Originally link : http://www.vuw.ac.nz/classics/Stephen/drug.html Writer URL: http://www.vuw.ac.nz/saelc/staff/stephen-epstein.aspx
It's captured unofficially. DisTort will contact later with him. He is one of the real Korea Lovers.
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<META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="Adobe PageMill 3.0 Mac"> Anarchy in the ROK(?): Punk Rock comes to Korea</TITLE>
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Anarchy in the UK, Solidarity in
the ROK: Punk Rock Comes to Korea
Stephen J. Epstein Victoria University of Wellington This article appears in <a href="http://www.actakoreana.org/publs/">Acta Koreana </a>3 (2000) pp.1-34
I am an antichrist
And I am an anarchist
Don't know what I want but I know how to get it
I wanna destroy passers-by....
-- "Anarchy in the UK," The Sex Pistols
Dad said to me, you've got to do something with your life,
But if I think about it, I can't do anything
In this tiny room of mine
Mom, Mom said to me, you've got to marry into a good family,
I like the place where my friends are better
The rich boy I met yesterday doesn't suit me
I want, I want to leave this place, I've got to get away
I want to throw away this me that isn't me
Now I want to leave, now I've got to get away
-- "Kalmaegi" (Seagull), CryingNut
Introduction
I cull the first passage above from what is arguably the world's most famous punk rock song, "Anarchy in the UK" by The Sex Pistols. In 1977 their album "Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols" heralded the arrival of punk, a confrontational musical and social movement whose iconoclastic followers rebelled against the institutions of British society. That album also featured the venomous "God Save the Queen," which topped England's singles charts despite being banned by the BBC. A bitter attack on royalty and the government ("God save the queen/ her fascist regime"), the song builds to an unsettlingly cathartic climax in which the snarled lyric "no future for you, no future for me" captured for many the economic despair of a generation. Espousing anarchy and nihilism in time to an aggressive, stripped-down rock beat, punk and its largely working-class practitioners not only changed the face of a popular music that had become increasingly turgid throughout the 1970's but generated a media-fed moral panic in Great Britain. Punk's musical form, its violent philosophy, and, not least, its stylistic aesthetic, which incorporated such elements as fluorescent day-glo spiked hair, safety pin earrings,
and bondage gear, shocked and outraged the nation's public.
In the last few years a punk scene has emerged in South Korea
(henceforth Korea) as well, but to little fanfare. A smattering
of clubs clustered for the most part in Seoul's fashionable Hongik
district feature punk bands who play to a small but devoted following,
composed predominantly of high school students. Unlike England
in the late 1970s, Korea's economic prospects had (until the collapse
of the won in late 1997) grown progressively brighter through
the 1990s; moreover, democracy has taken an ever firmer foothold
in the nation. The second passage above presents the lyrics to
"Kalmaegi" (Seagull), a song that appears on
the first full-length CD by CryingNut, Korea's most successful
punk band to date. And although the song possesses an anthemic
status within its own scene akin to that of "Anarchy in the
UK" in England, the lyrics take a personal turn: rather than
calling for public chaos, they speak of intergenerational conflict,
a desire for escape, and existential angst. Why did punk arrive
in Korea in the mid-1990s and what meaning does it hold for its
adherents?
In this essay I examine the emergence of punk rock in Korea, and
offer an ethnographic description of the scene that has grown
up around it, focusing on how a segment of Korean youth in the
1990s are constructing new identities via a global youth subculture
and musical form known for its socially resistant nature. Academics,
particularly sociologists, have had an interest in youth subcultures,
because "they are taken to represent, albeit in extreme form,
what 'youth of today are up to' " (Widdicombe and Wooffitt
1995: 7). One may extrapolate further: such cultures often serve
as a barometer of future social transformations. Korean punk rock,
in highlighting one set of strategies whereby a new generation
is appropriating external cultural forms in order to redefine
its own position within society, is emblematic of far-reaching
changes taking place in Korea as it approaches the next millenium.
The topic merits attention for other reasons as well: although
popular music studies have become established as a discipline,
scholarship has focused on the North Atlantic, especially the
music of the US and Britain, to the general exclusion of music
from Asia or the southern hemisphere (Hayward 1998: 1). While
ethnomusicologists have indeed treated these regions of the world,
they have concentrated primarily on classical and traditional
musical forms, although this is slowly changing (cf. Lockard 1998).
In the case of Korea, e.g., overseas scholars have discussed kug'ak
(classical music), nong'ak (farmer's music) and Buddhist
chant and their more contemporary descendants, but forms arising
from contact with the West such as taejung kayo
(pop songs), Korean hip-hop and rock have thus far received little
attention. Moreover, analysis of globalization often concerns
itself with transnational assimilation of mainstream cultures;
what happens, however, when an oppositional subculture moves from
one national environment to another?
In this paper I first present a general description of a punk
club in Seoul, and then set the movement in its contemporary social
and political context before proceeding to analyze aspects of
the movement's style, its appeal to its followers, the music's
lyrical concerns, and ways in which punk is being indigenized
in Korea. I conclude by considering the larger implications of
the movement and its relationship to issues of globalization and
nationalism.
Drug trip
At this point it will be helpful to set the scene in detail and describe the milieu in which the majority of my fieldwork took place, a club near Hongik University known as Drug. While I also visited other venues for underground music in Seoul, I concentrate this paper on perhaps the most well-known of these, the one that most regularly features bands that view themselves as playing a punk rock style, and the one that, by common consent, has provoked the most enthusiastic audience response over the
course of its history.
A portrait of a typical visit, then: picture a chilly Saturday
night in December. A long subway ride brings me to Hongik University
station, and a short walk from there to Drug, moments before the
7:30 p.m. performance time. I descend a series of steps to an
underground room. After pausing to pay 5000 won (approximately
US $4 in late 1998) and exchange a hearty chorus of helloes with
the familiar faces who collect the entrance fee, usually band
members themselves, I enter a graffiti and paint-splattered basement
room. The graffiti is mostly in Korean although one can find a
smattering of English and Japanese, offering together a mixture
of sloganeering ("blood, sweat, no tears") sexual banter
("how many times did you have sex yesterday?"), humor
("if your head can reach this, you're incredibly tall"
reads the top of a pillar), comments on scene politics ("Good-for-nothing
Pak Song Yong punk band, fuck off") and song lyrics.
The initial blast of cigarette smoke raises a cough; if I'm lucky
the number of smokers won't prove oppressive this night. A water
cooler lurks in one corner; as an all-ages venue, liquor is not
served. Although the club's name deliberately provokes, Powerade
and tobacco seem the most potent mind-altering substances ingested.
Yi Sok-mun, the 39-year-old owner and manager of Drug, known
to bands and clubgoers simply as ajossi (uncle),
claims that he chose the name not to imply drug use as such in
the club's clientele, but rather to suggest the casting off of
inhibitions and the free-spirited lifestyle that drugs represent.
The room, dimly lit, is dingy and bits of trash lie scattered
on the floor; the minimalistic, unkempt surroundings heighten
one's sense of being at a truly underground venue, literally and
figuratively. What little seating exists is dilapidated and uncomfortable,
and the majority of the audience stands. The composition of the
audience draws my attention, as it differs from night to night:
Saturday is frequently the most crowded, while Thursday witnesses
a high proportion of school uniforms among those in attendance.
Tonight's audience is primarily comprised of youth in their teens,
some perhaps slightly older, others perhaps only twelve. A few
take seats directly in front of the stage, while the rest mill
about against the walls of the room, mostly in same-sex groups.
The male to female ratio appears roughly equal, although usually
more females are in attendance. The occasional curious foreigner
who arrives is generally much older than the rest of the audience.
The first band soon takes the stage (see fig. 1). By the time
they are thirty seconds into their set, spectators are jumping
up and down and singing along with a catchily melodic punk tune,
driven by distorted guitar and a propulsive rhythm section. Although
I have been cold on the walk from the subway station, the heat
produced by the crowd rapidly warms me and I remove my coat and
sweater. Infectious enthusiasm suffuses the room, which crackles
with undeniable energy; the atmosphere is friendly, the audience
members seemingly unified in their love for the music. I have
the sensation of being a (much) elder brother at a party for hip
high school kids rather than attending a club per se. The
music evokes a noticeably physical response. At times audience
members pump their right fists as they chant along with particularly
compelling or anthemic choruses (e.g. nae mamdaero sal koya,
"I'll live the way I want"), in a gesture identical
to that found in Korean student or labor demonstrations, but absent
at Western punk shows. The hand motion often arises spontaneously
among the audience, or in response to a cue from a band member,
and, I would argue, heightens solidarity among the audience through
reference to shared tropes in Korean visual discourse that imply
resistance to authority (see fig. 2).
