If you had been to look into the eyes of 20-year-old Lee Joo-heon, you might need observed a flash of dedication in his hardened gaze. In 2015, he had simply debuted as a rapper within the Korean idol group Monsta X, and he was single-mindedly set on one purpose: fame. After years spent within the rigorous Ok-pop trainee system, he yearned for fulfillment and the entire riches that seemingly got here with it. Now, he sees his adolescent vanity as a type of self-preservation. “[That] Joo-heon,” he says of his youthful self, “he was always angry.”
At 28, Joo-heon, who goes by Joohoney professionally, is not fixated on stardom. Instead, he is adopted a calmer mindset, a brand new perspective that has formed his first official solo EP, Lights (launched this previous May). “This goal is not important — it’s life that’s important,” he tells AP over Zoom. It’s simply previous midnight in Seoul, the place Joohoney is wrapping up a spherical of press interviews for the discharge again at his label’s Gangnam headquarters. It’s been a protracted day of schedules. Earlier, he filmed a dwell taping of Mnet’s M Countdown, a weekly music present in South Korea the place he is likely one of the present MCs.
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But even within the small hours of Friday morning, Joohoney is all dimpled smiles and honest niceties, lyrically weaving out and in of English and Korean: “Right now, everything is good.”
[Photo via Starship Entertainment]
It’s a stark change from the Joohoney who bared his darkest, most intrusive ideas on his 2020 self-made mixtape Psyche. That Joohoney, he says, felt misplaced, and “Smoky” — with its mix of hazy hip-hop and punchy emotional intimacy — was an try and clear the murk, to search out his true self away from the highlight. Known for his biting lyrics and unwavering confidence, Joohoney possesses a strong presence. Onstage, he is incendiary, a blaze so monumental you possibly can’t look away. In individual, he is magnetic, a drive pulling you into his cheerful orbit. When he is alone, nonetheless, he lets his thoughts wander, analyzing occasions and synthesizing them into concepts. Through the method of creating Psyche, he discovered to let go of negativity and embrace a brand new mind-set.
Lights started with “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” a feel-good acoustic track that serves because the EP’s sentimental nearer. It’s the message Joohoney desires listeners to remove, that regardless of all of life’s hardships “the bright tomorrow of our love will come again.” He wrote it together with his followers in thoughts, and it is the one minimize on the EP that made him cry. “My tears just dropped,” he recollects. “That was a surprise for me.” That second of catharsis finally dictated what sort of challenge Lights was going to be. In the aftermath of Psyche, he envisioned this launch as “a chance to spread a positive message.”
“We are the keys [to our own happiness],” he provides. “We all should be lights for our own selves.” Joohoney would not let unhappiness linger anymore. He rejects negativity, selecting as a substitute to see happiness as a passing visitor you invite into your soul. Every day, he wakes up and says hiya. “Of course, we all feel sad and endure hard things, but [I remind myself] it’s not everything. Working, making music, and talking to people gives me a lot of positive energy to move forward,” he says. Joohoney poured that perspective into “Freedom,” the EP’s formidable lead single. On it, he roars, “Feel my freedom” — you possibly can hear it within the dissonance between gentle piano keys and thumping bass, sweeping vocals, and blistering rap verses.
He finds freedom within the chaos, one thing the Korean leisure trade sometimes avoids. “In K-pop, many idols want to be free,” Joohoney says. “There are struggles and hard times, a lot of training and schedules. You’re always tired.” He had a very onerous time in 2018. He was operating on empty, hustling from one schedule to the following and barely making any time for himself. He recollects working for a number of days straight with out stopping. He’s not complaining. He is aware of it is what he signed up for when he selected this life, and dealing onerous has yielded unimaginable outcomes for Monsta X — a prime 5 debut on the Billboard 200, sold-out enviornment exhibits within the U.S., and worldwide collabs with Steve Aoki, Pitbull, and Snoop Dogg.
Yet, he was struggling to search out enjoyment within the work. When he took a step again from promotions in 2020, he did some soul-searching, made music purely for himself, and picked up CrossFit. (“This is very TMI,” he laughs, “but while I was exercising, I realized that everything is hard, but as humans, we don’t die, even when doing CrossFit. That changed my mindset a lot.”) True to its identify, “Freedom” is his purest type of self-expression. To match the power of the track, he discovered easy methods to krump for its choreography from Trix, a South Korean world champion in krump.
“That kind of movement,” he says, demonstrating the sharp rhythm, “really stems from a place of extremes.” It’s how he needed to specific the feeling of breaking free — from anger, from conference, from something that is holding him again. “I believe that from the moment we’re born, we are not free,” he continues. “We’re stuck in a box of what we need to do. There are so many expectations [placed upon us]. Everyone craves this freedom.”
[Photo via Starship Entertainment]
Drawn to music at an early age, Joohoney grew up singing in church. When he turned a trainee as a younger teen, he gravitated towards hip-hop and dance, more vigorous components of eloquence. Songwriting and composition got here naturally to him. He launched his first mixtape in 2015, only a few months after Monsta X’s debut. He’s most affected by virtuosic performers and emotive storytellers, versatile artists who blur style strains and exist on the margins: pop icons, poets, musicians, and rock stars like Michael Jackson, Chet Baker, and Kurt Cobain.
“I feel most free when I’m making music, [when] I can mix different genres and sounds,” he says. “That is the meaning of freedom to me.”
To attain that stage of self-awareness, Joohoney spent loads of time reflecting on how anger metamorphoses into acceptance over time — not by burying it six toes below the floor however by studying to see by way of it. It’s what impressed the track “진화 (Evolution)” on the EP. The monitor itself is a journey, an emo hip-hop fusion of 808s, crunchy riffs, emphatic drum beats, shoegaze-y guitar, and the occasional splash of Auto-Tune. It’s Juice WRLD meets Nirvana. The sound is acquainted, however the depth of its emotion comes from a deeply private place.
“I was inspired by Nirvana,” he says. A pal in London gifted him a Nevermind LP just a few years again, and it was the primary time he listened with intent. “There’s a lot of emotion in their music.” It made him wish to dig deeper, too. He began to query why work strikes so rapidly, and why he and his friends work tirelessly on the detriment of their very own psychological well being. As a more senior artist, eight years into his profession, he sees it as his duty to talk out and be a catalyst for change. He desires your complete trade to evolve with him. “I’m capturing my honest emotions in my music; this isn’t typical in K-pop,” he explains.
It’s why when requested if the phrase “idol” can comprise all of his multitudes, a touch of his assertive youthful self seems. He has a distinct phrase in thoughts. “I’m capturing myself as a whole in my music,” he says with a happy grin. “I can say confidently that I’m a pioneer.”
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