Rich Brian

Rich Brian: The Kid Who Learned English From Rappers

In 2016 a sixteen-year-old in West Jakarta uploaded a rap song to SoundCloud. He had never been to school, had never been to America, and had taught himself the language he was rapping in by talking to a stranger on Skype and listening to Childish Gambino records. Within months Ghostface Killah and 21 Savage were on camera reacting to it in disbelief, and the video for "Dat $tick" was on its way to two hundred million views.

No School, One Computer

Brian Imanuel Soewarno was born in Jakarta on 3 September 1999, the youngest of four children of the lawyer Heru Soewarno and Megawati Purnomo, and of Chinese-Indonesian descent. The family lived in a middle-to-low income part of West Jakarta and ran a café where Brian helped out. Despite his father's profession he received no formal education at all; he was homeschooled throughout.

His education instead arrived through a browser. At eleven he found YouTube while searching for methods to solve a Rubik's Cube — he competed in speedcubing, finishing twentieth of 106 in the 3×3 qualifications at the 2010 Jakarta Open with a best time of 23.65 seconds. He graduated to dark comedy sketches on Twitter, then to Vine at fifteen, posting daily. He spoke only Indonesian when he started. He learned English three ways at once: Skype conversations with an American friend, YouTube, and the records of 2 Chainz, Macklemore, Childish Gambino and Tyler, the Creator. Hip-hop caught him in 2012, when an online friend played him "Thrift Shop." He wrote his first rap in 2014 and recorded it on an iPhone microphone over an MF DOOM instrumental.

Dat $tick

His first release, "Living the Dream," went up on YouTube in July 2015. "Dat $tick" followed on SoundCloud on 11 March 2016: a spare, menacing trap record delivered in an improbably deep voice by a teenager in a pink polo shirt and a fanny pack. The label 88rising made the record global by filming American rappers hearing it cold — Ghostface Killah, 21 Savage, Tory Lanez, MadeinTYO, Desiigner — and capturing the moment their assumptions collapsed. The track reached number four on Billboard's Bubbling Under R&B/Hip-Hop chart and was later certified gold. 88rising signed him.

It also carried a serious problem. He had been performing under the name Rich Chigga, coined with a friend in an internet joke whose weight he did not understand. On 1 January 2018 he dropped it, becoming Brian and then, six days later, Rich Brian, marking the change with the single "See Me." He was direct about it: he had been naïve, he said, and he had made a mistake. He has admitted he did not know people were going to react as they did.

Amen, and After

*Amen* arrived in 2018 and reached number eighteen on the Billboard 200, making him the second Southeast Asian artist to reach the top twenty, after the Filipino singer Jake Zyrus, and the first Asian musician to top the iTunes hip-hop chart. *The Sailor* followed in July 2019 with RZA and Joji among its collaborators, debuting just outside the Top 50. He released the seven-track *1999* in 2020 and the four-track *Brightside* in January 2022, featuring the fellow Indonesian rapper Warren Hue. *Where Is My Head?* arrived in August 2025, expanding into alt-pop and grunge.

He has worked with XXXTentacion, Keith Ape, Kris Wu, Joji, Trippie Redd, Baauer, Chungha, Jackson Wang and Jae Park; "Gospel," his 2017 track with XXXTentacion and Keith Ape, passed thirty-eight million views. His widest exposure came from outside rap: "Run It," made with DJ Snake and Rick Ross for the *Shang-Chi* soundtrack in 2021, became the unofficial anthem of that American college football season.

His music has moved deliberately away from the joke. Critics describe a delivery that is gruff yet agile and songwriting that has become genuinely skilled; AllMusic's framing — equal parts comedic novelty and natural ability — captures the tension he has spent a decade resolving in favour of the second half. "Seventeen," "Glow Like Dat" and 2019's "Yellow" marked the pivot toward autobiography. He moved to Los Angeles in May 2017, was cast by the director Justin Chon in 2021 in a music drama about a rapper confronting his relationship with his father, and says he has no interest in university, though he would consider film school.

Why Brian Is Called a Genius

The defensible claim is about acquisition speed, and it is unusually measurable. Rich Brian taught himself a second language, an entire musical idiom, and a functioning production workflow from a bedroom in Jakarta with no scene, no mentor and no formal education of any kind. Rap is one of the least forgiving forms for a non-native speaker: it depends on stress patterns, internal rhyme, phonetic elision and rhythmic placement that even fluent speakers get wrong. He learned it well enough by sixteen that the artists whose records he had learned it from could not hear the seams. The Rubik's Cube competitions are a small but revealing detail — the same disposition, applied earlier: take an opaque system, extract its rules from repetition, execute under time pressure.

The counter-case is real and he has largely conceded it himself. "Dat $tick" was partly a novelty, and the reaction video that made him famous was in a sense a documentary about racial expectation rather than about the song. His early stage name was a serious error of judgment made in public. His commercial peak came with his first album and his chart positions have not matched it since. No serious critic has called him a genius, and the word does not appear in the professional literature about him. What the evidence supports is something narrower and still remarkable: an exceptional autodidact who compressed a decade of apprenticeship into three years, and then had to spend the next ten proving he was more than the story of how he arrived.

Legacy

Brian's importance is partly structural. Before him, the Southeast Asian rapper was not a category that American hip-hop had a slot for; with 88rising he became the proof of concept for an entire pipeline of Asian artists into Western pop, and Warren Hue, Joji and others followed through the door he opened. He also stands as a case study in what unrestricted internet access does to talent in a country far from any industry centre: no label scout found him, no school trained him, and no gatekeeper approved him. He simply searched, listened, copied, and got good.