March 3, 2022 • 36 mins
Underground Korean hip-hop heads accused Tablo of appealing to the K-pop mainstream. Tablo’s success was a double edged sword that Tajinyo would use against him.
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
At the height of the scandal, in a track came
out by this underground hip hop group called Skull. It's
a typical disk track. Skull is going after some other
Korean hip hop artists like Dynamic Duo, but he also
has some bars for Tableau. One of the lines goes,
you can lie to other people about your education, but
(00:28):
you can't lie to yourself. There's cheaters all around us,
the media. It's all a set up. Someone's manipulating behind
the scenes. We contacted Skull for comment, he didn't respond.
But even beyond Skull, Tableau scandal was an opportunity for
rappers who have been living in Epicaia's shadow. You could
(00:50):
pile on, thow some lyrical darts, and maybe get some
new fans. Because like all modern hip hop beef, the
winner isn't necessarily the best rapper, it's whoever gets the
most attention. These were the musicians the Tableau came up with,
and when things started to crumble, they came for him.
(01:11):
But the whole genius rapper thing was a double edged sword.
It was a hook that helped Tablett break into the mainstream,
and it also made some people in the hip hop
scene turn on it a PHENI fip hop phenim fipop,
(01:39):
what flies my name never, I can be drum, I
can I can cat writing there my book around so
on the Worst Past the Mark Yeah, blah blah blahla
Vice and I Heart I'm Dexter Thomas and this is
(02:01):
authentic Episode three, the sellout. When Epic Hi released their
first album in two thousand three, the Korean music industry
didn't really know what to do with them. They didn't
understand how to package us, I guess, so they put
(02:21):
us in these like I look like a magician in
my first in my first TV performance, I literally look
like a magician, and Mitra looks like a pirate, so
we look like a magical like magical group of pirates.
They try to make us dance, but they realized we couldn't,
and so we're somewhere in between like dancing and rapping,
(02:44):
which makes everything look awkward, and it was just horrible.
I've seen pictures from these early days and the label
didn't seem to get hip hop. It looked like they
were trying to sell Epic High as some kind of
edgy boy band. But it's hard to blame the label
because there wasn't a whole lot of precedent. There was
(03:04):
this group that I really liked in Korea called steg
And and Voice The Patient Voice, great name right. For
a long time, hip hop and Korea had been associated
with this one group. The first time Saltegian Boys got
on TV was and there's a performance from back then
(03:26):
that everyone remembers. They were on a music competition show.
At first, the only difference from any other Korean singers
is that everyone's wearing baggy clothing New York Yankees jerseys
and overalls. The lights start out dim and the guy
in the front is singing what sounds like a run
of the mill pop valley. But then the lights turn
on and the beat drops, and then everyone gets up
(03:52):
and starts dancing like they're in an MC hammer video
and they start rapping in English to their music at
first was not really kind of hip hop, but more
of the dance music with some rapping. Ut ug Lee
is a music professor, but he was a teenager when
he saw sell Tegian Boys on that show. The rest
(04:13):
of the acts were more mainstream stuff like traditional Korean
pop music, were ballad singers, and the judges gave sell
Tegian Boys a terrible score. One of them said, quote,
your lyrics made me feel uncomfortable because of all the
grammatical errors. But to the kids that didn't matter. And
when I went to school next Monday, everybody talked about
(04:38):
SETEGI would you say that Suchegin Boys, that that first
TV appearance was that like the beginning for modern I
should say that. Still I cannot say that it is
the the hip hop, but still they were the one
who introduced rap in Korea. Rap hadn't developed into its
(04:58):
own genrees yet. It was more like some musicians would
occasionally wrap just to add some flavor to their pop songs.
I mean, even Celtegian Boys didn't fully lean into hip
hop until the third album, which came out a few
years later. It was the groups that came out after,
like Drunken Tiger, Dynamic Duo, and Epic High that would
(05:19):
really shape what we now think of as the early
Korean hip hop scene. But even into the early two thousand's,
this was all still pretty underground. Rappers were mostly just
a bunch of fanatic kids, and nobody thought that hip
hop would ever be mainstream in Korea. Whenever I ask
(05:41):
anyone about where it all started. For Tableau, for Epic High,
and for Korean hip hop in general, one place always
comes up, Hung Day. Hung Days the name for a
neighborhood that's around hung Nic University, and in the early
two thou it was the hip hangout for young people
(06:02):
who were into art and music alright, one to to
check one two one two. During the daytime, Hung Day
looked like any other college area, small cafes, boutique shops,
that kind of thing. But at night, the local pubs,
bars and clubs transformed the neighborhood. The central gathering points
(06:26):
was this neighborhood, and also specifically there was most of
the nightlife targeted young college kids, so the drinks were cheap,
the music was loud, and a lot of the clubs
were literally underground. I remember Master Planned. On the weekdays
they have rock music performance when the weekend was I
(06:48):
think hip hop. This is ju Choy, but people in
the hip hop scene call him j Win, So I
just added Win because among all this Jay, I'm the winners. Win.
J Win introduced Epic Hi to each other and he
produced their first album. But before that he was one
of the o G producers in the scene, and he
(07:09):
was always on the lookout for new talent in hung Day.
So at that time there's a hip hop live club
called master Plan in Soul. That's the underground hip hop
live club where Korean hip hop underground rappers who are
performing every weekend at that time for underground mcs. Their
(07:30):
dream is to perform at master Plan. If you were
into hip hop at this time, you were an outsider.
To the outsiders, there weren't a lot of places for
you to go, even in hung Day. So all the rappers,
the DJs, the break dancers, they went to master Plan,
not just to hang out, but to prove themselves. They
took it seriously. There. Master Plan was the place for
(07:54):
hip hop. Have you been in the neighborhood where master
Plan was recently, No Richard and a twenty years on,
the neighborhood has changed a lot. That grimmy underground vibe
is pretty much gone. It's a lot more commercial now.
