Stronger than a bullet, the wordsmith's philosophy, in the opening line of his celebrated track “뿌리” (“Foundation,” 2003) roared Tiger JK, the founding member of the canonical duo Drunken Tiger. Having migrated to Los Angeles before he was a teenager, JK often lists the 1992 Riots as his formative experience, after which he sought to cultivate his passion of hiphop into both a fresh addition to Korea’s cultural agenda and a bridge over the cultural gap between black and yellow. Reportedly, his gateway performance was a response to Ice Cube’s Black Korea given in a history class, which provided him with an opportunity to perform in a local festival.

​

Some exposure in LA was soon followed by a one-way ticket for the grand return home, where he and his team would pioneer one of the most significant contemporary cultural revolutions. JK claims to

have experienced discrimination in both countries, in America for wanting to be a rapper as an Asian, and in Korea for wanting to be like a ‘blackie’ as an Asian. Such xenophobic impulse, combined with extreme censorship on lyrical content, made the threshold before the South Korean cultural market difficult for him to step over. Yet for many listeners in South Korea, it was Drunken Tiger, the closest Korean equivalent of OG, who let them know for the first time that hiphop is more than a set of dance moves, a fashion style, and the mere verbalization of words without melody.

​

     Fastforward two decades, hiphop music is now of immense presence in South Korea, let alone its country of origin. Korea’s interpretation of hiphop has grown into a phenomenon of its own and a profitable export, now projecting itself overseas. If Gangnam Style was but a gigantic meme, the Korean-Japanese joint effort It G Ma has suggested that Korean music can come across a broader audience than traditional K-pop fans as a jam. Eung Freestyle featuring several rookies was selected by YouTube Music for its official ad. Individuals as well as collectives tour all over North America and Europe, collaborate with named figures in the original scene, and even sign with Roc Nation. Cultural practices and values derived from hiphop have influence of varying degrees on almost all of us, and needless to say, on young South Koreans spending time in America like me.

​

     I look around and realize everyone's becoming a rapper. A frequented Instagram account once featured yet another meme, with all its representative power for this generation: 'Oh yeah Ima listen to your soundcloud bro I got you,' promises the renowned aardvark Arthur Read, with his headphones on, wrapping the sides of his head like we all wear them. But of course, his ears are actually sticking out upward, because, well, he is an aardvark. Such is not an unusual phenomenon. A friend, S, recently uploaded his first EP, a fraternity brother from Seoul who paused his enrollment at a D.C. university to complete his due military service back home. He had been proudly selected as one of the seven annual admits to the coastal military police guarding Dokdo. 'Man, if I actually rapped, I could do much better. It's just that I choose not to,' I secretly thought like everyone else has secretly thought at some point. Upon hearing that S just tore his ACL and had to withdraw from his duties, however, I went out of my way to even share a link to one of his songs on my Facebook timeline to express sympathy and respect—what a favor I'd done. "That made me cringe even harder than my own brother's track did," my girlfriend commented five seconds in. Her brother also happens to own a Soundcloud.

​

     This paradigm, once unimaginable, seems to have become conventional in a New York minute. My first time in New York, organized by a Korean winter-break camp for English learning, was as eye-opening as it would have been for countless immigrants and tourists. After a quick look around Manhattan landmarks, the camp took me to Queens for a couple days of community service. As I had just descended the Top of the Rock, the homeless shelter was hard to process. My monolingual 11-year-old self had no template of experience to comprehend the perceived inequality. Poverty, homelessness, addiction, violence. I was no more than a slum tourist before a footage screening. The discussion of these matters was perhaps hiphop’s most important source of authenticity as the disciple of the streets, but I was utterly oblivious.

