or Chicken (2005) was released through Def Jam Recordings with production from Daft Punk, The Neptunes, and Just Blaze.

By 2022, NIGO’s solo album I Know NIGO! featured A$AP Rocky, Tyler the Creator, Pusha T, and Pharrell—20 years after the first boxes landed at Pusha’s house.

The Teriyaki Boyz were five men. One of them was Verbal, of m-flo; his wife, Yoon Ahn, was already designing alongside him on the AMBUSH side.

Standard major-label contracts in the early 2000s offered new artists royalties of 12-14% of suggested retail, before deductions for packaging, breakage, producer points, and recoupment, so that most artists saw less than $1 per album sold.

TLC, after moving over 7.7 million copies of CrazySexyCool domestically, two No. 1 singles in “Creep” and “Waterfalls”—earned 56¢ per album split three ways. Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes laid it out on VH1’s Behind the Music, 1999, breaking the royalty structure down to arithmetic:

There’s 100 points on an album. TLC had 7. Every point is equal to 8¢. 7 times 8, 56¢.

Under 19¢ per member per album, three women at the peak of American pop music, filed for Chapter 11 in 1995, declaring $3.5 million in debt.

For a generation of rappers who had watched TLC go bankrupt off a diamond album, who had seen artists lose master recordings, publishing rights, and their own names to label deals, the hoodie was physical proof of an idea working, though the real product was finally owning the receipts.

Napster was first in June 1999, then iTunes in April 2003. Spotify reached the U.S. several years later in July 2011, and the job was done. If you were an artist on a standard record deal, you got to watch the thing you owned a fraction of shrink from a disc, to a file, to a drip from someone else’s tap, priced in thousandths of a cent. Meanwhile, in Tokyo, a $500 Shark Hoodie sold straight out of Nowhere could put more money in its maker’s pocket than a platinum album put in the writer’s.

Pusha T and No Malice of the Clipse were the next Virginia Beach names—Neptunes-produced, wearing BAPE ahead of most of American hip-hop outside Pharrell’s immediate circle.

BAPE CAFE!? on the ground floor, plates and chairs and saucers wrapped in 1st camo. BAPE CUTS down the block, the hair salon. The Aoyama compound—a basement and three floors above ground—staged like a private archive. The Rolls-Royce out front, painted in BAPE camo down to the door handles.

On Hell Hath No Fury (2006), their Neptunes-produced record, Pusha rapped on “Ain’t Cha”: “Closet like Planet of the BAPEs.” Stalled by Jive Records for over two years, they dropped We Got It 4 Cheap Vol. 2 in 2005: 18 tracks over jacked beats, distributed free.

Pusha and Malice launched Play Cloths in 2008. Pusha was explicit about the debt: “The only reason I probably did a streetwear line was because of BAPE.”

Lil Wayne started wearing BAPESTAs in his 2005 “Fireman” video. The Clipse took it as theft. Their single “Mr. Me Too” (May 2006), produced by Pharrell, was a direct attack, actors dressed head-to-toe in BAPE filling the video.

In August 2002, Kanye West spotted Pharrell backstage at Jay-Z’s Dynasty Tour in Chicago—a moment caught in Coodie & Chike’s jeen-yuhs footage. If you were in the Roc-A-Fella/Neptunes orbit, you saw what Pharrell and Jay-Z were wearing before the public did.

Kanye, Places and Spaces I’ve Been, in 2012—

That was before everybody said swag, or when we were out in Japan. How could you communicate through people? We’re not even understanding the language but we knew the visual language, we knew the spirit, we knew the ideas, we knew the reference points.

Kanye attended the 2005 NYC Bape flagship opening at 91 Greene Street alongside NIGO, Pharrell, Mos Def, ?uestlove, Common, Faith Evans, Pusha T, and Spike Lee; in January 2007, he released a special-edition Kanye x BAPESTA featuring his Dropout Bear mascot.

Kanye West: Student of Streetwear

Before he touched a sketch pad, Kanye West wore BAPE head to toe during the College Dropout era—camo hoodies and pink BAPESTAs so consistent they became part of that album cycle’s visual identity. For Graduation (2007), he hired Takashi Murakami to design the album cover.

Kanye’s signature production technique—chipmunk soul—was its own flavor. He wore three hats as a designer, producer, and artist, during College Dropout’s rollout.

From there he moved through Raf Simons and into a Fendi internship in Rome alongside Virgil Abloh, both paid $500 a month, fetching cappuccinos and making photocopies.

Louis Vuitton sneakers at Paris Fashion Week in 2009 (the first hip-hop artist to design a full sneaker collection for a heritage luxury house). Nike Air Yeezy 1 (2009) and Air Yeezy 2 (2012) sold out instantly and commanded $10,000+ resale.

Nike refused to pay royalties; the policy reserved them for professional athletes, and a designer, no matter how famous, got a flat endorsement check instead. Kanye wanted a piece of every unit sold, and when Nike refused he went to Adidas. Adidas agreed to 15% of wholesale and full Yeezy trademark ownership—the first time a Western athletic-apparel major had handed a hip-hop figure a piece of every pair.

Yeezy-Adidas generated $1.7 billion in 2021 sales alone, roughly 7% of Adidas revenue and a reported $300 million in operating profit.

In June 2020, Gap announced a 10-year partnership with West targeting $1 billion in annual revenue by the fifth year. The first product, the $200 Round Jacket, went up for pre-order in June 2021 and—by former Gap CEO Mickey Drexler’s account—did roughly $7 million in sales overnight. Yeezy Gap Engineered by Balenciaga, announced in January 2022 with Demna Gvasalia, folded a luxury hand into Gap’s mass-retail pricing. Kanye was briefly the only designer in history running a streetwear brand with Adidas, a mass-retail line with Gap, and a luxury collaboration with Kering’s most avant-garde house.

October 3, 2022, Kanye wore a “White Lives Matter” shirt at the Yeezy Season 9 Paris show, and within weeks he made antisemitic statements on Drink Champs and Twitter that triggered immediate institutional exits: Balenciaga cut ties, Gap paused and then ended it, and Adidas, after two weeks of public pressure, terminated on October 25, forfeiting €1.2 billion in projected 2023 revenue and €500 million in operating profit—the Yeezy stock behind it left unsold in warehouses. Adidas released the remaining inventory in phased drops through 2023 and 2024 under a settlement that still paid West a royalty on sold units.

Virgil Abloh: Larger Than Life

Virgil: a Ghanaian-American kid from Rockford, engineering at Madison, architecture at IIT, Chicago screen-print shops, Kanye’s orbit.

Pyrex Vision (2012) was his first solo play: he purchased deadstock Ralph Lauren Rugby flannel shirts for about $40 each and screen-printed “PYREX 23” on the back and sold them for $550. Complex exposed the provenance.

NIGO had already figured the trick out back in 1993: take Polo Ralph Lauren blanks, hand-screen them in a Harajuku workshop, and turn old American status symbols into something stranger and cooler than the originals, which is exactly what Virgil was doing in a Chicago basement 19 years on, working Rugby flannels with a screen-printer and the understanding that America has always been weirdly eager to discard the symbols it spent years selling to itself.

At Harvard GSD in October 2017, Abloh laid out his design philosophy:

Things are intriguing to me when they’re slightly edited. I was only interested in restraining myself, and only editing it 3%. […]

It’s like hip-hop. It’s sampling. I take James Brown, I chop it up, I make a new song.

It was simple: take an object the world had agreed to stop looking at and shift it 3% off-center, moving the Swoosh back half an inch, putting quotation marks around “SHOELACES” like he was letting you in on the joke, leaving the zip tie dangling because it was never about perfection.

In January 2017, Kim Jones (then Louis Vuitton’s Men’s Artistic Director) showed a Supreme collaboration at the house’s Paris runway—Damier monogram reworked with Supreme’s box logo, branded hoodies, a backpack that sold at $2,760. The collection moved at a reported $100 million at retail across its limited drops. LVMH hired Virgil 15 months later.

Louis Vuitton named him Men’s Artistic Director on March 26, 2018, the first person of African descent to hold the position.

At the debut show, Kid Cudi and Playboi Carti walked alongside professional models, and as Abloh took his final bow, he and Kanye collapsed into each other’s arms, sobbing.

Abloh died of cardiac angiosarcoma on November 28, 2021, at 41:

Less than three years later, LVMH sold Off-White to Bluestar Alliance in 2024 for a fraction of what they’d paid. Pharrell Williams was named Men’s Creative Director of Louis Vuitton 15 months after Abloh’s death. Pharrell had walked through NIGO’s collection in 2000, and walked into Bernard Arnault’s corner office in late 2022 to discuss the largest menswear role in luxury.

His debut in in June of 2023, held on the Pont Neuf after sunset with Jay-Z performing, was engineered as spectacle. LVMH closed the bridge and reskinned it in gold. The Damier check came back in pixelated camouflage—Louis Vuitton’s 1888 house pattern crossed with BAPE’s 1996 1st camo.

Pearls became the season’s signature. Pharrell had been wearing pearl necklaces since the early 2000s; inside Louis Vuitton, the pearls became bag straps, jacket trims, and the Speedy Pearl in pastel python. The Millionaire sunglasses, originally designed by Pharrell and Marc Jacobs for the house in 2004, came back in expanded colorways.

Tyler, the Creator’s Golf Wang deployed a visual language so specific (pastel palettes, Le Fleur florals, and 1970s tennis culture) that it couldn’t be mistaken for anyone else’s, and he never licensed any of it.

A$AP Rocky broadcast Raf Simons so relentlessly that vintage dealers coined the “Rocky Effect” to explain the spike in archival resale prices.

Travis Scott’s reverse Swoosh on the Air Jordan 1 was the most literal application: Dennis Rodman’s Nike Air Darwin had flipped the Swoosh backward in 1994, then the silhouette sat dead in Nike’s archive for 25 years until Scott dug it out. Rodman noticed: “Travis Scott has copied my shoe.”

Scott told Nike the reverse Swoosh was necessary because “Virgil had the orange tabs. We gotta do something.”

In September 2021, LVMH named NIGO Artistic Director of Kenzo—the first Japanese designer to lead the house since Kenzo Takada’s 1999 retirement. Takada’s death from COVID-19 in 2020 closed an arc LVMH had spent the prior 22 years trying to extend through three European creative directors, none of whom returned the brand to relevance. To LVMH, the hire read as a curator with runway credibility and direct lines to Pharrell, Kanye, and every hip-hop artist the house wanted at its shows, while to NIGO it read as the first time a Japanese designer could run a Paris house without mimicking European tailoring as the price of admission.

NIGO explained more in a Fashionsnap interview at his Paris atelier the day before Kenzo FW23:

ストリートとラグジュアリーは対極にあるものと認識していたので、LV²が受け入れられるとは思っていませんでした。ラグジュアリーは好きでしたが、買えるだけでよかったんです。しかし、今こうしてモノを作るようになったのは、まだ不思議な感じですね。きっとヴァージルがドアを開けたから、僕は入っていけた。

I thought of street and luxury as polar opposites—I never expected LV² to be accepted. I loved luxury, but being able to buy it was enough. So the fact that I’m now actually making things at this level still feels strange. It’s because Virgil opened the door that I was able to walk through it.

The 2019 LV² capsule with Abloh—NIGO’s first cross with Louis Vuitton—arrived two years before Kenzo. Abloh’s Vuitton chair, won on the architecture-degree-and-Harvard-lectern legitimacy frame, gave the suits a bridge figure: someone fluent in streetwear and institutional luxury; someone Paris could credential.

NIGO’s January 2022 Kenzo debut revolved around the “Boke Flower,” a Japanese quince blossom installed as the house’s new monogram. The original, Kenzo Takada’s Poppy Flower, had filtered Japan through a French house’s French eye.

The first collection sampled varsity jackets, collegiate knitwear, and American workwear. A Levi’s jacket milled on Japanese looms Levi’s itself had discarded in the 1970s, recut by a Harajuku designer who learned the craft from Fujiwara, who learned it from Ishizu, now walked a Kenzo runway in Paris.

In a Fashionsnap sit-down, NIGO frames it less as authorship than custodianship:

ケンゾーは高田賢三のブランドであって、主役は僕ではありません。賢三さんのデザインが生き続けていくことが重要です。自分の解釈で発表するだけの、”Nigoのケンゾー”にはしたくない。

Kenzo is Takada Kenzō’s brand. I’m not the protagonist. What matters is that Kenzō-san’s design keeps living. I don’t want it to become merely “NIGO’s Kenzo”—just my own interpretations on display.

NIGO’s first collection triggered a spike in wholesale bookings and lifted e-commerce traffic. Successive shows continued the Boke Flower across sneakers, bags, and knitwear. By late 2024, Kenzo had reopened flagships in New York’s SoHo and on Rue Saint-Honoré.

Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo walked into Paris Fashion Week in the early 1980s, an arrival the European press first read as “Hiroshima chic” and the Japanese-domestic press as the milder pua rūku—poor look. Yamamoto’s 2021 Nikkei Watashi no Rirekisho serial autobiography frames the period in his own words. Issey Miyake had been showing in Paris since 1973.

Abe—who spent years at Comme des Garçons as a patternmaker under Kawakubo and then on Junya Watanabe’s team before founding Sacai in 1999—cuts two finished garments apart and sews them into one: a military bomber spliced horizontally onto a tailored blazer, a trench coat fused with a knit cardigan, cargo pants folded upward into skirts.

Every figure who’d opened a shop off Cat Street in the 1990s had, by 2025, either retired, collaborated with a luxury house, or taken a creative-director role inside one. Japan had placed a structural generation of designers inside the French luxury establishment without those designers first becoming French.

BAPE’s heir is Cav Empt, founded in 2011 by Toby Feltwell, SK8THING, and Hishiyama. There was no flagship, just rotating drops through the brand’s own website and a small set of global stockists, with graphics cycling through obscure references—pixelated internet-age science fiction, cyberpunk fonts, logotype arrangements that read as half-corporate and half-paranoid.

Most of the original Ura-Harajuku brands either scaled up or burned out: BAPE under I.T, Undercover into Paris Fashion Week, Neighborhood into international flagships.

Cav Empt’s three founders were all men, while a few blocks away Chitose Abe was quietly taking garments apart and rebuilding them. Junya Watanabe, who came up under Kawakubo as she had, got his own label under the Comme des Garçons umbrella in 1992; Abe left and built Sacai herself in 1999.

& Still

Legally, hip-hop sampling was contested: Grand Upright Music, Ltd. v. Warner Bros. Records Inc. (1991) ended uncleared sampling overnight. Judge Kevin Thomas Duffy opened his opinion with four words from the Seventh Commandment: “Thou shalt not steal.” He referred Biz Markie for criminal prosecution after Markie sampled Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “Alone Again (Naturally)” without clearance.

Three years later, Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music (1994) restored fair-use parody as a defense—2 Live Crew’s “Pretty Woman” survived on the Supreme Court’s ruling that a commercial parody can still qualify as fair use. The door was cracked back open for parody, but straight sampling still required clearance or a check.

After Grand Upright, every non-parody sample had to be cleared or it got you sued, so the Bomb Squad’s production style for Public Enemy, dozens of layered samples per track, became financially impossible (and outside of feasibility) inside a year.

Biz Markie got dragged into federal court over three sampled seconds while NIGO spent a decade selling near-identical BAPESTAs in patent leather camouflage with barely a lawyer in sight.

Interview asked NIGO what he had to say to bootleggers in 2005—

That if you have enough creativity, or energy to be a bootlegger, why don’t you just make your own thing? But then it also shows my own status and how successful my line is, because nobody bothers to rip off what you do unless you’ve succeeded.

Nike didn’t even register the Air Force 1’s trade dress until 2008—26 years after the shoe debuted. In 2009, Nike’s VP of footwear flew to Tokyo twice to confront BAPE over the BAPESTA; BAPE rejected a proposed licensing agreement and quietly reduced its U.S. presence but continued selling BAPESTAs for another 12 years.

In 2021, BAPE—now backed by Hong Kong investment money—scaled up production and reintroduced the BAPESTA at industrial volume. Nike sued for trademark infringement in 2023, alleging five BAPE models were “near verbatim copies” of the Air Force 1, Air Jordan 1, and Nike Dunk. The April 2024 settlement forced BAPE to discontinue three models and redesign two others.

NIGO returned to the BAPESTA in GQ’s Design Museum coverage two years later, after Nike had signed him onto an Air Force 3 and an LO2 Air Force 1.

NIGO, GQ, April 2026—

I’ve always loved Nike. There was a time when I was designing things that were inspired by Nike out of respect for them.

Capital Has Momentum, Not Taste

The first Yeezy Boost 750 drop in February 2015: 9,000 pairs worldwide, $350 retail, gone in 10 minutes. By 2021, $1.7 billion in annual revenue.

BILLIONAIRE BOYS CLUB entered a 2012 joint venture with Iconix Brands (the licensing conglomerate behind Rocawear) before Pharrell bought back Iconix’s 50% stake in January 2016 amid Iconix’s SEC investigation and $300 million debt crunch. NIGO sold 90% of BAPE to I.T Limited in 2011 for roughly $2.8 million—a deal Toby Feltwell used his law training to negotiate before leaving with SK8THING to launch Cav Empt later that year. By the time I.T arrived, NIGO’s parent company Nowhere Co. carried ¥1.25 billion in net liabilities and roughly ¥4.31 billion in bank loans and shop leases that I.T absorbed; NIGO told WWD the brand had grown past what he could handle, with the company having spread into BAPE CAFE!?, the BAPE CUTS hair salon, and a string of other ventures alongside the apparel core.

Nine years on, NIGO described the exit on J-WAVE’s Roppongi Passion Pit as a Lehman-shock collapse he could no longer outrun:

自分的に「ファンが望むモノづくり」というのが苦手で、どうしてもいつもマンネリズムになって自分の思うようなモノづくりができなかった。

I’m bad at making things fans want. I always ended up in mannerism and couldn’t make things the way I wanted.

The old Cyzo-era image of NIGO looked like the logical endpoint of Harajuku excess. NIGO’s post-sale business-card joke: 代表取締役用務員, Daihyō-torishimari yakumuin—Representative Director Janitor, which, for somebody who spent three decades archiving, sorting, rebuilding, and sweeping through American culture by hand, was probably closer to the truth anyway.

GQ asked NIGO about the sale 15 years later—

Looking back at my life, Bape was actually a big mistake. But in a good way. Because if I hadn’t had that, then I wouldn’t have had Human Made. I wouldn’t have been able to enjoy my life as I do.

He reached for a Tokugawa Ieyasu legend to explain it—

Maybe not so much a mistake. Maybe more as a battle that I lost. Because I ended up having to sell the company. Otherwise, I could have still been running it.

Supreme moved even faster: VF bought it in 2020. EssilorLuxottica picked it up four years later for $1.5 billion. By then the brand mattered less than its resale price; StockX and GOAT had turned the drops into line items, and the line outside the store had moved to a laptop.

Bernard Arnault built LVMH on the premise that the brand name is the only thing worth owning while the designer is a hire you can replace (€86.2 billion in LVMH revenue in 2023).

Under Jebbia, Supreme ran on intentional scarcity—weekly drops out of Lafayette Street. Under VF it became a revenue line that had to justify a depreciation schedule, and by 2024, when EssilorLuxottica arrived, the brand had been quietly marked down.

It’s All About Timing

Missy Elliott was already wearing oversized sportswear on camera before Pharrell got to Tokyo. Yoon Ahn co-founded AMBUSH in 2008 and was appointed Dior Men’s jewelry designer by Kim Jones a decade later, the only woman in the extended room to enter a luxury house in her own name, and she entered as jewelry rather than menswear.

Es Devlin designed the stages for Kanye’s tours—the twin cubes of Watch the Throne, the “Mount Yeezus” volcano he rapped from. Vashtie Kola directed the video for CRS, Kanye and Pharrell’s trio with Lupe Fiasco, became the first woman to design an Air Jordan, and ran the creative for Pharrell’s Icecream women’s line.

Rihanna’s Fenty clothing line, launched under LVMH in 2019 and paused in 2021 citing it as a WIP, was the first Black-owned house the conglomerate had ever opened in its 32-year history, and it lasted two years while the menswear chairs around it have lasted decades:

Rihanna and LVMH have jointly made the decision to put on hold the RTW activity, based in Europe, pending better conditions,” LVMH told WWD.

Virgil said it first, in a Dazed cover story in December 2019—

In my mind, how many more T-shirts can we have? How many more hoodies?

Streetwear, in my mind, is gonna die, you know?

Adidas was writing Yeezy billion-dollar checks and LVMH had pulled Virgil, NIGO, and Pharrell into its orbit.

NIGO, Sabukaru, April 2026—

It was something that could only have happened in that specific era. If I tried to start it now, I’m sure I couldn’t pull it off. It was only possible because of the lack of information at the time, our youth, and our own ignorance.

Frontin’ at the Afterparty

In the years between losing BAPE and taking over Kenzo, NIGO quietly rebuilt with HUMAN MADE—a single Tokyo storefront called Cold Coffee, open weekends, small-batch.

NIGO took over Kenzo in September 2021 (the first Japanese designer to lead the house since founder Kenzo Takada retired in 1999)—a house LVMH had long considered an underperformer, barely breaking even at roughly €150 million in annual sales.

January 2025 brought a collection co-designed with NIGO—“Damier Phriendship” trunks embossed with both creators’ profiles, kimono-inspired jackets, and a set designed by Tokyo’s Wonderwall agency.

Late 2024 brought NIGO’s first official Nike collaboration—a Nike Air Force 3, a 1988 silhouette that had sat dead in Nike’s archive for over three decades. He stamped “NIGO FORCE” on the heel and put one colorway in pony hair, a reference to Planet of the Apes. Nike had sent a VP to Tokyo in 2009 to shut the BAPESTA down, and 15 years later they handed NIGO a silhouette from their vault.

In April 2026 Nike revealed a NIGO × Jun Takahashi “Last Orgy 2” Air Force 1 Low ’01—the first retro of the 2001-cut AF1 last, Sail and Loyal Blue patent leather pulled from the 1993 NOWHERE storefront sign, “LO2” stamped on the foxing and sock liner, “NIGO AIR” in place of “AIR” on the tongue, a “2” on the lateral heel.

The release coincided with “NIGO: From Japan with Love” at London’s Design Museum: more than 700 objects, a reconstruction of his teenage bedroom in Maebashi, hand-thrown ceramics, archival clothing, a glass tea house built directly onto the gallery floor.

GQ asked NIGO at the close of the same interview what advice he’d give anyone trying to walk the same path now:

Well, I think they should look at the exhibition. And then do something completely different.

On June 15, 2026, NIGO’s Human Made, by then a company listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, agreed in principle to take all of Undercover. A nonbinding letter of intent for 100% of Jun Takahashi’s house, the share purchase targeted for September, the handover for early 2027, the price left blank pending a valuation.

In 1993 the two of them had split one wire-netted room on Cat Street, Undercover on one side, NIGO’s venture on the other.

33 years later the netting comes down, from NIGO’s side.

If you like this piece, you may enjoy:

This piece is as much about Korean music as it is about learning a culture I was born into but never fully handed. To everyone who handed me what I was missing along the way—thank you!

DISCLAIMER:

• This article constitutes opinion, cultural commentary, and criticism.

• Korean-language translations are unofficial non-authoritative—added for reader’s sake.

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Dead Last on National Television

One of the earliest major commercial transplants of Black American sound onto the televised idol stage came in 1990. Hyun Jin-young brought New Jack Swing to Korean television under Lee Soo-man’s SM Studio. Two years later, three young men walked onto MBC’s Teukjong! TV Yeonye (특종 TV 연예; 1992 to 1994) and broke the format.

Seo Taiji, a former heavy metal bassist turned songwriter, had sought out dancer Yang Hyun-suk for choreography training. Yang heard the music and joined on the spot. Lee Juno, a dancer, rounded out the trio. Their song, “Nan Arayo” (“I Know”), was South Korea’s answer to Bell Biv DeVoe.

The judges scored them 7.8 out of 10. Composer Ha Kwang-hoon, one of the four judges, later admitted the show’s concept was to score new acts down. Viewers made it No. 1 on MBC’s chart for 10 consecutive weeks. The debut album moved ~1.6 million copies. New Jack Swing was Teddy Riley’s invention, a prodigy from the St. Nicholas Houses in Harlem who fused hip-hop production, R&B melody, gospel vocal styling, and funk rhythms into something Barry Michael Cooper named in a 1987 Village Voice feature.

Seo Taiji’s rap descended from a tradition born in the West Bronx, 1973. Lee Juno’s breakdancing traced to Black and Latino b-boys in the same borough a decade later. The culture crossed the Pacific at clubs like Moon Night in Itaewon, where Korean dancers moved alongside Black American GIs stationed at the Yongsan garrison.

SBS’s Archive K (2021), on how the dancing arrived—

AFKN을 통해 방영된 힙합 브레이크 방송 ‘소울 트레인’… 어디서도 보지 못했던 비보이들의 춤을 접하게 됐고 그걸 실제로 볼 수 있는 곳이 바로 문나이트였다.

Through ‘Soul Train,’ the hip-hop break show broadcast on AFKN, dancers encountered the b-boy dancing seen nowhere else, and Moon Night was the only place to actually see it live.

Yang Hyun-suk and Lee Juno learned their vocabulary in those rooms. The garrison never left. The 28,500 USFK troops still in Korea today, roughly 19,500 of them Army, sit eight subway stops from where Seo Taiji recorded. The Eighth Army system that staffed the clubs ran ~5,400 military shows through the 1950’s, auditions compulsory for any performing artist who wanted the work, the grade running Special A (AA) down through A, B, and C, with D as elimination and pay tiered to the rank. The graded audition that ranks and culls every trainee in a Korean agency today—the monthly evaluation that decides who advances toward debut and who washes out—rhymes with that ladder. No paper trail connects the two.

Shin Joong-hyun came up through the same camp-town clubs, taking the stage as a guitarist in 1957, and earned the AA grade and the highest-paying officers’ clubs. John Lie, in K-Pop: Popular Music, Cultural Amnesia, and Economic Innovation (p. 30), records that in the late 1950’s, revenues from Korean musicians’ performances for US GIs probably exceeded the total export earnings of South Korea.

AFKN, the American Forces Korea Network that opened its Yongsan studios in April 1954 and added television in September 1957, piped soul, funk, and R&B into Korean airwaves on AM frequencies any civilian could tune. Even AFKN was a successor: WVTP had been broadcasting from Korea since 1945, putting American pop into the peninsula a decade before the Yongsan television studios came online. AFKN’s broadcasts sat exempt from ROK government censorship for the network’s full 39-year run (1957 to 1996), a status SOFA Article III §2 codified in 1966.

Kyung Hyun Kim, in Hegemonic Mimicry (2021), called Yongsan Garrison and Itaewon “the incubation lab for K-pop where local b-boys learned how to dance to black music throughout the latter part of the century.” Korean performers who began as “disposable, off-white/blackish entertainment bodies” for occupation audiences—neither white nor Black in the American hierarchy the GIs brought with them, ranked somewhere below both and asked to imitate the acts that outranked them—were repackaged generation by generation until the aesthetic emerged decades later as something the country claimed as its own.

Riley himself crossed the Pacific to write “The Boys” for Girls’ Generation in 2011, “Mamacita” for Super Junior in 2014, and “Call Me Baby” for EXO in 2015.

Spin ranked “Nan Arayo” fourth on their list of the 21 greatest K-pop songs of all time, but in 1992 there was no K-pop. The reigning form was trot, ppongjjak rhythms and pentatonic melodies carrying Japanese-colonial DNA, rooted in the 1920’s, dominant for decades. Roald Maliangkay traced synchronized girl-group choreography to Japanese entertainment companies in the 1910’s, which brought Western chorus-line dance to Korean stages during occupation. SM, YG, and JYP built their training and choreography systems on that same template.

Seo Taiji ended trot’s reign inside a single chart run. Trot would revive two decades later—Lim Young-woong’s 2022 Im Hero tour filled Olympic Park across consecutive nights—without ever threatening the export machine Seo Taiji’s departure had made room for. Seo Taiji and Boys played their farewell concert on January 19, 1996—Seo Taiji was 23. Yang Hyun-suk filed the paperwork for YG Entertainment within weeks.

The Digital Streets of Korean Hip-Hop

In the mid-90’s, Korean hip-hop formed online through PC communication servers—HiTel, Chollian, and Nownuri, the dial-up bulletin-board services Koreans used before the web, built out on the same timeline as the music itself—in communities called BLEX, Dope Soundz, and Show N Prove.

Rhythmer’s history of Korean hip-hop—

‘미국 힙합 음악의 모태가 되었던 거리의 개념이 국내에서는 온라인상에서 형성’

The concept of ‘the street,’ which was the womb of American hip-hop music, was formed online [digitally] in Korea.

BLEX, short for Black Loud EXploders, started on HiTel on February 2, 1996, as a small group called “Soul Train” (소울트레인). Within 18 months they’d accumulated 400 members, online and offline listening sessions, a charity concert for North Korean children, full HiTel dongho-hoe [official-club] status, and by May 2000, 1,500 registered members. They described themselves as a storehouse of Black music information that was hard to access in Korea, and impoverished even when accessible.

MC Meta, who came from Daegu to Seoul for graduate studies, became the system operator and steered BLEX toward original production. He said, “Let’s make the music we want to hear ourselves.” They released 검은소리 Vol. 1 in November 1997, one of the first independent Korean hip-hop compilations. Only about 10 CDs were physically pressed because burning a single disc took nearly half a day, done at a CD burning shop in Jongno or Myeongdong and split among the small handful of participants.

MC Meta, HiphopLE, 2011—

공식적으로 CD로 제작된 건 한 10장 남짓 할 거예요. 당시에 CD를 굽는 게 거의 반나절 걸리던 시절이라서... 종로인가, 명동 어디에 있는 CD 버닝하는 샵이 있었어.

거기서 애들이랑 밖에서 놀다 들어왔다 하면서 구워서 소수의 참여진만 나눠가지고

Only about 10 CDs were actually pressed. Back then, burning a single CD took nearly half a day... there was a CD burning shop somewhere in Jongno or Myeongdong.

We’d hang out with the kids outside, come back in, burn them, and distribute them to the small number of participants.

The official release was an MP3 upload to the BLEX bulletin board. Meta claimed BLEX uploaded before Jo PD, making 검은소리 Vol. 1 the first Korean hip-hop MP3 album.

Before MP3s existed or CD burners were affordable, BLEX members worked out pager rap.

In the era of beepers, members would play an instrumental from a CD on their stereo, hold a phone to the speaker because there was nowhere to upload, time the pager’s voicemail greeting and rap over the beat into the phone receiver.

Meta, in the same HiphopLE interview—

전화기에 ‘삐소리 후 말을 남기세요’와 함께 그때 딱 누르는거야. 20초 그 사이 막 랩을 해요. 전화 수화기 들고 막 랩하고 확인을 해요. 모니터링을 하는 거지. ‘아, 이거 틀렸네’ 이러고 다시 녹음을 하는 거예요.

When the message says, “Please leave your message after the beep,” that’s when you press it exactly on cue. You’ve got about 20 seconds, and you just start rapping in that window. You hold the phone receiver and rap, then check it. You’re monitoring it. “Ah, I messed that up,” and then you record it again.

They’d record, monitor playback, re-record if the timing was off, then post the pager number to the bulletin board as a new single release. On Nownuri, the parallel dial-up service, a smaller and more selective community called Dope Soundz had formed in April 1997, self-described as a clique—

마음이 맞고 음악적으로 뜻이 같은 친구들이 모여 뚜렷한 성격을 가진 모임으로 이끌어나가자.

Friends with matching sensibilities and musical vision gathering to build a group with a clear identity.

When BLEX released its compilation and the creative itch spread, several Dope Soundz members broke off in 1999 to form Show N Prove. The first system operator was Defconn, who’d later build a TV career on routinely antagonizing his guests. SNP attracted a murderers’ row: Verbal Jint, P-Type, 4WD, the singer Wheesung, the R&B vocalist Jung-in. The following year, SNP members 4WD and Verbal Jint released a diss track called “노자” that deployed multi-syllable rhyme schemes nobody in the Korean language had worked out yet.

Meta, in the same interview—

각자 활동을 하고 실력의 차이가 있고 하다보니까... 곡을 쓰는 사람과 랩퍼들이 만든 곡들이 올라오는 과정에서 이제 뭐 회원간이건 아니면 당사자간이건 살짝 견제하는 그런 분위기... ‘누구 랩이 더 좋네’, ‘누구 랩이 엉터리네’ 이런 것들.

As people became active and skill differences emerged... in the process of songs being uploaded by writers and rappers, there was a subtle atmosphere of rivalry between members and between the communities themselves: ‘this person’s rap is better,’ ‘that person’s rap is garbage.’

The craft they were chasing had been worked out in English. Korean-language rap existed and Seo Taiji had proven a market for it, but the grammar was still unsolved, and rappers working in Japanese and French were stalled on their own versions of it at the same time.

In late 1997, BLEX held a release concert for 검은소리 Vol. 1 at a venue called 푸른굴 양식장 (Blue Oyster Farm). The owner had never cleared that many ₩5,000 covers in a single night; the crew left with good feedback and a plan for a Christmas follow-up. When Meta called to finalize, the venue had been sold to Lee Jong-hyun, who was building a dedicated hip-hop club.

Somebody’s Oyster Farm Became the Sistine Chapel

Master Plan sat in the Hongdae/Sinchon corridor, a basement venue of 33 square meters, about the size of a one-car garage. Kyunghyang Shinmun later called it 한국 힙합의 성지, the holy ground of Korean hip-hop. No chairs, no tables, audiences on step-like structures. Performances every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Crowds of up to 200. No alcohol, which meant teenagers could walk in, watch the open-mic freestyle battles that closed every session, and eventually grab the microphone themselves.

Naachal went to Master Plan, saw Meta freestyle, practiced for two weeks, and debuted on the same stage. Meta saw Naachal perform and called him immediately. They formed Garion, naming the group after 가리온, a white horse with a black mane.

Artisan Beats (Saatan), a Korean hip-hop producer, arrived at Master Plan through a different door. He’d been preparing to debut as part of a four-member idol group, the company refused to let them make the music they wanted, and he quit and walked out.

Artisan Beats (Saatan)—

회사에서도 그런 거 만들면 안 된다고 하니까 그러다가 도저히 안되겠다 싶어서 때려치고 나와서.

The company said we couldn’t make that kind of music, so I quit and walked out.

He saw a teaser in Sub magazine, got pulled on stage for a freestyle, and Da Crew became MP 공개 오디션 1호, the first act to enter through open audition, paid ₩10,000 for their first show (about $9 at the era’s exchange rate), ₩5,000 each after split, while bus fare from Ilsan ran ₩4,000 round trip per person, leaving the pair ₩2,000—under $2—between them for food after the gig.

Saatan—

우리 둘이 2천원 가지고 뭐하지? 밥도 애매하고 분식집 가야되고.

What do the two of us do with ₩2,000? Can’t even afford a real meal—had to hit up a bunsik joint.

CB Mass, precursors of Dynamic Duo, Epik High’s Mithra Jin, Verbal Jint, and E-Sens all passed through those doors and built the next 20 years of Korean hip-hop.

E-Sens’ lyrics from Next Level—

난 Master Plan 말곤 한국 언더그라운드에 / 딸 래퍼들 있는 줄 몰랐는데.

I didn’t know there were other rappers in the Korean underground besides Master Plan.

When Master Plan transitioned from club to management company around 2001, Meta still talked about it as a loss—

클럽을 버릴 줄은 몰랐어요. 공연장을 접어버렸어요. 공연장을 버리고 그냥 기획사로 빠져버리니까 저는 그게 되게 안타까웠죠

I never expected them to abandon the club. They shut down the performance space. They dropped the venue and just became a management company, and that really gutted me.

Meta, continuing—

갑자기 구심점이 없어지니까... ‘부비부비’가 딱 치고 들어오면서 그게 엄청 앞으로 나와버려요. 케이블에서는 홍대 가면 ‘무조건 여자 엉덩이에 부비부비 할 수 있구나’ 이렇게 인식되는 모습들이 보여져 버리니까

Suddenly the center of gravity disappeared... the ‘boobibobi’ [grinding] culture rushed in and took over. Cable TV started showing Hongdae as a place where you could ‘grind on girls’ butts’… and that became the image.

The former site now houses Geek Live House, which still has Master Plan’s original checkerboard flooring. Digiri, who calls himself the “hip-hop grandpa,” started performing at the first hip-hop club in Sinchon at 18 in 1997, back when most first-generation artists were still just audience members. Digiri told the Korea Herald he didn’t know anything about hip-hop, and he and Young-poong would rap there, freestyle.

The group that formed around those sessions became Honey Family, and their producer was Lee Juno, third member of Seo Taiji and Boys. Two of Honey Family’s members, Gill and Gary, later formed Leessang. Gary became a household name through Running Man.

The Language Said No Until Somebody Stopped Asking

In 1998, overground rapper JP (Kim Jin-pyo) dropped a diss at the cosplayers calling themselves rappers—

여기는 미국 아냐 어죽을 East Side, West Side 외치지만 말고제대로 좀 해봐

This isn’t America. Stop saying East Side, West Side. Do something real.

Two years passed before an answer came. Yoo Seung-jun fired back with a response track—

난 랩 안해도 잘먹고 사네 yo J.P. 그깟 돈, 명예 너 다 가져 그저 네 기준에 맞추진 말아줘 1등 2등 신경쓰지 말아줘 나는 가위의 유승준, 나나나의 승준, 열정의 승준, big westside 승준 너의 기준 속에서 고정되는 나의 표준 새로운 창조를 위해 너희 다시 조준 질문 yo. 꿈이 뭐야.

I eat good without even rapping—yo, J.P. Keep your petty money and fame. Just measure me by another ruler. Forget who’s first or second. I’m Scissors Seung-jun [가위, his signature hit], NaNaNa Seung-jun, Passion Seung-jun, Big Westside Seung-jun. My standard stays fixed inside your standards. I’m re-aiming for new creation. Question, yo. What’s your dream?

T.K. Park, the Korean American writer behind Ask A Korean, called it “anchored realness.” In the 90’s, to be “real” was to look and sound American. Korean rappers flaunted their American connections, stuffed their lyrics with English, shot music videos in locations that evoked inner-city America.

T.K. Park, Ask A Korean, 2015—

In hindsight, Korean hip hop of the 1990s was cringe-inducing. The cringe does not simply come from the fact that most things, 20 years later, are tacky.

It also comes from the fact that Korean hip hop of the 1990s was clearly an exercise in exoticism and cultural expropriation.

To put it bluntly: these were a bunch of Koreans trying to be black.

Verbal Jint’s 2001 EP Modern Rhymes broke that consensus. In Korean the verb comes last, every clause ending on a conjugated verb suffix, the rhyme position locked unless the rapper breaks the grammar open from inside.

Before him, Korean rappers were, as Verbal Jint told the Korea Times, “satisfied with talking fast and thinking that it was rapping.” Kim Young-dae, music critic and ethnomusicologist, in 한국 힙합: 열정의 발자취, observed that a G.O.D. verse from 1999 rhymed only at the end of each line, stiff and forced. Verbal Jint’s “Overclass” rhymed everywhere.

MC Solaar had worked multisyllabic rhyme into French and Zeebra into Japanese; Verbal Jint had now done it inside Korean’s verb-final grammar.

After Modern Rhymes, the era of end-rhyme was over.

P-Type’s 2004 album Heavy Bass wrote the rules down, mapping Korean phonetics against rhythmic structure into a template later rappers drew on.

Garion took a different route: recorded in Korean, a deliberate rejection of English mixing. Their 2010 follow-up swept the Korean Music Awards, winning Best Hip-Hop Album, Best Hip-Hop Song, and Album of the Year.

The Quiett co-founded Soul Company in June 2004, an indie hip-hop label on the underground side of the line; a teenager named Dok2 was already recording demos in Busan at 12. Deepflow founded Vismajor Company and became the underground’s institutional memory, and in 2013 he dissed Zico and Jay Park by name for prioritizing money over craft, then kept doing the work while everyone else cashed Show Me the Money checks.

Verbal Jint founded the Overclass crew around 2008 for technical elitism and commercial ambition, while Soul Company stayed poetic and introspective. YG’s producer Teddy Park launched The Black Label as a YG sub-label in 2015, putting company-backed hip-hop on the same shelf as the independent underground.

By 2011, 10 years of rhyme innovation had closed the debate: realness no longer meant sounding American once the rhymes worked in the language the rappers actually spoke.

T.K. Park, Ask A Korean, 2015—

True authenticity requires no justification, because it justifies itself.

Today, Korea’s foremost rappers express their genuine selves through intricate rhyme and flow.

Listen for yourself, and tell me it’s all a lie. I dare you.

2648 West Grand Boulevard to Gangnam

SM worked from what Lee Soo-man called “Culture Technology,” a codified manual—casting, training, content production, and marketing written down as procedure every SM employee was required to learn. He coined the term around 1997 and carried it to Stanford, Harvard, MIT, and Cornell.

The New Yorker reported the details: chord progressions by country, the precise color of eyeshadow a performer would wear in a particular market, the exact hand gestures and camera angles. Every video opened on a 360-degree group shot before cutting to individual closeups. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2012 that developing a single top-tier idol ran into the millions.

The Black Roots Nobody Stamped a Return Address On

Berry Gordy’s Motown system had a logic. Cholly Atkins, a tap dancer who’d survived a segregated entertainment industry, drilled the Temptations and the Supremes until their stage movements were synchronized to the syllable. Maxine Powell, alumna of the Madam C.J. Walker School of Beauty Culture, ran the in-house finishing school: posture and grooming, then etiquette, how to exit a limousine with knees together, how to answer a hostile interviewer without breaking composure. Gordy controlled image, wardrobe, hairstyles, diets, offstage conduct.

The Supremes came out of the Brewster-Douglass projects. By 1959, Gordy had hung a sign reading “Hitsville U.S.A.” on the house at 2648 West Grand Boulevard and built what was then the most successful Black-owned business in the country. Crystal Anderson documented the lineage in Soul in Seoul (2020), tracing K-pop’s trainee system directly to Gordy’s Artist Development model.

John Seabrook, in his 2012 New Yorker profile, wrote that Lee Soo-man had built a system that made “the star factory that Berry Gordy created at Motown look like a mom-and-pop operation.”

Lee Soo-man rebuilt Gordy’s operation as written procedure, function by function. He cited Michael Jackson and MTV as the revelation. The exposure was direct: Lee studied at California State University, Northridge from 1981 through 1985, putting him in Southern California for MTV’s launch in August 1981 and the channel’s early ascendance. He went over as a folk singer trained at Seoul National in the 1970’s, watched the cable music economy invent itself in real time, and brought the blueprint home (per Lie, p. 119).

Jackson, Motown’s most famous product, was the kid Gordy signed at 10. Gordy’s quality-control voting system, where executives voted on which recordings were hits before release, became SM’s A&R process, and Powell’s charm school the trainee classroom. Cholly Atkins drilling the Temptations became SM choreographers drilling H.O.T. at 4AM.

The dormitory itself came from Johnny Kitagawa in Japan, whose trainee system Lee Soo-man had transplanted into Korea.

Kitagawa had been manufacturing idol groups since the early 1960’s, three decades before Culture Technology had a name. Total immersion: recruit teenage boys, house them in dormitories, drill dance and singing until stage presence was automatic, debut them into a market he’d already shaped through decades of television relationships. Diet, schedule, social contact, and creative output monitored around the clock. The Johnnys system produced SMAP, Arashi, and a generation of male idols who dominated Japanese entertainment for decades.

Before China and before the West, Japan was the money. BoA had debuted in Korea in August 2000 with ID; Peace B at 13; her Japanese debut on Avex in May 2001 made her a domestic Japanese star before most Korean audiences caught up, and her Japanese sales financed SM’s next generation.

TVXQ’s Tone Tour in 2012 drew 550,000 fans. When AKB48’s Yasushi Akimoto popularized the handshake-event model in the mid-2000’s, with fans buying multiple copies of a single to win face-to-face time with a member, K-pop agencies built their fansign-lottery system on it.

Lee Soo-man and Bang Si-hyuk have both said where it came from.

Lee Soo-man on K-pop’s Black roots—

South Korea has best consumed black music in Asia.

Just as J-pop was built on rock, we made K-pop based on black music.

Bang Si-hyuk (Hitman Bang) said the same thing in 2017 [translated, verbatim]:

음악적으로는 블랙뮤직을 베이스로 한다.
Musically, [BTS’s music] is based on Black music. […]

많은 장르를 해도 하우스나 어번 계열을 해도 ‘피비알앤비(PBR&B, 미국 힙스터에게 인기있는 알앤비 장르)’를 쓰면서도 블랙 뮤직임은 변함이 없다.
Even when [we] work in many genres—whether house, urban styles, or PBR&B—the fact that [it] is Black music does not change.

여기에 BTS(방탄소년단)만의 가치, 힙합과 흑인음악을 플러스하는 것이다.
To this, [we] add BTS's own values: hip-hop and Black music. […]

Anderson collected both in Soul in Seoul (p. 26). Euny Hong, The Birth of Korean Cool (p. 120), describes Korean pop cycling through a generation of “derivative music that was very slick, but not that different from the most unimaginative incarnations of American rhythm and blues.”

Motown developed its artists inside one house; Lee Soo-man built a multi-agency roster recording in Korean, Japanese, and Mandarin. Yoo Young-jin layered choir-thick vocal harmonies over aggressive rock guitars and Black American R&B and called the result SM Music Performance—the wall of stacked voices and orchestral-rock attack you hear on H.O.T.’s “Warrior’s Descendant” and TVXQ’s “Mirotic.”

President Park Chung-hee’s crackdowns on popular music in the 1960’s and 70’s had killed organic band formation in the cradle. The 1975 cannabis purge—대마초 파동—arrested popular musicians between December 1975 and February 1976—Shin Joong-hyun, Lee Jang-hee, Yoon Hyung-joo, Kim Choo-ja, members of He6 and The Devils—the Korea Entertainment Association expelled 54 of them on a Ministry of Culture directive that January, and the Performing Arts Ethics Committee banned 225 songs that year alone, with Shin Joong-hyun himself losing 17 of his own to the list.

Shin had refused a Blue House request to compose a song praising Park; he released 아름다운 강산 (Beautiful Rivers and Mountains) in 1972 instead, and the arrest came three years later. Korean LP sales collapsed from a 1973 peak of 11.2 million units to 3.1 million by 1976; 47 of 63 record labels closed.

Hong, The Birth of Korean Cool (p. 102)—

Kids didn’t have the free time to jam with friends or form bands. They were studying all the time. All the time.

John Lie, the UC Berkeley sociologist who wrote K-Pop: Popular Music, Cultural Amnesia, and Economic Innovation (p. 91)—

South Korean nationalist discourse is empty because in the past century Korean tradition, any semblance of organic continuity, has been annihilated.

What the purge left standing was trot, ppongjjak on every cab radio.

Packed During Lunch, Gone by Dinner

SM receives an estimated 150,000 audition tapes a year, and 10 become trainees. Powell’s finishing school lasted months. Korean trainee programs run for years.

Gordy sourced songs from a writing team he controlled. K-pop agencies outsourced to Scandinavian topliners alongside Atlanta trap producers alongside homegrown arrangers like Yoo Young-jin, whose SMP records owe as much to conservatory training as to any American template.

Yoo had no formal Black-music training when he started; he had heard Otis Redding’s “These Arms of Mine” on Korean radio and gone looking for voices that bend. Rejected by other agencies, he came in to SM as a last attempt and played Lee Soo-man a demo. Lee asked 더 있냐 (you got more).

Yoo went home, wrote 10 songs a day for three days, walked back in with 30, and built SM’s A&R room on the strength of the response. He landed at #39 on Billboard’s 50 Greatest Producers of the 21st Century 20 years later, one of two K-pop producers on the list alongside YG’s Teddy. Teddy Riley, producing inside SM, saw it firsthand. Korean executives would tell him—not knowing he was the man who made “No Diggity”—to make songs that sounded like “No Diggity.”

Teddy Riley, The Boombox, 2017—

They didn’t have no shame in their game. ‘We want the American culture.’

Lee Moon-won, Korean pop culture critic, quoted in Hong (p. 81)—

Very few countries have ever attempted to sell their pop culture to the United States. Even Japan didn’t try.

Hong (p. 108)—

The star-making process is so unpleasant that there are not many countries whose aspiring stars would put up with it. Korean youth, meanwhile, are used to intense sadomasochistic academic pressure, extreme discipline, constant criticism, and zero sleep.

SM, YG, JYP, and HYBE plan around five-year unit lifespans.

Lie (p. 132)—

The heart of the popular-music industry is planned obsolescence, and the same principle is central to K-pop’s star-maker machinery.

Lee Soo-man lost control of SM itself in a 2023 governance battle when Kakao acquired the company over his objections.

Holland-Dozier-Holland left Motown in 1968 over royalty disputes after writing 10 Supremes No. 1 hits. In Lee’s SM, three members of TVXQ filed a lawsuit in 2009. 13-year contracts. Album splits starting at zero and topping at 5% for a group selling out Tokyo Dome, termination penalties so steep they functioned as permanent bindings, all under an agency operating as management, booking agent, publisher, and label simultaneously. Seoul Central District Court granted an injunction, and the Korea Fair Trade Commission’s standard contract—announced that July, weeks before the suit—capped exclusive contracts at seven years. The Korean press called these deals slave contracts.

H.O.T. launched the idol formula, TVXQ carried it into Japan, and NCT’s expandable multi-unit roster ran the system at industrial scale. YG, founded by Yang Hyun-suk, closed the Seo Taiji lineage. JYP, founded by Park Jin-young in 1997, inverted Lee Soo-man’s system: character before talent, trainability over raw skill, the philosophy that produced Rain, the Wonder Girls, 2PM, TWICE, and Stray Kids.

Mnet’s Produce 101, launched in 2016 under CJ ENM, the chaebol’s media arm that built Show Me the Money, sold viewers a premise the idol system had never offered: you pick the group. In November 2019, police arrested producer Ahn Joon-young and chief producer Kim Yong-bum for rigging vote tallies across all four seasons. Ahn got two years. Kim got one year and eight months. X1 disbanded.

In 2010, Girls’ Generation’s Oh! slipped random photocards into packaging, a trick Japanese idol marketing had used for years. Fans began buying multiple copies to collect the cards. By 2018, one Wanna One fan purchased 554 copies of a single album trying to win a fansign lottery entry.

They didn’t get in.

The photocard economy inflated physical album shipments to 115.7 million units distributed in South Korea in 2023, a country of 51 million people. That number dropped to 93.3 million in 2024, the first decline since 2014.

The machine selling those albums was built in the winter the country went broke. On December 3, 1997, South Korea accepted a $58.4 billion IMF rescue package, among the largest sovereign bailouts to that point. The Won lost half its value. Unemployment tripled. The humiliation ran so deep that 3.51 million citizens donated personal gold. Wedding rings, military insignias, Cardinal Kim Sou-hwan’s appointment cross: 227 tons worth $2.13 billion toward the sovereign debt. They paid the loan back three years early.

Euny Hong on what followed (p. 81)—

Korea’s cultural ambitions are not just chutzpah. Nor did they come out of nowhere. They were born of necessity. And by necessity, I mean shame.

If it weren’t for the crisis, there might never have been a Korean Wave.

Into that rubble walked Kim Dae-jung, inaugurated February 1998, a man who’d survived imprisonment, a death sentence, and exile under military dictators. A 1994 report circulating in the Kim Young-sam administration had already noted that the global box office of Jurassic Park matched the export revenue of 1.5 million Hyundai sedans. Kim Dae-jung turned that comparison into national strategy.

Hong (p. 81)—

Building a pop culture export industry from scratch during a financial crisis seems like bringing a Frisbee instead of food to a desert island. But there was method to the madness. The creation of pop culture doesn’t require a massive infrastructure; all that is required is time and talent.

The culture budget went from $14 million in 1998 to $84 million by 2001. Content agencies consolidated into KOCCA by 2009. A $1 billion for-profit investment fund, 20 to 30% government-backed, was earmarked for pop culture. By the early 2010’s, Korean venture capital followed. The domestic industry was terrified that J-Pop would annihilate the market the moment Kim Dae-jung began lifting the decades-old ban on Japanese cultural imports in 1998, a phased process whose restrictions wouldn’t fully clear until 2006. The funding was a defensive measure against Japanese dominance first and an export strategy second. The generation building the industry had come directly out of the military dictatorship.

The state wired the broadband that gave Korea the fastest internet penetration in the OECD by 2002; the fund financed export fairs, KOCCA’s market research and distribution support, and digital platforms that let artists reach audiences without a broadcast slot.

Total cultural content exports reached $14.08 billion in 2024. South Korea is the world’s fourth-largest music exporter, and the largest non-English-language music exporter on Earth.

Everything, Everywhere, All At Once

S.E.S. (Bada, Eugene, Shoo) debuted in November 1997, one year after H.O.T., Lee Soo-man’s answer to TLC and proof that Culture Technology ran both ways. The members themselves pushed for a three-member formation modeled on the American group. I’m Your Girl sold 650,000 copies, Love 760,475, 3.6 million physical copies in five years. Alongside Fin.K.L and Baby V.O.X, they led the late-90’s girl groups.

They were also among the first Korean artists to debut and sing in Japanese after the postwar cultural ban began lifting. Their fan club, “Friends,” built the organized fandom modern K-pop inherited. Elected president, coordinated cheering, archival documentation of every broadcast.

They disbanded in December 2002 when the members wanted to re-sign as a group and SM wanted individual contracts. Eugene explained it years later: “Back then there was no such thing as individual activities, and if members did individual activities, people would think they were betraying the rest of the members.” Five years after S.E.S. walked out, nine women debuted as Girls’ Generation.

On January 7, 2009, SM released “Gee” by Girls’ Generation. The nine-member group had debuted 17 months earlier with visual direction by Min Hee-jin. Min, the SM creative director who would later leave to run HYBE’s ADOR and launch NewJeans, dressed them in colored skinny jeans and white T-shirts and connected concepts, the stage, and things in general organically from that point forward, going on to build the visual identities for SHINee, f(x), EXO, and Red Velvet. “Gee” hit No. 1 on Music Bank for nine consecutive weeks, topped Mnet’s chart for eight straight, later named Song of the Decade by Melon.

Rolling Stone would rank it No. 1 on their list of the 100 greatest Korean pop songs. Gallup Korea named it the most popular song of 2009. The music video became the first Girls’ Generation video to reach 100 million YouTube views. Billboard called it “arguably the most iconic K-pop song” of the decade. Nine women, a bubblegum hook built from two words—“Gee gee gee gee baby baby baby”—and choreography imitable enough that 300 people replicated it in a flash mob at SM Mall of Asia in Manila. The Financial Times named Girls’ Generation one of South Korea’s 10 most recognizable features in 2011, the only musical act on the list.

In 2009, SM, YG, and JYP partnered with YouTube as their primary international distribution channel, a bet the next half-decade of failed American campaigns would vindicate.

Park Jin-young’s Wonder Girls opened for the Jonas Brothers and got “Nobody” to No. 76 on the Billboard Hot 100 in October 2009, the first K-pop song to chart there, and it went nowhere even as they sold out arenas across Southeast Asia. Park had relocated to New York to oversee the campaign. JYP’s Korean market share collapsed while its CEO chased America.

BoA, SM’s billion-dollar asset who’d already dominated Japan’s Oricon charts, released an English album in 2009 that sank without a trace. SE7EN signed to a US deal, collaborated with Lil’ Kim, played BET, and vanished. 2NE1, YG’s proof that Yang Hyun-suk’s hip-hop DNA could build a girl group with its own register, debuted in 2009 as one of the hardest-edged female acts K-pop had produced to that point. CL signed with Scooter Braun in 2014. She recorded English tracks with Diplo and Skrillex. She landed a solo stage at the 2015 MAMA Awards, did the late-night rounds, released singles that charted nowhere. YG disbanded 2NE1 in November 2016 while she was still under contract, mid-campaign, waiting for an album that never released.

Girls’ Generation themselves pushed an English “The Boys” in December 2011, played Letterman and Madison Square Garden. First-week digital downloads: 21,000.

The acts were dominant in Japan, Southeast Asia, and China, and pre-streaming there was no way to build an American audience before the act landed; the television appearances aired after the campaign window had closed.

PSY Was Serious

“Gangnam Style” went live on July 15, 2012. Born Park Jae-sang in 1977 in Gangnam itself, PSY attended Berklee College of Music; he later admitted he appeared in class five times. By 2012 he had a 12-year domestic career built on comedy, profanity, concert crowds of 30,000, and a contested military stint after his exemption was revoked. The song was satire, mocking the posers who staged their lives in a neighborhood that holds about 1% of the country’s population but 10% of its total land value.

T-Pain, then others, tweeted the video two weeks after release:

The song peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, the highest a Korean-language track had ever charted, stayed 31 weeks, and on December 21, 2012 became the first YouTube video to reach 1 billion views. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon performed the horse dance with PSY at UN headquarters: “Until 2 days ago someone told me I am the most famous Korean in the world. Now I have to relinquish.” YG’s stock surged 60%. PSY later admitted the fame had taken a toll on him, and that he felt “a little empty inside.”

Before BTS debuted in America, the industry’s largest overseas market vanished. In July 2016, South Korea agreed to host the American THAAD missile defense system. China retaliated with 限韩令—an informal ban that cancelled K-pop concerts across the mainland, pulled Korean dramas off streaming, and recalled Chinese trainees from Korean agencies.

Top-tier groups pivoted. Mid-tier acts that had built their entire model around Chinese touring and endorsements, acts without Western fandom to cushion the loss, quietly disbanded. The same agencies that had spent 15 years building a China strategy pivoted to Southeast Asia, Japan, and the English-speaking West in months. BTS won Top Social Artist at the 2017 Billboard Music Awards 10 months into the ban.

Beijing partially relaxed the ban starting in 2023, with wider openings reported through 2025, uneven and never official. Hip-hop and KRNB had reached Western audiences through SoundCloud and Spotify before the ban existed, on channels Beijing couldn’t cancel.

The Breakout That Skipped the Gatekeepers

On New Year’s Day 2015, a 21-year-old rapper from Seoul named Keith Ape uploaded “It G Ma” (잊지마, “Don’t Forget”). The beat owed its DNA to Atlanta rapper OG Maco’s “U Guessed It.” Okasian, JayAllDay, and Japanese rapper Kohh featured. The video crossed 91 million YouTube views.

A$AP Ferg, Waka Flocka Flame, and Dumbfoundead jumped on the remix within months. Keith Ape rapped in Korean over trap production, with no competition show or label behind him, and the American underground wanted the energy. OG Maco initially accused the track of cultural appropriation, and the dispute ended with a royalty arrangement. Between 2014 and 2022, K-hip-hop Spotify streams grew 9,500%. America overtook South Korea as the No. 1 listener market.

Domestic streaming’s worst racket was sajaegi, chart manipulation. In 2018, an unknown artist named Nilo saw his song “Pass By” surge to No. 1 on Melon, beating Big Bang and TWICE. Nobody had heard of him, and the chart dominated during dawn hours then vanished during daytime, a pattern industry observers read as the signature fingerprint of bot-driven streaming. His label denied manipulation.

An SBS documentary followed.

Tiger JK, on camera—

I once got an offer for ₩100,000,000 to go higher in the charts.

Leaked marketing documents revealed the going rate: Melon Top 50 placement cost ₩250 million per day (~$190,000 at 2018 rates). Block B member Park Kyung publicly named six suspected artists on Twitter in 2019 and the court fined him ₩5 million for defamation despite widespread public support. Melon responded in July 2020 with the 24Hits system, counting unique listeners over a rolling 24-hour window.

The reform targeted machine-driven sajaegi from unknown ballad artists, but counting unique listeners rather than raw plays nullified any repeat-streaming operation regardless of who ran it—and the 2AM streaming farms idol fandoms had run for years to inflate chart positions did the same thing in bulk. Fandoms that had built their identity around organized streaming campaigns lost their leverage overnight.

Changmo proved the alternative. “Maestro” and “Beautiful,” B-sides that climbed the Melon annual chart on algorithmic autoplay and playlist placement with no television promotion or label push, a 19-rated song in the top 100 that barred minors from streaming it.

Nine Figures Anywhere You Look

A broadcast television appearance pays ₩50,000. BLACKPINK’s Born Pink Tour grossed $330 million over 66 shows and put 1.8 million people in seats, the highest-grossing tour by any female group, vocal group, or Asian act in history. Each member carries a luxury house ambassadorship as a second career. Jennie for Chanel, Jisoo for Dior, Rosé for Saint Laurent, Lisa for Louis Vuitton. SEVENTEEN grossed $98.4 million across 24 shows, the highest-grossing K-pop act on Billboard’s 2024 list.

Epik High, among Korean hip-hop’s most internationally successful acts, plays 500 to 3,000 capacity venues; the real money is daedongje, the university festival circuit, every May and September. Zico commands ₩30 to 40 million per 30-minute set.

Tablo, Epik High’s frontman, completed coterminal degrees at Stanford (a BA and MA in English, earned simultaneously) in 3.5 years and took Tobias Wolff’s fiction-writing program along the way. His 2008 short-story collection Pieces of You moved 50,000 copies its first week. His father’s cancer relapsed under the stress of the TaJinYo scandal, an online mob accusing him of faking the degree despite Stanford’s own confirmation. Stanford registrar Thomas Black, fielding 133 emails about a single alumnus, wrote—

Daniel Seon Woong Lee entered Stanford University in the Autumn Quarter of 1998-99 and graduated with a BA in English and an MA in English in 2002. Any suggestions, speculations or innuendos to the contrary are patently false.

He became the first major South Korean act to play Coachella in 2016.

RM, Rolling Stone, 2023—

To me, Tablo is like a huge mountain that I always look up to.

Tablo, on SBS’s Cultwo Show, said RM and Suga told him they grew their dreams listening to “Fly,” and that whenever he sees BTS accepting awards around the world he thinks, “It’s a good thing we made ‘Fly.’”

G-Dragon’s 2025 Ubermensch World Tour ran between Epik High’s scale and BLACKPINK’s. 39 shows. 825,000 fans. $71.8 million gross through 22 reported shows, projected ~$126 million full run.

Between 2008 and 2011, underground purists targeted him with diss tracks during BIGBANG’s ascent, testing whether an idol could claim hip-hop credibility and survive. In April 2026, BIGBANG returned to Coachella as a trio, marking their 20th anniversary on an American festival stage.

HYBE reported $1.86 billion in fiscal 2025 revenue. Operating profit collapsed 72.9% to $35.1 million. 1.9% margin. The company blamed one-off costs: investments in debuting new artists, and a restructuring of its American operation around label-owned IP.

Its legal war with Min Hee-jin, the ADOR chief who had launched NewJeans, consumed the entertainment press for over a year. HYBE audited her in April 2024 and demanded her resignation; Min said the fight began when she complained that ILLIT, a sister label’s debut, had copied NewJeans; by August the board had replaced her as ADOR’s CEO. That November the five members declared their contracts terminated. The Seoul Central District Court held them to the deal, ADOR through 2029, and in November 2025 they stopped fighting it and began a phased return.

Mandatory military service sits underneath every male K-pop career, 18 to 21 months for able-bodied Korean men. The 2022 National Assembly debate over whether BTS merited the exemption granted classical musicians and Olympic athletes laid bare the hierarchy: Korea’s most visible cultural export sat outside a benefit extended to a gold-medal archer. Agencies plan around it by accelerating contract cycles, pushing early solo debuts, front-loading global tours before enlistment forecloses the window. HYBE hedged the BTS enlistment cliff by acquisition: Ithaca Holdings, Pledis, and Source Music.

A virtual boy group called PLAVE sold 1.09 million copies in its first week. 10,000 people hold lightsticks at a PLAVE concert and scream at a screen, and the five animated characters, driven in real time by performers whose legal names the label has not released, wave back. The fandom runs the same playbook as any fourth-gen group’s: streaming campaigns, birthday projects, photocards traded in Discord servers by member bias.

Daniel Black, quoted in Suk-Young Kim’s K-pop Live (p. 156), 2018—

Idols exist primarily as a carefully constructed mode of performance. While, of necessity, this mode of performance is most commonly generated by a living body, dependence upon a physically present performer is not inevitable.

Behind the avatars are real performers in motion-capture suits, their public identities held by the company that owns the face, so the performer can’t generate a scandal or negotiate a better deal.

Idols are classified as “providers of business services” for tax and labor purposes. A former member of Teen Top named C.A.P was leading the Idol Labor Union Preparatory Committee, South Korea’s first attempt to organize K-pop performers as workers.

When NewJeans’ Hanni testified before the National Assembly in October 2024 about workplace harassment inside HYBE, the Ministry of Employment dismissed her case on the reasoning the tax code already applied: her contract paid commission rather than wages, the Labor Standards Act required a subordinate employment relationship to apply, and its workplace-harassment protections did not reach her.

Kim Jonghyun of SHINee left a note in December 2017: “I am broken from inside.” Sulli, October 2019, cyberbullied so relentlessly that Daum shut down celebrity article comments and the National Assembly introduced the “Sulli Act.” Goo Hara of KARA, six weeks later.

Two of the three were women. Sulli was cyberbullied for posting without makeup and for challenging beauty standards SM had built her image on. The harassment ran on the same platforms where fan networks coordinate streaming parties and fund subway birthday ads.

The Era of IVE: Outside the Three

Starship Entertainment sat outside the Big Three, without SM’s trainee pipeline, YG’s producer mythology, or JYP’s “character first” audition philosophy. It had two members, Jang Wonyoung and An Yujin, back from IZ*ONE, a project group dissolved after a vote-rigging scandal. On December 1, 2021, they debuted with “ELEVEN.” Seven days later, IVE won on Show Champion.

The concept came down to two words, “I have.” The plays were other men’s inventions—the graded audition, the dormitory, the photocard lottery—and they worked at full strength for whoever ran them. Starship ran them and won: six Perfect All-Kills (a clean sweep of every Korean chart at once), 12 million albums, the only girl group in the 2025 IFPI Global Album Sales Top 10, with three consecutive years on the chart.

By the time the conglomerate pried SM loose from Lee Soo-man, it already owned the company running his formula.

More on this in an upcoming piece.

The Underground Got Paid and Lost the Mic

Show Me the Money premiered June 22, 2012, at 11PM on a Friday on Mnet, which packaged underground rappers into a competition format it owned and monetized. Chief producer Han Dong-chul said his goal was to let people know there was more in Korea than idol dance music. A month after premiere, rappers who’d built careers on total creative ownership in Master Plan’s basement were performing for producers and cameras, earning real money for the first time.

On August 21, 2013, a week after Kendrick Lamar’s “Control” verse lit the American underground, Korean rapper Swings released “King Swings” over the same beat, calling names—

한국 거의 다 쓰레기 이미지 창조에 바빠 지네가 힙합이래.

Nearly all of Korean [hip-hop] is garbage, busy creating images and calling it hip-hop.

Sociologists Seong Yeon-ju and Kim Hong-jung analyzed the aftermath. Kendrick generated 24 unified response tracks around a single message: craft demands suffering and deserves reward. Swings generated 37 tracks that fractured into personal feuds within 48 hours. Contract disputes cited by name, attacks on weight and military records, girlfriends dragged into bars. E-Sens deployed specifics: 10억, a billion won promised years before by his label. Gaeko fired back the next day. Everyone piled in.

The underground’s authenticity ran on 솔직함, raw frankness, saying what couldn’t survive the overground. E-Sens called Choiza a 랩 퇴물, a rap has-been. Months later on Saturday Night Live Korea, Gaeko rushed out his response track before flying to a US show, then cried alone in America once it was out.

Seong and Kim’s final diagnosis: 상징화되는데 실패한 개인적 모욕의 교환, an exchange of personal insults that failed to become symbolized.

Bobby, a YG trainee who hadn’t debuted, won Season 3 while championing idol rappers’ right to the mic, defending his own legitimacy against an underground that dismissed anyone signed to an agency.

By Season 5, the rapper BewhY was quoting Corinthians over trap beats; Season 6 put Zico in the judge’s chair—an idol-group rapper the underground had spent years trying to bury.

SMTM 12 drew 36,000 applicants across 32 regions in multiple languages by January 2026. Season 12 rated 0.6%, the lowest yet. Rhythmer, on the same season, observed the show transformed Hongdae club culture into a profitable industry while trapping hip-hop’s autonomy inside broadcast’s standardized narrative.

Season 12 rated 0.6%, the lowest yet. Rhythmer, on the same season, observed the show transformed Hongdae club culture into a profitable industry while trapping hip-hop’s autonomy inside broadcast’s standardized narrative.

Tiger JK, who produced Season 6, called the show “scripted” and “staged,” watched them mute his Sewol Ferry references from the broadcast, and refused to return.

