JUSTIN TRASH is the First Anti-K-Pop Star

“I think the goal as a Korean-American shouldn’t be to gatekeep,” Justin Trash says. “It’s about uplifting younger artists who don’t know how to navigate the industry.”

The goal wasn’t always to go independent.

But last year Justin Trash decided to bet on himself and left Sony Canada, a major label he had been signed to for several years with his group UPTOWN BOYBAND. The group made waves with clever tracks like “SAILOR MOON”, but the label wasn’t suiting their needs. Plus, Justin had a song that he felt had potential to be huge and Sony wouldn’t release it. 

That song is “kiss me thru the phone”, a KR&B cover of Soulja Boy’s 2008 masterpiece. Justin calls the track “a nostalgic hit”, and it’s a smart choice for a group that has now shifted to CLUB BOYBND, a rotational group where Roc Lee and Justin are the fixed members. 

“Everything I do from this era is just me,” Justin explained. ”I’m not trying to have a persona or be a bad boy. I put whatever I want out there and however people perceive it is none of my business.” There is no plan for these rollouts, he told me. “I always say I’m Justin Trash and I don’t know what I’m doing,” he said as an introduction. “I’m just doing it.” 

What sets Justin apart from other indie artists releasing music is how little he cares about failure this time. “I don’t look at losses as L’s anymore. I’ve taken so many L’s in my life that me and Roc Lee call ourselves L eaters,” he said. “We don’t care. It tastes good now.” He let out a laugh, but the truth is Justin isn’t eating too many L’s these days. 

Justin’s instincts were right and “kiss me thru the phone” is a hit on streaming: Within a month it’s gained over 117,000 streams on Spotify. The group was quick to follow up with the equally appealing track “like this''. To date “Like This” has hit 10,000 streams, nearly matching the weekly growth of their Soulja Boy remake.

Justin is just as viral on TikTok, where he has over 100k followers. He navigates that space with ease, whether he’s calling out the misogyny and racism in Korean culture or making fun of J.Y. Park’s virability. All of this energy fuels CLUB BOYBND’s success, which is the result of a modern idea of celebrity that is driven by a group’s ability to easily communicate with fans and make shareable content. 

“My fans have this understanding that I was this guy signed to Sony Canada,” he said. But he’s learned that the fans stuck by him even after he left the label. “It was just me that they fucked with,” he said he learned. “That’s what I really love about this new era.” 

“Strategies make no fucking sense,” Justin stressed to me. We were in the middle of a conversation about how the rules of the industry have changed as he explained why this change directly impacted how he releases music. The barriers artists faced, those that made Justin sign to Sony a few years ago, have all but disappeared recently. To artists like Justin, label support now feels irrelevant. TikTok can make anyone a star at any moment, or, as Justin put it to me, “You can just release your music and it can instantly change your life.” 

This sort of gamble comes naturally to Justin, who’s never calculated much in his life. “I did whatever I wanted to do growing up. I tried playing basketball, I tried skateboarding. I was always mid [level] at everything,” he said. This trait carried over into music. “I don’t consider myself the most talented musician. When I was signed to Sony Canada, I just wanted to do whatever I wanted. I come at everything with the best intentions and I know the results are just gonna be whatever they are.” 

He was born in Scarborough, but moved around a lot, spending time in Illinois then Colorado and finally back to Toronto. He never settled roots anywhere though, and Justin was disinterested in the banality of school. “I didn’t like going to school. I couldn’t really retain information so while I was enrolled in school I decided to take music more seriously,” he said. “So I started playing shows and I think that’s where I found my love for music: Playing shows.” 

When he was in high school, Justin’s best friend Kory Ross, now of Sham Family, introduced Justin to a wide range of music. The gritty, unpredictable nature of the punk scene drew him in. “Kory grew up listening to old school hip-hop and heavy metal, indie music,” Justin said. “He put me on a lot of cool indie rock.”

His Korean identity wasn’t something Justin focused much attention on at first. “I never thought about influences when I was younger because I was just so immersed in whatever I was doing,” he said. “Obviously I watched people like Steven Yeun, Michelle Yeoh, Jackie Chan, but I never thought about people not looking like me in movies or music until I started making music and pursuing a creative career.” 

Justin really began to feel this pressure point when K-Pop became a cultural phenomenon in North America. For years, he explained, Asians were defined and judged by the kung-fu action movies actors like Jackie Chan starred in. But when K-Pop took over, suddenly idols were the standard that Asian people were compared to. 

“It fucks me up because I think, Am I just whatever they want to see or can I be something greater?” The rub was that Justin felt not only boxed in, but underestimated by these unrealistic standards placed on him by others. “Fuck being compared to someone else,” he began to think. Eventually his mindset shifted “There really aren't rules to this shit,” he told me. “Whoever you’re comparing yourself to, they already exist. Find out what your best verison is.”

“I want to be a footnote to show that there is something different outside of K-Pop,” Justin says.

Although the rules of the industry are changing, Justin has found challenges in navigating relationships. Maybe Tinashe called it out best in “Cold Sweat”: “This city ain’t kind/ To the people who sign up for judgment but can’t take none.” And that was before she was locked into years of record label hell with her releases shelved. 

“There’s a lot of gatekeeping,” Justin explained. “That really bothers me because I think the goal as a Korean-American shouldn’t be to gatekeep. It’s about uplifting younger artists who don’t know how to navigate the industry,” he said. “Not that I’m an expert, but I certainly know more than the next guy. So my goal is to help the guys I call my orphans because I’m  the older one now.” 

Justin has a lot of orphans he’s collaborating with, like Ethan Low and Semmi. But his own projects are keeping him just as busy. He’s a creative director for a clothing brand called Blackbook. He’s also started to act.

Justin is fueling his drive to change the industry by his work with EXPOSITION, a network to promote Asian-American independent artists whose music is largely going unnoticed. While the K-Pop industry – and the monetization of Asian bodies – is thriving, the artistry of smaller musicians is being overlooked. Justin and his friends are pushing to change that.

“[This work is] for artists who are knocking but no doors are opening,” he said. “I want younger artists to do whatever they want. There is no boundary or rules you have to follow for creativity and art,” he continued. “The people who succeed are those who provide something that’s missing.”

Justin’s workload is only increasing this year. He plans to release several projects in 2023, including solo work under his Korean name Bu-wan (부완). “There’s no agenda with that project,” he said. “It’s just the music I want to make.” That work, he said, is cathartic because there is no character attached to it. Bu-wan is tied to Justin’s identity as a Korean-American, and to the duality he feels in an industry that often can’t look past surface-level comparisons. Whoever Bu-wan is, Justin is giving himself permission to let him evolve and change. And he will continue to release with CLUB BOYBND, even dropping diss tracks with Swim Coach, a legend in the LA K-Town community. 

The goal of all of these projects, and for the identity he’s crafted as the anti-K-Pop star, is to show viewers that you can be whoever you want to be with no labels attached. “I want to be a footnote to show that there is something different outside of K-Pop,” he said.

Justin told me that at times he’s wanted to be the poster child for K-Town or Korean-American artists, but he bristled at the idea the longer he thought about it. “Honestly, I could give a fuck about that,” he said. Why limit yourself? Justin has come this far because he doesn’t play by the rules. “It goes beyond music,” he said firmly. “My goal is to be one of the biggest Asian entertainers of my generation.”