February 24, 2022 • 38 mins
A Korean superstar. A genius rapper. A liar and a cheat. Labels like these have followed Tablo for more than a decade. And now, he’s ready to tell the whole truth, once and for all.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
UM, you're good, levels wise, everything good. Um. How do
you introduce yourself to people? I don't even know how
to introduce myself anymore. MM to tell you the truth, UM,
because I think before, you know, I would say that, Hey,
I'm Tableau. I'm like the front man for this group
(00:21):
called Epiccai. We have these songs, we have these albums.
Maybe you know mentioned a couple like Accolades. But over
the last you know, two decades, you're I think there
have been so many things that happened that have that
have you know, become a part of who I am,
(00:41):
that it's really complicated for me to just try to
figure out how to introduce myself, especially in Korea too,
because the way people see me, Like some may just
see me as a musician, but at the same time,
some people see me as this person and who went
through a lot. So I don't know what tableau they
(01:07):
know or what tableau they may be interested in. So
I I just, you know, I just say hi, I'm Tableau,
and then I let them figure it out in the
room as you talked to him, Yeah, as I talked
to them, just starting starting on you every time. I guess, baby, baby,
(01:54):
who want a suit of Korea doesn't want a neat
day baby back that he praise a better way that
d D two cut play that ship, lay that at
(02:15):
a feeding fip pop a fee a feeding filth free
tip fip fipop what flyns my name whatever? You can
be drupaking writing. Then my book arounds on the words
passed the marks. Yeah, vice and I heart this is authentic.
(02:46):
I'm Dexter Thomas Episode one, God blow Hello, coachhull up.
(03:06):
The Coachella Music Festival has become such a milestone for
musicians that even getting invited to play it's something to
get congratulated for. In April, a hip hop trio from
South Korea called Epic High did an interview with Billboard
about becoming the first big Korean act to play Coachella.
Their frontman Tableau, told the magazine that he thought it
(03:28):
was kind of weird to already be getting so much
praise and attention, considering that they hadn't even gone on
stage yet. I begot you do it got a few
days later, they got on stage not far from Ice
Cube and a reunited Guns and Roses. Asap Rocky and
(04:02):
Run the Jewels had played the night before this was
some pretty legendary company they were in. But as excited
as Tableau and Epic High were to be there, this
was just another achievement in a long list of achievements.
(04:24):
Not only were they massive back home and Soul, but
by this point they were already well established as one
of the first, if not the first, Korean hip hop
groups to pull a mainstream international audience. Hanging out with
Epic Hai, there's so many cameras, Where do we love Hi?
(04:46):
How are one? It's maddox hanging out with the legendary
fellas of Epic Hi and Studio. They'd already done several
tours overseas, standing room only shows in Tokyo to New York,
and they had no problem selling out the will Turn
in Los Angeles. Epic High formed in the early two thousands,
(05:16):
and a lot of their influence came from the American
nineties underground hip hop scene. Tableau burst onto the Korean
hip hop scene around two five. Young, handsome and just
back from the US where he went to college. I
would say that he was part of the reason that
hip hop became big. Tableau and Epic High started in
the underground, but as they got bigger, so did hip hop.
(05:38):
They helped make hip hop mainstream in Korea, and they
didn't stop at the local scene. They went global. By
two thousand and ten, they were beating out Jay Z
and Kanye on the international hip hop charts, all while
rapping mostly in Korean. And it was then, right when
Tableau and his group were at the top of their game,
(05:58):
when Tableau's life out of Nowhere got jolted off course,
landing him in the center of a bizarre conspiracy. Someone
began making accusations against Tableau on an Internet forum. Rumors
had started spreading on the Internet, specifically on a site
called neighbor, which when it first came out was kind
(06:20):
of like Reddit, but nowadays it's more like if Reddit
was also your Google homepage, and you had your Facebook
context and you could order a pizza, so basically the
center of your digital life. People were posting on online
message boards saying the Tableau wasn't who he said he was.
He went to Stanford so he could become an international
hip hop star. You know, it doesn't make a lot
(06:42):
of sense. The accusations started out small, questions about his
academic credentials, doubts about worri he went to college. But
pretty quickly they started spiraling out of control. They were
like claiming that I had bribed the FBI, and that
I had ties to the Manati, that Stanford is like
(07:03):
a set and all these people are actors. I had
pulled over the Korean president, the American president. The online
forum grew to hundreds of thousands of members, and it
put Tableau in the middle of something that we didn't
really have a name for yet. Back in the relationship
between the Internet and reality was still sort of quaint.
(07:25):
Facebook had only recently gone from a college student website
to a place where anyone could sign up. A lot
of people didn't bother because they were still into my Space.
Twitter was just a few years old here in the States.
Social media was still something that was being used by
young computer nerds, not say CEOs of electric car companies
(07:46):
or presidents. We still drew a pretty bold line between
the online and the offline. Black Mirror wasn't out yet,
but I felt, I guess, was some horror sci fi
thing where the entire country I had been living in
I had collectively agreed to basically mind fuck me. Tableau
(08:11):
was an early adopter but in the worst possible way,
completely against his will, the dark part of the Internet
selected him as one of its first high profile targets.
What he experienced had never really happened before, not like
this and not on this scale. You know, they had
collectively agreed that nothing I say would be accepted as truth,
(08:36):
and they had collectively agreed to be delusional. It's either
they're delusional, like all of them, or I'm delusional. And
it fundamentally changed not only the people involved, but the
entire country, And maybe it would have changed a lot
more of us outside of Korea if we'd been paying attention.
(09:01):
I've listened to pretty much everything Tableau has ever released.
I've watched a lot of his interviews. I've read things
he's written, read things that other people written about him,
the whole nine. And you would think this would give
me a pretty good idea of who he is, and
for journalists often that's enough. I've been deejaying and writing
about Internet culture and music for years now. At the
(09:23):
end of the day, though, it's still about the music.
But this one, this isn't just about the music. It's
also about the Internet and what happened to him when
people who would also watched his interviews and seen his videos,
decided that they knew who Tabot was better than Tableau himself,
so much so that Tableau started wondering if maybe they
(09:46):
were writing. So when Tabou decided that he was finally
ready to talk about who he is twelve years later,
there was only one way to do this, not online,
in person, face to face. I was gonna fly out
there to Soul and meetings over Google. You how's to say? Off?