Filed Under Somebody Else’s Name

Korean R&B (KRNB) grew up in the same house as hip-hop, sharing imported American cassettes and indie labels while the international press ignored both. In 2016, Zion.T and DEAN performed at SXSW’s “K-Pop Night Out” alongside Mamamoo, every Korean act filed under one 3-letter umbrella regardless of what they sound like.

T.K. Park at Ask A Korean, 2017—

No one disputes that IU, BTS, and FT Island are ‘K-pop artists,’ but musically, they share nothing in common.

IU sings mostly standard pop, BTS performs mostly hip hop numbers, and FT Island, light rock.

The commonality among IU, BTS, and FT Island isn’t, and can’t be, music.

Their only commonality is that they all perform popular music of Korea.

D’Angelo’s Voodoo (2000) buried vocals in the mix as texture. Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange (2012) carried literary ambition in R&B without sacrificing groove. Those two records set the template DEAN and Crush worked from. Vocals as ambient color. Arrangements hollowed out to leave space around the voice. Korean vowels (open syllables, elongated phrasing) sat inside the sustained, melismatic cadence American R&B had spent three decades perfecting.

Amoeba Culture, founded by Gaeko and Choiza of Dynamic Duo, held both rappers and the two artists who would blow R&B open, Zion.T and Crush. AOMG had GRAY. H1GHR MUSIC signed pH-1, a Korean-American from Long Island who studied biology at Boston College before deciding melodic rap paid better than dental assisting.

Kim Hae-sol, who would become Zion.T, was born to a taxi driver in Dongjak-gu in 1989 and couldn’t afford supplies for the illustration career he wanted, so he made music. The stage name fuses the biblical “Zion” with a “T” representing the Christian cross; friends, riffing on his vocal style, called him “Zion.T-Pain.” His debut came through Hiphopplaya’s label arm before he signed to Amoeba Culture, where his streaming numbers pushed the label’s domestic sales past JYP on the Gaon Chart in 2015.

His signature track 양화대교 (“Yanghwa BRDG”), September 2014, was a love letter to his father. As a child, when he called asking where his dad was, the answer was 양화대교, Yanghwa Bridge, meaning he was nearly home from his shift.

Zion.T, Hidden Singer 5—

아버지 직업 이야기하는 게 쉽지 않았다... 그래서 영어로 바꿔서 택시 드라이버라고 표현했다.

It wasn’t easy talking about what his father did for a living, so he switched to English (“taxi driver”).

The song exploded in 2015 after he performed it on Infinite Challenge, crossing 66 million streams. Acquaintances crossing the bridge would phone him late at night just to say 나, 양화대교야! He referenced the annoyance in his track “Complex.”

DEAN, born Kwon Hyuk in 1992 in Seodaemun-gu, took the opposite path. He found hip-hop through Epik High in middle school. He ran with Keith Ape in an amateur crew called Getto Boyz at 16. He ghost-wrote for EXO, VIXX, Lee Hi, and Block B under the alias Deanfluenza before anyone knew his face. Signed as a songwriter at 20, trained in New York, he built his international resume first. His solo debut went to American and British iTunes before Korean platforms. His 2016 EP 130 Mood: TRBL hit No. 3 on Billboard’s World Albums chart and made him the first Asian artist at Spotify House at SXSW, alongside Miguel and Chvrches.

His track “Instagram” dropped in December 2017. KBS and MBC banned it for referencing a commercial brand. Certified all-kill anyway. Every Korean chart simultaneously, zero traditional promotion, 171,979 first-week downloads, over 2.5 million domestic downloads to date. IU posted a cover on release day:

Korean media called him 음원 깡패, a digital monster.

The algorithm served the song to people already listening at 2AM with headphones in. DEAN said late-night Instagram scrolling made him feel “infinitely small and lacking.”

Club Eskimo, DEAN’s creative collective, ran on no outside money, the way BLEX and Master Plan had a generation before. Out of those sessions came OFFONOFF (Colde and 0channel) and their 2017 “boy.”, bedroom-produced R&B with Korean vocals at fidelity nobody expected.

When Colde split from OFFONOFF to found WAVY, he built the label explicitly around the playlist economy. His COLORS appearance made him the second Korean artist after DEAN at that global curatorship tier.

Heize, born Jang Da-hye in Daegu, came through Unpretty Rapstar 2 in 2015, eliminated in the semifinals, then pivoted from rap to the melodic ground between genres nobody had claimed.

Her 2017 single “You, Clouds, Rain” topped the domestic charts. Award shows couldn’t decide what she was. Best Hip Hop at MAMA one year. Best R&B/Soul at MelOn the next. She signed to PSY’s P Nation and became one of the few women who stayed visible in a scene male artists dominated on both sides.

Crush and Zion.T’s “Just” hit No. 1 in 2015, two R&B singers atop a market built for idol groups and rap battles. Crush’s “Beautiful” from the Goblin soundtrack later crossed 150 million streams, and by 2026 he was co-producing SMTM 12 alongside Zico.

GRAY joined AOMG as its first artist in 2013, making beats for Jay Park’s hip-hop and melodic production for the label’s R&B acts. In March 2024, he left with Code Kunst and Woo Won Jae to co-found duover. First hire: Hwang Aram, a former AOMG executive, carrying the institutional knowledge.

Primary’s 2012 album Primary and the Messengers broke into the Korean charts with a rotating cast of vocalists who functioned as session musicians for his brand. A Primary feature guaranteed a chart run before anyone knew who was singing on it; Groovy Room placed one beat with multiple vocalists across the playlists.

No Invitation? No Problem.

Jay Park was born in Edmonds, Washington, 1987. He joined a Seattle b-boy crew called Art of Movement at 16, auditioned for JYP at 17, and led 2PM by 2008. A year later, old Myspace posts surfaced: 2005 messages to a friend in which a homesick trainee wrote that he hated Koreans and wanted to come home. Korean media translated them without context into a national insult. He left 2PM September 8, 2009.

3,000 people signed a petition calling for his suicide. JYP terminated his contract February 25, 2010. On March 15, Park posted a cover of B.o.B’s “Nothin’ on You” to YouTube. 2 million views in 24 hours. B.o.B’s original topped the Cyworld chart off that momentum, generating $300,000 in sales across Korean digital platforms, all of it to B.o.B.

Park was unsigned, rebuilding from a webcam in his parents’ house. He founded AOMG in 2013. CJ E&M took a stake in January 2016. He launched H1GHR Music with Cha Cha Malone in 2017, signed with Roc Nation as the first Asian American artist on Jay-Z’s label.

He stepped down from both AOMG and H1GHR at the end of 2021 and founded More Vision in March 2022; Kakao bought 20% three months later. On January 13, 2026 he debuted LNGSHOT, a four-member boy group whose youngest member is still a teenager, and the group has already cracked Billboard’s Global charts with 35 million Spotify streams.

AOMG and H1GHR Music together housed Simon Dominic, Loco, GRAY, Woo Won Jae, pH-1, Sik-K, Groovy Room, a roster that at its peak defined the sound of Korean hip-hop and R&B.

Seong and Kim’s study of every indie hip-hop label after the crew era’s collapse: crews organized around a guru’s artistic identity, a label shared administrative functions and little else. When AOMG’s roster eroded a decade later, the split between guru-crew and label-LLC opened wider. Through 2024: Simon Dominic left after a decade, Loco walked out, GRAY, Code Kunst, and Woo Won Jae departed, and Lee Hi and DeVita were gone. What remained announced a joint girl group with H1GHR Music called NEWY, assembled from former I-LAND 2 contestants.

Illionaire had written the playbook for this unraveling. Founded January 1, 2011 by Dok2 and The Quiett, no formal contracts, artists kept their masters, it lasted nine years. Dok2’s debts eventually totaled 672 million won in outstanding taxes and insurance, settled by June 2025. His mother died that February. He released the tribute track “UMMA” in March. The Quiett co-founded Daytona with Yumdda in November 2020, Def Jam model, no “label color,” diverse artists, a record shop-cafe in Hapjeong-dong called Daytona Records.

While Jay Park rebuilt in Seoul, the organic American audience the Billboard campaigns had been missing was assembling itself on the LA side of the Pacific, with no K-pop pipeline in view. Ryan Higa and Kevin Wu held two of YouTube’s most-subscribed ranks by 2008, Wong Fu Productions hit 1 million subscribers by 2011, and Kollaboration, a nonprofit talent show founded in 2000 for Asian American performers, grew to 14 regional chapters; its alumni—Far East Movement, Dumbfoundead, Awkwafina, Steven Yeun, Ali Wong, Jo Koy—built American comedy, film, and hip-hop careers off a domestic Asian American audience already in the tens of millions.

On February 25, 2026, Park made the next move. More Vision announced a partnership with Transparent Arts, the company Far East Movement built after putting the first Asian-American No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 with “Like a G6” in 2010—a No. 1 no act out of Seoul would match for another decade. Kev Nish, Prohgress, J-Splif, and DJ Virman grew up in Downtown LA and Koreatown, a pan-Asian crew without a category for them.

Mainstream hip-hop labels heard them as too Asian, and the community centers that did book Asian performers wanted classical piano recitals. They pressed records themselves, booked nightclub and Asian-American convention shows (Anime Expo, Kollaboration, underground LA), and moved mixtapes through MySpace and the LA college circuit until a Cherrytree/Interscope deal finally arrived in February 2010.

Once the Hot 100 was banked, they spent the next decade turning a single hit into a management and production company. Transparent Arts became the vehicle. Roh, as COO, managed Dumbfoundead and Yultron, produced Head in the Clouds content with 88rising, consulted for brands trying to reach Asian American consumers.

In the Koreatown that raised Far East Movement, a kid named Jonathan Park, no relation to Jay, was making his name in Asian American underground rap as Dumbfoundead. He was born in Buenos Aires in 1986, smuggled across the Mexican border as a toddler, and raised in K-town from 3. He came up at Project Blowed, the Leimert Park open-mic Aceyalone and Abstract Rude founded in 1994. A Black-founded West Coast proving ground; he earned his place at the mic against the room.

His Grind Time battle videos racked millions of views. His 2016 track “Safe” confronted Hollywood whitewashing, his face superimposed on Depp, DiCaprio, and Travolta. He acted in Bodied, Eminem’s battle-rap satire, appeared in Starz’s Power as Dylan Shin, featured in Bad Rap alongside Awkwafina, Rekstizzy, and Lyricks.

88rising, the label Sean Miyashiro built from a SoundCloud page and a bet that Asian artists could thrive in American hip-hop without code-switching, signed a roster that wasn’t Korean. “Asian” as a marketing category flattened distinctions the artists themselves would never have erased. Indonesian trap, Japanese lo-fi R&B, and Korean hip-hop share a continent and almost nothing else.

Rich Brian, an Indonesian teenager who’d never left Jakarta when he released “Dat $tick” in 2016; the track went on to cross 200 million YouTube views. Joji, a Japanese-Australian who pivoted from one of YouTube’s largest comedy channels to melancholic R&B. NIKI, an Indonesian singer-songwriter whose vocals carried no accent and needed none. Their Head in the Clouds festival in Los Angeles, launched 2018, became an Asian-centric music festival in America that filled a field on its own roster.

Park sold out American arenas through AOMG and Roc Nation while Korean promoters staging K-pop tours booked his shows through separate channels. Far East Movement got there seven years ahead of BTS, and the K-pop success story rarely has room for them: the export story keeps only the breakthroughs manufactured in Seoul.

The Fandom Maggie Kept to Herself

Maggie Kang grew up in 90’s Toronto loving K-pop in a city that didn’t have the faintest idea what it was. She kept it in her headphones, at school and in the car alike.

20 years later, she co-directed KPop Demon Hunters with Chris Appelhans, an animated film about a fictional girl group called HUNTR/X who fight demons between comebacks. Netflix released it June 20, 2025, and by year-end it had crossed 500 million views, the most-watched movie in the platform’s history, more than 3.5× the next-biggest film of late 2025.

Teddy Park, born in Seoul, raised in the United States, returned to Korea, co-founded The Black Label, the production house behind BLACKPINK’s biggest hits. Teddy produced “Golden” and “How It’s Done” with 24, IDO, and Ian Eisendrath.

“Golden” hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed there for eight nonconsecutive weeks, the longest-leading hit by an animated act in the chart’s 67-year history; the soundtrack became the first to place four songs simultaneously in the Hot 100 Top 10 and hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200. At the 68th Grammy Awards, “Golden” won Best Song Written for Visual Media, the first Grammy for a K-pop song; at the 98th Academy Awards, the film won Best Animated Feature and Best Original Song, the first K-pop Oscar—neither one collected by an act SM, YG, JYP, or HYBE had debuted. Kang became one of the first Asian women to win in the animated feature category.

HUNTR/X’s voices belonged to three women who’d built careers between K-pop, hip-hop, and R&B. EJAE, a South Korean singer-songwriter, had entered SM’s trainee system at 11 and spent nearly a decade inside it without ever being cleared to debut; she co-wrote “Golden” and gave Rumi her singing voice. Audrey Nuna, an R&B artist from New Jersey. Rei Ami, born in South Korea, raised in Maryland. The soundtrack put rap verses and R&B vocal runs over K-pop-scale production, the home register of diaspora artists like Dumbfoundead and of Korean American kids who grew up making music that didn’t fit neatly into “K-pop” or “American.”

The Bulletproof Boy Scouts and a Webcam

K-pop fandom runs on an overwhelmingly female volunteer army. Streaming coordinators, real-time translators, group order managers hand-sorting photocards, fansite photographers with telephoto lenses funding subway birthday ads from merch revenue. No payroll, no chain of command.

Jeff Yang, founder of A Magazine, quoted in Hong—

When people buy into K-pop, they buy into a lifestyle. K-pop is pop culture as lifestyle brand.

In June 2020, BTS donated $1 million to Black Lives Matter. ARMY matched it within 24 hours. That same month, K-pop fans mass-registered for tickets to a Trump rally in Tulsa that claimed over a million requests. Fewer than 6,200 showed up. K-pop fandoms had spent eight years gaming platform algorithms to drown out rival groups and dominate global Twitter trends; in 2020 they pointed the same coordinated mass-posting at electoral targets. China’s 2021 Qinglang campaign suspended 159,000 Weibo accounts after fans bought thousands of yogurt cartons for QR vote codes and poured the yogurt down the drain.

The underground runs as a boys’ club; crew loyalty and gatekeeping are the price of entry. Yoon Mi-rae was the only female rapper of her cohort to clear it; Jessi, CL, Heize, and Lee Young-ji each cracked the surface at different altitudes after, and the gatekeeping has loosened since 2020. The K-pop side ran the other way: Min Hee-jin designed the creative direction, female-dominated A&R boards greenlit the albums, and the volunteer fandom moved the product. Hiphopplaya, HiphopLE, DC Inside’s hip-hop gallery, and r/khiphop functioned as spaces for criticism and lyrical analysis, with no streaming parties or app-crashing campaigns behind any of the rappers.

At the 23rd Korean Music Awards in February 2026, Sik-K and Lil Moshpit swept both rap categories—Best Rap & Hip-Hop Album and Best Rap & Hip-Hop Song.

BTS came from the underground. At 11, a kid in Ilsan named Kim Nam-joon heard Epik High’s “Fly” and decided he wanted to rap. By 2007 he was posting tracks on underground forums as Runch Randa, running with Daenamhyup (대남조선힙합협동조합, the Great Southern Joseon Hip-Hop Cooperative, a name its founder Marvel.J took from an agricultural cooperative sign). A teenager named Woo Ji-ho moved through the same forums as Nakseo (낙서, graffiti). The two collaborated on a track called “F*** Cockroachez” over a DMX instrumental when RM was 13 and Zico was 15. Min Yoon-gi, a Daegu kid working at a recording studio at 17, produced beats as Gloss; he would debut as SUGA.

Bang Si-hyuk, a JYP hitmaker who’d left to start Big Hit, heard Runch Randa rap and decided to build a hip-hop group around him. Economics forced the concept toward the idol format during development.

Thirteen years ago today—June 13, 2013—BTS debuted on M Countdown with “No More Dream.” 760 first-week copies, small enough to disappear into a single Lotte Mart’s sales. The album debuted at No. 19. Big Hit was nearly bankrupt.

A leaner budget forced a different approach. BANGTANTV launched six months before debut, first upload RM covering a Korean political rap track. Their Twitter ran unfiltered and daily, members at the keyboard. The first Bangtan Bomb landed six days after debut: Jungkook playing cameraman in the waiting room, self-filmed and unscripted. Hundreds more followed. The Hwa Yang Yeon Hwa era added transmedia narrative fans had to decode across platforms. ARMY organized itself without hierarchy, every role self-appointed.

They rapped about academic pressure and societal conformity in a direct lineage from Seo Taiji’s banned “Classroom Ideology.” Kim Young-dae, the music critic who died Christmas Eve 2025 at 48, analyzed their full discography in BTS: The Review (2019): from the perspective of musical history, the word “hip-hop idol” is an oxymoron—hip-hop still predicated on the DIY spirit of the streets, idol music standing at the farthest end of the popular spectrum from it. In the dialogue printed in the same book he lands on “hot ice.” His interlocutor there is Kim Bong-hyeon, the hip-hop journalist Bang Si-hyuk called before debut for advice on an idol group whose identity would be hip-hop.

BTS’s smoky makeup and choreography became targets in the underground. The standard hostile read: men wearing makeup, rappers dancing. Bong-hyeon called the collision “inevitable for the period of transition”—it made him realize, he said, how idols and hip-hop inherently conflict.

BTS answered the underground rappers and hip-hop fans who called them frauds with the Cypher series, four tracks released between 2013 and 2016. Kim Bong-hyeon, asked in the book for their most notable hip-hop track, picked “BTS Cypher, Pt. 3: KILLER”—

This was unfiltered fury and came straight from their heart. It will probably go down in history as the most explicit, or the most hip-hop moment from a Korean idol boy band.

Kim Young-dae called the Cyphers the place where BTS’s essential motivations converge, “the outrage against their haters and the desire for authentic hip-hop.” The solo mixtapes carried what the group albums could not. RM’s self-titled 2015 tape had technique that made the idol label irrelevant. SUGA’s Agust D in 2016 was rawer, with depression, obsession, and self-hatred confessed on “The Last.”

Bong-hyeon argued you can replace instruments, but you can’t discard your identity—H.O.T. used hip-hop as an instrument; 1TYM, Yang Hyun-suk’s design, took it up as their own. BIGBANG made hip-hop succeed inside the idol establishment, and none made rap the center. BTS’s members wrote lyrics and built beats from the trainee period, and Bang Si-hyuk fed their creativity.

On “Paldogangsan,” RM, SUGA, and J-Hope rapped in their regional dialects (Ilsan, Daegu, Gwangju), something Kim Young-dae called “an exemplary Korean adaptation of American hip-hop’s emphasis on one’s roots,” and an inflection idol music had buried, where vocal coaches had spent two decades training provincial accents out of trainees.

Kim Young-dae’s diagnosis in Hip-Hop and K-Pop—

The idea of K-pop’s modernity is always evolved and developed in a way that avoids or eliminates Koreanness as much as possible.

In 2017, Seo Taiji chose BTS to remake “Come Back Home” for his 25th anniversary project, four years after the BTS debut. J-Hope and RM personally reworked the rap verses:

Zico came at it from the idol side. Scouted by SM as a child before his father’s transfer took the family to Japan. In Japan he found hip-hop through E-Sens and Verbal Jint. He bought equipment. He uploaded tracks to Hiphopplaya. Back in Korea, he debuted with Block B in April 2011 under a project billed as “Creating Korea’s Eminem.” The underground’s reaction was venomous.

Deepflow dissed him by name in 2013—

우리가 사는 집 기둥을 세운 META
그 집을 먹여살린건 결국엔 ZICO 와 Jay Park
변색된 힙합 갈라진 녹색 피부색
달콤한 멜론을 따먹고 슬피우는 새
자본주의를 부추기는 랩들

[tr.] META laid the pillars of the house we all live in
But in the end, it’s ZICO and Jay Park putting food on the table
Hip-hop’s color has changed, the skin has cracked and turned green
Birds cry mournfully after feasting on sweet melons
Raps that do nothing but fuel capitalism

Zico kept going, and founded KOZ Entertainment on January 10, 2019, weeks after his Seven Seasons contract expired. HYBE acquired KOZ two years later while Zico was in the military, and Bang Si-hyuk called him “the best producer and artist of Korea.”

In January 2020, his single “Any Song” hit Perfect All-Kill, spent seven non-consecutive weeks at No. 1, and launched the #AnySongChallenge (100,000 fan videos in 10 days, 800 million cumulative views), inventing the K-pop TikTok dance challenge formula every major release has copied since. He later apologized on television for the rope the format had handed every act after him: a lot of people resented him because the dance challenge had become an obligation.

On November 21, 2013, underground rapper B-Free confronted BTS’s RM and Suga at a hip-hop panel. He called Suga “Mr. Sugar.” He asked whether wearing makeup on stage was hip-hop, then corrected the host—

B-Free, hip-hop panel (November 21, 2013)—

No, that’s not boonjang [disguise], it’s yeojang [cross-dressing].

When Suga said he wanted to reach many people with music, B-Free was dismissive.

B-Free offered a partial apology in 2016, then a fuller one in 2019, by which time BTS had become the highest-ranking Korean act on IFPI’s Global Recording Artist chart, No. 1 for 2020. In their 2023 memoir Beyond the Story, RM recalled the night as getting “slapped in the face out of nowhere,” using the English word insult because the Korean word moyok felt “too flat.”

Jin enlisted December 13, 2022. J-Hope in April 2023. RM and V in December 2023. Jimin and Jungkook the next day. Suga, serving alternative social service after shoulder surgery, finished last on June 21, 2025.

On July 1, a Weverse livestream of seven men sitting in a room drew 7.3 million real-time viewers.

In a December broadcast, RM said the group had contemplated disbanding or suspending activities “tens of thousands of times.” He apologized for saying it two days later.

On March 20, 2026, they released ARIRANG. 3.98 million copies on day 1. All 14 tracks simultaneously in Spotify’s Global Top 14. Diplo executive-produced. Flume, JPEGMAFIA, Kevin Parker, and Ryan Tedder handled individual tracks.

NPR’s Sheldon Pearce called it “the ultimate realization of a genreless, referential and yet homegrown popular music of Korea.”

The Needle Drop’s Anthony Fantano scored it a strong 2 to light 3, calling it a carefully groomed product more than a genuine artistic expression.

The next evening, the group walked the eodo—the King’s Road from Gyeongbokgung. They walked it to a stage in Gwanghwamun Square, the same ground where Koreans had gathered for the 2002 World Cup.

On March 21 and 22, Seoul’s national alert text line notified citizens of a K-pop group’s concert and subsequent concert area shutdown

Netflix streamed it live, its first standalone concert broadcast. 22,000 Golden Ticket holders inside the perimeter. Seoul’s metropolitan government counted 40,000 to 42,000 in the streets. National Gugak Center musicians played traditional instruments alongside the band.

J-Hope, mid-concert—

I was worried that we would be forgotten a little bit.

The world tour behind it runs 82 dates across 34 cities and 23 countries, April 2026 through March 2027. In Mexico City, over one million people entered the virtual queue for 150,000 seats. President Claudia Sheinbaum appealed to South Korea’s President Lee Jae Myung for additional shows, then posted his response on TikTok—

@reutersHuge demand to see K-pop boy band BTS, among the world's most popular artists, has led Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum to formally ask South Korean counterpart Lee Jae Myung to help arrange more concerts in Mexico. #mexico #southkorea #bts #kpop #sheinbaum

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Everybody Ate and Nobody Said Grace

Tiger JK moved to the United States at 12. His father, Suh Byung Hoo, was a DJ, one of Korea’s first pop columnists, and the first Billboard correspondent in Korea. In LA, Tiger JK watched Koreatown burn in 1992. Ice Cube had released “Black Korea” the year before—

[…] Oriental one penny countin’ motherfuckers
That make a nigga mad enough to cause a little ruckus
[…] Look, you little Chinese motherfucker
[…] So don’t follow me up and down your market
Or your little chop suey ass’ll be a target
[…] So pay respect to the Black fist
Or we’ll burn your store right down to a crisp
And then we’ll see ya
‘Cause you can’t turn the ghetto into Black Korea

Tiger JK wrote a class-paper response-rap to it that won a school award. Word-of-mouth carried him to a 1992 “Roots Of Rap” festival held in the immediate wake of the uprising. He stepped to the mic in front of a predominantly African American crowd, dropped “Call Me Tiger,” and won the freestyle category:

Tiger JK said of that night that he knew if he put his heart into it, they would get the message that Koreans can do it, too. The win earned him a 쟈니윤 쇼 slot and the return to Korea that founded Movement Crew.

He graduated UCLA with a B.A. in English, founded Drunken Tiger in 1998. Korean broadcasters refused them outright; Tiger JK listed the rejections—

검둥이하고 뭐하는 짓이냐 / what are you doing with that Black guy

춤이 없어서 안 된다 / no dancing, won’t work

한국어도 못하면서 뭘 할 셈이냐 / what are you going to do, you can’t even speak Korean

The Los Angeles Times later called him “perhaps the most popular Korean rapper in America, Asia, and the world.”

His wife, Yoon Mi-rae—born Natasha Shanta Reid in Fort Hood, Texas to a Korean mother and an African-American USFK serviceman who DJ’d on-base clubs and whose record collection became Yoon’s first musical exposure—was called “negro” in a society that emphasizes danil minjok, the “single-ethnicity nation,” told to go back to her country, and dropped out at 15.

Yoon Mi-rae—

In the U.S., I wasn’t Black enough. In Korea, they called me ‘Yankee.’

Her 2007 single “Black Happiness” confronted executives who told her to deny her African-American heritage; the same agency had falsified her age from 15 to 19 at debut.

The lyric—

…하루에 수십 번도 넘게 난 내 얼굴을 씻어내 하얀 비누를 내 눈물에 녹여내~

…dozens of times a day I wash my face, dissolving white soap in my tears~

MFBTY made “Rebel Music” during the Trayvon Martin tragedy and held benefit concerts for multicultural families in Korea. Yoon Mi-rae had crossed between hip-hop and R&B for a quarter century before streaming required a genre tag to make the crossing visible. Drunken Tiger’s catalog was being sampled by second-generation Korean-American rappers in LA and cited by Dumbfoundead on record by the time Spotify and Apple Music could route the streams to him, two decades on.

Suk-Young Kim, in TDR/The Drama Review (2020), argues the same K-pop idols whose performance of Blackness challenged Korea’s idea of itself also reproduced America’s racial ranking in the process. T.K. Park counters that Korea received American culture as the weaker party in a colonial relationship, since the dominant culture was the one broadcasting from Yongsan. A trainee stylist pulling 레게머리 [‘reggae hair’] from Pinterest and a label CEO designing Southeast Asian strategy occupy different positions in that exchange. Neither reading settles who holds the masters.

Crystal Anderson, Soul in Seoul (2020)—

Korean entertainment agency CEOs seek to use Korea’s culture to project a self-determined image onto the global stage. It ties its creative and commercial cultural production to its national image through cultural work that worked for Motown decades earlier.

Nelson George, The Death of Rhythm and Blues, defined “crossover” as an industry term for shifting the sales base of black performers to the larger white audience. Korean acts cross over now too, but the master, the publishing, and the touring revenue book to a company in Seoul rather than one in Detroit or New York.

Megan Thee Stallion records with BTS. Anderson .Paak and DEAN collaborate on “Put My Hands on You.” Producers move between Seoul and Atlanta studios regularly.

The charge runs through K-pop’s own black fans, recorded—and rejected—by Anderson in Soul in Seoul (p. 39), who reads K-pop as citing its sources rather than erasing them—

Such fans argue that K-pop artists do not give credit to the influences on that music, thereby getting the credit for the music and erasing the black originators, both artistically and financially.

The British Invasion came up through Liverpool pubs and EMI, and J-pop developed inside domestic rock venues and Oricon charts; Korea’s pop came through AFKN, Itaewon, and Detroit, on ground Park Chung-hee had already flattened.

The 2024 catalog runs Black Atlantic rhythms straight: NewJeans’s “Super Shy” is Jersey club from Newark, “Ditto” is Baltimore club, “How Sweet” is Miami bass. DJ Tameil and the Brick Bandits crew built Jersey club in Newark, Frank Ski pushed Baltimore club onto the radio, and the credits of the Seoul records running their rhythms carry neither name. aespa’s “Whiplash” pivoted to techno over a beat structure that traces back to Detroit.

In 2015 the ROK army loaded Big Bang’s “Bang Bang Bang” and Girls’ Generation’s “Genie” into the DMZ loudspeakers, as psychological-warfare ordnance against the North.

Kyung Hyun Kim, Hegemonic Mimicry, describes Korean identity sitting “opaquely racial” on the global stage, a double consciousness inherited twice—first under Japan, then under America.

Pento, in an interview with Myoung-Sun Song in 2014—

In America, rappers talk about how their uncles were shot or killed selling drugs.

…but, this is an almost impossible story in Korea.

What Korean rappers wrote about instead was exam hell, ₩5,000/show economics, and contract disputes aired in beefs that broke the rappers they were supposed to sharpen.

It’s All Korean to Me

Lie’s verdict on the system (p. 127, 146)—

K-pop isn’t about art, beauty, sublimity, or transcendence. The business of K-pop is simply business. […]

Even so, K-pop isn’t just an interesting social phenomenon; it is also an aesthetic achievement.

Whether K-pop is business or art was settled long before he weighed in; whose name goes on the achievement was not.

In a stadium of 50,000, every fan sings every word in a language they don’t speak. Google Docs lyric sheets translated and re-translated by volunteer linguists, pronunciation videos recorded after work, romanization guides, circulated freely across Discord servers in seven time zones. The screens flanking the stage scroll the lyrics anyway, Korean climbing past at reading speed.

No one needs them. No one is looking.

In 2002, all across Korea, the banners read—

Thank you to those who helped generously with feedback and insight, especially Marcus.

A special shout to Charles for putting your fingerprints on this—it feels like yesterday we were trying to make it all work.

In a way, a follow-up to What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been—published 5 years ago today.

DISCLAIMER:

• This article constitutes opinion, cultural commentary, and criticism.

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Dial-Up & Devotion

The year was 2000, the year everyone thought the world would end.

It didn’t.

I’d get off the bus, rush home with a backpack that weighed more than I did, hit the fridge, scavenge a Go-Gurt (maybe two), then hike up the stairs with the boulder still on my back. I’d boot up my old and dusty beige Gateway, and the ritual of mimicking the AOL dial-up sound with my mouth would begin. Nights disappeared into feeding Neopets, posting on the Neoboards about feeding my Neopets, derailing RollerCoaster Tycoon, Mephisto runs in Diablo II, and hogging the AWP in Counter-Strike. Call of Duty, RuneScape, and World of Warcraft were still a few years away.

Beyond games, I lurked in eye-searing IRC channels that felt equal parts house party and dumpster fire, camped out on gaming forums that smelled of leftover pizza, and joined AIM chatrooms to witness the chaos. Nobody tracked reach or CTR.

These spaces had real problems. Harassment went unchecked, access was gatekept by regulars, and ops’ accountability was optional. Volunteer governance had its own structural failure mode: unelected admins with unchecked authority, presiding over spaces that worked for insiders and froze out everyone else. Suits formalized what volunteers couldn’t scale; it also replaced one set of blind spots with another. Nobody was there to be monetized, which would prove to be the distinction that mattered.

Try explaining this to a parent whose idea of the internet was MapQuest and email, and you’d witness the light leave their eyes.

Carl Jung—

Loneliness does not come from having no people around you, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you.

Today, the same instinct is a line item in a pitch deck. Users are retention curves, LTV bands, and projected ARPU. Somewhere between then and now, someone recognized that devotion is more efficient than hiring, and longing generates revenue.

Often run by people fluent in corporate SOPs who’ve never lurked in the channels.

Open Flame

IRC channels, forums, and adjacent message boards ran without corporate oversight, monetization pressure, or growth mandates. There was no content strategy because there was no campaign with KPIs to satisfy. The admin in charge was usually the one who cared most whether it existed tomorrow.

Anyone with shared hosting and enough patience could build a community. The barriers were technical, not financial, and survival depended on how often people showed up, not capital. Over time, familiar usernames accumulated like sediment, establishing a cultural bedrock that new users adapted to or left behind. Nobody was trying to franchise it or harvest user data to inflate a pitch deck.

When these communities died, it was nearly always natural attrition.

Fandom and community aren’t the same thing, though the terms are used interchangeably often enough. A fandom is organized around devotion to a subject: The Killers, Gran Turismo, Lord of the Rings, obscure video games, rare Japanese denim from some rural loopwheel knitting mill, or forgotten indie labels only a few people remember. This invites the fan in. A community is organized around the relationships between users.

Albums end, tours wrap, campaigns fade, and fan fatigue sets in. This shouldn’t kill the community, unless it was designed to be disposable.

Textual Poachers by Henry Jenkins recognized in ‘92 that fandoms are inherently communal. They construct their own social structures, creative means, and hierarchies:

While fans display a particularly strong attachment to popular narratives, act [sic] upon them in ways which make them their own property in some senses, they are also acutely and painfully aware that those fictions do not belong to them and that someone else has the power to do things to those characters that are in direct contradiction to the fans’ own cultural interests.

The question of who owns what has been contested ever since, and the balance gets harder to hold as a fandom grows. When an online community develops its own hierarchy, language, and reasons to show up, the subject becomes optional.

KanyeToThe was one of the largest hip-hop forums to ever exist, boasting nearly 100 million posts and 1 billion pageviews across a decade, and it didn’t endure because of Kanye West alone. It endured because the community built something that no longer depended on him.

The shift is gradual and nearly impossible to pin to a single moment. It remains the clearest answer I’ve found to the question every artist team or label executive eventually asks after launching a server on Discord: ‘When do we know this community is healthy?’

Ingredients attract attention, meals build loyalty.

Keep the Sign, Fire the Chef

When corporations began entering the community space en masse during COVID-19 lockdowns—Discord in particular—incentive structures shifted rapidly. Engagement metrics replaced connection as a success indicator, and growth targets superseded stability. The recipe changed, cheaper ingredients were used, and the sign stayed the same. The Applebee’s model.

This isn’t always about caring versus not caring. VC-backed companies report to their boards; online communities don’t operate on the same clock because they aren’t on one. The short-termism isn’t a character flaw; it’s a design constraint, which makes it harder to fix and more important to call out.