In addition to this fist-pumping, many in the audience also
engage in dancing of sorts, primarily either in the form known
as pogoing (repetitive leaping into the air as though on a pogo
stick, hands held at the sides, head bobbing to the insistent
beat) or the more notorious slam dancing, which essentially involves
hurling one's body at those in one's vicinity and bouncing off
of them. Although a non-participant might interpret slam dancing
as violent and anti-social, this would be an error. Often those
who slam together are those who arrive together and with whom
ties of friendship are already well-forged. The "mosh pit",
the area spontaneously generated by slam dancers, provides an
opportunity for amicable, playful aggression, similar to the body
contact that occurs during a sporting event, such as a hard-fought
soccer match. Anyone who stumbles is quickly helped to his or
her feet. Slam dancing, in fact, by virtue of bonding members
in an act perhaps incomprehensible to outsiders, encourages identification
and cohesion among those who participate. I am tugged cordially
at one point into the mosh pit during a song by the band Gum,
in what I regard as a gesture welcoming me as a full-fledged member
of the scene. Contributors to the Internet BBS (bulletin board
service) in Korea devoted to punk frequently refer to slam dancing's
role in relieving stress; as one poster writes, "slamming
does not mean mashing people down, trampling them under your feet
or getting into a fight, but rather that the organ which enjoys
music is your body rather than your head and ears." The function
of dancing in punk music thus differs from that of other genres:
one generally finds little male-female pairing off or suggestion
that such dancing forms part of courtship ritual; rather punk
dancing encourages physical release via a full-body response to
the music and generates bonds of solidarity among its participants.
The occasional debates that appear on the BBS make it clear that
those who do not abide by the implicit rules of slam dancing that
prescribe limits to its aggressiveness are ostracized.
When filled to capacity, Drug accomodates roughly two to three
hundred people. The low stage is just large enough to permit bands,
typically composed of four members, some room to jump about energetically.
All that separates the band and audience is a narrow metal counter
on which fans occasionally leap, dance briefly and exhibitionistically
and then, in an action known as stage diving, fling themselves
(gently) onto the waiting arms of those below. Indeed, fans regularly
mount the stage itself: tonight an overenthusiastic audience member
who joins CryingNut accidentally knocks the lead singer into
the drum kit in his frenetic dancing. (The singer, clearly bemused,
takes the collision in stride.) Punk, in common with other progressive
artistic movements (cf. e.g. the work of Berthold Brecht, the
Surrealists, Andy Kaufman, etc.) breaks down barriers between
audience and artist. This separation is not simply a tenet of
revolutionary aesthetics, however, but also a feature of folk
music where, in a larger sense, artist and audience, consumption
and production, are one: An important aspect of punk music in
Korea, to which I shall return, is that despite drawing upon international
forms for meaning and authenticity, it simultaneously situates
itself within indigenous paradigms of populist culture.
And so the show progresses for two and a half hours, with performances by a selection of other bands from the Drug "stable," who go by such names as JohnnyRoyal, Supermarket, The Goonies, NoBrain, Lazybone, and (one of the few with a Korean name) Saebome p'in ttal'gikkot (Strawberry Blossoms in Early Spring). The music ends at 10 p.m. to allow fans from far-flung satellite areas like Ansan, Inchon or Suwon to return home before the subway system shuts down for the night. I file out of the
club, like many others, sweaty and exhilirated.
The Class of '97
Dick Hebdige, in Subculture: The Meaning of Style, argues
that each instantiation of a youth culture must be read within
its contemporary context: Britain's teddy-boy cultures of the
early '50s and late '70s, for example, while maintaining a similarly
oppositional relationship toward the black community in Britain,
were differently placed vis-a-vis the parent culture and
other youth cultures (1979: 80-84). Similarly, we must consider
the specificity of historical experience in analyzing the significance
of punk rock for Britain's so-called "class of '77"
and for Korean youth in the '90s. While this obvious caveat may
seem not to merit statement, let us consider briefly its ramifications:
the perhaps tempting assumption that punk rock itself has an unchanging,
essential meaning, imported wholesale from the West into Korea,
rapidly becomes untenable.
By most informants' accounts, punk rock began in Korea in 1994.
During that year Kang Ki-yong, a well-known bass guitarist,
formed The Pipi Band, a group that succeeded in attracting a modicum
of media attention for their unusual outfits and hairstyles, their
nonsensical or humorous lyrics, and their antagonistic attitude
toward the audience. Although many dispute their status as a true
punk band, they were at least among the first Korean groups to
deliberately appropriate aspects of punk. Yi Sok-mun, Drug's
ajossi, likewise reports that until 1994 there had
been little awareness of punk rock in Korea and no bands; the
tiny minority familiar with punk from its early days heard the
music from friends who had been overseas and would acquire one
or two CDs at a time. That year, however, a band named Drug formed,
playing in the style known as "grunge," a musical form
which draws on punk roots; the creation of the band provided inspiration
for the opening of the club as well. In 1995 CryingNut formed,
as did several other bands; October of 1996 saw the release of
the CD Our Nation Vol. 1, the first recording by Drug's
own production company, an independent initiative without affiliation
to a major label. And the scene continues to expand: in the first
few months of 1999 alone at least four punk CDs on various small
labels appeared in Korea.
The more interesting questions, of course, revolve not around the specifics of who first played punk rock in Korea, but rather why punk begins in Korea at the moment it does. What social, economic, political and cultural factors caused the emergence of punk rock in Korea almost twenty years after it first appeared in England? Critics have often been guilty of single-cause explanations for the rise of punk in the West, usually informed by political biases (cf. Redhead 1997: xi), and we should beware of similarly monolithic accounts of the recent appearance of punk rock in Korea. Many features characteristic of the emergence of punk in Britain in the 1970's do not fit Korea. The nation in 1994-1996 did not seem to be in economic decline--quite to the contrary. Punk music arrived in an era of material optimism for Korean youth: the country was enjoying its highest-ever levels of per capita income, the movement being well under way before the IMF shocks of late 1997. Indeed, in this case prosperity, rather than economic depression, and
the rise of punk seem to have gone hand in hand.
One must, then, adduce several factors for the rise of punk in
the mid-1990s: first, the government, aware that international
borders are eroding, started to make globalization (segyehwa)
a conscious goal from the early part of the decade (Kim 2000:
101). Simultaneously, a dramatic increase in travel abroad for
Koreans beginning with the liberalization of passport requirements
in the late '80s meant greater exposure for many to Western popular
culture(s). Affluent youth who had traveled or studied abroad
in the West acted as a conduit for the introduction of punk sounds
into the country. Although the lifestyle of Apkujong-dong's
so-called orenji-jok (lit. "orange tribe"), a
notorious youth subculture known for its conspicuous consumption,
is anathema to the punk ethos, their appearance in the years immediately
prior is not fortuitous. The emergence of youth subcultures and
growing affluence (albeit largely in increased working-class spending
power) had coincided in Britain in the '50s and '60s as well (Hall
et al. 1976; Frith 1978). Perhaps most importantly, a growing
generation gap highlighted substantive social changes; virtually
all Koreans, young and old, concur that those born after 1970
or so have a different outlook from their parents. The following
precis by Kim Youngna, a professor of art history at Seoul
National University, typifies the view of many:
raised in relative prosperity, they do not know the economic hardship that their parents experienced during the Korean War and in the postwar period....the new generation is not interested in political struggles; its members are individualistic, valuing their own lives as more important than the welfare of society. Many of them have had the experience of living abroad due to their parents' work. They are quick to accept new things, adapt well to foreign cultures, have grown up with MTV, chat on the Internet, and are materialistic. (Kim 2000: 112)
Kim's reference to the Internet is particularly relevant here,
for in Korea, one of the world's largest Internet markets, its
use among teens is fostering rapidly expanding subcultures (Sullivan
1999: 23); its rise has contributed markedly to the emergence
of punk. At the same time, the role of the Internet offers further
testament to the Korean punk movement's middle-class origins and
audience. Indeed, clubs such as Drug and its brethren have been
only the more obvious "site" of my field research: I
also frequented the "Our Nation moimbang," a
chat room and set of bulletin boards on Unitel, a Korean ISP (Internet
service provider), that offers a virtual space in which punks
may gather and acts as the single most important source of information
on upcoming shows, releases and the like. The medium here is,
in itself, part of the message in two ways: on one hand, the Internet
provides an inherently democratic form that allows youth all over
Korea to participate as equals in a virtual punk community via
computer, and thus becomes invaluable for creating a self-generated
history of Korean punk for its members that draws upon the input
of multiple voices. Moreover, the Internet also plays an important
role in enabling Korean youth to familiarize themselves with a
wide variety of punk music from overseas. As Hayward notes (1998:
4), the Internet has been crucial in the increasing globalization
of musical forms and has not simply dissolved but reconstituted
the local and regional. On the other hand, to talk of true democratization
may mislead: access to the Internet is a priori class-restricted;
computers are relatively expensive pieces of equipment that presuppose
a certain level of education, and in the post-IMF era this means
of communication remains largely out of reach of a Korean underclass.
