The Reverse Engineered Success of Eric Nam

eric nam, before we begin, i don't know you anymore, korean american, atlanta, duluth, doraville, — *Credit: Kigon Kwak*

Eric Nam is the ultimate bias wrecker in K-Pop.

Since his debut in 2013, Eric has slowly and then forcefully pushed back against the misconceptions the public might have about K-Pop. He writes, produces, and now self-releases his own music, with his latest album “There and Back Again” becoming his most successful release yet.

Over the past three years, Eric has become more than just a musician but an entrepreneur and activist, too. In 2019, he launched DIVE Studios, a podcast company founded with his brothers Eddie and Brian Nam, that specializes in podcasts for an AAPI audience by AAPI creators. It became one of the only podcast companies that hosts shows by K-Pop stars and AAPI influencers. Eric has also become an ambassador for the Asian American community, as an outspoken advocate against Asian American hate crimes, which have risen sharply since the pandemic began. In 2021 when a gunman murdered eight people, six of whom were Asian women, in Atlanta spas, Eric penned an op-ed for Time Magazine titled, “If You're Surprised by the Anti-Asian Violence in Atlanta, You Haven't Been Listening. It's Time to Hear Our Voices.”

Finally, in late 2021, Eric and his brothers founded Mindset, a platform that gives listeners intimate, exclusive access to stories from their favorite artists. The stories often touch on mental health awareness and are a reminder that we aren’t alone. The Nam brothers have been intentional with the artists they’ve brought into the Mindset family, with each bringing diverse narratives to listeners.

It took Eric Nam nearly a decade to find his voice and to release the music he long dreamed of. “There and Back Again” is an album that feels wholly connected to the personality of Eric due to the lyrical introspection and the attitude that often radiates from singles like “I Don’t Know You Anymore.” It’s also an album that finds Eric experimenting with his style: He wears pearls, high heels, and paints his nails. He’s not interested in being the pop star you wanted him to be. Now, he is a man who does not want to be defined by a label or boxed into the label of a “K-Pop star”. instead, he wants you to know him as an artist.

Drive outside of Atlanta, Georgia, away from the modern condos and high-rise buildings, the chic rooftop bars or lush campus of Georgia Tech and aim north. If you take the interstate headed for Duluth and Doraville, the contemporary landscape will soon give way to bits of heavy greenery and large looming trees with low hanging moss. Take the exit to Doraville, population 10,000, and you’ll find a thriving community of Korean immigrant businesses. Korean restaurants abound in Doraville, usually in older suburban shopping buildings that likely were completed in the early 90s. The town itself is small and while it doesn’t display the sheen or gloss of Atlanta, there is a charm to it.

Doraville is home to K-Pop Store in USA, Atlanta’s K-Pop store, nestled into a corner spot of a two-story shopping mall. Before his albums went out of print, K-Pop Store in USA had a dedicated spot for Eric Nam in their store. When I went this past weekend, he was still placed prominently near the front of the store - his newest release low in stock due to it’s popularity.

The Nam family hails from the suburbs of Atlanta. While he’s never specified which suburb, I have wondered if it was the area of Duluth or Doraville. While Eric found that Atlanta was a very white-centric city, at home and at church, Eric was surrounded by people who looked like him – people from the motherland of Korea who spoke the same language and understood one another’s customs.

eric nam, eddie nam, brian nam, atlanta, georgia, korean american, mindset, dive — *Eric and his brothers, Eddie and Brian Nam. Image courtesy of Best of Korea (check out sources list at the end for the article)*

This is backed up by scholarly research into the boom of Korean immigration to the South. “From 1990 to 2000, Georgia’s Korean community grew by a staggering 88.2 percent, faster than anywhere else in the country. Now, approximately 80 Korean companies — including Hyundai, Kia Motors, and LG — have established American headquarters across Georgia,” wrote Jennifer Hope Choi in her article “Class and the History of Korean Americans in Georgia”.

In a community like Doraville, or Duluth, which has the highest population of Korean Ameircans in Georgia, it is easy to forget you’re near the city of Atlanta. The towns feel insulated. According to a 2019 Census, Gwinnett County has over 22,000 of Korean descent who live in the suburb. When Eric was growing up, the Koreans began to move into the suburbs where he lived.

“Church became very big and that was probably the core of my Korean identity. I remember having a lot of identity crises,” he said in a Korea Society podcast interview. “I was very blessed to go to a private school, but it was majority white. My first year there, I believe I was the only Asian kid there. It was a very rude awakening. I’d like to think that those types of experiences allowed me to develop a perspective that is unique to who I am today.”

Eric was subjected to bullying and microaggressive questions about where he really came from. Teachers and students would make comments about his boxed lunches, his eyes, and ask where Korea was on a map. In an episode of Daebak Show he compared the experiences as a Korean American to, “some weird alien shit.” He continued, “The breakdowns, the mental anxiety, the crazy… For me as a Korean American I’m never accepted here because I’m too American. We’re always categorized because we’re American. But back home we’re categorized as Korean.”

His parents barely spoke English so after learning the language as a child, his role became one as the “middle man”. “I had to do everything a parent was supposed to do,” he recalled. “I never wanted to be left behind. I never wanted to be Other.” The experience of being a child of immigrants, “crafted me into a person who is very individualistic.”

But for a while Eric tried to be like everyone else. He attended college at Georgetown then accepted a job at Deloitte in New York. But he was unhappy and an international travel opportunity presented itself. He began to dream, too, about the possibility of trying his hand at music.

Moving to Korea to pursue music, “wasn’t a choice,” he maintained. If he stayed in America, “I probably would be unemployed. There's no way they’re [record labels] going to take a chance on some Asian kid from the South.” Eric believed that maybe if he could succeed in Korea, he could slowly reverse engineer his way back to America.