Nonetheless, I still considered myself a hiphop fan. My iRiver iFP-799, the tenth-birthday present with the capacity of no less than 1GB, was entirely filled with one single album. Remapping the Human Soul (2007) by Epik

High, the 2-MC & 1-DJ trio, has now established itself as one of the foremost classics of K-hiphop. But most of the mainstream recognition it gained at the

time of its release came from the group members’ active presence in variety shows and a track or two labelled ‘title songs’ that were deemed poppy enough to be aired. In the Korea of Wintertime ‘07~08 that I left behind, hiphop was hardly a subculture, and what I witnessed in Queens was no more imaginable as a reality. 

 

     In the following summer, when a glitch in space-time fortunately offered me a spot at an all-boys private boarding school in New Hampshire, I again set foot in JFK, this time as a real student in America. This journey that began so unexpectedly brought about several changes. I was now less of a stranger to this nation, proved by my visa status that changed from ESTA to F-1. But I also became a complete stranger to the other story that had never been explained to me. Tucking my dress shirt in every morning and getting my mandatory haircut every month, I grew convinced that what I thought I'd seen in Queens was probably a fantasy. This white, white environment, while undoubtedly a blissful doorway into the bigger world for me as a South Korean schoolboy, drew me further away from hiphop. My oblivion was left unchanged until I befriended hiphop fans at this public school in Ann Arbor. It was only then that I began pondering the ontology of the music.

​

     More than anything, I align the genesis of hiphop with the ongoing protest against institutional injustice in the U.S., against the irreconcilable disparity between the Declaration of Independence and the Dred Scott verdict, a hypocrisy that has ceaselessly lurked every street corner of America ever since its foundation. It is an unflinching resistance to essentialist binarism, an art that extracts realness from reality into permanence. Many American listeners today lament the desensitization of this aspect of the genre, the shift of public focus from this to this, in which the thriving narrative of hiphop changed gears from scolding the existing societal ladder into climbing it through unconventional circumvention. Yet when this culture is applied to South Korea, it is crude to assume that it would emerge, grow and branch along similar critical points. 

​

     Consciousness has come to bear a slight defeatist undertone, but in South Korea I have often seen a culture that displays a predetermined homogeneity, in which a singular paradigm dominates the citizen’s mind and most of the corruption and perversion take place behind the public scene. After the fall of the Chosun Dynasty in 1910, there was a significant amount of loss of values and customs, after which there was a significant lack of retrieval. There was only five years of nominal autonomy between Independence Day, August 15, 1945, and the outbreak of the civil war, June 25, 1950. As soon as South Korea began to function as an independent nation, cultural recovery was marginalized by state-guided plans to extensively follow the capitalist development model and antagonize communism as bluntly as possible. Hence the institutionalization and standardization of all that comes in life.

 

     The love hiphop is getting today from the other side of the world from where it was born certainly wouldn't have been easily expected. It is indeed a strange phenomenon in South Korea: one may find it either empowering or threatening. Here is a music as well as a lifestyle that rejects automatic conformity and doesn't need to beg to differ. And here are English-speaking teens and tweens with tattoos on their necks and fingers but no obligations to conscription, who curse in their rap and dominate music charts on big online platforms such as Naver Music and MelOn, one of the only outlets through which the agreed standards of fame and success in mass media are established. It is received both as an ethical downgrading and as a form of cultural philanthropy. Yet to view the social controversy accompanied by hiphop simply as the clash between two fixed ideologies, of the conformist, obedient traditions of Confucianism and the self-reliant survival-of-the-fittest spirit of Queensbridge, would be to overlook what occupies the space in between the two along the spectrum.

​

     The single biggest contributor to exposing hiphop to the Korean mainstream was the rap survival program Show Me the Money, featured on Mnet, the music channel owned by the Korean media hegemon CJ E&M Corporation. Every summer for the past six years and counting, the show has been serving as the primary source of fortune for many artists in the scene and

of lament for others. There was ‘rap’ in popular songs before, but ‘hiphop’ as a culture gained salience in the society only after this show aired. As a fan of hiphop, its pros and cons are rather obvious. It paved way to fame for many talents and made the public aware of hiphop’s existence; yet it commodified hiphop into a singular paradigm of Friday-night drama. It made the genre rise as the most central aspect of South Korea’s

contemporary popular cultural discourse. Noteworthy participants in the program replaced the usual K-pop ‘idols’ on the background photos of middle schoolers’ iPhones, offering a fresh voice to the saturated, industrialized pop music market. Yet this distinction, between the rapstar and the idol, has slightly blurred, when trainees in big entertainment corporations have gained disproportionate popularity by participating in the show, only to be promoted by their companies as ‘idols’—with pretty faces and PG personalities as usual—who are also good at rapping unlike the other robotic indentured agents of corporate profitability upon their market debut.

