Bewitched

I'm not at all sure what to make of this clip, which I just happened on. The combination of a very girlish-looking boy with the word "drag" in the title got my attention, though I knew that "drag" wouldn't have the same resonance for Koreans as it does in American English: I was just curious to see how it was used in this context. "Drag" here refers to moving icons and screens around on a

Bewitched

I'm not at all sure what to make of this clip, which I just happened on. The combination of a very girlish-looking boy with the word "drag" in the title got my attention, though I knew that "drag" wouldn't have the same resonance for Koreans as it does in American English: I was just curious to see how it was used in this context. "Drag" here refers to moving icons and screens around on a

Let Me Hear You Say "Hola!"

This song gave me another Who was that? moment when I first heard it, last summer in a record store in Seoul. What got my attention was mainly the quasi-Latin arrangement, though I liked the faintly abrasive timbre of the singer's voice. It turned out it was on the new CD by Bobby Kim, so I bought a copy. The CD as a whole is pretty good, but this remains my favorite song on it. I looked on

Let Me Hear You Say "Hola!"

This song gave me another Who was that? moment when I first heard it, last summer in a record store in Seoul. What got my attention was mainly the quasi-Latin arrangement, though I liked the faintly abrasive timbre of the singer's voice. It turned out it was on the new CD by Bobby Kim, so I bought a copy. The CD as a whole is pretty good, but this remains my favorite song on it. I looked on

Sweet Sorrow

It's been a while since I've done a post on K-pop, so here's an introduction to Sweet Sorrow, a vocal group who recently released their third CD. They can do gorgeous a capella, though as this live recording shows, it ain't easy to do it live. Still, this song, "Sunshine," from their first CD, is one of my favorite songs of the past decade, and always brings tears to my jaded old eyes.They do

Sweet Sorrow

It's been a while since I've done a post on K-pop, so here's an introduction to Sweet Sorrow, a vocal group who recently released their third CD. They can do gorgeous a capella, though as this live recording shows, it ain't easy to do it live. Still, this song, "Sunshine," from their first CD, is one of my favorite songs of the past decade, and always brings tears to my jaded old eyes.They do

CLON

A couple of videos by CLON, a Korean duo of the 90s. They were especially famous for their dancing, and their career came to a screeching halt when one of them, Kang Won Rae, was paralyzed in a motorcycle accident. This much I'd learned from Korean Pop: Riding the Wave (Global Orient, 2006), edited by Keith Howard. According to a commenter on "Come to Me", after years of therapy he returned to make a fifth album, Victory, with his partner Koo Jun Yup, which included a song for a project which "highlighted the struggle for disabled rights in South Korea. For both of the videos and for the limited live performances done for the album, Gu and Gang developed dance routines incorporating wheelchairs." If I find the videos, I'll add them to this post. But "Come to Me" really impressed me -- the female lead singer is magnificent -- as well as filling me with nostalgia for the days when I loved to dance.





The articles in Korean Pop introduced me to a number of Korean pop acts I hadn't heard of before, and I'll be writing about them in the near future.

P.S. I haven't found the wheelchair routines yet, but I did stumble on this TV performance by Ku Yun Jup of Clon and Rain, the young Korean singer/dancer who's been trying to break through to a US audience. The song is called "Nan," Korean for "I." Rain seems abstracted, and Ku exudes an authority and confidence that's very, um, appealing. Notice the double-headed male symbol in the Clon logo, though; I guess it expresses their testosterone-pumped dancing pretty well, but still.

CLON

A couple of videos by CLON, a Korean duo of the 90s. They were especially famous for their dancing, and their career came to a screeching halt when one of them, Kang Won Rae, was paralyzed in a motorcycle accident. This much I'd learned from Korean Pop: Riding the Wave (Global Orient, 2006), edited by Keith Howard. According to a commenter on "Come to Me", after years of therapy he returned

CLON

A couple of videos by CLON, a Korean duo of the 90s. They were especially famous for their dancing, and their career came to a screeching halt when one of them, Kang Won Rae, was paralyzed in a motorcycle accident. This much I'd learned from Korean Pop: Riding the Wave (Global Orient, 2006), edited by Keith Howard. According to a commenter on "Come to Me", after years of therapy he returned

Can't Get An Happy End?

The grammatical error in the title is deliberate. You'll see why.

Late in the 1990s a Korean friend and I went to Chicago together, and as usual we went to a Korean bookstore on North Lincoln that also sold cosmetics, CDs and DVDs. My friend found a new CD by Seo Taiji and Boys, a farewell / greatest hits album, and bought it excitedly. I was just beginning to explore Korean pop at the time, so I had no idea why this album was an event. My friend explained that Seo Taiji had singlehandedly changed the face of Korean popular music by introducing rap, alternative, and metal elements that had never been used so well before -- and now, at the age of 24, he had disbanded the group and announced his retirement. We played the CD in the car as we drove around the city, and I was amazed by it. I believe we went back to the store before we left Chicago so I could buy a copy of my own.

Seo Taiji's retirement, like that of many stars, turned out to be exaggerated. Within a year or two he'd begun releasing music again as a solo artist, and a few years later he was performing. The Boys were even resurrected. I bought a few of his solo CDs, which were masterful but limited in range, and lost interest in Taiji for awhile, in favor of more accessible acts. Until I began looking for his videos on Youtube, that is.

Here's an amazing clip of his first performance on TV with the Boys, in 1992. The program was a showcase for new talent, and the mostly older, more sedate judges couldn't appreciate what he was doing. The song, "Nan Arayo" (my Korean is minimal, but I believe it means "I know"), became a huge hit. Taiji was 19 or 20 at the time (depending on which birth date I've seen is correct, and on whether you reckon age Korean or American style), and had been performing for several years already, but the authority of this performance, the tight and skillful dancing, knocks me out. (They're lipsynching of course.) In all the closeups, though, he seems detached from what he's doing; that could just be me misreading his concentration, but I don't think so. It's certainly a mark of his confidence that he didn't feel the need to put on a stage smile.



(There's a live version, made years later in a different style, here, and as a mark of what an institution Seo Taiji has become, here's a clip of three new Korean pop stars performing the song on TV.)

This song, "Hayoga," is another lipsynched TV performance from a year later:



My friend told me, the day he instroduced me to Taiji's music, about the song "Please Come Home," which implores runaway Korean kids to return to their parents, assuring them of a welcome. Yes, even (or especially?) in traditional Confucian cultures, kids run away from home. This music video seems less optimistic than that. Notice Taiji's new look.



Finally, here's a recent song, "Heffy End." There's no 'f' sound in Korean, so the same letter in hangul, the Korean alphabet, does double duty for English "p" and English "f"; so, the title is an ironic, even sneering "Happy End." (There's also a famous Korean film, released in 1999, with the same English title, and it's just as double-edged.) It's a pretentious video, with a long introduction; the music doesn't start for about 2 minutes. You can see an excellent live version of the song itself here, performed in Vladivostok.) The final line of the song is, in English, "I can't get an happy end."



The more I listen to this song, the less impressed I am by it. Taiji seems to be running out of musical ideas. Ever heard the proverb that the immature artist borrows, the mature artist steals? Seo Taiji has always stolen musical ideas and melodic bits -- there's a song on the Goodbye CD that I'd swear is an entire American alt/metal song sung in Korean (by Nirvana, maybe?). But "Heffy End" sounds like the kind of stuff Hollywood puts on the soundtracks of its current "youth" movies. It also sounds too much like Seo Taiji's earliest solo work, which was so uninventive that I stopped listening to him.

The video also seems creepily cynical in its invocation of horror/slasher films. I think it's mildly (or not so mildly) misogynistic, with the Lecter-like killer guarded and served by a pretty young girl, whose prisoner he may or may not be. Watching it, I was reminded at how many young men I've known seem to see themselves as warped at the core. (And young women too -- the problem doesn't have a gender, but young women express it differently, by hurting themselves with cutting and burning.) This video and so many others pander to, and perhaps encourage that feeling. There are plenty of facile social-science explanations of why this might be so, and I'm wary of accepting any of them. But it must be painful to live with that feeling. I don't think it's just generational, but I think it has become more widespread, and taken for granted, since I was a teenager. This is something I want to think about some more.

Meanwhile, you can hear more of Seo Taiji's recent music at this unofficial MySpace page. The song "Moai" is gorgeous; maybe he hasn't run out of ideas after all. He's definitely talented, and worth looking into.

Can't Get An Happy End?

The grammatical error in the title is deliberate. You'll see why.Late in the 1990s a Korean friend and I went to Chicago together, and as usual we went to a Korean bookstore on North Lincoln that also sold cosmetics, CDs and DVDs. My friend found a new CD by Seo Taiji and Boys, a farewell / greatest hits album, and bought it excitedly. I was just beginning to explore Korean pop at the time,

Can't Get An Happy End?

The grammatical error in the title is deliberate. You'll see why.Late in the 1990s a Korean friend and I went to Chicago together, and as usual we went to a Korean bookstore on North Lincoln that also sold cosmetics, CDs and DVDs. My friend found a new CD by Seo Taiji and Boys, a farewell / greatest hits album, and bought it excitedly. I was just beginning to explore Korean pop at the time,

Kim Gun Mo' Better

I can't think of anything to write tonight, so I'm going to put up some video clips by Kim Gun Mo, who's one of the more interesting K-Pop singers out there. He started out in the early 90s doing reggae -- so I'd been told, though I hadn't heard any of his music from that period until I found this song:



I first heard Kim's music on my first visit to Korea in 2001, playing on a tape in a friend's car. He's the Korean Stevie Wonder, my friend told me, and that was a plausible comparison. I started buying his CDs as they came out after that.

From his eighth album, released in 2003, comes "Swallow" (though the video clip is titled "Your apartment," I don't know why). By this time Kim was well-established as a TV personality too, a successful comic performer on improv sketch-comedy programs. I was startled, seeing him on TV during later visits, to see just how funny he could be. Some of that comes across in this video:



And here's "Kiss", from his latest album:

Kim Gun Mo' Better

I can't think of anything to write tonight, so I'm going to put up some video clips by Kim Gun Mo, who's one of the more interesting K-Pop singers out there. He started out in the early 90s doing reggae -- so I'd been told, though I hadn't heard any of his music from that period until I found this song:I first heard Kim's music on my first visit to Korea in 2001, playing on a tape in a friend's

Kim Gun Mo' Better

I can't think of anything to write tonight, so I'm going to put up some video clips by Kim Gun Mo, who's one of the more interesting K-Pop singers out there. He started out in the early 90s doing reggae -- so I'd been told, though I hadn't heard any of his music from that period until I found this song:I first heard Kim's music on my first visit to Korea in 2001, playing on a tape in a friend's