Nonetheless, the general increase in purchasing power in Korea has meant not only an increase in demand for imported releases and a growing availability of Western rock music in its various subgenres, but has also stimulated the local production of similar forms on independent labels. Cho Younghong, who maintains the fullest English language web site on Korean popular music and promotes a progressive outlook, writes that the rise of independent and undergound music and other arts in Korea may be inevitable, for with economic prosperity people demand more options to satisfy
individual tastes:
The heart of the indie business is to recognize all the small differences of thoughts and standards that reside within a society. It's about encouraging the diversity in a society and benefiting from it as a whole. In the past, we were so hung up on surviving day-to-day that we had to emphasize the "commonness" and ignore the differences. However, I believe our society has reached a stage where we need to listen to the diverse thoughts and grow into deeper level of maturity. Recognize and embrace the differences.
Whether or not Korean social cohesion has depended on the struggle for day-to-day survival is debatable, but Cho's basic point that economic development, especially in an increasingly interconnected world, has encouraged the expansion of cultural possibilites throughout the '90s is well taken. Accompanying greater Korean exposure to the West and Western music and increasing diversity of taste is the historical accident that produced the first large-scale successes of alternative and punk music in United States in the early '90s with such bands as Nirvana and, to a lesser extent, Green Day and The Offspring. As this music penetrated ever more deeply into mainstream American culture, punk's thematic center evolved from expressing English urban working-class frustration to American suburban alienation, boredom and depression and offered Korean punk a growing variety of generic themes to draw upon. The meaning
of punk was clearly evolving (see esp. Arnold 1997).
Finally, we should also recall that beginning in 1993, a democratically
elected civilian leader governed the Republic of Korea for the
first time. The relaxation of authoritarian control has contributed
to the growth of punk and the emergence of underground rock clubs
in at least one significant way: for many years military regimes
had banned live music in bars as a potential source of subversion
and bands simply would have had no venues in which to play. Concomitantly,
as sociologist Cho Hae Joang observes (personal communication),
the manner in which college youth spend their leisure time underwent
dramatic changes in this decade: as the student movement weakened
ca. 1994, campus bands began to form and would play at university
festivals; protest songs were losing popularity to loud rock music.
All these changes, she continues, were accompanied by an increasing
DIY ("do it yourself") ethic among youth that led many
to form bands of their own. One might hypothesize then that at
least some of those with rebellious impulses have turned away
from political protests, now that oppressive governmental institutions
are not so readily obvious, and are engaging in protests of a
more personal nature, centering upon issues of identity, self-expression
and fighting society's narrow definitions of acceptable behavior
and appearance.
For official rigidity and aversion to potentially subversive behavior
that is stylistically coded remain: in July of 1997 Choson
Ilbo reported that the Korean Broadcasting System (KBS) had
decided to bar from their shows artists whose appearance might
detrimentally influence youthful morality: KBS officials would
inspect the way performers looked before rehearsals, and ban those
who did not comply with their regulations of what was acceptable.
Among items deemed inappropriate were dyed hair; dreadlocks; earrings
or tattoos on men; exposed navels or nose-rings on women; dark
sunglasses; caps and clothing with commercial logos; "indecent"
clothes such as torn jeans; suggestive or violent choreography;
and the somewhat mysteriously designated unaesthetic (migwansang
choch'i anhun) accessories.
The First of the Mohicans
Ironically, the continuing narrowness of Korean mainstream music and the prescribed behavior associated with it may also unwittingly be playing a major role in fostering a desire for alternatives. KBS' reactionary announcement encourages a defiant backlash among those who favor banned items as apparel and raises the question of the relationship between style and specifically Korean subcultures. British youth movements, of course, such as teddy boys, mods, rockers, and most spectacularly, punks all had individual styles that served as badges of self-identification. British sociologists have drawn fruitfully on the work of French structuralists and semioticians in explicating the significance of these sets of stylistic choice. For example, Clarke, in his essay on "Style" (1976) and its relation to working class subcultures, elaborates upon the concept of "bricolage" from Levi-Strauss (1966), who explains how objects chosen from preexisting artefacts may be reassembled and recontextualized so as to create new forms of signification and become a means of forging new communal identities for another group. Hebdige (1979) also employs Roland Barthes' oft-developed arguments that objects possess no intrinsic significance, but only a cultural meaning derived from the object's social use: to employ an object in a different context, therefore, and to invest it with alternate values challenges a culturally constructed symbolic universe and becomes subversive, as, for example, when a punk wears a safety pin as an earring. For a punk to adopt such deliberately confrontational hairstyles as a multi-colored mohawk or to wear a dog collar to symbolize his or her economic bondage means to take on a form of stigmata and create a self-imposed exile within the larger
society.
Hebdige's explication of such gestures is particularly relevant
to the Korean punk movement, which arises in a society with a
deeply-rooted Confucian ideology favoring consensus: "style
in subculture is, then, pregnant with significance. Its transformations
go 'against nature', interrupting the process of 'normalization'.
As such they are gestures, movements towards a speech which offends
the 'silent majority', which challenges the principle of unity
and cohesion, which contradicts the myth of consensus" (1979:
18). In Korea, particularly, the Confucian tradition and its modern
transfiguration have often emphasized body discipline as a mark
of civilization; visitors to the country are frequently struck
by the effort put in by members of society at all levels towards
wearing appropriate and neutral dress. The ban recently instituted
by KBS reveals, however, both the extent to which new stylistic
markers associated with youth culture have been entering Korea
in recent years and the level of discomfort they cause.
The Korean punk movement has, to be sure, exploited style in conscious
ways: the cover of the 1999 compilation CD 3000punk, sold
for a mere 3000 won, proudly sports a xeroxed photograph
of a young man (of indeterminate national provenance), back to
the camera, with a mohawk (see fig. 3). Nonetheless, the sixteen
band photographs within the CD sleeve suggest the relative rarity
of such hair styles: only one group has members who have similarly
turned to mohicans (and it should be noted that musicians are
more likely to distinguish themselves in dress or hairstyle).
Favored punk stylistic markers include instead the use of earrings,
chains dangling from belt loops to pants pockets (an accessory
adapted from US skateboard culture) and dyed and/or mildly spiked
hair. During the course of my fieldwork, I noted that many members
of the scene enjoy experimenting with different looks and change
their hair style or color every few months; arrival at Drug with
a new coiffure would provoke good-natured raillery. And although
the markers exploited by self-identified punks in Korea may appear
less obviously outrageous to the eyes of outside observers than
those of their American or British brethren, such markers derive
force not from aesthetic "absolutes" but from differentiation:
even seemingly mild fashion statements may be perceived as more
confrontational in Korea, because of narrowly circumscribed strictures
of acceptable dress and social emphasis on conformity (one should
recall that during the Park Chung Hee regime a "hair police"
of sorts, armed with scissors, insured that young men did not
grow their hair beyond a certain length, because long hair was
felt to indicate subversive, radical beliefs). The lead singer
of the Drug band 18Cruk, who has a stud piercing in the cleft
of his chin, remarked that when one has such a look, "people
stare at you like you're an animal or a monkey."
By the same token, however, certain potential stylistic punk
markers have, perhaps surprisingly, become far more mainstream
in Korea than one might have expected in the last few years: dyed
hair, in particular, no longer possesses the shock value it held
a decade ago. In 1999 not only musicians, but fashionable young
people with no connection to the punk movement will often wear
their hair in blonde or red colors. In a 1998 Internet interview
(Our Nation ttarajapgi 18), Yi Sok-mun comments upon
his astonishment at discovering in 1995 that a member of the band
Yellow Kitchen was a student at Seoul National University, the
nation's most prestigious institution, because of his hair and
clothing style. He then goes on observe that in 1998 one can find
a variety of hair colors-red, blonde, green, blue-but as recently
as 1995 such dyed hair was rare. Change continues apace, and over
time the transformations, mentioned by Hebdige above, that once
seemed to go "against nature" may lose their force as
stigmata.
Even so, however, most audience members at Drug-and this is the crucial point-are indistinguishable from other conventionally attired Korean teenagers seen on the streets; many arrive at the club in school uniforms, toting book bags, with hair trimmed neatly
and glasses perched on their noses.
The Kids Are Alright (Or Are They?)
