Seo Taiji 1992-2004: South Korean popular music and masculinity (my master's thesis)
© Janet Hilts 2006 - please note: this is not the final version of my thesis.
CHAPTER 1: Talking about Taiji emotionally: 3 Case Studies & Yun-hûi
Published 월요일, 3월 20, 2006 by 쟈넷 | E-mail this post
Like many researchers, I began my interviewing process looking for information, in my case information on what young people think about Seo Taiji, his music and about gender issues. What was interesting in many interviews was less the information given, but more the emotion in young people’s talk about Taiji and the emotionality of their engagement with Taiji and his music. In this chapter, I chose to highlight emotion because it became impossible to minimize it over the course of my interviews with young Koreans. Additionally, emotion has tended to be overlooked in studies on Korean youth culture or popular music, as Lee Kee-hyeung points out in his survey of South Korean cultural studies research on youth culture in the 1990s and early 2000s:
I have chosen to present three young people’s responses as case studies to examine the personal and cultural (and potentially political) significance of emotional engagements with Taiji and his music and how gender issues factor into these. The people are Yun-hûi (31), Kang-t’ae (27) and Chae-tol (19). In Yun-hûi’s talk, we see the joy and excitement that Seo Taiji brought out in so many of her generation, and how at times, these emotions rub up against her feminist concerns and a different set of emotions. In Kang-t’ae, we see how Taiji, as an example of an alternative man, figures into his emotional struggle over defining himself against hegemonic Korean masculinity. In Chae-tol’s talk, we see an unbridled enthusiasm and joy for Taiji—including Taiji’s recent pro-feminist song—which affects his initial attempts at conceiving himself differently from ‘normative’ Korean masculinity. Influenced by the discursive turn in anthropology, I approach these young people’s communication as parts of dialogical processes that constitute culture—the Taiji phenomenon and gender foregrounded here―rather than as reflections of culture (Farnell and Graham, 1998). I present case studies of three young Koreans and give quite a few pages to each in an effort to remedy the lack of qualitative research on young Koreans and popular culture available in English. Additionally I include long sections of Yun-hûi and Chae-tol’s talk and a lot of context around Kang-t’ae talk. I have done this to allow my reader to get a feeling for what each person is like and to take his or her talk and experience seriously. I also hope that my reader will remember these voices and their characters throughout the remainder of my thesis. I chose to focus on these three’s responses because they sit neatly across the age range of Seo Taiji fans. Their engagement with my research project was excellent, and at times, they gave me access to the emotional influence Taiji and his music has or had on them.
[1] For an approach to emotions, youth culture and popular music in an eastern Asian context, see Eric Ma’s (2002) ethnographic work on emotions and sub cultural politics in punk bands in post 1997 Hong Kong.
The Case Studies
Yun-hûi
Yun-hûi spoke about Taiji with multiple voices―sometimes as a fan and at other times as a young scholar and feminist―and with considerable emotion. Her multiple voices and contradictory reactions to Taiji’s music and Taiji in terms of gender, enrich the Taiji phenomenon and our understanding of it.
Yun-hûi and I met in a small graduate seminar class. She was stylish with an artsy fashion sense, pretty and intellectual. Funny and empathetic, she also presented at times as standoffish and a little stubborn when discussing ideas or issues. Her passions seemed to lie more in the alternative education and youth centre she had worked at in Seoul rather than in her graduate study in Canada. During the term of our seminar class, I felt she was at the same time interested and dismissive of my research topic for the class, masculinity and Korean ballad singers’ voices (a paper on which chapter three of this thesis was built). Because of this and the fact that I respected her a lot, I was apprehensive about interviewing her. I thought I would learn from her a ‘from above’ analysis of the Taiji phenomenon because of her tendency to intellectualize things combined with her response to my interview invitation over email that she was not a huge fan but thought Taiji was an important cultural icon to her whole generation. Because of this, I was surprised at her emotional responses to Taiji and his music and the personal significance he and his music had had for her.
During our sessions, Yun-hûi sometimes talked about Taiji, as well as youth issues, gender and other popular musicians, with exuberance, expressing personal joys and at other times a sense of urgency and passion. Her urgency and passion were most prominent when she emphasized Taiji and other performers’ integrity and socially progressive lyrics. When we discussed gender issues in depth, her voice changed again, and she spoke with intensity, at times humorously, but earnestly.
Yun-hûi’s exuberance and joy over Taiji and his music and her passion for his integrity form much of her talk in the excerpts I have chosen to include here. Excerpt 1 comes from the middle of our first interview session, an evening she and I shared chocolate cake in a café and Yun-hûi talked with few breaks, smiling a lot and laughing at her memories. Her talk swirled between her personal memories of songs and associated memories and the social messages of Taiji’s lyrics and his sincerity. A number of times she went into enthusiastic digressions on other singers and bands—Jaurim, Panic and Yi Sang Ûn—whose artistic integrity and, in her own words, “independent spirit” and progressive lyrics, she felt they shared with Taiji. In excerpt 1, Yun-hûi flew through topics and issues with an enthusiasm and joy in talking that took me by surprise. She framed songs and albums in emotional ways. She began talking about the second album―the album that first drew her into the music of Taiji and Boys―by recalling her break-up with her boyfriend and the excitement that the word “drug” had for her and her peers at the time. Her laughter indicated that their passions for Taiji’s ‘cool’ message at the time was significant emotionally yet hard to explain to me some ten years later. Yun-hûi’s enthusiastic talk in this excerpt also reflects the affective qualities of Seo Taiji and Boys performances’ newness and inventiveness. Yun-hûi’s talk a little later on in the evening (excerpt 2) reveals the affective qualities of Taiji’s integrity, as she explains why she liked and respected him because he quit then and came back with honesty.
