AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

Abstracts saturday morning 115
HIP HOP TRANSNATIONALISM AND DIASPORIC IDENTITY:
KOREAN AMERICAN HIP HOP AND THE POLITICS OF BELONGING
Hyun Chang
University of California, Los Angeles
What are the stakes when hip hop crosses national borders? This paper explores the way
Drunken Tiger, a group of two Korean American men who launched a hip hop career in Seoul
in 1999, negotiate cultural and ethnic identity within the contradictory sociocultural contexts
of South Korea. Analyzing texts, sampling, and CD visual art, I will outline the ways Drunken
Tiger have positioned themselves in relation to two hegemonic visions: first, anti-American
Korean nativism, which exerts assimilationist pressure on the group; and second, a hip hop
globalism rooted in African American iconography and styles.
In their first album, Drunken Tiger have portrayed themselves as the first voice of true hip
hop in Seoul. Backed by a large South Korean entertainment corporation and big-time popular
music entrepreneurs in Seoul, their first album showcased their capability to improvise
rap in African American English and publicized their former hip hop and DJ careers in Los
Angeles and Chicago. Similarly, the CD jacket evoked African American hip hop by featuring
a number of youths standing defiantly against the backdrop of a graffiti-filled wall and dancing
on urban dance floors in baggy jeans. These qualities distinguished Drunken Tiger from
most Korean popular music groups, who did not make fine distinctions between popular music
genres but instead focused on heavily scripted and synchronized dance moves. Drunken
Tiger’s popularity with South Korean youth shows the extent to which claims of genre authenticity
matter for an audience increasingly familiar with the stylistic and iconographic features
of African American hip hop.
On the other hand, Drunken Tiger’s subsequent choice to revise their earlier image and
forge new forms of identification with South Korea provides insight into the politics of the
local internalized by the group. Fashioning this new image has involved incorporations of nativist
tropes and symbols, including folk guitar songs that were used to protest South Korea’s
authoritarian regimes in the 1970s. For their album art, the group members posed in Seoul’s
urban slums and captured images of the working class, translating the idea of hip hop as a
voice of marginality into the local (Korean) context. The chauvinistic criticisms that challenged
the group’s “Koreanness” may explain the group’s shift.
Finally, in their most recent album titled “Liberation 1945” (Korea was liberated from
Japanese colonialism in 1945), Drunken Tiger problematize ethnic and cultural nationalisms
through ethnic drag and dis-identification. For example, they parody anti-Japanese sentiment,
which constitutes the foundation of Korean nationalism, by rendering it as discursive
and by parroting nationalist rhetoric in playful ways. Caricatures of liberation songs in the
style of Bob Marley and of nationalist melodies serve as the sonic background.
Drawing on the theories of Shu-mei Shih and José Esteban Muñoz, my paper can be read
as a case study of the process by which “nonwhite Western” persons become a “problem” in
the East and of the creative ways in which these uniquely situated minorities articulate the
relationship between the local and the global.