How, then, do we analyze sociologically this punk offshoot whose fans often look like model students and whose guitarists may attend the nation's top universities? Interpretations of the power of rock and roll, and especially punk, subcultures in the West focus on themes of resistance, community, and self-definition.
Brake (1985: 191) writes that the
attraction of subculture is its rebelliousness, its hedonism, its escape from the restrictions of work and home....Young people need a space in which to explore an identity which is separate from the roles and expectations imposed by family, work and school. Youth culture offers a collective identity, a reference group from which youth can develop an individual identity.
Redhead (1997: 38) echoes many of the same themes:
the power of rock lies...in its proven ability to produce and circulate 'meaning', primarily the message of its own cultural force-to bind people in 'community', to be 'authentic' and so on. Its success in yoking successive 'rebellious' youth subcultures to specific musical forms...is a testament to its pervasive durable effect. Punk is the archetype.
Punk thus offers Korean youth a model ready to hand for the
expression of local resistance within an internationally recognizable
form. And although "a second generation's faithfulness to
traditional rebellious stereotypes can come across as reactionary
in its own way" (Hebdige 1979: 83), the transition to a completely
different context makes Korean youths who appropriate punk styles
very much pioneers within their own country. NoiZe (ne
Min Pum Hong), a Korean music critic and video DJ who spent his
childhood in London during the heyday of punk, expresses both
bemusement with and admiration for Korean punks: "I mean,
on one hand when I see some kid with spiked red hair walking down
the street in Seoul, I think gimme a break, but at the same time,
I'm really glad there are kids out there who are willing to look
like that and challenge Korean society. It's hard here, man, it's
hard. We need more of 'em."
As noted above, however, those who embrace such obvious social stigmata are in the minority. And just as we should avoid monolithic explanations for the rise of punk, so too we should avoid overly simplistic accounts for the attraction of punk. Fox's ethnographic account (1987) of a local punk scene in the United States emphasizes its stratification and the varying levels of commitment that its members bring to it. Similarly, the audience at Drug ranges from band members and an inner circle of fans who are present virtually every night to curious onlookers who might appear just once, and includes a broad continuum between both poles. Punk holds different appeal for different people, and even can hold a different appeal to the same individual at different times: "it can represent a major dimension in people's lives-an axis erected in the face of the family around which a secret and immaculate identity can be made to cohere-- or it can be a slight distraction, a bit of light relief from the monotonous but none the less paramount realities of school, home and work" (Hebdige 1979: 122; cf. Frith 1978: 206). Various explanations, then, have arisen to account for the appeal of punk in the west: whereas some sociologists have seen the movement as a reaction to urban alienation and a bleak economic future, others have argued that individuals join in not because they see it as a movement articulating social grievances, but because they find it fun, enjoy its fashion and are following
trends (see Widdicombe and Wooffitt 1995: 21).
Neither set of explanations elucidates the situation in Korea
especially well, however: while those who attend Drug vary widely
in the way they dress, the frequency with which they attend, and
their ultimate involvement in the punk world, a handful of basic
themes recur in my conversations with fans and band members and
on the Internet BBS. Many participants in the Korean scene begin
by drawing a distinction between themselves and practitioners
of punk in the West. Ahn Hong-Kyung, the president of the Unitel
BBS Drug fan club, describes Western punk as caught up with "drugs,
sex, anarchism, self-mutilation" and as expressing the worldview
of working class laborers, in contrast with Korea's more middle-class
participants. Those familiar with punk in the West may well regard
this portrait as misinformed caricature, but that is scarcely
relevant: what is important here is Korean youth's discursive
practice concerning their own movement and how they define themselves
within it. Ahn goes on to say that to her Korean punk's most important
feature is that "it expresses the energy of young people."
In a BBS posting (Our Nation ttarajapgi 9) the owner of
Drug puts forth the club's credo, stating that "punk is not
a musical genre, but a free-spirited way of thinking, a frank
attitude in life, resistance to that which is wrong and the possibility
that we too can act." One of the words that most frequently
appears in informants' accounts of why they frequent Drug is chayu
(freedom); the club provides a setting where they may relax with
peers outside the scrutiny and demands of the adult world (cf.
Brake 1985: ix). Pak Yun-shik of CryingNut notes that interpretations
often differ over clubgoers' intent: "people who look at
punk from above say it's rebellion (chohang); we
say it's freedom (chayu)." A large underground festival
held in 1996 to celebrate the abolition of state censorship of
music was, in fact, titled "Chayu ch'ukje" (The
Freedom Festival).
A second word that appears repeatedly is "stress,"
especially in the phrase suturesu p'ulda-to
relieve stress (a typical comment: "I go once a week to relieve
stress)." In the interplay of these two motifs one can discern,
above all, an intense desire for escape. As one informant put
it, "once you go down the steps into that small space, you
can do anything you want. You can just escape from the realities
of going to school every single day, worrying about college entrance
exams or whatnot. Just do whatever you want." For many, the
punk scene represents one of the lone outlets through which they
can briefly elude the pressure of their daily lives: slam dancing,
pogoing, and loud music are viewed as ideal ways to relieve what
one informant called his kyoyukjokin pulman (lit.
"educational discontent").
Why discontent? In Korea, admission to a prestigious university
is widely held to determine both one's economic future and one's
position in society; interviews with fans make clear that the
competitive rigors of the Korean education system and the resultant
push to succeed placed upon them by parents constitute the dominant
backdrop to their lives. One fan expressly asked that I convey
to an overseas audience that "there are a lot of bad things
about the Korean educational system. It's really difficult....From
your junior year all you can think about is getting into university.
It should change a lot." Another fan, now out of high school,
articulated her situation vividly: "When I was in high school,
I got up at six, went to school at seven. I got home at five,
had an hour for dinner and then studied until I fell asleep. Study,
study, study. I almost went crazy." A common metaphor for
high school life is to describe it as the equivalent of being
in prison (kamok). Such subjective accounts are matched
by more objective research into the Korean educational system.
A survey of over two thousand parents of high school students
in Seoul conducted by the Korean Sociological Association provides
a sense of the tremendous academic pressures placed on Korean
youth. Byungchul Ahn, who published the results in English, concludes
from the survey that (1995: 78) "the fathers' view on their
child's education is characterized by the idea that only their
own child must excel and that he or she must strive to be the
best at school;" more strikingly, the study also revealed
that many fathers "perceived school work and [the] college
admission exam to be more important than their child's health
or personality [problems]." Ahn ends his article with words
of strong indictment (86-87): "there are few who would say
that the Korean educational system is moving in the right direction.
Instead, the majority of people would agree that there is something
fundamentally wrong with the system....It is clear that some of
the education-related problems facing our society such as the
feverish preoccupation with education and tutoring is partly a
result of the parents and attitudes and values of education."
Let us examine in more detail how a few participants of varying
levels of commitment to the scene describe their own involvement
with punk and its relationship to the contours of their daily
lives. To-yon, another recent high school graduate, has
just begun attending university in a city in Kyonggi-do, south
of Seoul. I accompanied him to campus one hot summer day, and,
after finding a shady spot, we chatted about a variety of topics:
To-yon related how he had not listened to music very much
until he entered junior high school, but at that point he became
exposed to Nirvana, The Sex Pistols and other bands, and his interest
grew rapidly. He and his friends would listen to music together
and exchange new purchases, helping each other learn about different
bands. He has been visiting Drug since he was sixteen, sometimes
going on his own, but more frequently attending with friends.
In high school, however, he went above all when he was in a bad
mood, often as a result of getting a hard time from his mother
about studying and getting into a good university, or if he felt
under unusual stress from his schoolwork, or if he had had a fight
with friends. To-yon himself plays keyboards and guitar
and aspires to becoming a musician someday and so in part he goes
to Drug in order to learn by watching; his mother, he notes, is
fairly understanding about his attendance at the club, feeling
that it will be of benefit to his future career. In his high school
years he used to slam dance, but now he is more inclined just
to listen; he also goes less frequently because he believes that
the glory days of Drug have passed and that it no longer cleaves
to an underground ideology, especially since it has begun releasing
CDs (see further below). In his own lyrics he intends to write
particularly about things he doesn't like, whether social problems
or issues in his own life. To-yon does not view himself
as a "real punk," a term he reserves for those who truly
live an irregular (pulkyujikjogin) lifestyle more
rejecting of society, "like Johnny Rotten," the erstwhile
lead singer of the Sex Pistols, but he indeed regards some in
Korea as true punks, including a few of his friends who hang out
at Drug. He casually mentions that once while in high school he
participated in a demonstration, but that he didn't really know
what he was doing; he went along with some friends because he
thought it might be interesting. And although he doesn't believe
that the IMF crisis has affected the music scene at all, he notes
that it has had a major effect upon on his own life: he has experienced
a drastic reduction in his disposable income and is far less able
to purchase new clothes; moreover, he feels guilty whenever he
needs to ask his mother for spending money.
