HEADLINES

Tu Pham is unpretentious and ambitious and his debut album provides his fans with a refreshing and unique take on hip hop

Tu Pham is a doctor, rapper, songwriter, public speaker and second generation Vietnamese Australian. He undertook his medical school and residency in Brisbane, Australia, and did three years of residency at the Princess Alexandra Hospital. He has spent time rural relieving and working in Aboriginal child and antenatal health services. He currently works on a university campus in family medicine, and in Headspace, a youth mental health service. He divides his time between clinical practice and the supervision of registrars and medical students. He was a plenary speaker for the "Creative Careers in Medicine conference" at the Gold Coast in 2019.

His medical journey has been concurrent with his musical journey. Hip-hop was popular in the refugee community he grew up with, and he was influenced by conscious artists like 2Pac, Public Enemy, J Cole, Lauren Hill, Chance the Rapper and Kendrick Lamar. His first studio recording was done in Saigon, Vietnam. His music videos examine politics and health issues in a biopsychosocial framework, performed in an engaging and accessible format. The topics he covers in his songs include organ donation, addiction, borderline personality disorder, socioeconomic disadvantage, climate change, young carers, sleep disorders, freedom of speech, attachment theory, bipolar disorder, child protection, bullying, refugees and discrimination. He is also known for releasing a number of political tracks, holding controversial politicians to account soon after their election or divisive policy announcements. Coming up in 2019 will be a music video “Save Our Seas”, which is a collaboration with Mark Sickmind, a Filipino rapper, and Mei Lee, a Malaysian singer, and is about standing up for the sovereignty of small countries in South East Asia. To balance out his content heavy tracks, he has also made pop tracks in collaboration with artists Sophie.Ann, Holly Komorowski, Nastajia Arjona and Ashleigh Denning.

Tu has performed at a number of community events, including Tet Lunar New Year Festival, Laura Street Festival, Darra Street Festival, the Nelson Mandela Memorial Festival, Scorcherfest, World Refugee Day, the March in August Rally and the Brisbane Malayee Festival. His song “What You Know About Me” was featured in “Change of Our Lives”, a film destigmatising and raising awareness about Hepatitis B in the Vietnamese community. He has performed shows in Brisbane, Sydney, London and New York.


Tu has graced the covers of mX and GP Journey Magazine, and has had feature articles in the Medical Observe, Scenestr Magazine and Doctors of Australia. He headlined for the event “Rhyme, Rhythm and Reason” in Ipswich, and has been a panel member at the Pho’nomenal BrisAsia Festival and Inter-Asia Pop Studies conference at Monash University. He has also served as a member of the Queensland Leadership Group for the Institute of Creative Health.

Tu has worked with producers across the globe, including the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Trinidad, Ukraine and Senegal. He has reached number 1 on the Reverbnation Brisbane hip hop charts multiple times, and has been featured on 4ZZZ, SBS and ArtistFirst radio. His debut album “Made of Jade” can be found on iTunes, Amazon and Spotify, and he is working on his second album “Agenda”.

Though he was featured in recently released Lifoti's January/February 2020 issue 11, you can check it from below link's for your country:


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