(10:43):
You brought coffee? Come on in. I'm not sure we
have enough slippers for everybody who everyone wants one, you
can use one, Okay. Today table was forty one years old,
but he still has the vibe of a college student.
(11:04):
And then yes, like he was so cool about it too.
He was like, no, I don't want to just use
it all you want. We're sitting in a studio and
Seoul owned by DJ two Cuts, who along with Tableau
and the group's other m C myth with Jim makeup
Etic High. Yesterday I met him and he's like, smoothly,
how about like I pay a half and then you
(11:25):
and myth Thrill. You guys paid each right, And I'm like,
there's no way I can say no, right, because I
have to use it again today, right, So I'm like, oh, intelligent,
well played. Tableau cleaned the place up before I got there,
but you could tell they were in the final stretch
(11:46):
of completing the next album. There's a bunch of music
equipment like samplers and MIDI input devices scattered all over
and on the door they'd written the track list and
dry a race marker for the next album. Tableau was
wearing an oversized T shirt and playing kind of dad
jeans and sandals. He doesn't look like a rapper, but
(12:06):
then again, he doesn't look like anybody in particular, and
anyone who knows him says he's sort of always been
like this, the kind of guy who if you pass
him on the street, you wouldn't even notice until you
talk to him. Um. Actually didn't have breakfast today. Woke up.
I had to help my wife brush my dog's teeth.
(12:30):
I had to leave in the middle of it because
the dog hates it, like obviously, but we need to.
You know, he's gonna appreciate it later. And he's got teeth.
He's got this way of always cracking jokes at just
the right moment. But it's not just that. Aside from
the rap thing, he's also written collections of short stories
(12:52):
and poetry, both in Korean and English, and that versatility
crosses over to his work as a musician. He's done
every thing from the serious tracks talking about societal injustice
or religion to just flexing and dissingwack um seas. I
(13:18):
spent days in that studio with him and our producers
talking about music and how this all came to be.
And it turns out that that story begins really truly
at the beginning. I mean, tell me about what were
you like growing up? Growing up? So I grew up
in many different places. I was born in Korea. I
(13:40):
don't remember this, but that's what it says, um. And
then apparently my parents took me to Indonesia supposedly spoke
um two languages before I returned to Korea. Around the
time Tableau was in second grade, his parents moved the
family to Canada. Yeah, I have a perfect visualization of
(14:06):
what went down when we were when I realized we
were leaving, because it was during the Olympics and Soul
and the games had just begun. Welcome athletes of the world.
After seven years of preparation, difficulties and hoop the Olympic Games.
(14:30):
I'm like, where are we going? And then you know,
a couple of days later, we were in Canada and
on TV we were, you know, now watching the Olympics.
The people of the world returned as Caria hosts the
games of the twenty four Olympia, but from from abroad.
(14:54):
The big question mark in my head was why we
had decided to leave our countr Tree at a time
when the entire world is celebrating our country. I think
it made me feel like, oh, Korea has like its
place in the world. I felt like this is the
beginning of the bright future. But immediately, because I was
(15:17):
taken elsewhere that I had to face being an outsider
and it was it was like a huge wake up
call because I couldn't speak English right. So, um, first
day of school in Canada, I guess some kids wanted
to play a prank call me because you know, I
was the new kid from from Asia, which was maybe
(15:42):
a foreign concept to them. So they put some school
supplies in my pocket and I wasn't aware of it.
We went through recess and they came up and they
reached into my inner jacket pocket and pulled out the
supplies and pretty much just creating a scenario where I
(16:02):
had stolen this and now it gave them the right
to do whatever they wanted. And some of the guys
held me to a tree, held my arms. Onea had
an umbrella he started hitting me with it. Um. Yeah.
My parents came to pick me up, and I remember
like crying and telling my dad I wanted to leave.
(16:24):
In the span of like a few months, I had
gone from feeling like, oh, Korea kind of rocks right,
and I'm proud to be Korean, and immediately I was
like in a place where in a situation where I
did not want to be Korean more. After the break,
(17:03):
Tablo's parents moved around a lot, and he was often
in the new kid in school, but his parents had
a plan. Moving the family to Canada had a specific objective.
It was for my brother and my sister, you know,
for their future, for the education. Tablow's father had a
hard time finding a good paying job in Canada. The
(17:24):
thing that kept him stable was that his mom still
owned a hair salon back in Korea, but that meant
that she had to go back and forth to Soul
to keep it running and all this made things even
harder on the kids. He's the youngest of three. His
sister Christine is in the middle. His brother David is
the oldest. My brother had to literally memorize the entire
(17:46):
English dictionary. I mean, like my my dad like forced
him to because he had maybe two years to apply
to a college, and um, they wanted him to go
to an Ivy League school, which is ridiculous considering he
just left Korea. I would always see him like pass
down on the desk. He started like kind of hallucinating
(18:09):
at some point. I remember this one time he was
slouched on his desk like he had fallen asleep while
you know, with the dictionary and everything open, And my
dad tried to wake him up, and he got up
and he ran to the front door and he started like, uh,
you know, the whole for the for the mail, the
mail slow, yeah, yeah, the mail slot. He opens it
(18:30):
up and he started taking something out of it, like
out of thin air, as if there was a package,
and he was like talking to himself. So seeing that,
I was like, Okay, well, you know, I think I'm good,
Like I'm grateful that no one's paying attention to me.
(18:50):
Eventually though, they started paying attention. So your your parents
told you you need to go to an ivy league.
Here's a list of the schools. Like I want you
to either go to Harvard, Stanford or like M I T.
And then you need to get one of these jobs.
We had three. Uh, you could be a doctor, you
(19:13):
could be a lawyer. And what else was there? Yeah? Yeah,
like a like a professor, or or like a Nobel
Prize winner. I really heard the words out of my
parents mouths Nobel Prize winner, exact same list my parents
(19:33):
gave me. That's Minjiku. She's one of our producers. She's
younger than both Tableau and I. She grew up in
South Korea, and thankfully for her parents, she went to
law school. Yes, we all have a shared experience in that.
In that way, it's it's the same now. A lot
of parents still I still think that way. They may
(19:57):
have added on a couple professions like CEO or Jeff Bezos.
When Tablo was growing up, this academic pressure wasn't just
something that was implied, it was explicit. One summer, his
parents took him on a road trip across the United
States along the way, they stopped at all these different
(20:20):
elite universities, Brown, Harvard, Cornell, and then they hit the
West coast. When we got to Stanford, right in front
of the church that I ended up graduating at, my
mom and dad they were like praying, and then they
told me they had stopped in the middle of the
main quad at the Santa Campus, the iconic Stanford Memorial Church.
(20:45):
We want you to go to. This is school you're
gonna go to. And they really said this if we
we just prayed that you go to this school. And
this was when I was a kid. As I listened
to him talk about this, there was something that felt
familiar to a point, right because I'm not Korean, I'm Black.
But my parents also took some pretty extreme measures to
(21:05):
make sure that I got a good education too, because
like Tylo's parents, they knew that the one thing that
American society cannot take from you and can never deny
from you, it will actually reward you for is a
credential or a title or degree. It's a way to
protect your kids. That also means keeping them away from
(21:27):
anything that might stray them off that path, like say
hip hop. My parents were and still are like extremely religious. Okay,
very very Christian, but there's degrees to being Christian, right,
And they were pretty hardcore, you know, the whole the
(21:48):
whole thing with like devil music, right, yeah, I can
attest that that's that's for real, Like that's what my
parents actually would say. And you know, I had saved
up enough to buy a CD. I wanted a CD
with explicit content on the cover. You wanted, you wanted
(22:08):
a little explicit lyrics thing. So I walked in and
there was a CD with this little kid on the
cover and it had explicit lyrics. And I was like, okay,
this this looks like it has a lot of cuss words,
right um. And I picked it up and I bought
(22:30):
it and it was the Automatic Your Black Top. It
didn't have as many cuss words as I expected, but
the music like Blew Me Away. That's a pretty solid
(22:53):
first CD. That's I just lucked out. But anyways, like
the CD collection I had, if you eyes can think
back to like early nineties, some of these album covers,
like the art was like very to the point, you
know what I mean, Like you could just look at
the cover and know that there's something wrong. If you're
(23:15):
against it. Yeah, so, um yeah, I came home one
day and my parents had you know, smashed it. They
had put it into a pile in the middle of
my room and and smashed it. And it obviously devastated
me because when you're like, you know, twelve thirteen, that's
(23:39):
like your life, you know, that's like your identity, that collection,
and it was almost as if they had smashed me,
you know. So it broke my heart, but you know,
that just made me want it even more. All that said,
(24:00):
his parents methods got results. His oldest siblings did get
into those Ivy League schools. His brother got into Brown
and a year later his sister got accepted the Cornell.
They were done with project number one and Project number two,
which were my brother and my sister, and I was
supposed to carry out Project number three and that meant
(24:22):
getting really serious about his studies, which at this point
Tableau was not. So they sent me to a boarding
school and then left Canada. Parents did. They went back
to Korea. This was the kind of boarding school that
(24:43):
pumped out Ivy League kids, which was great for the parents,
but hell for Tableau. He didn't last long there. He
started pulling pranks to getting into fights, and after a
couple of years he was kicked out, Even though the
school didn't exactly word it that way, they don't kick
you out right because they're they're too sophisticated for that, right,
(25:05):
so they just don't invite you back. His parents brought
him back to Korea when he was fifteen, and is
piste off as his parents were about him having to
come back home. Pretty quickly, it started looking like this
had been a good decision. He now had family around
who could keep an eye on him. His cousin Sam
even went to the same high school, and he started
getting good grades. But more importantly for Tableau, he was
(25:28):
also starting to find his own motivation. He'd started writing
poetry not for school but for himself, and then something
wild happened and it ended up giving Tableau a huge opportunity.
A couple of poems I had written had somehow traveled
outside of the school and gotten into the hands of
(25:48):
a musician in Korea who was huge at the time. Yeah,
Kim Gamo. He was actually the number one top selling
album like artist. Obviously, I had no connection to celebrities
(26:12):
or musicians right, but someone that he works with contacted
my mom through like found a mutual connect and apparently
they had somehow read some of my poems and he
wanted to make an English album with Bobby mcfern. Bobby mcfern, okay,
(26:35):
that's don't worry. Be happy, Bobby mcphern. If the name
isn't ringing a bell yet, be happy. They had agreed
to do a like a collab album and needed uh
someone to write lyrics in English, and for some reason
(26:57):
they wanted it from me from from my high school kid.
So um, I was like what it was just weird,
but um, so he had me writing lyrics. I wrote
lyrics for a ton of songs. Only one came out
(27:18):
right Christmas, I broke my thought, my dreams, but one
came out during winter break, and when I got back
to school, I had somehow like you sort of become
a minor star in the school. Obviously right, because they
(27:42):
were like what the heck? Writing not only helped Tableau
keep his sanity through high school, but it eventually ended
up helping him get into college. Tableau ended up fulfilling
what his parents asked of him. He got into stand
for just like they had prayed for. So he went
(28:04):
As it turned out, that same cousin, Sam, that Tableau
went to high school with, had been admitted to Stanford
the year before. They weren't close, but Tableau's mom said
he should go hang out with him, and he had
been there a year now. I thought, maybe, you know,
would be awkward, but he can like talk to me,
maybe give me some tips about like life there. But
(28:26):
honestly I doubted it because I just thought that it
was gonna be awkward. But we did sit down, and
the first thing he said to me, how did you
get into Stafford? Really? Yep? I was like, all right, Sam,
let's just see. That's not exactly how his cousin remembers it,
(28:48):
but either way, it didn't really face Tableau, especially because
even his own friends were a little shocked he'd gotten
into Stanford. But none of that mattered now though What
mattered was a Tableau was finally out on its own.
Now I could technically do whatever I wanted, Like I
had the option of not doing well if I chose
(29:09):
to do so. And I had dorm mates that would
swing by and they because because of the music I
was playing, like, you know, just like a lot of
underground hip hop at the time, but like, who who
(29:29):
are you playing? Hieroglyphics, hiro souls and mischief? Like like
far side, I was, let's just do a lot of
underground hip hop. I think my playlist maybe it drew people,
but like I had football players in my dorm that
would come hang out in my room because the music
brought them. I don't know why I was in such
(29:55):
a rush to get out of there, Like that's why,
that's why I grad wated like a little earlier, because
like I, I just piled on the credits. I think
I tried to get out of there as fast as
possible so I can be just done with that chapter
of my life. Stanford has this program called a co
terminal degree, where you do graduate level work during your
(30:16):
undergraduate studies. If you can handle the course load, you
graduate with a bachelor's and a master's at the same time.
This requires a lot of extra courses, sometimes almost double
of what's required of most full time students, and Tableau
was going even beyond what most co terminal students do.
That's how badly he wanted to be out of there.
(30:37):
At first, his main goal was to get out of
school a sam, but he was also starting to think
of where he would go after he finally made that escape,
and he was getting the feeling that there might be
some answers in this hip hop group he started. It
was small, but they were starting to make a name
for themselves and even getting small gigs here and there
in the Bay Area. We had two guys in the
(30:57):
group at first that did nothing but break das two
rappers and to be boys. It was just to taste.
But from maybe the first time, Tableau had found something
he wanted to take seriously. In two thousand two, after
just three and a half years, Tableau's mom flew out
to Stanford for his graduation. She sat in the pews
(31:21):
of that same church they once prayed in at the
Center campus. So they call you out and then say
what you're gonna do well, for example, like Frank, Frank
is going to Google or something like that. They're like, Okay,
Daniel suddenly v A M A in English, Lad, he's
(31:41):
going back to Korea too to do hip hop music,
and everyone's like cracking up. My parents. I don't think
they ever really like accepted it, And even after I
became very successful, they would say it a weird way,
like during dinner or something with someone else, like with
their friends. You know, oh yeah, like you know, he's
(32:04):
probably gonna go get a PhD later, So it's it's
like hard for them to let go. You know, those
credentials which are impressive, I mean, graduating with a dual
bachelor's and master's degree unless time it takes most people
just to do their undergrad They ended up being a
part of Tableau's life forever. Even though he did something
(32:26):
totally off the beaten path, he couldn't get away from
that Stanford degree. It marked him for better and for worse.
In Korea, when you when you think, when you when
you're saying that someone's like dope, like rappers or like
singers or actors or whatever, when someone is really good
(32:49):
at what they do, they take the first letter of
that person's name and replace it with God. They started
calling me god blow because you would have to be
a god to be able to do all that. God
blow like Tableau as in, to have become famous and
successful as a rapper and having a bachelor's and a
(33:10):
master's from an elite school in the United States, he
has to have been God to have accomplished that. That's
how they um like compliment you. It was a reflection
of that surprising contradiction. The educated rapper. Tableau fulfilled the
model of a well educated Korean son, but he took
an unadvised risk and beat the odds becoming a successful musician.
(33:35):
It became his hook. When he was on a TV
show or did an interview, he get introduced as the
genius Rapper until those rumors started online. In then god
blow became more of a backhanded compliment or an ironic accusation,
one that suggested that Tableau story was too good to
(33:57):
be true, but it was to to basically mock me
or two sort of shame me. It's often said that
on the road to fame, people lose themselves person they were.
(34:19):
More recently, people say that on the internet, for better
for worse, we either forget or we abandon who we
really are. But what if it's other people telling you
that you are not who you say you are? Did
you define what means tableau again? Change it yo guanda?
It's we demand the truth from Tableau like an abbreviation
(34:44):
yeah ta jin tab again change it which means truth
yo guanda, We demand it um which is an ironic
name considering that's not what they wanted. They wanted everything
but the truth. But in the span of a day,
like a virus, it spreads so fast. It was like
(35:06):
a wildfire. It was insane how fast it spread. So
I panicked. I was like, oh my god, this is like,
this is like real. Over the next seven episodes, we're
gonna look at how a wild but honestly kind of
(35:29):
trivial accusation starts on an anonymous internet forum and then
following as it explodes into a national obsession. Do you
remember when you first heard about Tableau scan? Yes, yes,
I was like, whoa, what's happening? What's happening with our minds?
(35:50):
Not only bringing Tableau's life to a complete halt and
his families, but also messing with the lives of innocent
bystanders living on the other side of the planet. I'm
just like, who is this weirdo? Look, I'm hanging up now,
please stop calling me, you know. And and I was
about to hang up the last time, and I hear
him yell, we'll pay you ten thousand dollars. Okay, let's
(36:13):
let's hear some more and we'll see the lines between
harassment online and real life consequences get blurred. Also thought
to myself that might be getting too close to this
weird conspiracy theory world. People were threatening me online. I
tried to turn it off, but in the real world
it still happened like it was connected and the whole
country divides itself but never once looks away. People have
(36:38):
a lot of built up resentment, and then when a
situation like this happens, people were like just like ravenous,
like zombies, just trying to like like suck the blood
to try to feel like like their life would be okay.
Authentic is a production of Vice Audio and I Heeart
podcast Network, produced and reported by still Finny Karayuki, Minji Coop,
(37:02):
Hate Osbourne, and myself with Janet Lee, Stephanie Brown, and
Sam Egan. Sound design and original music composition by Kyle Murdock,
with additional support from Natasha Jacobs. Our supervising producer is
Janet Lee, editing from Lacy Roberts, fact checking by Minji
Kop and Nikole Pasuka. Our executive producer and VP Advice
(37:25):
Audio is Kate Osbourne. From I Heart Podcast Network. Executive
producers Nicky E Tore and Lindsay Hoffman. This episode features
Epic High music from their album's swan songs, High Society
and Pieces. Part one distributed by c J Music Music,
also from Kim Gun Moo and Bobby McFerrin. Special thanks
(37:45):
to Isne Bobo Nooiet for Epic High's original concert footage.