There's expensive restaurants and franchise stores and master Plan closed
(08:16):
a long time ago. The building where it used to
be still exists, but now it's more of a multipurpose
event space. One of the few things that hasn't changed
is the spot across the street. I really want to
visit there because there's a favorite restaurant we always it
after a performance. Is it the one right across the street, right, yeah,
(08:38):
right in front of the Yet it's called I think Yet,
I think. Okay, let's see. Yeah. So if you look
on the wall here, you can see there's all these
different people with signs, stuff from whatnot. The restaurant is
really tiny. The owner is this older woman who didn't
want to be interviewed, but she was down to talk
to us. She seemed kind of confused about why we
(08:59):
were asking about this club that had closed down so
long ago. I asked her if she knew who Epic
High was, and she said she did, and as a
matter of fact, she had pictures of them taped up
on the wall in the back. Right here at the top,
there's table with this like I said, this got like
a run DMC, kind of big brimmed hat like Pharrell
(09:21):
of Epic High. The members signed paper. Yeah yeah you
gotta go back, man. Yeah, she's got she's got stuff
from everybody. Yeah, my god, I should go there. I
really missed that place. I remember like every time we
were waiting outside. Could better we're you're so you know,
shaky because it's so cold. And then she always told
(09:44):
us like, hey, come inside, you just take back here.
What do they think of you? There are a bunch
of hip hop kids coming in after the concert. I
don't think she knows what we are doing. I don't
think she knows what hip hoppies. I think she just
treat us just kind of her grandson. Do you remember
(10:08):
when you first met Tablow? Where were you? Oh? What? Regin,
whose real name is Jin Choi, is the other m
C and epic Hi. He says when he first met
Tableau in a hotel lobby, He's been expecting somebody who
looked a little less nerdy. J Wynn had orchestrated the meetings.
(10:32):
At the time, Tableau was still in college and he'd
come home to Soul for the winter break, and he
was wanting to see if maybe he could get signed
in Korea. J wyn made table Will perform on the spot.
He played him some beats and Tableau started rapping. One
all of them was actually lesson ones uh originalal beat
in the first album, and that was same lyrics of
(10:56):
Lesson mark break out. Wow, What did you think? Because
those are some pretty serious lyrics. Were you expecting that? No?
In my mind, I was like, whoa, this guy's first
serious right. I kind of like it, but I don't
want to say, Oh, I like you. I like your
(11:18):
wrap on the first day. Right. Tableau only wrapped in
English back then, which was fine for the parties in California,
but it wasn't going to cut it in Korea. So
j Wynn told him, as soon as you go back
to Stanford every week, you should record one or two
songs in Korean lyrics and you should send me. So
(11:40):
he did that I was fluent in Korean, but that
my Korean writing was nowhere near the way I was
writing in English. And also it's very different rapping in Korean.
You know, I had less experience with that. So while
Tabolo was still studying in Stanford to finish his last semester,
(12:00):
DJ came to my home like once, so we junk said,
Kim a k A d J two Cuts is the
third member of Epic Chai. When I asked him how
he became a DJ, he told me that he didn't
really have any choice. He tried to wrap. When did
you decide, Hey, maybe I want to start trying to
DJ labor, but quickly realized that he wasn't any good
(12:25):
at and out of four elements of hip hop, BBoy D,
the all I just show you so boy, you don't get.
The only thing he was good at was DJ. He
kept at it and one day he met j Wynn
(12:48):
through a mutual friend. J Wynn mentioned that he needed
a DJ for a group he was trying to put together,
and two Cuts said well, hey, I could DJ, So
they started working together. Then in two thousand to Tabloo
came back to Korea and they all formed a group
and j Winn helped them get signed to a small label.
The way they all tell it, they didn't really have
(13:09):
high expectations for this thing. They were a bunch of
inexperienced kids making music in a genre that almost nobody
in Korea even listened to the music industry at this
point was basically either mainstream pop ballads or this other
thing that people were starting to call k pop. There
wasn't any room for a bunch of dudes yelling over
drums into a microphone. They didn't even figure out a
(13:31):
name yet, so we were talking like a pig at
pick at pig something at pig or just just keep
you know, spit it out like at pick Fly, like
something like that. Then one day Tabolo and iur sitting
in the college and watching TV and they said I
(13:52):
was like at Pig High. Oh my god. I was like,
oh my god, yes, every card, that's how your name.
Now they were officially a hip hop group. They had
a name, a contract, and some things they wanted to
(14:13):
wrap about, so they started recording. But pretty soon they
realized that something wasn't right with their label. They figured
out that this this contract was messed up. It wasn't
just messed up in that they weren't getting paid well,
and they weren't. I mean, they were getting about ten
dollars per day for meals to split between the three
(14:34):
of them in the most expensive city in Korea. But
the problem was now we had to pay the bill
for all the recording and everything, which is ridiculous because
we really didn't have enough to eat. And Tableau's parents
were not an option. They were still up in arms
(14:54):
about the fact that I've finished up college and to
do this that they didn't want me like living in
their home, So now we have nowhere to live. I
was living at one rapper's house and another rapper's house.
Any friend that would have me, you just CouchSurfing at
this point, Oh, it wasn't CouchSurfing. One guy that I
was living with who's still great friends with me, he
(15:16):
had a like an attic, uh, like where you climbed
up a ladder and you opened the attic and a
tiny space. He allowed me to stay there as long
as his mom didn't find that. And I remember, like,
just like some movie, like I would open the crack
and they would be eating dinner, and I would open
(15:38):
it because he smelled so good and I was so hungry,
and it was like from some Disney movie or something
where like I'm like hiding in this rich family's house
and I'm hungry, and I'm just you know, that's just
literally what what? What went on? For about a year,
Epic High was stuck but at an album, but no
(16:01):
one could hear it because the contract they were in
so they couldn't release the record until they paid back
their debt first, and none of them had that kind
of money. I felt like I had completely fucked up
my life, like on my own. The only way they
could escape was if another label took them on and
pay them out of that bad contract. But even then
(16:23):
that would just mean they'd be in debt to someone else.
But at the same time, I was now in too deep,
Like I had finished this album and I knew the
album was good and there's no way I can just
give up. But I was pretty much ready to Do
you ever think about giving up? Yeah? I was like
(16:44):
this might not pan out. I might have to live
the lie, like become a lawyer. Oh my god. And
then as I was ready to quit, I was drunk,
passed out somewhere. I got a call and some company
(17:05):
that I had never heard of wanted to talk to me,
So I went in. They liked the album, they signed us,
and literally put out the album and I think like
two weeks. Map of the Human Soul was released in
October of two three. Finally, after a year on the show,
(17:25):
the world was gonna hear Epic Haigh's debut. In the
hip hop scene, we became huge stars. There was this
one hip hop like web scene where every hip hop
kid would go to just you know, get Korean hip
hop news and stuff, and they would have a yearly
award thing and we like basically swept like best artists,
(17:46):
best album, best whatever. Right, But mind you, this is
a very small number of people at the time, right,
this is like maybe at most ten thou people. And
I know this because we sold ten thousand records. In
mainstream terms, we had completely bombed. We'll be right back.
(18:33):
Epic Has first album wasn't doing great. We were winning
this web scene award, but at the same time, like
we were, you know, tutoring kids and like trying to
survive and to make matters worse, they found themselves in
another bad contract. Nothing had really changed because we just
didn't get paid. They were all working multiple jobs trying
to make ends meet. It didn't really matter because nobody
(18:56):
recognized us. But they kept going, hoping that their second
album would change things. Right after our second album came
out and within a couple of days, I knew that
this was gonna fall. WHOA, because you just know, you
just feel it. You Mith told me that the second
album did sell better than the first one. I didn't
(19:16):
take one on the on the cold, but we're still
talking in relative terms here, as in it sold well
for an indie album in a niche genre, which hip
hop was at the time, and the label wasn't really
satisfied with that. They started working on the third album,
(19:41):
but they knew that this one was probably their last.
If this one didn't sell, they'd call it quits. That's
quickly make our last album. But in the meantime, I
have a little bit of a plan, and that's when
I asked the thing. The thing was the taboo thing
in hip hop going on TV, me appearing on a
(20:02):
talk show during those times what equaled death in the
hip hop scene. It was considered like a big no.
Now says that at this point, the underground versus mainstream
(20:23):
was a huge issue in the Korean scene. I mean,
it's the classic hip hop debate. I remember this debate
from when I was DJ in college radio in California
back in the early two thousand's. A lot of us
were kind of suspicious of anyone who got too popular,
but we weren't going to boycott your records just because
somebody interviewed you on TV. But hearing these guys describe it,
(20:45):
it sounds like it was way harsher in Korea. Maybe
it's because the scene was so small, but people were
really serious about this stuff. Going on TV was proposes sellouts,
was the opposite of hip hop. TV promotion was more
a k pop's lane. At the time, we debuted with
(21:05):
the most popular Korean k pop groups in history, Tombang
Shingi TV XQ, literally possibly the most popular group ever
in Korea before BTS, and that meant that when we
(21:25):
went to perform at these this show like they wanted
us off the stage, like as soon as possible if
they didn't have a stomach for us. Um, you know,
it just wasn't clicking because nobody wanted us on those shows.
K pop has always been the bigger, flash year and
more popular cousin to hip hop, but both genres have
(21:46):
a history that's pretty deeply intertwined. When did k pop
as we understand it even really start in Korea, It
was when the very first K pop band, h O
t Man Derek debut. There is a lot of debate
about the exact time when modern day k pop came
(22:07):
to be, but Utah Lie says that what we can
say is that by the late nineties, around the same
time as hip hop was emerging, k pop was already
in the front seat and it was redefining what it
meant to be mainstream music in Korea, h O T
(22:28):
and S E S. We're dominating the Korean music charts.
This was a programmatic move by a guy named Li
su Mine, the founder of s M Entertainment. He spent
some time in the US in the eighties, and he
was amazed at what MTV was doing. He also took
(22:51):
notes on some other successful industries, like the j pop
music scene in Japan and America's motown formula. And it
wasn't just music industries that he was inspired by. For
decent that kind of factory music processing fdism. You're saying
Fordism as in Ford Yeah, right, the did the car,
(23:13):
that the automobile factory, that the labor, the work is
clearly divided to each one, just like the motor company,
you know. And he combined this all together and he
came up with a sort of factory model for music.
It worked really well until about the early two thousands.
Some of the idol band even complained it as a
slight contract. The biggest K pop idols started to realize
(23:37):
that the deals they'd signed into weren't all that great,
and the general public realized that a lot of those
idols weren't all that talented. That they did not do
their live performance well on the stage, they only danced
to the music. So a lot of casual fans started
to get disillusioned with K pop and this left a
(23:59):
gap for other genres of music to come in. Also,
Epicai really came at just the right time. Yes, but
it was very coincidence because actually that was the very
period for many Hippan musicians, Dynamic Duo, Drunken Tiger and
the Epicai at that time. Yes, there was a room
(24:21):
for that. I get this butt to your second album
where you're you're almost having to explain the people what
hip hop is and here's how we're going to do it. Oh,
it goes beyond that. Really, basically interviews were really boring
(24:42):
to them because I was giving lectures about like how
graffiti played a role in it, how b boing played
a role, like you know, two cuts had to break down,
like why djaying matters like Herbie Hancock, and like it's
just like everything had to be a lesson to just
simply introduce what we do for our living. It's not
(25:06):
our music, but it has grown into something that we
can identify with and that we can you know, turn
into something that we can express our own thoughts and
voices through right, but this was an entire population that
was not, you know, they just had never been exposed
to it. Epicai spent years patiently explaining hip hop on
(25:30):
any TV show that would have them, all the while
competing with K pop for stage time, and it really
wasn't until two thousand five, with the release of the
third album that anyone started paying attention. Part of that
new attention was because Tableau was everywhere doing the TV thing.
The other part was because in this album they started
(25:51):
incorporating influences from K pop, and since that genre was
already made stream, it was a little easier for people
to adjust to Epicai sound. So it was only natural
that when their third album was released, they were bona
fide superstars. But it wasn't all love. Hip hop heads
accused them of selling out to K pop for mainstream approval.
(26:14):
Their fourth album did get some hip hop fans back
on their side because they went back to the core,
underground sound, but that record was censored by the Korean government.
Some of the songs dealt with things like sex crimes, war, education,
and religion, and songs that talked about these kind of
social issues were banned from playing on the radio. This
(26:36):
would usually be a bad thing, but not for a
hip hop group. Epic High getting censored actually probably helped
them rebuild their street crib with that core hip hop audience,
because it let their fans know that Epic High wasn't
just about the fame. They were about the messaging, the
things they were saying and doing. So people started paying
(26:57):
more attention to them with the release of their fis
and the sixth albums, but not all the attention was positive.