Jin-hee, one of the scene's many female participants, is devoted
to her studies and her career goal is to become an interpreter.
She became familiar with the music through friends, and once in
high school she began listening to such alternative American bands
as the Smashing Pumpkins. When she was first exposed to this music
she found it refreshing, unlike other pop genres, which she characterized
as stifling. She doesn't attend Drug very often but enjoys it
when she does. Upon her first visit, she regarded it as alien
but interesting: her most dominant impression was of the expression
of youthful energy and a sudden overwhelming sense of a generation
gap that exists in Korea, because it seemed to her that it would
be impossible for older people to dance and jump around and shout
like those at Drug. Her parents do not comprehend why she visits
Drug ("why would you want to go to a place like that?"),
but do not actively prevent her. In contrast, however, Jin-hee
sees no particular gender gap at the club and feels no less a
full-fledged participant than the boys, although she notes that
because of her size she is afraid to take part in the mosh pit
when people are "going crazy," because she might get
crushed. Supermarket, a band composed of four young woman, strikes
her as novel (shin'gihada) and although she would not say
that it inspires her to "do it herself," she thinks
that it looks cool (mosittda) to see female peers
on stage playing punk rock. Jin-hee finds it difficult to define
punk, noting that it is a musical style close to rock, but not
exactly like rock; to her, someone who is punk is a true individual.
She does not regard herself as a punk, nor does she dress in a
confrontational mode in any way. Implicit in the way she speaks
about Drug, however, is the joy in peer solidarity that motivates
her occasional participation.
John Kim and David Park, the guitarists in The Goonies, offer the perspective of those for whom punk comprises a more integral part of identity. They started as regular attendees at Drug, and eventually felt encouraged to start a band of their own. Their involvement in the Korean punk scene reflects its hybrid nature: both lived for long periods in North America and feel more comfortable with English than Korean, although their secondary schooling took place in Seoul. Each hints at a sense of belonging they found in the punk rock community that counterbalanced disaffection in school. John, now a freshman at a university in Canada, eloquently described his feelings about punk and the part it plays in his
daily life as follows:
I suppose the role of the high school I went to in relationship to my interest in punk was that it provided the institutional hazing and the power structures which I quickly recognized and resisted against in my own way....A hesitant compliance and eventual uncomfortable assimilation did take place but the non-compliance and the "doing my own thing" aspect still remained....I did interpret and modify the ideology and what punk meant to me. It meant that you could act yourself, that you could be whoever you wanted to be, and that people didn't care really for conventions and expectations, that people should strive to be authentic. It takes all the rejects from mainstream society, all the marginalized, the different, the disaffected, the ones that don't "fit in" anywhere. It meant a lot of things to me, and still does. But what it did was that it gave me something to grasp onto and build upon, it assisted in defining me within some cultural undercurrent to prevent feelings of dislocation and separation while at the same time satisfying my need to feel like I was against something, that I was on the very fringe of society, an active member of the counter-culture, a part of the underground, a part of the resistance. That's part of the attraction of punk the way I see it. Plus, the music is catchy as hell, too. After all, when it comes down to it, when you get past all the ideals and common themes pigeonholed and defined by people like me, in the end it's simply power chords in a nice arrangement, with a simple sound and a message you define.
David, whose affable and gently thoughtful character belies his e-mail address "evilincarnate," likewise describes
what Drug has meant to him:
If I look back on my middle school days and picture not having Drug, I probably would have gone crazy. 'Cause middle school is kind of a tough time....For Korea to have anything like that, it was such an oasis-type place. It was really just crazy, you know. You'd have high school life...in a place like Korea, you really don't have much choice. It's either one group or the other. You finally have the option of being an outsider and not having to fit into any of that....You have this other place where you can just hang out and have friends. No one can judge you, really.
Songs of Ourselves
Korean adherents of punk thus see in it a release from their
daily lives; and although John relishes an identity as an "active
member of the counter-culture," few call for overturning
society at any deep level. Despite the frequency with which bands
at Drug cover "Anarchy in the UK," the Korean punk movement
does not espouse lawlessness as such. Expessions of dissatisfaction
with the educational system and social constraints take precedence
over explicit political statement. Personal narratives, as above,
and song lyrics reveal that for the most part Korean punks, rather
than engaging in radical political activities or even frequent
confrontational displays of stylistic resistance, focus instead
on the everyday, the personal, and the routine (cf. Widdicombe
and Wooffitt 1995: 204).
A striking example of Korean punk's focus on the everyday and
the personal occurs in the song Kalmaegi, the lyrics of
which I included as an epigraph to this paper. Kalmaegi
usually elicits an empassioned response from the crowd at Drug,
a response deriving both from its lyrics, which invoke the domestic
conflicts of Korean youth, and its compelling musical form. I
wish to stress here that despite the frequent emphasis placed
by scholars and music critics on content analysis (analysis in
which I too unavoidably engage), in order to account for the affective
appeal of punk songs, music virtually always supersedes lyrics,
as John's remarks imply (cf. Nehring 1997: ch. 6). That much of
the audience regularly (and somewhat atypically) sing the words
of Kalmaegi along with CryingNut, however, suggests that
its lyrics strike a particularly responsive note. One of the main
reasons for such response is the song's inclusive nature: the
first verse is sung from a male point of view, the second from
a female's, and the chorus represents emotions common to both.
One female fan, when I asked her thoughts about the song, exclaimed,
"That's my story!"
Kalmaegi starts at mid-tempo, employing a familiar chord
progression and rhythmic lilt that harks back to '50s-style rock
and roll, underscored on the CD version by the innovative use
of a harp. The first words, appanun naege malhaettchi
("Dad said to me"), immediately evoke a youth's confrontation
with paternal authority: although the father urges his son on
to achievement, the son begs off, incapacitated by ennui. The
second verse exhibits parallel structure: beginning ommanun
naege malhaettchi ("Mom said to me"), the next lines
go on to envision a young woman's conflict with her same sex parent.
The mother spurs her daughter into marriage in a good family (lit.
"a good place"), despite the daughter's preference for
her friends' company. Nagging pressures from father and mother:
the song thus brings youth of both sexes together in an act of
solidarity against normative parental and societal expectations.
In the chorus these concretely expressed vignettes yield to vaguer
desire to be free from the agony of living life falsely (naega
anin nal porigo...ship'o: "I want to throw
away this me that isn't me"). Yet the song derives its full
power not from the lyrics but what occurs musically here: after
the first chorus, at roughly the two minute mark of this three
minute-long song, the tempo doubles, distorted guitar takes over,
and the song rockets into overdrive. Audience members often form
a mosh pit at this point and slam dance frantically as the refrain,
with its fervent plea for escape, repeats until the end of the
song.
A frequent topic of songs is difficulties with parents; the subject scarcely arises in British punk. Like CryingNut in Kalmaegi, 18Cruk also sings of intergenerational conflict, but more bitterly in Ku nuga na ui chonjae rul alkka?
("Who knows what my life is like?"):
I get chewed out first thing in the morning, "Hey, boy, get up!"
First thing in the morning it's "Where are you going?" "You make my life hell!"
I get chewed out every morning at home
But I really have nothing to say
I get chewed out in the evening too, "What the hell do you want, boy?"
As soon as I go to bed, "You make my life hell, boy!"
I always get chewed out in the evening too at home
But I really have nothing to say
"Why are you like that, boy?" "Just look at those clothes!"
"Where did I go wrong?" Dad got pissed off again
I always get chewed out by my dad
But I really have nothing to say
Sometimes I even want to thrash my dad
But when I look at him when he gets drunk and passes out
I see everybody sneer and point right at me
Those are the times I really just cry.
Despite his anger and frustration, the narrative voice is unable
to respond; instead he winds up harboring fantasies of violence
against his father, and vignettes of conflict yield to a sense
of poignancy in the final lines. Once more, as with Kalmaegi,
we find the expression of intense emotions that cannot be voiced
directly to parents.
That the titles of three tracks on CryingNut's CD take their
name from birds deserves note (Kalmaegi, Parangsae,
and Komunsae--"Seagull," "Blue
Bird," and "Black Bird," respectively). The lyrics
of Kalmaegi imply that the bird is to be regarded as a
metaphor for personal freedom and escape, and indeed in all three
songs the verb ttonagada (to leave, to get away)
appears. This longing is recapitulated on the Our Nation 2
CD, whose cover depicts a tiny cartoon island topped by a coconut
palm (see fig. 4). The most well-known song on the CD is NoBrain's
Pada sanai ("Man of the Sea"), a ruggedly idealistic
paean to dropping out of society and spending one's life voyaging
the Pacific. Even more strikingly, 18Cruk has recently recorded
a song entitled 18Cruk hanguk ul ttonanda ("18Cruk
Leaves Korea"): again a form of the verb "to leave"
(ttonada) appears and we see a rejection of the homeland
itself. In all these songs, however, yearning for freedom and
a sense of powerlessness as youth rather than bleak economic prospects
motivate desire for escape. Resistance and rebellion take the
form not of confronting society head on, but simply refusing to
play by its rules and breaking away.