 

     The rest of the observable criticism of Show Me the Money unfolds along similar lines. Kim Ximya, one of the most outstanding talents of the newest generation of K-hiphop, pronounces his aversion to the current circumstance in Manual, created with an ex-TDE producer, released for free.

​

​

​

​

​

​

 

아직도 힙합이 유행인 줄 아는 병신들아
(You idiots who still think hiphop is a trend)
정신 좀 차려
(Get your shit together)

지금 가장 뜨거운 건

(The hottest thing right now)

랩이 아니라 쇼미더머니

(is not rap, it's Show Me the Money)

​

Given its undeniable significance, rappers’ opinion on the show serves as one of the main parameters that differentiate their standpoints as rappers, even among non-participants who have managed to gain recognition without

presenting themselves on TV. The Cohort, the popular crew including Keith Ape and Okasian (conveniently put, the guys who did It G Ma) parted ways with former member Reddy due to his decision to participate in the

show among other reasons. Okasian calls it "childish" and suggests that it strips one off of the coolness necessary for a rapper's persona, in Save Time, a collaboration with the leading Japanese rapper Kohh. Justhis and Huckleberry P are among the celebrated lyricists who have voiced their beef with Show Me the Money. 

 

     On the other hand, Nafla, who uses his LA background to display his rap persona, chooses not to speak of the show critically, calling it just one available platform out of many for artists to express themselves. Known for his detachment from the politics of the K-hiphop scene, the 25-year-old seems to focus on treating hiphop rather professionally, honing his skills to

craft himself as the dopest he can manage to be, like a performative. DOK2, the young half-Korean, half-Filipino CEO of Illionaire Records, commonly referred to as 'the rapper of the

rappers' within Korea,

regularly partakes in the show, not as a contestant but as a judge. His point of view appears to be that he is all for anything that seeks to promote hiphop and help rappers spread their wings. He maintains such Middle Way of being a rapper in Korea—he boasts multiple Rolls Royce cars, Rolex watches, Versace clothes and his tattoo-filled body, but at the same time he refrains from cursing in Korean, remains eager to communicate with hiphop fans and the general public alike, and presents his transparent personality on television frequently. And his tattoos turn out to be inspirational adages he likes to remind himself: Aloha, Get money.

 

     Hong Kong-based international ‘hype’ magazine Hypebeast, on their coverage post about the program, mispronounced it as Show Me Money. Indeed, it seems a little odd to have the definitive article precede money. Isn’t the whole point to stack up an indefinite amount? The phrase does have a little history within Korea: it was the most frequently used ‘cheat-command’ for Blizzard Entertainment’s simulation game StarCraft, which used to be, nearly unanimously, the favorite pastime for younger South Koreans. While playing against the computer, type the command on the chat, then receive an instant 10,000 units of mineral, which can be used to pay for bunkers and alien soldiers. The imperative is no longer the echoes of Method Man and Prodigy Get the money, but simply a memefied version of Biggie's Get money. Aside from DOK2, who is renowned for having transformed the imperative on the back of his hand into his mode of being, many of us do seem to be treating it as a trend we conform to and grow out of. This show helped some older rappers keep their careers alive and practically set off the very careers of many younger ones. But the idea that the biggest story of Korean hiphop is one of commercial institutionalization, taking place on screen within a censored and edited show with a script, led others into a pessimistic view of the scene. 