I'm Dexter Thomas. Make sure to subscribe wherever you get
your podcast so you don't miss an episode, and if
you dig it, give us a rating and a review,
and don't forget to check us out on Twitter and
Instagram at Vice News m
UM, you're good, levels wise, everything good. Um. How do
you introduce yourself to people? I don't even know how
to introduce myself anymore. MM to tell you the truth, UM,
because I think before, you know, I would say that, Hey,
I'm Tableau. I'm like the front man for this group
(00:21):
called Epiccai. We have these songs, we have these albums.
Maybe you know mentioned a couple like Accolades. But over
the last you know, two decades, you're I think there
have been so many things that happened that have that
have you know, become a part of who I am,
(00:41):
that it's really complicated for me to just try to
figure out how to introduce myself, especially in Korea too,
because the way people see me, Like some may just
see me as a musician, but at the same time,
some people see me as this person and who went
through a lot. So I don't know what tableau they
(01:07):
know or what tableau they may be interested in. So
I I just, you know, I just say hi, I'm Tableau,
and then I let them figure it out in the
room as you talked to him, Yeah, as I talked
to them, just starting starting on you every time. I guess, baby, baby,
(01:54):
who want a suit of Korea doesn't want a neat
day baby back that he praise a better way that
d D two cut play that ship, lay that at
(02:15):
a feeding fip pop a fee a feeding filth free
tip fip fipop what flyns my name whatever? You can
be drupaking writing. Then my book arounds on the words
passed the marks. Yeah, vice and I heart this is authentic.
(02:46):
I'm Dexter Thomas Episode one, God blow Hello, coachhull up.
(03:06):
The Coachella Music Festival has become such a milestone for
musicians that even getting invited to play it's something to
get congratulated for. In April, a hip hop trio from
South Korea called Epic High did an interview with Billboard
about becoming the first big Korean act to play Coachella.
Their frontman Tableau, told the magazine that he thought it
(03:28):
was kind of weird to already be getting so much
praise and attention, considering that they hadn't even gone on
stage yet. I begot you do it got a few
days later, they got on stage not far from Ice
Cube and a reunited Guns and Roses. Asap Rocky and
(04:02):
Run the Jewels had played the night before this was
some pretty legendary company they were in. But as excited
as Tableau and Epic High were to be there, this
was just another achievement in a long list of achievements.
(04:24):
Not only were they massive back home and Soul, but
by this point they were already well established as one
of the first, if not the first, Korean hip hop
groups to pull a mainstream international audience. Hanging out with
Epic Hai, there's so many cameras, Where do we love Hi?
(04:46):
How are one? It's maddox hanging out with the legendary
fellas of Epic Hi and Studio. They'd already done several
tours overseas, standing room only shows in Tokyo to New York,
and they had no problem selling out the will Turn
in Los Angeles. Epic High formed in the early two thousands,
(05:16):
and a lot of their influence came from the American
nineties underground hip hop scene. Tableau burst onto the Korean
hip hop scene around two five. Young, handsome and just
back from the US where he went to college. I
would say that he was part of the reason that
hip hop became big. Tableau and Epic High started in
the underground, but as they got bigger, so did hip hop.
(05:38):
They helped make hip hop mainstream in Korea, and they
didn't stop at the local scene. They went global. By
two thousand and ten, they were beating out Jay Z
and Kanye on the international hip hop charts, all while
rapping mostly in Korean. And it was then, right when
Tableau and his group were at the top of their game,
(05:58):
when Tableau's life out of Nowhere got jolted off course,
landing him in the center of a bizarre conspiracy. Someone
began making accusations against Tableau on an Internet forum. Rumors
had started spreading on the Internet, specifically on a site
called neighbor, which when it first came out was kind
(06:20):
of like Reddit, but nowadays it's more like if Reddit
was also your Google homepage, and you had your Facebook
context and you could order a pizza, so basically the
center of your digital life. People were posting on online
message boards saying the Tableau wasn't who he said he was.
He went to Stanford so he could become an international
hip hop star. You know, it doesn't make a lot
(06:42):
of sense. The accusations started out small, questions about his
academic credentials, doubts about worri he went to college. But
pretty quickly they started spiraling out of control. They were
like claiming that I had bribed the FBI, and that
I had ties to the Manati, that Stanford is like
(07:03):
a set and all these people are actors. I had
pulled over the Korean president, the American president. The online
forum grew to hundreds of thousands of members, and it
put Tableau in the middle of something that we didn't
really have a name for yet. Back in the relationship
between the Internet and reality was still sort of quaint.
(07:25):
Facebook had only recently gone from a college student website
to a place where anyone could sign up. A lot
of people didn't bother because they were still into my Space.
Twitter was just a few years old here in the States.
Social media was still something that was being used by
young computer nerds, not say CEOs of electric car companies
(07:46):
or presidents. We still drew a pretty bold line between
the online and the offline. Black Mirror wasn't out yet,
but I felt, I guess, was some horror sci fi
thing where the entire country I had been living in
I had collectively agreed to basically mind fuck me. Tableau
(08:11):
was an early adopter but in the worst possible way,
completely against his will, the dark part of the Internet
selected him as one of its first high profile targets.
What he experienced had never really happened before, not like
this and not on this scale. You know, they had
collectively agreed that nothing I say would be accepted as truth,
(08:36):
and they had collectively agreed to be delusional. It's either
they're delusional, like all of them, or I'm delusional. And
it fundamentally changed not only the people involved, but the
entire country, And maybe it would have changed a lot
more of us outside of Korea if we'd been paying attention.
(09:01):
I've listened to pretty much everything Tableau has ever released.
I've watched a lot of his interviews. I've read things
he's written, read things that other people written about him,
the whole nine. And you would think this would give
me a pretty good idea of who he is, and
for journalists often that's enough. I've been deejaying and writing
about Internet culture and music for years now. At the
(09:23):
end of the day, though, it's still about the music.
But this one, this isn't just about the music. It's
also about the Internet and what happened to him when
people who would also watched his interviews and seen his videos,
decided that they knew who Tabot was better than Tableau himself,
so much so that Tableau started wondering if maybe they
(09:46):
were writing. So when Tabou decided that he was finally
ready to talk about who he is twelve years later,
there was only one way to do this, not online,
in person, face to face. I was gonna fly out
there to Soul and meetings over Google. You how's to say? Off?