In our second interview, Yun-hûi was more enthusiastic about Taiji and Boys’ songs and revealed the emotional value they had had for her when she was younger. We met in a small pub and Yun-hûi seemed especially happy and even excited, smiling a lot. I thought she must have had an especially good day, but no, she told me she had had a very frustrating day in the library reading difficult English language materials.
She especially enjoyed listening to songs together and even complemented me on using this interviewing method. Her joy in listening to songs and talking about her memories and opinions were something of a happy surprise for both of us. When we listened to the song “Hwansang sok ûi kûdae” from the first Seo Taiji and Boys album (1992), Yun-hûi punctuated her quickly moving talk with emphasized words, singing, animated movements, plenty of smiling and short phrases such as “It was all so cool” and “Think about this!” expressing her joy and exuberance for Taiji and Boys, even over ten years after she had originally experienced them (see excerpt 3). Her reaction to “Hayôga”, another song she chose to listen to with me, was just as enthusiastic and she drew on her personal emotional experience of the song she had mentioned to me in the previous interview. Yun-hûi preceded her talk in excerpt 4 by rapping along to the first minute and ten seconds of “Hayôga”. She enjoyed this, not showing off, just having a good time remembering the rap exactly, moving her body to the beat as she sat in her chair. Yun-hûi’s enthusiasm and joy in her comments and reactions to songs was interspersed with moments where she took a step back to provide me with information on the Taiji phenomenon and youth culture in the 1990s-- the shift toward a more superficial or light youth culture throughout the 1990s for example. At these moments her talk was calmer but still engaged and as she progressed through an explanation, she often ended up expressing another enthusiastic personal account or memory of Seo Taiji and Boys from when she was younger. Although these two voices differed, Yun-hûi’s voice in our third interview session was often strikingly different from her joyous personal accounts of Taiji and Boys’ music.
In our third session when we focused on gender issues generally and specifically on popular music and Taiji, Yun-hûi spoke with intensity for two and a half hours. Earlier comments she had made—that Taiji was genderless and his unisexual characteristics rendered gender issues and Taiji’s music a non-issue, or that gender issues in popular music are essentially superficial and as such not so interesting—had left me mistakenly thinking she would rush through my questions. Yun-hûi’s talk was informed by her feminist concerns, which I had been aware of from her atypical demeanour and fashion sense, her knowledgeable comments in the course we took together and from certain personal stands she took in her daily life, for example refusing to use the term “oppa” when calling older male friends or classmates on the grounds that it renders women childlike. Although she was funny at times and we laughed about things as the evening went along, Yun-hûi’s voice was earnest and serious, lacking the cynicism, sarcasm and flippancy I am used to hearing from post-feminist or even feminist women of her generation from Canada. Furthermore, Yun-hûi’s comments at the end of our session confirmed my sense during the interview that she had been talking with a lot of emotion and had some apprehension experiencing this and showing this to me.
Yun-hûi’s talk in the third interview was firm at times and at others ambivalent or ambiguous. She explained her definition of masculinity and the characteristics she looks for in a boyfriend with certainty (see excerpts 5 and 6). She spoke of gender and music, most importantly rock and rap, with some ambivalence. In some ways, her comments during this session contradicted her reactions to songs we had listened to earlier and to her joy in discussing Taiji as a social icon (see excerpt 7). The most striking contradiction was how she spoke about rap and rock performed by males with a negative sentiment, and yet these two aspects of “Hayôga”—guitar solo, rapping and so on—had provided her with considerable joy in our previous meeting. Her joy while listening to the song seemed to contradict the fact that she spoke critically of the strong beat in rap and rock music as manly and as expressing strength, specifically masculine strength. But her criticism was not entirely so simplistic. Like early feminist punk rockers in England and the Riot Grrrl bands (O’Meara, 2003; Leonard, 1997), Yun-hûi wished that this beat were hers and not simply belonging to guys. As a result, she expressed some hesitation about liking rock or rap performed by males, even Taiji.
In some ways Yun-hûi’s divergent voices resemble those discussed by Susan Fast in her book In the houses of the Holy: Led Zeppelin and the power of rock music (2001). Fast comments on the discrepancies between her colleagues’ reactions, most notably feminist scholars, and that of fans to Led Zeppelin and gender issues. Fast points out how her colleagues for the most part could not enjoy or understand how others could enjoy Led Zeppelin, citing the band’s alleged machismo and misogyny. As a result, Fast’s colleagues overlooked the fluidity of gender construction in Led Zeppelin and the role that affect and emotion in their performances and fan reception had in enriching gender constructions. Fast, herself both scholar and a fan, found herself having to justify her fandom but in the end was successful in combining these aspects of herself into her analysis of Led Zeppelin. For Yun-hûi, the discrepancies Fast points out—fan versus feminist scholars’ perspectives—form much of her talk and reactions to Taiji’s music. However, Yun-hûi’s feminist attitude irregularly forms her experience of Taiji and his music, leaving her comments seeming disjointed or at times contradictory.