 

     But just like DOK2, it is hard to detest Show Me the Money as a fan of hiphop for its pragmatic effect on the public. N, another good friend of mine is about six months into his army service, for which he had to pause his enrollment at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, just about half an hour from the middle school I went to. He was a stoner rock kid who wrote friendly folk songs. We had a summertime band together in which he sang and I strummed the guitar. Once, on the Alpine Railway from Interlaken to Milan, I wrote poems on my iPhone and N recorded a friendly folk song called Fettuccine Alfredo. So when my taste was shifting from rock to hiphop, I was wistful for what I thought would be the end of our musical companionship. But primarily because of Show Me the Money, N opened his eyes to hiphop at his secluded army base in a rural town in a distant province I’ve never been to. Now, whenever he is able to get his hands on the station computer for a few minutes, he raps on the headset and sends me the recordings through Facebook Messenger, musing on his angst for the future of his family and himself, his identity between Korea and America, and the homogeneity of the culture that currently surrounds him. Before he began his service, he calmed himself with the anticipation that the army would be a chance for him to befriend ‘real Koreans’ at last, Koreans who don’t live in the Gangnam district or attend American schools.

 

“So who are their favorite rappers? What do they think about Show Me the Money? I’m writing this piece about Korean hiphop. I wanna get some firsthand input on what the locals think,” I asked him.

 

“Well, it’s hard to initiate a conversation like that. They all watch the show, but we don’t really discuss music. Not that many things other than meeting people and seeking pleasure are talked about around here.”

​

     Language, French-Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida explained in his lecture collection Of Hospitality published in 2000, “is the values, the norms, the meanings that inhabit the language,” the ethos. Countless phases of oppression, revolution, violence, economic growth and cultural challenges characterized the Korean Peninsula of the Twentieth Century, namely Japanese colonialism shortly followed by a civil war that ‘never ended.’ Throughout these trembling times, the Korean identity was often put into question, let alone the threat of annihilation. And language was an essential factor that not only epitomized the collective struggle of the people but also contributed largely to both the retention of and modifications to the perceived identity of Koreans. Under Japanese oppression, the Korean language was a symbol of resistance and perseverance, perhaps more so because it was prohibited and met with torture. October 9, which celebrates the creation of Hunmin Jeongum (훈민정음: the original version of the Korean Alphabet), is now a national holiday.

​

     Korean is a language free of the linguistic notions of tone and stress. Regional dialects have intonation systems, yet solely the monotone language of Seoul is branded 'standard.' It is the language of textbooks, interviews, lawsuits, journals and lyrics. More than 50 million people reside in a territory that fits in between San Francisco and Los Angeles, with nearly one-fifth of them packed in a city just five times the size of DisneyWorld. In the dimension of socioeconomic refinement, one is either Seoul or not Seoul. The single biggest determinant of an adolescent's career is his/her performance on Soo-neung (수능), the once-in-a-lifetime college application exam, based on which the student's place in the hierarchy pyramid is chosen: he/she could belong to "SKY" (the top three colleges; Seoul National University, Korea University, Yonsei University), "In-Seoul" ("인 서울"; the next best colleges, all of which are in Seoul), or "Ji-jap-dae" ("지잡대"; abbreviation for "지방의 잡스러운 대학" meaning 'shitty non-Seoul colleges). Then, all men suspend their careers for the military mostly around age 20, and the women receive criticism for not having to serve. Once people start earning money, they are bombarded with all sorts of ways in which their lives are branded and ranked: Do you get paid at least two million won (around $2000) a month? Do you ride a Sonata or a Genesis? How many "Pyeong" (평: a traditional unit measuring area, 3.3058 m²) is your apartment? Is your rent short-term or long-term, or do you own a unit? How rich is your husband? How pretty is your wife?

  

     I spent the summer of 2016 on the Trans-Siberian Railway with G, another friend from Hong Kong. About halfway through, we experienced three days of refreshment on Olkhon Island by Lake Baikal, the largest closed mass of water. We disconnected from the digital phantom and manifested our approximations of the analogue spirit, jumping in the lake naked and writing poems by the shoreside cliffs. During the cheerful walk back to our hut, we came across an East Asian couple dragging their luggage through the unpaved dirt roads. I instantly recognized that they were Korean, but they didn’t recognize me.