(10:43):
You brought coffee? Come on in. I'm not sure we
have enough slippers for everybody who everyone wants one, you
can use one, Okay. Today table was forty one years old,
but he still has the vibe of a college student.
(11:04):
And then yes, like he was so cool about it too.
He was like, no, I don't want to just use
it all you want. We're sitting in a studio and
Seoul owned by DJ two Cuts, who along with Tableau
and the group's other m C myth with Jim makeup
Etic High. Yesterday I met him and he's like, smoothly,
how about like I pay a half and then you
(11:25):
and myth Thrill. You guys paid each right, And I'm like,
there's no way I can say no, right, because I
have to use it again today, right, So I'm like, oh, intelligent,
well played. Tableau cleaned the place up before I got there,
but you could tell they were in the final stretch
(11:46):
of completing the next album. There's a bunch of music
equipment like samplers and MIDI input devices scattered all over
and on the door they'd written the track list and
dry a race marker for the next album. Tableau was
wearing an oversized T shirt and playing kind of dad
jeans and sandals. He doesn't look like a rapper, but
(12:06):
then again, he doesn't look like anybody in particular, and
anyone who knows him says he's sort of always been
like this, the kind of guy who if you pass
him on the street, you wouldn't even notice until you
talk to him. Um. Actually didn't have breakfast today. Woke up.
I had to help my wife brush my dog's teeth.
(12:30):
I had to leave in the middle of it because
the dog hates it, like obviously, but we need to.
You know, he's gonna appreciate it later. And he's got teeth.
He's got this way of always cracking jokes at just
the right moment. But it's not just that. Aside from
the rap thing, he's also written collections of short stories
(12:52):
and poetry, both in Korean and English, and that versatility
crosses over to his work as a musician. He's done
every thing from the serious tracks talking about societal injustice
or religion to just flexing and dissingwack um seas. I
(13:18):
spent days in that studio with him and our producers
talking about music and how this all came to be.
And it turns out that that story begins really truly
at the beginning. I mean, tell me about what were
you like growing up? Growing up? So I grew up
in many different places. I was born in Korea. I
(13:40):
don't remember this, but that's what it says, um. And
then apparently my parents took me to Indonesia supposedly spoke
um two languages before I returned to Korea. Around the
time Tableau was in second grade, his parents moved the
family to Canada. Yeah, I have a perfect visualization of
(14:06):
what went down when we were when I realized we
were leaving, because it was during the Olympics and Soul
and the games had just begun. Welcome athletes of the world.
After seven years of preparation, difficulties and hoop the Olympic Games.
(14:30):
I'm like, where are we going? And then you know,
a couple of days later, we were in Canada and
on TV we were, you know, now watching the Olympics.
The people of the world returned as Caria hosts the
games of the twenty four Olympia, but from from abroad.
(14:54):
The big question mark in my head was why we
had decided to leave our countr Tree at a time
when the entire world is celebrating our country. I think
it made me feel like, oh, Korea has like its
place in the world. I felt like this is the
beginning of the bright future. But immediately, because I was
(15:17):
taken elsewhere that I had to face being an outsider
and it was it was like a huge wake up
call because I couldn't speak English right. So, um, first
day of school in Canada, I guess some kids wanted
to play a prank call me because you know, I
was the new kid from from Asia, which was maybe
(15:42):
a foreign concept to them. So they put some school
supplies in my pocket and I wasn't aware of it.
We went through recess and they came up and they
reached into my inner jacket pocket and pulled out the
supplies and pretty much just creating a scenario where I
(16:02):
had stolen this and now it gave them the right
to do whatever they wanted. And some of the guys
held me to a tree, held my arms. Onea had
an umbrella he started hitting me with it. Um. Yeah.
My parents came to pick me up, and I remember
like crying and telling my dad I wanted to leave.
(16:24):
In the span of like a few months, I had
gone from feeling like, oh, Korea kind of rocks right,
and I'm proud to be Korean, and immediately I was
like in a place where in a situation where I
did not want to be Korean more. After the break,
(17:03):
Tablo's parents moved around a lot, and he was often
in the new kid in school, but his parents had
a plan. Moving the family to Canada had a specific objective.
It was for my brother and my sister, you know,
for their future, for the education. Tablow's father had a
hard time finding a good paying job in Canada. The
(17:24):
thing that kept him stable was that his mom still
owned a hair salon back in Korea, but that meant
that she had to go back and forth to Soul
to keep it running and all this made things even
harder on the kids. He's the youngest of three. His
sister Christine is in the middle. His brother David is
the oldest. My brother had to literally memorize the entire
(17:46):
English dictionary. I mean, like my my dad like forced
him to because he had maybe two years to apply
to a college, and um, they wanted him to go
to an Ivy League school, which is ridiculous considering he
just left Korea. I would always see him like pass
down on the desk. He started like kind of hallucinating
(18:09):
at some point. I remember this one time he was
slouched on his desk like he had fallen asleep while
you know, with the dictionary and everything open, And my
dad tried to wake him up, and he got up
and he ran to the front door and he started like, uh,
you know, the whole for the for the mail, the
mail slow, yeah, yeah, the mail slot. He opens it
(18:30):
up and he started taking something out of it, like
out of thin air, as if there was a package,
and he was like talking to himself. So seeing that,
I was like, Okay, well, you know, I think I'm good,
Like I'm grateful that no one's paying attention to me.
(18:50):
Eventually though, they started paying attention. So your your parents
told you you need to go to an ivy league.
Here's a list of the schools. Like I want you
to either go to Harvard, Stanford or like M I T.
And then you need to get one of these jobs.
We had three. Uh, you could be a doctor, you
(19:13):
could be a lawyer. And what else was there? Yeah? Yeah,
like a like a professor, or or like a Nobel
Prize winner. I really heard the words out of my
parents mouths Nobel Prize winner, exact same list my parents
(19:33):
gave me. That's Minjiku. She's one of our producers. She's
younger than both Tableau and I. She grew up in
South Korea, and thankfully for her parents, she went to
law school. Yes, we all have a shared experience in that.
