“Can you hear me?” echoes a Britishaccented voice over Zoom. With a tap, Tyson Yoshi appears onscreen. Dressed in a white Stüssy T-shirt, he calls Tatler from the steps of Blue Bottle Coffee in Central, Hong Kong, unfazed by the bustling midweek scene around him.
“Fame is quite annoying, if I’m being honest,” he says, incognito thanks to a baseball cap hiding his distinctive mane, which, in mid-July, is bleach-blond—a more subdued shade than his usual silver, pink or purple bob. “I try to maintain my normal life: I still take the MTR and bus. I’ll never let fame get to my head because I know it might be gone one day,” he says.
Yoshi’s fame would appear to be more than just a flash in the pan. His songs have amassed more than 46 million views on YouTube; he has 247,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, with streams from more than 100 countries; and he has toured internationally, a feat for any Hong Kong musician, let alone an independent hip-hop artist from the city. Yoshi, whose