 

“Hi, where are you from?” the guy slowly asked approaching us.

“Hi, well he’s from Hong Kong and I, um… I’m Korean.”  

His eyes glimmered. 

“어! 한국사람이세요?” (Oh! Are you Korean?)

“네, 안녕하세요.” (Yes, hello.)

The couple and I bowed to each other and shared the stories of our trips. They came from a province I’ve never been to, somewhere further down south—which one I forget. They took a little detour after a visit to their mutual Korean friend exchange-studying in nearby Irkutsk. First time outside the peninsula.

“아, 그럼 그때부터 지금까지 미국에 쭉 계신 거에요?”

(So, then you’ve been in America since then until now?)

“아 그게, 방학 때는 항상 집에 돌아왔었어요. 가족은 계속 한국에 계세요.” (Well, I came back home for every vacation. My family has always been in Korea.)

“아, 금수저시구나..” (Ah, so you’re a gold spoon..)

Many South Koreans classify one another by inherited socioeconomic status into gold spoon, silver spoon, and dirt spoon. Able to study abroad? Gold spoon. My conjecture for the origin of this analogy is that it derives from the common idiom “placing one’s spoon on top of a full meal already prepared,” indicating one’s lack of contribution to the formation of a situation. I could tell that his remark was in no way any expression of disapproval or contempt, just an unornamented observation. For the first time I felt so far away from another South Korean. I felt even more so realizing that the experience might have been similar for him and her. It was getting dark.

 

“Yo, we should try to find a place to eat before it gets dark.” I told G briefly.

​

“와, 발음봐…” (Wow, look at his pronunciations…) the lady told the guy.

 

They gazed at each other and then marveled at me, as though they couldn’t believe the /r/ and /l/ sounds produced by my phonetic articulators. I wasn’t exactly sure what sentiment to react with, but I felt good about it. That remains my guilty pleasure. Knowing English, knowing America, knowing that many South Koreans aspire but fail to do the same, knowing that they look up to my privileges. I’ll skip the rest of the encounter which only consisted of cordial farewells. 

 

     South Korea has neither adopted English as an official language nor developed a considerable population of English speakers domestically, but it has experienced something of an ‘English fever,’ upon realizing the significance of English in the global economy, according to an article published online in 2009 on Cambridge University Press by Jin-Kyu Park. English is firmly ensconced as one of the key academic subjects in the Korean educational system. Apart from the school environment, in which the government invests heavily for English education, vigorous parents spend large sums of money on extracurricular English education from private non-school institutions called ‘hagwons’ (학원) where their children study until late at night. Leading corporations such as Samsung, LG and Hyundai, on which the Korean economy tremendously depends, seek to raise their employees’ English competence to meet the standards of the globalized market. Annually, tens of thousands of elementary and secondary school students leave Korea to study abroad in English, and even more students go abroad for short-term English training over vacation. It was during a month-long summer camp at the New Hampshire boarding school when I was offered a spot for the academic year. Such efforts to teach English fostered the ‘English fever’ with which the Koreans’ competition for English acquisition grew relentless.

​

     The result is that English is a skill, not a way of living. And it’s far different from how we put down ‘foreign language skills’ in our resumes here in America. It’s more similar to the colonial language of the aristocracy spoken in a colony, except there was no colonization by English speakers but a mechanical power structure constructed in vain by a language nobody really inhabits. It’s a marker of societal excellence, just like the type of one’s car, type of one’s rent, airplane seat, jacket, watch, alma mater, spouse. Such standardized lifestyle is often reflected in rappers works in ways that keep them trapped in the standard perspective.

​

     MyunDo, just like my friend S who served as a Dokdo military police officer, is a part-time student at George Washington University, and a rapper who often brags about speaking great English even though he is a Korean citizen. His English is his go-to for both flexing and beefing. When he dissed Loopy, a founding member of the label MKIT Rain along with Nafla, because Loopy referenced Kobe Bryant in a song that he, MyunDo, didn’t think was a good enough homage to Kobe, his main source of slander was Loopy’s English.

 

     MyunDo is a graduate of one of Korea’s ‘foreign language high schools,’ notorious for their intense academic perfectionism. Because English was my second language, I, too, had been especially watchful about grammatical and rhetorical ‘correctness.’ During my English acquisition, therefore, I could not help but give in to the misleading tendency of prescriptivism, inadvertently assuming that there is only one paragon for every English expression that is both immune to intrinsic change and superior to all other ways of conveying the same information. This idea then led me to suppose that there is some distinct entity called ‘English’ that has undergone every change and amendment and achieved completeness, the final product of linguistic ‘evolution.’ While it is not possible to conclude that this background led him to believe in the idea of the one correct way of speaking English, such is how many South Koreans perceive English: a skill at which one must be competent, perfect, and flawlessly faithful to the established set of rules.

​

     Changstarr, just like my other soldier friend N, went to Dartmouth College. In every commentary or interview dedicated to him that I've seen, he begins with the statement that he does not want to be branded as 'Ivy League' and conform to the following stereotypes. But it has always been specifically his recital of that discourse that has branded him as 'Ivy League.' In South Korea, Ivy League is the Western equivalent of SKY: one is either Ivy League or something inferior. Starkly evident in his display of intellectualism is the lack of intellectualism in the audience. His album description proclaims: "Inspired by Jack Kerouac, Charles Baudelaire, Aldous Huxley, Ken Kesey, Rene Magritte, Van Gogh, Salvador Dali, Zhuangzi, 27 Club, The Beatles, and all my heroes." The Korean public as of now have very few alternatives to characterizing it merely as an Ivy-League-smart list. While the Ivy League rapper offers a worthwhile attempt by radicalizing the paradigm of K-hiphop with an introduction of references to Western literature and philosophy, the references themselves are often rudimentary (as his own rap name suggests.)

Changstarr might not be wrong with his claim that he is the Korean rapper with the richest intellectual references and aspiration to produce a "hippie bible" for Korea's posterity, but to open up and normalize such discourse appears to be a long way to go.

 

     As scarce as it may be, lyricism in K-hiphop blooms where it does bloom. The 30-year-old E Sens goes nearly unmatched when it comes to naming the best South Korean rapper, however differently everyone might define it. Once one-half of the duo Supreme Team, celebrated mainstream and underground alike, he rose to such position only with a single full-length solo, The Anecdote. Fans vow not to cease talking about it as the best work of K-hiphop ever made. DeepFlow, the influential leader of the label Vismajor Company and a rapper of a recognized career, labelled it “the Illmatic of South Korea” and willingly embraced the heat that followed. E Sens’s circumstance at this point was simultaneously climactic and anticlimactic, depending on which master narrative one chooses to trace—the epic or the constitution. In the midst of the release of The Anecdote and his ascension to the top of the game, he was secluded from the scene, in prison, serving a 16-month sentence for marijuana consumption.

 

     I live in a futuristic town called Songdo, a less than half an hour drive from the international airport in Incheon. It is home to the ‘International Campus’ of the prestigious Yonsei University, many skyscrapers, malls, residences and entertainment complexes that attract tourists and immigrants from overseas as well as weekend-travelers from other parts of Korea. If I were to somehow set fire to a joint at Central Park Songdo across the street from my apartment building, the diversity of people’s reactions would be extremely intriguing. Simultaneously, I would be saluted, demonized, incriminated, and asked for a hit. Ethical debate aside, it’s much easier to acknowledge that there is a cohabitation of mutually exclusive ideologies. E Sens was seen as both a martyr for liberalization and a petty criminal best incarcerated.