Forums that survived operated on a different timeline. Something Awful and Supertalk are both privately owned and have been online for more than two decades. Built, maintained, and futureproofed by those who care and consistently show up.

Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize for proving that commons can be governed without institutional destruction. She outlined eight design principles; the three that matter most for online communities are:

• the people using the resource participate in setting the rules

• monitoring is handled by those accountable to the community

• conflict resolution is accessible and cheap

Something Awful charges $10 to register, moderates through long-tenured users with institutional memory, and meets Ostrom’s conditions by coincidence.

The average agency-run Discord server meets none.

Brass and agencies alike launching a Discord server today think in campaign cycles. A quarter of content strategy, two if the target has budget, then autopilot until it becomes a husk. The plans don’t go that deep, because no one’s staying long enough to see them through. It’s difficult to plan a tour for someone else, for a city you’ve never visited.

Young put it plainly—

The success or failure of an online community depends, in part, on an organization’s commitment to sustained organizational and financial support for dedicated community management.

You can tell within seconds when you enter a community. You stroll in via an invite or a CTA on an ad, and the humidity is palpable; no one wants to be there. The moderators are obsessive fans, often kids selected by the staff, who have no experience. The announcements channel reads like a press release nobody asked for. The rest of the server is quiet, because there’s nothing to talk about. The whole place is a digital billboard that will die in a month.

The gap between who makes the decisions and who lives with them is the most underexamined dynamic in this niche. You can fund a restaurant, but you can’t fund a culture.

One question gets skipped every time, and it’s the only one that matters. Every user is subconsciously asking it, from the moment they join, especially around launches:

Why should I come back tomorrow?

Clean Aprons, Everywhere

By mid-2020, Discord moved on from its grassroots gaming origins, capturing a far wider audience with their Your Place to Talk campaign. Agencies flooded the market, positioning themselves as “fandom experts.” Not cooks who learned a kitchen; tourists who toured it, printed out business cards, then gleefully handed them out.

Demand outpaced qualified supply, and the market filled the gap fast. When the platform underwent a brand refresh in mid-2021, led by Koto and rolled out by AKQA (Koto’s breakdown has since been removed; the near-identical case study by Creative Director Bem Yemesgen remains accessible—not to be confused with Daniel Destefanis’ 2023 mobile redesign), the repositioning toward a broader market was unmistakable.

Those with access to capital and platform visibility were quick to crank out prescriptive frameworks on community-building. Lectures, keynotes, AI-generated static content, long rambling (often insufferable) LinkedIn posts, even books. Some without ever managing an online community at scale. Everyone was an expert, because nobody had been one long enough to be proven wrong.

In one such book, the author reduces friendships to referral mechanisms, and belonging to a driver of lifetime value. If community value is measured exclusively in monetary terms, the framework can’t account for the conditions that created it. You can’t reverse-engineer a family dinner from a receipt.

The agencies that followed soon after built their business models on the same logic, enveloping what they market as cutting-edge sentiment analysis with off-the-shelf SaaS dashboard templates courtesy of Claude Code, to any trained eye, pitched as ‘bespoke’ or ‘custom’ or ‘turnkey solutions.’ Venkit et al. reviewed 189 peer-reviewed papers on sentiment analysis and found a lack of explicit definitions and frameworks, a problem that compounds when the tools built on this research are sold as reliable to clients.

In music, they hand you a dashboard and call it a strategy to ‘convert fans’.

In gaming, the room knows you’re full of shit before you finish the pitch.

Most of these outfits could set up a Discord server well enough to pass the sniff test. Role hierarchies, channel structure, bot configuration, AutoMod enabled, baseline moderation in place, phone verification to prevent spam. Most of this is what Discord’s own setup tutorial tells you to turn on by default. A brand new car on the showroom floor with no engine; keys included.

The pitch always outperformed the service because the next pitch depended on it. When enough clients get burned, the whole category takes the hit, myself included. The people who caused it have already moved on to the next client.

The damage compounds upward. A-level artist and AAA-IP gaming servers launch with no long-term roadmap, entering decay cycles the moment retainers dissolve. I’ve been brought in to bring places like this back, and sometimes it can’t be done. The artist isn’t posting, the label doesn’t want to lean in, and the fan pages that once drove thousands of rabid fans into the room are losing interest (or have shut down completely). You can feel the air leaving, and it’s heartbreaking. In many cases, even the artist or group themselves couldn’t care less.

Some of these servers are still online, years later. No active moderation, announcements channel a ghost town. Just the automated ‘send a sticker when someone joins’ trigger activating, Wumpus waving and all, like one of those inflatable tube men flailing outside a used car lot in the middle of nowhere.

When an A-level artist’s server fails, they don’t come back. Their team flags Discord as the problem, not the execution, and tapes a scarlet letter to it. Discord takes the blame for an operational failure. The next time someone on that team is asked about the platform, the answer is short: ‘Nah.’

That misdiagnosis spreads, and before long, nobody adjacent wants to touch Discord either.

Larger entities, like major labels, reach the same conclusion from a different angle: Discord requires sustained investment for comparatively little in return. Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Spotify let you run ads with almost zero friction, measure ROAS easily, roll out the red carpet for priority partners (VASPs), and reach the same audience without ever learning their names. One-way funnel, no sustained investment needed. Inject when necessary.

Just over a year after Pitchfork asked Discord about music, Discord cut 4% of its workforce in August 2023. A few months later, another 17% in January 2024. The communities affected remained active throughout, like a conversation carrying on after everyone stops listening.

Fandom is the condition that makes revenue possible. The fan who buys every album, shows up to every tour, and brings three friends who don’t even listen to the artist, didn’t get there through a ‘conversion funnel’ or a ‘lifecycle campaign.’ They got there through belonging, and belonging is the only thing that survives a shifting algorithm and fluctuating ad spend.

CAC has more than doubled over the past decade.

You Brought a Charcuterie Board to a Cookout

You can learn Discord in a week, but understanding of a culture compounds slowly over time, and the room knows it the moment you open your mouth (or, read your canned, diluted, corpo-approved copy).

K-pop communities have always had some sort of leadership structure, whether it’s bulk-buying coordination, streaming promotion parties, or enforcement hierarchies; same bones as a hip-hop street team from 2003, except the territory is global and the quota is a Billboard chart. Their composition often resembles something closer to organizations than fandoms. Deploy a less-than-perfect launch, and it’ll be ignored. The fans will tell you themselves: they were here before you, and they will be here after you. If not out of loyalty, then spite.

Hip-hop communities operate on a different wavelength—geography as identity:

• DJ Screw redefined Houston’s sound with his gray tapes

• Detroit was changed forever by Dilla’s drums

• Atlanta stopped asking for permission after Outkast took stage at the ‘95 Source Awards

• Nas made QB feel like the center of the universe

To an agency, it all collapses into an indistinguishable, templated “rap community.” To anyone who has lived or still lives hip-hop, that sentence is enough to know the server’s fate.

To those who have spent their lives within these cultures, this is all commonplace. Most never encounter it because the ignorance is structural, and it’s not their own fault. Hiring pipelines bias platform fluency on paper over cultural literacy in practice, and the recipe gets passed down wrong because nobody in the kitchen has tasted the original.

Coca-Cola conducted extensive taste testing before launching New Coke in 1985, which lasted 79 days. The tests measured preference, not identity. They taste-tested the ingredients and ignored the room. In this case, literally.

Engagement can be A/B tested and optimized, but belonging has no control group.

The Yelp Review Said ★★★★★

Tools which ‘measure’ community health have replaced human judgment. Efficient for tracking activity, sure. Loyalty, trust, or safety? Good luck.

A message that says “this community changed my life” carries the same numerical weight as one that says something egregious, because both register identically as engagement within the tool. Aggregate data can show how many people entered a space, but can’t indicate whether anyone intends to remain.

Enter sentiment analysis, the industry’s most expensive way to misread the room:

• Van Atteveldt et al. tested every automated sentiment method available and found that none “come close to acceptable levels of validity.”

• Mohammad posed a simple question: can machines infer one’s true emotional state? His answer: “No.”

• Viola concludes sentiment analysis was “originally conceived as a tool to maximize profits.”

• Puschmann and Powell describe the numerical outputs as “a comforting illusion of objectivity and precision.”

The issue isn’t confined to “cutting-edge sentiment analysis” tooling or whatever phrasing sells. Beth Barnes, founder of METR—the AI evaluation lab whose benchmarks AI 2027 and frontier labs cite—put it in plain English on Machine Learning Street Talk, May 2026:

…you can sort of, like, be superhuman at making numbers go up, but it’s unclear whether or not you’re actually getting what you wanted.

This isn’t news. The cooks know the kitchen’s on fire. They’ve said so for (six or so) decades, in journals nobody at the table reads. The waiters keep pouring, the dashboards keep shipping, and the check—conveniently—never lands with ownership.

Michael Polanyi named the underlying problem in The Tacit Dimension:

We can know more than we can tell.

The feeling in the back of your mind that something is off, before you can explain why—tacit knowledge. No dashboard replicates it because it isn’t reducible to the inputs the dashboard ingests.

You can automate a process; you can’t automate judgment. David Rein on the same Machine Learning Street Talk episode:

…we just kind of estimate how long we expect it to take people from our kind of vibe or intuition. Ultimately, that’s kind of the best we can do.

Slang, sarcasm, memes, inside jokes, irony. Every server cooks its own dialect, drifting faster than any training cycle can chase. A tourist with a phrasebook can order coffee. A system that can't distinguish context to any reliable degree has no business informing governance decisions up the chain.

When data reporting becomes the center of community management, culture and retention begin to move in opposite directions. The moment a metric is deemed a KPI, the question shifts:

↓

The community once overflowing with starry-eyed fans is now an ant farm being tapped and tilted by a guy wearing a quarter-zip a few sizes too small.

This misunderstands the space, dressed up as incentive-centered design. When compensation tracks user growth, the system rewards reach, delayed enforcement, and strategic shitposting to drum up numbers—an artform in and of itself. Culture decays slower than reports can track, and by the time the software throws up a Bat-Signal, everyone’s long gone.

Today, phrases such as “direct-to-fan experiences” are greeted by executives like prisoners seeing sunlight for the first time. Packaged as empowerment, but in practice composed of mostly well-established marketing tactics done with modern software. While these tools can “move the needle” on selective KPIs, there is no conclusive evidence that structural power has shifted away from the major platforms. ‘Emerging evidence’ is not the same as proven structural change. Nearly every core aspect of fandom runs on someone else’s platform. “D2F” and “direct-to-fan” are shadows on the cave wall. Fans clap excitedly for the experience, while someone else collects the echoes.

In February 2026, direct-to-fan platform EVEN announced a multi-year agreement with UMG, positioning itself as infrastructure for the “superfan economy.” Turnkey solutions, safe communities, scalable fan engagement. The announcement landed days after a former executive filed a 29-page federal complaint alleging he was “discriminated against on the basis of his race and gender” and “deliberately misclassified as an independent contractor” through 70+ hr/wk crunches with no overtime, then fired after speaking up.

The complaint further describes “an unlawful pattern and practice of misclassifying Washington to suppress labor costs and obligations”, alleges the company “publicly promoted user growth metrics” that included unverified profiles the plaintiff had internally flagged, and claims its CEO acknowledged the contractor arrangement was “not necessarily legal” in a text message he then attempted to unsend. EVEN has called the claims “baseless and false.”

Empowerment is easy to sell when you never have to build it.

Topside, there’s no clapping. The fans show up hesitantly, signing up for yet another platform. How many? They’ve lost count.

Name, email, phone number. The name field doesn’t matter; it’s the other two that count.

ToS pop-up? TL;DR. Approved. Submit.

A tooltip window pops up, with a prompt to generate another password that will be forgotten in a week.

They spend, they believe they’re part of something larger than themselves. Then, often, they move on.

Not inevitability, but a common reaction when shared incentives shrink, and long-term strategy was never, well… long.

Loyalty is monetized without a second thought, and the community’s culture is proven disposable.

Healthy communities, especially large ones, rarely crack all at once; they develop many hairline fractures at a snail’s pace. You must watch the trusted regulars and notice when offshoot cliques form. This is a sign the main community is no longer serving them. Tracking it by hand is the only way; there is no technology for this. It comes from way too many late nights staring into the bluish glow of a monitor way too bright to keep your eyes comfortable.

The most subtle of shifts in an online community can trigger an avalanche, and the fandom experts’ ‘industry-leading’ tools won’t see shit until you’re buried.

Temperature Check

When someone outside a trust-based community optimizes it for extractable value, the optimization selects against the behaviors that built the trust.

Patience, institutional memory, genuine moderation—these get deprioritized because they don’t fit in a slide for the pitch deck that no one reads. The metrics improve while the underlying community decays.

Hirschman mapped the decision in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970): the regulars who built the culture are the first to sense the drift and the least willing to tolerate it. Exit stage left.

The people who remain are disproportionately passive, new, or loyal past the point of influence. By the time management notices, the members who could have reversed it are already gone.

Two things prevent this:

• If the people inside the community govern the optimization themselves—Ostrom’s principle applied to servers instead of fisheries—measurement doesn’t destroy the room, because the room controls the thermometer

• If the community is small enough that the person making decisions still knows every regular by name, there’s no gap between observation and dashboard.

Landlords Always Eat First

Biometric and ID verification is a regulatory response, but it also reshapes the platform. The regulatory pressure is real; child safety legislation is tightening globally, and platforms that serve minors have no legal room to ignore it. The harder problem is whether verification can be implemented without dissolving the identity layer that made the platform worth verifying in the first place.

Around the same time as Discord’s March 2026 biometric “age assurance process,” two separate events occurred: an October 2025 breach affecting roughly 70,000 users’ government-ID photos, and a confidential IPO filing in January 2026. Together, they define the context behind widespread user concern. Long-time Discord employee ‘Zorkian’ acknowledged: “But if you do end up in the ID bucket, then yeah, you’re right that has some risk. We’re doing what we can to minimize this.”

Discord’s ID rollout, originally set for March 2026, was subsequently delayed to H2 2026, following widespread backlash. Discord severed ties with Persona, a Thiel-backed ID vendor, after researchers found Persona’s code exposed on a government-authorized endpoint. Discord’s CTO acknowledged the company missed the mark.

Discord isn’t merely a destination. It’s been the backbone of modern online community for a decade.

Jason Citron, co-founder and former CEO, now advisor to the CEO, during the Your Place to Talk campaign in 2020:

Games are what brought many of you on the platform, and we’ll always be grateful for that.

As time passed, a lot of you realized, and vocalized, that you simply wanted a place designed to hang out and talk in the comfort of your own communities and friends.

You wanted a place to have genuine conversations and spend quality time with people, whether catching up, learning something, or sharing ideas. A place where you and your world can truly belong.

You came to us and said Discord was this place. And for millions of you, it already felt like a home.

When verification becomes default rather than exceptional, the environment shifts from pseudonymous to intentionally identity-aware. That sense of belonging fades fast, and it no longer feels like home.

Disqus’ analysis of 60 million users found pseudonymous users generally outperformed both anonymous and identified users in volume and contribution quality (original link now 404’s @ SVW). These observations, made nearly 15 years ago, pertain to virtual self-expression and identity, a core ethos (and rev driver) of Discord’s Shop.

Friedman and Resnick demonstrated that cheap pseudonyms carry real social costs—bad actors can shed reputations and start fresh (which they often do). Their solution wasn’t real names; it was designing reputation systems where pseudonymous identities accumulate stakes worth protecting. Discord’s username history, server-specific roles, and accumulated social capital function exactly this way. Strip pseudonymity, and you eliminate the identity layer users invested in.

Users frustrated with Discord’s identity verification rollout weren’t questioning legality. They were reevaluating their relationship with the platform itself, en masse—ask any long-time user.

Roblox’s AI-powered age verification, rolled out in late 2025, introduced mandatory age checks to access chat features. According to Roblox’s own reporting, only ~45% of DAU had completed age checks as of January 31, 2026. It has been deemed a mess, a trainwreck, a dumpster fire, and more. Pejoratives aside, it’s a clear sign of what’s to come.

Discord differs from Roblox. Its user base is older, far more politically aware, and seasoned at building community infrastructure.

Pseudonymity erosion isn’t hypothetical. Research on Facebook’s real-name enforcement documented what happens when a platform decides it knows your name better than you do: transgender users, domestic violence survivors, Indigenous users, and others were deactivated under strict identity policies.

No Substitutions

None of what transpires on Discord exports externally. Every message, conversation, back-and-forth, flame war, sarcastic smartass reply, anything ever sent in Discord is always on Discord, and if Discord were to suddenly disappear, it’s gone forever. Discord is not searchable as a forum. Discord is not an information repository. You must be on Discord, to see Discord, and to use Discord, using your Discord account.

The recipe lies in Building Successful Online Communities, sitting on a shelf between good intentions and plausible deniability:

Incumbents gain strategic advantage when switching costs are higher: the costs serve to lock in members. In the startup stage, a community is in the role of competitor and will generally want the switching costs to be low, making it easy for people to join. Once people have joined, however, the community is in an incumbent role, and a community designer will want the costs of those same members switching out to be high.

Brands, IPs, artists, streamers, entire ecosystems interconnected under one roof. If one migrates, hardly any follow. For all the frontpage Reddit threads and outrage headlines, five-person friend groups that migrate off the platform or viral tweets that get some traction—we’re lazy. When everything’s already in one place, we rarely sacrifice convenience for privacy.

The kitchen could be on fire and we’d still eat at the table.

Large platforms gravitate toward standardized verification because scale rewards predictability. Communities scale through trust density and shared culture, both of which accumulate on someone else’s land. As ID verification becomes infra, the damage is a slow drift, not a sudden collapse.

Those of us who curated our Top 8 on MySpace or refreshed Frank Ocean’s Tumblr constantly might remember: neither platform collapsed from a single decision. It was suffocation in slow motion.

• MySpace, under News Corp, increased ads while infra crumbled

• Tumblr banned NSFW after Apple pulled the app over unfiltered CSAM, and took a ~30% nosedive in traffic

• LiveJournal’s infamous ‘07 shift contributed to over 8 million users lost by ‘11

What may remain is a platform more durable, ad-friendly, and appealing to public markets than the Discord we grew up with. Whether it will still harbor the communities that made us laugh, cry, and cheer in our chatting primes is a bet I wouldn’t take, even if you caught me being frisky.

The Check Always Lands Face Down

Every kitchen operates on some economic structure. Ingredients arrive, labor transforms them, dishes leave the room, and revenue settles somewhere nearby—somewhere specific.

In 2006, Nicholas Carr described this as digital sharecropping:

The sharecroppers operate happily in an attention economy while their overseers operate happily in a cash economy. In this view, the attention economy does not operate separately from the cash economy; it’s simply a means of creating cheap inputs for the cash economy.

Participation scales outward, but ownership doesn’t.

In a pitch deck this would touch on something like the ‘attention economy’ and ‘value capture’ with some AI-generated graph. In your favorite restaurant’s kitchen, this is the ‘house cut.’ Labels and IP holders have collected that cut for decades; this isn’t new. What changed is the intermediary layer: platforms now extract from the attention while labels extract from the content, and the fan foots both tabs.

Fans generate the inputs that make a community worth monetizing. This lends itself to rev-gen. This isn’t inherently wrong. Artists need to eat well, as do labels. Communities that can’t justify their existence during quarterly reviews eventually get cut. ROI matters, but when it becomes the only lens (which it almost always does), the community stops being a room and starts being a register. Then, it dies.

Two hip-hop artist communities launched on Discord within months of each other in 2021; similar in sub-genre, comparable in scale, both backed by majors. One was managed by an agency for engagement metrics: weekly activations, growth targets, content calendar driven by the label. The other was managed by myself, for trust: slow onboarding, moderators from the fanbase, no growth mandates.

By mid-2023, the metric-optimized server was dead; the retainer ended, the room emptied inside six weeks, and the agency was cut. The server was stripped of its verification shortly after, and the server was deleted a few months later.

The trust-managed server never hit the same peak numbers. It also never lost more than 15% of its active base in any quarter, survived the artist’s year-long social media hiatus, and continued generating organic merch sales with zero paid promotion. It still exists today, one of the largest artist servers on the platform for an A-level artist. The artist’s thoughts? Loves it.

Over 30 months, the trust-managed server generated more revenue at lower cost.

The metric-optimized server generated a better slide in a pitch deck, though. That’s all that counts, right? The vanity metrics?

I reached out to a senior label exec, and close friend:

The core community is what matters most.

Artists get visibility from playlisting, TV performances, award shows, press—but what makes a career is when the artist has a flywheel built with fans.

Fans who don’t just consume the music, but buy tickets, buy merch, and invest their hard-earned money on the artist.

That’s a career. Everything else is a moment.

A community gets traction, the numbers look stellar, so someone up the chain throws them into a deck. The quarterly budget call arrives, and community management gets weighed directly against paid media, influencer campaigns, and legacy ROAS figures, as if comparable, somehow. It’s a fight lost before it begins, because there is no column for trust.

There’s no reliable metric for when the room goes cold, though there are many false positives. The power users sniff it out first, the regulars shortly after, then the users who only drop in for announcements, and before you know it, everyone’s gone. A few weeks after the server shuts down completely, the dashboard alerts you there has been a decline in messages.

Nobody puts it in the post-mortem. The next quarterly review takes place.

“What do we think about trying Discord out again?”

A grin, a headshake—maybe a giggle from the top dog if the weather’s sunny—and a hand gesture to move onto the next item.

Gratuity Included

I still believe communities are built the way they always have been: slowly, by people who choose to show up for each other. What took me far too long to learn is how fast everything is gutted once someone realizes it’s worth something.

The problem is mostly plumbing, not people. Plumbing isn’t the whole story, though, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of malpractice. There is an attention migration underway, one that has nothing to do with bad agencies or misaligned incentives.

Social media itself evolved past the conditions that made these spaces thrive. Alg-based feeds now compete directly for the sustained attention that community participation demands, and they’re winning—not because they’re better, but because they’re easier. A 15-second loop doesn’t ask you to show up tomorrow. The hallway got infinitely more interesting than any room ever could, and foot traffic dropped accordingly. The climate shifted. It explains why fewer people walk through the door. It doesn’t explain why the ones who do walk right back out.

Incentives reward short-term engagement over long-term trust, because engagement fits in a PDF. Online communities are treated as an expense until numbers show up. Which numbers? Any numbers, they just have to go up. When they do, they’re optimized. Bit by bit, byte by byte, quarter by quarter, until the deck says the community is healthy by every metric except the ones that matter. Look up from the spreadsheet, and it’s an empty room. Platform dependency centralizes ownership, and eventually, there are no digital sharecroppers left to harvest the ingredients.

You enter your favorite restaurant. The host doesn’t even bother checking the list anymore.

“Back again?”

The brass slide into the booth by the window. The same one as last time, and the time before that.

Finance gets the wine list first.

Agencies sit last, and immediately begin telling everyone about their weekend at Art Basel. Nobody asked.

In the back, past the swinging door, the fans are cooking. In the kitchen they built, with ingredients from the pantry they stocked, following recipes they wrote from memory. They’ve been here since before the restaurant had a name. Some are more experienced than others and it’s obvious this isn’t the first time they’ve cooked on the line.

Then the kitchen begins to shrink, as it always does. The menu gets rewritten by a Top Chef from a few towns over who’s never tasted the local joints. The recipes remain, but the hands that wrote them move further from the stove each quarter. Eventually, they become flavors on a plate.

Every night, without fail, the waiter comes out to take everyone’s order.

“What’ll it be?”

The menu is seasonal. It caters to whatever the room needs to hear.

Flip to any page, and somehow, some way, the fans are always there.

Not seated. Not served. Not even in the kitchen anymore.

Just on the menu.

If you like this piece, you may enjoy:

In 20+ years of watching Choe’s career, the radical transparency kept me fascinated—an honesty so unguarded it makes you uncomfortable, and then you realize the discomfort is your own.

This is my attempt at homage, an unfiltered look at, and a thank you to, .

My first piece in over half a decade.

Happy 50th.

Edit: Thank you David for reading; I appreciate your message.

Everyone is doing their best.

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Ride the Bus

An artist worth hundreds of millions of dollars whose auction record is $32,760.

The art world has a ladder: MFA, group shows, galleries, fairs, museums, biennials, and if you’re lucky enough—auction houses. Each step is greased by the people above and paid for by the ones below.

David Choe skipped all of them, got more famous than most of the people still climbing, and the art world dismissed it as a failure, until his work landed in places the art world couldn’t ignore.

Ask Choe how it went down and you’ll get a fantastic story. The details shift; the year moves, the city changes, the girl’s name is different. The host doesn’t catch it because the delivery is so good, and the grin so wide, that you’d rather hear the better version than the true one. FX’s official biography for The Choe Show described him as “a liar, thief, gambler, and unreliable narrator.” His own TikTok bio says the same:

Los Angeles, 1990. A thirteen-year-old Korean kid from Koreatown sprayed John 11:35 on a bus bench with a can of Krylon flat black.

The bench was his first canvas—his family couldn’t afford an actual one. In early-90’s LA, most graffiti writers obsessed over letters: wildstyle tags, bubble scripts, throw-ups with sharp corners. Choe sprayed faces, figures, philosophical quotes, and a grinning, bucktoothed whale with no arms or legs that has stuck for 30 years.

Sa-i-gu

Before the riots, his mother Jane had already begun the brainwashing: a born-again Christian, she named her son after King David, told him at five he was the greatest artist who ever lived. His father Jimmy brought home used Xerox paper from work to use for drawing. Every morning, Choe rode the bus from Koreatown to Beverly Hills; same kid, different planet. One side of the ride, families that couldn’t afford canvases. The other side, a place that didn’t know the word struggle.

Eight days after Choe’s sixteenth birthday, on April 29, 1992, his brother pulled up to school in a stolen delivery van and they both drove through burning streets, throwing rocks and looting. Their parents’ business burned to the ground. He later wrote in Vice that he and his brother were “the only Koreans that looted during the riots,” and that his own community called him slurs for it.

His family spent the next few years on welfare.

The Barron Draws Himself Awake

A generation of artists who rejected the mainstream illustration playbook traced themselves back to one man: Barron Storey.

Barron Storey had drawn Time magazine covers of Howard Hughes and Yitzhak Rabin, painted NASA’s space shuttle in 1979, illustrated the 1980 cover of Lord of the Flies, and contributed to Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman: Endless Nights.

Since 1976, Storey had filled more than 145 visual journals. Pen, paint, collage, photographs, typed text, handwriting, found objects; all layered onto pages that resembled crime scenes more than sketchbooks. His technique, as he described it on the Escape from Illustration Island podcast, was to “draw myself awake” every morning, grabbing his pens the moment consciousness arrived, scribbling whatever floated through his brain. The journals explored human despair, war, homelessness, suicide; powerful, dark, free of anyone else’s opinion about what they should look like.

Choe called him the king. In Slow Jams, Choe’s 1999 graphic novel, he wrote:

Nobody draws better than Barron.

Not you, not your little sister, your architect dad, not your rebellious ex-boyfriend who draws with his own blood, not the most talented kid at your art school.

Not your favorite artist in the whole world; I’ve seen the work with my own eyes.

Nobody draws better than The Barron.

Storey layered pen, collage, and photograph until his pages looked like crime scenes. Choe layered pencil, ink, crayon, watercolor, acrylic, oil, spray paint, house paint, applied wet-on-wet, every surface already marked before the first stroke landed.

In 2004, Choe began mentoring Joseph Choe (no relation), a Korean-American artist with autism who talks through paint.

Joseph’s parents wrote that David “recognized [Joseph]’s talent and helped cultivate his artistic creativity”—the influence ran both ways.

Choe called Joseph’s work “the most brilliant drawings I had ever seen”; Joseph’s way of processing the world loosened something in how Choe approached paint. The shift is visible in the years after: the watercolors Choe exhibited at the Museo del Chopo in 2013—controlled, precise, trusting the gesture enough to let it breathe rather than layering over it—show Joseph’s influence more than any single technique.

A couple of years under Storey, then he dropped out.

99¢ Copies and a Letter Nobody Forgot

Kinko’s on Vermont charged 99¢/copy. Choe would stand at the self-serve machine, feeding his best paintings through the scanner one at a time, because he couldn’t afford to waste a single sheet on a bad reproduction. He’d walk to the nearest newsstand afterward, flip to the masthead of Rolling Stone, Time, Newsweek, write down the art director’s name and address on a scrap of paper, walk home, and mail the copies with a handwritten note.

Rejection letters came back in the same envelopes he couldn’t afford to replace. Most of the time, nothing came back.

Always fascinated by comics—Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld, Todd McFarlane—he initially dreamed of drawing for the big publishers. He claims he wrote Slow Jams in a single night in 1996: 35 pages of violent sexual obsession rendered in pen-and-ink with typed text pasted over drawings like ransom notes. He photocopied 200 copies, handed them out at San Diego Comic-Con in 1998, won a Xeric Grant of $5,000 to self-publish 1,000 copies in 1999. More self-published books followed: Bruised Fruit (2002), Cursiv (Giant Robot, 2003). Every one self-financed or pulled from inside the community; never pitched to a publisher who didn’t get the joke or context.

Around 2001, he and writer Brian Wood developed NYX for Marvel’s MAX imprint: a mature-readers series about powered-down young mutants surviving in New York City. Marvel’s editor-in-chief Joe Quesada killed it before publication, calling it a proposal never formally approved. Choe wrote an open letter to Quesada—unhinged, profane, emailed to hundreds in the industry—and was blacklisted. Marvel published its own NYX in 2003 with different artists. Choe’s version never existed.

His final instruction for anyone who disagreed with him:

This is what I do for a living and that makes me the luckiest happiest guy around, I don’t need to do your bullshit, I’m not some fucking kid from the Joe Kubert art school, with a portfolio and ripped off Rob Liefield drawings trying to break into the industry, you just so happened to get a hold of me at a weak moment, and swing the word “x-men” in front of my face, and that’s the only reason I decided to do it. Just to do it. Not for money , not for fame, just for the chance to take a stab at my hero’s who I read growing up in the 7-11, like I owed it to myself or some shit.

Joe Quesada’s Instagram bio, as of March 2026:

I make stuff up. Sometimes I get paid to do it.

Double Rainbow Epiphanies

No blue-chip gallery would show him.

His paintings went up at Double Rainbow, an ice cream parlor on Melrose Avenue near La Brea. An ice cream shop, owned by a ‘nice, older white couple from Marin county’ was the only venue that said yes. Sales were strong enough that the store continued for two years, Choe replenishing pieces as they sold.

In Dirty Hands, he described the first sale like a man who couldn’t believe the slot machine paid out:

I remember I sold this painting for $500, which I mean—I was almost crying.

And you know, I trade a piece for like a skateboard.

Some girl calls me says she wants to fuck me, like just things are happening.

I’m like, what the fuck?!

His work hung between the flavor list and the hallway to the restroom. House paint and spray enamel on what might have been a cabinet door; the layering so thick you could see brush strokes from the register.

Giant Robots, Primates, and Landscapes

Giant Robot was the foundation: the Asian-American culture magazine founded by Eric Nakamura and Martin Wong in 1994. What The Source was to hip-hop in the late 80’s, Giant Robot was to Asian-American creatives in the 90’s—the only magazine that understood the room because it was built inside the room. Half magazine, half store, half community center. The hub for a generation of creatives who didn’t fit the mainstream art world, the mainstream media world, or the mainstream anything world.

Wong first met Choe at SDCC in 1997, a kid who walked up to their small press table and offered to contribute. The painting he sent back was perfect. Choe became Giant Robot’s go-to illustrator, “super fast and ridiculously versatile,” as Wong later wrote, and by Issue 50 he was painting the cover. By then Steve Lazarides, Banksy’s agent, was managing him.

Choe walked over and met a young man excited about his first American show, who didn’t care that nothing had sold and cared more about waking people the fuck up. The man gave Choe a cardboard cutout stencil of a rat with a bazooka.

An excerpt from Why Saving Banksy Means Saving Yourself (2016)—

I used my Korean negotiation skills to talk him down to $50; although, even at $50 I felt a little cheated buying stencil art, but back then, as a starving artist myself, I was always open to supporting other starving artists so I felt good about that part. I asked who the artist was, and he said it was a fellow from across the pond in the UK who goes by the name Bank-Ski, and he was across the street. […]

He gave me a cardboard cutout stencil of a rat with a bazooka , I loved it so much I spray painted it all over koreatown until the stencil fell apart, as I looked back and realized, oh shit I’m a Banksy! the stenciled thrift store painting which I purchased for $50 still hangs in my bathroom and is estimated at $500,000 today.

Lazarides managed both of them.

Choe’s take was personal, defending Banksy’s anonymity against the scientists and journalists trying to unmask him:

I want to end this eloquently, with a personal message to all the evil expert scientists: you went to school and got all that education and were born with this giant brain; you could be helping to solve cancer and/or real crimes and this is how you choose to spend your time? Fucking with artists? Leave artists alone to create. The only people you should ever want to unmask are villains.

Matt Revelli’s Upper Playground completed the infrastructure. He founded the San Francisco-based apparel brand and gallery operation; what he built with Choe over the next decade moved street art into the market.

Munko

Munko had been Choe’s graffiti signature since he was a teenager, randomly appearing on pavements, concrete walls, overpasses, and freeways across LA, always accompanied by quotes or philosophical fragments. A character, limbless and grinning, evolving over the years into dozens if not hundreds of variations.

Where most graffiti writers sprayed their name, Choe sprayed a creature that couldn’t walk, couldn’t hold anything, couldn’t do anything except absorb. Upper Playground partnered with Japan’s Good Smile Company to produce Munko vinyl figures and a plush line—Munko, Munkosaur, Munkette—each of which became an instant collector staple.

The character description he wrote for the plush:

Munko has no arms or legs, but don’t take pity and cry for her. She is him and he is her, she is chubby little baby and 2 billion year old wise wizard. The black hole in her head eats all the pain and darkness in the world. He believes all her strength knowledge and luck comes from his only tooth, but in reality it’s the sole survivor of her over active sweet tooth. When you are with Munko you just be, and you will finally be at peace with your fucking self.

Cover art for Jay-Z and Linkin Park’s Collision Course in 2004, a 2x Platinum EP that debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. The Obama poster in 2008 after initially refusing (“Fuck that, I’m a nihilist”), then wheatpasted across the country. Illustrations for Hustler, Ray Gun ($160/piece), Vice, Marvel, DC, Sony Pictures, Converse, and Levi’s. Artwork for the sets of Juno and The Glass House.

None of it came through a gallery.

