"Exploiting the Tension between the Transnational and National Spheres in Korean Hip-hop"
Donna Kwon, Visiting Assistant Professor, Music, Lawrence University
| DATE: | Friday, May 9, 2008 |
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| TIME: | 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM |
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| PLACE: | IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor |
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| FORMAT: | Colloquium |
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| SPONSORS: | Center for Korean Studies |
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Since the emergence of Seo Taiji and the Boys in the early 1990s, many Korean hip-hop and pop groups have sought to create cultural continuity in their work by drawing from explicitly Korean sources. This trend has persisted in the work of One Sun, Drunken Tiger, MC Sniper and even in recent collaborations with samulnori drumming master Kim Duk-Soo in his performances with Korean B-boys, DJs and rappers. I would argue that this ongoing impulse to engage intentionally with Korean expressive elements is a distinguishing characteristic of Korean hip-hop and illustrates a strong desire to maintain a national flow in the music, even with the continuing influence of pan-regional and transnational sounds and forces. With this in mind, I would like to first identify some of the challenges that Korean artists have faced in adapting Korean expressive elements to hip-hop; these include differences in language, socio-cultural attitudes, rhythmic patterns, melodies, timbres and movement styles. I will then focus the rest of my analysis on how Korean artists have struggled to articulate and exploit potential areas of compatibility and tension between the "transnational" and "national" spheres: reconciling hip-hop beats with Korean rhythmic cycles or
jangdan, distorted guitars with the sound of a wailing
taepyeongso, synthesized sounds with the delicate, flexible timbre of the
gayageum, and the rich rhyming flow of American rap with a language that features a fundamentally different grammatical structure and poetic style. I will also discuss other engagements with Korean sources including the use of vernacular phrases and melodies drawn from folksongs, the indexing of earlier Korean popular genres, and sampling from Korean film scores. My intention is to provide a more nuanced view of the ways in which artists exploit the tensions between contrasting expressive elements to project varying national, regional and transnational sensibilities and identities.
