{"id":11257,"date":"2019-12-17T06:01:12","date_gmt":"2019-12-17T14:01:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/hi-lo\/?p=30000005459"},"modified":"2019-12-16T18:17:09","modified_gmt":"2019-12-17T02:17:09","slug":"all-i-know-is-pain-so-i-gotta-grind-how-long-beach-shaped-rapper-g-funk-supreme","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/hi-lo\/all-i-know-is-pain-so-i-gotta-grind-how-long-beach-shaped-rapper-g-funk-supreme","title":{"rendered":"&#8216;All I know is pain, so I gotta grind\u2019: How Long Beach shaped rapper G Funk Supreme"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Sometime in the middle of November, rapper G Funk Supreme drove me in his silver sedan from a little studio along Cherry Avenue to his adolescent strongholds. The year 2019 was big for him. His music was streamed 5,400 hours collectively across 64 countries, a 141% increase from last year, according to Spotify statistics. He released his sophomore hip hop album \u201cUnapologetic,\u201d penned a 148-page written narrative detailing the past 30 years of his life and rapped a verse on R&amp;B artist J Dep\u2019s \u201cCambodian Queen.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>His musical odyssey in creating \u201cUnapologetic\u201d was efficient and reflective. Themes of pain, hardships, relationships and grind culture ooze beneath beats of funky rhythms or smooth jazz, a musical maturity from his 2015 debut album \u201cForever and a Day.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>G Funk Supreme\u2019s music derives everything from his life experience. Adopting today\u2019s contemporary hip hop beats and the G Funk instrumentals that influenced his childhood, the Long Beach rapper enters his music with a smooth flow and rhythmic cadence that serves to teleport you back to that \u201890s era.\u00a0He raps about staying on his grind and putting on for his city, all the while implicitly acknowledging a hardship growing up as a minority in the poorer part of Long Beach.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI feel like everything resonated with who he was because he tends to stay very true and genuine with what he represents,\u201d said sound engineer Ronald Dominic.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"G Funk Supreme - Nuthin 2 Sumthin\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/cUWOwmEF5IM?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Although I expected a great degree of candor from the 30-year-old rapper, I didn\u2019t think he\u2019d be so stripped back. This sunny November afternoon, G Funk Supreme was Borey Chau, a man with a mechanical engineering degree and a job at an aerospace company. He donned a pair of white Nike Air Maxes, basketball shorts, and a hat with \u201cCambodia\u201d stitched across the crown. Instead of spitting lyrics into a microphone, he was driving across Long Beach, reminiscing about the yestercades that cultivated his youth and informed the themes of his newest album.<\/p>\n<p>He lectured me on personal Long Beach landmarks as we passed them. Gospel Memorial Church of God, where he and his mom used to pick up groceries via a welfare program. California Recreation Park where he got into his first real fight. Newport Dental Plaza off the intersection of Long Beach Boulevard and Wardlow Road, where a high school version of himself was \u201ctaking out the trash, raking leaves and shit&#8230; We was like just working to make a couple hundred bucks a month.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>We stop for an hour and sit down at an outside table at The Merchant coffee house. On this Saturday, the streets bustling with activity, the coffee shop was an obvious choice to talk about this life; it was the location where he wrote his 2019 narrative, \u201cIf My Eyes Could Talk The Things They Would Say.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Though he reveals a lot while sitting there, it&#8217;s when he&#8217;s back in his silver sedan, slicing up his personal Long Beach, that things begin to cut deep.\u00a0We pass an apartment complex along Alamitos Avenue. From the outside, it looks like any other apartment, its two-story cream walls and blue wooden strips overlook a busy street filled with beauty salons and Salvadoran cuisine.<\/p>\n<p>Nearly 20 years ago, a young Borey watched his seamstress mother sewing clothes on the kitchen table for 10-cents apiece. He\u2019d spend days in front of the TV screen watching BET, often changing up the lyrics to popular \u201890s hip hop music videos.<\/p>\n<p>There were many mealless nights when he\u2019d drink water just to have something in his stomach before sleeping. If he was lucky, he\u2019d have a dinner of rice with soy sauce or Top Ramen noodles. His days of meager living have translated into lyrical gold, personified in songs like \u201cBetter Dayz\u201d and \u201cAll I Know.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOur house was like a sweatshop&#8230; and as far as the things we have to eat, it was just rice and soup all the time,\u201d Borey\u2019s sister Sorya Neang said.