Just as subject matter changed in Korean literature during
the '90s away from more politicized topics (cf. Kim 2000: 109),
so topics of Korean punk represent a shift not only from British
punk but from both Korean protest songs of the '80s and pop ballads
that focus on love. Indeed, Korean punk songs only rarely invoke
romantic motifs. One of the few to do so is CryingNut's P'ongk'ugol
("Punk Girl"), but even here, however, the focus is
not on expressions of lust or sexual stirrings, but rather that
the girl glimpsed at a bus stop who forms the song's subject looks
like a punk rocker and is thus a perfect match for the song's
narrative voice. The song therefore becomes a celebration of the
subculture, and a rejection of the rest of the world, which is
dirty and tedious (toropgo ttok katun sesang).
In contrast, the "punk girl" alone is dirty and clean
(toropko kkekkuthae). P'ongk'ugol
rejects mainstream values, while asserting for the singer and
the object of his affections a paradoxically purer morality.
The lyrics of the band 18Cruk, as suggested above, offer an
interesting counterpoint to those of CryingNut, as their world
view and demeanor has a gruffer, more confrontational edge, starting
in a band name that puns on an obscenity in Korean. Some of their
song titles, such as Fucking USA, Maesuk'omun
uril senoeshik'yoyo ("The Mass Media is Brainwashing
Us") and Viva La Revolution suggest a politically
activist bent, but a band interview published in Paenjin Kong
(1998.5: 82-88) quashes that impression. When asked about the
song Fucking USA, Kim Chu-wan, 18Cruk's guitarist, acknowledges
that neither is the song their own, nor does he know in what aspects
The Exploited, the original artists, consider the United States
deserving of the pejorative. A follow-up question asking whether
the band hopes for anything from Kim Dae Jung, the recently elected
president, is answered thus by the group's lead singer: "What's
there to hope for? We just want to be left alone." The song
that perhaps most neatly sums up their attitude and ethos, then,
is Shikkuroun nyosoktul ("Noisy
Kids") in which they celebrate their own noisiness and their
provocative attitude.
18Cruk's most pointed expressions of anger challenge society rather than government and, not surprisingly, criticize especially Korean fascination with education. Their composition Ttalttali kim kyosu ("Professor Kim, Wanker") mocks the hypocrisy in upholding academic achievers as morally superior. Kim Chu-wan explains the song's meaning thus: "If you say you're a Seoul National grad and you're a professor, Koreans (uri nara saramdul) think 'Wow,' but they all look at porno mags at home, jerk off, and wipe their asses too." Similar attitudes to the importance of school performance as a yardstick to measure one's worth appear
in their Nae mamdaero (The Way I Want):
Don't insult me if I blow my nose in front of you (oi!)
If it's stuffed, you've got to blow it (oi!)
So what if I don't study very well (oi!)
We're all people anyway
I'll live the way I want
Why don't you mind your own business
I'll live the way I want
No one's going to get in my way
Don't get down when people give you crap (oi!)
The guy who's dissing you has nothing to be proud of (oi!)
They shouldn't go thinking they're so clever (oi!)
Someday they'll be in big trouble
Here too we find defiant assertions of equality, combined with
an attack on constraining Korean customs that value a misplaced
etiquette over personal comfort. And here too the song's effect
depends not simply on what is sung, but how: the song clips along
at a jauntily angry pace and the raucous cry "Oi!" at
the end of each verse line draws upon a familiar cry from British
punk that evokes rebellion. More than any band at Drug, perhaps,
18Cruk embodies what Grinker notes (1998: 118) as the concern
dominating contemporary Korean discourse on daily life: "the
failure of Korea's youth...to preserve conventional Korean values
of loyalty, family and community." 18Cruk undoubtedly would
draw the ire of those older Koreans who, writes Grinker (119),
"criticize younger people as rude and say they speak Korean
poorly...and are interested only in American movies and music."
18Cruk's declaration of autonomy, however, must be read in conjunction with the attitudes of others in the punk movement and not taken as an authoritative statement of "punk values." A poster on the Internet BBS who goes by the alias "misfits" also makes a revealing distinction between the desire for freedom
at Drug and the need to respect the rights of others:
Of course enjoying freedom (chayu) to your heart's desire in a place like that is a good thing. If we couldn't have as much fun as we wanted at Drug, I wouldn't go either. But freedom has its limits too. Our nation (uri nara) is a place where the freedom of the individual is recognized. But for one person to enjoy freedom and to harm another, saying "I'm following my freedom, this is a free country, I'll do what I want" is self-indulgence....It's the same at Drug. No matter how free it is, you can't exceed all boundaries.
The neo-Neo-confucian (if I may coin the phrase) sense of social responsibility expressed here, couched in terms that invoke a sense of nationalism is a far cry from not only the early British scene with such lyrics as The Sex Pistols' "I wanna destroy passersby" and The Clash's "White riot/ I wanna riot/ White riot/ A riot of my own" but even 18Cruk's milder assertion of the right to self-expression. "I'll live the way I want....to a point." Ultimately, then, it is difficult to see in Korean punk any genuine threat to Korean society, in the way that for a brief period British punk, in the perception of many of both its proponents and its detractors, genuinely appeared to be shaking the foundations of British society. Rather, the emergence of Korean youth subcultures in the '90s is providing a social safety valve that allows for the outlet of tension, similar to how the student movement may have functioned at least in part as a political safety valve in earlier years. I cite again Grinker (1998: 192-93), who has argued that one may see student protesters as playing out a "ritual of rebellion," a ritual that while appearing to subvert hierarchy in fact reinforces it: "although student demonstrators express their anger, resentment, and frustration as subordinates, this manifest content also structures their sentiments in a specific ritual form that mitigates the potential for radical consequences." In a somewhat similar fashion, the establishment of Drug and other rock clubs as a safe haven, squirreled away from the adult world, in which youth can vent their frustrations underscores their relative powerlessness to effect real social
changes.
Going Underground
Where Korean punk subculture does draw battle lines most adamantly,
however, is in cultural/musical terms and its followers frequently
express an oppositional relationship between it and mainstream
popular culture; Korean punk and other forms of underground music
belong in this sense to an aesthetic counterculture, resenting
the control of major labels and the limited choices of music made
available to them. Fanzine Kong, a fanzine that has arisen
to document not just punk but underground music generally in Korea,
often runs articles whose anonymous authors distinguish forcefully
the stultifying oba (overground, i.e. mainstream) culture
and that of the dynamic, inventive ondo (underground).
One brief notice (Fanzine Kong 1998: 18), announcing a
series of new CDs including one entitled All Kind of Extreme
Music (sic), angrily refutes charges that bands remain underground
simply because they are unable to make it to the mainstream: "No
way. The underground is a music style, a lifestyle, a feeling
of being a minority." The following page discusses approvingly
how one club's atmosphere ridicules and attacks mainstream culture
(churyu munhwa). Another issue ends with a sarcastically
humorous piece (Fanzine Kong 1997: 111), explaining "15
Reasons Why We Remain Underground." Examples may be multiplied.
Punk thus offers an enticing mixture of individual escape and
righteous group solidarity for its followers.
Nonetheless, the Korean scene is rapidly undergoing change.
CryingNut's first CD has now sold over 60,000 copies and videos
for their songs are appearing on television with some frequency;
even more disturbingly for those who champion punk's oppositional
stance, their signature song Mal tallija ("Let's Gallop
A Horse") has found its way into an ice cream commercial
(the band was not informed of this until it was largely a fait
accompli), and onto the noraebang circuit. During the
course of my fieldwork, they even wound up appearing on a TV pop
show lip-syncing to one of their songs, a performance one fan
characterized to me as "pathetic...terrible." Because
one of punk's most heartfelt credos is belief in its opposition
to mainstream culture, whenever it becomes more popular in a given
milieu, its proponents undergo an identity crisis: as Arnold (1997:
xi) notes, "punk rock must feel righteous, not popular; alone
not nurtured: it has to be embattled to exist at all". Crying
Nut themselves are aware of these contradictions and take them
with good humor, even laughingly acknowledging to me that now
they are imitation (katcha) punks.
