Epik High’s Tablo talks ‘Epik High Is Here 下, Part 2’: “I’m still exactly where I started”

Hours before NME’s interview with Tablo, news of his COVID diagnosis breaks, right in the middle of promotions for Epik High’s highly anticipated album ‘Epik High Is Here 下, Part 2’. Ever the trooper, however, the Korean-Canadian musician calls from a room in the midst of quarantine. At 8:30am on a Wednesday morning, his sweatshirt clad form shakes and stills as he positions the camera in a brighter spot.

Over the course of the conversation, the oft-mythical man becomes more and more human: he cries easily, he’s not always sure of things, but he doesn’t take everything too seriously. He laughs at memes and comments fans leave on social media. He loves what he does, but sometimes hates it, especially when things are misunderstood, but he doesn’t care anymore. Tablo is here – present, in the moment – but, most importantly, he is content.

“All my life, I’ve been asked, ‘Who do you wanna be?’ Which, in another way, is asking you where you want to be. Where do you want to be in life when you’re 20, when you’re 30, when you’re 40? We imagine all these different things, right? Everybody in the world spends money to go somewhere that isn’t here.”

“But, in my mind, I want to be here. I feel fine just here,” he says. “When people ask me, ‘Hey, who do you wanna be? Where do you wanna be in life five years from now, 10 years from now?’ Whether or not you think that’s great or that’s horrible, or something to envy or something to laugh at, I don’t really care. Here is where I am.”

As someone whose generation grew up on a steady consumption of bite-sized show-off fuelled by constant doom-scrolling, the word “here” means a very different thing. It falls into the envy-inducing space of FOMO, touted around to show people that your life is so much more exciting and happening than everyone else’s – “I’m here, and you’re not. Well, sucks to be you, I guess.” “Here” brings dread, isolation, inadequacy, incapability, because you never want to miss out on it.