If you get a lot of fans, you're gonna get
a few haters, and pretty soon those haters would find
an opportunity in the Tajo scandal was making national headlines.
(27:27):
Things started coming offline into the real world. Tableau was
now getting death threats and being accosted by strangers in
the streets. I don't know how they got through to me,
but someone threatened to kill me, my wife, and my
daughter if we didn't get out of the country. And
(27:48):
almost overnight, he'd gone from being a beloved symbol of
success in Korea to one of the most hated people
in the country. You know how people think that, like
you know, like hey, don't think about the comments. They
don't worry about the comments. Don't don't read the comments.
That's not real, you know, that's detached from reality. All
(28:12):
you gotta do is turn your computer off. Dude, just unpluged, logout, man,
and you're fine. I gotta say, like the experience I had,
it wasn't detached. You know, people were threatening me online.
I tried to turn it off, but in the real
world it still happened like it was connected. It had
(28:35):
been a month since the Tagino message board had started.
Tableau had stopped going outside. It wasn't safe to leave
his house anymore. Tableau had released his transcript, thinking that
this would fix everything. A few hours later after the
article came out, when I learned that that was not
(28:56):
going to be the case. That people were not accepting
these documents as real. They were saying my diploma was doctored.
They were saying the transcript was fake. Tanjano was looking
at every detail of that transcript in calling everyone and
anyone associated with Stanford to confirm details. No one believed
(29:19):
that just being in Korea started to feel so dangerous
that Tabou left the country with his wife and his baby,
who was still only a few weeks old. First they
went to Japan and then Hawaii. He tried not to
think about it for a while. He knew that sometimes
weird stuff just takes a while to blow over. After
(29:41):
a month, he figured it'd be safe to go back
to Korea. And I actually hadn't been looking at the
internet for a while because well, obviously, right then he
looked at his phone. And then I realized that it
had now spread to my family, like it had become
a campaign against my family. I realized that it got
(30:01):
it had gotten to a point where I now had
no choice but to fight. Isn't this point There were
also people calling and contacting the broadcasting stations saying that
like I should get fired. I didn't really go to
Stanford either, This was already happening. Yeah, Sean Limb worked
as a broadcast journalist in Korea. He also happened to
(30:24):
be good friends with Tableau from their days back at Stanford.
They were trying to attack everybody who was associated with Tableau,
and you talk about Dock saying they're really good. What's
the worst that it got for you? I think it
was like a lot of hate messages on our company
(30:44):
website or show website. People calling the station, what kind
of hate messages? What were people saying? Some would be
just cursing someone's saying like things about Tableau. Someone say
like I think they would be like even judging my appearance,
or are like you know, saying like they're the same
type of people who you know. They found all of us.
(31:06):
I didn't buy any of the yearbooks at Stanford, and
I regretted it because I didn't have any of the pictures.
But they found all the pictures and scanned it and
put it online so I was able to have them.
So there are some pictures of me and Dan. Those
pictures are from when Sean and Dan Lee a k a.
Tableau both lived in the dorms at Stanford. They stayed
in contact over the years, and as the scandal was
(31:28):
getting bigger, Tabloo contacted Sean and asked if they could meet.
He was having I think a bit of psychosis. He
was kind of also detaching from reality because he was
seeing it so much that he started to doubt whether
he actually went to Stamford himself. And I thought that
(31:50):
to get to that stage, did he tell you that, yeah? Wow?
Would you think when he said that. I thought when
he said that, are you being dramatic or this is
what can really happen? And then he was getting to
the point where like trying to ask me, like what
I do? An interview for him for NBC, which is
(32:11):
one of the main TV outlets here. NBC, a huge
broadcasting network in Korea, had proposed a major documentary project.
They would physically fly with a news crew out to
California to visit Stanford with Tableau. They'd go to the
school and talk to the administrators directly. If Tableau was lying,
(32:34):
they were going to get to the bottom in person.
Tableau accepted and they flew out in August. Meanwhile, Tajno
was continuing to grow. The documentary spends time talking to administrators,
(32:58):
former students, and even some of Tableau's old professors. An
impostor I'm I'm the real Tobia Swelf okay. They also
found old videos of Tableau hanging out with his friends
and the sandwich Man Sandwich. Up until this point, all
the news about Tableau had been piecemeal, a report about
(33:21):
Tableau's transcript here or a news article about toddy nose
conspiracy theories there. I was watching the documentary with my
mom again. She was like, why is this happening? This
is hey On Park. She is a major epic high
fan for her and most of Korea. When this two
part documentary aired in October, it was the first to
(33:43):
really lay out in one place everything that was going on.
And I couldn't answer her, you know, because I wasn't
sure what was going on because none of us, none
of us in this country, have seen a cyber bullying
case this big, and it was on a channel that
almost everyone in Korea watched. For some the documentary made
(34:05):
it clear the tableau had been telling the truth the
whole time. It also helped that it was made by
a respected national news outlet, But for others, it was motivated.
Within one day of the documentary airing, the form doubled
in size to almost two hundred thousand members. Now it
(34:29):
was clear this wasn't ending anytime soon. I checked the
Internet and now it had become a campaign against my brother,
my sister, and my mom and dad. So when I
got back and I was like, oh my god, and
not only is persisting, it's gotten like much worse. That's
(34:52):
next time on Authentic. Authentic is a production of Vice
Audio and I Heeart Podcast Network. Produced and reported by
Stephanie Karayuki, Minji Coo, Kate Osbourne and myself with Janet Lee,
(35:13):
Stephanie Brown, and Sam Egan. Sound design and original music
composition by Kyle Murdoch, with additional support from Natasha Jacobs.
Our supervising producer is Janet Lee, editing from Lacey Roberts,
fact checking by Minji Ku and Nicole Pasulka. Our executive
producer and VP of Vice Audio is Kate Osbourne from
(35:33):
iHeart Podcast Network. Executive producers Nikki e Tor and Lindsay Hoffman.
