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.
welcome to my thesis - blog version
Published 월요일, 4월 03, 2006 by 쟈넷.
Here is my online version of my Master's thesis on Seo Taiji and Masculinities. The paper version should be available through university libraries in pdf format. I officially graduate from York University (Toronto) in October, 2006.
Introduction
Published 일요일, 4월 02, 2006 by 쟈넷.
My thesis is set in South Korea from 1992 to the present. 1990s South Korea, especially urban South Korea, was a time of radical social and cultural transformation particularly for pre-teens, teens and university-aged students. This period, post-authoritarian South Korea, saw the first democratically elected civilian presidency (Kim Young Sam) in 1993 after decades of military dictatorship, and substantial political and social reforms brought about mostly during the Kim Dae Jung presidency (1998-2002). Although the 1990s did not bring as many social and political reforms that many South Koreans had hoped for and many social chances were turned back by the IMF (International Monetary Crisis) crisis of 1997-2001, it was an especially exciting and fun time for young people. This was mainly due to rapidly increased consumerism and a new popular culture industry for youth. The 1990s brought the first full-scale youth culture and marked generational changes to South Korean society. Although these changes are often over-stated, erasing variety among youth especially class and urban versus rural differences, shifting social attitudes and behaviours and cultural tastes were so noticeable this generation was quickly labeled the “New Generation” (shinsedae): “Newspapers are filled with stories about the New Generation—those born after 1970—whose values and customs seem alien and irresponsible to their elders. These youth who cut holes in new jeans, prefer pizza to rice, and don’t believe the old are necessarily wise” (Kim B., in Morelli, 2001:250); a generation who “defend their “newness” actively…are different from their parent generation who work feverishly, restrain their opinions rather than express, and who are constrained by Confucian ethics” (Joo E-w, 1994 in Lee K-h, 2002:48). These young people were either teens or in their early twenties when the subject of this thesis, Seo Taiji burst onto the scene in 1992.
At the centre of this new youth culture and generational conflict was the pop star Seo Taiji (Sô T’ae-ji) and his group Seo Taiji and Boys (Sô T’ae-ji-wa Aidûl). Taiji is often labeled the hero or president of this new youth culture (munhwa taet’ongnyông), commanded unprecedented media attention throughout the 1990s and is considered by many as the most important and influential figure for popular culture in contemporary in South Korea. In the 2000s, Seo Taiji’s activities have remained important to massive numbers of young Koreans, including many born in the 1980s, younger than shinsedae, and are still treated as major cultural events. For those unfamiliar with Seo Taiji, a fact sheet on Taiji follows this introduction.
Aim
My aim has been to focus in on themes, patterns and conceptions of masculinity in South Korea as represented by cultural products and discussion among young Koreans. Specifically my aim has been to examine how South Korean popular culture, namely Taiji’s songs and performances, deal with “being a man” using non-verbal modes of signification (primarily aspects of music but also dance and so on). Additionally, in evaluating young Koreans’ sense of Taiji, popular music and “being a man”, I have aimed to trace patterns of gender, with special attention to those of masculinity.
Audience and significance
In writing this thesis, I have borne two primary audiences in mind. Considering these audiences can help us to reflect on the significance of my aims of studying the South Korean popular music superstar Seo Taiji in terms of masculinities.[1]
One audience comprises cultural anthropologists, popular music or media scholars and ethnomusicologists with an interest in interrelationships between cultural products (music, film and so on) and gender as well as the discourses surrounding them, specifically in an Asian context. Examining Seo Taiji in terms of masculinities gives this audience a view into changes and contingencies of South Korean gender formations based on the music of one of the biggest local superstars in Asia. Seo Taiji’s music and performances as well its reception, facilitate understanding gender complexity and contradictions which have impacted the culture of younger South Koreans, since Taiji’s début in 1992. Specifically, the Taiji phenomenon allows us to gauge perceptions of young Korean masculinity, as it hovers precariously between parent culture and future possibilities.
My second audience consists of fans of Seo Taiji and Korean adults with an interest in the Taiji phenomenon and the cultural transformations brought about through youth culture in 1990s South Korea. By examining Taiji in terms of masculinities, I offer this audience a chance to re-examine the role of Taiji’s music and performance within the social and cultural transformations of 1990s South Korea. This approach offers an alternative to the usual lens of “youth” and “youth culture” which has previously been used to examine Taiji in both the Korean and English literature (Howard, 2002; Kim, 1999; Lee K-h., 2002; Morelli, 2001; Shin S-c., 1998; Yi, 1999; Young, 1999).
Scope and subject matter
My thesis explores the patterns of masculinity (namsôngsông or namjadaum) in Seo Taiji’s music and performance, in particular songs, live performances and music videos as well as fans’ communications about him, his music and performance and issues of gender.
A total of thirteen fans participated in my research but the opinions and narratives of only nine made it into my thesis, four participants dropping out along the way. My informants included South Koreans studying in or near Toronto as international or ESL students as well as two studying in Seoul. The nine range between 19 to 32 years of age, three under 25, three in their mid-upper 20s and three in their early 30s, with one female and two males fitting into each age range. In total, approximately 42 hours of interviews were conducted between December 2004 and August 2005, excluding brief casual conversations I had with Korean acquaintances and friends on my thesis topic.
In the thesis, I examine Taiji’s output in terms of not only the vocal style and timbre of his songs, but also with reference to other performance parameters such as dance, video/filming techniques and instrumentation. I have chosen songs and performances dating from the early to mid 1990s, consisting of three slow soft-pop songs and three performances of one of Taiji’s biggest hits, “Hayôga”, which is a mixture of rap, dance and rock; a music video and two live televised performances. I chose examples from the early to mid 1990s because Taiji most strongly affected South Korean society and was most visible during these years. This period was also a turning point in South Korean popular culture, in which Taiji played a major role. Combined with new youth and consumer cultures, these years confronted gender issues, with normative sexuality and gender norms seriously confronted by those in a sexuality politics movement and by young feminists/post feminists (Seo, 2001, 1996; Song, 2003; Lee S-h, 2002). I chose soft, slow songs to highlight Taiji’s androgynous voice. Also, I chose these songs because writers often focus on Taiji’s more shocking, noisy songs while neglecting his popular soft, sweet ballad influenced songs. I chose “Hayôga” and its performances because of its inventive features, exciting energy of dance and memorable music video, which communicated the newness and energy of shinsedae. Songs such as “Classroom idea” and “Comeback Home” are often the focus of studies on Taiji because of their lyrics’ social commentary [e.g. Baek S-k, 1996; Shin S-c, 1998; Morelli, 2001; Kim H.S., 1999). I hope to fill a gap in the scholarship on Seo Taiji by examining in detail songs that are not lyrically particularly exciting and as such are overlooked or dealt with only briefly in existing scholarship (e.g. Howard, 2002 & 2003).
The scope of my thesis also includes patterns of masculinity represented in other types of South Korean cultural products, notably film, and in Korean discourses on gender, collected and discussed by social and cultural anthropologists in recent years.