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_10000009448\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-10000009448\" style=\"width: 1800px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-10000009448\" src=\"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/hi-lo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/1116Supreme1-2.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1800\" height=\"1333\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-10000009448\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Rapper G Funk Supreme in front of Polytechnic High School. Long Beach, CA on November 16, 2019. Photo by Sarahi Apaez<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Their parents were Khmer immigrants who, like many in the local Cambodian community, escaped their war-ravaged home country and settled into under-invested areas of a city already teeming with established ethnic enclaves vying for the same limited resources.<\/p>\n<p>Battling with a deprived socio-economic position like other minority groups in the area, Cambodian youth formed their own groups and gangs for survival and a renewed sense of identification. And they engaged in the same fights as other ethnic groups, a scene Borey is all too familiar with.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBack in Cambodia, they were on the brink of a war,\u201d he said. \u201cComing to America, you\u2019re fighting another war but against different races&#8230; [Gangs] started off as something to protect each other from shit like that.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>From ages 4 to 8, Borey was already exposed to hate crimes. He vividly remembers one instance where a group of Asian men climbed the roof of his apartment complex to escape a car filled with another group yelling at them. Initially, Borey\u2019s family was reluctant to praise his rap career due to the gang activity surrounding them.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI think being from an immigrant family where you know other people&#8217;s families have nodded to this type of stuff and either got murdered or shot, we were definitely wary of it,\u201d Neang said.<\/p>\n<p>After a brief stop, Borey keeps on driving, away from the apartment complex where he grew up. We park along a curb across the street from a high school and walk across the empty green lawn until we reach the front gate. He relaxes his posture and rests his arms on the school\u2019s tan bars barricading him from a campus he once roamed<b>.<\/b><\/p>\n<p>Long Beach Polytechnic High School.<\/p>\n<p>Poly is where Borey spent much of his formative years. He remembers eating $1.50 fries at Tommy\u2019s (now Poly\u2019s Burgers), ghostwriting poems for his homies\u2019 eternally angry girlfriends, smiling over the memories of fights he broke off or joined in.<\/p>\n<p>Before he was spitting rhymes about his <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=0PNOCl6liPY\">\u201896 Previa<\/a>, he was spitting game to girls, something he\u2019d been doing since his days at John Marshall Middle School (now Marshall Academy of the Arts).<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIn middle school, [if] I\u2019d write you a poem, I like you. And girls like it, like \u2018yo I\u2019m getting girls and shit,\u2019\u201d he said, with a small smile revealing his bright white teeth.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_10000009449\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-10000009449\" style=\"width: 1800px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-10000009449\" src=\"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/hi-lo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/1116Supreme2-2.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1800\" height=\"1080\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-10000009449\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Rapper G Funk Supreme, standing in front of his alma mater, Polytechnic High School. Long Beach, CA on November 16, 2019. Photo by Sarahi Apaez<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>In high school, he traded in romance rhymes for flows about real relationships and real hardships. Long Beach Poly was the thematic training ground where Borey officially found his rap moniker in \u201cG Funk Supreme.\u201d He remembers recording his first studio song in ninth grade in his friend\u2019s closet; the highs and lows of his voice mixed and cracked with pubescent fervor.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe burnt [sic] a CD with the songs we had just made and played it for all the homies at school, and it was crazy, the type of energy I was getting from everyone,\u201d Borey wrote in his book. \u201cEveryone was complimenting me on my voice and how it sounded, while I was over here thinking I just sounded hella young.