(gentle music)
- My name is James Han.
I am 31 years old.
I was born and raised in Washington, DC,
Maryland area, and moved to Atlanta in 2015 to pursue
my creative and music endeavors.
Growing up in a black and Latino Hispanic neighborhood,
I was one of few Asian faces.
So at school, you know,
I would kind of have the usual things that you can expect.
All the disparaging things that evil little kids
will say to you.
Because I was always around
and helping my parents' dry cleaners,
I think I got a glimpse of what the world
was like pretty quickly.
You know, a lot of people just dehumanize them.
I'm sure like all cleaner's kids kind of have this moment
where like a customer will come in,
accuse your parents of doing something when clearly
you know they haven't done a thing,
and you want to do everything to defend them.
But you're like a seven year old kid, you know,
what can you really say to this huge, huge adult you know?
So I feel like that desire to wanna fight for them,
protect them, that kind of intensity exists in me.
And I think I put it into my art,
I put it into everything I do.
My parents growing up,
they told me finding something stable,
finding a job that pays a lot of money is your life goal.
And I just internalized that ever since I was probably
in middle school.
You know I just kept thinking,
okay I gotta do something for my family.
I gotta do something to take care of my family.
At the same time I'm asking these questions, why do I exist?
Where do I belong?
Where do I fit in?
And that's where I, that's where I discovered hip hop music
probably around sixth, seventh grade,
like Eminem, 50 Cent, G Unit back in the day.
When I first took a listen I was like man,
these people just like feel so confident.
They sound like they have their life put together.
We know music is, you know,
we don't know if it's all true.
Regardless, they put this image out and I bought into it
and I really believed that this is what I needed in my life.
I felt like I was lacking in confidence,
lacking in identity, belonging.
And I was just, I also loved the music.
I loved the, the like the poetic prose,
you know it was just so intoxicating for me.
So as a young kid getting introduced to hip hop music,
dived deep into it.
And I start meeting kids in my school
who were also into hip hop.
So now people I normally wouldn't be able to talk to
or wouldn't talk to, we're starting to have conversations
you know, about things we like, we're connecting.
And that was kind of my first step into the world
of hip hop and music.
You know I really felt like there was acceptance there.
It was ninth or 10th grade I had to do like a,
like a history report.
And they were like it could be creative,
you could do it however you want.
I don't know how to record myself,
but I'm like I'm gonna write a song to this.
And I asked my friends, my high school friends like yo, hey,
can you record me?
He had like a gamer mic, some software we bootlegged
off of LimeWire and we just recorded to it, you know?
And that was kind of like my first start into just
like recording my voice.
I realized then,
like I think I had like a natural knack for rhythm.
Oh maybe, maybe I'm musically inclined.
Cool.
Was I gonna take it into a career?
Like in, at that time it's like no.
Doing rap and then being an artist or whatever,
like I just didn't think it was a real possibility.
Freshman year of college, I went to University of Maryland,
that's where things picked up a little bit.
I recorded a Facebook video with my friends.
I was wrapping to Lil Wayne's A Milli beat.
And that video basically just kind of blew up
in our little communities
and we wanted to maybe get famous off of it.
Who knows?
It was just something we did.
We were bored in college, we were at the dorm.
And I share that because that's how I met Sam Ock,
and Sam Ock is a music producer, singer songwriter.
And at the time he was studying music engineering
at a nearby college in Maryland.
He saw my video and then he reached out.
He was like hey bro, like I really like your rapping.
Would you like to make a song together?
And mind you at the time
I've never made a professional song ever,
'cause he said he had access to recording studio
and we could use like real mics and stuff like that.
So I'm like, oh yeah, no sweat.
Acting like I really knew what to do, you know?
So we meet and we make two songs.
The first song is called Running,
and then the next song is called Never Change.
Back in 2009, 2010, that kind of blew up on like
the Korean American scene on young YouTube.
Like it got like 1.5 million views,
put us on the scene for every Korean organization
you could think of.
Every Korean church organization,
you know, every conference.
Like it was crazy, every university.
So that, that was like really fun for us 'cause we,
I mean we saw the views just stacking up
and I think it like really resonated with
the Korean Americans at the time.
I was in a Christian rap group from 2010 to 2018.
AMP took us all around the world.
I mean that's pretty much how I even started
my whole music journey.
There was three of us in AMP.
It was me, Sam Ock, and Chung Lee, aka CL.
We made a song called See You in Heaven.
That kind of blew up in the church circles.
We ended up traveling to all the colleges on the East coast.
We also made an album called Glory Songs.
It took us to Korea.
We did tour in China, Japan, Sydney, Paris, Canada.
Because of all of that, all the traveling we were doing,
I felt like we all felt that Maryland had a ceiling
'cause we wanted to work with people who could
create the videos we wanted.
We couldn't find anybody no matter how hard we tried.
We had a show sometime in like 2014,
2015 where we went to Atlanta and I felt like this is,
I think this is a place we need to move to
'cause there's so much music here, it's close to Nashville.
Thought we could build a network out here.
And yeah, that's how me and Sam Ock, we ended up moving.
I really like Atlanta for the fact that I have opportunity
here to build something of my own
because there aren't too many Korean American artists here.
Actually, we can even broaden it.
Just Asian artists.
There aren't that many in general.
There's a lot of dreamers here
and I think we're allowed to dream and grow
and make it happen.
I just want to create things that my imagination
wants to make and that I guess is in line with
what I care to do in the short term.
Like I want to create content that bridges a gap
between like Korean, Asian Americans, and black Americans.
I think because of all the history of what Asian people
have been portrayed as or what they mean in America,
I think that relationship has been tampered with, you know,
and that's something that I think Asian people are unsure of
how to deal with, how to approach it.
And I feel like I'm in the position, being in Atlanta,
being in the black mecca, the, the hub of black excellence,
and all my friends being essentially Asian and black.
I feel like I'm in the position to have those conversations.
I care about alliance between the, you know, Korean, Asian,
you know communities being repaired
with the black community.
You know, like I care about that kind of stuff,
especially being in Atlanta.
I decided essentially in college not to listen
to what other people say and just listen to what I feel like
I need to do.
My parents came to the states to gimme a better life
but what they didn't realize was giving me a better life
gives me a choice.
Like they didn't have a choice coming here
to pick whatever they wanted.
They only had a few choices of what kind of jobs they could
to create a living for themselves.
Because of their sacrifice,
now I can have the choice to be whatever I want.
That's actual true freedom.
That's what the American dream actually is,
to be whoever you want to be.
My name is James Han and this is my Korean American story.
(gentle music)