As CryingNut gains more exposure they inevitably attract more fans to Drug, some of whom have little knowledge of punk music as such, a fact disturbing to not a few within the scene. The most bitterly contested arguments on the Our Nation BBS confront issues of authenticity and whether those at Drug individually or collectively have the true "punk spirit." Of course, "punk" has been a highly contested term throughout the genre's brief history: as Leblanc pointedly writes at the beginning of her chapter entitled "Punk's Not Dead-It Just Smells That Way" (1999: 33), "punks and pundits agree that punk started out as a music-based subculture. Beyond that, there is little agreement about its geographic origins, its ideologies, its membership, and even...its continued existence." Many bands at Drug profess a lack of concern with labels: when queried if they are punk, the members of 18Cruk tell me they don't think about it and are scarcely worried about living up to some dictionary definition of the term. Repeatedly during my fieldwork interviewees would state that Person X or Band Y is not punk or even that Drug itself is no longer a real punk club. The inclusion of a brief statement of the Drug credo in the recently released "Choson p'ongk'u: The Korean PUNK Compilation" CD scripted by Yi Sok-mun reveals that whether these criticisms are
dismissed or not, they are acknowledged:
We don't know what punk is.
But we are doing punk.
We are neither anarchists nor advocates of violence.
We are simply letting our youthful ardor burn at Drug, a small club in
the Republic of Korea.
Some people say that our music isn't punk.
We don't want to argue with them.
We make our music and name it as we want.
Yi has also offered a spririted defense of the club's direction
by saying that, "Drug is a space for tearing down the wall
between the underground and the mainstream." Some voices
within the punk scene, then, call not for strict opposition between
the underground and the mainstream, but rapprochement. And while
punk may never become fully assimilated into the mainstream of
Korean pop music, every step that it takes closer towards it further
dilutes its oppositional force. But as its force is blunted, so
do more extreme bands continue to appear, many playing in the
even more rough-edged style known as "hardcore punk."
The genre and its bands remain in a continual state of evolution,
as punk reinvents itself to allow for those who are attracted
to it as a symbol of rebellion.
All these debates highlight that in Korean punk we encounter,
perhaps surprisingly, a traditional discursive mode in which a
dispossessed group champions the moral high ground and asserts
its voice as conscience of the nation. Many local punk rockers
engage with values espoused in minjung discourse and portray
themselves implicitly, and indeed paradoxically, as akin to the
minjung on one hand and student protesters and dissidents
on the other. Sallie Yea, in a recent overview of the culture
and politics of resistance in Korea that synthesizes multiple
interpretations of the vexed term minjung (Yea 1999: 223),
moves beyond definitions rooted in analysis of class and social
position that describe the minjung as, for example, in
Koo's terms (1993: 131) "a broad alliance of 'alienated classes,'
people alienated from power and from the distribution of the fruits
of economic growth." Instead Yea focuses on the "subjective
and emotional contours" of the minjung experience
and regards it as comprising "those Koreans who establish
and promote populist values and sentiments in the face of hegemonic
definitions of culture, modernity and the nation." In this
sense punk also draws on the deep well of minjung sentiment
within Korea, and promotes an anti-establishment cultural politics,
and an alternative view of the Korean nation.
And yet the punk movement simultaneously distances itself from both the minjung and the student protest movement in crucial respects: first, unlike a more militant radical intelligentsia, punk's cultural rebels concentrate on areas of oppression besides class and have a more libertarian bent (cf. Brake 1985: 105); secondly, not only does Korea's punk movement proudly arrogate a perversely elitist-cum-pariah status, it moves beyond the boundaries of Korea in forming alliances, imagined or not, with an international punk community. Therefore it seeks to diversify (sub)cultural opportunities available to Korean youth by looking to the West, in contrast to those whose "anti-American minjung nationalism tended to promote the pseudo-democracy of sameness rather than the recognition and respect of difference, treating the nation as a categorical identity more fundamental than other identities such as gender and region" (Shin 1998: 163-64). Through recourse to an originally non-Korean musical form this segment of youth is not only expressing social dissatisfactions and opposition to the institutionalized culture produced by capitalism and the mass media but also rejecting the path of resistance chosen by many of their elder siblings: the genre's urgent tempos and distorted guitars accomodate anger and conflict far more readily than bland Korean pop or even the musically unadventurous student protest songs, while its do-it-yourself ethic encourages wide participation from those within the movement and the exploration of novel modes of expression and identities. I turn now in conclusion to these assertions of new but authentic Korean identity and a
new vision of the nation.
Choson Punk: Our Nation, Volume 1
As suggested above, the Korean punk movement celebrates peer
solidarity. Drug offers a youthful surrogate family, a reconstituted
community of like-minded individuals who come together in opposition
to mainstream culture. The terms of address used in the scene,
as one might expect from any close-knit Korean grouping, replicate
kinship terms such as hyong (big brother to a male),
onni (big sister to a female), oppa (big brother
to a female) and so on. More interesting is the greater inclusivity
of the Korean scene than similar movements in the West. Although
CDs generally offer thanks and acknowledgements in the West as
well, pride of place in the Drug label releases is reserved, strikingly,
for expressions of thanks (in either English or Korean) to the
"turok shik'ku" or the "Drug
Family". For many, especially band members, the primary locus
of identity and self-definition shifts from school or even family
to the subculture itself. No less do the repeated enactments of
performance in the spirit of Bakhtinian carnival four times a
week foster unity among the scene's followers. Performance merges
spontaneity and ritualized aspects (again, a ritual of rebellion),
which inevitably conform to certain expectations-energetic music,
noisy guitars, bodies in motion. In fact, some bands carefully
choreograph their stage shows and will repeat the same movements
each performance (e.g. simultaneous leaps into the air at climactic
points of the song), but rather than seeming tired, these moments
become highlights to be anticipated.
What initially drew my scholarly attention to Korean punk, and perhaps most fascinates one familiar with the genre in other contexts, is its own consciousness of and desire to proclaim a specifically Korean identity. The first punk CD to appear in Korea possessed an English title: Our Nation, Vol. 1. My initial reaction was that this title was surely ironic, punk being punk (after all, this is the anti-authoritarian genre that foisted The Sex Pistols' "God Save The Queen" upon the world). I soon reassessed my views: in keeping with the high degree of Korean nationalism in virtually all segments of society, I came to feel the title was meant with utter sincerity. Indeed, the (un)self-conscious deployment of nationalist tropes within the subculture seemed precisely what rendered Korean punk Korean. And yet upon further discussion with participants in the scene I now believe that that interpretation is not fully correct either. As Tangherlini and Pai (1998: 1) note in their introduction to
Nationalism and the Construction of Korean Identity:
Uri nara, Uri mal, Uri minjok--those who study Korea are often struck by the abundance of symbols linked to the nationalist discourses surrounding the construction of Korean identity and culture. The invention, manipulation, and control of these symbols is a hotly contested battleground in the politics and ideology of representing Korea's past and present....Using their particular perspectives-be they Japanese scholars and bureaucrats of the colonial period, anti-Japanese independence fighters, Marxist historians, nation-building politicians, or student protesters among others-these groups have appropriated certain cultural expressions as part of the legitimizing process for their ultimately political projects.
When Korean punk invokes the term "Our Nation"-and
chooses to do so in English rather than using the Korean uri
nara-it becomes neither simply a patriotic expression, nor
an ironic comment on Korean nationalism: rather punks appropriate
Korean discourse-and in this sense one may indeed regard it as
a nationalistic movement-in order to re-create the Korean nation,
to create a new place for Korean youth to stand, one in which
they can be proud and feel comfortable.
Nonetheless, in keeping with what one might expect from such
contested terminology, interpretations differ somewhat even among
those within the punk scene as to the significance of its use
of the term "Our Nation." The members of CryingNut,
for example, assert quite adamantly that there is no connection
to be drawn between patriotism and their vision of "Our Nation."
Song Ki Wan, the video jockey for Korea MTV's "Alternative
Nation" program, who was involved in the making of the Our
Nation CD, feels that its release was a historic moment in
Korean underground rock culture: he sees in its title a deliberate
reworking of the prevalent discourse of "uri nara-ism"
in Korea; the government had failed to shape "uri nara"
to accomodate Korea's youth, he says, so they deliberately created
an "Our Nation" of their own. Ahn Hong-Kyung, president
of the Our Nation moimbang fan club, does not even see
a connection between "Our Nation" and the Korean term
uri nara; rather she would translate the English back into
Korean, loosely, as uridul ui sesang: our world.
