The success of KPop Demon Hunters last year proved just what a global phenomenon K-pop still is. Last month, Anderson .Paak’s directorial debut, K-Pops!, finally hit Netflix – and it features him and his son as a father-son duo.

Paak is best known as a critically acclaimed rapper, R&B musician and one half of the soul duo Silk Sonic with Bruno Mars – but who exactly is his son, Soul Rasheed?

What is Soul Rasheed’s background?

Soul Rasheed was born to Korean mother Jaylyn Chang, a gospel singer better known as Jae Lin, and African-American father Brandon Paak Anderson, known professionally as Anderson .Paak. Like his father, who is one-quarter Korean, Rasheed is of mixed African-American and Korean descent.

Despite Paak’s success in music – he’s won nine Grammys – in the early days of his career, he and his wife faced many challenges when Soul was born. Paak was suddenly dismissed from his job on a marijuana farm in Santa Barbara, per LA Weekly, and the young family had to rely on couch-surfing and temporary stays at friends’ homes, including at the musician Shafiq Husayn’s house, to get by. Paak filed for divorce from Jae Lin in 2024.

How did Soul Rasheed get into showbiz?

During the pandemic, when Rasheed was around eight years old, his father noticed that he had a creative passion and two specific obsessions – YouTube and K-pop, per The Hollywood Reporter. Rasheed wanted to be a YouTuber, so they began making skits together, and Paak realised that Soul was “magnetic and hilarious” on camera, per Rolling Stone. This sparked the idea for a film project so the father-son duo could continue working on together.

Rasheed’s interest in K-pop also influenced the film idea. He was a fan of K-pop group BTS, and he and his mother took Paak to see a BTS concert, per Variety. In a Buzzfeed interview in 2026, Rasheed also said that he likes Le Sserafim, a girl group under a sub-label of Hybe, which also manages BTS.

He appeared in his father’s music video