In that way, it's it's the same now. A lot
of parents still I still think that way. They may
(19:57):
have added on a couple professions like CEO or Jeff Bezos.
When Tablo was growing up, this academic pressure wasn't just
something that was implied, it was explicit. One summer, his
parents took him on a road trip across the United
States along the way, they stopped at all these different
(20:20):
elite universities, Brown, Harvard, Cornell, and then they hit the
West coast. When we got to Stanford, right in front
of the church that I ended up graduating at, my
mom and dad they were like praying, and then they
told me they had stopped in the middle of the
main quad at the Santa Campus, the iconic Stanford Memorial Church.
(20:45):
We want you to go to. This is school you're
gonna go to. And they really said this if we
we just prayed that you go to this school. And
this was when I was a kid. As I listened
to him talk about this, there was something that felt
familiar to a point, right because I'm not Korean, I'm Black.
But my parents also took some pretty extreme measures to
(21:05):
make sure that I got a good education too, because
like Tylo's parents, they knew that the one thing that
American society cannot take from you and can never deny
from you, it will actually reward you for is a
credential or a title or degree. It's a way to
protect your kids. That also means keeping them away from
(21:27):
anything that might stray them off that path, like say
hip hop. My parents were and still are like extremely religious. Okay,
very very Christian, but there's degrees to being Christian, right,
And they were pretty hardcore, you know, the whole the
(21:48):
whole thing with like devil music, right, yeah, I can
attest that that's that's for real, Like that's what my
parents actually would say. And you know, I had saved
up enough to buy a CD. I wanted a CD
with explicit content on the cover. You wanted, you wanted
(22:08):
a little explicit lyrics thing. So I walked in and
there was a CD with this little kid on the
cover and it had explicit lyrics. And I was like, okay,
this this looks like it has a lot of cuss words,
right um. And I picked it up and I bought
(22:30):
it and it was the Automatic Your Black Top. It
didn't have as many cuss words as I expected, but
the music like Blew Me Away. That's a pretty solid
(22:53):
first CD. That's I just lucked out. But anyways, like
the CD collection I had, if you eyes can think
back to like early nineties, some of these album covers,
like the art was like very to the point, you
know what I mean, Like you could just look at
the cover and know that there's something wrong. If you're
(23:15):
against it. Yeah, so, um yeah, I came home one
day and my parents had you know, smashed it. They
had put it into a pile in the middle of
my room and and smashed it. And it obviously devastated
me because when you're like, you know, twelve thirteen, that's
(23:39):
like your life, you know, that's like your identity, that collection,
and it was almost as if they had smashed me,
you know. So it broke my heart, but you know,
that just made me want it even more. All that said,
(24:00):
his parents methods got results. His oldest siblings did get
into those Ivy League schools. His brother got into Brown
and a year later his sister got accepted the Cornell.
They were done with project number one and Project number two,
which were my brother and my sister, and I was
supposed to carry out Project number three and that meant
(24:22):
getting really serious about his studies, which at this point
Tableau was not. So they sent me to a boarding
school and then left Canada. Parents did. They went back
to Korea. This was the kind of boarding school that
(24:43):
pumped out Ivy League kids, which was great for the parents,
but hell for Tableau. He didn't last long there. He
started pulling pranks to getting into fights, and after a
couple of years he was kicked out, Even though the
school didn't exactly word it that way, they don't kick
you out right because they're they're too sophisticated for that, right,
(25:05):
so they just don't invite you back. His parents brought
him back to Korea when he was fifteen, and is
piste off as his parents were about him having to
come back home. Pretty quickly, it started looking like this
had been a good decision. He now had family around
who could keep an eye on him. His cousin Sam
even went to the same high school, and he started
getting good grades. But more importantly for Tableau, he was
(25:28):
also starting to find his own motivation. He'd started writing
poetry not for school but for himself, and then something
wild happened and it ended up giving Tableau a huge opportunity.
A couple of poems I had written had somehow traveled
outside of the school and gotten into the hands of
(25:48):
a musician in Korea who was huge at the time. Yeah,
Kim Gamo. He was actually the number one top selling
album like artist. Obviously, I had no connection to celebrities
(26:12):
or musicians right, but someone that he works with contacted
my mom through like found a mutual connect and apparently
they had somehow read some of my poems and he
wanted to make an English album with Bobby mcfern. Bobby mcfern, okay,
(26:35):
that's don't worry. Be happy, Bobby mcphern. If the name
isn't ringing a bell yet, be happy. They had agreed
to do a like a collab album and needed uh
someone to write lyrics in English, and for some reason
(26:57):
they wanted it from me from from my high school kid.
So um, I was like what it was just weird,
but um, so he had me writing lyrics. I wrote
lyrics for a ton of songs. Only one came out
(27:18):
right Christmas, I broke my thought, my dreams, but one
came out during winter break, and when I got back
to school, I had somehow like you sort of become
a minor star in the school. Obviously right, because they
(27:42):
were like what the heck? Writing not only helped Tableau
keep his sanity through high school, but it eventually ended
up helping him get into college. Tableau ended up fulfilling
what his parents asked of him. He got into stand
for just like they had prayed for. So he went
(28:04):
As it turned out, that same cousin, Sam, that Tableau
went to high school with, had been admitted to Stanford
the year before. They weren't close, but Tableau's mom said
he should go hang out with him, and he had
been there a year now. I thought, maybe, you know,
would be awkward, but he can like talk to me,
maybe give me some tips about like life there. But
(28:26):
honestly I doubted it because I just thought that it
was gonna be awkward. But we did sit down, and
the first thing he said to me, how did you
get into Stafford? Really? Yep? I was like, all right, Sam,
let's just see. That's not exactly how his cousin remembers it,
(28:48):
but either way, it didn't really face Tableau, especially because
even his own friends were a little shocked he'd gotten
into Stanford. But none of that mattered now though What
mattered was a Tableau was finally out on its own.