My conceptualization of gender, and masculinity, comes primarily from the field of study Critical Studies of Men. This approach to studying gender and men grew out of feminist address of men’s responsibility in challenging patriarchy (e.g. Snodgrass, 1977), queer scholarship (e.g. Plummer, 1981), as well as empirical studies of masculinity (e.g. Herdt, 1981) of the late 1970s and early 1980s, which stood out against feminist conceptualizations of gender that tended to promote binary conceptions of gender and a simplistic view of the “male sex role” (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005). Critical studies of men has also been influenced by feminist writing by women of colour (e.g. Davis, 1983; hooks, 1984) who drew attention to the biases inherent in focusing on power issues simply in terms of “men” versus “women” (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005). For my uses and many others doing masculinity studies, gender is about the social relations that people act within, but it is different from other social relations because of its relationship with bodies (Connell, 2003). Gender does not simply describe differences in bodies, although in some instances it does. The social practices of gender
Gender then, is something people and society use to make sense of differences in bodies, especially reproductive differences, and is what people (collectively and individually) do to bring reproductive differences between bodies into the social and cultural domain (Connell, 2003). Gender is not something that people have, but more something that people do. This way of thinking about gender allows us to acknowledge that individuals have some choice over what gender practices they use. It allows us to focus on diversity of genders (rather than simply focusing on two “types”)—diversity among and within individuals. It also allows us to acknowledge that gender patterns are changeable, over time and over situations and locations, but that they can also be, and often are, rigidly maintained. Such a way of conceptualizing gender shares some similarities with queer theorist Judith Butler’s conception in Gender Trouble (1990). For instanced Butler emphasized that gender “should be seen as a fluid variable which shifts and changes in different contexts and at different times” (Gauntlett, 1998) and that people can, and should, do (‘play’ or ‘perform’) various genders (Butler, 1990). Butler argued that if people promoted and enacted a multiplicity of genders, then hegemonic hetero-normative gender practices and normative/suppressive conceptions of gender and sexuality could be weakened (Butler, 1990). This positive idea has influenced why I have bothered to examine Korean popular music in terms of masculine diversity—there can be optimism in pointing out the complexities and confusion of masculinity in South Korean contemporary culture.
Masculinity, for my uses, refers to arrangements of social practice that dictate what it means to be a ‘man’ and how to be a ‘man’. As arrangements of practices, as opposed to static types, multiple masculinities can take shape according to the gendered environment where they are enacted (Petersen, 2003; Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005). In other words, a masculinity is understandable in relation to other masculinities (or femininities or other gender configurations) that circulate in a given time period, locale and situation. Critical studies of men have been especially successful in illustrating how masculinities, in an extraordinary number of societies and historical periods, are organized hierarchically (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005). Furthermore, it has illustrated that individuals often strategically take up different gender patterns—some powerful and taken-for-granted, some oppositional and so on—depending on the situation that they find themselves in or in certain periods in their life (e.g. Wetherell & Edley (1999) on a wide spectrum of England men, and Taga (2003) on young urban Japanese men). As such, I have approached my analysis of masculinity in Taiji’s music and performances and my consideration of fans’ communications with sensitivity to multiple patterns of masculinity, and to the status of such patterns in relation to others in contemporary South Korean society.
My focus is specifically on masculinities of young Korean men. Although most studies of masculinities tend to still focus on men, of course examining the relationships between women and masculinities would be beneficial to understand ways of being a young Korean female. In Korean studies for instance, Kwon (2000) outlines the close relationships between highly masculinized Korean militarism and formations of Korean femininity and female culture in contemporary South Korean society. Additionally, Halberstam (1998) thoroughly addresses females enacting masculinities and in the South Korean context, Abelmann (2003) addresses this to some degree as well. My reason for focusing on young men and masculinities is primarily personal as well as practical. Practically, as a Master’s thesis, examining the masculinities of both young Korean men and women would have developed into far too long a manuscript. Personally, as the girlfriend/fiancé to a young South Korean man, I have gained invaluable incite into how masculinity plays out day-to-day in the lives of young Korean men. Having dated this young Korean for four years, lived together for an extended period—for a time with his brother living with us as well—and regularly interacting with his primarily male Korean friends and brother, my understanding of ways of being a young Korean man far exceeds that of young Korean females. Although I am knowledgeable of the latter, my high interest and knowledge of the intricacies of being a young Korean man is something that is required for my happiness and success in a serious, intercultural relationship. The scope of my thesis reflects this personal need.
Analytic Methods: Discourse Analysis
My primary method of analysis for both Taiji’s music and performance and fan communications is derived from discourse analysis, that is, a consideration of fans’ talk and Taiji’s music and performance as communicative practices that work to create and maintain meanings in society. In other words, I believe that Taiji’s music, performance and fans’ talk contribute to gender patterns and to gender changes or transformations, as is the case in contemporary South Korea. This means that I work from an idea that the music, performance and talk participate in socially constructing reality, rather than simply telling about reality (Bradby, 2003). Taiji’s music, performance and fans’ talk are part of a reflexive process where they display existing gender conventions but also change them. I came to discourse analysis through Korean Studies, and therefore am more familiar with analysis of South Korean subject matters than with the work of the ‘inventors’ of discourse analysis, Bakhtin or Foucault, for instance. The work of Korean Studies discourse analysis which I have paid most attention to is that of social anthropologist Nancy Abelmann’s work on the talk of middle aged-women in 1990s Seoul, The Melodrama of mobility: women, talk, and class in contemporary South Korea (2003). Although much South Korean cultural studies research throughout the 1990s and 2000s has been plagued by uncritical appropriation of Western theories and research questions and has paid little attention to local details and realities (Kang, 2004; Lee K-h., 2002), the application of discourse analysis to Korean studies has fared better. Writers such as Abelmann (2003) and Song (forthcoming) have been able to borrow from Foucault or Bakhtin while constructing questions based on details of contemporary South Korean reality. For example, Abelmann (2003) borrows Bakhtin’s insistence that everyday has its own language, where a word “tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life” (Bakhtin, 1981:293), where the social values, meanings and conflicts of a certain time are wrapped up in its words. Following Bakhtin’s call to trace the socio-ideological process at work in language, she isolates key words in the talk of her informants and traces their usage to illustrate how these words are not only strongly gendered and classed, but reveal striking conflicts and ambivalences over how one should be a woman in 1990s South Korea. Song has drawn upon Foucault, among others, in developing her approach to discourse analysis. Specifically in her forthcoming paper “"Family Breakdown" and invisible homeless women: neo-liberal governance during the Asian Debt Crisis in South Korea 1997-2001”, she analyses “Family Breakdown” to illustrate Foucault’s idea of liberal governance and how power works through various agents and operates intimately. In-so-doing, she argues South Korean neo-liberalism is a “social ethos of economic-moral value” prevailing in the talk and activities of those in various segments of government and civilian society (Song, forthcoming:21). With its focus on micro-analysis, discourse analysis has been helpful in focusing critical Korean Studies on specifics of South Korean culture/society, rather than producing abstract and generalized studies heavily influenced by Western theory and often indistinguishable from studies of Western societies (Kang, 2004:254).
Examining the talk of fans and their responses to listening to Taiji songs with me, I focused on what conceptions of gender emerged from their communication. I looked for patterns in fans’ talk that displayed common ways of ‘knowing’ gender and of ‘knowing’ popular music and Taiji. In the case of three fans, I specifically focused on how they spoke with special attention to how and when they spoke emotionally, in order to track the emotional meaningfulness of Taiji as well as of gender patterns and issues.
