Hoodie Allen is not your average rapper, even just to look at. He’s got a super clean-cut thing going on and generally, he looks a little bit like he’d be more in his element at a computer help desk than on the cover of an album. With all of that said, he’s managed to take the music world by storm, which is no mean feat. We’re going to take a look at how Hoodie Allen reached the height of his success, as well as what he might be doing now. We’ve been waiting for almost a couple of years for a new album after all!

Early Life
Born on the 19th of August 1988 to a Jewish household, Hoodie Allen, as you might have guessed, was not always named as such. His birth name is Steven Adam Markowitz and he remained that until around 2010. Up until that point, Markowitz lived a pretty normal life. He grew up in Long Island with his brother, though he did attend a School for the Gifted, which was no surprise really as he had a clear talent for mathematics. He excelled at sports in school too, but even at this young age, his party trick was to perform raps for his friends.

His hard work paid off and got him into the University of Pennsylvania. He threw himself fully into university life, joining the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity. Alongside this, he played football for the sprint football team and still graduated with a strong degree in marketing and finance. All the while he’d been keeping up his rapping, but after graduation, things would become a little trickier.

First Career

On graduating, Markowitz was snapped up by Google and became an AdWords associate. He traveled to work, worked a full day and spent his evenings working on his burgeoning rap career. His days were frequently 18 hours long and at times it felt like he was working two full-time jobs. His work paid off in the end, as paid shows started rolling in. It was at that point that Markowitz made the decision to leave Google and pursue his true passion; music.

Poker Success

Never one to slack off in his free time, Markowitz also made poker a big hobby of his. It should be clear that he has a brain for numbers by now, so it’s no surprise that he did pretty well at the tables. He made it to arguably the biggest poker tournament in the world, the World Series of Poker. He played the big events in 2021 and despite it being his first major tournament, he fared well. If all this talk of the WSOP has got you wondering Where You Can Play Online Poker In Pennsylvania then it’s hardly surprising. It took Hoodie Allen just 8 months to make it to tournament level, which is pretty impressive!

First Album

He released his first EP in 2012, which he called All American. It did really well, debuting at number 10 on the Billboard 200. Just a couple of years later he’d release his first full-length studio album entitled People Keep Talking, which was an enormous success, achieving more than 30,000 sales in its first week and beating his EP’s debut on the Billboard 200 by two places. Since then he’s released Happy Camper, The Hype (which you can read our review of) and most recently, Whatever USA in 2019.