 

     Marijuana is just one of many things that have been important factors in the discourse of hiphop yet with virtually no salience in the common South Korean life. Firearms, drug trade, gang ties, street violence, police brutality, and last but not least, racism and the fight against it. At the same time, with hiphop’s increasing popularity, more young Koreans are beginning to see a certain quality of romance or glory embedded in these issues. Nevertheless, distant stories of Compton and Harlem told through rap are not being glorified six thousand miles away solely because of the exoticism they exhibit. As unimaginable as those stories sound to them, many Korean listeners also recognize displays of independence, bravery, and brotherhood—human qualities they struggle to manifest in such dramatic ways in the homogeneous urban life of South Korea. To those Korean admirers, hiphop was not the romanticization of street violence itself but of the people who live through it with determination and autonomy.

​

     Stronger than a bullet, the wordsmith's philosophy was the opening line of this piece. I now confess that it went through some modification during the translation process. Literal translation would render scarier than a bullet is the MC's philosophy (총알보다 무서운건 MC의 철학.) I instead used stronger because it seemed more relatable to followers of American hiphop. The morphosyntactic variation of the adjective "무섭다" (scary) used in the original line also entails a sense of power, which I couldn't find in its English counterpart. To say that philosophy is more "무섭다" than a bullet, therefore, would suggest that it is more of a threat better avoided than an equally powerful substitute. Omission of the auxiliary, to dramatize the juxtaposition. Wordsmith, I liked it more. Not much differently, whenever a piece of culture travels over the oceans and lands on a foreign land in the form of another language, it molds into the local cultural contour. 

​

     Because hiphop is indisputably a black American creation, hiphop music of other cultures, ethnicities and languages today must exist in relation to the original. Given the different societal circumstance, South Korean hiphop can be more easily explained by its lacks compared to the original. The ontology of K-hiphop is that it feels rather incomplete when placed next to the original. Cultural deprivation is the story most Korean rappers carried yet avoided. It was E Sens, however, breezing through his trite, gun-less Seoul life, who addressed the kind of struggle all rappers share, as artists in the modern world. Initiated two decades before The Anecdote was the anecdote of Queensbridge that became the anecdote of hiphop, in which the artist howled his life: my pen taps the paper then my brains blank. Now in the opposite side of the world, the artist legitimizes his story by giving substance to his experience of lack.

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

내 일터는 집하고 녹음실
(my workplace is my home and studio)
가는 길이 익숙해진 게 좋은 일 인 지 모르겠어
(I can’t tell if it’s good that I’ve grown familiar with my way there)
뭔가 좀 새로운 느낌 있어야 뭐 좀 나오는 거 아닌지
(Shouldn’t there be something fresh to get myself going?)
매번 보는 길
(the same path I see every time)
이런 말해놓고 몇달 째 같은 내 플레이 목록
(even having said that, my playlist’s been the same for months)
Nas 하고 Jay Hova와 Biggie M E T H O D Man
(Nas, Jay-Z, The Notorious B.I.G., Method Man)
거기에 새 것 조금 매일 돌리네
(on top of that I play just a little bit of new shit)
한국의 밤에 가 본 적도 없는 뉴욕 이야기에 뻑가네
(It’s a night in Korea, but I’m blown away by the story of New York,
a place I ain’t even been to)
사장들이 봤다면 웃긴 일이지만
(it’s something to laugh at if the CEOs saw this)
어때 난 아직 그것들이 제일 죽이지
(but guess what, to me, those things still kick the hardest)

 

     It was precisely when this underlying narrative was captured when K-hiphop became its own. Lifes Like by Jazzyfact, a duo made of rapper Beenzino and producer Shimmy Twice, is another canon that extracts aesthetics from the common South Korean life. Under the theme of cigarettes, 

which is deeply embedded in South Korean social life, Beenzino, a graduate of Seoul National University, narrates both the uncertainty and emotional deprivation among Korean youths and his struggle of finding his feet as an artist.

​

알다가도 결국은 모르는게 인생사

(Such is life. You think you know one day,

and then you don't on the next).

