Today, April 28th, 2015, is without a doubt Towkio day. It’s not even noon and the man has already dropped a project, a video and landed on the cover of the Chicago Red Eye. Not too shabby. The Chi City paper is touting Towkio as the next big thing, and gives us some history on the artist, his sound and his relationships with the SaveMoney squad. Head over to their site to enjoy the full feature, and check out the .wav Theory project right here.
“I’ve always been rapping. I wrote a poem in fourth grade and thought, ‘Damn, this is kind of raw,’” Towkio recalls. He adds, laughing, “I think [the poem] was about a girl. I remember this Gym Class Heroes song, ‘Sloppy Love Jingle Pt. 1.’ I used to recite it to girls and tell them I wrote it. And then I wrote another poem just like it.” While in eighth grade he uploaded demos to Myspace under the moniker Young P, it wasn’t until his senior year at Lane Tech College Prep, after stints as the football team’s quarterback, that he started seriously pursuing music–first performing as Preston San, then later as Tokyo Shawn before settling with his current name. “I was trying to go with the vision and the brand,” Towkio, the son of a Mexican mother and a Japanese father, says of the change. “With Tokyo Shawn, Shawn isn’t my name. Now, it’s not just a character’s name—it has more meaning.”