Some may suggest that this disjointedness and contradiction show that Yun-hûi has not worked out her thoughts fully and that this is a personal and private flaw in her understanding of Taiji and rock or rap music generally. However, this judgment would minimize the value of emotions, often mixed, in experiencing Taiji and his music. This judgment would also minimize the value of examining Yun-hûi’s talk as constituting not only aspects of her self, but of her culture as well.
As anthropologists Brenda Farnell and Laura R. Graham (1998) explain in their survey of discourse centred approaches in anthropology, it is important to consider that people’s communication does not simply tell about reality, but participates in socially constructing it. This type of anthropology, which has influenced my research, considers language as social action (Farnell and Graham, 1998). Theoretically, discourse analysis in anthropology abandons psychological determinism (of Freud for instance) and sociological determinism (of Durkheim, for instance) and instead views persons “…as causally empowered embodied agents with unique powers and capacities for making meaning…” (Farnell and Graham, 1998:414). Anthropologists who do discourse analysis often find it useful to draw upon Bakhtin’s ideas on language (for example Skinner, Valsiner and Holland’s work on Nepali adolescents (2001) or Abelmann’s work on middle-aged, urban South Korean women (2003). Bakhtin’s (1981) emphasis on the dynamic, intertexual and multi-voiced tendencies of language is highly applicable to anthropology because it is conducive to thinking about everyday conversations and communication, and their relationships to society. As a result, much anthropological discourse analysis pays attention to the heterogeneous and dynamic aspects of people’s communication (Farnell and Graham, 1998). For instance what Bakhtin referred to as the dialogic nature of language (1981), his idea that an individual occurrence of language is always in response to another occurrence of language—from the speaker’s past discussion with a friend, from the speaker’s different manners of speaking, or from the media and so on—have proven useful in discourse centred approaches in anthropology (Farnell and Graham, 1998). With Bakhtin’s dialogic view of language, occurrences of an individual’s communication are actively created by the individual, but are also always in dialogue, interacting with other voices and shaping social worlds. For example Skinner, Valsiner and Holland in “Discerning the dialogical self: a theoretical and methological examination of a Nepali adolescent’s narrative” (2001), analyse the multiple voices used by a Nepali teen as he discusses himself, critiques his society, and plans for its change. This teen incorporates multiple voices into his conversation with the researcher: his own voices as a student, as low caste member and as future successful man, and numerous characterizations of different social classes in dialogue with him in the past and present and then reconstructed differently in his future (Skinner et al, 2001). Skinner, Valsiner and Holland (2001) utilize Bahktin’s concepts of dialogic language to illustrate how the teen’s communication simultaneously acts to reshape his identity and works to transform the meanings of social status in his community. Influenced by these approaches to analyzing conversation, I noticed Yun-hûi’s different voices, including their different emotions. I noticed that at times, Yun-hûi spoke and listened to songs as a young scholar and feminist with seriousness, criticalness and intensity, that she talked as a fan with a lighter voice expressing her joyous personal accounts of Taiji, other performers and popular culture, that she listened to songs and reacted to them with bright, happy energy and remarks. Taking a step back from the three interviews we had, I realized her different voices seemed in dispute with one another (in dialogue). Importantly, I do not consider her dispute private and isolated. Instead, as with the women’s communication in anthropologist Nancy Abelmann’s book The Melodrama of Mobility: Women, Talk, and Class in Contemporary South Korea (2003), we must take into account “…that language does not represent a reality out there, but rather that it fashions the world (such that it looks, however, always already made)” (Abelmann, 2003: 13). Yun-hûi’s talk then, especially its contradictory voices, should be taken seriously.
Yun-hûi’s various views and ways of expressing them are rich, not flawed, and reveal how Seo Taiji was so important to her and her generation. At the same time, her communication reveals that as a male performer using rock and rap, Taiji contradicts some of her feminist ideals and wishes. These sides of Yun-hûi’s talk reveal the intricacies of the Taiji phenomenon and the difficulty (perhaps futility) of neatly defining it, in terms of gender for example.
Yun-hûi’s responses caused me to reconsider the purpose of my research project. At the very end of our final interview session, her comments made me think carefully about emotions in experiencing Taiji and the awkwardness of using feminist analysis to understand popular music songs. Quickly after she had finished her final argument, we exchanged the following words:
By having her discuss her feminist concerns and popular music, I made her feel uncomfortable in her seriousness and passion and in showing these to me. In a way, by speaking with such passion, she exposed herself to me perhaps more than she had planned to. Perhaps by showing the depth of her concerns, she felt uncomfortable because had returned to lecturing or talking at people about gender, patriarchy and so on ―literally at me but also and more importantly an imagined audience of young South Koreans who in her words “Are just interested in being sexy.” Her seriousness, although meaningful and valid, did not seem to be what informed her most meaningful experiences of Taiji. The value of Taiji and his music seemed to lie more in the joy and excitement she experienced in our earlier sessions than in this last session. Despite this observation, we should acknowledge that all of her talk and responses—some voices oppositional or in struggle and others speaking of her lighter engagement with her culture―combine to reveal her complexity. Furthermore, her excitement and joy and then apprehension, discomfort and seriousness when listening to Taiji’s songs with gender in mind in turn contribute to her culture itself.