Special thanks to Isne Bobo Nooiette for Epic HAI's original
concert footage. This episode features Epicai music from their album
Map of the Human Soul, distributed by c J Music
Music also from Sotegian Boys. Thanks also to MBC for
(35:54):
their documentary tableaugoes to Stanford. 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
At the height of the scandal, in a track came
out by this underground hip hop group called Skull. It's
a typical disk track. Skull is going after some other
Korean hip hop artists like Dynamic Duo, but he also
has some bars for Tableau. One of the lines goes,
you can lie to other people about your education, but
(00:28):
you can't lie to yourself. There's cheaters all around us,
the media. It's all a set up. Someone's manipulating behind
the scenes. We contacted Skull for comment, he didn't respond.
But even beyond Skull, Tableau scandal was an opportunity for
rappers who have been living in Epicaia's shadow. You could
(00:50):
pile on, thow some lyrical darts, and maybe get some
new fans. Because like all modern hip hop beef, the
winner isn't necessarily the best rapper, it's whoever gets the
most attention. These were the musicians the Tableau came up with,
and when things started to crumble, they came for him.
(01:11):
But the whole genius rapper thing was a double edged sword.
It was a hook that helped Tablett break into the mainstream,
and it also made some people in the hip hop
scene turn on it a PHENI fip hop phenim fipop,
(01:39):
what flies my name never, I can be drum, I
can I can cat writing there my book around so
on the Worst Past the Mark Yeah, blah blah blahla
Vice and I Heart I'm Dexter Thomas and this is
(02:01):
authentic Episode three, the sellout. When Epic Hi released their
first album in two thousand three, the Korean music industry
didn't really know what to do with them. They didn't
understand how to package us, I guess, so they put
(02:21):
us in these like I look like a magician in
my first in my first TV performance, I literally look
like a magician, and Mitra looks like a pirate, so
we look like a magical like magical group of pirates.
They try to make us dance, but they realized we couldn't,
and so we're somewhere in between like dancing and rapping,
(02:44):
which makes everything look awkward, and it was just horrible.
I've seen pictures from these early days and the label
didn't seem to get hip hop. It looked like they
were trying to sell Epic High as some kind of
edgy boy band. But it's hard to blame the label
because there wasn't a whole lot of precedent. There was
(03:04):
this group that I really liked in Korea called steg
And and Voice The Patient Voice, great name right. For
a long time, hip hop and Korea had been associated
with this one group. The first time Saltegian Boys got
on TV was and there's a performance from back then
(03:26):
that everyone remembers. They were on a music competition show.
At first, the only difference from any other Korean singers
is that everyone's wearing baggy clothing New York Yankees jerseys
and overalls. The lights start out dim and the guy
in the front is singing what sounds like a run
of the mill pop valley. But then the lights turn
on and the beat drops, and then everyone gets up
(03:52):
and starts dancing like they're in an MC hammer video
and they start rapping in English to their music at
first was not really kind of hip hop, but more
of the dance music with some rapping. Ut ug Lee
is a music professor, but he was a teenager when
he saw sell Tegian Boys on that show. The rest
(04:13):
of the acts were more mainstream stuff like traditional Korean
pop music, were ballad singers, and the judges gave sell
Tegian Boys a terrible score. One of them said, quote,
your lyrics made me feel uncomfortable because of all the
grammatical errors. But to the kids that didn't matter. And
when I went to school next Monday, everybody talked about
(04:38):
SETEGI would you say that Suchegin Boys, that that first
TV appearance was that like the beginning for modern I
should say that. Still I cannot say that it is
the the hip hop, but still they were the one
who introduced rap in Korea. Rap hadn't developed into its
(04:58):
own genrees yet. It was more like some musicians would
occasionally wrap just to add some flavor to their pop songs.
I mean, even Celtegian Boys didn't fully lean into hip
hop until the third album, which came out a few
years later. It was the groups that came out after,
like Drunken Tiger, Dynamic Duo, and Epic High that would
(05:19):
really shape what we now think of as the early
Korean hip hop scene. But even into the early two thousand's,
this was all still pretty underground. Rappers were mostly just
a bunch of fanatic kids, and nobody thought that hip
hop would ever be mainstream in Korea. Whenever I ask
(05:41):
anyone about where it all started. For Tableau, for Epic High,
and for Korean hip hop in general, one place always
comes up, Hung Day. Hung Days the name for a
neighborhood that's around hung Nic University, and in the early
two thou it was the hip hangout for young people
(06:02):
who were into art and music alright, one to to
check one two one two. During the daytime, Hung Day
looked like any other college area, small cafes, boutique shops,
that kind of thing. But at night, the local pubs,
bars and clubs transformed the neighborhood. The central gathering points
(06:26):
was this neighborhood, and also specifically there was most of
the nightlife targeted young college kids, so the drinks were cheap,
the music was loud, and a lot of the clubs
were literally underground. I remember Master Planned. On the weekdays
they have rock music performance when the weekend was I
(06:48):
think hip hop. This is ju Choy, but people in
the hip hop scene call him j Win, So I
just added Win because among all this Jay, I'm the winners. Win.
J Win introduced Epic Hi to each other and he
produced their first album. But before that he was one
of the o G producers in the scene, and he
(07:09):
was always on the lookout for new talent in hung Day.
So at that time there's a hip hop live club
called master Plan in Soul. That's the underground hip hop
live club where Korean hip hop underground rappers who are
performing every weekend at that time for underground mcs. Their
(07:30):
dream is to perform at master Plan. If you were
into hip hop at this time, you were an outsider.
To the outsiders, there weren't a lot of places for
you to go, even in hung Day. So all the rappers,
the DJs, the break dancers, they went to master Plan,
not just to hang out, but to prove themselves. They
took it seriously. There. Master Plan was the place for
(07:54):
hip hop. Have you been in the neighborhood where master
Plan was recently, No Richard and a twenty years on,
the neighborhood has changed a lot. That grimmy underground vibe
is pretty much gone. It's a lot more commercial now.