For her, the creators of "Our Nation" are not entering
into argument over what Korea is or should be, but, just as many
of the genre's songs celebrate escape, fashioning an alternative
space for themselves, virtually divorced from Korea. Finally,
in the first posting of the Our Nation moimbang that emanated
from Drug itself, Yi Sok-mun (Our Nation ttarajapki
9) wrote, "OUR NATION is a small society that is being prepared
by those who are active at Drug, together with you who have helped
Drug get to where it is today...In OUR NATION there are no special
heroes...the goal is to gradually enlarge this small society through
action, not criticism or research, and to plot the overthrow of
the ruling culture." Given the variety of opinions, we might
well ask whether "Our Nation" represents a rejection
of Korea, a desire to remake it in a new image, or something else
yet again.
I would argue, however, that interpretations of "Our Nation"
that ultimately stray too far from a deep-rooted sense of Korean
nationalism falter, especially when we consider the following:
alert readers will already, I suspect, have been struck by the
title of another Drug label CD I referred to shortly before-"Choson
p'ongk'u: The Korean PUNK Compilation." I deliberately,
and perhaps disingenuously, at that point withheld the final line
of Yi Sok-mun's defense of the Drug community's right to
name their music as they saw fit: "We have decided to call
our music Choson Punk." To be sure, a distinction
is to be drawn here between minjokjuui, connoting
a sense of ethnic pride, as opposed to kuksujuui
or kukkajuui, a chauvinistic patriotism that would
be associated with the government (Janelli 1986: 44; Tangherlini
1998: 129), but the name selected has regardless an undeniably
nationalistic aspect: the musicians of Drug have chosen to view
their music first and foremost as a Korean version of the punk
genre. Moreover, the decision to use choson to stand
for "Korea" is itself significant. Eschewing the use
of hanguk, the regularly employed term for Korea in South
Korean discourse, the choice of choson to represent
the nation, as does, e.g. the student protest movement, looks
back to the Choson dynasty and forward to a reunified Korea
(choson, it should be noted, is still employed by
North Korea) and makes a simultaneously archaizing and progressive
political statement.
Even more striking than the title of the CD itself, however,
is its cover (see fig. 5), which depicts Admiral Yi Sun-shin,
posed much as in his famous Kwanghwamun statue in the very heart
of downtown Seoul--wielding not a sword, however, but an electric
guitar. Punk's use of Yi Sun-shin thus subverts Korean nationalism
while remaining embedded within it: the great admiral, widely
revered as a national savior for his role in warding off the Japanese
invasions of the late 16th century, appears here as patron of
a movement that challenges authority. Shin Gi-Wook (1998:154),
in quoting Park Chunghee, notes how the former president turned
to Korean history in order to justify his own nationalist claims,
stressing "heroic moments when historical Korean personages
strove to save the nation. In particular he lauded Admiral Yi...as
the "spirit of national salvation" and...urged the people
to 'link the life of Admiral Yi with our own' so that 'the past
and the present should be fused into one in terms of the clear-cut
nation-saving policy of independence, self-reliance and self-defense.'
" Here, however, we find Yi, the symbol ne plus ultra
of resistance to external influence and invasion, heralding the
proud appropriation of a Western genre. We may perhaps interpret
the CD as a living instantiation of the policy advocated by King
Kojong for the modernizing of the nation a century before: "tongdo
sogiron" (Eastern Ways, Western Machinery); Korean
youth proclaim that they are maintaining cultural identity while
eagerly incorporating such foreign technology as distortion pedals
(cf. Dilling 1998: 166).
One may also draw interesting parallels between punk and Christianity in Korean society, a Western import which, as Donald Baker (1998: 109) points out, has been fully inculturated. Whereas Christianity once appealed "primarily to those who have rejected, or been rejected by, their traditional culture and society," it has now become another mode for the proud expression of Korean values. Could Korean punk be on a similar road? Han Kyong-rok, the bass player of CryingNut, frequently wears t-shirts that display on the front a colorized photo of a local band such as NoBrain, together with its name (scripted in English). Lettering on the back reads "choson punk" (hangul, then the Roman alphabet) underneath the red letter "A" embedded in a circle (the symbol for anarchy). Such t-shirts, visual icons of hybridization and amalgamation, virtually demand reading as programmatic texts and statements of values about the intersection of globalization and nationalism in Korea. The melange of scripts asserts a mixed identity, as "choson punk" cuts in two direction: declaration of alliance with a foreign genre, but also genuine pride in being Korean. The symbol for anarchy nods in the direction of rebellion, but stands as both complement and contrast to this assertion of nationalist
but non-hegemonic sentiment.
Conclusion
More than ever Korean youth are positioned between two worlds,
and feel the twin tugs of globalization and nationalism. Yet as
argued by Lily Kong (1997: 20-21), who writes on popular music
and local identity in Singapore, it would be incorrect to assume
that global commercializing forces lead inevitably to musical
homogenization; rather, "distinctive cultural practices and
differentiated identities have either evolved, been maintained
or even strengthened....contact with global resources intensifies
local identification in music." Although the Korean punk
musicians I interviewed expressed anxiety about their ability
to make a truly indigenous musical (ch'angbop) and
performance style (yonjubop), they agreed unanimously
that Korean punk had its own flavor and believed they were engaged
in a collective project to create a punk rock of their own; they
felt that in assimilating new musical forms they were participating
in an international youth culture, but remaining uniquely Korean
at the same time.
In an essay that attempts to assess the limits of global culture,
Street (1997) notes that the transnationality of many musical
forms does not prove the existence of a dominant global culture,
pace those critics who argue otherwise. Even if there is
a global culture, one cannot assert that it retains the same meaning
in different localities. Similarly, Pieterse (1995) takes issue
with the notion that the world is becoming standardized and unified
via Westernization: such critiques for him are synchronically
incomplete, overrate homogeneity, and overlook indigenization
and the culturally mixed character of many forms; globalization
is instead producing hybridization. The emergence of punk rock
in Korea supports the contentions of Kong, Street and Pieterse.
Although much in the strictly musical form of punk (instrumentation
that consists of one or two guitars, bass and drums; a 4/4 beat;
preference for songs with minimal chord changes) is shared between
Great Britain and Korea, the meaning and practice of the genre,
as I hope to have demonstrated, differs significantly in each
context.
What is the ultimate significance of Korean punk rock? As Michael
Brake (1985: ix) writes, subcultures "generate a form of
collective identity from which an individual identity can be achieved
outside that ascribed by class, education and occupation."
Korean punk permits its adherents to assert new modes of being
Korean, and offers a redefinition of Korean identities: to be
proudly Korean, one need not follow the hegemonic directives of
mainstream popular culture. Too often Korea is portrayed--and
portrays itself, encouraged by a government that finds it in its
own interest to promote an ideology of unity--as culturally monolithic,
and indeed, at least ethnically, Korea remains among the most
ethnically homogenous nations in the world; the emergence of punk
testifies, though, to an increasing diversity of social and cultural
options in Korea.
In the end, too, punk reveals that Korean youth are maintaining agency and autonomy in the face of the normalizing pressures of school, home and the state on the one hand, and the encroaching influence of international culture on the other. As the frustration of one oppositional youth subculture has been channeled into another national context, nihilisitic calls for anarchy have yielded to an oppositional but progressive solidarity. Ahmed Gurnah's delightful analysis (1997) of his own childhood in Zanzibar in the '50s and the way he and his peers assimilated a variety of global influences, not least rock and roll, likewise offers a scholarly but personal account of how foreign culture may be absorbed and indigenized quite naturally. To take aboard a form that emanates originally from the West need not be evidence of post-colonial bewitchment or domination. In closing, we should listen closely to what 18Cruk have to say in their song Taehanmin'guk Punk Kid ("Republic
of Korea Punk Kid"):
Okay, we look like we're good-for-nothings
Walking down the street
Everybody gives us dirty looks
And tries to push us away
There's one thing I've got
All I've got is an old guitar
We don't have anything but
We're Republic of Korea punk kids who refuse to grovel
ROK punk kids, ROK punk kids
We've got no regrets, we've got no regrets
I don't have any regrets in life
We've got no regrets, we've got no regrets
I don't have any regrets about the road I'm taking.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I owe thanks to more people than I can name for assistance on this project. I would like, however, to single out the contributions of Ahn Hong-Kyung, Cho Hae Joang, Cho Younghong, Michael Glass, Laurel Kendall, Kim Mi Young, David Kosofsky, Min Pum Hong (aka noiZe), Michael Shin, Song Ki Wan, Timothy Tangherlini, Sallie Yea and Yi Sok-mun. Above all, my thanks go out to the members of CryingNut, The Goonies, Gum, Lazybone, Supermarket and 18Cruk, and to the entire Drug community. Much of the interview material is culled from footage shot for a documentary on the Seoul punk rock scene that is currently under production by Timothy Tangherlini and myself.
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