Affective play and alliances formed by youth in their everyday cultural life provided key biographical and social resources for alternative forms of identities. What was missing in the dominant form of “interpretive” subculture work was properly articulated analysis of the articulations among youth’s passion for particular favored objects, icons, and texts that formed their personal—potentially political—significance, as well as their different “affective economies” (Lee, 2002: 61).
I have chosen to present three young people’s responses as case studies to examine the personal and cultural (and potentially political) significance of emotional engagements with Taiji and his music and how gender issues factor into these. The people are Yun-hûi (31), Kang-t’ae (27) and Chae-tol (19). In Yun-hûi’s talk, we see the joy and excitement that Seo Taiji brought out in so many of her generation, and how at times, these emotions rub up against her feminist concerns and a different set of emotions. In Kang-t’ae, we see how Taiji, as an example of an alternative man, figures into his emotional struggle over defining himself against hegemonic Korean masculinity. In Chae-tol’s talk, we see an unbridled enthusiasm and joy for Taiji—including Taiji’s recent pro-feminist song—which affects his initial attempts at conceiving himself differently from ‘normative’ Korean masculinity. Influenced by the discursive turn in anthropology, I approach these young people’s communication as parts of dialogical processes that constitute culture—the Taiji phenomenon and gender foregrounded here―rather than as reflections of culture (Farnell and Graham, 1998). I present case studies of three young Koreans and give quite a few pages to each in an effort to remedy the lack of qualitative research on young Koreans and popular culture available in English. Additionally I include long sections of Yun-hûi and Chae-tol’s talk and a lot of context around Kang-t’ae talk. I have done this to allow my reader to get a feeling for what each person is like and to take his or her talk and experience seriously. I also hope that my reader will remember these voices and their characters throughout the remainder of my thesis. I chose to focus on these three’s responses because they sit neatly across the age range of Seo Taiji fans. Their engagement with my research project was excellent, and at times, they gave me access to the emotional influence Taiji and his music has or had on them.
[1] For an approach to emotions, youth culture and popular music in an eastern Asian context, see Eric Ma’s (2002) ethnographic work on emotions and sub cultural politics in punk bands in post 1997 Hong Kong.
The Case Studies
Yun-hûi
Yun-hûi spoke about Taiji with multiple voices―sometimes as a fan and at other times as a young scholar and feminist―and with considerable emotion. Her multiple voices and contradictory reactions to Taiji’s music and Taiji in terms of gender, enrich the Taiji phenomenon and our understanding of it.
Yun-hûi and I met in a small graduate seminar class. She was stylish with an artsy fashion sense, pretty and intellectual. Funny and empathetic, she also presented at times as standoffish and a little stubborn when discussing ideas or issues. Her passions seemed to lie more in the alternative education and youth centre she had worked at in Seoul rather than in her graduate study in Canada. During the term of our seminar class, I felt she was at the same time interested and dismissive of my research topic for the class, masculinity and Korean ballad singers’ voices (a paper on which chapter three of this thesis was built). Because of this and the fact that I respected her a lot, I was apprehensive about interviewing her. I thought I would learn from her a ‘from above’ analysis of the Taiji phenomenon because of her tendency to intellectualize things combined with her response to my interview invitation over email that she was not a huge fan but thought Taiji was an important cultural icon to her whole generation. Because of this, I was surprised at her emotional responses to Taiji and his music and the personal significance he and his music had had for her.
During our sessions, Yun-hûi sometimes talked about Taiji, as well as youth issues, gender and other popular musicians, with exuberance, expressing personal joys and at other times a sense of urgency and passion. Her urgency and passion were most prominent when she emphasized Taiji and other performers’ integrity and socially progressive lyrics. When we discussed gender issues in depth, her voice changed again, and she spoke with intensity, at times humorously, but earnestly.
Yun-hûi’s exuberance and joy over Taiji and his music and her passion for his integrity form much of her talk in the excerpts I have chosen to include here. Excerpt 1 comes from the middle of our first interview session, an evening she and I shared chocolate cake in a café and Yun-hûi talked with few breaks, smiling a lot and laughing at her memories. Her talk swirled between her personal memories of songs and associated memories and the social messages of Taiji’s lyrics and his sincerity. A number of times she went into enthusiastic digressions on other singers and bands—Jaurim, Panic and Yi Sang Ûn—whose artistic integrity and, in her own words, “independent spirit” and progressive lyrics, she felt they shared with Taiji. In excerpt 1, Yun-hûi flew through topics and issues with an enthusiasm and joy in talking that took me by surprise. She framed songs and albums in emotional ways. She began talking about the second album―the album that first drew her into the music of Taiji and Boys―by recalling her break-up with her boyfriend and the excitement that the word “drug” had for her and her peers at the time. Her laughter indicated that their passions for Taiji’s ‘cool’ message at the time was significant emotionally yet hard to explain to me some ten years later. Yun-hûi’s enthusiastic talk in this excerpt also reflects the affective qualities of Seo Taiji and Boys performances’ newness and inventiveness. Yun-hûi’s talk a little later on in the evening (excerpt 2) reveals the affective qualities of Taiji’s integrity, as she explains why she liked and respected him because he quit then and came back with honesty.