Attempting discourse analysis of songs and performances was more difficult. This is primarily because there is still debate over whether music itself can be analyzed as a discourse and few scholars have tackled it as such (Bradby, 2003). A major roadblock facing those wishing to unravel music as a discursive site is the post-structuralist ambivalence about addressing whether music alone is capable of carrying social meanings without words (Shepherd, 2003). Although poststructuralist thinkers, most notably Barthes and Kristeva, place considerable weight on the importance of music’s sound in forming our understandings of our social worlds, they believe music to be “…‘prior’ to language and social awareness” and removed from ideological processes (Shepherd, 2003:115). Because of this belief, many scholars think of music as “…‘pure’ and ‘innocent’ when compared to the ‘ideological loading’ accompanying other form of symbolism” (Shepherd, 2003:115). In short, poststructuralists have fallen into the same trap as most structuralists in simply assuming linguistic meaning’s superiority over all other symbolic forms (Shepherd, 2003). Similarly in linguistics, research on speech intonation (the different pitches and inflections used in talking) has assumed intonation to be only an “…affective colouring of the word-based sense of language”, although this assumption has begun to be challenged in recent years (Daley, 1997:74). Ethnographic work in non-Western cultures done by ethnomusicologists such as Steven Feld (1990[1982]) and Anthony Seeger (1987) as well as anthropologists focusing on body-movement such as Brenda Farnell (1995), Alessandro Duranti (1992) and Adam Kendon (1980, 1983), has revealed that this linguistic superiority and divide between linguistic meaning and other symbolic forms, such as sounds or movement, is Euro-centric and simply not assumed in many of the world’s cultures (Farnell and Graham, 1998). Popular music scholars have perhaps shied away from attempting discourse analysis of the sound of music because of this Euro-centric assumption about linguistic superiority, and tend to focus on lyrical meanings or do not attempt analyzing meaning and discourse at all but instead focus on content analysis or the formal structures of the music. Even Middleton (1990) who emphasizes the importance of decoding meanings in popular music sound, has assumed a division between linguistic and paralinguistic sounds and the superiority of linguistic meanings. Bradby in her survey article on popular music and discourse analysis isolates only four scholars, Walser (1993), Brackett (1992) and Shepherd and Wicke (1997), who have attempted discourse analysis while seriously examining musical sound in popular music (Bradby, 2003).
Despite this lack of theory and suitable models, I have chosen to investigate how musical sound in South Korean popular music and performances can be ideologically meaningful and if it can indeed signify masculinities. I paid most attention to vocal sound and vocal styles, as well as the interrelationships between these and other parameters such as instrumentation, dance and video filming techniques.
Key concept: Hegemonic masculinity
I have used the concept hegemonic masculinity to facilitate my analysis of both fans’ communications and Taiji songs and performances. Hegemonic masculinity is a concept formed by R.W. Connell in the early 1980s and marked the beginning of critical studies of men. It has been used widely since the 1990s in disciplines such as communications, social anthropology and social psychology, among others (Hearn, 2004; Hanke, 1998). According to Connell, hegemonic masculinity refers to “…the configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women” (1995:77). This concept then refers to the practices of masculinity that hold the most power in retaining gender hierarchies, and patriarchy more generally. A definition put forth by Robert Hanke highlights the automatic acceptance of hegemonic masculinity: the “social ascendancy of a particular version or model of masculinity that, operating on the terrain of ‘common sense’ and conventional morality, defines ‘what it means to be a man’” (Hanke, 1990 in 1998:185). As the term implies, it is a mistake to assume that all, or even most, men’s actions, beliefs, and ways of living fall within the superior power position. Differing masculinities do not operate as discrete entities, but are part of a hierarchy of masculinities that “…is itself a source of violence, since force is used in defining and maintaining the hierarchy” (Connell, 2000: 217). In western cultures, as well as in other parts of the world, the most extreme uses of force directed against other men are gay bashing, including murder, but there are more subtle fear tactics deployed against straight men and boys (Connell, 2000 and 1998). Connell points out that, with the help of ethnographers, we must acknowledge that a great number “…of men and boys have a divided, tense, or oppositional relation to hegemonic masculinity” and those who practice masculinities that clearly go against hegemonic masculinity risk being “…abused as wimps, cowards, fags etc” (Connell 2002:217).
Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity has proven helpful to critical studies of men in a number of ways. It has been well suited to identifying forms of domination by men over women and other men, and “addressing what is happening beyond mere force” when the dominance of certain conceptions and practices of masculinity become taken-for-granted (Hearn, 2004:55). The concept is helpful in seeing the diversity of masculinity; it draws our attention to the hierarchical positioning of gender practices, and to “…the relevance of relations between men as well as relations between men and women for the formation of gendered identities” (Wetherell and Edley, 1999:336).
South Korean hegemonic masculinity
The concept of hegemonic masculinity has not been as commonly used in Korean studies as it has on research on men and masculinities in the West. In her essay “The Production and subversion of hegemonic masculinity: reconfiguring gender hierarchy in contemporary South Korea”, Moon Seungsook (2002) uses the concept to draw our attention to the power processes at work in upholding certain patterns of masculinity, highlighting their automatic acceptance and drawing our attention to diversity in Korean masculinity, although this later point remains understudied. Cheng (2000) mentions the concept briefly. I find Moon’s use of the term apt, and it matches my informants’ views about the most accepted ways of being a Korean man as well as my own observations based on my daily life and my experiences as an ESL teacher near Seoul and in a small provincial city in Kyôngsangbuk-do in 2002 and 2003. Moon argues that in the contemporary South Korean context, hegemonic masculinity refers to the configuration of masculine practices played out in three key ways: participation in the mandatory military service, acting as primary or exclusive family breadwinner, and avoiding daily childcare and nurturing in the home (2002). All three of these components work together to uphold male domination over females while reinforcing and rewarding men who act-out these masculinized public, patriotic and courageous, and non-nurturing roles (Moon, 2002). The South Korean system of military conscription for males combined with the legacy of decades of military dictatorship, according to Moon (2002, 2005), Jager (2002), Cheng (2000) and Kwon (2000), work to shape and uphold the domineering position of militarized masculinity― a myriad of authoritative, reactionary, virile and heterosexist practices― in the South Korean gender hierarchy. Kwon (2000) also shows that not only does the military influence conceptions of manly-practices in daily life, but also the working structure of institutions such as the public education system and many companies and corporations. But as Connell (2000) and Hearn (2004) emphasize, hegemonic masculinity is often challenged and subject to alteration or resistance, and so in the South Korean context, some groups of younger men are now increasingly beginning to challenge hegemonic masculinity especially regarding men’s roles in the military service as well as in childcare (Moon, 2002)― something we will see in fans’ talk in Chapter 1. Despite these protests, hegemonic masculinity in South Korea remains quite tenacious as public discourses continue to reveal a largely uniform sense of masculinity: courageous and confident, authoritative and decidedly concerned with and delegated to ‘public’ spheres (Kim K.H., 2004; Moon, 2002; Finch and Kim, 2002). Also, the success of this hegemonic masculinity is inextricably tied to the success of the ‘development’ of the South Korean nation as a whole, economically as well as culturally and politically (Song, forthcoming; Kim K.H., 2004; Finch and Kim, 2002, Kim H.M., 2001; Jager, 2002; Nelson, 2000). In film, when men are depicted distanced from hegemonic masculinity or unable to attain it (common in films made or set in pre-democratic 1980s South Korea), these ‘soft’ and dependent or powerless men do not provide useful alternative role models to hegemonic masculinity (Kim, 2004; Abelmann, 2003). Instead portrayed and viewed as undesirable, they in fact reinforce hegemonic masculinity as audiences dream of heroes taking their place (Kim, 2004, Abelmann, 2003). In the present era of the Korean blockbuster, this hero, an ‘ideal’ of hegemonic masculine practice, has arrived in full force as “…splendid, aggressive, and confidently violent” (Kim K.H., 2004:232).
