Tablo Says Talking to Himself Improved Rapping Skills

Epik High‘s Tablo jokes that mumbling to himself during university when he was struggling with anxiety might have helped prepare him to be a rapper.

“I talk to myself a lot,” he says on his radio show “Tablo’s Dreaming Radio” on March 24. “I remember exactly when I started doing it. It was in my last year of university, when I found it hard to find mental stability. Around that time, I suddenly realized, ‘Wow, I’m talking to myself.'”

He goes on to add, “When I thought about it, I worked out that I’d been talking to myself for a while. I was kind of surprised. I was like, ‘Why am I doing this?'”

But he says he doesn’t think it’s necessarily an issue. “When you have no one to talk to, talking to yourself isn’t a bad thing. It’s not about being lonely. I think it’s maybe just that when I don’t have someone who’ll tell me things I want to hear, I say them to myself.”

“I used to just mumble gibberish to myself sometimes,” he laughs. “But maybe that helped me exercise my mouth and has made me able to rap now.”

Tablo and his fellow members of Epik High have just returned from their first performance at Texas’s South by Southwest music festival, where they received accolades from fans and music critics alike.

“Tablo’s Dreaming Radio” airs every night from 10 p.m. to midnight (KST) on MBC FM4U.