Excerpt 1
Yh: Ah, when their second album came out, I was in the last year of high school so I was studying so serious. But, I, bought the tape because my boyfriend was really crazy about that. So I bought that. Soon after I bought that, we (with both hands gestures pushing away)…broke up. [Ah, you broke up.] Yes we broke up. So their second hit, always reminds me of the, the end of our love.
J: Of the break up, right.
Yh: Ya. So I, uh, uh. At that time I listened and listened to their hits, those songs. The first time I bought their album because of my boy-, ex-boyfriend, but, uh, after that, ah, I became…I became obsessed with it by myself and the melody, because, ah their second hit, had, uh, a new attempt, put their own message in their hits, and their message was totally different from, ah, the existing system of popular music. In the second album, there, there was one song, about the psychology of one person, ah, ah, addicted to, addicted to drugs. You know that song?
J: Which one? Ah
Yh: In Korea, the problem of drugs was not serious. But the word “drug”, ah! Just the word made teenagers crazy! (Laughs) Kind of ah, kind of ah, something cool, with, message We needed something serious, ah ah, some message in our life (laughs) so that song really appealed to me.
Excerpt 2
[This excerpt is preceded by Yun-hûi’s discussion of the song “Comeback Home”, the media frenzy around it, and how it caused some runaway kids to return home. She expressed dissatisfaction about this song and the media frenzy.]
Yh: So at that time I thought, if Seo Taiji wa Idûl do anything, it is seen as a good attempt so I didn’t like that at the time and I think, ah, I already became old enough, I changed my impression of them. So the next hit they declared they would stop their performance. I liked that. Because, at least, at first maybe they would come back and restart their performance, that ah, a kind of trick that many singers and actors use, so they didn’t come back, and that’s great. And each of them, went their own way. So, ah, after a couple years, I, I, became to realize their announcement was true, I (laughs) I liked Seo Taiji again (smiling). Because he was so frank, ah he, was enough self-confident. Many celebrities, celebrities don’t do that because they, they couldn’t risk their reputation but he did. He just, ah, got more into his music. So I, thought he knew what is important, and he can know, ah what he wants, and what he has to do. So, I liked him more and thought, ah, ah. A couple more years later, he really did come back, but I didn’t hate that he came back because it also was so natural. Maybe, ah, ah someone left their area, and he, ah, left for a long time, it is so hard to come back because he, he or she they can’t be sure of their success or not, so it was not, it wasn’t an easy decision but he did, and he, ah, came back and introduced his new attempt at performing music. And he just wanted to show his, ah, his own musical work.
In our second interview, Yun-hûi was more enthusiastic about Taiji and Boys’ songs and revealed the emotional value they had had for her when she was younger. We met in a small pub and Yun-hûi seemed especially happy and even excited, smiling a lot. I thought she must have had an especially good day, but no, she told me she had had a very frustrating day in the library reading difficult English language materials.
She especially enjoyed listening to songs together and even complemented me on using this interviewing method. Her joy in listening to songs and talking about her memories and opinions were something of a happy surprise for both of us. When we listened to the song “Hwansang sok ûi kûdae” from the first Seo Taiji and Boys album (1992), Yun-hûi punctuated her quickly moving talk with emphasized words, singing, animated movements, plenty of smiling and short phrases such as “It was all so cool” and “Think about this!” expressing her joy and exuberance for Taiji and Boys, even over ten years after she had originally experienced them (see excerpt 3). Her reaction to “Hayôga”, another song she chose to listen to with me, was just as enthusiastic and she drew on her personal emotional experience of the song she had mentioned to me in the previous interview. Yun-hûi preceded her talk in excerpt 4 by rapping along to the first minute and ten seconds of “Hayôga”. She enjoyed this, not showing off, just having a good time remembering the rap exactly, moving her body to the beat as she sat in her chair. Yun-hûi’s enthusiasm and joy in her comments and reactions to songs was interspersed with moments where she took a step back to provide me with information on the Taiji phenomenon and youth culture in the 1990s-- the shift toward a more superficial or light youth culture throughout the 1990s for example. At these moments her talk was calmer but still engaged and as she progressed through an explanation, she often ended up expressing another enthusiastic personal account or memory of Seo Taiji and Boys from when she was younger. Although these two voices differed, Yun-hûi’s voice in our third interview session was often strikingly different from her joyous personal accounts of Taiji and Boys’ music.