Against this background, I indicate how Taiji often seems strikingly different from such dominant masculinities, but is also oddly similar at times. For instance, Taiji’s pro-feminist song “Victim” or his gentle vocal style in tandem with his androgynous image, confirm alternative masculinities while the lack of female participation in his performances and music making combined with displays of masculine competition and heroics through dance, confirm hegemonic masculinity. With the concept of hegemonic masculinity and an overall conception of gender that emphasizes the diversity of masculinity, I conceive of Taiji the star and Taiji’s performance as revealing and reinforcing multiple patterns of masculinity which are not equal in the South Korean gender hierarchy. As such, although Taiji is often understood as an alternative man by fans as well as in the popular press, I consider that Taiji’s music and performance are inconsistent in their contestation of powerful Korean masculine practices and patterns. I also argue that fans speak about Taiji and popular music in ways that emphasize masculine diversity and instability.
Contribution
My focus on South Korean popular music and gender will contribute to recent scholarship on East Asian popular music and gender, from writers such as Darling-Wolf (2004a, 2004b), Fung and Curtin (2002), Yano (2003), Stanlaw (2000) and Baranovitch (2003). Alongside Heather Willoughby’s forthcoming essay “Image is everything: The marketing of femininity in South Korean popular music”, my thesis contributes a much needed South Korean case to this emerging scholarship.
The thesis also contributes to the study of South Korean masculinity. Although a fair amount of research has addressed masculinized discourses and structures in contemporary South Korean society, for example Abelmann (2003), Cheng (2000), Cho (2000), Cho (2004), Choi (1998, 2002), Jager (1996, 2002), Kim H. M. (2001), Kim & Finch (2002), Kwon (2000), Lee J. J. H (2002), Moon (2002a, 2002b) and Song (forthcoming), few studies examine popular cultural or young South Korean masculinities. With its focus on popular music, my work complements research on film, most notably Kim Kyung Hyun’s book The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema (2004) as well as Choi (2002), and research by Seungsook Moon on television (Moon, 2005). Focused on young masculinities, my research, again with Kim’s analysis of young men in films (2004), Moon’s (2005) of young soldiers on a television game show as well as Hong’s (2003) of soccer stars’ images and advertising campaigns diversifies research on South Korean gender by including more patterns of young men’s masculinities.
My focus on non-linguistic modes of signification as well as how they make sense to South Koreans brings different parameters of analysis to South Korean gender studies. The research on South Korean gender issues to date has tended to focus almost exclusively on linguistic modes of signification with a few studies focused on visual modes, such as Kim Kyung Hyun’s analysis of film or Jager’s excellent analysis of architecture and sculpture in her essay “Monumental histories: Manliness, the military, and the War Memorial” (2002). My focus on music poses new questions about gender in contemporary South Korea. My consideration of the relationship between gender and sound and their reception in the South Korean context also contributes to internationalizing the debate over popular music sound and meaning.
Organization of the thesis
My thesis two main sections, Fans’ Communications and Songs/ Performances, each with two chapters. The sections are preceded by a short vignette where I present experiences I have had in South Korea which relate to the topic of my thesis.
Chapter 1, Talking about Taiji emotionally, partially acts as a second introduction, providing those unfamiliar with Seo Taiji with a few fans’ extended accounts of Taiji and fandom. Presented as case studies, this chapter also examines the meaningfulness of how Taiji and gender are spoken about in emotional ways.
Chapter 2, Talking about Taiji, popular music and gendered meanings, examines how participants discuss these topics with attention given to how they spoke about popular music sound and gender. Patterns that emerged in fans’ talk on these issues are highlighted. It asks about the implications of the ways participants expressed their conception of gender and Taiji’s place within this.
Chapter 3, Alternative masculinity through Taiji’s soft voice, asks how Taiji’s vocal style in three slow songs from the early 1990s is meaningful in terms of masculinity. Features of Taiji’s extremely soft vocal style used in singing and in rapping are examined and analyzed in relation to powerful patterns of masculinity circulating in South Korean society.
Chapter 4, the Relationship of “Hayôga” performances to three themes of South Korean masculinity, analyses three performances of Taiji’s hit song “Hayôga” and traces themes of masculinity, fraternity, remasculinization, and competition with ‘Western’ masculinities, within them. Aspects of performance, notably new and noisy elements of the song, filming techniques of the video, hip hop style dancing, and the narrative of the music video, are examined and analyzed in conjunction with prevailing themes of masculinity.
Conclusion, presents participants’ feedback on my thesis and considers my position as a (very) partial insider on the development and shaping of this thesis.
[1] I have borrowed this way of presenting my audiences and how they impact the significances of my study from the introduction to Jesook Song’s Ph.D. dissertation, Shifting technologies: Neoliberalization of the welfare state in South Korea, 1997-2001 (2003). I have intentionally chosen to have two audiences like Song—and like in her study these two do overlap in some cases—and have tried to write my thesis in such as way that it significant to both. With the exception of articles by Maliangkay (2003 a & b), most English language articles by non-Koreans on South Korean popular music seem to be written with only a non-Korean audience in mind (e.g. Howard, 2002 & 2003; Morelli, 1997 & 2001; Willoughby, 2005) and as such are of little value or interest to a South Korean audience. Because growing numbers of South Koreans can read academic English well, non-Korean writers should consider them as potential audiences and write accordingly. This is especially important in my case, as the subject matter of my thesis, Seo Taiji, has been such a huge cultural phenomenon in South Korea that any published work on him is scrutinized by high numbers of fans (facilitated by websites such as www.seotaijireport.com) and other Koreans interested in issues of popular culture.
Seo Taiji Fact Sheet
· The group Seo Taiji and Boys (Sô T’ae-ji-wa Aidûl) was formed in Seoul in 1991 and released their first album in March 1992. The group consisted of Taiji and two male hip hop-style dancers (the Boys), Lee Juno (I Chun-o) and Yang Hyun Suk (Yang Hyôn-sôk).
· Seo Taiji and Boys released four studio albums, three live albums and a greatest hits album between 1992 and 1996. The group broke up in early 1996.
· Seo Taiji came back as a solo artist in1998 and has so far released three studio albums and two live albums. His latest album was released early 2004.
· In Seo Taiji and Boys and as a solo artist, Taiji wrote, arranged and produced virtually every song, and was either the primary producer or heavily involved in production as well as in sound engineering on all albums As well as being the main singer and rapper, Taiji also has played bass and guitar on many songs, but in performances he usually just does vocals.
· Seo Taiji and Boys albums and songs included many genres of popular music, most prominently dance, rap, soft pop, and metal influenced rock. Taiji’s solo albums are also an amalgamation of genres, most prominently new-metal, alternative rock, gangster rap, Cypress Hill style rap, emo and metallic hardcore punk.
· Taiji was one of the first South Korean artists to use rap and dance music and is often credited with popularizing these genres.
