Reflection on the essay on South Korean hiphop

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The initial prompt for this project was to choose a previous written work that I wished to modify or expand. I came up with several options, including a review I wrote for Little Creatures by Talking Heads and a linguistics paper on the history of contact between Korean and English. What became clear to me reviewing all my options was that I wanted to explore my circumstance as a Korean student in America and that I wanted to write about music and language. Then the idea of writing about South Korean hiphop came to my mind. Although I had no substantial work produced on the subject, hiphop was a favorite subject of my pastime thoughts, and I was certain that I would somehow be able to link hiphop music to broader themes of the societal differences between the two countries I’ve been traveling back and forth for the past decade, as well as my experience through them. My instructor Raymond confirmed that this would be a good opportunity for me to delve into a topic I was already thinking a lot about but hadn’t been able to produce written work out of the thoughts. That is when I decided to give it a shot, but any plan I could muster at the time was tentative. The three ‘experiments,’ tryouts of different styles, tones and media formats, that is, virtually turned out to be the sole guiding light through this process. The only ideas I began with was that I had several elements that I wished to connect—American hiphop, South Korean hiphop, my personal experience, and blurry background information on the relevant history, culture etc. But I was entirely clueless as to what type of writing with which to bring them together and which one of those elements would be the ‘main’ one.

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For the first experiment, it seemed evident that I should use my personal narrative as the encompassing frame, because it was the one that required the least amount of external references. So I jotted down as many memories as I could think of that had something to do with the other elements I wanted to bring together, and then tried to zoom out of my life and insert external sources, such as specific songs and interviews, and general claims about the society. But since the substantial body of writing I began with was an unorganized series of my past experiences, ordering them cohesively and branching out to bigger claims became a struggle. Many of the ideas newly developed after I had already formatted the big outline, and it was difficult to deem which parts appropriate and decide which parts to cut out. For instance, some works of Korean hiphop has caused a cultural appropriation controversy in America, so I originally thought that it would be a crucial part of the piece to address that issue. But because most of my experiences I had written down had to do with either the transition in between Korea and America or the impact of hiphop perceived by Koreans, I wasn’t able to articulate enough of my perspective to incorporate the issue into the rest of what I had. Experiment 1 also risked sounding to self-immersed and less responsive to the circumstance of the audience, who would have most likely been Westerners not so familiar with the topic.

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Because relying primarily on my past experiences yielded a problem of communicability, I sought to resort to the objective in Experiment 2. I focused on choosing actual works by Korean hiphop artists that could help shed a light to my perspective after undergoing lyrical analysis. This one risked a problem of accessibility again on the reader’s behalf. Because I referred intensively to works of Korean hiphop only, the reader unfamiliar with Korean hiphop would have been placed outside relatable grounds. It seemed to lack points of empathy through which I could draw the reader into my subject. I thus had to go back to including my experiences to ensure that everything was coming from an ordinary adolescent who has lived in America for long enough to grasp its culture. This is when I realized that the inclusion of my personal narrative was going to be a necessity, not only because music analysis is never fully objective for everyone but also because the observations on the society and the music all derived from my individual perspective. The final outcome of Experiment 2 was therefore not that much different from the first in terms of its constituting elements. Even though the second experiment did not end the way I originally anticipated, I was able to attain a clearer view of what the final project should consist of.

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I resolved to keep the personal narrative as the main frame, because the most effective way for me to generate content accessible and relatable to the reader was not to neglect that my experiences served as the very motivation for me to consider working on this project. Experiment 3, therefore, was not so much an attempt to create a promising alternative to the past two experiments as literally an experimentation with an approach that had not been taken that might provide me with some fresh ideas that did not occur to me when I was preoccupied with the methods I already tried out. Raymond agreed to the idea that my personal anecdote should be the primary lighthouse for the rest, so what was left for me to do for the final project was to do my best perfecting the narrative by comprehensively incorporating the music and my general observations. However, I wasn’t all the way through with Experiment 3. An approach that hadn’t been taken was an academic one drawing from scholarly voices from journals and articles. I browsed the school’s library database for reports on Korean hiphop as well as my past research papers on sociolinguistics and South Korea.

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Even though I knew that what I did with Experiment 3 was not going to be the approach I would eventually adopt, the process was worthwhile in that it reminded me once again how crucial it was to include my own story in order to successfully communicate what I wanted to say. While academic voices possess perhaps the greatest authority in terms of convincing the reader to believe that what is being said is reasonable, the greatest authority I had in my hands was my own, precisely because it was my own thoughts on which I was trying to elaborate. I recognized that what would prove far more convincing to the reader than citing distant scholars was articulating how the messages I wanted to convey came to occupy my thoughts and help develop my perspective on the subject, and what experiences I had inspired them.

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I have always seen myself as a very inconsistent writer. Time consumption, pleasure, stress, focus, boredom, writing procedure—they all changed values for every written work. So forcing myself into producing three different thoughtful attempts was, as difficult and time-consuming as it might have been, an unprecedented way of going about my creative process, and surely the most thorough one I have experienced. I was first bombarded with doubts: What entitles me to discuss the American institution, the South Korean institution, black culture, Korean culture, in the way I do? Interestingly, the question of entitlement is also a fundamental question of South Korean hiphop as I see it. In hindsight, I chose this topic perhaps because I had projected myself onto the societal phenomenon of South Korean hiphop and, simultaneously, let it mold me back; I now struggle to entitle myself to it, and the best way to do that was to recognize for myself that such was my own story. This project eventually led me to think that, like any other creation as some would argue, this too is self-expression.