Yung Shōgun

Born and raised in Melbourne, Yung Shogun is, like all of us, the product of pure chance — a distinct individual shaped by the tides of fate that have pulled him through life. Raised by a mother enamoured by the classics of blues, jazz and hip-hop but secretly entranced by a step-father who had a fondness for heavy metal, Yung Shogun has always kept a foot in each world. When he started to take agency over his own listening, he gravitated towards both sides — the hip-hop as well as the alt-rock and heavy metal. His love of rock was parlayed into a desire for guitar lessons, which his mother granted; suddenly, a new world of music was opened up — not just because of the lessons, but because of a teacher who, fatefully, would introduce a young Yung Shogun to entirely new worlds of sound and style.

As their lessons ended, Yung Shogun was gifted a USB that would prove insurmountably fateful, its contents including, among other things, Kendrick Lamar’s epochal Good Kid M.A.A.D City, a piece of gospel for Yung Shogun’s gestation as an artist and as a human. From there, Yung Shogun’s path was set: he had been given the blueprint for the creation of art that was inspiring, inspired, and didactic in the best sense, an artist whose ferocity belies his power as a force of good. As a teenager, he began to write music and freestyle, and was given the opportunity to record his first music through The School of Living Music, a studio that provides studio time to young people in the youth justice system.

From this set of life experiences comes Yung Shogun, fully-formed, a rapper whose ambitions and ideologies are crystalised on his first release. “This Side” is backed by “Tell Me”, a straight-talking piece of old-school hip-hop that airs out Yung Shogun’s thoughts and introduces him as a musician unafraid to speak his mind: “I walk the streets with my backpack, dodging the triple-0s/Black man, no fat stacks, shit I’m so broke.” Over an unrelenting boom-bap beat by JUJO, Yung Shogun places a mirror up to contemporary Australia, revealing himself as an masterful poet all the while. The perfect complement to “This Side”, it shows the id and the ego of Yung Shogun’s world, his view faced externally and internally. Rap changed Yung Shogun’s life; now his raps might change yours.