· Taiji is famous for his unconventional manoeuvres in the South Korean music industry. While the vast majority of singers and groups are dependent on and manipulated by broadcasting and entertainment companies (Yi, 1996; Macintyre, 2002), Taiji has been able to remain independent from this system, which has ended up working in his favour economically. For example, through the 1990s up to today, the popularity of singers and groups often depend on how well they are received on television pop music performance contests and on television appearances generally. In contrast, Taiji chose early on in his career not to appear on television except for a few live concert appearances. Since the early 1990s, Taiji albums have been the highest selling albums in South Korea, his new songs are downloaded and paid for at a much higher rate than other artists, and in 2003, Taiji signed on with an advertising campaign for KTF for 2.7 million dollars (USD), the largest sum a spokesperson has ever received in South Korea (Kim S-j., 2004; Seo Taiji, KTF-wa kwang'gomodel, 2003).
· Over the years, a number of Taiji and Taiji and Boys songs have been censored, either by the government or the media. For example, “Shidaeyugam” (1995) (censored by the government) and “Victim” (2004) (deemed unfit for broadcast by MBC, KBS and SBS) (Im, 2004).
At the centre of this new youth culture and generational conflict was the pop star Seo Taiji (Sô T’ae-ji) and his group Seo Taiji and Boys (Sô T’ae-ji-wa Aidûl). Taiji is often labeled the hero or president of this new youth culture (munhwa taet’ongnyông), commanded unprecedented media attention throughout the 1990s and is considered by many as the most important and influential figure for popular culture in contemporary in South Korea. In the 2000s, Seo Taiji’s activities have remained important to massive numbers of young Koreans, including many born in the 1980s, younger than shinsedae, and are still treated as major cultural events. For those unfamiliar with Seo Taiji, a fact sheet on Taiji follows this introduction.
Aim
My aim has been to focus in on themes, patterns and conceptions of masculinity in South Korea as represented by cultural products and discussion among young Koreans. Specifically my aim has been to examine how South Korean popular culture, namely Taiji’s songs and performances, deal with “being a man” using non-verbal modes of signification (primarily aspects of music but also dance and so on). Additionally, in evaluating young Koreans’ sense of Taiji, popular music and “being a man”, I have aimed to trace patterns of gender, with special attention to those of masculinity.
Audience and significance
In writing this thesis, I have borne two primary audiences in mind. Considering these audiences can help us to reflect on the significance of my aims of studying the South Korean popular music superstar Seo Taiji in terms of masculinities.[1]
One audience comprises cultural anthropologists, popular music or media scholars and ethnomusicologists with an interest in interrelationships between cultural products (music, film and so on) and gender as well as the discourses surrounding them, specifically in an Asian context. Examining Seo Taiji in terms of masculinities gives this audience a view into changes and contingencies of South Korean gender formations based on the music of one of the biggest local superstars in Asia. Seo Taiji’s music and performances as well its reception, facilitate understanding gender complexity and contradictions which have impacted the culture of younger South Koreans, since Taiji’s début in 1992. Specifically, the Taiji phenomenon allows us to gauge perceptions of young Korean masculinity, as it hovers precariously between parent culture and future possibilities.
My second audience consists of fans of Seo Taiji and Korean adults with an interest in the Taiji phenomenon and the cultural transformations brought about through youth culture in 1990s South Korea. By examining Taiji in terms of masculinities, I offer this audience a chance to re-examine the role of Taiji’s music and performance within the social and cultural transformations of 1990s South Korea. This approach offers an alternative to the usual lens of “youth” and “youth culture” which has previously been used to examine Taiji in both the Korean and English literature (Howard, 2002; Kim, 1999; Lee K-h., 2002; Morelli, 2001; Shin S-c., 1998; Yi, 1999; Young, 1999).
Scope and subject matter
My thesis explores the patterns of masculinity (namsôngsông or namjadaum) in Seo Taiji’s music and performance, in particular songs, live performances and music videos as well as fans’ communications about him, his music and performance and issues of gender.
A total of thirteen fans participated in my research but the opinions and narratives of only nine made it into my thesis, four participants dropping out along the way. My informants included South Koreans studying in or near Toronto as international or ESL students as well as two studying in Seoul. The nine range between 19 to 32 years of age, three under 25, three in their mid-upper 20s and three in their early 30s, with one female and two males fitting into each age range. In total, approximately 42 hours of interviews were conducted between December 2004 and August 2005, excluding brief casual conversations I had with Korean acquaintances and friends on my thesis topic.
In the thesis, I examine Taiji’s output in terms of not only the vocal style and timbre of his songs, but also with reference to other performance parameters such as dance, video/filming techniques and instrumentation. I have chosen songs and performances dating from the early to mid 1990s, consisting of three slow soft-pop songs and three performances of one of Taiji’s biggest hits, “Hayôga”, which is a mixture of rap, dance and rock; a music video and two live televised performances. I chose examples from the early to mid 1990s because Taiji most strongly affected South Korean society and was most visible during these years. This period was also a turning point in South Korean popular culture, in which Taiji played a major role. Combined with new youth and consumer cultures, these years confronted gender issues, with normative sexuality and gender norms seriously confronted by those in a sexuality politics movement and by young feminists/post feminists (Seo, 2001, 1996; Song, 2003; Lee S-h, 2002). I chose soft, slow songs to highlight Taiji’s androgynous voice. Also, I chose these songs because writers often focus on Taiji’s more shocking, noisy songs while neglecting his popular soft, sweet ballad influenced songs. I chose “Hayôga” and its performances because of its inventive features, exciting energy of dance and memorable music video, which communicated the newness and energy of shinsedae. Songs such as “Classroom idea” and “Comeback Home” are often the focus of studies on Taiji because of their lyrics’ social commentary [e.g. Baek S-k, 1996; Shin S-c, 1998; Morelli, 2001; Kim H.S., 1999). I hope to fill a gap in the scholarship on Seo Taiji by examining in detail songs that are not lyrically particularly exciting and as such are overlooked or dealt with only briefly in existing scholarship (e.g. Howard, 2002 & 2003).
The scope of my thesis also includes patterns of masculinity represented in other types of South Korean cultural products, notably film, and in Korean discourses on gender, collected and discussed by social and cultural anthropologists in recent years.
My conceptualization of gender, and masculinity, comes primarily from the field of study Critical Studies of Men. This approach to studying gender and men grew out of feminist address of men’s responsibility in challenging patriarchy (e.g. Snodgrass, 1977), queer scholarship (e.g. Plummer, 1981), as well as empirical studies of masculinity (e.g. Herdt, 1981) of the late 1970s and early 1980s, which stood out against feminist conceptualizations of gender that tended to promote binary conceptions of gender and a simplistic view of the “male sex role” (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005). Critical studies of men has also been influenced by feminist writing by women of colour (e.g. Davis, 1983; hooks, 1984) who drew attention to the biases inherent in focusing on power issues simply in terms of “men” versus “women” (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005). For my uses and many others doing masculinity studies, gender is about the social relations that people act within, but it is different from other social relations because of its relationship with bodies (Connell, 2003). Gender does not simply describe differences in bodies, although in some instances it does. The social practices of gender
…often do more than that, or less than that, or something else completely. In relation to the distinction of male from female bodies, social practices sometimes exaggerate (e.g. maternity clothes), sometimes deny (many employment practices), sometimes mythologize (computer games), sometimes complicate (‘third gender’ customs). So we cannot say that social arrangements routinely ‘express’ biological differences (Connell, 2003:10).