There's expensive restaurants and franchise stores and master Plan closed
(08:16):
a long time ago. The building where it used to
be still exists, but now it's more of a multipurpose
event space. One of the few things that hasn't changed
is the spot across the street. I really want to
visit there because there's a favorite restaurant we always it
after a performance. Is it the one right across the street, right, yeah,
(08:38):
right in front of the Yet it's called I think Yet,
I think. Okay, let's see. Yeah. So if you look
on the wall here, you can see there's all these
different people with signs, stuff from whatnot. The restaurant is
really tiny. The owner is this older woman who didn't
want to be interviewed, but she was down to talk
to us. She seemed kind of confused about why we
(08:59):
were asking about this club that had closed down so
long ago. I asked her if she knew who Epic
High was, and she said she did, and as a
matter of fact, she had pictures of them taped up
on the wall in the back. Right here at the top,
there's table with this like I said, this got like
a run DMC, kind of big brimmed hat like Pharrell
(09:21):
of Epic High. The members signed paper. Yeah yeah you
gotta go back, man. Yeah, she's got she's got stuff
from everybody. Yeah, my god, I should go there. I
really missed that place. I remember like every time we
were waiting outside. Could better we're you're so you know,
shaky because it's so cold. And then she always told
(09:44):
us like, hey, come inside, you just take back here.
What do they think of you? There are a bunch
of hip hop kids coming in after the concert. I
don't think she knows what we are doing. I don't
think she knows what hip hoppies. I think she just
treat us just kind of her grandson. Do you remember
(10:08):
when you first met Tablow? Where were you? Oh? What? Regin,
whose real name is Jin Choi, is the other m
C and epic Hi. He says when he first met
Tableau in a hotel lobby, He's been expecting somebody who
looked a little less nerdy. J Wynn had orchestrated the meetings.
(10:32):
At the time, Tableau was still in college and he'd
come home to Soul for the winter break, and he
was wanting to see if maybe he could get signed
in Korea. J wyn made table Will perform on the spot.
He played him some beats and Tableau started rapping. One
all of them was actually lesson ones uh originalal beat
in the first album, and that was same lyrics of
(10:56):
Lesson mark break out. Wow, What did you think? Because
those are some pretty serious lyrics. Were you expecting that? No?
In my mind, I was like, whoa, this guy's first
serious right. I kind of like it, but I don't
want to say, Oh, I like you. I like your
(11:18):
wrap on the first day. Right. Tableau only wrapped in
English back then, which was fine for the parties in California,
but it wasn't going to cut it in Korea. So
j Wynn told him, as soon as you go back
to Stanford every week, you should record one or two
songs in Korean lyrics and you should send me. So
(11:40):
he did that I was fluent in Korean, but that
my Korean writing was nowhere near the way I was
writing in English. And also it's very different rapping in Korean.
You know, I had less experience with that. So while
Tabolo was still studying in Stanford to finish his last semester,
(12:00):
DJ came to my home like once, so we junk said,
Kim a k A d J two Cuts is the
third member of Epic Chai. When I asked him how
he became a DJ, he told me that he didn't
really have any choice. He tried to wrap. When did
you decide, Hey, maybe I want to start trying to
DJ labor, but quickly realized that he wasn't any good
(12:25):
at and out of four elements of hip hop, BBoy D,
the all I just show you so boy, you don't get.
The only thing he was good at was DJ. He
kept at it and one day he met j Wynn
(12:48):
through a mutual friend. J Wynn mentioned that he needed
a DJ for a group he was trying to put together,
and two Cuts said well, hey, I could DJ, So
they started working together. Then in two thousand to Tabloo
came back to Korea and they all formed a group
and j Winn helped them get signed to a small label.
The way they all tell it, they didn't really have
(13:09):
high expectations for this thing. They were a bunch of
inexperienced kids making music in a genre that almost nobody
in Korea even listened to the music industry at this
point was basically either mainstream pop ballads or this other
thing that people were starting to call k pop. There
wasn't any room for a bunch of dudes yelling over
drums into a microphone. They didn't even figure out a
(13:31):
name yet, so we were talking like a pig at
pick at pig something at pig or just just keep
you know, spit it out like at pick Fly, like
something like that. Then one day Tabolo and iur sitting
in the college and watching TV and they said I
(13:52):
was like at Pig High. Oh my god. I was like,
oh my god, yes, every card, that's how your name.
Now they were officially a hip hop group. They had
a name, a contract, and some things they wanted to
(14:13):
wrap about, so they started recording. But pretty soon they
realized that something wasn't right with their label. They figured
out that this this contract was messed up. It wasn't
just messed up in that they weren't getting paid well,
and they weren't. I mean, they were getting about ten
dollars per day for meals to split between the three
(14:34):
of them in the most expensive city in Korea. But
the problem was now we had to pay the bill
for all the recording and everything, which is ridiculous because
we really didn't have enough to eat. And Tableau's parents
were not an option. They were still up in arms
(14:54):
about the fact that I've finished up college and to
do this that they didn't want me like living in
their home, So now we have nowhere to live. I
was living at one rapper's house and another rapper's house.
Any friend that would have me, you just CouchSurfing at
this point, Oh, it wasn't CouchSurfing. One guy that I
was living with who's still great friends with me, he
(15:16):
had a like an attic, uh, like where you climbed
up a ladder and you opened the attic and a
tiny space. He allowed me to stay there as long
as his mom didn't find that. And I remember, like,
just like some movie, like I would open the crack
and they would be eating dinner, and I would open
(15:38):
it because he smelled so good and I was so hungry,
and it was like from some Disney movie or something
where like I'm like hiding in this rich family's house
and I'm hungry, and I'm just you know, that's just
literally what what? What went on? For about a year,
Epic High was stuck but at an album, but no
(16:01):
one could hear it because the contract they were in
so they couldn't release the record until they paid back
their debt first, and none of them had that kind
of money. I felt like I had completely fucked up
my life, like on my own. The only way they
could escape was if another label took them on and
pay them out of that bad contract. But even then
(16:23):
that would just mean they'd be in debt to someone else.
But at the same time, I was now in too deep,
Like I had finished this album and I knew the
album was good and there's no way I can just
give up. But I was pretty much ready to Do
you ever think about giving up? Yeah? I was like
(16:44):
this might not pan out. I might have to live
the lie, like become a lawyer. Oh my god. And
then as I was ready to quit, I was drunk,
passed out somewhere. I got a call and some company
(17:05):
that I had never heard of wanted to talk to me,
So I went in. They liked the album, they signed us,
and literally put out the album and I think like
two weeks. Map of the Human Soul was released in
October of two three. Finally, after a year on the show,
(17:25):
the world was gonna hear Epic Haigh's debut. In the
hip hop scene, we became huge stars. There was this
one hip hop like web scene where every hip hop
kid would go to just you know, get Korean hip
hop news and stuff, and they would have a yearly
award thing and we like basically swept like best artists,
(17:46):
best album, best whatever. Right, But mind you, this is
a very small number of people at the time, right,
this is like maybe at most ten thou people. And
I know this because we sold ten thousand records. In
mainstream terms, we had completely bombed. We'll be right back.
