Celebrity Travel: Go Away With San E
For hip-hop artist San E (born San Jung), the decade he spent living in the United States made a huge impact on his music. "I didn't really know what hip-hop and rap was when I was in (South) Korea," he says. "And then I moved to Atlanta when I was in middle school and just naturally started paying attention to it, because it was everywhere. I was lucky, even though I didn't think so as a kid. Atlanta has a lot of great musicians. The music scene is pretty diverse and I was just going with it." Phoning from Seoul, the bilingual rapper said he was excited about his first nationwide tour of the U.S. Fans may follow his updates on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/sanethebigboy/) and Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/sanethebigboy/).
Q. Besides playing your shows, what are you looking forward to experiencing on this tour?
A. Visiting the places I have never been to before. I am looking forward to seeing the local artists and producers and hearing live music. I like meeting people and having fun. I feel blessed and honored that I get this opportunity, because you never know if this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I'm looking forward to trying different kinds of food. I have never visited Chicago before. I have had deep-dish pizza in Korea that supposedly was Chicago style, but I know it has got to taste different than what actually is made in Chicago. So things like that will be fun to find out firsthand. (Laughs) I get excited when we talk about pizza.
Q. Will you spend any time in the U.S. after your tour ends?
A. Actually, I'm going to stay in Atlanta for a month or two and make some music over there. I'd like to work on an album there.
Q. What have you found to be some of the differences and similarities between the way rap songs are written in the U.S. and in Korea?
A. Beat and flow-wise, there's a lot of similarity. But lyric-wise, it's very different. Subject matters can differ, depending on what's going on in your country to an extent. In Korea, you don't say, "I've been popping!" You don't rap about guns, because it's not an issue for us.
Q. If you faced racism during your time in the U.S., what kind of impact did that have on your songwriting?
A. It was not a huge deal, but in middle school and high school, I faced very typical anti-Asian racism. In hip-hop, there's an element of resistance and what happened when I was younger did impact my songs, because I was resisting that kind of racism. It made me angry and I wanted to express what I was really feeling inside of me. But at the time, I didn't speak English well, so even when people were making fun of me, I couldn't say anything back. Around that time, I would listen to rap music and I started to write down my own lyrics in Korean to express myself.
Q. How did living in different parts of the world impact you as a musician?
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