How old were you when you first got to listen to music?
I was an elementary school student then. One of my friend’s father was working as a producer for a television music program and when I got to visit his place, there were so many music albums of international artists. I heard hip-hop for the first time there and I was kind of shocked.

Like, “there’s this kind of music in the world!”?
I’d only listen to k-pop until I heard of this genre, hip-hop, so I was just like “why is hip hop called to be a good type of music? I don’t even know what this foreign language means.” I just didn’t understand why it was called to be so good, so I wasn’t that much interested in it. But when I heard the song called “C.R.E.A.M” by Wu Tang Clan. They were the most popular U.S. hip hop group back then and my vision of music was just so widened at once.

So the barriers of the language didn’t matter?
Of course i didn’t know the meaning of the lyrics or the right pronunciations of the English language at all, but I didn’t care those kind of things because that music sound was just so cool. I had both the CD and the tape, and I listened to them until the CD and tape were worn out, and I sang along to them as much as I could understand from what they were saying. Also, I wanted to show my friends that I memorized the whole lyrics, so I sang the song on stages, like at the school’s singing festivals. I thought everyone would be just like, “Wow!” and praise me, but they actually didn’t accept it that much. On the contrary, they were just staring at me making faces as like, “What’s he singing? I don’t get it at all.” *laughs*

Ah, that’s sad, but I think you were different from your school friends considering that you must be the only one who was listening to the western music in your elementary school.
Yes, but the friends who were not accepting that music, are calling me now saying, “I should have listened to it with you.” *laughs*

And starting from then, your dorkiness (in a good way) has been defined. *laughs*
Back from when I was younger, I loved to try new things that the others don’t know about, which I thought was great. In fact the very first thing that I started was dancing. I loved to dance along with some music or some television show. We loved to run and jump around meaninglessly when we were young right? Just the same as that, I thought it was fun when I was dancing. My mother saw that and got me to apply to a lot of auditions, which I was accepted to all of them.