(18:33):
Epic Has first album wasn't doing great. We were winning
this web scene award, but at the same time, like
we were, you know, tutoring kids and like trying to
survive and to make matters worse, they found themselves in
another bad contract. Nothing had really changed because we just
didn't get paid. They were all working multiple jobs trying
to make ends meet. It didn't really matter because nobody
(18:56):
recognized us. But they kept going, hoping that their second
album would change things. Right after our second album came
out and within a couple of days, I knew that
this was gonna fall. WHOA, because you just know, you
just feel it. You Mith told me that the second
album did sell better than the first one. I didn't
(19:16):
take one on the on the cold, but we're still
talking in relative terms here, as in it sold well
for an indie album in a niche genre, which hip
hop was at the time, and the label wasn't really
satisfied with that. They started working on the third album,
(19:41):
but they knew that this one was probably their last.
If this one didn't sell, they'd call it quits. That's
quickly make our last album. But in the meantime, I
have a little bit of a plan, and that's when
I asked the thing. The thing was the taboo thing
in hip hop going on TV, me appearing on a
(20:02):
talk show during those times what equaled death in the
hip hop scene. It was considered like a big no.
Now says that at this point, the underground versus mainstream
(20:23):
was a huge issue in the Korean scene. I mean,
it's the classic hip hop debate. I remember this debate
from when I was DJ in college radio in California
back in the early two thousand's. A lot of us
were kind of suspicious of anyone who got too popular,
but we weren't going to boycott your records just because
somebody interviewed you on TV. But hearing these guys describe it,
(20:45):
it sounds like it was way harsher in Korea. Maybe
it's because the scene was so small, but people were
really serious about this stuff. Going on TV was proposes sellouts,
was the opposite of hip hop. TV promotion was more
a k pop's lane. At the time, we debuted with
(21:05):
the most popular Korean k pop groups in history, Tombang
Shingi TV XQ, literally possibly the most popular group ever
in Korea before BTS, and that meant that when we
(21:25):
went to perform at these this show like they wanted
us off the stage, like as soon as possible if
they didn't have a stomach for us. Um, you know,
it just wasn't clicking because nobody wanted us on those shows.
K pop has always been the bigger, flash year and
more popular cousin to hip hop, but both genres have
(21:46):
a history that's pretty deeply intertwined. When did k pop
as we understand it even really start in Korea, It
was when the very first K pop band, h O
t Man Derek debut. There is a lot of debate
about the exact time when modern day k pop came
(22:07):
to be, but Utah Lie says that what we can
say is that by the late nineties, around the same
time as hip hop was emerging, k pop was already
in the front seat and it was redefining what it
meant to be mainstream music in Korea, h O T
(22:28):
and S E S. We're dominating the Korean music charts.
This was a programmatic move by a guy named Li
su Mine, the founder of s M Entertainment. He spent
some time in the US in the eighties, and he
was amazed at what MTV was doing. He also took
(22:51):
notes on some other successful industries, like the j pop
music scene in Japan and America's motown formula. And it
wasn't just music industries that he was inspired by. For
decent that kind of factory music processing fdism. You're saying
Fordism as in Ford Yeah, right, the did the car,
(23:13):
that the automobile factory, that the labor, the work is
clearly divided to each one, just like the motor company,
you know. And he combined this all together and he
came up with a sort of factory model for music.
It worked really well until about the early two thousands.
Some of the idol band even complained it as a
slight contract. The biggest K pop idols started to realize
(23:37):
that the deals they'd signed into weren't all that great,
and the general public realized that a lot of those
idols weren't all that talented. That they did not do
their live performance well on the stage, they only danced
to the music. So a lot of casual fans started
to get disillusioned with K pop and this left a
(23:59):
gap for other genres of music to come in. Also,
Epicai really came at just the right time. Yes, but
it was very coincidence because actually that was the very
period for many Hippan musicians, Dynamic Duo, Drunken Tiger and
the Epicai at that time. Yes, there was a room
(24:21):
for that. I get this butt to your second album
where you're you're almost having to explain the people what
hip hop is and here's how we're going to do it. Oh,
it goes beyond that. Really, basically interviews were really boring
(24:42):
to them because I was giving lectures about like how
graffiti played a role in it, how b boing played
a role, like you know, two cuts had to break down,
like why djaying matters like Herbie Hancock, and like it's
just like everything had to be a lesson to just
simply introduce what we do for our living. It's not
(25:06):
our music, but it has grown into something that we
can identify with and that we can you know, turn
into something that we can express our own thoughts and
voices through right, but this was an entire population that
was not, you know, they just had never been exposed
to it. Epicai spent years patiently explaining hip hop on
(25:30):
any TV show that would have them, all the while
competing with K pop for stage time, and it really
wasn't until two thousand five, with the release of the
third album that anyone started paying attention. Part of that
new attention was because Tableau was everywhere doing the TV thing.
The other part was because in this album they started
(25:51):
incorporating influences from K pop, and since that genre was
already made stream, it was a little easier for people
to adjust to Epicai sound. So it was only natural
that when their third album was released, they were bona
fide superstars. But it wasn't all love. Hip hop heads
accused them of selling out to K pop for mainstream approval.
(26:14):
Their fourth album did get some hip hop fans back
on their side because they went back to the core,
underground sound, but that record was censored by the Korean government.
Some of the songs dealt with things like sex crimes, war, education,
and religion, and songs that talked about these kind of
social issues were banned from playing on the radio. This
(26:36):
would usually be a bad thing, but not for a
hip hop group. Epic High getting censored actually probably helped
them rebuild their street crib with that core hip hop audience,
because it let their fans know that Epic High wasn't
just about the fame. They were about the messaging, the
things they were saying and doing. So people started paying
(26:57):
more attention to them with the release of their fis
and the sixth albums, but not all the attention was positive.
