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 4: The relationship of “Hayôga” performances to three themes of South Korean masculinity
Published 화요일, 3월 07, 2006 by 쟈넷 | E-mail this post
(Speaking excitedly) “You know what? When he (Taiji) came on TV the second time, I still remember how excited I was! The music video (for “Hayôga”)was shows on TV. It was so cool! (Laughs). I was late to my private institute because of the video. Lots of teenagers competing in a dance contest. Korean versus American. The Americans came up with better skills. The Koreans wanted to beat them, so they call Taiji and Boys, so they beat them because the two guys are so good.” - Kang-t’ae
Introduction
Seo Taiji and Boys are widely believed to be the representatives of shinsedae (the new generation) to which, in some ways, Kang-t’ae belongs. Their performances loudly exhibited the generation gap between shinsedae and adult culture, which emerged with the advent of consumer culture in early 1990s South Korea. Gender in these young men’s noisy exhibition of youth culture is generally rendered invisible. However, Taiji and Boys’ exhibition and celebration of youth culture, although paramount to generational change in Korea in the 1990s, are not important enough to warrant sidestepping gender altogether. The importance of Taiji and Boys’ performances and shinsedae ‘anthems’ (“Nan Alayo”, “Hayôga”, “Kyoshil Idea”, “Shidaeyugam”) to 1990s Korean culture warrant they be examined in terms of gender. We should ask, how have performances of these songs participated in constructing gender, specifically ways of being a young Korean man in contemporary South Korea? To confidently understand youthful South Korean masculinity, specifically of young Korean men, we must answer this question and learn what masculine themes are at work in Taiji and Boys’ biggest hits, such as “Hayôga” or “Shidaeyugam.”
In this chapter I have chosen to investigate gender in performances of “Hayôga” (1993) while noticing themes of masculinity that are significant to contemporary Korean popular culture. My approach here is influenced by recent research on East Asian masculinities and popular music, most notably Darling-Wolf (2003, 2004) and Baranovitch (2003) who relate popular music to important discourses of masculinity circulating in other areas (film, television, novels, sports and so on) of Japanese and Mainland Chinese culture respectively. Like Darling-Wolf’s analysis of Japanese idol star Kimura Takuya, my analysis is aimed at uncovering the codes of young men’s masculinity emerging in Seo Taiji and Boys’ mediated representations “…and examining the ways in which these codes might challenge, support, and relate to other constructions of masculinities present in the…[Korean] popular cultural environment” (2003: 3). I have found that performances of “Hayôga” in the 93 Naeil ûn nûjûri (1993) and the 94 Yôrûm saeroun tojôn (1994) live television performances (with live audiences) and the song’s music video present multiple and contradictory masculinities of young men, at times hegemonic and at others subversive or alternative. Darling-Wolf (2003, 2004) and Baranovitch (2003) have made similar observations on contemporary Japanese and Chinese pop stars respectively.
The masculinities of “Hayôga” performances are complex because they reveal themes of Korean masculinities—fraternity, remasculinization, and competition with ‘western’ masculinity—which hold ambiguous positions relating to the gender hierarchy. [1] However, through participating in these masculine themes, these performances also confirm the link between masculinities and South Korean males, which continues to dominate much of contemporary South Korean society. In so doing, they legitimize the hierarchical positioning of males who succeed in performing powerful forms of masculinity, while denying females from performing them. [2] The “Hayôga” performances then act in re-confirming, for younger Koreans, the dominant position of males, even as these performances also rebel against conservative, decidedly patriarchal adult culture. My choice to analyze young men’s masculinities in these performances, instead of how they relate to young women’s masculine practices for instance, is too not only show young men’s gender configurations, but to also illustrate how the performances participate in legitimizing male dominance by linking males to (dominant) masculinities.
[1] These themes and their relationships to gender hierarchies are examined by Kim K.H. (2004), Abelmann (2003), Jager (2002, 1996) and Choi (2002, 1998).
[2] Moon (2005) has analyzed this, the legitimatization of the dominant position of males, as a group, through the production of men as a social construct in contemporary South Korea. Moon illustrates how males are conscripted into the army (and never females) and through the military are constructed into men. A specific militarized masculinity is formed and contrasted against a femininity assigned to females, and this femininity, and weak masculinities as well, is ‘beat out of’ the conscripts. This making of young male Koreans into men, even in the 2000s, is part of a nationalist project forming the “nation as a community of blood and belonging among men in which women become absent” (Moon, 2005:86-87).