This part of the interview took anywhere between thirty minutes to three hours. “Using these drawings as sign posts, I asked each artist to narrate his or her life for me. Some added doodles, arrows, illustrations.Īfter the timeline was finished, Song talked to them. Some used different colors to “code” different periods in their life. The results were as varied as the artists. I asked each artist to freely draw his or her life using these materials,” she said. The aim was to create a log of “important moments in each artist’s life including the first time she or he heard hip-hop, wrote lyrics, recorded music, performed on a stage, released an album.” “I brought along a spiral bound sketchbook and a set of 12 colored markers. Instead of a basic question and answer format, Song devised a more flexible, creative way to work with her subjects. Song put her own stamp on the interviews she conducted with over 40 Korean hip hop artists. And so she went to work creating her own. When Song began work on her dissertation, “Hanguk, Hip Hop: The making of Hip Hop in South Korea,” she quickly realized that the sources she needed didn’t exist. From these activities, Korean hip hop as cultural and musical entity began to grow.” They started writing lyrics, making beats, and performing together. “Those with a creative drive began to think about what Korean hip hop would sound like. They crowded into cafes and clubs to listen together. “Because hip hop cassette tapes and CDs were rare at the time, it was not uncommon to have 100-200 people join,” Song said. Tapes and CDs would be brought back from America by Koreans who had traveled abroad and then in the artsy neighborhood of Seoul called Hongdae, hip hop fans would meet for “listening sessions.” Like modern fans of any type of pop culture, Korean hip hop fans connected with each other first online, sharing lyrics and news, and then offline. It started in the bedrooms and homes of Korean fans of American hip hop, who logged onto their personal computers and joined community bulletin boards.” “In America,” Song pointed out, “it’s not uncommon to hear people say that ‘hip hop started in the streets.’ In Korea, hip hop did not start in the streets. With the rise of the internet, hip hop made the leap from the U.S. “It’s safe to say that the Korean public got their first glimpse of hip hop through the sensational 1992 debut of the group Seo Taiji and the Boys, who broke out into the music scene with a dance song infused with rap segments,” she said. Song said that hip hop first started to take root there in the early nineties, just a few years before she heard “Gangsta’s Paradise” on the radio. Many Americans might not know anything about Korea’s hip hop history. It also reflects the very nature of Korean hip hop as it continues to change and evolve to reflect the society and culture that it is a part of.” The title, she said, “represents how hip hop is created, lived, and shared by artists in Korea. So adding hip top to ‘hada,’ Koreans frequently use hip hop as a verb: to hip hop.” The title means, roughly, “to do hip hop.” Song explains, “By adding the Korean verb ‘hada,’ which means ‘to do,’ with a noun, it becomes a verb of its own. The interviews Song conducted for her dissertation have now been turned into two books, volumes 1 and 2 of Hiphop-Hada, which were published in July by Annapurna Book. She received her PhD in Communication in May of 2016 and the previous fall, organized a Visions & Voices event at USC that was an extension of her dissertation and which brought some of Korea’s most influential hip hop artists to Los Angeles. Twenty years later, as a doctoral candidate at USC Annenberg, Song’s dissertation focused on Korean hip hop. From this moment, I became an avid hip hop fan.” But the beat was enough to catch me because it was unlike any other song I’d heard before. “I was still learning English at the time and was quite young,” she said, “so I couldn’t understand the lyrics. for three years during elementary school, was transfixed by what she heard. Song, who was born in Seoul and lived in the U.S. In a Blockbuster Video parking lot in Virginia, Myoung-Sun (Kelly) Song sat in the family car, waiting for her mom to return some rented movies when “Gangsta’s Paradise” by Coolio came on the radio. Specialized Journalism (Arts and Culture) (MA).Public Relations Innovation, Strategy and Management (Online) (MS).Global Media and Communication (MA) / Global Media and Communications (MSc).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |