Hip Hop in South Korea

Our recent segment in class on hip hop culture in the United States got me thinking, “How does the hip hop culture in South Korea differ from that of the United States?” This, of course, was easy for me to answer. As an avid listener of Korean hip hop, especially Epik High (the hip hop group that was quoted in the last entry), I am familiar not only with the ‘mainstream’ sort of hip hop in South Korea, but also the more ‘underground’ artists.

As I noted earlier, the music industry in South Korea is notorious for its ‘copycat’ tendencies. However, this mostly pertains to the mainstream artists who are signed with the larger entertainment groups such as SM Entertainment, JYP Entertainment, or YG Entertainment. Epik High, for example, is signed with a smaller company called Woollim Entertainment. But before continuing on to the modern hip hop culture, I believe it necessary to discuss the history of hip hop in South Korea.

Hip hop was, for a long time, a non-existent genre in South Korea. After all, it wasn’t too long ago that it evolved out of the poorer neighborhoods of New York and found itself writing the paychecks of the fat cats of the music industry. Soon after the rise of hip hop in the American music industry, a Korean-American artist would pave the way for Korean hip hop artists. Although hip hop had existed in the Korean mainstream music industry, there were no ‘strictly hip hop’ artists – that is, most of hip hop that existed in the Korean music industry was being performed by artists who had previously performed other genres of music – most notably rock – and were infusing hip hop-like elements into their music.

However, a Korean American, Seo Jeong Kwon, better known by his stage name of Tiger JK, became one of the first ‘pure’ hip hop artists to foray into the Korean mainstream. He faced strict censorships of many of his songs because of their content – sexual themes, antiestablishment ideas, and general explicit language – but by the third album, released in 2001, Tiger JK and his hip hop group, Drunken Tiger, made a name for themselves in the Korean mainstream for introducing pure hip hop – especially ‘Americanized’ hip hop because of Tiger JK’s childhood and adolescence spent in LA – and doing what few other artists do – write their own lyrics and produce their own beats.

It was Drunken Tiger that brought hip hop into the Korean mainstream, but it would be a few years later, in 2005, that hip hop would suddenly explode onto the Korean mainstream with the release of Epik High’s third album. The group had humble beginnings starting in 2003, when their first album all but flopped. Their second album fared better, but did nothing in terms of pushing hip hop into the mainstream. But with the release of their third album, Epik High was able to make hip hop go from being a barely recognized genre to a sudden craze.

The difference between Drunken Tiger’s popularity and Epik High’s was that while the former was a pure hip hop group, using traditional beats and instruments and synthesizers to produce their melodies, Epik High experimented with various types of music. In that sense, Epik High also wasn’t, and still isn’t, a ‘purely’ hip hop group. However, just like their predecessors, Epik High continued to produce their own beats and write their own lyrics. They even had a brief stint as an independent label from early to late 2009 as an independent label, Map the Soul, but returned to their previous label of Woollim Ent. when one of their members had to leave for the mandatory 2-year military service.

The themes found in both Drunken Tiger’s songs and Epik High’s songs discuss many ‘taboo’ topics. While the former follow more along the lines of ‘traditional’ American hip hop by discussing a wide array of subjects from sex – a taboo topic even in modern Korean society – to typical ‘hard’ hip hop behavior to issues facing society. Epik High, on the other hand, discusses various topics. Their earlier albums were more poetic, discussing things such as the process of life, starting from one’s birth to one’s death (their first album), and the various classes and niches of society (their second album). But neither of these were too popular with Korean music listeners. It was when Epik High began to write about the more ‘traditional’ mainstream music topics – mainly love – that they found success. Their third album found great success because of two songs – Fly, the album’s title song which encouraged its listeners to push ahead despite the hardships facing many in the Korean society, and Paris, a song about love. However, the other songs on their album still contained powerful songs with meaningful lyrics. What especially made their lyrics so relevant was that it was all written by the two rappers of the group – leader Tablo and co-lyricist Mithra Jin – and thus carried many personal opinions and emotions. Their fourth and fifth albums followed this pattern: the albums contained ‘bait songs’ of sorts – songs that would interest the mainstream Korean listeners – then the rest of the album would contain songs which carried Epik High’s beliefs and criticisms of contemporary society.

Contrary to the overarching themes of outcries against societal wrongs and criticisms of governmental shortcomings, American hip hop has, I feel, degraded. Most songs all talk about sex, drugs, violence, or some sort of combination of the three. There are the occasional trend breakers, but those are few and far in between. Most Americans put up a front of being ‘hard’ and ‘tough,’ because that is what the record companies want to portray the black and Latino communities – these two minority groups make up the majority of the hip hop industry – and won’t sign artists who deviate from this typecasting of the minority groups. Because of this, the hip hop industry has degraded to a bunch of men using rhyme schemes to disrespect each other and women while masking all of this up with a catchy beat.

In a sense, Korean hip hop artists who have had American influences – Drunken Tiger’s Tiger JK and Tasha Reid and Epik High’s Tablo, all of whom have spent a significant part of their lives in America – have adhered to the more ‘traditional’ American hip hop themes, while America’s own has degraded to a bunch of disrespectful men spitting hate rhymes.


References:

Tiger JK:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_JK

Drunken Tiger:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drunken_Tiger

Epik High Discography:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epik_high_discography


Edited May 3rd, 2010 for content/relevance