Gender then, is something people and society use to make sense of differences in bodies, especially reproductive differences, and is what people (collectively and individually) do to bring reproductive differences between bodies into the social and cultural domain (Connell, 2003). Gender is not something that people have, but more something that people do. This way of thinking about gender allows us to acknowledge that individuals have some choice over what gender practices they use. It allows us to focus on diversity of genders (rather than simply focusing on two “types”)—diversity among and within individuals. It also allows us to acknowledge that gender patterns are changeable, over time and over situations and locations, but that they can also be, and often are, rigidly maintained. Such a way of conceptualizing gender shares some similarities with queer theorist Judith Butler’s conception in Gender Trouble (1990). For instanced Butler emphasized that gender “should be seen as a fluid variable which shifts and changes in different contexts and at different times” (Gauntlett, 1998) and that people can, and should, do (‘play’ or ‘perform’) various genders (Butler, 1990). Butler argued that if people promoted and enacted a multiplicity of genders, then hegemonic hetero-normative gender practices and normative/suppressive conceptions of gender and sexuality could be weakened (Butler, 1990). This positive idea has influenced why I have bothered to examine Korean popular music in terms of masculine diversity—there can be optimism in pointing out the complexities and confusion of masculinity in South Korean contemporary culture.
Masculinity, for my uses, refers to arrangements of social practice that dictate what it means to be a ‘man’ and how to be a ‘man’. As arrangements of practices, as opposed to static types, multiple masculinities can take shape according to the gendered environment where they are enacted (Petersen, 2003; Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005). In other words, a masculinity is understandable in relation to other masculinities (or femininities or other gender configurations) that circulate in a given time period, locale and situation. Critical studies of men have been especially successful in illustrating how masculinities, in an extraordinary number of societies and historical periods, are organized hierarchically (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005). Furthermore, it has illustrated that individuals often strategically take up different gender patterns—some powerful and taken-for-granted, some oppositional and so on—depending on the situation that they find themselves in or in certain periods in their life (e.g. Wetherell & Edley (1999) on a wide spectrum of England men, and Taga (2003) on young urban Japanese men). As such, I have approached my analysis of masculinity in Taiji’s music and performances and my consideration of fans’ communications with sensitivity to multiple patterns of masculinity, and to the status of such patterns in relation to others in contemporary South Korean society.
My focus is specifically on masculinities of young Korean men. Although most studies of masculinities tend to still focus on men, of course examining the relationships between women and masculinities would be beneficial to understand ways of being a young Korean female. In Korean studies for instance, Kwon (2000) outlines the close relationships between highly masculinized Korean militarism and formations of Korean femininity and female culture in contemporary South Korean society. Additionally, Halberstam (1998) thoroughly addresses females enacting masculinities and in the South Korean context, Abelmann (2003) addresses this to some degree as well. My reason for focusing on young men and masculinities is primarily personal as well as practical. Practically, as a Master’s thesis, examining the masculinities of both young Korean men and women would have developed into far too long a manuscript. Personally, as the girlfriend/fiancé to a young South Korean man, I have gained invaluable incite into how masculinity plays out day-to-day in the lives of young Korean men. Having dated this young Korean for four years, lived together for an extended period—for a time with his brother living with us as well—and regularly interacting with his primarily male Korean friends and brother, my understanding of ways of being a young Korean man far exceeds that of young Korean females. Although I am knowledgeable of the latter, my high interest and knowledge of the intricacies of being a young Korean man is something that is required for my happiness and success in a serious, intercultural relationship. The scope of my thesis reflects this personal need.
Analytic Methods: Discourse Analysis
My primary method of analysis for both Taiji’s music and performance and fan communications is derived from discourse analysis, that is, a consideration of fans’ talk and Taiji’s music and performance as communicative practices that work to create and maintain meanings in society. In other words, I believe that Taiji’s music, performance and fans’ talk contribute to gender patterns and to gender changes or transformations, as is the case in contemporary South Korea. This means that I work from an idea that the music, performance and talk participate in socially constructing reality, rather than simply telling about reality (Bradby, 2003). Taiji’s music, performance and fans’ talk are part of a reflexive process where they display existing gender conventions but also change them. I came to discourse analysis through Korean Studies, and therefore am more familiar with analysis of South Korean subject matters than with the work of the ‘inventors’ of discourse analysis, Bakhtin or Foucault, for instance. The work of Korean Studies discourse analysis which I have paid most attention to is that of social anthropologist Nancy Abelmann’s work on the talk of middle aged-women in 1990s Seoul, The Melodrama of mobility: women, talk, and class in contemporary South Korea (2003). Although much South Korean cultural studies research throughout the 1990s and 2000s has been plagued by uncritical appropriation of Western theories and research questions and has paid little attention to local details and realities (Kang, 2004; Lee K-h., 2002), the application of discourse analysis to Korean studies has fared better. Writers such as Abelmann (2003) and Song (forthcoming) have been able to borrow from Foucault or Bakhtin while constructing questions based on details of contemporary South Korean reality. For example, Abelmann (2003) borrows Bakhtin’s insistence that everyday has its own language, where a word “tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life” (Bakhtin, 1981:293), where the social values, meanings and conflicts of a certain time are wrapped up in its words. Following Bakhtin’s call to trace the socio-ideological process at work in language, she isolates key words in the talk of her informants and traces their usage to illustrate how these words are not only strongly gendered and classed, but reveal striking conflicts and ambivalences over how one should be a woman in 1990s South Korea. Song has drawn upon Foucault, among others, in developing her approach to discourse analysis. Specifically in her forthcoming paper “"Family Breakdown" and invisible homeless women: neo-liberal governance during the Asian Debt Crisis in South Korea 1997-2001”, she analyses “Family Breakdown” to illustrate Foucault’s idea of liberal governance and how power works through various agents and operates intimately. In-so-doing, she argues South Korean neo-liberalism is a “social ethos of economic-moral value” prevailing in the talk and activities of those in various segments of government and civilian society (Song, forthcoming:21). With its focus on micro-analysis, discourse analysis has been helpful in focusing critical Korean Studies on specifics of South Korean culture/society, rather than producing abstract and generalized studies heavily influenced by Western theory and often indistinguishable from studies of Western societies (Kang, 2004:254).
Examining the talk of fans and their responses to listening to Taiji songs with me, I focused on what conceptions of gender emerged from their communication. I looked for patterns in fans’ talk that displayed common ways of ‘knowing’ gender and of ‘knowing’ popular music and Taiji. In the case of three fans, I specifically focused on how they spoke with special attention to how and when they spoke emotionally, in order to track the emotional meaningfulness of Taiji as well as of gender patterns and issues.