Excerpt 3
Yh: This was during high school. I remember the melody was so cool. The way, ah, for Seo Taiji to sing, was so different, he sang with rapping, it was the first attempt in the mainstream. Ya. It was all so cool. All the boys and girls imitated that way! Like this (She mimics a rapper, with hand gestures and smiles afterward and laughs). Ahhh! And their message was so philosophical. […] (She tries to translate a few lines of the lyrics into English as she listens). Very cool rhythm and melody, they mix very philosophical lyrics. So, ah, ah, there is no way Seo Taiji wasn’t cool. They, yes. So. Think about this! Many Korean songs just say, (she starts singing, “I love you” etc in Korean) all singers sing, have songs about love and similar things, but one day, three boys appear and sing, ah totally different kinds of things, and their melody and rhythm lyrics were totally different, and that was not just great but very cool.
Excerpt 4
J: You will probably remember forever right?
Yh: Ya! (Laughs) It’s so surprising! We laugh. She continues to move her body to the beat and she shows lots of energy) It’s a sort of love song, but but different. So, ah, it’s yes. Last time I told, when this album came out, ah I had just broken-up with my boyfriend and, you know every teenager or even older people, think their love is special. But this song is, appropriate for my special love because it is was so special (laughs) special love song. (She laughs a little) … This part (the guitar solo) I’m always touched by it. Yes this melody, it’s a little bit similar to rock, hmm, very ah, ah ah similar, like Western music but, he used t’aep’yŏngso, and it’s an an amazing mixture (smiles).
In our third session when we focused on gender issues generally and specifically on popular music and Taiji, Yun-hûi spoke with intensity for two and a half hours. Earlier comments she had made—that Taiji was genderless and his unisexual characteristics rendered gender issues and Taiji’s music a non-issue, or that gender issues in popular music are essentially superficial and as such not so interesting—had left me mistakenly thinking she would rush through my questions. Yun-hûi’s talk was informed by her feminist concerns, which I had been aware of from her atypical demeanour and fashion sense, her knowledgeable comments in the course we took together and from certain personal stands she took in her daily life, for example refusing to use the term “oppa” when calling older male friends or classmates on the grounds that it renders women childlike. Although she was funny at times and we laughed about things as the evening went along, Yun-hûi’s voice was earnest and serious, lacking the cynicism, sarcasm and flippancy I am used to hearing from post-feminist or even feminist women of her generation from Canada. Furthermore, Yun-hûi’s comments at the end of our session confirmed my sense during the interview that she had been talking with a lot of emotion and had some apprehension experiencing this and showing this to me.
Yun-hûi’s talk in the third interview was firm at times and at others ambivalent or ambiguous. She explained her definition of masculinity and the characteristics she looks for in a boyfriend with certainty (see excerpts 5 and 6). She spoke of gender and music, most importantly rock and rap, with some ambivalence. In some ways, her comments during this session contradicted her reactions to songs we had listened to earlier and to her joy in discussing Taiji as a social icon (see excerpt 7). The most striking contradiction was how she spoke about rap and rock performed by males with a negative sentiment, and yet these two aspects of “Hayôga”—guitar solo, rapping and so on—had provided her with considerable joy in our previous meeting. Her joy while listening to the song seemed to contradict the fact that she spoke critically of the strong beat in rap and rock music as manly and as expressing strength, specifically masculine strength. But her criticism was not entirely so simplistic. Like early feminist punk rockers in England and the Riot Grrrl bands (O’Meara, 2003; Leonard, 1997), Yun-hûi wished that this beat were hers and not simply belonging to guys. As a result, she expressed some hesitation about liking rock or rap performed by males, even Taiji.
Excerpt 5
Yh: I always think about that (masculinity). Masculinity is a question of, ah, power, ah men’s power and desire for power. Based on their own confirmation of self. [oh ok] That’s my definition, so that’s why I think of the concept of masculinity not only as characteristics of some men such as manly voice or muscular body and uh, uh… But also as ah, ah…yes! Even in softness of guys, I think there is masculinity. There are many questions. For example, I read your term paper, and I, I questioned that, whether the male ballad singers’ voice, ah, ah, question of softness, if they are free from masculinity. In my : perspective, I don’t think so. Because … especially in lyrics, there are also the philosophy of love, from guy’s, and ah, some, ah, characteristics, characters of men in situations—love or …and actually because this society is, this society is ahh, patriarchal, so all guys cannot break free from masculinity. Because masculinity has meant men’s, ah, a mandate for being a man. But of course I have want to have some masculinity of my own. So that’s why I think masculinity is the confirmation or desire about power.
Excerpt 6
J: So, this question, what kind of guys do you like?
Yh: Silent!
J: What? Talented?
Yh: Silent.
J: Mute? (Jokingly)
Yh: Ya, mute! […] Silent and … silent and ah, he has, he has something he can concentrate on. Especially I prefer something, artistic work but I don’t want poor artistic, because I would be stuck with supporting that kind of boyfriend. I don’t want that anymore! They have to take care of themselves, and I take care of … myself. And we can, we can, ah, give and take. No one-way street, or one-way street, I don’t want that[…] Especially I can’t stand guys, ah, who are not even my boyfriend, who, ah, talk about, talk about feminism or gender issues, uh, very firm in their perspective. [Oh ya]. Um they had better be silent about that kind of issues and they should try to support the people who, who ah, who really have a problem, that’s women. So silent is, uh … [or listening] Ya. It is a good attitude especially for a guy. J: Ya being a really good listener and a learner is very important for me.