Revelli’s line about Choe:

Giant Robot, Upper Playground, Double Rainbow, Lazarides: none of it shows up in a Christie’s catalog. Asian-American artists in LA built their own thing because the art world wouldn’t pick up the phone. At the Dirty Hands premiere in 2008, it was Nakamura who introduced the film. The Giant Robot community and the Choe community were the same community.

Choe had no MFA, zero exhibition history through official channels, and was lacking critical validation. His work came from graffiti, his methods were abrasive and occasionally criminal, and his public persona made curators nervous.

600 Drawings in Soy Sauce and Blood

In late 2003, Choe flew to Tokyo for an art show. Within 24 hours, he punched a private security officer in the face, earning himself a 90-day clip.

The cell was small and the rules left no room either. No talking during certain hours, no moving around, no lying down during the day. He was the only foreigner in his section, couldn’t communicate, and survived a system designed to break compliance through monotony.

He had a single pen and scraps of paper. Over 600 drawings came out of it. He bartered portraits of cellmates for peace, painted in whatever he could scavenge: soy sauce, blood, tea, urine.

Soy Hedz—a face painted entirely in soy sauce on scrap paper. Soy sauce bleeds at the edges, pools where the paper dips, dries into gradients the brush never planned. The face dissolves into its own surface—portrait becoming stain, a human image in a medium that won’t let it stay permanent. No layering, no revision; what landed first is what stayed. Every medium Choe built his reputation on is absent here, and the work is more raw as a result.

Stripped of spray cans, acrylics, house paint, every tool he’d built his practice around, putting his life onto paper without mediation.

Revelli relays that Choe’s prison sentence was an ultimate karmic payment for buried sins, collected in full. Released on the condition he leave Japan and never return, he exhibited the prison work in New York. Years later, the ban was lifted, and Upper Playground brought him back to paint a wall in the city that had caged him.

The Lens That Never Looked Away

Harry Kim had been filming since 2000, often living with Choe while videotaping the art-making, the fights, the confessions, the intimate wreckage. What started as a ten-minute film school project grew into a half-hour short titled Whales and Orgies, then expanded into Dirty Hands: The Art and Crimes of David Choe, which premiered and sold out twice at the Los Angeles Film Festival on June 21, 2008, won Best Documentary at the San Diego Asian Film Festival, and screened as MoMA’s closing film in the All the Wrong Art series.

Variety called it “about as indulgent as Choe is, rampaging around the globe and its subject’s mind.” Kim kept filming for years, eventually releasing David Choe: High Risk.

Kim caught the self-sabotage on camera in 2007, unperformed:

What the fuck, dude? I got a gorgeous girlfriend. I’m making great money doing art and all this shit.

And it’s like, how come I still do all this stupid shit to, like, sabotage that?

How come? And why can’t I stop that? So what’s my future goal?

Like, I guess to work on myself and just to, like, become, like, a normal person, whatever that means.

Vice extended the record into performance. Thumbs Up! followed Choe and Kim hitchhiking and freight-hopping across continents with no money and no plan.

Los Angeles → Miami
Tijuana → Alaska
Beijing → Shenzhen → Macau
Manila → Siargao

The Palo Alto Murals

Sean Parker tried to commission Choe in 2003 but couldn’t pay; Napster had been sued into the ground and Parker hadn’t landed at Facebook yet. Parker was a fan, and Choe was broke.

On the Huberman Lab podcast in December 2025, Choe told the story: Sean had been in a meeting with Warner Brothers executives and one of them, a guy named Chip, had disrespected Choe in passing. Parker shut the meeting down, telling Warner Brothers to their faces they weren’t doing business because of what Chip had done to his friend. Choe cried when he recounted it: “sometimes the little guy wins.”

Two years later, in 2005, Parker commissioned murals for Facebook’s first Palo Alto office. Parker offered $60,000 cash or company stock. Facebook seemed pointless, a shy MySpace at best, that nobody he knew used.

He took the stock because he believed in Sean, not Facebook.

It was peak Choe on the walls: graphic, sexual, confrontational, vintage Slow Jams energy scaled to architecture. Naked figures, animals, his signature whales, all sprayed and painted onto the interior walls of a startup that would become one of the most valuable companies on earth. Choe’s friends Rob Sato and Joe To loosely recreated them for the set of The Social Network.

Zuckerberg commissioned tamer murals in 2007 for the next office, and the one after that. On May 18, 2012, Facebook went public.

By the time Choe linked up again with ZUCK 1 in 2012 (above video), his stake was worth an estimated $200 million (in 2017).

Choe’s wealth came from painting walls for a friend who offered stock in a company he thought was stupid.

Shatterproof

David Choe, It All Adds Up, 2020—

That hole will never be filled. That hole is bottomless.

You could fill it with sex, drugs, money, achievements, cars, houses, goals.

It’ll never add up. It’ll never be enough.

The disease of more.

The gambling had been severe long before the IPO; he’d built his first million from blackjack by roughly age 30, starting with $500 and the Martingale system. The windfall removed every constraint that had kept the addiction survivable.

A weekly Vegas trip, $250,000 per hand on blackjack. Five sleepless days at a stretch, $20,000 chips falling from his pockets, an angina attack on a suite floor; he woke up 30 hours later. The casinos rolled out private everything, made sure their VIP client’s dopamine supply never crimped.

David Choe, on The Rich Roll Podcast, September 2021—

I wanted to die... I wanted to die.

I was too cowardly to actually kill myself, but I wanted to get into some kind of situation where someone would murder me or something would happen where I would die.

I had an angina attack in a casino when I was 35. And that was the best, because when I collapsed, I felt so much joy.

That was the happiest I was, because I was like, it’s going to end soon.

My pain is going to end soon.

Jason Jaworski, a close friend and writer who spent years traveling with Choe during the worst of it, published a profile of Choe in 2021 written from the inside. Choe described cycling through casino suites—Bellagio, Aria, Palazzo, MGM, Caesars—waking each morning in a different room and running to the window, hoping for escape, failing every day, too much of a coward to do it by any other means.

Huberman asked him about recovery, and Choe described his version:

David Choe, on Huberman Lab, December 2025—

Just right on the wall:

‘I am worthy. I am enough.’

And I see it every morning when I wash my face.

And it’s just like, I’m starting to brainwash myself.

Brain-mapping, he called it. Every addiction, he told Huberman, is a gambling addiction underneath: if you drink and drive, you’re gambling; if you overeat when you’re diabetic, you’re gambling.

Gambling was running from shame. The shame preceded the money, and by proxy, everything else: the trap of growing up first-generation Korean-American, where failure is the only unforgivable sin and vulnerability is weakness.

Tony

Anthony Bourdain changed Choe’s trajectory more than anyone else; more than Parker, more than Revelli, maybe more than Storey.

Their friendship started around 2010 through David Chang. Choe had been painting murals for Chang’s restaurants (Momofuku, later Majordomo) and both Davids bonded over gambling, Korean food, and being Korean-American men who had achieved a level of success they were only supposed to want. Immigrant parents who sacrificed everything; success by every metric that should have silenced the imposter syndrome, and neither one could stop feeling like the next bad decision would prove their families right about them.

Chang invited “his friend Tony” to a dinner at the Chateau Marmont, and the friend was Bourdain. They talked for hours. On following visits, Bourdain would go to Choe’s mother’s house for homecooked meals.

Bourdain had been an addict, a line cook, a man who burned through relationships and careers before Kitchen Confidential turned the wreckage into a brand.

Kitchen Confidential (2000) closes with a line Choe would’ve tattooed on himself a decade later:

It’s been an adventure. We took some casualties over the years. Things got broken. Things got lost. But I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

Parts Unknown Season 1, Episode 2, shot in 2013. Koreatown. They ate at Sizzler on South Vermont—not a destination restaurant but a chain steakhouse on a strip mall block, the kind of place Korean-American families went after church on Sunday. Bourdain used Choe’s term “KGB,” Koreans Gone Bad, and it became shorthand for the Korean-American creative class that refused to be model minorities.

After Bourdain’s death by suicide in June 2018, Choe grew his hair for three years as a memorial. In Morgan Neville’s Roadrunner (2021), he spray-painted over a mural of Bourdain that Neville admitted he had commissioned specifically to be destroyed on camera.

DVDASA

DVDASA, the podcast Choe co-hosted with Asa Akira, launched January 2013 and hit No. 1 in iTunes’ Health category. The name stood for Double Vag Double Anal Sensitive Artist—tells you everything about the frequency the show operated on.

Two people in a room talking about sex, addiction, childhood damage, and the fear of being unlovable, with no delay, no producer, and no edit button.

They recorded in the White Room, a studio space that doubled as a confessional booth and a performance stage. 140+ episodes through late 2014: sex talk, gambling stories, crude humor, and stretches of genuine therapeutic vulnerability that left no cover.

Choe disclosed his childhood sexual abuse on air; he talked about his father’s emotional distance, his mother’s weaponized faith, and his fear that he was unlovable.

Akira, an adult film actress and director who had published her own memoir, was smarter than the show required—unflappable, willing to call Choe on his own mythology in real time. When he went dark, she stayed.

One move was deliberate: nobody would ever be sure what was real. Guests cycled through. Comedians, adult film performers, musicians, random friends; episodes lasted as long as the conversation did, sometimes 45 minutes, sometimes three hours. Val Kilmer visited the White Room. Whether Choe was performing or confessing at any given moment was anyone’s guess, and he liked it that way.

Bobby Lee’s younger brother Steve became a regular under the name “Steebee Weebee,” and the chemistry was immediate. Choe built a band around him in 2014: Mangchi, Korean for “hammer,” with Money Mark, the Beastie Boys’ longtime keyboardist, and tour artwork by James Jean, who’d shared a 30,000-square-foot warehouse with Choe in LA.

Episode 106

March 10, 2014. DVDASA Episode 106, titled “Erection Quest.” Choe described a massage from a masseuse he calls “Rose.” By this point the show had run 105 episodes where nobody could tell confession from performance, and an audience had formed that took the disclosures at face value—the same audience that had heard Choe describe his own childhood sexual abuse with visible pain. 105 episodes had stripped the format of any safety net.

DVDASA ended with a 25-hour marathon on November 1 to 2, 2014.

Episode 106 resurfaced in 2017 when his Bowery Wall mural drew protests and was eventually defaced.

It resurfaced again in April 2023 when clips went viral following Netflix’s Beef. The creative team issued a joint statement calling the story “undeniably hurtful and extremely disturbing.”

The audience split. Some defended him: it was a story, he said so, and the format was always unreliable. Others couldn’t square it: the same voice that had disclosed childhood sexual abuse with audible weight had used the same microphone to describe what he described. Listeners who had invested in DVDASA as something real, who had treated Choe’s confessions as a contract of mutual vulnerability, couldn’t forgive Episode 106.

No victim has come forward, and no charges have been filed.

The School of Dirty Styles

From Sedition, mapping the dirty style back to its material origins:

My dad would bring home used Xeroxes from work so I could Crayola all over the backs, then I moved on to painting on benches and other shit on the street because I couldn’t afford canvases... So even before you start, there’s some history, there’s some chills, spills, and marks, then you keep creating more history on top of that, spilling, spraying, dripping, creaming, collaging, making a mess. All this ugly dirty shit, with hopefully the end product being something tolerable and beautiful... born from that filth.

A Choe face up close: features that look barely controlled, lines drifting past anatomical accuracy into something looser and more unsettling, eyes that hold you with a fixedness implying months of studio time when the whole thing went down in minutes. The surfaces have topography; you can see brush strokes from across a room. The grin migrates from painting to painting, Munko’s grin on human features, absorbing everything.

In a piece called “The Perfect Day,” written during a mural trip to Cambodia with the Igloo Hong Foundation, he described the philosophy underneath the paint:

I will admit, I try to stay purposefully ignorant about the history, politics, and current events of most places I visit. Ever since I started hitchhiking all over the planet in my teens, I would rather get an oral history from the people I met travelling instead of reading about it on my phone or in a book... It’s been a lifelong journey and fight to stay present, to live in the moment without holding onto old grievances, revenge, or getting stuck replaying histories I cannot change... It’s about freeing your vision to allow you to see the beauty in the imperfections around you, and every once in awhile those imperfections culminate into a perfect day.

Exhibitions tell the rest of the story—an ice cream shop on Melrose to:

• David Choe at Fifty24SF (2003, 2004)

• Anno Domini in San Jose (2005)

• First museum solo at the Santa Rosa Museum of Contemporary Art (2005)

• “Gardeners of Eden” at Jonathan LeVine in Chelsea (2007)

• “Murderous Heart” at Lazarides in London and Newcastle (2008)

• “Nothing to Declare” in Beverly Hills (2010)

• Character Assassination by David Choe at Fifty24SF (2010)

David Choe, on The Rich Roll Podcast, September 2021—

I was like, it has to be in LA. It has to be on the most expensive—right in Rodeo Drive.

I want every celebrity there. I had to show everyone, like, I was enough.

And I was not—I wasn’t even enough.

I was better than you.

Alien graffiti on The Mandalorian’s Tatooine sets—tags calibrated to species heights, Jawa-level scrawl kept low to the ground—came from Choe pitching Jon Favreau directly, then taking a cameo in the Gamorrean fight club scene instead of payment. Juxtapoz dedicated an entire issue to him, guest-edited by Choe himself. His Obama portrait hung in the White House. Each placement bypassed the traditional ladder entirely.

• Kantor Gallery noted the tension between reckless scrawling and refined composition

• Variety conceded a moment of bliss watching him execute an ornate face with a spray can in each hand

• KQED wrote that his hands are dirty literally and metaphorically, and to wash them would erase the creativity that is his nature

• Slant Magazine called him “an unsettling hybrid of what is terrific and terrible about the American dream”

The strongest aesthetic case against Choe: strip the mythology away and you’ve got a technically gifted painter who never learned when to stop. He runs on the same transgressive energy that powered Robert Williams and the Juxtapoz generation.

The layering is relentless; at its weakest, the sheer mass does the work that composition should.

“Snowman Monkey BBQ” at the Museo del Chopo in Mexico City, 2013: all watercolors. Controlled, precise, quiet. He told Rogan why:

David Choe, on The Joe Rogan Experience #563, 2014—

At some point, I just stopped selling my paintings.

I was like, I just either give them for free to my friends or you can look at it for free on Instagram or you can buy my books that are cheap or you can go out and look at the murals I did.

I’m not on this planet to make really expensive art for rich people.

Koreatown, not Seoul

Choe turned being a bad Korean into a brand—a contradiction Wendy Sung examined in Global Asian American Popular Cultures.

The riots broke the model minority bargain: work hard, stay quiet, don’t make trouble, and America lets you in. His parents held up their end, and America burned down their business anyway. Choe watched it happen at sixteen and drew the only conclusion a teenager could draw: the bargain was never real, and the people who kept honoring it were getting played.

Before the riots, his parents had sent him to South Korea as a young child, where he has disclosed being sexually abused.

David Choe, It All Adds Up lecture, 2020—

I was shipped away to Korea when I was four years old because my parents were too poor to raise three kids.

And that fucked me up for the rest of my life.

That wound was so deep.

They sent him the way immigrant families do, to reconnect with the culture, to learn the language. What happened broke something that took decades to name. It taught him early that his family’s respectability hung by a thread, and could collapse at any moment.

Jimmy Choe told a therapist [tr.]:

Everyone has a hard time growing up.

You don’t talk about it. You zip it up. You fold it up.

You put it in a drawer in your chest, and you lock it away.

On Rich Roll’s podcast, he described what that silence looked like at the dinner table:

David Choe, on The Rich Roll Podcast, September 2021—

I was six or seven, and the waiter’s like, what do you want? I never had an adult asking me what I want. There was a lobster tank. I’m like, that, I’ll have that. And I could just feel my dad glaring down at me.

’Do you know how much a fresh lobster costs?’ My brothers jumped in—stupid, David.

So the lobster comes, I can’t even enjoy it. He’s like, no, we’re gonna sit here till you finish eating that. And so I’m like crying eating this lobster tail.

Cut to 20 years later, I’m gambling millions of dollars in Las Vegas, having lobsters sent up to the room. I don’t even eat the lobsters. There’s rotting lobsters in every penthouse in Vegas. It’s just like a fuck you to my dad.

And I didn’t even put that together till I was in therapy.

David Choe, It All Adds Up lecture, 2020—

Everyone that’s here is a trauma survivor escaping a horrible situation.

So they hit the ground running when they get here. They carry all that burden from their generations of their families in here and they put that onto you.

We didn’t fucking come here for a second class life. We came here for a better life.

That’s workaholism. That’s trauma surviving workaholism.

The “Koreans Gone Bad” label gave people room to be loud, broken, public, and Korean at the same time.

Cathy Park Hong, in Minor Feelings (2020):

Minor feelings are also the emotions we are accused of having when we decide to be difficult—in other words, when we decide to be honest.

Roy Choi built Kogi BBQ. Bobby Lee turned his dysfunction into a comedy career. Choe turned his into paintings, then a podcast, then a windfall, then television, then trading cards.

By 2016, he was in therapy. Years of treatment followed.

The Choe Show

Its first version had nothing to do with television.

In the summer of 2017, with years of therapy, Choe rented the old Farmers Insurance building off Wilshire in Koreatown and built something nobody had a name for. He called it “The Choe Show.”

Applicants filled out an extensive online questionnaire, got phone-screened by members of Choe’s family, signed NDAs, and were told to abstain from food, drugs, alcohol, porn, and masturbation for twelve hours before arriving. They showed up in groups of strangers, put on jumpsuits, and were led through a series of rooms: one where a guide used intimate details from their applications to push them toward buried pain, one where actors recreated scenes from Choe’s life, one where participants beat a padded actor with a whiffle ball bat while screaming the name of whoever was hurting them—the sound filled the room.

Choe’s paintings hung in a pitch-black room, visible only by flashlight. He appeared first as a hologram, then in person. The cameras recorded everything.

LA Weekly reported that participants emerged in tears, connecting with strangers they’d met hours before, describing the experience as something between group therapy and a religious ceremony. It ran July 12 through August 5, free, invite-only, in a building with no sign out front.

The Choe Show (FX, 2021) scaled the format for broadcast. Hiro Murai executive produced alongside Revelli and Christopher Chen—Murai was coming off Atlanta, and the pairing made sense. All five episodes dropped June 25, 2021. Choe filmed in his childhood Koreatown home, sat with guests while painting their portraits—a medium he openly hated, which is why he chose it—and conducted conversations that followed wherever vulnerability led.

• Will Arnett discussed childhood shame.

• Steve-O explained how childhood abandonment led to a career as, in his own words, “an attention whore.”

• Asa Akira returned, revealing dimensions the DVDASA format had kept buried.

The Hollywood Reporter called it “a chaotic, emotionally exposed mess—by design.”

Val Kilmer’s segment was the format pushed to breaking. Kilmer, who by then could barely speak after throat cancer treatment, communicated through a notepad. Choe painted him in silence.

FX cancelled it after five episodes.

Not For Sale

Lee Sung Jin had been kicking around a road rage premise for years, based on an actual incident, when he realized the story needed Asian-American characters. Netflix won a bidding war for the series in March 2021.

Isaac Cho—Danny’s cousin fresh out of prison—was the role nobody could cast. Hundreds of actors submitted tapes. Lee told Today that everyone was “leaning really hard into the kind of Koreatown mafioso energy,” and none of it felt right. He was watching The Choe Show when it clicked. Choe was talking about being abandoned by his family, and Lee thought: “The way he’s talking about it just feels so Isaac.” He texted Steven Yeun and Ali Wong: “Hey, do you think David would ever act?” Choe submitted what Lee called “the most creative self-tape I’ve ever seen in my life,” complete with bloopers and creative editing. “I just knew he was perfect. That guy doesn’t know how to be false.”

Lee received something Choe hadn’t given the public in over a decade: his paintings.

Hundreds of canvases, all unseen, stockpiled during his years of withdrawal. Lee’s original plan had been public domain paintings for the title cards; he’d already selected Pieter Aertsen’s sixteenth-century A Meat Stall with the Holy Family Giving Alms for the first episode. When Choe offered his catalog, Lee switched. He kept the Aertsen for Episode One and picked nine Choe paintings for episodes two through ten, each one interrupting the cold open with Choe’s twisted, paint-heavy figures, then vanishing before the viewer could process them. Lee worked with Sarofsky on custom title text, using late-90’s Ray Gun magazine as visual reference. They tweaked the font, Balboa, to look increasingly manic as the series progressed.

Three seconds of Choe before each episode began. Lee’s favorite was the finale’s, Figures of Light: a figure peering down at chaos below, mirroring the high-angle shot that returns to Danny and Amy’s wrecked cars. IndieWire observed that the title cards yanked a tripwire that made the characters fall. Every week, Choe’s paintings smuggled themselves into the cold open of one of the most-watched shows of 2023.

Beef earned a 98% Rotten Tomatoes score, eight Emmys, three Golden Globes. Ali Wong became the first woman of Asian descent to win an Emmy in a lead actress race. The show became the first created by and starring Asian Americans to win Best Limited Series at the Golden Globes.

70 million viewing hours in its second week alone.

Choe stopped selling paintings, stopped exhibiting, told Rogan he wasn’t on this planet to make expensive art for rich people.

From Shame to Grace

The Huberman Lab interview in December 2025, a four-hour unedited look into the mind of David Choe. Tales of his mother’s blind faith, then a switch to stories about 99-cent color copies mailed to art directors whose addresses he’d copied from mastheads at newsstands.

David Choe, on Huberman Lab, December 2025—

Everything the world had shown me, besides from my mother, is that you’re not enough. And that was also confusing because she sent me away and abandoned me. So it was like, you’re telling me I’m the best, but then you threw me out like trash.

Work addiction was the one nobody flagged because the output looked like success. He told Rich Roll you can hide in plain sight and people pat you on the back. He’d had a heart attack at 35 and gone back to the casino the next day.

David Choe, It All Adds Up lecture, 2020—

My love must be performance-based. Only when I achieve, perform, and I do something good. That’s when people accept me.

His best work always came from constraint. On Rogan #1518, he said every horrible thing that ever happened to him—physical abuse, sexual abuse, prison, career destruction—had always led to bigger and better.

His girlfriend at the time of Dirty Hands:

My girlfriend says it all the time.

She’s like, you just want to be tortured.

You just want to be fucked up.

And it’s like, yeah, I mean, sometimes you miss it.

Sometimes you miss the loneliness. Sometimes you miss the pain.

He’d tested that hypothesis in Tanzania. On the same episode, Choe told the story of living with the Hadza, a hunter-gatherer tribe, for four months. He’d arrived with a tent and branded food while they slept in caves and foraged.

At the end of the first week, he moved into the cave and gave up everything. “That first week is withdrawal. I’m like, fuck, where’s my phone?” he told Rogan. “And then, all of it goes away. I’m not thinking about any of my addictions, I feel peace, I’m not miserable, my depression goes away.”

Morning to night: hunt, eat, celebrate, sleep. No screens, no money, and no audience. He spent days making art with the Hadza kids.

The tribe came back covered in blood from a hunt, looked at the art, and threw it off the cave.

David Choe, on The Joe Rogan Experience #1965, April 2023—

It just hit me so hard in that moment. They’re so present.

It’s just—we did it. We love it. And bye-bye, it’s a piece of paper in the wind now.

And I threw it off the cliff and I was like, more of this.

Donations flooded the Meleka Foundation, funding wells and schools. Choe co-shot a documentary, We Are Hadza.

David Choe, on The Rich Roll Podcast, September 2021—

It is an impossibility to be a great artist and to be well.

And the pain of walking around being like, I’m not entitled to actually take care of myself because that will threaten the very thing that makes me who I am.

A former teacher of Choe’s, interviewed by Jaworski, saw the bind from outside the mythology:

I truly feel he’s more comfortable when he’s fighting, when things are broken.

Most artists first start off obsessed with work as an escape, as a survival tool—the work distracts them from the pain of reality.

But take that away—that means and need to survive—what happens to the work, to the person?

Like a dog chasing a car that eventually stops, they get pummeled or run over by their own longing for achievement.

Choe still believes in Santa Claus, announcing it publicly, and unironically, for the first time at almost (now) 50. As a child, when someone told him Santa wasn’t real, he decided Santa was real but just didn’t bring him presents because he was bad.

On the verge of tears, from the Huberman Lab episode, December 2025—

I can’t sit still because that means I have to sit with myself and I can’t do that.

I can’t do that.

I couldn’t do that—I couldn’t do that.

I can now.

CHOEYMON

Choeymon arrived on February 2, 2026: 888 packs, ten cards each, Pokemon-inspired art rendered in Choe’s hand across textured foil, cracked ice, and holo finishes. Munkomon, Choemon, Pikachu through Choe’s line, Mega Charizard reimagined in dirty-style brushwork.

Every pack carried a chance at an original 1/1 hand-painted card, a Choe painting the size of a playing card, tucked inside a $45,445 eight-pack set sold through Rowang Gallery on Artsy.

From shame to grace. CHOEYMON.com is here. I came out of my cave of isolation.

All proceeds back to the Meleka Foundation, the same Hadza community he’d been funding since Tanzania. A fifteen-year-old can hold a Choe original in his hand for fifty bucks.

Why Saving David Choe Means Saving Yourself

On March 13, 2026, Reuters published a year-long investigation identifying Banksy as Robin Gunningham, a Bristol native who’d later adopted the name David Jones.

“There is no Robin Gunningham,” Lazarides told Reuters. “The name you’ve got I killed years ago.”

A decade earlier, Choe had written that unmasking Banksy would serve no one, that the only people worth unmasking were villains.

Choe on March 9, 2016—

Who is Banksy?

Banksy is Batman he is not Robin.

Choe’s response to the unmasking, posted as an Instagram Story on March 18th, accompanied by a still of Spider-Man being carried:

There was an
Understanding
When Spider-Man was
unmasked
You saw my face
Now shut the fu<k up
About it
if you want me to keep
protecting you
Than you protect me
You didn’t see sh!t

Somewhere on Western Avenue there’s a whale on a cracked off-white slab of concrete between a transmission shop and a taquería. Four feet tall, no arms, no legs, one tooth, and a hole in its head. The spray paint is so old the color has left it. It’s been repainted twice.

Soy sauce, blood, Krylon, stock options, and trading cards.

Different paint on different walls, in cities that kept changing, over decades that didn’t slow down. Underneath all of it, the same kid trying to get past the part of himself that kept score to the part that could finally sit still.

Choe finally did.

• All uncredited images c/o David Choe

Where’s the foundation for all of this come from?

I guess for me, there was never a time or point in my life I can remember where music wasn’t around. A time where it wasn’t playing on the radio, riding in the car with my mom, my sisters, my brother. The same goes for in the house, or just the neighborhood.

Some of my earliest memories when I think of music... I think of Video Jukebox, watching that, hoping someone would request videos that I wanted to see. My mom wasn’t hearin’ that, you know what I mean? [laughs]

I think I got the chance to do that one time, ever.

It was dope to have a place where I could see all the artists I admired, to see the culture.

The shows and movies of the 80’s as well. From Breakin’ to Flashdance with that brief b-boying scene in the movie. That was huge for me, because before I knew I wanted to rap, I just loved hip-hop culture in general. I wanted to dance.

I used to dance far more than I went around quoting my favorite rap lyrics. It was difficult to pinpoint a specific moment of when I fell in love with it [hip-hop]. Around the age of 10 is when I first wrote my first actual rap.

It took a few years, though, before I decided that’s what I was going to do.

The dancing you mentioned, give me some years. Was the influence coming from b-boy culture or?

Definitely.

I didn’t know what “b-boying” was personally. I wasn’t in a major city like LA; I was in Prince George’s County, Maryland. Specifically, a small city called Landover.

So, at that particular time, I didn’t really see who really called themselves a “b-boy” or “b-girl” because of where I was at.

Right.

I’d see it on the television, and there were people in the neighborhood that’d play around with some moves, but they weren’t serious about breaking [breakdancing]. This was the early 80’s, I was infatuated. When school plays would end they’d bring up a few kids up on the stage, throw on some music, and let us dance.

I remember trying to do a headspin, all types of... man, look, I was all-in. You couldn’t tell me nothin’. [laughs]

I want to say as b-boying and breakdancing fell off a bit in the area I was in, videos moved away from showing you breaking in them, and more so these choreographed routines, less freestyle.

Watching people like Big Daddy Kane with Scoob and Scrap, and then MC Lyte, who had the ‘leg 1, leg 2...’–Heavy D and the Boyz who had their own dance, Stezo as well. Rest in peace, he passed not too long ago, rest in peace to Heavy D as well.

These videos that were coming out–late 80’s, early 90’s with these intricate dance routines... for the longest, that’s what I wanted for me. I wanted some part of hip-hop, and dancing probably was my first true love of the elements.

Followed by graff [graffiti] art, followed by music in the double digits [his 20’s].

Your logotype for the ‘Substantial’ brand is a tag.

Yeah, that’s a tag I did in Jun’s [Nujabes] studio.

It was a tag I was already using, but refined it in the studio.

We took a quick break and talked about the tag—the one across much of his previous work’s labels. A short detour into Nujabes, and then we landed on hip-hop itself.

What it means to different people. Whether it’s a culture, an art form, a lifestyle, or all of it folded together. Whether boxing it into a single definition even makes sense—or whether leaving it undefined risks diluting the very thing worth preserving.

Some say hip-hop is a culture, others say an art form, or perhaps a lifestyle. What’s your take on that discussion of what hip-hop is? Does it have to fit in a box?

Yeah, man. [acknowledgement]

It’s one of those things very hard to fit into a box.

It started out as a culture, right? [takes a second to gather thoughts]

People from a specific community... things they did on a regular basis ultimately became a norm throughout so many communities and states around the world.

Something which originated in the project houses, the block parties, and such things where people had never seen or experienced firsthand. The way the music, the art, the dancing flowed. What is now the norm, was at one time, very unique to a small community. That’s how cultures become cultures.

When you look at what it is today–and shout out to the Universal Hip-Hop Museum, I am so excited–

I saw the post with Nas and Fat Joe meeting Slick Rick.

Right, right.

I’ve reached out to them [the museum] and have been speaking with some of the folks involved. I’m very dedicated in the preservation of hip-hop; we can see how easy it is for roots to be lost, and what ignorance can result in.

Sometimes people get offended when you point out certain things, when you’re giving them truth. They take it as being racist, or exclude a certain people.

That’s not it at all; it’s just important to know where things started, before it became everybody’s. It belonged to a very small group of people, and we should acknowledge those folks.

Hip-hop is much larger than a culture or a subculture today. This thing we love has employed God knows how many people, right? How many people have been able to raise themselves out of poverty because of this ‘thing’ that came out of the South Bronx?

How many people have inspired other people because of this? Cities, places they’ve never been, that’s become global.

All because of this ‘thing’ that started in the South Bronx.

Man... I think all of the great things in the world which go on and touch and inspire so many people, it starts with a small group of people and goes global.

Then, it takes a life of its own and you can’t control it.

In a very real way, it is saving lives. Those who didn’t commit self-harm because they heard a song, or, you know... how many ex-gangbangers are hip-hop artists?

People forget some who are very socially-conscious came from that cloth. Common was a gangbanger, you know what I’m sayin’?

It’s beautiful.

It’s definitely a culture for me; it’s changed my life, and how it influences my day-to-day. I’d tend to agree that it’s much larger than that now.

Stan is one of a handful of preservationists who actively make moves to keep hip-hop bound to its roots. The art form has been a lifelong influence; he’s had run-ins with some of its OGs along the way.

Many before him have said the same thing—you need to live it to fully understand it.

We took a step back and got into his debut; what led up to that project coming together.

Your debut was in ‘01. What are you doing between the early 90’s and the drop of To This Union A Sun Was Born? Acclimation to the underground battle scene?

By the time I was in high school, this is ‘93 or ‘94, I really started to rap for real. Everyone talks about being in the cafeteria, at the lunch tables, beating on the tables [freestyling]. My high school was near Washington D.C., and the indigenous music of that area is go-go music.

A popular aspect of the genre is covering songs. We’d be at the lunch tables rapping, doing covers of our favorite songs. At some point in time, my signature sound–not just my production, but my voice–my homies kept coming to me saying I started sounding better than the rappers I was rapping.

I wasn’t saying that, but they were, so it built confidence. One of my close homies came to me and said exactly that, and said he’d go home and write a rap and for me to do the same, my man Tijuan.

I can blame him for all these songs. I’ll be sure to share this with him, we still keep in touch.

So I went home, I wrote something, he wrote something. Tijuan is really talented, and he said ‘yeah, bro, you should just go and do that’ you know what I’m sayin’?

I just kept trying to refine my skill and by that summer I recorded my first demo. Alongside my man Kaji, who now goes by Flip One. I recorded it with him, and DJ Ruckus. Flip One later did a track off my Sacrificial Lambs project called I Own You.

I literally met Kaji–the day I met Kaji, I stayed the night at his house, I was 14 or 15 at the time. Called my mom, she talked to his folks, trusted him, so I spent the night recording my demo. I risked it all back then, could’ve gotten snatched up!

That was the start of it. As soon as that happened, I was in talks–as soon as I had that demo, things began to move. This was ‘94.

I met this guy around the way who claimed to have ties at Columbia [Records], he put me in touch with some folks who were playing my stuff. A&R’s at the time, had talks about me and my boys Cash and Jamal. The company at the time was only interested in me, and I refused to part ways as a group.

I passed up on doing more work with those folks and tried to develop my craft even further.

Ended up moving from Landover to Suitland, right behind the high school I was attending. The reason for the move was there was a shooting which occurred, where I was almost shot during an altercation that transpired.

I was already cool with Acem from the rap group Gods’illa, T.Lucas, Bird and Chris AKA Warchild by now I was 15, and was producing my own beats.

My mom and I would barter; we’d barter and meet half-way. That was me and mom’s relationship through middle school and high school. As long as I did what I had to do in school, she’d work with me (to buy recording equipment).

A local indie label approached the group I was in, and expressed interest, affiliated with Mercury Records. After realizing there was only interest in two of the guys, T-Lucas and Warchild, in retrospect, it was the first moment I was really shitted on.

Oh no. [laughs]

[laughs]

I say it like that because they gave me–and yo, I’ve been reading contracts since I was 15, and at this time I was 16 now–so the contract basically said I couldn’t rap first, last, or be featured on a song with just myself and one other member of the group.

Due to the label having a production team, I wasn’t able to create beats either, and keep in mind I was the group’s producer.

Very limiting. Restraining.

Exactly.

At this point I’m battling in freestyles every day, and it was a shock. My writing clearly wasn’t what it could have been at that time, if I took more time with it. Needless to say, I rejected the contract, and the other two guys signed.

