Low G, a popular MC from Vietnam, has been deep in Hip Hop since his early teens. Dance gave him rhythm, discipline, and an instinct for how music moves, but he still gets nostalgic for the early-2000s era when he was chatting with friends on a Nokia flipphone, firing off emails on Yahoo, and living in that simpler, analog-digital blur. These days, when he hears Y2K playlists spinning in clubs and restaurants, he’s reminded that there was real magic in that moment, so he bottled it. The result is L2K, a 16-track time capsule that rewinds the clock with style, humor, and heart.

Over the past few years, LiFTED has watched Low G evolve from dropping fun, feel-good videos to scoring collabs with big names like bbno$ and becoming one of Vietnam’s most consistent Hip Hop forces. Now, as LiFTED’s December cover star, it’s time to tap in and see what really makes Low G tick.

I first learned about Hip Hop when I was seven or eight-years-old watching Stomp The Yard and You Got Served on HBO with my dad. I was transfixed immediately. Some years later, when I turned 12, I started learning how to skate, how to draw graffiti tags, and then eventually I decided to focus on learning C-walk because it didn’t cost anything and you could barely get any injuries from it. The C-walk community was a big one for sure and people posted their videos C-walking to Rap music constantly both in Vietnam and on global forum websites, and that’s where I collected Rap songs to listen to [and also on MTV and radio, of course]. Ever since that period, I felt clearly that this was a whole lifestyle, and you must be into the combination of music, fashion, and art to be considered a legit Hip Hop fan.

Dancing for more than 10 years taught me almost everything I needed to make music. From the basics like counting, moving on beat, creating my own dancing flow, as well as my own style and variations, to the advanced stuff like having different attitudes, setting up the structure of a performance…it’s all the same in making music. The ways to surprise the listeners and make them never get bored throughout a song, I learned from my dancing era.

For my projects, I’ll always invite whom I think will suit the vibe of the song the best to collab with. It depends on the song that I’m making for sure because I make a lot of different songs with different vibes, and I believe in choosing the right artists instead of the more popular ones.

bbno$ came to Vietnam for a show in which I was headlining as well. We met each other, and I took him and his team around on motorbikes, eating Vietnamese food, drinking coffee, and basically having a good time for two days. Later on, he sent me some demos so I can pick one and do something with it. He told me that having another Viet rapper should be fun so I pulled Anh Phan in because he’s the number one rapper in terms of comedy Rap in Vietnam to me. Later on, me and Anh Phan had a show in Vancouver, bbno$’s hometown, so we met again and had another good time for sure. Several months after that, we finally completed our verses and arranged the dates for bbno$ to come back to Vietnam to shoot the music video and release the song.

To be honest, it was a chance for me to have some international exposure, but that didn’t reach out much to Vietnamese listeners here so nothing too big happened afterwards. What really matters is I had a chance to meet the team behind COLORS and to perform in the set-up where a lot of big artists did. That’s the experience I’m grateful for and happy to be a small part of that project.

At the moment, I feel like I’m in the middle generation in the scene, not the oldest and not the newest at the same time. I see a lot of new rappers getting the hype like I did five years ago, meanwhile I’ve built a solid fanbase for myself where there are still people appreciating what I do and I’m totally happy about that.

Thank you. The 2000s era pretty much represents the original me to be honest. Growing up dancing and listening casually to 2000s US songs, playing 2000s online and offline games, chatting using Nokia, Yahoo, and editing my videos with Sony Vegas is the life that I will never forget.

Even now, I still get hyped, happy, or sad by listening to my old 2000s playlists sometimes. Also, seeing public places like clubs, restaurants, and hotels still playing 2000s songs lets me know that the 2000s era is indeed special and someone needed to do something about it. It shouldn’t just disappear forever because there are a lot of people feeling nostalgic out there.

“If I’m overrated then I must be underrated”. I just like how it sounds, but it doesn’t mean too much personally.

I haven’t thought of anything big after the album, maybe I need a break.