Hwang Woo-jin was having one of his bad days—which was not to be confused with Hwang Woo-jin having a bad day. If it had merely been a bad day, the rapper would have handled it like he handled all of life’s obstacles: minute by minute, moment by moment, head down and teeth gritted.

It was how Woo-jin had survived his childhood after his mother died, and he’d been left with his angry old man and his older brother who’d protected Woo-jin until he’d left for his military service. It was how he’d endured the heartbreak when his father, furious at Woo-jin’s teenage rebellion, had ripped up his notebooks full of lyrics. It was how he’d withstood having his beats stolen early in his career by unscrupulous producers preying on desperate artists.

Woo-jin had weathered the endless hours of his trainee days, writing music and lyrics in the few hours between dance rehearsals and his shifts as a delivery boy for local restaurants. After debut, he’d swallowed the endless humiliation from Korea’s hip-hop community when they’d sneered at Woo-jin for becoming a rapper in a K-pop idol group instead of a hip-hop crew. Even now, nearly two years after his group Dreams of Youth Eternal Nation (DOYEN) had debuted, they still struggled to top the Korean music charts despite experiencing enough international success to be in the middle of a 36-stop tour.

Hwang Woo-jin had suffered through almost 23 years of more bad days than good ones in his young life, and if today had been merely one of those bad days, Woo-jin could have borne it.