Attempting discourse analysis of songs and performances was more difficult. This is primarily because there is still debate over whether music itself can be analyzed as a discourse and few scholars have tackled it as such (Bradby, 2003). A major roadblock facing those wishing to unravel music as a discursive site is the post-structuralist ambivalence about addressing whether music alone is capable of carrying social meanings without words (Shepherd, 2003). Although poststructuralist thinkers, most notably Barthes and Kristeva, place considerable weight on the importance of music’s sound in forming our understandings of our social worlds, they believe music to be “…‘prior’ to language and social awareness” and removed from ideological processes (Shepherd, 2003:115). Because of this belief, many scholars think of music as “…‘pure’ and ‘innocent’ when compared to the ‘ideological loading’ accompanying other form of symbolism” (Shepherd, 2003:115). In short, poststructuralists have fallen into the same trap as most structuralists in simply assuming linguistic meaning’s superiority over all other symbolic forms (Shepherd, 2003). Similarly in linguistics, research on speech intonation (the different pitches and inflections used in talking) has assumed intonation to be only an “…affective colouring of the word-based sense of language”, although this assumption has begun to be challenged in recent years (Daley, 1997:74). Ethnographic work in non-Western cultures done by ethnomusicologists such as Steven Feld (1990[1982]) and Anthony Seeger (1987) as well as anthropologists focusing on body-movement such as Brenda Farnell (1995), Alessandro Duranti (1992) and Adam Kendon (1980, 1983), has revealed that this linguistic superiority and divide between linguistic meaning and other symbolic forms, such as sounds or movement, is Euro-centric and simply not assumed in many of the world’s cultures (Farnell and Graham, 1998). Popular music scholars have perhaps shied away from attempting discourse analysis of the sound of music because of this Euro-centric assumption about linguistic superiority, and tend to focus on lyrical meanings or do not attempt analyzing meaning and discourse at all but instead focus on content analysis or the formal structures of the music. Even Middleton (1990) who emphasizes the importance of decoding meanings in popular music sound, has assumed a division between linguistic and paralinguistic sounds and the superiority of linguistic meanings. Bradby in her survey article on popular music and discourse analysis isolates only four scholars, Walser (1993), Brackett (1992) and Shepherd and Wicke (1997), who have attempted discourse analysis while seriously examining musical sound in popular music (Bradby, 2003).
Despite this lack of theory and suitable models, I have chosen to investigate how musical sound in South Korean popular music and performances can be ideologically meaningful and if it can indeed signify masculinities. I paid most attention to vocal sound and vocal styles, as well as the interrelationships between these and other parameters such as instrumentation, dance and video filming techniques.
Key concept: Hegemonic masculinity
I have used the concept hegemonic masculinity to facilitate my analysis of both fans’ communications and Taiji songs and performances. Hegemonic masculinity is a concept formed by R.W. Connell in the early 1980s and marked the beginning of critical studies of men. It has been used widely since the 1990s in disciplines such as communications, social anthropology and social psychology, among others (Hearn, 2004; Hanke, 1998). According to Connell, hegemonic masculinity refers to “…the configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women” (1995:77). This concept then refers to the practices of masculinity that hold the most power in retaining gender hierarchies, and patriarchy more generally. A definition put forth by Robert Hanke highlights the automatic acceptance of hegemonic masculinity: the “social ascendancy of a particular version or model of masculinity that, operating on the terrain of ‘common sense’ and conventional morality, defines ‘what it means to be a man’” (Hanke, 1990 in 1998:185). As the term implies, it is a mistake to assume that all, or even most, men’s actions, beliefs, and ways of living fall within the superior power position. Differing masculinities do not operate as discrete entities, but are part of a hierarchy of masculinities that “…is itself a source of violence, since force is used in defining and maintaining the hierarchy” (Connell, 2000: 217). In western cultures, as well as in other parts of the world, the most extreme uses of force directed against other men are gay bashing, including murder, but there are more subtle fear tactics deployed against straight men and boys (Connell, 2000 and 1998). Connell points out that, with the help of ethnographers, we must acknowledge that a great number “…of men and boys have a divided, tense, or oppositional relation to hegemonic masculinity” and those who practice masculinities that clearly go against hegemonic masculinity risk being “…abused as wimps, cowards, fags etc” (Connell 2002:217).
Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity has proven helpful to critical studies of men in a number of ways. It has been well suited to identifying forms of domination by men over women and other men, and “addressing what is happening beyond mere force” when the dominance of certain conceptions and practices of masculinity become taken-for-granted (Hearn, 2004:55). The concept is helpful in seeing the diversity of masculinity; it draws our attention to the hierarchical positioning of gender practices, and to “…the relevance of relations between men as well as relations between men and women for the formation of gendered identities” (Wetherell and Edley, 1999:336).
South Korean hegemonic masculinity
The concept of hegemonic masculinity has not been as commonly used in Korean studies as it has on research on men and masculinities in the West. In her essay “The Production and subversion of hegemonic masculinity: reconfiguring gender hierarchy in contemporary South Korea”, Moon Seungsook (2002) uses the concept to draw our attention to the power processes at work in upholding certain patterns of masculinity, highlighting their automatic acceptance and drawing our attention to diversity in Korean masculinity, although this later point remains understudied. Cheng (2000) mentions the concept briefly. I find Moon’s use of the term apt, and it matches my informants’ views about the most accepted ways of being a Korean man as well as my own observations based on my daily life and my experiences as an ESL teacher near Seoul and in a small provincial city in Kyôngsangbuk-do in 2002 and 2003. Moon argues that in the contemporary South Korean context, hegemonic masculinity refers to the configuration of masculine practices played out in three key ways: participation in the mandatory military service, acting as primary or exclusive family breadwinner, and avoiding daily childcare and nurturing in the home (2002). All three of these components work together to uphold male domination over females while reinforcing and rewarding men who act-out these masculinized public, patriotic and courageous, and non-nurturing roles (Moon, 2002). The South Korean system of military conscription for males combined with the legacy of decades of military dictatorship, according to Moon (2002, 2005), Jager (2002), Cheng (2000) and Kwon (2000), work to shape and uphold the domineering position of militarized masculinity― a myriad of authoritative, reactionary, virile and heterosexist practices― in the South Korean gender hierarchy. Kwon (2000) also shows that not only does the military influence conceptions of manly-practices in daily life, but also the working structure of institutions such as the public education system and many companies and corporations. But as Connell (2000) and Hearn (2004) emphasize, hegemonic masculinity is often challenged and subject to alteration or resistance, and so in the South Korean context, some groups of younger men are now increasingly beginning to challenge hegemonic masculinity especially regarding men’s roles in the military service as well as in childcare (Moon, 2002)― something we will see in fans’ talk in Chapter 1. Despite these protests, hegemonic masculinity in South Korea remains quite tenacious as public discourses continue to reveal a largely uniform sense of masculinity: courageous and confident, authoritative and decidedly concerned with and delegated to ‘public’ spheres (Kim K.H., 2004; Moon, 2002; Finch and Kim, 2002). Also, the success of this hegemonic masculinity is inextricably tied to the success of the ‘development’ of the South Korean nation as a whole, economically as well as culturally and politically (Song, forthcoming; Kim K.H., 2004; Finch and Kim, 2002, Kim H.M., 2001; Jager, 2002; Nelson, 2000). In film, when men are depicted distanced from hegemonic masculinity or unable to attain it (common in films made or set in pre-democratic 1980s South Korea), these ‘soft’ and dependent or powerless men do not provide useful alternative role models to hegemonic masculinity (Kim, 2004; Abelmann, 2003). Instead portrayed and viewed as undesirable, they in fact reinforce hegemonic masculinity as audiences dream of heroes taking their place (Kim, 2004, Abelmann, 2003). In the present era of the Korean blockbuster, this hero, an ‘ideal’ of hegemonic masculine practice, has arrived in full force as “…splendid, aggressive, and confidently violent” (Kim K.H., 2004:232).
Against this background, I indicate how Taiji often seems strikingly different from such dominant masculinities, but is also oddly similar at times. For instance, Taiji’s pro-feminist song “Victim” or his gentle vocal style in tandem with his androgynous image, confirm alternative masculinities while the lack of female participation in his performances and music making combined with displays of masculine competition and heroics through dance, confirm hegemonic masculinity. With the concept of hegemonic masculinity and an overall conception of gender that emphasizes the diversity of masculinity, I conceive of Taiji the star and Taiji’s performance as revealing and reinforcing multiple patterns of masculinity which are not equal in the South Korean gender hierarchy. As such, although Taiji is often understood as an alternative man by fans as well as in the popular press, I consider that Taiji’s music and performance are inconsistent in their contestation of powerful Korean masculine practices and patterns. I also argue that fans speak about Taiji and popular music in ways that emphasize masculine diversity and instability.
