Nam Nice is a rapper and amateur freelance photographer hailing proudly from Rainier Valley in Seattle, Washington.
Underground, mainstream, conscious, street - whatever you call it, there's no denying that it's honest music. And that honesty can come with a smile or a stomp, depending on his mood. With a distinct voice textured with urgency and wisdom beyond his 31 years, no bars are wasted when he spits. Onstage, he's a beast with a commanding presence mixed with a humble stride.
In a rap game run by entertainment profiteers who romanticize hood life, Nam arrives not to reject, but to inject reality where those fantasies dominate. Raised in the shadow of the West Coast (Cali) renaissance of the early-mid 90s, he's seen and heard it all - the gangbanging, the police brutality, domestic violence, the hustle - and is not impressed with your copycat swagger or hipster novelty.
He has always been a storyteller, trading his middle-school attempts at comic-books and graff-writing for the pen and the pad as a student at Franklin High School. In 2007, he began work on what would eventually become his debut album, Exhale - a fourteen-track coming-of-age biography.
Sadly, with so many rappers clogging the airwaves and internet with stereotypes and fiction, it's rare to find an artist willing to carry a community on his back instead of chasing what's momentarily hot. Armed with a voice and many lifetimes worth of untold stories, Nam is that dude who's always prepared to do battle.
When he took a hiatus from writing raps, he picked up another creative outlet, armed with a camera lens. From film to digital, portraits to street, you can tell he has an eye for it.
Whether it be through music or his new found love of photography, he's always got something to show you, and there's always a story.