Yh: Otherwise I can’t hear any love from my boyfriend. […] How about your boyfriend? Silent?
J: Oh he’s not silent, but he is a very good, ah. He’s a very good listener and he likes to learn from other people. [Ah! That’s] […] He is very very good at listening and learning from other people so I like, I like that about him and I always tell him that. [Right] When he, sometimes he doesn’t understand why I like him, because he still has, his family is very traditional and [oh] ya so he still thinks that, that I should like somebody who is, really, really gonna make lots of money or (we laugh) you know (we laugh) so! Or somebody who knows a lot, right? Or somebody who, but I like people who like to learn.
Yh: me too!
Excerpt 7
Yh: I don’t want to categorize instrument or styles of songs as manly or masculinity, but ah, that’s true. [Oh!] For example I don’t feel the, ah rap songs. [Rap?] yes rap. I always feel rap is so manly. [Ok]. Think about this, in the case of women, we don’t speak in that kind of style. We talk about more interactively [ah!] but there, there they speak one way, in one direction and the beat is very strong […].
J: Hayŏga. I don’t know about this song. I have confused opinions, or no opinions at all.
(We are listening together over headphones)
Yh: Yes this kind of beat is ah, considered manly.
J: Considered manly by you or by other people?
Yh: By others including me
J: Including you. Even though you don’t like, you feel uncomfortable to categorize
Yh: No! [Oh!] But the difference is ah, even though this ah, was categorized manly in the past, the difference in my uh, generation, don’t want to ah, fall in love with guys who make this kind of beat [oh ok]. We said we want to, uh, make this, uh kind of beat by ourselves. Yes. I wanted and still Yh: want this kind of beat to be mine, not by, not be my boyfriends. […]
(We are listening to the song “Victim” release 2004. Yun-hûi listens carefully without much expression or movement. She doesn’t seem to enjoy it).
J: This is the same as the one before (“Tank”), or a little bit different?
Yh: Little bit different. But I … I found I, uh, I consider rock band music ah, ah, manly. [Ok]. Usually, usually, so I, I’m missing Courtney Love. I miss Courtney Love, because, she is, uh, she leads a rock band. Actually if I, ah, listened, participated in concert uh, of, a female band, I really become crazy, because [Crazy good, or crazy bad?] Good! [Oh ok] but, ah…
J: But only for a female rock group.
Yh: Not only female but prefer female.
J: Ok. So you don’t like this because
Yh: Because it’s violent and it’s too strong. I don’t want men to express, uh, strength. [Ah] I don’t like that. I want them to keep silent and, ah, not expressing strength. [Right]. Because even though they don’t express their strength they are strong enough because this society is based on, ah, patriarchy, so they need to be silent and calm until both genders become equal.
In some ways Yun-hûi’s divergent voices resemble those discussed by Susan Fast in her book In the houses of the Holy: Led Zeppelin and the power of rock music (2001). Fast comments on the discrepancies between her colleagues’ reactions, most notably feminist scholars, and that of fans to Led Zeppelin and gender issues. Fast points out how her colleagues for the most part could not enjoy or understand how others could enjoy Led Zeppelin, citing the band’s alleged machismo and misogyny. As a result, Fast’s colleagues overlooked the fluidity of gender construction in Led Zeppelin and the role that affect and emotion in their performances and fan reception had in enriching gender constructions. Fast, herself both scholar and a fan, found herself having to justify her fandom but in the end was successful in combining these aspects of herself into her analysis of Led Zeppelin. For Yun-hûi, the discrepancies Fast points out—fan versus feminist scholars’ perspectives—form much of her talk and reactions to Taiji’s music. However, Yun-hûi’s feminist attitude irregularly forms her experience of Taiji and his music, leaving her comments seeming disjointed or at times contradictory.
Some may suggest that this disjointedness and contradiction show that Yun-hûi has not worked out her thoughts fully and that this is a personal and private flaw in her understanding of Taiji and rock or rap music generally. However, this judgment would minimize the value of emotions, often mixed, in experiencing Taiji and his music. This judgment would also minimize the value of examining Yun-hûi’s talk as constituting not only aspects of her self, but of her culture as well.