Contribution
My focus on South Korean popular music and gender will contribute to recent scholarship on East Asian popular music and gender, from writers such as Darling-Wolf (2004a, 2004b), Fung and Curtin (2002), Yano (2003), Stanlaw (2000) and Baranovitch (2003). Alongside Heather Willoughby’s forthcoming essay “Image is everything: The marketing of femininity in South Korean popular music”, my thesis contributes a much needed South Korean case to this emerging scholarship.
The thesis also contributes to the study of South Korean masculinity. Although a fair amount of research has addressed masculinized discourses and structures in contemporary South Korean society, for example Abelmann (2003), Cheng (2000), Cho (2000), Cho (2004), Choi (1998, 2002), Jager (1996, 2002), Kim H. M. (2001), Kim & Finch (2002), Kwon (2000), Lee J. J. H (2002), Moon (2002a, 2002b) and Song (forthcoming), few studies examine popular cultural or young South Korean masculinities. With its focus on popular music, my work complements research on film, most notably Kim Kyung Hyun’s book The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema (2004) as well as Choi (2002), and research by Seungsook Moon on television (Moon, 2005). Focused on young masculinities, my research, again with Kim’s analysis of young men in films (2004), Moon’s (2005) of young soldiers on a television game show as well as Hong’s (2003) of soccer stars’ images and advertising campaigns diversifies research on South Korean gender by including more patterns of young men’s masculinities.
My focus on non-linguistic modes of signification as well as how they make sense to South Koreans brings different parameters of analysis to South Korean gender studies. The research on South Korean gender issues to date has tended to focus almost exclusively on linguistic modes of signification with a few studies focused on visual modes, such as Kim Kyung Hyun’s analysis of film or Jager’s excellent analysis of architecture and sculpture in her essay “Monumental histories: Manliness, the military, and the War Memorial” (2002). My focus on music poses new questions about gender in contemporary South Korea. My consideration of the relationship between gender and sound and their reception in the South Korean context also contributes to internationalizing the debate over popular music sound and meaning.
Organization of the thesis
My thesis two main sections, Fans’ Communications and Songs/ Performances, each with two chapters. The sections are preceded by a short vignette where I present experiences I have had in South Korea which relate to the topic of my thesis.
Chapter 1, Talking about Taiji emotionally, partially acts as a second introduction, providing those unfamiliar with Seo Taiji with a few fans’ extended accounts of Taiji and fandom. Presented as case studies, this chapter also examines the meaningfulness of how Taiji and gender are spoken about in emotional ways.
Chapter 2, Talking about Taiji, popular music and gendered meanings, examines how participants discuss these topics with attention given to how they spoke about popular music sound and gender. Patterns that emerged in fans’ talk on these issues are highlighted. It asks about the implications of the ways participants expressed their conception of gender and Taiji’s place within this.
Chapter 3, Alternative masculinity through Taiji’s soft voice, asks how Taiji’s vocal style in three slow songs from the early 1990s is meaningful in terms of masculinity. Features of Taiji’s extremely soft vocal style used in singing and in rapping are examined and analyzed in relation to powerful patterns of masculinity circulating in South Korean society.
Chapter 4, the Relationship of “Hayôga” performances to three themes of South Korean masculinity, analyses three performances of Taiji’s hit song “Hayôga” and traces themes of masculinity, fraternity, remasculinization, and competition with ‘Western’ masculinities, within them. Aspects of performance, notably new and noisy elements of the song, filming techniques of the video, hip hop style dancing, and the narrative of the music video, are examined and analyzed in conjunction with prevailing themes of masculinity.
Conclusion, presents participants’ feedback on my thesis and considers my position as a (very) partial insider on the development and shaping of this thesis.
[1] I have borrowed this way of presenting my audiences and how they impact the significances of my study from the introduction to Jesook Song’s Ph.D. dissertation, Shifting technologies: Neoliberalization of the welfare state in South Korea, 1997-2001 (2003). I have intentionally chosen to have two audiences like Song—and like in her study these two do overlap in some cases—and have tried to write my thesis in such as way that it significant to both. With the exception of articles by Maliangkay (2003 a & b), most English language articles by non-Koreans on South Korean popular music seem to be written with only a non-Korean audience in mind (e.g. Howard, 2002 & 2003; Morelli, 1997 & 2001; Willoughby, 2005) and as such are of little value or interest to a South Korean audience. Because growing numbers of South Koreans can read academic English well, non-Korean writers should consider them as potential audiences and write accordingly. This is especially important in my case, as the subject matter of my thesis, Seo Taiji, has been such a huge cultural phenomenon in South Korea that any published work on him is scrutinized by high numbers of fans (facilitated by websites such as www.seotaijireport.com) and other Koreans interested in issues of popular culture.
Seo Taiji Fact Sheet
· The group Seo Taiji and Boys (Sô T’ae-ji-wa Aidûl) was formed in Seoul in 1991 and released their first album in March 1992. The group consisted of Taiji and two male hip hop-style dancers (the Boys), Lee Juno (I Chun-o) and Yang Hyun Suk (Yang Hyôn-sôk).
· Seo Taiji and Boys released four studio albums, three live albums and a greatest hits album between 1992 and 1996. The group broke up in early 1996.
· Seo Taiji came back as a solo artist in1998 and has so far released three studio albums and two live albums. His latest album was released early 2004.
· In Seo Taiji and Boys and as a solo artist, Taiji wrote, arranged and produced virtually every song, and was either the primary producer or heavily involved in production as well as in sound engineering on all albums As well as being the main singer and rapper, Taiji also has played bass and guitar on many songs, but in performances he usually just does vocals.
· Seo Taiji and Boys albums and songs included many genres of popular music, most prominently dance, rap, soft pop, and metal influenced rock. Taiji’s solo albums are also an amalgamation of genres, most prominently new-metal, alternative rock, gangster rap, Cypress Hill style rap, emo and metallic hardcore punk.
· Taiji was one of the first South Korean artists to use rap and dance music and is often credited with popularizing these genres.
· Taiji is famous for his unconventional manoeuvres in the South Korean music industry. While the vast majority of singers and groups are dependent on and manipulated by broadcasting and entertainment companies (Yi, 1996; Macintyre, 2002), Taiji has been able to remain independent from this system, which has ended up working in his favour economically. For example, through the 1990s up to today, the popularity of singers and groups often depend on how well they are received on television pop music performance contests and on television appearances generally. In contrast, Taiji chose early on in his career not to appear on television except for a few live concert appearances. Since the early 1990s, Taiji albums have been the highest selling albums in South Korea, his new songs are downloaded and paid for at a much higher rate than other artists, and in 2003, Taiji signed on with an advertising campaign for KTF for 2.7 million dollars (USD), the largest sum a spokesperson has ever received in South Korea (Kim S-j., 2004; Seo Taiji, KTF-wa kwang'gomodel, 2003).
· Over the years, a number of Taiji and Taiji and Boys songs have been censored, either by the government or the media. For example, “Shidaeyugam” (1995) (censored by the government) and “Victim” (2004) (deemed unfit for broadcast by MBC, KBS and SBS) (Im, 2004).