Fast-forward to high school, I make a reputation within my peer group for music, I start attending battles locally. I’m a young kid, so no high profile stuff yet. Hip-hop wasn’t as popular as go-go music in these days, at least local hip-hop.

There’s a song where I said, ‘back when this shit wasn’t cool to do,’ and it was the truth, man. Back when I’d rap, they’d think it was corny unless it was over go-go music. Unless it was over gangsta rap shit, because where we were, it was the hood.

There’s a song where I said, ‘back when this shit wasn’t cool to do,’ and it was the truth, man.

Back when I’d rap, some would think it was corny unless it was over go-go music. Or unless it was gangsta rap shit because where we were, it was the hood.

I was a product of the same environment but I went a different route.

I was trying to find that balance and battle rap was an easy thing for me to really fall in love with; we [peer group] would crack jokes all the time on each other. It was almost an extension of that, with music.

Looking towards college in ‘97, I was applying to hip-hop meccas. I wanted to be wherever the dope shit is. Philly, New York, I wanted to be where hip-hop was.

Eventually I was accepted into Pratt Institute, and by the end of my freshman year in ‘98, linked up with PackFM. Throughout that year, got into the open mic scene and made a name for myself. From there, met up with Mr. Mecc as well.

Don’t remember how long he went undefeated for, but PackFM was one of the best battle emcess out of NYC at the time; and this was the dude I was runnin’ with. We joined forces, so to speak.

Over time we started rubbing elbows with more people in the battle scene, people like PH AKA Pumpkinhead, rest in peace.

Eventually we became part of a crew called The Plague, which included PH, GMS, Wildchild (not to be confused with West Coast Wild Child of Lootpack), LR Blitzkrieg, PackFM, Mr. Mecc, Session, Tonedeff, DP One, Kameel-yen, and Jean Grae at the time. Also, shout out to Jin who was also down with us for a minute.

DJ DP One, Hydra, shout out to Hydra, Blitzkrieg, Wildchild (not to be confused with West Coast Wild Child), Session... Jin the MC, which he was called back then, was down with us for a minute.

These stories matter to hip-hop. Every artist took a different path, and those paths rarely get documented in any real depth—biographical or otherwise.

The anecdotes and reflections are what hold the culture together when you scope out and look at the bigger picture.

Speak on Jin and how that came together.

It was crazy when I met Jin; I had heard about ‘this Asian dude’ in the battle scene.

Was this right at the turn of the millenium, like ‘99 or ‘00?

Yes. Right before or right after I linked with Jun [Nujabes]. This was pre-Ruff Ryders stuff with Jin, hadn’t been on 106 & Park yet, none of that. He had just moved into the area, and I had heard his name come up several times within the battle scene.

I hosted a battle, as I ran this hip-hop organization at Pratt Institute called 4 Corners, and Jin came through for an emcee battle. At the time there was a mixtape I was on, called 24-Hour MC, shout out to John Frasier, my man Chew Fu, and all these brothers that came through.

When I used to work up there with PackFM, I had a freestyle on that joint, just a blackout verse. Talk my shit and that’s it. This dude Jin got a hold of that mixtape, so when I met him, and hosted that battle, he was a fan. He was quotin’ my verse, bar for bar!

Again, at that time, we were underground, underground. I hadn’t even had a record out yet. When we had those moments–me, PackFM, and Mr. Mecc, we’d go to these local places and do events without records out yet; we’d go to certain places, and when we used to host events, people knew us and our songs. Just off our live performances, averaging around 2 gigs a week.

Jin showed mad love, we hit it off instantly. Outside of amazingly talented and skilled, he was a genuinely good guy. Good people; it didn’t take much for us to hit it off. Even after he got with Ruff Ryders, we kept in touch. Dude was really heavy into the battle scene.

Funny enough, I was and still am good friends with DJ Enuff’s cousin. He heard me spit in ‘98, and wanted to introduce me to his cousin, and I was thinking ‘here we go,’ you know–

Been there before.

Exactly. So he said ‘oh, you don’t believe me?’ and hit him up right then and there. I heard DJ Enuff’s voice, and it was crazy. I spit a verse for him over the phone, he was still A&R over at Def Jam, and he wanted me to send him some work.

At this point in my life, like many folks who want to be professional, I can’t give him the shit I did like a year ago. I’m a better rapper now, the verse I spit on the phone was a week old, and I’m about to give him something 2 years old?

I start recording a demo, I get it to my man Jaemin, Jaemin gets it to his cousin [DJ Enuff], and Enuff goes ‘yo, you took too long, dog’–

No way.

That was a blow.

It was a bit disappointing because I knew he was really into my stuff. Here I was with this demo, and I get hit up by Nujabes, but I didn’t know who he was. Internet was not what it is now.

This random dude [at the time] hittin’ me up, and if it was not for the fact he said Tomo’s name, I would’ve hung up, thinking it was a practical joke.

I was a college student; being hit up by a dude I had never heard of before, from a foreign country saying he made beats and wanting to fly me over... yeah, I mean... I’m just happy that I’m an adventurous guy and I took him up for it.

Life became very different.

That call from Jun, the guy from Japan, a country Stan had never had any contact with prior, was a turning point in his career.

The unlikelihood of the exchange borders on comedic; even scripted for a movie, it wouldn’t pass the sniff test. It set the tone for the next few years leading into the early 00’s and beyond.

Stan and Jun have an unreleased album. The title? Stan couldn’t recall right away, but it was one of the beat names on Bullshit As Usual by the legendary Pase Rock. One of those beats was supposed to be Stan’s, but it never played out.

I wanted to learn more about that shift Stan mentioned in his life.

He references his father passing several times throughout his music:

“...on my grown man steez since my papa died... in ‘89,”
—Another Day In The Life

“10 when my pops passed”
—Ain’t No Happy Endings

Going off that point about life taking a large shift–speak on that if you’re comfortable with it.

I’m actually named after my father.

We had different middle names, so that’s why I’m not a “Jr.”–let’s just say he wasn’t the most loving person.

Perhaps in the eyes of people today, they’d call him abusive. I didn’t know what abuse was at that time. All I knew was if you did something wrong, your ass got whooped.

Let’s back up for a sec. [pauses and takes a deep breath in]

So my mom and dad had me in ‘79, and were together for a bit. They had a huge fight, maybe I was 5 or 6.

Prior to that, I remember my mom getting me up in the middle of the night and taking me out of the house and leaving my dad. Might have been 4 or so, I remember I was very young. Maybe a year or so later, they got back together.

My father was a scary dude; very explosive temper.

[pauses]

If I got in trouble and he wasn’t around, I’d pray it’d get resolved before he came home, you know what I mean?

Intimidating presence.

Very, and when my mom split after that big fight–and it was really bad, I remember a knife coming out, my father’s hand bleeding, me and mom barricading the door.

When they went their separate ways he was living in Queens as a chef, I remember him bragging about LL Cool J coming into the restaurant he worked at. Little things like that.

When he came back the final time when he was sick, he was losing weight but still pretty large. Yo, I just remember people in my neighborhood was so scared of my dad. So scared.

As the story goes, someone touched my sister inappropriately, and my father–broad daylight–starts shooting at the dude, middle of everything, broad daylight.

Oh, man.

So when my dad returned, friends of mine would not knock on my front door, when they knew; they’d come knock on my window.

I remember the first time a friend came and knocked on the window it scared the shit out of me and I asked him why he was doing that and he said “yo, your father is scary as shit,”–but everyone loved my mom.

My father got back together with my mom, got married; I think a lot of that was getting back together with what little time he had to legally make the transition of property easier to help set up and provide help to my mom. I don’t know the reasoning for sure, but I take circumstances into consideration. He lived for around 4 more months.

When I processed all the information I had access to as I grew older, I came to the conclusion he wanted to use his last few months to spend time with family before he passed away.

How’d all of this affect your music?

So, I didn’t write my first rhyme until I was hanging out with my friend in Palmer Park named Tony, who goes by Black Bandit now.

More than anything, he [father] affected my art in general. The reason I say that is, a lot of people don’t know I’m a visual artist as well. I went to Pratt for graphic design, etc., and the only thing I liked more than dancing when I was young was drawing.

My older brother is an amazing artist in his own right. When I was applying to Pratt, I mentioned how my dad used to tell me straight up, “boy, you can’t draw, your brother–he can draw–you, you can’t draw, though”–who the hell says that to a 9-year-old, bro?

How cold are you?

It shakes you up. Shakes you to the core.

Yeah, man, absolutely.

Me as an educator now, I know that there are so many better ways to go about expressing that; not lying to someone about their ability, but informing them with support and constructive criticism.

Let me see if there is some potential to be tapped into.

If it was me, talking to my daughter, since I don’t have a son–if I’m going to make comparison between my daughters, I don’t want to inject any animosity to drive those two apart. It creates unhealthy competition, spite, and all these other things.

I reflect on that a lot–what I would have said in that situation.

The label mirrored it. Never believing in him, never giving him a shot, never letting him prove what he could do. All inference, all assumption.

Stan wanted to change that in any way he could, and it started with his family. How could he support his kids’ dreams? In what ways could he push their ideals forward?

No complex approach. Kindness, and genuine encouragement.

Always support them.

Right, very important.

So, I look at my kids, and who I ended up becoming. It’s tricky, man. Due to not struggling like I was when I was younger, such things are optional–my daughters can do these things if they want to, but they shouldn’t feel the need to prove something to anyone. Which is both a gift and a curse; because of what my father said to me, I had a very big chip on my shoulder.
It made me a better artist, because still to this day, I feel as if I’m still trying to prove my dad wrong, even in my music.

That contract they [the label] gave me way back then. That shitty ass contract, when I read that contract...

[pause]

Yo, I felt like I was reading that in my father’s voice. You know what I mean? It’s like... and by that time, he’d of been passed 6 years prior.

For anyone who sees this [piece]–I’m not sure how far they’ll get into it. We know I’m not the biggest artist in the world, and I’m still alive, so there’s that. Right?

[laughs]

Fact of the matter is, I look at what I’ve accomplished in spite of lack of support in certain circumstances from certain people... my dad didn’t, but my mom was ride or die. She always supported anything I did, even if she didn’t understand it.

“If your grades aren’t what they should be, maybe college ain’t for you, there’s always the military,”

You know? Like, shit, the military? I’ma make this work now!

[laughs and pauses]

I always managed to find “it” somewhere else. What I couldn’t get in one place, I could never quit easily, and would always find support in other places.

In many ways your story acts as a parallel to a core idea of the pursuance of hip-hop as a career, never phased by obstacles. By any means necessary.

For sure, man. Making something out of nothing. That’s what my line is about in Black of All Trades; a tribute to hip-hop itself.

[recites the verse below]

“I can paint a picture with words or just brushes
Make something out of nothing ain’t nothing to make something
Cutting up samples while keeping the bass pumping
Nothing we can’t handle I will have this place jumping”

That’s what hip-hop is.

All these kids became amazing funk artists, jazz artists, R&B, hip-hop... these careers, this lifestyle... a lot of the programming I teach now relates.

There weren’t DJ school, b-boy classes, no rapping. I’ve dedicated more than two decades of my life to create these programs in communities which they never existed in.

Regardless of what you don’t have, there’s always a way.

Stan grew up around over 100 jazz records in the house. That collection shaped his early digging habits and built the foundation for how he approached music—vibes, grooves, specific tones, catching a certain atmosphere in the air.

It’d be a disservice to the OG himself, Naphta “Funky DL” Newman, if we mentioned funk and didn’t tap him in.

A jazz and hip-hop preservationist of two decades, DL is well-respected old guard of the UK hip-hop scene. I wanted to know what he thought of his long-time friend, and what sort of impact he sees:

Stan has always demonstrated a high level of diversity in his music, delivering lyricism with effortless finesse over an assortment of styles across his releases. What has impressed me the most is the thought-provoking subject matter he conveys, dealing with issues from socio-economic to race and family. His impact in hip-hop is unquestionable and he serves as a supremely competent rapper, embodying the purity of what it truly is to be an MC.

The importance of community is evidently prominent in Stan’s messaging and this is not only exemplified in his art, but equally is the case as an educator, where he invests and contributes positivity into the lives of the younger generation. Stan’s contribution to hip-hop is unequivocally immeasurable.

I swung back to Extended Famm—how it came together. By this point, Stan was traveling constantly, building a reputation as an emcee you didn’t want to face on the mic.

He was hungry to push his own boundaries. He needed a spark.

That takes us to around ‘02, ‘03... shed some light on how E-Famm (Extended Famm) came together.

Sure.

It was definitely before ‘01; me and PackFM linked up with Tonedeff and went out to his place, which is where we met Session (Jose Singh) for the first time. We recorded the opening track from our album, Happy Fuck You Songs, and at the time we recorded that track we weren’t E-Famm yet, just emcees in a studio.

We were happy how it turned out and started discussion about how we all were like extended family. Different crews, rep different spots, but we had good chemistry. We had our core fam, and expanding at this point, so we just took that and ran with it. Had a lot of fun, man.

The idea of taking this and seeing how far we could push it each time. That opening track [The Evil Pens That Do] is probably the only shit-talk track on the album. Outside of that, when we rapped on a track together, we wanted to push the boundaries, like using the telephone game as a concept on Celly.

I think the album had 75 tracks or something crazy when we were making it.

75? Damn.

Yeah, and if you look at any of my solo releases which feature E-Famm, we could have just gone back and relied on our typical battle rap shit, but you’ll find that we explored very complex concepts and attempted to again, push boundaries of our own creativity.

Every time we did it, take Sign Language off of Sacrifice. Very intricate track.

At this point in your life, the early 00’s, how are you studying and learning about hip-hop? Is it a conscious effort?

Absolutely, at this time I’m very much so living it.

When Rock Steady Weekends happen during the summer, we’re there. That evolved into us actually participating, then being featured, then having our own showcase–the QN5 Megashows, during the weekends.

Fans would come from around the world, to New York, for Rock Steady. Our hardcore fans could check out the showcase, showing all the artists on QN5 [label] at the time and affiliates.

Bumping into legends all the time. When we put out the album with E-Famm, rest in peace to Black Rob, we used to have Fuck You, I Rhyme Better t-shirts, and Black Rob saw us with them on at SOB’s and bought one off us.

Matter fact, when people listen to my Substantial Evidence mixtape, you’ll hear Black Rob doin’ the drop on the project as Ain’t No Happy Endings comes onto the mixtape; that’s him on the chorus before it drops.

Grand Puba was on there as well.

Yo, like, being in New York, it was like being in a movie.

Was this in ‘03 or so?

Yeah. I dropped Substantial Evidence in ‘03. I was working with Jun [Nujabes] and at this time, not many knew who he was. It was difficult to find an average hip-hop fan that knew; Samurai Champloo didn’t exist yet, so folks just didn’t know him.

Outside of the rapping, I was meeting legendary beatboxers as well. When I wasn’t rapping, I’d love to beatbox. So I’m out there in New York meeting people like Kenny Muhammad, while I’m in Harlem.

Is this on the fly? Walking around?

Just out, bro.

Just out and about living life. [laughs]

This was the funny thing, though. You didn’t have to actively seek out “hip-hop” in New York. It just presented itself. You’d be walking down the street and notice “Oh, shit, the Gang Starr video was shot here!,” something like that.

Take when Jun first contacted me in ‘99, the apartment I was living in at that time was right next door to the building Biggie [Smalls] lived in, grew up in. This is after he passed, of course, but I lived on the same street.

I moved up there toward the end of the year that he passed, and then about a year and a half later–I was living in the building next door.

A lot of history took place there, the stories you hear of him, the Juicy video where the backdrop is a little strip with convenient stores and whatnot, and That was my neighborhood for real.

Near St. James?

Yes, near St. James, that whole Clinton Hill area.

We have a lot of classic hip-hop albums dropping in this time period. Your sound is distinctively different from any of those, though. Were you against mimicking these albums or?

It had a lot to do with the music I grew up on. It wasn’t so much that I was trying to distance myself from those artists; a lot of them are from a different place than I’m from, geographically. I’m from PG [Prince George’s] County, so the outskirts of DC.

A lot of people around me were listening to artists such as Scarface; the truth in his lyrics, he’s telling a story people can relate heavily to. I’m not even going to pretend; I had homies you couldn’t tell them shit. Scarface was God, you know? [laughs]

I’ve grown to appreciate it [the messages] more as I’ve grown. That sound was around me all the time, and the type of hip-hop I kept spinning all day long were artists like A Tribe Called Quest, or Common, or Pharcyde. Redman as well, since he was a battle emcee. Those are some of my favorite artists. At the same time, though, I love Ice Cube as well.

Artists who were street, and artists sampling soulful jazzy stuff. A balance. Even when you listen to Scarface–almost a blues-ier hip-hop. That stuff was around me all the time.

When the chance came to make my own stuff, to do some demos, I’m sampling a lot of old jazz records I had. When I connected with Jun, his sound was more throwback than what I was doing myself.

Homies would say similar things when they heard my sound; I don’t want to say it ostracized me, but I knew full well that it would make it an uphill battle in the current landscape.

Sometimes good, sometimes bad.

A lot of people don’t know, but I DJ’d as well at one point, and I had a struggle thinking about how it would fit. When I played my stuff with other stuff, it didn’t fit in. It was a different path to take, and it was going to be challenging.

Just happy the way it turned out.

I hit up the other half of Bop Alloy and close friend of Stan, Marcus "Marcus D" Marino and he had this to say about Stan's path through the hip-hop game, and what kind of person he is behind the mic:

To say Stan’s contributions to the art, culture, and various hip-hop scenes that have been lucky enough to have him are noteworthy, would be an understatement.

Stan is one of, if not the hardest working dude I’ve ever met, and not just when it comes to rhyming. He works hard for his family, his friends, his community, and he’s always trying to increase the quality of life for those around him. I don’t know anybody else like that.

I think a lot of people love to facilitate a public image like they’re always grinding yada yada, but it’s just an act. Stan’s actually putting in the legwork all the time, and usually pulling more than his own weight. He’s somebody you can rely on, and that’s getting rarer and rarer.

How’d you link with Marcus D?

In 2007, Marcus was still in high school, maybe 16 or 17? He was still a kid when he hit me up. He reaches out on MySpace, tells me he’s working on a project–his debut–I ended up doing a couple tracks for it. Enjoy Yourself is one of those tracks.

When I heard his stuff, there was something about it which reminded me of Nujabes, but his drums and production–Marcus had harder hitting drums, it was a good middle ground where it’s familiar to me, but still has these beautiful samples over them.

I played it for an agent of mine who was focused more so on Japan movement, and told him if we got this kid on board, something special could happen. Me and Marcus ended up doing a whole project together.

Bop Alloy?

Yes, the birth of Bop Alloy!

Anyone who knows me on the business side of things, they’ll know that I have named quite a few groups. Shout out to Fresh Daily if he sees this!

Tell me about how that came about. Fresh Daily.

He’s the guy that shoots up the block party in the Poetic Justice video.

He used to go by Ill Tarzan, and was runnin’ with my crew UV. Most of the crew was from Maryland, some from New York. When he ran with us he started to buzz heavier, got some magazine features.

Out of nowhere he gets a cease and desist from the family who owns the rights to Tarzan [Disney].

Came in with the sad face into the crib. Told us the story, and I clowned him. He was pissed–Fresh if you read this, you know I love you.

I told him they were doing him a favor; and more importantly, he had a story. Right?

First, he came up with an alternative name–Fresh All Day–and I told him I didn’t think that was it. It was a play on his fashion sense, he was always fresh.

I used to work at JP Morgan Chase, and my supervisor’s last name was Daly. She came in, while I was writing notes jotting down what to do with it, and I was trying different stuff.

“Nah, this ain’t it. That ain’t it, either.”

Then, I hear someone say “Ms. Daly!”–that was it, Fresh Daily.

I write the shit down, tell him, and he was hesitant at first. The moment he went with Fresh Daily, he started poppin’.

Hella moves. The right name can create a lot of opportunities for you.

Another quick example is Gods’Illa, inspired by a Talib Kweli line I heard:

“Thinkin you fly, signin contracts with the devil, but God’s iller.
We flatten your town like Godzilla”

The rest is history.

I want to move up a bit. So after your second release on QN5 with Dub MD, it’s around 2011.

Now between 2012 and 2017 you have three albums release... I tend to group them together as they come off as a maturation of self.

I want to ask you–would you agree with that, and if so, could you break those three down a bit? They seem linked.

That’s a great observation.

At the time I’m writing the first Bop Alloy album, I had just become a father. I’m still “in it” and navigating my way through it [the hip-hop scene and life itself]. Part of me is resistant to change, I’m touring like crazy around the world at this point with CunninLynguists, this is before 2012.

On the road for a month, three different times a year. I’m still not fully into fatherhood mode yet, but by the time 2012 comes, I have a 4-year-old daughter. My album Home Is Where The Art Is dropped right before my daughter turned 4. There’s a lot more references to her and being a father and my world view. It was different. Shit that was different a few years prior, I could really [not] give a fuck about at this point.

You have to raise a kid, sure.

Yeah, man.

I was blessed enough that I feel like the relationship between my wife and I had just gotten better. You have to find yourself, and who you are together; how you both can continue to grow, while not growing apart. At the same time, not sacrificing who you are, what your goals are, there’s a lot of stuff and a lot changed by that point in time.

I had a fallout with Tonedeff and QN5, which has since been worked out so no issues speaking on it–that’s my brother–but at the time, we had a falling out. I decided I wasn’t going to put the record out with QN5.

Shout out to Kno from CunnunLynguists, I was on tour with him and remember exactly where we were when he gave me the idea for the album. We were in Bern, Switzerland, writing the Bop Alloy record. I was on tour with them, promoting their album and mine, which was Sacrifice at the time, all of this simultaneously.

The album Home Is Where The Art Is was originally going to be called Mr. Robinson’s Neighborhood, based on Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood but with an Eddie Murphy spin on it, you know?

[laughs]

Kno suggested himself to help with my upcoming album; he also suggested Oddisee. Like I said, the topics are largely inspired by my family life.

Gordon Parks, a name often associated with photography, serves as a large inspiration to you when it comes to the way you look at the world and otherwise.

Yes. Gordon Parks was a photographer, a journalist, he wrote symphonies, the first black director. He directed The Learning Tree which was based on a book he wrote; he was an author.

He directed Shaft, a lot of people forget!

When you look at his photography, this dude... you think of all the shit he done, and when you see The Learning Tree he scored all of that, too.

So, I’m reading his book The Smile In Autumn, and on Bop Alloy’s second album, we have a song called Autumn Leaves inspired by that book.”

The reason that book hit me so hard is that he dives into his early 30’s in the book; he talks about how from that point of time in his life, and then another generation–the “autumn years” of his life–and what he did in that period of time. Not necessarily in the “winter years” of his life just yet.

The autumn years may be the years when people tend to fall off. I was scared as fuck to turn 30; I thought my rap career was burnt. In those years, my 30’s, I found my voice and I really became super comfortable in my skin. My level of “I don’t give a fuck-ness” was higher than it had ever been.

[laughs]

Put that in quotes.

[pauses]

I stopped playing the game others told me how it should be played. Being an underground artist, you’re already somewhat of an outcast. What about the outcasts of the outcasts?

I’m cool with everyone at the lunch table, though. I know legends, I could call Kool Herc right now, you know?

I have all these connections, but I don’t have to exist in the places they’ve already... I don’t need to ride in their lane. I’ve learned enough to build my own lane and exist within and sustain it.

Me and Tone started talking again, and he wanted me to play with the EP. This was at a time where people started to drop EPs more. The Past, Always and Present were born.

Crowdfunding the second Bop Alloy album was a quiet victory. Mello Music didn’t follow up, they had parted ways with QN5, and the campaign was proof that fans still cared about the music.

For Stan, it re-affirmed something larger—his rap career could keep moving forward without worrying about stability. Nearing 40, he was what many would consider an old man in a young man’s game.

The entire conversation up to this point suggests otherwise. Every move Stan described—the informed decisions, the clever navigation—pointed to someone whose experience was the advantage, not the liability.

After that, you have what I think is your best work, and a strong example of the maturation I mentioned earlier. You’re an older, more wise artist on The Past Is Always Present In The Future and have a storied career at this point. Over two decades. Talk to me about that and what it means, the record itself and otherwise.

Hands down the record I’m most proud of. If you were to go through all my shit and ask me, at this moment... because I’m cookin’ some good shit... [laughs] but if you were to ask me what is the best representation of who I am as an artist, that’s the one.

That’s the one where I figured it [life] out. I’ve been producing since I was 15.

You work with all these legends and dope ass artists, they’re all sick producers. Makes you hesitant to throw your shit out there, you know?

What’s The Garden about? Tell me about the cover and approach.

I wanted to try my hand at an instrumental project, dip my toes into the water, see how the fans took it.

I had some pictures leftover from a trip to the New York Botanical Garden located in the Bronx.

They took it very well, I have a mini project called Seeds from 2017, and when I saw how that was being consumed, I knew I had to make something larger. It was a seed I planted, hence the title.

I knew the tracks they liked, I knew The Garden had stuff on there which was even better and it was the direction I wanted to try out.

You’ve been extremely involved with education enrichment for young kids, as well as activism within the black community.

It would not be an understatement to say you’ve dedicated your entire life to that, outside of music and family.

Tell me about where it all started, and what drives the passion to help others.

Even before I met Jun in ‘99, I had been doing youth work.

Helping people in the community, and what have you. It was kind of something... not necessarily I knew was going to be exactly the way it turned out, but I went back and read my letter I wrote to Pratt, and one of the things I mentioned in there was that I wanted to always give back to my community and be involved.

Be a person my community could look to, not just inspiration but for help or service.

A flashback, sort of. Damn, you know? My sister just happened to have paperwork on hand and I found the letter.

The dopest part about doing all of it is that subconsciously, I always knew that I would be doing something relative. I didn’t know exactly how it’d look, but I knew it’d be something like what I’m doing.

The way it came about was in high school, when I had to do my volunteer hours–you could volunteer recruitment efforts for the art department, and so I’d go to school at 7:00AM, I had 10 classes because I was in a performing arts program, so I’d be out of school at 4:00PM, then still be at school until 7:00-8:00PM giving tours to kids that wanted to check out the art department.

This evolved into me visiting middle schools, speaking to kids about how an opportunity like an art department could genuinely change their lives.

Shout out to Suitland High School, that shit literally saved my life.

It was dumb luck how you got into the arts program as well, right? Speak on that.

I was staying at a friend’s house overnight, he was applying for the arts program that weekend. I was in the waiting room, drawing in my notebook to the side. The woman who was there was so impressed, she asked if I was there to take the test.

I said no, and she was intrigued enough to want me to take the test; she called my mom up. I had no portfolio, nothing, and they tested me on the spot after verbal permission from my mom.

That summer, I got into this high school which had a strong focus on art programs, and the irony of it all is, my boy didn’t.

A shot in the dark.

We were just texting the other day, this been my man since kindergarten. My man Jamal, who I mentioned earlier.

My success in anything that I do... [pauses]

Without that school, I don’t get into Pratt.

I wouldn’t know art schools existed without that high school, so I would never have made it to Brooklyn, or Pratt.

I wouldn’t know Tomo, which means I don’t meet Nujabes.

Which means I don’t meet Tone, it goes on and on. That school has connections to everything. That’s where I started rhyming, that’s where I started getting competitive.

It laid foundation for me to be creative and made me realize the importance of speaking to kids about it. Poetry workshops, rap workshops, how to rap, how to enter the art scene.

What it was doing for me, I knew it could do for others.

Shout out to my friends at the Brooklyn Tea Party and my friend Micah–he’s a great visual artist and sick poet as well. Although he praised me for my battle raps, he always pushed me to go deeper and embrace more personal raps.

Now, when you go anywhere to perform, where it’s classified as a socially conscious venue, there is always, 100% a teacher in the crowd. Always.

Stan took a step back to talk about the black student organizations at Pratt—they existed, but lacked direction or any real emphasis on innovation. He wanted to change that, and did, with a student-led group called Origination.

He jumped back to something funny: teachers were always in the crowd. Stand-up comedy gigs, hip-hop gigs, any type of conscious venue. Always there.

He was right.

That’s right, that’s right. [laughing]

A fuckload, always in the crowd, you know what I’m sayin’? [laughing]

So, when I started performing both in Japan as well as stateside, when teachers would see me perform, they would request me to speak to their students.

Again, this is before people knew “Nujabes” so I’d be introduced as–”Substantial, fresh from Japan!,” you know?

The importance of what an independent artist means, as well as my subject matter. The teachers wanted to tell the kids that there are other types of hip-hop.

I’m not a huge artist, I get that, but I’m making a living off it and I toured the world several times.

So, I did it a few times, I spoke to kids at schools. One really rough school I spoke at, the teachers came up afterwards and pitched the idea of working with kids more permanently, more in-depth.

I wasn’t sure what they meant, and the teachers said that I kept the kids engaged better than most adults they seen who done it most of their life.

Sure enough, this is a common sentiment I get multiple times after going to a few places. They wanted the kids to know hip-hop, graffiti art, how to rhyme, things like this.

I was heavily involved with activism as well; we were fighting the Rockefeller Drug Laws. I had to host a performance that was in Albany, New York, and then before the event we were speaking with different people in the government and informing people about what it was.

I can’t pretend about going harder than some of the members in the activism group–some of them really lived that shit day in, day out, all the time–but I was fortunate enough to be one of the individuals with a talent for speaking. I had a voice, and when I can lend my voice to something I believe in, I’ll always use it.

Even budget cuts to education in New York, education is always on the chopping block. It’s just something... you know, Q-Tip said it before–hip-hop is always political.

The trouble that the Bronx had with the gangs, and how ultimately it took a bunch of teenagers to come together and how to resolve their own problems.

I had a debate the other day about this with a friend, where they mentioned the problem lies within media and just the idea of having to explain the different sectors of hip-hop.

The real problem is that a group of people saw that a certain image could be projected to a certain degree, and they ended up taking it ‘this’ way instead of ‘that’ way.

Gangsta rap was what? A decade after Rappers’ Delight. Prior to that movement, hip-hop was not often associated with hard shit, thug shit, you know?

That’s not to say hip-hop wasn’t street. It was. For the most part, everyone was having fun. Peace, love, and unity.

They may have looked hard, been from the hood, whatever, but at the end of the day, they were still having fun.

You go to any under-served or poor community, problems like hunger, poverty, crime exists.

No matter where you go in the world.

That’s not uniquely black shit, it usually is related to green more than anything else.

Sometimes you need to let them know you’re there, as well.

Absolutely. I’m a person who is true to hip-hop. I know the culture, I know the history.

When you care about people going through the struggle, from where you’re from, you reach back. Sometimes you even go back, to let them know you’re there.

To be black is not a monolith. In many ways, I show them–not to be corny and shit–but I’m from the mud.

I’m from one of the worst neighborhoods this area has had, so when kids think their life is going to go a certain way automatically, I act as the voice to let them know they can make it.

Me talking to you, us doing this right now, me being here. It’s a miracle, an absolute miracle to me. I thought for sure I was going to be out by my early 20’s. I wasn’t even out here like my folks–out here doing wild shit–I was present for some of it. I know how much horrible shit came my way, and I was outta the way.

You were on the sidelines still being hit.

Right, and there really was no way you could not get hit. It was everywhere.

I just didn’t see any of that, because I knew people who were less involved than me, who...

Yeah, I just never saw myself being this old man. I always wanted a wife and kids, but there was always a part of me that believed it would never happen. You hope like a motherfucker, you know? If I had caught a slug or some shit, I would have been out. I would have been the last person to be surprised.

Surprises you when you make it past that. You’re in your 20’s, you meet your wife, suddenly you’re a father. Before you know it, you’re in your own autumn years.

That’s exactly why I embrace all of this. I’m not trying to fit into what people think hip-hop should be. I’m not caught up in that.

I’m embracing this moment.

I didn’t think I would have this moment, so I’m fully invested in it, loving it, and doing everything I can to immortalize this shit with as many records as I can, so they know there’s other stuff out there.

I’m less popular now, than I perhaps was in one point in time. Yet, I make exponentially more money than when I was on MTV and elsewhere.

You need to know how to navigate the game, and what works for you.

Navigating the game is something hip-hop OGs will talk about but rarely elaborate on.

Whether it's apocryphal wisdom or something you can only learn firsthand over time, it's what many swear by when asked why they lasted as long as they did.

When you’re long gone, and people look back... Who is Substantial? Who is Stan Robinson?

Family. Community. Art.

Recognizing this thing, hip-hop, often times doesn’t get viewed as true art. I dedicated my career to showing people the beautiful things which exist in this culture, and always tried to hold that up.

Even in the ugliness there is beauty. Talib had that joint The Beautiful Struggle, right?

This was the path I had to go. I’m proud of it.

Stan's dedication is evident in everything he does. With a bit of luck, I managed to get a rare contribution from the legend himself, Shingo "Shing02" Annen, on Stan's impact within hip-hop:

Stan is the quintessential MC, he is THE mic controller, an educator of the highest level, a role model, and an overall inspiration.

He is the embodiment of consistency, I am honored to have shared the same stage with him.

Big up!

Tell me about some current plays you’re making in music, I know you’ve been diving more so into the video game world. You’re a big fan of anime, video games, multimedia, we share that passion. What’s going on with that?

The most unique thing I’m working on is that I’ve been invested in a lot more video game music over the last few years. Shout out to the homie Mason Lieberman, an amazing musician in his own right and a senior composer and audio coordinator at Tencent [Games].

He gave me about 24 stems worth to work off of, and I was able to contribute to a game called Renaine. I remixed the track he gave me for that game, shout out to my man DJ AAROCK, who helped with that cut.

That was the beginning in 2017 going into 2018... fast forward, and this year alone I’ve been nominated for a Hollywood Music and Media Award along with other artists, such as Jaden Smith and others.

Very awesome.

Thank you! So that song I did [for Renaine], and then also one for Arknights, a recently-released video for Mobile Legends Bang Bang, and that track has millions of views. It’s been crazy, I also did something for PUBG MOBILE, called Growth.

Shout out to Hexany Studios for the help.

I think when people think of me, they don’t necessarily think about video game music, but it’s definitely the thing now.

Also have a new project, sort of a compilation and mixtape, where it contains my songs about fatherhood. Also, a children’s book that I wrote based on my song ‘My Daughter’s Eyes’.

Stan’s gaming collaborations opened ground nobody in hip-hop anticipated. Working with some of the largest mobile titles on the planet—Mobile Legends, PUBG—the reach landed entirely outside traditional music channels.

