From Beat Maker to Filmmaker: Anderson .Paak Steps Behind the Camera in K-Pops! — A Love Letter to Family, Black Culture, and the Global Language of Music

Grammy Award-winning musician Anderson .Paak has never been one to stay in a single lane. The multi-hyphenate artist built his legacy as a drummer, vocalist, producer, and rapper — and now he's adding director, co-writer, and leading man to the list. His debut film, K-Pops!, which hits AMC theaters today, February 27, is as personal as it gets: a family comedy set against the glittering, high-stakes world of Korean pop music, starring .Paak alongside his real-life teenage son, Soul Rasheed.

The film follows BJ, a washed-up L.A. musician who lands a gig playing drums for a K-pop competition show in Seoul, only to discover that his long-lost son is one of the contestants. What begins as a second shot at fame quickly becomes something far more meaningful — a reckoning with fatherhood, identity, and legacy. And threaded throughout is a thesis .Paak clearly believes in deeply: that K-pop and Motown aren't so different after all, that Black musical DNA pulses at the heart of global pop culture whether the world acknowledges it or not.

Born out of the COVID lockdown, when .Paak began filming comedy skits with his son and realized the kid had an undeniable gift, K-Pops! is the rare Hollywood project that feels like it was genuinely lived before it was written. I sat down with Anderson .Paak and company to talk about the courage it takes to be vulnerable on screen with your own child, what it means to tell a Black story within a genre the mainstream rarely connects back to its roots — and why sometimes the best thing a father can do is get out of his own way.

See interview below with Paak and cast