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>It wasn\u2019t long for his sister to become a supporter of Borey\u2019s music. After watching his interest in poetry grow into early freestyle performances and then into self-released rap demos, Neang realized music was his passion.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI asked him, &#8216;How did you even think about that kind of stuff, where are you coming up with these words in your mind?&#8217;\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In 2016, G Funk Supreme released the \u201cCali Grammar\u201d music video in collaboration with fellow Long Beach rapper Tayf3rd, who\u2019s signed to DJ Big Boy\u2019s The Neighborhood. The song was featured on the AMC TV series \u201cLodge 49,\u201d and accumulated more than 120,000 views on YouTube, as well as more than 40,000 streams on Spotify.<\/p>\n<p>https:\/\/lbpost.com\/hi-lo\/podcast-g-funk-supreme-filmmaker-eric-tandoc-and-how-much-honesty-do-we-really-want-on-a-first-date<\/p>\n<p>But what remains constant is his humility, a trait that won over the hearts of teachers in his days in middle school and high school.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI had a lot of kids who over the many years thought they were going to be the living end; they were going to be celebrities and all of that,\u201d said Amy Matthews, Borey\u2019s former poetry teacher. \u201cYou would\u2019ve never thought that with Borey. Very humble, very quiet kind of personality&#8230;To come as far as he&#8217;s come, I&#8217;m so over-the-top proud of this kid.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The words ring true since, on a car trek through time and place, it&#8217;s easy to forget Borey is a rapper whose music reaches listeners in the hundreds of thousands, easy to forget he has mounted the stage alongside hip hop legends Mobb Deep and Warren G.<\/p>\n<p>And for him, it will be enough to be remembered as a man simply passionate about his craft.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cA thousand years when CDs are dead and gone,&#8221; he said, &#8220;[when] Bluetooth is gone. If they can still play my music and it still relates to people, I think that&#8217;ll be dope.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This year, his music was streamed 5,400 hours collectively across 64 countries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":70735,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"newspack_sponsor_sponsorship_scope":"","newspack_sponsor_native_byline_display":"inherit","newspack_sponsor_native_category_display":"inherit","newspack_sponsor_underwriter_style":"inherit","newspack_sponsor_underwriter_placement":"inherit","inline_featured_image":false,"newspack_ads_suppress_ads":false,"newspack_popups_has_disabled_popups":"","_EventAllDay":false,"_EventTimezone":"","_EventStartDate":"","_EventEndDate":"","_EventStartDateUTC":"","_EventEndDateUTC":"","_EventShowMap":false,"_EventShowMapLink":false,"_EventURL":"","_EventCost":"","_EventCostDescription":"","_EventCurrencySymbol":"","_EventCurrencyCode":"","_EventCurrencyPosition":"","_EventDateTimeSeparator":"","_EventTimeRangeSeparator":"","_EventOrganizerID":[],"_EventVenueID":[],"_OrganizerEmail":"","_OrganizerPhone":"","_OrganizerWebsite":"","_VenueAddress":"","_VenueCity":"","_VenueCountry":"","_VenueProvince":"","_VenueState":"","_VenueZip":"","_VenuePhone":"","_VenueURL":"","_VenueStateProvince":"","_VenueLat":"","_VenueLng":"","_VenueShowMap":false,"_VenueShowMapLink":false,"_":"","_author_alias":"","cap-aim":"","cap-description":"","cap-display_name":"","cap-first_name":"","cap-jabber":"","cap-last_name":"","cap-linked_account":"","cap-newspack_employer":"","cap-newspack_job_title":"","cap-newspack_phone_number":"","cap-newspack_role":"","cap-user_email":"","cap-user_login":"","cap-website":"","cap-yahooim":"","newspack_article_summary":"","newspack_email_html":"","newspack_email_type":"","newspack_featured_image_position":"","newspack_hide_page_title":"","newspack_hide_updated_date":false,"newspack_post_subtitle":"","newspack_show_share_buttons":"","newspack_sponsor_byline_prefix":"","newspack_sponsor_disclaimer_override":"","newspack_sponsor_flag_override":"","newspack_sponsor_only_direct":"","newspack_sponsor_url":"","newspack_article_summary_title":"Overview:","newspack_show_updated_date":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[486],"newspack_spnsrs_tax":[],"coauthors":[7382],"class_list":["post-11257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-hi-lo","tag-long-beach-music-scene","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11257"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11257\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/70735"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11257"},{"taxonomy":"newspack_spnsrs_tax","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/newspack_spnsrs_tax?post=11257"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=11257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}