어떤이들은 고민 않고 쉽게 살아가지만

(Some people live on without worrying)

그 보다 좀 더 예민한 난

(But I, a little more sensitive,)

하나하나 짚고가느라 피곤한 밤이야

(Give myself another tiresome night,

stepping over bit by bit)

나를 위로하던 누군가의 음악도

(Even the music of somebody that consoled me) 

뚝딱 나온게 아닐것임을 깨닫고

(now I know, wasn't made overnight)

그간 나의 어머니가 그린 그림도

(Even the pictures my mother has drawn)

무심코 보던 어제 보다 더 깊어

(Are deeper than yesterday when I was apathetic)

로마같은 그들을 우러러봐

(I look up to them who are just like Rome) 

쓰러져 가는 내눈에 그들은 푸르르다

(To my falling eyes, they are green)

​

     Downtown Ann Arbor, by South Main and Williams, an aged white man approached me and my girlfriend having a breezy April stroll. "Hey, what's your name?" he asked her, but then realized I stood in the way. He turned to pointing fingers back and forth between us. "Are you brothers and sisters?" I noticed his messy beard, snuff-smelling outfit and ugly sunglasses and began debating whether to resort to recalling stereotypes. But we were already halfway through the crosswalk, so I left remarking, "wow, never knew this happens in Ann Arbor, too."

 

     A few months later, I was back in Korea having lunch with my paternal grandmother for the first time in over a year. Grandmothers are alike everywhere: she was extremely worried about my well-being in the United States far away from my family.

“I can’t help but get worried, because, you know, everything they tell us about the place, what I see on TV, it looks really dangerous. Wasn’t there a big hurricane the other day?”

“Yes, grandma, but it happened very far away from where I study. I live in a very safe place.”

 

“Even so, you should always take care of yourself. And especially, you know, the black kids, right? It looks like it’s always them going around doing bad things.”

“No, grandma, those are just lies made by the TV. They just want you to think that. I live with a black kid, he’s very smart and nice. I live with a black kid and a Muslim kid.”

Even by the time we parted, she did not seem to be able to fully cope with the last couple things I told her. Perhaps, South Koreans, while uniformly encultured, have found it difficult to undergo acculturation because there hasn’t really been a second culture. Now that globalization and the Internet are fostering change, stereotypes are being challenged and backlashed likewise. Owen Ovadoz, another member of Nafla and Loopy’s label MKIT Rain, projects a misplaced wish onto a vulgar remix of Nas is Like: 

검은 심장에 누런 피부, 주님의 실수 (yellow skin on a black heart, a mistake by the lord).

​

     We are born to represent, whether or not we are bound to our land by nature, whether or not the association is frivolous in the grand scheme. It is less likely for black American hiphop to pack itself in a luggage and fly over to Korea or be forwarded as an email attachment than for Korea’s own interpretation to grow into a story. If transcribed without modification, hiphop can only be an aspiration. Our strongest piercing instrument may indeed be philosophy, to be honed so we could be the last ones to kill our own vibe. Rhythm and poetry.

​

     Back again in Ann Arbor, my roommates are blasting a song after midnight in the common area of our apartment, so I decide to pause studying and ask them to consider lowering the volume on everyone else’s behalf—my neighbors’ and especially my own. Instead, I sit in the unoccupied armchair and Shazam it. First Day Out by Tee Grizzley, from Detroit, Michigan. You hear me? Hit the rollie store with a rollie on, he roars. They seem to consider this a real one.

​

One of them said, "That shit is cold as fuck. James ain't even know what that mean." 

"What, hitting the rollie store with a rollie on?" I mustered, frustrated less by the fact that I do understand the line than the fact that I was immediately placed outside the circle of empathy.

​

"That's a whole new level of greed," he continued. So as well might be my wish to immediately integrate.

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

Note: the translations of lyrics focused on delivering only the propositional content as directly as possible, without regards to rhyme scheme and flow.

​

​

 

 

 

 

​