Eric was signed by Stone Music Entertainment in Korea and quickly entered a quasi- K-Pop bootcamp. He was older at 23 than most idols who debut and he found that any idea he had could label him as a troublemaker. He played the game as best he could for the first five years of his career. Some of the music holds up incredibly well, like “Runaway” and “Honestly”, but others never truly reflected Eric’s identity.

But in 2019, the singer finally began to make headway with the release of his first English language album “Before We Begin”. He considered the work a first introduction to who he is as a person. It did not, he conceded, tell the full story of Eric Nam as he wants us to know, but it was the most clear-eyed portrait he could release.

The album, he later said, ““tells a completely different narrative” than the general public understands about K-Pop. Instead of groups coming to America to “take over the charts, this dude is Asian American, born and raised here, he just happened to start his career in Korea. But he can sing and perform like any other pop artist in the States.”

The album includes fan favorites like “You’re Sexy, I’m Sexy” (which Eric takes great pleasure in performing live) and “Love Die Young”. “The songs are about love, but for me they’re a lot deeper,” he said during album promotions. “Love Die Young”, for example, came from a time of extreme burnout in Eric’s life. The love was not necessarily for a lover, but for his career and for his need to live a life he was proud of. What if he died tomorrow, he wondered? Would everything he worked on all be worth it?

Most importantly, could he bet on himself?

“If you think about the first generation [of Korean immigrants], we have to survive. We have to get the basic things—you know, food, shelter, clothing, stability. That makes a lot of sense,” Korean American novelist Min Jin Lee said in an interview with the New Yorker this past winter. “The real disconnect is between the first and second or third generation, especially if the second or third generation has done sufficiently well. We’re not interested in just survival anymore. We’re interested in meaning, and that quest for meaning has just as many difficulties, if not more intangible difficulties, than just survival.”

Eric Nam has been searching in earnest for meaning since he left for Korea in 2012. In the motherland he found a country of people who looked like him but whose experiences resembled very little of where he came from. Oddly enough, he found himself as an outcast: Never Korean enough for South Korea but never American enough for the United States. The pandeimc gave him the space to realize it was time to make some changes.

First, Eric severed ties with his label in Korea. He decided that if he was going to release the music he wanted, he had to release independently of a label. Creating DIVE Studios and Mindset proved he could release his own music and be his own boss.

Then, he got to work. The album came together quickly, in living rooms of Los Angeles and through lyrics he scribbled together with friends. Where the creation of a K-Pop album could be sterile, with scheduled times to record in a vacuous studio space, the creation of “There and Back Again” felt freewheeling.

“I’m a singer-songwriter here, it just happens that the music travels well and I do stuff outside [of Korea] and so they call me a K-pop star. In the States I’m trying to position myself as an English, American pop artist,” he said as he began to lay the groundwork for transitioning to the West. “I embrace my K-pop roots and where I started. Korea and K-pop was the place that gave me the opportunity to become a musician, to develop a set of skills. But now it’s about how do I move and grow beyond the boundaries of it.”

He began to play with the concept of his identity and his lineage of Korean heritage. In Savannah, Georgia, where he shot three music videos for the album, he wore pearls, heels and chiffon shirts that made him look like a gorgeous rockstar. He wanted to remind people that, yes, Asians do exist in the South, even in the midst of a white SEC culture or white conservatism.

“I didn’t know happiness was fleeting in my life,” he sings in his second single “Any Other Way”, “Till you, my butterfly.” In the video, he poses on a sailing yacht and dances on open beaches. He reminds you that being a pop star is not just for white folks; Asians can be pop stars and not just be relegated to K-Pop.

At Eric Nam’s “There and Back Again” world tour, which is still ongoing, he’s sold out nearly every single date. At my show in New York, I was packed into a pit with fans who looked at Eric and saw their identity and experiences reflected back at them. Here was someone outspoken and cool; someone who not only resembled them, but reminded the fan of a friend they could have a beer with. I met so many fans who had been with Eric since the beginning. One girl in a “Before We Begin” hoodie (an extremely rare find) told me that she had been at one of Eric’s first concerts, ever, in a small Atlanta coffee shop.

On his face that night, I saw pure joy. “New York!” he shouted with a near gutteral roar as he jumped around the stage to “Any Other Way”. He rapidly bounced his head and lost himself in the beat. Min Jin Lee was also in the audience that night, above me in a balcony. Later that evening she wrote on Instagram, “Eric is a global superstar. I am proud to support the next generation of Asian Americans.” Just days before Christina Yuna Lee, a Korean American who lived in Chinatown, was murdered. Ms. Lee was instrumental in amplifying Christina’s story. The morning of her murder, Eric shared a link to her story on his Instagram. There was an urgency in Eric’s show that night to see that the Korean American community is loved and that there is a safe space for them. That night, in a moving speech, he told his AAPI community to stay strong and to know that he was behind them.

“There’s a Korean word, pronounced noonchi, which basically means understanding of unspoken language,” wrote Soon Mae Kim, an executive vice president and global diversity and inclusion leader for Porter Novelli. Ms. Kim’s article appeared in Atlanta Magazine in the aftermath of the murder of six Asian women in spa’s around the city. “When you are “other,” when you don’t know the language or culture, noonchi is a must. You have to search faces, read rooms, detect nuance.” Ms. Kim had learned the importance of noonchi in her time in the Southern United States.

At Eric’s show that night, and within his music, I see the power of this shared understanding. His work is as vital and as important as ever. As Ms. Lee wrote, he is truly a global superstar, and his battles have been hard won.

“It’s been lonely. It’s been tough,” Eric said in 2020. “But thank God I’m here.”