The Mobile Legends video sits at 20 million views. His first PUBG collaboration: nearly 80 million. The newest, two weeks old, already at 3 million.

Combined, those numbers dwarf anything Stan has accumulated through Spotify or otherwise; his closest streaming comparison is 9 million.

The natural question: should artists prioritize new media—channels where their work reaches wider audiences—before defaulting to traditional distribution? Case by case, was the consensus.

Before wrapping, I asked Stan where he thought hip-hop itself stood. Whether the art form was sharper than it had ever been, or whether something in the voice was getting lost. Whether the culture’s adoption had chipped away at parts of it, or whether that concern was noise against the bigger arc.

The answer depends entirely on who you ask and where they’re from. I side with Stan’s.

The voice of hip-hop itself as an artform. How do you view it?

Stronger than ever. Hip-hop is extremely vast. It’s not a monolith.

All of us, when you say hip-hop, envision a different thing. If I asked 20 people what hip-hop means to them, I may get 20 different answers.

What I’ve seen is a trend where people take something from hip-hop, or of hip-hop likeness, and attempt to separate it due to negative connotation of hip-hop.

We’re not hip-hop, we’re lo-fi. We’re not this, we’re that.

It’s vast, it’s all hip-hop. When these things come, we need to understand it’s a collective voice. All part of it.

We say hip-hop all the time, but we usually mean the hip-hop music–rap. Hip-hop is more than rapping, it’s many elements.

One of the elements we don’t talk enough about is knowledge. The fact that in 2021, they’re breaking ground for a museum in the Bronx to preserve the history of hip-hop, is incredible.

When I hear the younger artists shit on the older artists, or vice versa... when I hear the young ones do it, I get it. You’re not old, yet.

God-willing you live to be older, you’ll be trading places with those old heads. You’re going to be mad the next generation talks about you, you know?

It’s not always a perfect harmony. We might not always have the same view.

That’s what makes hip-hop beautiful. It’s more beautiful than it’s ever been.

I’ll always fly this flag.

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Most of my friends and mentors found me through a screen, and online communities held my attention long before they were a category anyone was hiring around.

My team and I have been building the platform’s music presence since launch, one server at a time. The work isn’t finished quite yet.

What follows is the last half decade and change on Discord—closer to a journal entry than a thesis. The platform isn’t perfect, don’t get it twisted.

It’s good enough, though.

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Uphill Both Ways

Early Discord was rough.

Anyone who used it before ~2017 remembers: voice died the second you had over a dozen users connected simultaneously, moderation tools were almost non-existent, themes changed constantly, and server discovery was a fiction.

Discord? It’s like Skype, but better...

It really was like Skype and Slack had a kid, except the kid was smarter than both parents and already knew TeamSpeak had failed its “community interactivity” exam.

You can’t fit a square peg in a round hole.

Sure you can, you just make the peg smaller.

Know Your Roots

The second it switches up, trust dies and never comes back. There had to be greener grass, and if my crew and I couldn’t find it, we’d have to build it.

Forums weren’t new to me; owning one was. I was never that good at math, but could confidently calculate this was going to be an uphill battle.

Getting people to move is one of the most difficult things you can do within online communities. Users hate change, myself included, and begging never works; you just get buried in quote chains.

Only two things separated what I could do on Discord from everyone else.

Care, and never sell out.

News that KanyeToThe had been sold to VerticalScope made its way across DMs, removing the last bit of faith left. That push was all it took.

Friends IRL clowned my love for hip-hop; the conversation moved online and stayed. Every few years, whichever community felt most like “home” sold out, got bought, or imploded due to careless admins. Clockwork.

The goal was simple: a space where the only thing anyone judged was your Top 10. Not ethnicity, not your GPA, not which way you swing. A fandom can exist around a subject, but a community only exists around the people in it.

I made a hip-hop community, one of Discord’s first ever music servers.

Something was there, unmistakable, and everyone from my clique felt it.

Only the scale was unknown.

Talk is Cheap, Chat is Cheaper

With almost no built-in moderation tools, growth showed up hand-in-hand with chaos. Slowmode did not exist, but raiders did.

It quickly became meta to interact with them. Sometimes it felt like virtual turf wars; regulars began to play personas, shitposting strategically, asking wanderers for “train tickets” or “admission slips” to join channels that did not exist. One guy showed up every night for two weeks just to type “L” in general chat before getting banned. The mods started greeting him by name.

The server never needed 24/7 high-brow conversations. It just needed to feel alive.

One real rule existed: show up every day. Not because someone was watching, but because every user who walks in is silently asking why they should return tomorrow. You answer that question through the way you maintain the space; it gets answered daily whether you like it or not.

Ask Me Anything

Reddit nailed the AMA format. I took it, ran with it, and brought it to Discord—real-time text AMAs for hip-hop. Chaotic and inefficient as you’re imagining.

The first guest was Stanley “Substantial” Robinson, a DMV-based artist, educator, and one of the earliest collaborators of the late Seba “Nujabes” Jun. A month after launch, a text AMA went live. Then another. Anyone with a story was welcome.

After about a dozen text runs, the format leveled up to voice. No more just reading answers; live timing, awkward pauses, all of it became part of the experience. Inside jokes, memes, poking fun at both hosts and guests.

Discord’s voice stack improved. Everything looked ready. Then Pusha T showed up.

The Exact Moment

Word about my hip-hop server eventually reached Summer Watson, Pusha’s long-time business partner. A few messages later, a time was set. No agenda, no promo, no plug required.

Pusha wanted to understand what this “Discord” thing was, how a hip-hop community was thriving on a gaming app, and to be there before it blew up.

7PM, August 8, 2018. Drake was still riding Scorpion, Astroworld had just dropped the same week, and the Pusha-Drake beef had turned every hip-hop conversation on the internet into a referendum on authenticity. Fitting backdrop.

1,700+ people queued up in voice channels, with hundreds more in overflow. We made a taped-together relay system because voice channels had limits far below the number of people trying to get in. A recent move IRL meant internet was live but only an old Chromebook was available; no desktop, no backup plan.

The instant Pusha joined, the server melted. Thousands of messages per minute.

Phone frozen. Chromebook frozen. Audio became the only lifeline, which was also frozen. Texts and calls to my crew weren’t going through; connection was spotty and everything teetering on collapse.

Audio distorted into an endless static. A relay channel bought a few minutes of sanity; then everything tapped out. Server dead, then alive, then dead again.

Complete chaos. On paper, a technical disaster. In reality, impossible to stop smiling.

Everyone including Summer and Pusha knew something was in the water here; the only question was how to wrangle it.

Corporations Cometh

Discord has now been in the wild for six years, three since the Pusha chaos, and has rebranded away from gaming into a generalized chat platform.

The platform’s potential for real dialogue in music was obvious from the start. Internal pushback from staff, warnings about bandwidth and risk, and AMAs being frowned upon were just corpospeak; the people building the product knew better.

Now the suits show up.

For most major-label teams, Discord remains alien terrain; someone has to walk them through it.

Hip-hop especially is a culture that must be lived. I’ve watched A&R reps confuse Griselda with Dreamville in a pitch meeting and still expect to run a hip-hop server. That’s the talent pool.

Spotify proved in ‘18 with a partnership that music has a place on the platform. Corporate-backed communities are another story entirely; the majority of brands want to spray a message, farm a metric, and leave. Launch loud, go quiet, then ghost. The server stays online, and the users bounce.

Selling Out

Corporate presence at scale is a one-way door: exposure on one side, authenticity loss on the other, and no reverse gear.

At some point, Discord has to pick which side of that blade it’s willing to hold when the acquisition closes or the IPO bell rings.

The monetization route doesn’t require genius to see. Facebook, Reddit, mobile games already ran the playbook: you don’t monetize the conversation, you monetize the costume.

The platform will inevitably sell identity to users, and in whatever flavor they want:

• Profile picture frames and avatar decorations (like Facebook, but paid)

• Seasonal flairs and themed collections (Naver has done this for years on its Blog platform)

• Username and role-icon theming (like old-school forums, but modern)

• Profile effects (like Steam did this past year with Steam Points Shop)

• Client skins like DOTA2

• More tiers of Nitro, up or down

• Dedication rewards, streak badges, digital collectibles

• Paid ads, eventually flooding the app and destroying it

Eventually, some form of engagement-driven virtual currency shows up: earned through paid CTAs, redeemable for cosmetics and subscription credits.

The corpospeak term for this is “earned, not purchased.”

Identity is social currency in any online community, and when it can be bought to boost status, regulars swipe. Years in esports back that instinct up. Scrappy to manufactured, but larger than anyone expected; big sponsors, money pouring into teams, seven-figure prize pools. Any prediction of that in 2010 would’ve sounded like a joke. K-pop’s climb from subculture to export machine is the same trajectory; every piece of K-media that goes viral adds eyeballs that never leave. Give it five years. Esports did plenty of good. The truly grassroots version is mostly gone. That’s the trade-off, and it’s the same one Discord will have to make.

More than two dozen conglomerates, majors, and assorted players have reached out to me directly with some mix of: free or paid promotion, offers to buy the server, guest booking pitches, and quiet astroturfing angles to make their presence “feel” organic.

Most take the cash. Business without roots wouldn’t be hip-hop, it’d be greed, and I live hip-hop.

A few reps openly admitted this was part of a wide campaign across hundreds of servers. The quiet part isn’t even quiet anymore; it’s a checkmark on someone’s social strategy.

Take any offer large enough to make this particular server fold, write that number on a piece of paper, and hand that same number (or a fraction of it) to a younger owner looking for a quick bag. Now the logo and owner stay the same, but the agenda quietly changes.

A subtle push of one label’s artist over another, a generic meme that gently sways opinions over time, a content strategy calculated with precision to appear genuine. The shape of the server shifts, and nobody voted on it.

Regulars can always sniff this out. Even if you think you’re slick, you aren’t.

The moment the person making decisions about a space stops being the person who lives in it, the space starts dying. Doesn’t matter if it’s a forum, a server, a record label, or a league. Fans show up, build something worth caring about, and the culture they generate catches someone’s attention. Then someone with no stake in any of it acquires control, and every decision optimizes for the view from outside the room instead of the experience inside it.

Neglectful management in favor of min-maxing ROI over building something real and evergreen, is always the downfall.

Chi Modu—

I look at hip-hop as an art form. It was a voice of the people. You can go wherever you want but if you leave the roots, and to me the roots are the voice of the people, you lose your soul.

If Discord walks away from its own roots, what’s left is anyone’s guess.

Discord’s Secret Weapon: Stages

Since 2016, a single-page pitch called “The PDF” has done all the heavy lifting for HHD’s AMAs. Artist teams, PR, anyone remotely relevant: it all started there. More than a thousand emails sent.

Names came from scraped bios, old interviews, dusty tweets. Most ignored it. Some replied only to say Discord didn’t “fit our vertical.”

Many of those same majors and creators now quietly operate Discord servers of their own.

No backing, no sponsor, no budget. Just that PDF. Just under 100 AMAs hosted. Every guest and event on HHD traces back to that one page.

Then Discord shipped Stages.

Stages is built-in live audio; Clubhouse without the velvet rope. The platform’s biggest strength has always been in-app reach, not its Twitter, TikTok, or YouTube presence. Lean into the users already here, and new users follow on their own.

Once Stages came into play, visitation on HHD jumped 1,107.9% in a single week. The largest day-to-day spike since the server’s creation. Nothing else has come close.

Stages work. The conversations people actually want are the ones that can’t be replayed, clipped, or optimized after the fact. Live, messy, real. Discord already has the users and the technical infra. The goldmine is right there, and it won’t sit unclaimed forever.

Don’t Let It Slip

Instead of leaning into what Stages proved, the platform is securing brand collabs and calling it music strategy. Servers for The Weeknd or Eminem where it’s obviously an intern pushing NFTs through an artist-branded account do more damage than good. The Cactus Jack collaboration with Travis Scott was deleted from Twitter for reasons unknown.

Discord is a company with hundreds of millions in funding and a multi-billion dollar valuation, and the best it can do for music is a branded server that goes dark after three months. Real conversations—the type that only happen when artists, fans, and live audio collide—can’t be manufactured and sold back on a content calendar. You can fake spontaneity, but you can’t monetize it. The audience knows.

HHD proves what happens when someone who actually lives in the culture runs the room. No budget, no sponsor, no partnership deck. A PDF and a decade of caring about the same thing every single day.

Music has real depth, and Discord barely scratches it.

Chi Modu

In early 2018, a virtual link-up for a piece turned into an ongoing exchange, and eventually an IRL meetup. Most evenings on the way home from work turned into shaky long-exposure attempts on a phone at crosswalks, sent straight to his inbox. The shots weren’t good, but feedback was always kind, honest, and paired with small tips.

Late 2019 brought a trip to NYC. On the very last day in the city, Chi agreed to meet.

He walked in with UNCATEGORIZED shrink-wrapped under his arm, a Sharpie, and a small bag.

“Let’s do this,” he said.

Two hours vanished. Hip-hop. The city. Stories from his favorite shoots, behind-the-scenes shots on his phone.

“What you see is 1% of what I have in the vault.”

Lunch was on him. The book got signed. Then came the line that killed the thought of quitting HHD after years of feeling stuck:

You see the beauty in this city, in its flaws. That’s rare these days. I can tell you genuinely love hip-hop.

A joke about escaping the noise to Jersey City and a prediction that anyone who really loved the city would eventually do the same. As the meeting wound down, a Leica M3 came out of the bag. The strap wrapped around his wrist, lens turned inward.

“...mind if I get some for the road?”

A few quick frames later, selfies with the GOAT.

“I’ll send these in a few. Until next time. Peace!”

That moment replayed on loop the entire flight home.

That anecdote has been pitched to nearly a dozen well-known music outlets looking to feature HHD.

None ran it. “Irrelevant.”

Once things turn corporate, traffic outranks meaning. Culture gets filed under “not a fit.”

So it lives here as an ode to a legendary documentarian who inspired the way I move through hip-hop and music itself. Chi influenced people every day, even when the story behind the image never made it to print.

The Formula

Community cannot be forced. It takes time; more than anyone ever budgets for.

My hip-hop community is far more than just a Discord server. It is also just a Discord server.

Would I do it again? Absolutely.

Whatever Discord becomes, the only thing that matters is who’s still building for the people, no one else.

The people who were here before any of it mattered will also be here after it all stops mattering.

You’ll never see that part in a pitch deck.

If you like this piece, you may enjoy:

Since its initial release, the work has been plagiarized and reproduced on multiple occasions without proper credit. If you incorporate any portion of this work into your content, please provide appropriate attribution and include a link to the original source.

This piece is published with no intention of monetization.

It is offered as an evergreen archive, in respect and gratitude, to Alch’s lasting impact on the lifestyle we all know and love—hip-hop.

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Alan Maman has spent the better part of three decades leaving fingerprints on hip-hop’s most enduring records, all while keeping his name out of most people’s mouths. The depth of his roots—embedded in collaborations with a long list of hip-hop’s greats—gets overlooked more than it should.

A quiet force in hip-hop production, he has stayed in the shadows, crafting classics in his dimly-lit studio while keeping to himself.

The Mudfoot Era

It was the early 90’s—height of the Golden Age. The West Coast had G-funk and gangsta rap roaring, while the East Coast was consumed by boom bap. The genre was being refined and reinvented in real time, and the culture maintained a rebellious stigma within media.

During this time, Maman, a Beverly Hills native, would start to carve a path for himself. Never Hollywood-esque (aside from hosting his high school’s cable television show in 1992), he would align himself heavily with hip-hop culture, creating a duo in 1991 with local friend Scott Caan, calling themselves The Whooliganz. Scott would go by Mad Skillz, while Maman’s moniker of choice was Mudfoot.

B-Real of Cypress Hill recognized Maman freestyling at a house party, extending a hand in Maman’s career efforts, offering The Whooliganz entry into his friend DJ Muggs’ art collective, The Soul Assassins.

This dude [Maman] had bar work [able to spit nice] at 13, maybe 14.

Wildly successful with a self-titled double-platinum group album Cypress Hill, B-Real saw genuine potential—via his good friend and notorious music dot-connector behind the scenes, Amanda Demme. Maman accepted, and the duo was suddenly on a nationwide tour alongside the Soul Assassins. They weren’t just affiliated; they were friends.

Through that network, The Whooliganz landed a record deal with Tom Silverman at Tommy Boy Records, though the label shelved and dropped them after their debut single saw lackluster airplay; the album, Make Way for the W, never saw a proper release. Caan decided to follow his father’s footsteps in acting, while Maman gravitated towards DJ Muggs’ work for Funkdoobiest and started learning how to produce.

It was the mid-90’s, and Maman was putting in long hours learning the ropes. Nearly 30 years after the fact, he reflects with B-Real on the rise to fame and honing his craft:

I always say, you gotta put your 10,000 hours of work in.

You gotta master your craft, but it’s gonna be one unforeseen scenario of timing that’s going to line up, and that’s going to be the real thing to take you there.

You still need to put your 10,000 hours of work in. That’s all those years, [of] what I did.

Then, it was unforeseen scenarios, which are really based on timing.

He recollects taking B-Real’s GMC Typhoon in ‘94 to the airport before Woodstock, picking up a young and still relatively unknown Busta Rhymes.

Maman eventually found himself at a crossroads in life, and only one thing was certain: Mudfoot had to go. A reminder of an era gone by.

It’s speculated that after resonating heavily with Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, he adopted the book’s name as his alias, finding parallels with the book’s protagonist, Santiago. Others say it was from his name being Alan and him playing the role as some sort of beat chemist, combining the two words to land on Alchemist.

The new millennium was on the horizon, and The Alchemist had refined his production skills to a degree that raised the eyebrows of those around him.

The Cusp of Making It

The Alchemist was brewing heat at a degree few could match. He was mentored primarily by DJ Muggs early on, and absorbed the drum master knowledge as best he could.

DJ Lethal, a mutual of both, took Al to a local Guitar Center and pointed out the ASR-10. Al was initially more invested in a Roland SP-404, but Lethal told him to go with the Ensoniq ASR-10—same as the rest, except it had keyboards.

The young producer obliged. From that day forward, he developed his style around the ASR-10 as an instrumental part of his production artillery (no pun intended).

His first credit with a big name on it came in the form of a remix called Tequila Sunrise featuring Fat Joe, the Bronx boss.

That was a big deal for me.

This served as the entry point for a slew of remixes over the next couple of years. Within that time, Al continued to pick and choose inspiration from a wide variety of interactions and connections he had built within the industry.

Childhood friend and fellow artist Michael Perretta, better known to most as Evidence of Dilated Peoples, was one individual that opened doors in his career.

In 1997, the world would hear the first contribution to Dilated Peoples from The Alchemist in the form of Third Degree. Al’s first formally credited step with Evidence, and a stepping stone for a large amount of collaborations down the road. The beat was laid back and simple—you can hear the differences in the style he brought to the table back then, heavily influenced by more old school acts from the late 80’s.

A year later, he’d hop back into the studio with Evidence and do work on The Main Event, which he co-produced. Not technically a member of Dilated Peoples, Alchemist was still reppin’ Soul Assassins. On the vinyl itself, he is credited as Alchemist for Soul Assassins and it denotes that he was represented by ASCAP. Dilated Peoples would go on to be signed by Capitol Records, and release this song through them two years later in 2000.

Keep in mind this was exactly the same time Madlib was coming up with Tha Alkaholiks [Tha Liks] which Dilated Peoples had an affiliation with. The man behind Quasimoto himself speaks a bit on the experience of The Liks and what it was like living through those times in a rare French interview:

The underground smash album Likwidation, their third body of work by ‘97, was already making waves on the West Coast for its breakbeat and OG sound, harnessing what was considered to be among the most “wide and fat beats” EQ’d up to that point in time; a feat perhaps only matched by Dilla a few years later.

Coming back to The Platform, Tha Alkaholiks would end up featuring on a track titled Right On produced by Toledo, Ohio native Eric “E-Swift” Brooks.

The Alchemist crafted 5 beats for this album, becoming an established go-to for the Los Angeles crew led by childhood friend Evidence, and putting him on the radar of Madlib and The Liks early.

College was on the horizon, and it was time to pack the bags. New York was the next stop.

Lost In New York

Al made the decision to move to New York for college, which meant flying back and forth across the country to make things work on the music side. He needed to balance priorities in life while maintaining a high and positive reputation within the hip-hop scene. Otherwise, he would fall short.

A key figure who often goes unsung was the late Bigga B. A producer and A&R, closely affiliated with DJ Muggs and the Soul Assassins clique, Xzibit’s come up, and the deep underground of West Coast hip-hop. A master curator—many acts coming up in the mid-to-late 90’s owe much of their put-ons to Bigga B.

Before passing, Bigga B would link DJ Muggs with Queensbridge hip-hop group Infamous Mobb, close affiliates of Mobb Deep, consisting of Havoc and the late Prodigy. A tribute written by Eddie Huang for the New York Times details how much P cherished those close to him.

At the turn of the millennium, Mobb Deep was on a streak few in hip-hop could follow. Although active for nearly a decade at that point, they saw immense success with their second studio album, The Infamous, continuing their rise to fame with Hell on Earth.

Good news for the Beverly Hills native. More opportunities for connecting—business and friendship—on the other coast. As he focused more on remixes and came into his own while producing beats, he became more lost. A young kid attending college in New York, trying to make it as anyone else would, yet he had no real plan or direction. DJ Muggs was no longer by his side all day, and he was on his own.

After linking with Infamous Mobb and building strong bonds, he continued making beats. He linked up with DJ Premier and his crew as well. In a 2015 interview, DJ Premier recalls a studio session where the four of them hung out to finish up some beats, following Canibus rejecting a track.

And J. Dilla was there at the session.

Al was in the loop with the Dilla stage, so he could lamp with us and smoke for a lil’ bit.

We just hung out. I knew him for a long time as well.

Wandering the streets of Queens aimlessly searching for something tangible to grab onto for his future, Al was torn when it came to keeping the dream alive.

It would be Mobb Deep that found him and took him under their wing.

Prodigy initially thought he was a fed until he laid beats down on the pad. In his 2011 autobiography My Infamous Life: The Autobiography of Mobb Deep's Prodigy, P exclaims:

When Alchemist came around with those dope beats and I saw how serious he was about his career, I embraced him like a brother.

He was like a gift from the heavens.

That white boy’s got a lot of soul.

We made up nicknames for him like White Chocolate, the White Vulture, and the Rare White Bird.

In a rare interview with Pop Killer, Al appears visibly emotional while explaining how Havoc and Prodigy turned his life around:

They [Mobb Deep] just found me. I was lost, you know what I mean?

Walking the streets of Queens, just lost at the time. Walking around Queensbridge, in different alleyways, trying to find myself.

...

Mobb Deep took me in, they polished my style up, and I learned. I just learned, I sat back and learned.

That’s the first step—absorb.

That meeting took place in 1999, over two decades ago. The same year that The Realest beat would drop, according to Prodigy:

Must have been ‘99 at the Soundtrack Studio in Manhattan...

...

First tour, Family Values...

Mobb Deep recognized the young producer’s ability and granted him access to produce on their upcoming album already in production, Murda Muzik. He joined them on their 1999 tour, Family Values.

When asked by Prodigy in a very rare Rap City episode with Mobb Deep on the tour about Murda Muzik the movie, Alchemist said the following:

It’s Mobb Deep. If you know them, it’s their life. It’s how they live, like taking a piece of their life, and putting it into movie form.

If you know the records, it’s like a visual. Everything they speak on, you see it.

It’s the realness, you know?

He produced two tracks for the album, but he struck gold with The Realest, utilizing a soul sample via the 1974 classic Born To Lose You by Ecstasy, Passion & Pain. The track would go on to be a standout, and subsequently propel Al near the top tier of names to watch in New York production.

It was now 2000; a 22-year-old Alan Maman, within the span of a half decade, had pivoted from a startup rapping duo alongside Scott Caan into a full-fledged hip-hop producer, now working beats for the scene’s elite. He was known on the West Coast via Dilated Peoples, making shockwaves there, while also carving a name for himself at the very top of New York rap as an outsider. Consistently making remixes, producing for Prodigy on top of Mobb Deep.

He kept a low profile and seemingly intentional anonymous aesthetic to his presence, feeding into the buzz and mystery all around.

Who was this kid in his early 20’s, and where did he come from?

The New Millennium

Al was coming into his own. Establishing a brand, playing into the Alchemist aesthetic. One of the very first projects he dropped was entitled The Chemistry Files, an instrumental piece showcasing what he considered to be his most potent work. The 12-inch 33⅓ RPM vinyl was printed military green, with what appears to be a very smudged selfie (in 2001?!) on the cover.

It had both new and old beats, along with a unique Remarks column describing each beat’s vibe in Al’s own words. This could very well be considered the origin of his production journey—his first body of work crafted entirely by himself, as opposed to a remix or feature.

More portfolio piece than marketable product, he focused on continuous output.

With some luck on his side, exactly 1 year later to the day, he would appear in The Source, seemingly as an outlier, in a full two-page spread of the best producers in hip-hop.

He wasn’t up-and-coming anymore. He was at an elite level.

2001: A Hip-Hop Odyssey

Perhaps the most important year in Al’s career; one that would solidify his namesake and position among the largest names in hip-hop production.

By now, he was in with all the top New York names, but he was still fiending to make his portfolio more impressive. Flying back and forth endlessly between the coasts to maintain relationships and output, it was difficult to find a balance between Cypress Hill and Dilated Peoples in Los Angeles while Mobb Deep remained in New York.

Things started coming together in late 2000, and Al was rummaging through beats and samples, attempting to make magic happen. He would end up releasing two songs the next year which would define him through the early 00’s; undisputed classics, which have stood the test of time nearly two decades later.

The classic names who we often take for granted today were in their primes.

We Gon’ Make It

The release of We Gon’ Make It (stylized as We Gonna Make It) did not come without controversy. Accused by Ras Kass’ crew for double-dealing after a verbal agreement in late ‘99, Al fired back claiming it was his legal team’s fault. Since then, the two have made up their beef. In 2006, Al was featured on a track with Ras Kass on his Revenge of the Spit mixtape.

In retrospect, perhaps the ordeal was a blessing in disguise. New York heavyweight Jadakiss was working on an album set to release in August of 2001 titled Kiss tha Game Goodbye, a massive release that would include hip-hop’s largest names as features: Pharrell, Nas, Snoop Dogg, The Lox, Styles P, Swizz Beatz, Nate Dogg, DMX, among others.

Zoned in to his studio, The Alchemist put together a beat and sent it around his network; many showed interest, and it only made its way to Jadakiss after being passed on by both Nas and Jay Z by way of Nashawn Jones, Nas’ friend from QB who went by Millenium Thug.

First time Al would collaborate with Ruff Ryders. Still one of Jadakiss’ largest hits, We Gon’ Make It went on to be the lead-off single, resulting in first-week sales for the album passing 200,000 copies.

The album itself, despite its star-studded lineup on paper, would never make a massive impact on the game; overshadowed in part by In Search Of... by N*E*R*D a day prior, and The Blueprint by Jay Z hype, which would drop a month later and kick off the infamous Nas vs. Jay Z beef with Takeover, a track produced by a then-unknown talent who went by the name of Kanye West.

The Alchemist-produced single was the highlight of the album. Even though the album didn’t hit like Jadakiss may have hoped, Al was a known name now; if not by association, then by radio play.

Worst Comes to Worst

A month had gone by since the release of Jadakiss’ album, and Al was back in the hot seat producing beats left and right. Following Dilated Peoples’ debut album The Platform—which Alchemist produced just short of half a dozen tracks for—the group was set for success when they put together the initial tracks and feature lineup for their follow-up, Expansion Team.

A movement in and of itself, the album acted as a statement against current trends in hip-hop, straying away from gangsta rap and aligning more closely to traditional conscious. Alchemist speaks on how the sound of Dilated Peoples was influenced heavily by East Coast vibes:

That’s why, Dilated Peoples when you really listen to it? We were trying to be like Gang Starr.

On the best day, we could be half of how dope they [Gang Starr] are.

...

[DJ] Premier? Man. Evidence will tell you, I made fake Premier beats for YEARS. [laughs]

The old school traditional sound is where he shined the brightest. He sat in the studio while Gang Starr produced their magnum opus, Moment of Truth, back in 1998.

In charge of producing Expansion Team’s lead single, while being mentored by Havoc, Al tapped into one of Mobb Deep’s biggest records—Survival of the Fittest—for the vocal sample.

Somehow managing to find balance between Havoc’s hard-hitting drums and the sultry elegance of William Bell’s I Forgot to Be Your Lover, Al crafted something that would appeal to both hardcore hip-hop heads and more casual radio listeners.

Gold again. Elegant mid-70’s soul blended with gritty OG boom bap. And the late Guru, legendary MC, hopped on the track as a guest feature:

Gifted Unlimited with Dilated Peoples Babu, Evidence, Iriscience

And a shout out to my man Alchemist on the trizzack

Still, to this very day, Dilated Peoples’ most successful song.

Released October 23rd, its presence would grace hip-hop two days prior to Al’s 24th birthday.

1st Infantry and Hold You Down

When people hear the name The Alchemist, the usual go-to song is Hold You Down. Hypnotic and simple, the beat is familiar to anyone who has ever listened to hip-hop. Whether you know who Al is or not, chances are you’ve heard it. Somewhere, in some place, at some time.

2004 would be Al’s return to the pen and pad; he had been on a production wave for over a half-decade with almost no verses laid down. Hungry to try his hand at rhyming again, putting together a cohesive project with his newfound knowledge of hip-hop behind the curtain.

He got into production to get his name out there. Over time, he ended up sticking with it. After producing consistently for three years following an explosive 2001, he was ready to grip the mic once again. His production credits included hip-hop’s best.

So it was set, and Al went to work on his own rap album. The lead single would be Hold You Down, with Prodigy spitting the opening verse. Below, rare footage of the two chopping it up, sometime between 2003 and 2004:

Two versions of the music video exist: one mixed with movie clips featuring Prodigy in the hood spitting, the other a more “consumer friendly” version which aired on VH1 and MTV:

Directed by old friend Estevan Oriol, this song combined many things which led to its success. During the height of “chipmunk” production, it sampled Al Kooper’s The Landlord theme, sped up to be in line with current trends. Crafted with close to a decade of production experience at this point, the beat was both catchy and broad in its appeal—strategic and smart, as it broadened exposure for the now well-known producer.

This was also among the first instances where Al was breaking out of his shell; previously anonymous and hidden behind closed doors, no one really knew who The Alchemist was. Many believed he was a black producer out of QB, or otherwise, as he states himself when reflecting on that half-decade leading up to the release of 1st Infantry.

When you can match a face to the name, you start to get in touch with the identity of who and how I am.

It’s all about the music to me. Hold Me Down [sic] was instrumental to putting me out there.

The album acted as a reflection of his career up to that point, with rhymes dating back to ‘99.

A long list of guests made their appearance: Nas, Prodigy, The Game, Mobb Deep, Dilated Peoples, Twin—everyone who featured were people he had touched previously and linked up with.

He also credits his brother Neil Maman on the album, for production and management, although he says his brother Neil “doesn’t understand music on a technical level” thus implying he was credited for longevity’s sake regarding rights.

In a 2004 interview with Rap Reviews, Al states the following:

I think being able to just express myself—because I’m not rhyming on all of these beats—I still have to express to how I feel.

Even if I play some stuff on the keyboard, I keep to my formula.

I don’t really know how to play, but I’ll play stuff and I’ll sample what I play and chop it up like it was a record.

So I still keep my same formulas in how I do what I do.

That formula may change from record to record, but there’s something in it that makes people bob their head back and forth, letting them know who’s there. Not the tag nor signature loops, but the feeling you get when you hear an Alchemist beat. Singular, and rivals that of DJ Premier, Madlib, Pete Rock, and others’ styles where you know it will be a treat. Calculated and controlled.

He liked to share the magic when he could, too:

Alan Maman now had a decade under his belt; his debut solo album had dropped, and the new year was approaching.

A perfectionist at times, Al contemplated what would push his career along further. There was no other option than to go straight to the top.

So, he did just that.

Becoming Eminem’s DJ

Following the release of his debut solo album, Al linked up with Eminem, the largest name in hip-hop at that time, arguably all-time depending on who (or where) you ask.

Contrary to popular belief of Eminem magically “discovering” Al out of the blue, the two had been aware of each other since 1999. Al was managed by Goliath Management and Paul Rosenberg throughout the early 00’s, so he was naturally associated with the entire Shady camp.

In 2005, Em invited Al to DJ for him on the Anger Management 3 tour; from that tour forward, Al became his go-to in-house DJ. Not producer—up until 2020 with the Step Dad track, Em had never used an Alchemist-produced beat on one of his studio albums.

With one of the largest tours in the world came fame and notoriety, including Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, who was riding off hit after radio hit, merely two years after being signed to Shady Records via Em. On top of genuine friendship, this was business opportunity for Alch; his network was overflowing, and he was all for it.

During the tour, Eminem’s tour bus crashed; Al suffered serious injuries, but everyone involved was treated appropriately and recovered.

Among those injured was Eminem’s DJ Alan Maman, also know [sic] as Alchemist; the 27-year-old from New York City was listed in good condition Thursday.

Over the next few years, Alchemist’s output was consistent but did not pop like it did prior. His priorities were with Eminem, and that was a double-edged sword.

Volume of Work

An observation you’ll notice while digging through The Alchemist’s discography is the sheer volume of work. Hundreds upon hundreds of credits, perhaps going past a thousand if you include compilations and songs we don’t know he helped out with, or ones which are uncredited.

It would be nearly impossible to break down each body of work in a piece like this. This is why we’ve focused mainly on larger projects, as his library of beat tapes exceeds dozens. Perhaps it would take a book with direct insight to adequately do a proper deep dive.

Following the 2005 Anger Management 3 tour, Al continued with the beats and planted the seed to follow up his debut solo album. Chemical Files with DJ mello dropped in 2005, a compilation of already-released tracks mixed into a tape. No Days Off dropped a few months later in 2006, designed by D-Day and mixed by Al himself; another quick joint with great features on paper.

During this era, we saw a collaboration with Linkin Park, a return to remix a Cypress Hill song, among several other beats. This also was when Al started work on Return of the Mac with Prodigy, a collaboration album which would be hailed across hip-hop as a return to form for the Mobb Deep legend.

An on-point performance by the man behind the beats, who at this point was becoming a household name in rap. Smooth like butter. He would also collaborate with Prodigy and Nina Sky once again, for a track called Key to the City:

2009 saw the release of The Alchemist’s second studio album, Chemical Warfare. Playing on the military theme of the first album, this one acted as a futuristic vision of that concept. The lineup was just as strong, if not stronger than the first.