As anthropologists Brenda Farnell and Laura R. Graham (1998) explain in their survey of discourse centred approaches in anthropology, it is important to consider that people’s communication does not simply tell about reality, but participates in socially constructing it. This type of anthropology, which has influenced my research, considers language as social action (Farnell and Graham, 1998). Theoretically, discourse analysis in anthropology abandons psychological determinism (of Freud for instance) and sociological determinism (of Durkheim, for instance) and instead views persons “…as causally empowered embodied agents with unique powers and capacities for making meaning…” (Farnell and Graham, 1998:414). Anthropologists who do discourse analysis often find it useful to draw upon Bakhtin’s ideas on language (for example Skinner, Valsiner and Holland’s work on Nepali adolescents (2001) or Abelmann’s work on middle-aged, urban South Korean women (2003). Bakhtin’s (1981) emphasis on the dynamic, intertexual and multi-voiced tendencies of language is highly applicable to anthropology because it is conducive to thinking about everyday conversations and communication, and their relationships to society. As a result, much anthropological discourse analysis pays attention to the heterogeneous and dynamic aspects of people’s communication (Farnell and Graham, 1998). For instance what Bakhtin referred to as the dialogic nature of language (1981), his idea that an individual occurrence of language is always in response to another occurrence of language—from the speaker’s past discussion with a friend, from the speaker’s different manners of speaking, or from the media and so on—have proven useful in discourse centred approaches in anthropology (Farnell and Graham, 1998). With Bakhtin’s dialogic view of language, occurrences of an individual’s communication are actively created by the individual, but are also always in dialogue, interacting with other voices and shaping social worlds. For example Skinner, Valsiner and Holland in “Discerning the dialogical self: a theoretical and methological examination of a Nepali adolescent’s narrative” (2001), analyse the multiple voices used by a Nepali teen as he discusses himself, critiques his society, and plans for its change. This teen incorporates multiple voices into his conversation with the researcher: his own voices as a student, as low caste member and as future successful man, and numerous characterizations of different social classes in dialogue with him in the past and present and then reconstructed differently in his future (Skinner et al, 2001). Skinner, Valsiner and Holland (2001) utilize Bahktin’s concepts of dialogic language to illustrate how the teen’s communication simultaneously acts to reshape his identity and works to transform the meanings of social status in his community. Influenced by these approaches to analyzing conversation, I noticed Yun-hûi’s different voices, including their different emotions. I noticed that at times, Yun-hûi spoke and listened to songs as a young scholar and feminist with seriousness, criticalness and intensity, that she talked as a fan with a lighter voice expressing her joyous personal accounts of Taiji, other performers and popular culture, that she listened to songs and reacted to them with bright, happy energy and remarks. Taking a step back from the three interviews we had, I realized her different voices seemed in dispute with one another (in dialogue). Importantly, I do not consider her dispute private and isolated. Instead, as with the women’s communication in anthropologist Nancy Abelmann’s book The Melodrama of Mobility: Women, Talk, and Class in Contemporary South Korea (2003), we must take into account “…that language does not represent a reality out there, but rather that it fashions the world (such that it looks, however, always already made)” (Abelmann, 2003: 13). Yun-hûi’s talk then, especially its contradictory voices, should be taken seriously.
Yun-hûi’s various views and ways of expressing them are rich, not flawed, and reveal how Seo Taiji was so important to her and her generation. At the same time, her communication reveals that as a male performer using rock and rap, Taiji contradicts some of her feminist ideals and wishes. These sides of Yun-hûi’s talk reveal the intricacies of the Taiji phenomenon and the difficulty (perhaps futility) of neatly defining it, in terms of gender for example.
Yun-hûi’s responses caused me to reconsider the purpose of my research project. At the very end of our final interview session, her comments made me think carefully about emotions in experiencing Taiji and the awkwardness of using feminist analysis to understand popular music songs. Quickly after she had finished her final argument, we exchanged the following words:
Yh: … I think I, I think I say something too, ah too ah… educational?
Lectural?
J: Ah, too intellectual, too scholarly?
Yh: No no.
J: What do you mean?
Yh: Educational?
J: Oh you mean trying to teach people?
Yh: Ya! [Oh!] So that’s why I don’t like talking about feminism anymore.
J: You feel like you are lecturing people
Yh: Yes, right. Uncomfortable
J: Yes I know that feeling… that’s ok, I don’t think you’re lecturing me.
Yh: (Laughs a little).
By having her discuss her feminist concerns and popular music, I made her feel uncomfortable in her seriousness and passion and in showing these to me. In a way, by speaking with such passion, she exposed herself to me perhaps more than she had planned to. Perhaps by showing the depth of her concerns, she felt uncomfortable because had returned to lecturing or talking at people about gender, patriarchy and so on ―literally at me but also and more importantly an imagined audience of young South Koreans who in her words “Are just interested in being sexy.” Her seriousness, although meaningful and valid, did not seem to be what informed her most meaningful experiences of Taiji. The value of Taiji and his music seemed to lie more in the joy and excitement she experienced in our earlier sessions than in this last session. Despite this observation, we should acknowledge that all of her talk and responses—some voices oppositional or in struggle and others speaking of her lighter engagement with her culture―combine to reveal her complexity. Furthermore, her excitement and joy and then apprehension, discomfort and seriousness when listening to Taiji’s songs with gender in mind in turn contribute to her culture itself.
Previous posts
- [ch. 1] Kang-t'ae
- [ch. 1] Chae-tol
- [ch. 1] conclusion
- CHAPTER 2: Talking about Seo Taiji, popular music ...
- [ch. 2] Popular music and gendered meanings
- [ch. 2] Popular music and gendered meanings cont.
- [ch. 2] Taiji and gender 1
- [ch. 2] Taiji and gender 2 & Conclusion
- Vignette # 2
- CHAPTER 3: Alternative masculinity through Seo Tai...