Baek Hwong

Baek Hwong was born on May 14, 1997 in Chicago, Illinois.[1][2][3] Hwong is a Korean American non-binary singer-songwriter, guitarist, producer, and composer.[1][2][4] Hwong grew up attending a music festival that their mom worked at, which was a venue where legends such as B.B King, Bonnie Raitt, and Aretha Franklin performed.[1] Hwong attended remedial level Korean school as a child because their family did not speak the language to them when they were young.[2] Hwong also participated in theater classes during their childhood, and performed in plays such as West Side Story.[2]

At the age of 12, Hwong decided to pursue their own musical endeavors, and they initially took guitar lessons at a local shop in their area, until deciding to learn to play guitar on their own in their family’s basement.[1][2]  When they were 16, Hwong moved to Los Angeles and started to seriously write music.[1][2] Eventually, Hwong pursued their undergraduate education at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music, where they studied popular music.[1] Hwong later signed with Partisan Records, under the performance name, NoSo. In 2019, NoSo entered NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Concert.[1][4] This event is where Noso was first discovered by NPR for their guitar skills.[1]

NoSo’s debut album is entitled Stay Proud of Me.[1][2] Hwong began to lay the groundwork for their debut album in 2017, and eventually recorded the work in their family’s condominium during the COVID-19 quarantine.[2] The guitar-led album was released on July 8th, 2022 as a coming of age story that encapsulates Hwong’s experiences with their gender and racial identity thus far.[1][3][5] The cover art for this album was inspired by Korean records from the 1980s that Hwong’s parents played for them as a baby.[1] Hwong is a nonbinary artist, and they have utilized songwriting as a space in which they can process their ever-evolving gender identity.[4] This is exemplified by the experience Hwong had when writing the opening track of the album, titled “Parasites”, as it was written while they were recovering from gender-affirming top surgery.[1][5] Several songs on the album express their reflections on their complex and inextricably connected identities as a queer transgender Korean-American who grew up in a predominantly white neighborhood.[1][4]