On His New Single, Bobo.Xx Fires Up the Kerosene
The punk singer rejects conformity and looks back at his trailblazing career with the new song “Kerosene”.
It’s audacious to be Bobo.Xx.
The singer and photographer has made a career out of betting against the odds – and he nearly always wins. Bobo started betting early when he dropped out of college to move to Los Angeles, a choice that many people thought was insane. But within six months of moving to the city, Bobo booked his first gig as a tour photographer. After several world tours with many of his heroes, Bobo turned his attention to what he really came to LA for: to become an icon. And after nearly a decade of hard work, Bobo is now one of the few Asian Americans shredding it in rock music. In the past year, he released a handful of excellent singles, opened for The Rose at Kia Forum, and collaborated with Epik High’s Tablo on the rager “PAIN”.
Things have been moving so fast, Bobo told me on a recent call, that he’s had no time to rest or reflect. But this week Bobo is commemorating how much he’s accomplished with his new single “Kerosene”. The song, he explained, “is an homage to how far I’ve come.” It dissects how strange Los Angeles can be and covers Bobo’s drive to be one of the few Asian Americans standing in rock music.
“With ‘Kerosene’, I’ve committed to this character and I’m living the dream but I’m reflecting on where I came from,” he explained. “I’ve met all my heroes, and I’ve done so many fucking amazing things. So, this song is for that kid.”
The people Bobo has encountered throughout his career take a central role in “Kerosene”. He describes Los Angeles as “cellophane wrapped around this phony town”, so he takes a match to the idea of conforming and burns it all down. “When you’re chasing your dream in Los Angeles, there’s a lot of people you see on the internet who are so cool and they seem larger than life,” he said, before explaining that sometimes his heroes have disappointed him.
“I never wanted to be that person who only thought about himself,” he told me. “If I make it to the top but I lose my integrity would it all be worth it? I don’t fucking think so.”
Bobo’s job as a photographer is to capture the world of the celebrities around him. But over time he’s trained his eyes to observe how successful musicians move. “I get that fly on the wall view of how people carry themselves and their confidence,” he said. “I think that’s a special thing that photography has always done for me.” Bobo’s seen everything: From musicians who are far more humble than he anticipated to peers who fall apart right as they reach a moment of success and how they handle that attention. But it’s the stories about the artists who lose themselves that stick with him. Those are the horror stories that motivate him to go in the opposite direction.
When I suggested that perhaps the reason he’s survived in this industry is because of his genuine love for art, he pushed back. “But I also do love attention,” he replied with laughter, asserting that he understands why people lose themselves. “I crave that validation too.” When he wrote “Kerosene”, he asked himself, “Where has all my trauma come from? Why do I want all of this validation?” He paused for a moment as he considered this. “I think my search for validation is through art.”
Growing up in a Vietnamese immigrant family, Bobo always felt like he had to prove himself in order to receive love. “I feel like the only times my parents showed they were proud of me is when I brought home trophies from my martial arts competitions,” he remembered. “I think that’s when I found the most love.” As he grew older, the trophies became metaphorical: A single that charted well. A new tour booked as a photographer. An opening slot for a huge tour. Being the star in commercial work. “I think I get my grind from the trauma of that situation,” he said.
The trophies and trauma represent, too, a scarcity mindset that dates back to Bobo’s childhood. “I grew up fucking broke,” he said. “My parents sacrificed all their life to give me everything and so I can have this opportunity to dream and really go for it.” He often pays homage to them at shows, telling his audiences the story of how they fled Vietnam during the war, left everything behind with the hope that they could build a better life for their family.
Bobo is the result of that dream. “Imagine if they didn’t have me,” he explained. “They’d have so much more money. They could go on vacation. They could buy a house and have way more luxury. They wouldn’t have struggled so hard.” For Bobo, not succeeding is the equivalent of disrespecting the sacrifices his parents made for a shot at the top. “They drilled into me that you gotta be fucking successful and win against the odds especially because America views us Asians as weak and underestimate us. It’s your job to break through that and win,” he said.
Bobo’s most acutely aware of what he has to lose when he travels back home to the suburbs, a place that he calls a “motherfuckin’ dream killer”. He knows too many talented people who landed there, stamping out their light and shrinking themselves to fit into tiny boxes. “It fucking breaks my heart,” he said “to see people grow up and start doubting themselves for a stable job that really isn’t that stable, especially in this economy. They’re depressed making a shitload of money and don’t know why.” He’ll be damned if he ever winds up trapped in a box.
“In LA, being weird is normal,” he explained – and Bobo likes to stand out. Lately he’s been researching what he describes as “the anatomy of a rockstar”. In his freetime, he watches documentaries on legends like David Bowie or Mick Rock. He mirrors their tenacity through his stage performance or his decision to wear stage makeup. At a recent performance for the Lunar New Year, Bobo even wore a skirt in an effort to mix a masculine stage presence with a feminine look. All of these choices are because a great rockstar is transgressive. “They challenge how the average human thinks,” he continued. “They go crazy pushing the boundaries of what’s accepted.”
Bobo knows that to be a rockstar you need to be a “little delusional”. The odds are stacked against you from the beginning, especially as an Asian American. But he’s not interested in hearing from people who chose a conventional path. “This year I stopped taking advice from people who I wouldn’t wanna become,” he said. Often, those people would question why Bobo was still setting himself on fire to succeed. Why couldn’t he get a normal job, they’d ask. What makes you think you can make it?
But maybe, he realized, their questions came from fear: How many of those critics had given up on their own dreams because they were scared they wouldn’t make it? Too many of us believe that story. It takes bravery to fight as hard as Bobo, and his mission is to remind us that we can do this too. It is possible to achieve your wildest dreams because who would have expected he’d be here? Bobo is living proof.
“Being an Asian American in music, your odds of making it are fuckin’ terrible. You gotta go crazy to do this,” he said passionately. There is, he reiterated, absolutely no Plan B if this doesn’t work out.
“Maybe not everybody has the opportunity to believe in themselves like I do,” he continued. “But the fact that I have the audacity to dream is a blessing and I’m grateful for everything that comes with it.”