Now I could technically do whatever I wanted, Like I
had the option of not doing well if I chose
(29:09):
to do so. And I had dorm mates that would
swing by and they because because of the music I
was playing, like, you know, just like a lot of
underground hip hop at the time, but like, who who
(29:29):
are you playing? Hieroglyphics, hiro souls and mischief? Like like
far side, I was, let's just do a lot of
underground hip hop. I think my playlist maybe it drew people,
but like I had football players in my dorm that
would come hang out in my room because the music
brought them. I don't know why I was in such
(29:55):
a rush to get out of there, Like that's why,
that's why I grad wated like a little earlier, because
like I, I just piled on the credits. I think
I tried to get out of there as fast as
possible so I can be just done with that chapter
of my life. Stanford has this program called a co
terminal degree, where you do graduate level work during your
(30:16):
undergraduate studies. If you can handle the course load, you
graduate with a bachelor's and a master's at the same time.
This requires a lot of extra courses, sometimes almost double
of what's required of most full time students, and Tableau
was going even beyond what most co terminal students do.
That's how badly he wanted to be out of there.
(30:37):
At first, his main goal was to get out of
school a sam, but he was also starting to think
of where he would go after he finally made that escape,
and he was getting the feeling that there might be
some answers in this hip hop group he started. It
was small, but they were starting to make a name
for themselves and even getting small gigs here and there
in the Bay Area. We had two guys in the
(30:57):
group at first that did nothing but break das two
rappers and to be boys. It was just to taste.
But from maybe the first time, Tableau had found something
he wanted to take seriously. In two thousand two, after
just three and a half years, Tableau's mom flew out
to Stanford for his graduation. She sat in the pews
(31:21):
of that same church they once prayed in at the
Center campus. So they call you out and then say
what you're gonna do well, for example, like Frank, Frank
is going to Google or something like that. They're like, Okay,
Daniel suddenly v A M A in English, Lad, he's
(31:41):
going back to Korea too to do hip hop music,
and everyone's like cracking up. My parents. I don't think
they ever really like accepted it, And even after I
became very successful, they would say it a weird way,
like during dinner or something with someone else, like with
their friends. You know, oh yeah, like you know, he's
(32:04):
probably gonna go get a PhD later, So it's it's
like hard for them to let go. You know, those
credentials which are impressive, I mean, graduating with a dual
bachelor's and master's degree unless time it takes most people
just to do their undergrad They ended up being a
part of Tableau's life forever. Even though he did something
(32:26):
totally off the beaten path, he couldn't get away from
that Stanford degree. It marked him for better and for worse.
In Korea, when you when you think, when you when
you're saying that someone's like dope, like rappers or like
singers or actors or whatever, when someone is really good
(32:49):
at what they do, they take the first letter of
that person's name and replace it with God. They started
calling me god blow because you would have to be
a god to be able to do all that. God
blow like Tableau as in, to have become famous and
successful as a rapper and having a bachelor's and a
(33:10):
master's from an elite school in the United States, he
has to have been God to have accomplished that. That's
how they um like compliment you. It was a reflection
of that surprising contradiction. The educated rapper. Tableau fulfilled the
model of a well educated Korean son, but he took
an unadvised risk and beat the odds becoming a successful musician.
(33:35):
It became his hook. When he was on a TV
show or did an interview, he get introduced as the
genius Rapper until those rumors started online. In then god
blow became more of a backhanded compliment or an ironic accusation,
one that suggested that Tableau story was too good to
(33:57):
be true, but it was to to basically mock me
or two sort of shame me. It's often said that
on the road to fame, people lose themselves person they were.
(34:19):
More recently, people say that on the internet, for better
for worse, we either forget or we abandon who we
really are. But what if it's other people telling you
that you are not who you say you are? Did
you define what means tableau again? Change it yo guanda?
It's we demand the truth from Tableau like an abbreviation
(34:44):
yeah ta jin tab again change it which means truth
yo guanda, We demand it um which is an ironic
name considering that's not what they wanted. They wanted everything
but the truth. But in the span of a day,
like a virus, it spreads so fast. It was like
(35:06):
a wildfire. It was insane how fast it spread. So
I panicked. I was like, oh my god, this is like,
this is like real. Over the next seven episodes, we're
gonna look at how a wild but honestly kind of
(35:29):
trivial accusation starts on an anonymous internet forum and then
following as it explodes into a national obsession. Do you
remember when you first heard about Tableau scan? Yes, yes,
I was like, whoa, what's happening? What's happening with our minds?
(35:50):
Not only bringing Tableau's life to a complete halt and
his families, but also messing with the lives of innocent
bystanders living on the other side of the planet. I'm
just like, who is this weirdo? Look, I'm hanging up now,
please stop calling me, you know. And and I was
about to hang up the last time, and I hear
him yell, we'll pay you ten thousand dollars. Okay, let's
(36:13):
let's hear some more and we'll see the lines between
harassment online and real life consequences get blurred. Also thought
to myself that might be getting too close to this
weird conspiracy theory world. People were threatening me online. I
tried to turn it off, but in the real world
it still happened like it was connected and the whole
country divides itself but never once looks away. People have
(36:38):
a lot of built up resentment, and then when a
situation like this happens, people were like just like ravenous,
like zombies, just trying to like like suck the blood
to try to feel like like their life would be okay.
Authentic is a production of Vice Audio and I Heeart
podcast Network, produced and reported by still Finny Karayuki, Minji Coop,
(37:02):
Hate Osbourne, and myself with Janet Lee, Stephanie Brown, and
Sam Egan. Sound design and original music composition by Kyle Murdock,
with additional support from Natasha Jacobs. Our supervising producer is
Janet Lee, editing from Lacy Roberts, fact checking by Minji
Kop and Nikole Pasuka. Our executive producer and VP Advice
(37:25):
Audio is Kate Osbourne. From I Heart Podcast Network. Executive
producers Nicky E Tore and Lindsay Hoffman. This episode features
Epic High music from their album's swan songs, High Society
and Pieces. Part one distributed by c J Music Music,
also from Kim Gun Moo and Bobby McFerrin. Special thanks
(37:45):
to Isne Bobo Nooiet for Epic High's original concert footage.
I'm Dexter Thomas. Make sure to subscribe wherever you get
your podcast so you don't miss an episode, and if
you dig it, give us a rating and a review,
and don't forget to check us out on Twitter and
Instagram at Vice News m
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