If you get a lot of fans, you're gonna get
a few haters, and pretty soon those haters would find
an opportunity in the Tajo scandal was making national headlines.
(27:27):
Things started coming offline into the real world. Tableau was
now getting death threats and being accosted by strangers in
the streets. I don't know how they got through to me,
but someone threatened to kill me, my wife, and my
daughter if we didn't get out of the country. And
(27:48):
almost overnight, he'd gone from being a beloved symbol of
success in Korea to one of the most hated people
in the country. You know how people think that, like
you know, like hey, don't think about the comments. They
don't worry about the comments. Don't don't read the comments.
That's not real, you know, that's detached from reality. All
(28:12):
you gotta do is turn your computer off. Dude, just unpluged, logout, man,
and you're fine. I gotta say, like the experience I had,
it wasn't detached. You know, people were threatening me online.
I tried to turn it off, but in the real
world it still happened like it was connected. It had
(28:35):
been a month since the Tagino message board had started.
Tableau had stopped going outside. It wasn't safe to leave
his house anymore. Tableau had released his transcript, thinking that
this would fix everything. A few hours later after the
article came out, when I learned that that was not
(28:56):
going to be the case. That people were not accepting
these documents as real. They were saying my diploma was doctored.
They were saying the transcript was fake. Tanjano was looking
at every detail of that transcript in calling everyone and
anyone associated with Stanford to confirm details. No one believed
(29:19):
that just being in Korea started to feel so dangerous
that Tabou left the country with his wife and his baby,
who was still only a few weeks old. First they
went to Japan and then Hawaii. He tried not to
think about it for a while. He knew that sometimes
weird stuff just takes a while to blow over. After
(29:41):
a month, he figured it'd be safe to go back
to Korea. And I actually hadn't been looking at the
internet for a while because well, obviously, right then he
looked at his phone. And then I realized that it
had now spread to my family, like it had become
a campaign against my family. I realized that it got
(30:01):
it had gotten to a point where I now had
no choice but to fight. Isn't this point There were
also people calling and contacting the broadcasting stations saying that
like I should get fired. I didn't really go to
Stanford either, This was already happening. Yeah, Sean Limb worked
as a broadcast journalist in Korea. He also happened to
(30:24):
be good friends with Tableau from their days back at Stanford.
They were trying to attack everybody who was associated with Tableau,
and you talk about Dock saying they're really good. What's
the worst that it got for you? I think it
was like a lot of hate messages on our company
(30:44):
website or show website. People calling the station, what kind
of hate messages? What were people saying? Some would be
just cursing someone's saying like things about Tableau. Someone say
like I think they would be like even judging my appearance,
or are like you know, saying like they're the same
type of people who you know. They found all of us.
(31:06):
I didn't buy any of the yearbooks at Stanford, and
I regretted it because I didn't have any of the pictures.
But they found all the pictures and scanned it and
put it online so I was able to have them.
So there are some pictures of me and Dan. Those
pictures are from when Sean and Dan Lee a k a.
Tableau both lived in the dorms at Stanford. They stayed
in contact over the years, and as the scandal was
(31:28):
getting bigger, Tabloo contacted Sean and asked if they could meet.
He was having I think a bit of psychosis. He
was kind of also detaching from reality because he was
seeing it so much that he started to doubt whether
he actually went to Stamford himself. And I thought that
(31:50):
to get to that stage, did he tell you that, yeah? Wow?
Would you think when he said that. I thought when
he said that, are you being dramatic or this is
what can really happen? And then he was getting to
the point where like trying to ask me, like what
I do? An interview for him for NBC, which is
(32:11):
one of the main TV outlets here. NBC, a huge
broadcasting network in Korea, had proposed a major documentary project.
They would physically fly with a news crew out to
California to visit Stanford with Tableau. They'd go to the
school and talk to the administrators directly. If Tableau was lying,
(32:34):
they were going to get to the bottom in person.
Tableau accepted and they flew out in August. Meanwhile, Tajno
was continuing to grow. The documentary spends time talking to administrators,
(32:58):
former students, and even some of Tableau's old professors. An
impostor I'm I'm the real Tobia Swelf okay. They also
found old videos of Tableau hanging out with his friends
and the sandwich Man Sandwich. Up until this point, all
the news about Tableau had been piecemeal, a report about
(33:21):
Tableau's transcript here or a news article about toddy nose
conspiracy theories there. I was watching the documentary with my
mom again. She was like, why is this happening? This
is hey On Park. She is a major epic high
fan for her and most of Korea. When this two
part documentary aired in October, it was the first to
(33:43):
really lay out in one place everything that was going on.
And I couldn't answer her, you know, because I wasn't
sure what was going on because none of us, none
of us in this country, have seen a cyber bullying
case this big, and it was on a channel that
almost everyone in Korea watched. For some the documentary made
(34:05):
it clear the tableau had been telling the truth the
whole time. It also helped that it was made by
a respected national news outlet, But for others, it was motivated.
Within one day of the documentary airing, the form doubled
in size to almost two hundred thousand members. Now it
(34:29):
was clear this wasn't ending anytime soon. I checked the
Internet and now it had become a campaign against my brother,
my sister, and my mom and dad. So when I
got back and I was like, oh my god, and
not only is persisting, it's gotten like much worse. That's
(34:52):
next time on Authentic. Authentic is a production of Vice
Audio and I Heeart Podcast Network. Produced and reported by
Stephanie Karayuki, Minji Coo, Kate Osbourne and myself with Janet Lee,
(35:13):
Stephanie Brown, and Sam Egan. Sound design and original music
composition by Kyle Murdoch, with additional support from Natasha Jacobs.
Our supervising producer is Janet Lee, editing from Lacey Roberts,
fact checking by Minji Ku and Nicole Pasulka. Our executive
producer and VP of Vice Audio is Kate Osbourne from
(35:33):
iHeart Podcast Network. Executive producers Nikki e Tor and Lindsay Hoffman.
Special thanks to Isne Bobo Nooiette for Epic HAI's original
concert footage. This episode features Epicai music from their album
Map of the Human Soul, distributed by c J Music
Music also from Sotegian Boys. Thanks also to MBC for
(35:54):
their documentary tableaugoes to Stanford. 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
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