Featuring Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Fabolous, Talib Kweli, Blu, Kid Cudi, Pusha, Jada, Kool G, and others along with a bonus track with Madlib’s brother Oh No, it was clear that Al was taking rap very seriously and teetered on the idea of production versus rhyming constantly. Here, we see Al speak on Em lobbing him a verse:

Although he was good at raps, he outdid himself on the beats. He may have been a rapper before a producer, but many viewed him more as a producer who tried his hand at rap.

At this point, Alan Maman was nearly 15 years into his career. He could be considered a household name in the hip-hop scene, albeit contrary to some reviewers, and put himself out there enough to be recognized. Although his raps would not gain the same exposure as his beats, he was still in the zone when it came to anything he touched.

Revered and respected by the elite, he was in a good place, but needed some spark. Songs would drop—Lose Your Life in 2008 with Snoop Dogg, for example—but they were more or less flash in the pans or flavor of the month type joints.

He would strive for more full-length collaborations in the coming years, focusing on the idea of sticking with a single artist and producing an entire body of work with them.

Heavily inspired by his 2007 release Return of the Mac with Prodigy and 2009’s The Antidote with Fashawn, Al would continue this trend going into 2010 and beyond.

He was after reverence, not fame.

Gutter Water

It was early 2010 when Alchemist threw around the idea of forming a group, for real, with Madlib’s younger brother and studio regular Oh No, someone introduced to him by Evidence.

The duo elected to be deemed Gangrene and would release Gutter Water following a short EP titled Sawblade just a few weeks prior. Perhaps one of the more strangely titled bodies of work Al has under his belt—albeit my favorite title to a project of his—the aesthetic followed suit.

A take on cinematic rap within the New York scene, the insight of street storytelling and an approach which Nas claims is a large part of his rhyme-writing process, it was a sect slowly fading in favor of more accessible sounds.

A complete 180 for Alchemist, and a slight shift for Oh No. Tom Breihan throws down some knowledge:

Alchemist is probably still best-known for crafting gutpunch street-rap anthems for guys like Mobb Deep and Jadakiss, but his early-decade aesthetic is almost entirely gone from Gutter Water.

That clash of styles, despite having a very similar approach to hip-hop as a whole, melded perfectly. Although Pitchfork threw it a 6.7, it was loved by fans on both sides, and cemented Gangrene in the annals of hip-hop as another duo that could make magic happen.

Perhaps the title acts as an allusion to that cinematic fragment of rap being slowly lost through decay.

They would go on and collaborate for five more albums before taking a hiatus in 2015.

Covert Coup

Following respectable success with Gangrene, Al continued to collaborate with artists who he considered to be both inspiring and friends; one thing he is staunch about is only collaborating if both sides agree.

That came in the form of 2011’s Covert Coup, a mixtape with Curren$y which Al reflects on as one of his favorite projects. The aesthetic of his collaboration albums up until this point had been consistent: post-apocalyptic and grim, seemingly out on the ends of society attempting to survive and weave through the obstacles that had come before them.

Pseudo-conceptual in a way, it was a new direction for both artists, which resulted in a solid project overall. Although it did not make a massive splash, it turned heads and made fans further appreciate the work.

This would also be one of the very first times Freddie Gibbs worked with Alchemist on a released project, featuring on the track Scottie Pippen, planting the seed for future collaborations. Al and Gibbs had crossed paths as early as 2003:

People don’t know that me and Freddie go back to 2003 or 2004. We was making music a long time ago. Nothing ever came out. It’s funny how we just reconnected.

The Action Bronson Era

Al always had his ear to the streets; trying to keep himself on top of what was hot, and what was burgeoning. Music itself is dynamic, and hip-hop as both a culture and genre is one of the best examples of this.

Around 2010, he found himself listening to Action Bronson, a then up-and-coming chef-turned-rapper out of Flushing, Queens. They would befriend each other, and Alch was now part of Bronson’s clique alongside Big Body and Meyhem Lauren.

A 2012 project titled Rare Chandeliers would be the result of their initial music collaboration, with many more to come following, which we’ll touch on later.

The Vortex of Russian Roulette

I’d be more than willing to die on the hill that Russian Roulette is one of the best conceptual albums ever made, perhaps only rivaled by A Grand Don’t Come For Free by Mike Skinner. Criminally slept on, the themes and approach to this cinematic masterpiece of music resulted in waves of influence still seen today.

It was the sonorous ayahuasca trip that sent The Alchemist into a vortex that he never came out of, in the best way possible. If you were to nail down a point in time where Al changed his entire sound and approach to music, this would trump even his style switch during Gutter Water. Al himself admits he still hasn’t come back:

The bars on the album were not the best in the game, nor were the beats the most radio friendly or hard that he had produced. That didn’t matter nor was it the focal point, despite critics smacking it for those exact things. Nobody saw the bigger picture of what was happening here.

A tried and true producer, a now-heavyweight of the rap game, was producing what would turn out to be more akin to an audible painting than a hip-hop album, any way you sliced the cake. Consisting of 30 tracks, it was a magnificent example of how Al could craft something cohesive, have it not be a traditional hip-hop album in any sense, and still knock it out of the park.

The samples are heavily Russian-influenced. Completely different than his usual style of nitty gritty boom bap or hard-hitting street vibes, Al expanded on what Oh No had been accustomed to via his older brother Madlib: crate digging. On this project more than any other, Al dug deep for obscure, strange, psychedelic samples that tested the listener’s ear.

He speaks on the creation:

It wasn’t made like an album – it is more a project of audio art. I just threw it together and really spent time out hoping it will be a project you play from beginning to end. I even envisioned parts of it like a fake movie to inspire me.

Whether it was a Russian mafia film being sampled, some old niche jazz of a bygone era, or something more familiar, it worked. Controlling the obscurity, finding the perfect balance.

Was it an instrumental tape? For a few tracks maybe, but then it’d turn into a rap album.

So was it a rap album? Not quite if you were a purist; it was filled with interludes and sample-heavy asides, much like we observe in Dilla’s early work.

How about a sonic gallery, was that too pretentious? Perhaps, but it leaned more heavily towards art than a traditional music album.

So what was it exactly? Whatever you wanted it to be.

A dynamic, ever-shifting piece of artwork. He was, finally, comfortable with his ability and it showed.

I definitely felt that with this project it was like throwing the dice and I am not worried anymore.

Much more than just another release from a producer who had given two decades of his life to the game; it was proof of how far he could push experimentation boundaries within his skillset.

Synths throughout the entire project; no longer the signature loops. Beats carried the dark and sinister vibe from Mobb Deep’s aesthetic, but refracted through a different lens. A culmination of his style blended into a Russian post-apocalyptic fever dream of sounds filing into a line with style.

A cult classic. A figurative light switch in his production. Following this project’s release in July of 2012, Al’s output was different. Collaborations tighter, bolder in the risks the sounds took, and received as better projects by consensus. He would one-up even his own self, and shock the hip-hop scene with project after project considered to be of high marks or classics among fans and producers alike.

Critics largely missed the mark, comparing it to his past work and the work existing within hip-hop at that time, when its main purpose was to experiment, not compete. This should have been evident by the large array of cinema samples and brooding ambience throughout. Some even said it was difficult to appreciate—sorely mistaken if you’re a head.

The same year saw work with Dave East, Meyhem Lauren, Domo and Hodgy from Odd Future, Prodigy, ScHoolboy Q, Gangrene with Oh No, among many others.

An EP titled Yacht Rock subsequently released the following year for free on Bandcamp. The sequel, Yacht Rock 2, would end up dropping 6 years later in 2019.

No longer a question of whether his projects would be good or flop; more a question of how good they would be.

Alchemist was on fire. What onlookers were unaware of: he was just getting started.

Contributions Abound

Contribution to hip-hop is a large part of why The Alchemist has a status few have reached when it comes to respect and people knowing how much work he puts in. A long lineage of elite output is a key variable in that equation.

By 2013, Al was cruising. He worked with his good friend Mac Miller on the late rapper’s second album Watching Movies with the Sound Off. The result: Red Dot Music. The psychedelic tones meshed well, as all three artists involved—Action Bronson, Mac Miller, and Al—had a track record of weaving such into their music.

At this same time, Odd Future was taking off alongside artists like Joey Bada$$; Al had credits in both camps, including Earl Sweatshirt’s debut album Doris. The contribution was a song titled Uncle Al, a quick ode to the potent concoctions Al had crafted over the years:

Killing who you sinning first, verse wintergreen spit it, show ‘em that I meant it

Ho, I’m rolling with my niggas, find a gold and call the chemist

Perhaps Al’s personal favorite project, though, was with one of his mentors, Prodigy of Mobb Deep, titled Albert Einstein. Their second collaboration in album form, it was a return to form for Prodigy, and a cataclysm of sound from Al.

One theme within any Alchemist project is the cinematic quality, and that holds true here; perhaps one of his strongest examples, beyond Russian Roulette.

Well-received and reviewed, high marks all around.

Al had one more thing up his sleeve for 2013, perhaps the largest reach his career ever had up to that point: the soundtrack for what would become the largest video game release in history—Grand Theft Auto V.

He was the maestro alongside Oh No, for the game’s score. 2014 was on the horizon.

Step Brothers

Step Brothers, a duo consisting of Al and his longtime friend Evidence, would finally release their long-awaited project, teased all the way back in 2009. The name comes from a realization they had, according to Rhymesayers:

When Dilated Peoples had its 2001, Alchemist-produced song “Live On Stage” licensed in the 2008 film Step Brothers movie starring Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly, Dilated Peoples member Evidence and the Alchemist had a realization.

Features were plentiful, including artists they’d worked with in the past; named after a bar on Dark Shades, Lord Steppington would receive nods from the critics. Although selling only a few thousand copies first-week, it remains a favorite of fans who followed Al and Evidence throughout their careers.

A want album, not a need album, as Evidence explains in a 2013 Fuse interview:

It’s not an album we need to do; It’s an album we want to do, so if we want to do it, it needs to be right.

It’s stemming from a lot of our solo experiences and taking it back to a trio.

He lets collaborations happen naturally at their own will, if both parties are interested. Every release sounds genuinely well-made and naturally cohesive because of it.

Closer to the Present

The work output was nothing different: top-notch, frequent, and consistent as hell. 2015 saw Al work with Blu, Fashawn, Big Twins, Oh No for another Gangrene release and follow-up to GTA V’s score, as well as 50 Cent and Joey, but no single song made it as big as Terry, a track off Bronson’s Mr. Wonderful.

Not a chart-topping smash, but instantly a cult-classic within hip-hop, with people on the day of release searching left and right for the sample cut. How was he able to switch up his style so often? A question to this day, answered only with handwaving. A real alchemist, a wizard, maybe an alien.

Following a solid 2015 came an even stronger 2016; year after year, Al was improving both in skill set and output quality. He made an entire series of limited vinyls, collaborated with the burgeoning FLYGOD which established a connection to the Griselda camp, put together a collaboration project with Havoc, and became a staple part of Action Bronson’s hit series Fuck, That’s Delicious on top of other Viceland titles which he appeared on.

The world had never seen The Alchemist in situations like this, laid back and relaxed with friends who genuinely cared for him. Tough love at times—they’d poke fun at each other—but through it all, Al was opening up, becoming comfortable exposing a more vulnerable side of himself.

As fans watched the series over the years, they would at times become more interested in the bond the four guys shared than the music.

It humanized the figures and names which we had only seen on song titles and CD sleeve credits. It led the way and carved out a niche, showing by action (no pun intended) how successful such shows could be in the new age of media consumption.

It allowed newcomers from outside hip-hop to check out the artists—Al especially.

The Passing of Prodigy

Throughout 2017, Al remained somewhat quiet and kept a low profile. His dear friend Prodigy passed in June; it was clear that it hurt him bad. Understandably so.

Prodigy had helped Al from the very beginning of when he landed in New York to make a name for himself, for two decades, up until his sudden passing. An outpouring of well wishes and support ensued, but he continued to do what he knew P would tell him to do: keep making beats.

We saw a Mach Hommy collab, two tracks for Kendrick, an MF DOOM track for an Adult Swim promotion, and a few other projects including a unique French-only sample tape titled Paris, L.A., Bruxelles. The Paris mixtape was the result of a Red Bull pitch, pulling in upcoming and established French producers, artists, and creatives to work with Al on a cohesive body of work.

He kept it to Bandcamp, “officially” released January 2018, but previously available through Red Bull several months prior.

last year i linked up with Redbull France.
They brought me out to Paris for a week, paid for my records, and let me craft beats in their studio.
(I ended up moving the equipment to my hotel room due to smoking restrictions )
[sic]

Al’s fan base was growing faster than ever. The bodies of work he was putting out were hard to go unnoticed, and he was doing it more consistently than almost anyone else.

Everyone wanted more. He heard them loud and clear.

No Days Off in 2018

One of the most prolific years in his career. If you know hip-hop, you know about The Alchemist’s output during this time; every single project, no misses, was hard as hell.

The final part in Evidence’s The Weathermen series, Weather or Not had a handful of tracks with Al on the beats; features from Slug, Catero, Mach Hommy, Styles P, Rapsody, Khrysis, and more; that was just one project to start the year.

Next up: Lunch Meat, a fully-produced and mixed project from Al featuring familiar New York names—Benny, Roc, Gunn, Conway, Bronson. Released on streaming platforms including Bandcamp, with a very limited 100-issue vinyl print.

Conscious with Evidence, sinister and gritty with Lunch Meat. He could switch on command to cater to whoever he was collaborating with, or if he was seeking a certain aesthetic. True to form and name, he had become a literal beat alchemist, able to control the result with two decades of production experience.

He’d jump to collaborating with Gunn and Conway on Budz:

Then again just a few weeks later on Supreme Blientele, an ode to the classic Ghostface album, Supreme Clientele. The second studio album from Westside Gunn—an unreal release on paper.

9th, Fraud, Statik, Roc, Pete Rock, Daringer, and Al himself handled the production. Features list made it welcomed amongst hip-hop.

Following that, we saw loosies including more Craft Singles releases via Bandcamp for the crate diggers out there, some more work with Benny and Gunn, a solid small EP called Bread which dropped on Bandcamp along with yet another very limited vinyl pressing, but nothing in 2018 came close to the masterpiece that was Fetti.

Italian Situations

One of his career standout projects, Fetti served as the peak of Al’s work in 2018. Widely considered one of the best albums in hip-hop that year, it showed just how far the artists involved had come. Curren$y since the Covert Coup days, Gibbs since his mixtape days, and Al since he took the leap of faith and got taken in by Mobb Deep.

Coming in at just under 24 minutes, the 9 tracks are packed front to back with hard-hitting bars and production that accents it perfectly. The chemistry between all three artists was obvious.

Different than past projects—Alchemist was in the spotlight. A rare occurrence as the producer, he had built up such a reputation that he was on-par and just as hyped as those spitting bars over the beats. A class of his own, acting as a conductor for an orchestra of hip-hop, waving his baton to enhance each second.

This would widen eyes and ears as listeners looked on towards what else he had planned. The Alchemist would deliver again in 2020, creating an equivalently strong body of work titled Alfredo that played more into the Italian theme and got even higher marks—this time just Gibbs and Al. More on that soon.

Along with a Nas beat, Paak beat, working with Benny and Gunn again, contributing to Earl’s new album, and an entire project with Bronson called Lamb Over Rice, and an EP with Boldy James to close out the year, he made Yacht Rock 2.

Featuring his Fuck, That’s Delicious friends, the tape’s core aesthetic was cruising on the high seas, in a yacht, accented by Big Body’s street poetry. Only Al could pull this off. He had mastered different aesthetics and style switches to a degree that was hard to compare.

2020 was around the corner.

2020 Vision

Now a veteran of the game, some would say an OG, Alan Maman was 42 years of age. His output of projects in 2020 would arguably be his strongest year yet, with no misses or filler. Consistent in every aspect from merch to rollout to aesthetics and presence, it would be the year of panic and disaster where The Alchemist shined the brightest.

He kicked off 2020 in January, producing Stepdad for Eminem’s Music to Be Murdered By album, one of the first ever Alchemist-produced beats on an Eminem studio album. Previously, he had only done composition and production on compilation tapes aside from DJing for Em.

He followed this with an underground smash, a collaboration top to bottom with Boldy James titled The Price Of Tea In China, an artistic take touching on what sort of merchant work each artist has dipped their toes into.

Vince Staples, Benny The Butcher, Gibbs, and Evidence made appearances. Hailed early on as one of the strongest releases of the year, it received full treatment when it came to limited vinyl pressings and merch.

Followed up with a track for Roc on Marcilago titled Saw and another for Jay Electronica called The Neverending Story featuring Jay Z, it was barely March and Al’s output was causing jaws to drop. It wouldn’t be until he linked up with Conway for LULU, though, that’d make people lose their minds.

The Art of LULU

One thing Al kept close to his heart at all times was the concrete jungle of New York City; with that, upcoming and established artists that made his eyes get big. One of those artists was Conway the Machine. A keen ear to the streets at all times—no trend went unnoticed.

Griselda was one of the hottest acts in New York, and their product proved it. They were turning heads more than almost anyone in the game, and their bars were raw as hell. Brother of Westside Gunn and cousin of Benny The Butcher, Conway made a mark over the near-decade as having one of the sharpest pens in New York; not an easy achievement.

Recorded over several months, the album was bar after bar telling the story of Conway’s life. The cover was particularly interesting and overlooked. A great white shark portrayed off the coast of South Africa, a famous photograph shot by Brandon Cole, sent a clear message. Taking no prisoners.

Below, four photographs taken on the same day as the cover; little is known about the backstory, but variations can be seen with additional information for context. Believed to be a great white shark, RFID-tagged, off the Western coast of South Africa.

One of the first full-fledged projects where Conway did not enlist his Griselda family to lob a bar. Intentional—Conway’s style is calculated, and perhaps it was a showing of what he was capable of on Alchemist beats alone.

Hailed as one of the best releases of 2020 so far, alongside The Price Of Tea In China with Boldy James. A single month after his previous project had dropped, and despite the world falling apart with COVID-19, The Alchemist was coming out on top with two of the best albums in hip-hop.

It wasn’t even April yet.

In an interview with Rob Markman for Genius, Al comments on Conway's music and how he chooses who to work with:

I’m a fan first. I’m a fan of battle rap, I’m a fan of words. ... I always keep my ear open, tuned in.

The minute we [him and Conway] linked, it worked.

When Al expanded on Griselda’s work ethic, and how they recorded Griselda Ghost in a single 24-hour span, he went to confirm with Conway, exclaiming:

When they told me that, I said, ‘yo, get the fuck outta here, man,’ you know what I’m saying?

The quality didn’t sound like a microwaved meal. It sounded like they were putting their whole life into these records.

After producing two tracks for the widely-dapped Pray For Paris project by Gunn, he would drop arguably the most praised album of the year and a follow-up to 2018’s Fetti—Alfredo with Freddie Gibbs.

Alfredo

Released mid-2020, over 15 years since the two first crossed paths, roughly a year before Al released his solo debut. This album nailed down the mobster, post-noir, gangster, eerie aesthetic, blending past albums of both artists seamlessly into one another’s chemistry.

The audio embodiment of walking into an old italian ristorante with a tuxedo on. The listener was transported to another plane.

A fun collaboration and one that hip-hop heads had wanted to see for years. A large drop of merchandise appropriately themed after classic Italian diners and stereotypical pizza delivery services further enthused onlookers.

Receiving very high marks, Alfredo was a project for the ages. No question that both Gibbs and Al had cemented spots at the top of hip-hop, in quality and respect.

The one-on-one collaborative process Alchemist had preached from early on paid off heavily. He was no longer making songs people simply liked or bobbed their head to; he was generating some of the best music in hip-hop. Period.

Following Lamb Over Rice with Bronson, the two linked back up this year to do a track entitled Sergio for the Queens, New York native’s newest album, Only For Dolphins.

Most recently, he contributed a few tracks to Gunn’s newest project, Who Made the Sunshine, and took no time off to get to work on his upcoming project, The Food Villain.

The Food Villain

Chris Grosso, co-founder of Munchies and Viceland, knighted Al with the nickname due to his notoriously funny personality of being a very picky eater throughout the Fuck, That's Delicious episodes.

Despite experiencing multiple flavor breakthroughs, over time he had become an extremely villainous food critic when roaming with the usual crew around the world to taste test some of the finest food available, especially expensive cheese. Al also has been rumored to moonlight as a sommelier.

Initially believed to be a collaboration between the long-time producer and MF DOOM, it was revealed that this was not so. Following the release of LULU, Alchemist hopped onto Instagram Live and teased several tracks—one of which made waves throughout hip-hop, a remix of Action Bronson’s 2015 song Terry with an opening MF DOOM verse, as well as his previous DOOMSAYERS collaboration.

A food-centric album, even reminiscent of DOOM’s early concepts, it’s a fun album that perfects a niche aesthetic. Body and Bronson both make an appearance on the spacy album, featuring otherworldly synths and samples. Bronson, after all, was the individual who pushed Al to appear on the show and break out of his shell.

The album is filled throughout with samples of the crew speaking and cuts from old films, feeding into the evil villain archetype. Action Bronson clips, especially:

He’s just a villainous person.
...
The Alchemist is the most pickiest, tasteless human being when it comes to food.
...
He’ll eat things from 3 days ago with no regard for his own body!

A hilarious example of how a simple idea can turn into a full-fledged project. With a hint of genius production, it turns into an actually-good album. Everyone knows the clips are in good faith from those closest to him.

Although well-executed and crisp from front to back, it begs the question: does Al really hate cheese this much, or was he speaking from a hypothetical point of view? Say it ain’t so.

More interesting than the music was what it carried as a whole: an ode to the experiences he’s had around the world traveling with the crew on the shows he starred in. Not just a creative take on good-hearted jokes with friends—it was a painting of appreciation.

The friendships he made along the way. The whole process touched him as an artist and as a person.

2020 was showing this new, humanizing side of Al we had seldom seen, and we all want to see more of it going forward.

The Alchemist

Today is his birthday. Now 43 years of age, Alan Maman reflects on his time within the hip-hop scene. One of the most prolific producers to ever grace the pads and decks, he continues to strive for further continuing his legacy as one of the best to ever do it.

He has become more humbled over the years. He has made a name for himself on top of his art, as one of the most genuinely appreciative individuals within hip-hop. Top to bottom, figureheads and fans alike respect him all the same.

The Beverly Hills native is not after fame or fortune; he has stayed true to his words, crafting masterpieces for the sake of reverence, curating sounds carefully to make them timeless upon release.

Whether it was his unparalleled ability to make 2-bar loops sound identical to drums, his micro-chopping rivaling that of Dilla, or his beats making even the most snarky hip-hop connoisseur bob their head with glee, Maman had cemented his spot among the best in hip-hop, dead or alive.

His ability to maintain both quality and quantity, never sacrificing one for the other, is seen only with perhaps Madlib’s catalogue. Remaining humble by turning down a battle with the Beat Konducta himself, he laughs, but makes sure to pay homage:

Madlib would absolutely destroy me. Are you crazy?

Madlib is like my idol, that’s my brother too.

He’s on another planet of his own, he’s his own genre.

That respect Maman held with everyone in the game throughout his near 30-year career—it acted as muscle tissue, and he continues to uphold it.

For most of us, 2021 is right around the corner.

For The Alchemist, there’s still plenty of time left.

Special Thanks

With gratitude to the friends, mentors, and colleagues who contributed below:

• John Carmack

• Justin Kan

• Kevin Lin

• Sundance DiGiovanni

• Richard lewis

• Sean Plott

• Rachel Quirico

My most sincere thanks to Marcus, as my mentor since 2008 and a dear friend, for his trust with handling a piece like this.

Since its initial release, this work has been plagiarized and reproduced on multiple occasions without proper credit. If you incorporate any portion of this work into your content, please provide appropriate attribution and include a link to the original source (this page).

Since publishing this piece, Marcus has moved on from Twitch, and is now working as VP of Community Development at Fortis Games.

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The Pitch

On October 13, 2017, two weeks to the day after I moved to Seoul, I was still chasing my own answer.

I emailed Marcus on a whim:

Hey Marcus,

I’m in Seoul. Right now, I’m in a McDonald’s so I can pick up WiFi.

Life’s really different here when you’re not visiting, for sure.

I’m getting back to writing soon, just wanted to get settled in. Saturday will be two weeks.

Seeking out opportunities still. Anywhere, everywhere, everything.

I’d like to still do a text interview with you. The usual.

Let me know if/when.

All the best.

A few hours later, he said he was down.

Part I: Forging Dreams

The computer that started it all, and the group that stuck with him for life.

Marcus Graham has had skin in the game for over two decades—at the core of esports and internet broadcasting since before either had a name.

Since childhood, Marcus has been fascinated with the idea of what a video game could be. At the time of this interview, he was Twitch’s Director of Creator Development.

Rather than having a limited interest, how did your passion for video games arise?

I distinctly remember my first experience with video games being in the late 70s, early 80s.

So, in a crazy way, they’re some of my longest memories. Some of the first memories that I have, which was playing the Atari, or at least trying. Hell, maybe even being “that kid” that has a controller in his hand, but maybe brother, or mom, or dad is playing. All I know is that I’m fixated on whatever this thing is on the television.

This was age 3-5 that I really remember this happening. The Atari was something that we got games for regularly. I guess what probably happened was, back in the day before there was Chuck-E-Cheese, there was Showbiz Pizza. Showbiz Pizza, and eventually Family Fun Center, would be my two big arcades. That is where I truly fell in love with video games.

The sights and sounds from this very chaotic and creative brain that I had growing up, that felt more like home than maybe even home did. Wasn’t into skiball or tickets; I just wanted to play every single game that was there [in the arcade] and always had a desire to just be good at that. I immediately recognized that the “score” was a measurement of in-game performance. It was all about getting a better score.

Admittedly, this is probably where my problem started, too. I’ll get more into that as I go on.

That’s when Nintendo was released; I remember Christmas Day, getting the Duck Hunt Gyro version of the Nintendo [NES], which came from grandma and grandpa, because mom and dad wouldn’t buy it. Who knows? All I knew at that point is that, I became a Nintendo kid at that point.

They [my family] would go golf or play basketball, and I would say ‘nah man, we’ve got all these games that we can play’, and those were the games that I wanted to play. From an early age, I was already conditioning myself. I don’t even know what the fascination was, man, like… I think part of it was, this was just an amazing new thing. It was a whole different world; there was a feeling of accomplishment that came with it. During this era, you also saw constant evolution of what was being played and made. It just became… every kid just gets a “thing” — there’s no doubt about it that video games was my “thing”.

I was the kid wearing Frogger hats, Pac-Man pajamas, and I wanted Donkey Kong sheets. I just couldn’t get enough.

A movement.

Yeah.

It’s hard for me to put myself back in the shoes of young Marcus, of young djWHEAT, because I don’t necessarily remember why I was so drawn to video games.

What I know is that I couldn’t. Fuckin’. Get. Enough.

I had a problem as a kid; I had the problem of choosing video games over responsibility. Choosing video games over eating. Choosing video games over doing whatever. There was always something new to play, there was always a kind of friendly competition.

“Hey, I got X score in Y game, see if you can beat it!”

I couldn’t get enough of that.

Give me some years.

The Atari came out in the late 70s. I was born in ’77, so the Atari was in our household already. The Nintendo was ’86. I would have been 9 years old when I got my Nintendo.

From ages 5-9, I played a lot of games at home, but I wanted to go to the arcade. When we went to the movie theater, or a pizza place, or anywhere, I wanted to play the arcade. If I got to choose where we’re going to dinner, then we were going to Showbiz Pizza, just so that I could play games.

I don’t want anyone to think that this is a bad thing, but there was no doubt about it: I was addicted to video games.

I’m pretty sure I probably took a 5 [$5 bill] too many from my mom’s purse. I would get grounded from video games, and my mom would have to call all of my friends’ parents, and tell them “Marcus is grounded from video games; he can’t play.” so I would scheme to play games. I would go to Shop Co., and they’d have a demo stand set up; anything to get the gaming fix.

At the same time, I would say that there’s no doubt about it: video games were my first creative muse. If I got grounded, I’d be like “…well then, fuck! I’m going to draw the video game I’m going to make, I want to create some concept for games,” right?

So I was just channeling any creative energy I could while I wasn’t playing games to try and do so. I thought “okay, this is what I want to do when I grow up, I want to be making these things, sharing my stories and ideas and thoughts with the world,” so from age about 3… that was the first time I was consciously aware “Ok, there’s an Atari here, we’re here, playing things” until now. It’s never stopped.

From 3 until probably… let’s just say 13, maybe 12, was my “arcade, NES, SNES, Sega Master System” days.

Were you aware during any time during those days of the gaming competitions happening, such as the Nintendo World Championships or names like Billy Mitchell, Steve Wiebe, or Todd Rogers?

I tried getting my hands on any gaming magazine they had out at the time. They’d be in there pretty regularly, since the magazines would post scores on certain games.

I wouldn’t claim that I was aware beyond that; this was a time where I saw Billy Mitchell’s name in, say, EGM or GamePro or… shit, maybe even in the Nintendo Powers of old, they would post “so and so beat this game in this time” with a picture of the guy taking a picture of his screen.

So, that kind of thing was definitely evident, but obviously not like it is now. I would definitely say that because of my friend circles, competitiveness was still a very [evident].

Dude, one of my favorite Atari games to this very day, is Combat. It’s one of the earliest form of death match I can remember myself playing. It’s tanks versus boats, ships versus planes, that was the beauty of it. It was such a simple game. Sometimes you were fighting against one another, sometimes it was almost PvE where you’d work together and see who can blow up the most ships or something.

This caused some fights in our house because of how competitive Combat got.

[laughs]

I would say that even on at the earliest, earliest, earliest phases of my life as far as gaming, scorechasing, which is what I call it, was interesting to me. When you had something that was truly head-to-head, competing against my brother or dad, that was it. That was where the fire started.

A Very Special Christmas

Then everything changed. Tell me about that.

At 12, that’s when my world changed, a lot.

All the video game stuff stayed the same, but that’s the age where I discovered PC gaming, and received my first PC. That was also when I discovered BBS (bulletin board systems). I was 12 years old, I remember it vividly, dude. I will never forget. Just one of those moments in your childhood that you’ll never forget.

I fucking begged my parents for a new computer. I begged them. I told them I didn’t want anything for Christmas except a computer.

“I’ll type up all your shit for you, anything. Please, please, please, mom and dad. I just want a computer!”

I remember it vividly. Omaha, Nebraska. Piedmont. I can remember exactly where I was sitting, and my mom turns to me, and she’s like, hey. I know you really wanted a computer, but… we couldn’t get you one this year.

And I was like you know, it’s all good, thank you, I appreciate that.

My mom said “…we really wanted to do it for you.”

“Nah, it’s all good.” I said.

Then, she said “Well, why don’t you go and grab the trash bag and lets clean up the mess here we’ve made from opening up presents?”

So, I go into what was our guest room at the time, and that night they had moved the bed, installed a desk, and there was a computer sitting there…

[takes a breather and becomes visibly emotional]

Take your time.

It gets me really emotional because, that single act of kindness completely changed my life.

I wouldn’t be where I am, right this moment, talking to you, or done any of these things, if my parents, my mom and dad, hadn’t seen that “…wow, this kid really wants a computer,” and you know, we can talk all day about the “…well, you probably would have ended up on that path, eventually!” and maybe I would have, but it was that moment that I feel like I truly feel like I can truly trace my career and every step, and mistake, and everything else I’ve made. It all came from that point.

It was very important as far as in the grand scheme of things in my career.

So as far as the PC went, it was another world to download Wolfenstein, download DOOM, play all the PC ports and games.

I was all up in it; then, I discovered BBS. That was just suddenly, just imagine, the internet. The asynchronous internet; I could send you a mail, but you couldn’t get it necessarily at the same time as I sent it. I would send you a message, log off, then you’d log in, send a message back. This became my secondary addiction, or maybe my second primary addiction, which was this idea that “….holy shit, I have the ability using this device, a modem, from my computer, to call other computers, so that I can find other people who are into gaming like I am, or into BBS like I am,” or whatever it may have been.

There was about a 2-year period from… hold on, let me check.

[mentally rechecks the dates]

Ok, so it was released in ’87, so I want to say it was ’89. I was 12.

Dude, I logged into a Spitfire BBS, I was like “…holy shit, this is amazing, I want to run one of these,” so I learned how to run a BBS, I learned how to start coding Doors, the scripting, the installation of the scripts, I couldn’t get enough. I just couldn’t get enough.

I think also at the same time, an underlying thing that was happening was that I was discovering community; I had a friend community, but this was the first time that I was discovering “…I can be a part of this community because I’m a sys-op,” or “…this community, because I really like Operation: Overkill, the BBS Door game,” because it was just a community that was built and eventually became a larger community.

It was the idea of creating a community, online.

Makes sense. You’re communicating with people around the world. That opens an entirely new realm of possibility, at a very young age.

Correct. In a weird way, this is where broadcasting kind of merges in.

I was loving video games, loving BBS, and loving this technology of being able to communicate with other people that shared similar interests. I was quickly becoming incredibly proficient with computers. Almost dangerously proficient; got really interested into hacking, the culture that surrounded it, trying to understand it. Historically learning about the history of computation. I’d go to these meetups and exchange information; I was a sponge. I wanted to learn.

At the same time, I was a real piece of shit when I was a kid, growing up. I got into trouble mostly because of video games or because of computers or whatever. I would lie a lot to try and get my parents to get off my back so I could play more games.

Often times, my punishments became containment.

[laughs]

What I mean by that is, my mom would say something like:

“Hey, the only way we can keep you is, after school, you have to walk to your dad’s office and spend time in his office until he’s ready to go home.”

That’s how they’d [parents] limit my time.

Believe it or not, what that did was that physically put me in the car with my father, who listened to a lot of AM radio. My father is very conservative; Republican to the core, and so, he would listen to the local Nebraska 1110 KFAB [radio station]. He wasn’t listening to a ton of political stuff; he would listen to this guy named Bruce that would talk finance. My dad had mortgages and rental houses; he loved that stuff. To me, the subject matter was fucking boring, man. I didn’t understand what they were talking about. Mature stuff, interest rates; I’m just this teenage kid, wanting to listen to music or something.

Eventually, what ended up happening was that by not paying as much attention to the content, I spent time paying attention to the other aspects of it [the radio broadcast].

I started paying attention to how this individual comes out of a break into the introduction of his show.