Jhameel

Born of Korean, Japanese, and Mongolian ancestry, provocative, androgynous, multi-faceted indie pop artist Jhameel grew up in a sleepy town in Minnesota. Creative, driven, and multilingual, the high cost of furthering his education led him to a military recruiter, and while still in high school, he entered into the U.S. Army's Reserve Officer Training Corps program. The program allowed him to attend the University of California, Berkeley, but with the caveat that he would have to commit four years of his life to the military, a concept that grew increasingly problematic as his social and political worldview expanded, due in no small part to the university's noted liberal environment. He eventually dropped out of the ROTC, and within two years, had graduated summa cum laude with a degree in Arabic, changed his name to Jhameel (he refuses to release his birth name), and embarked on a career in music. Inspired by Prince, Michael Jackson, and the high-energy, mercurial, electro-pop of bands like Phoenix and MGMT, the singer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist self-released his eponymous debut album in 2009, followed in 2011 by the Dance EP, and his sophomore full-length The Human Condition. A second EP, Waves, arrived in 2012.