Korean Hip Hop Research Articles

Penggunaan Akun Twitter Sebagai Media Komunikasi Di Kalangan Penggemar Musik Korean HIP HOP

Social media is media created to facilitate communication for humans. Twitter is one of the social media that is currently used by many people, not only to communicate but also to write opinions, to news. Fans as a community gather online through social media Twitter. These fans are joined in a community for the presence of a brand. Indonesia is ranked 1st as a country that talks about K-Pop on Twitter the most. Apart from talking about K-Pop, Twitter users also talk about other music genres such as Korean Hip-Hop. Base on social media Twitter, is an account that accommodates people who have the same interests to share information and communicate. The purpose of this study is to find out how social media Twitter becomes a medium of communication for fans of Korean Hip-Hop music. The research method used is a case study with a qualitative approach. The data analysis technique used in this study was by conducting interviews with six informants and one triangulator. The results of the study show that through User- Generated Content it produces an active community of Korean Hip-Hop music fans on the @khhfess account. That way the role of fans on the @khhfess account is very influential in the growth of the Korean Hip-Hop community on Twitter. This proves that Twitter social media can be the right communication medium for a community to discuss and share information.

Gentlemen rappers: Masculinity and traditional style in Korean popular music performance

Across its history, K-pop has put traditional Korean elements to a diversity of uses, including in music, dance and visual style. This article investigates the use of traditional elements in the sub-genre of Korean hip hop and rap performance. In this strongly masculine sub-genre, the cultural meanings invoked in the incorporation and remediation of traditional Korean elements take on a more particular generic significance, one that highlights the hegemonic masculinity enjoyed by the referenced figure of the ‘gentleman scholar’ ( seonbi). With this narrower scope of investigation, I argue that the use of traditional cultural elements in Korean popular music can simultaneously function as an element of attraction for global audiences, as has previously been argued, while still maintaining local, genre-specific meanings. In particular, I argue that the gentlemanliness of the ‘gentleman scholar’ comes from and expresses a position of power and privilege.

Third Generation Zainichi Korean Hip Hop Music: Investigation of the Diverse Focus on Representation of Heritage Embodied by Young Zainichi Rappers

This research project centers on the discussion about the question of how the Third generation Zainichi Korean rappers internalize, reproduce and represent their Korean ethnic heritage through the form of Hip Hop. Three Zainichi rappers, including Chanmina, Kohh, and Moment Joon, are carefully selected for the case study with the expectation that they each embody a distinctive focus on their self-identity construction. The central proposition of this paper is to highlight the cruciality of approaching the ontological construction of young Zainichi Koreans concerning individual choices and then to regard the formation and representation of individual identities as an ongoing process rather than a fixed, monolithic entity.

Hip Hop Mun Ikjeom

Research Article| March 01 2023 Hip Hop Mun Ikjeom: The Life and Music of Hyun Jin Young Myoung-Sun Song Myoung-Sun Song Dr. Myung-Sun Song is an assistant professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on the representations of race, gender, sexuality, class, and national identity in Korean media and popular culture. She is the author of Hanguk Hip Hop: Global Rap in South Korea (2019, Palgrave Macmillan), the first scholarly book-length study in English or Korean on the subject of Korean hip hop. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of Popular Music Studies (2023) 35 (1): 4–19. https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2023.35.1.4 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Myoung-Sun Song; Hip Hop Mun Ikjeom: The Life and Music of Hyun Jin Young. Journal of Popular Music Studies 1 March 2023; 35 (1): 4–19. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2023.35.1.4 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of Popular Music Studies Search In the early to mid-1990s, groups such as Hyun Jin Young and Wawa, Seo Taiji and Boys, and DEUX helped introduce hip hop to Korean audiences by incorporating rap into mainstream dance music and performance. This style will later be labelled “rap dance,” a precedent to K-pop, where rap is frequently formulated into segments of dance songs.1 During this period, television—particularly channels like AFKN and later MTV—served as a gateway to American hip hop for Korean youth. An important coinciding moment is the 1992 LA Riots, which would have an impact on how Koreans viewed Black American communities and how hip hop was perceived in South Korea during its formative years. These sociocultural and historical conditions set the backdrop for the rise of Hanguk hip hop [Korean hip hop] from the mid- to late-1990s, when Korean fans of American hip hop—through the help of technology, most notably personal computer... You do not currently have access to this content.

Blackness, Koreanness, and Han: Unmasking Race in Korean Hip Hop

Previous studies have analyzed Korean hip hop through the lens of authenticity, language, and cultural hybridity, but not through the lens of race. One of the main characteristics of hip hop culture is that it emerged in the form of resistance against dominant hegemony and as a form of resistance to systemic injustice; however, it is difficult to find K-hip hop artists that defy the racial supremacy of Koreanness and racism through their art. This article utilizes Yoon Mi-rae, who is half-Black and half-Korean, as a significant text to explore how race plays a role in Korean society and how Blackness, Koreanness, and han intersect in the K-hip hop scene. Utilizing the concept of community cultural wealth, interest convergence principle, and Koreanness, the study analyzes how Yoon Mi-rae’s “Black Koreanness” was consumed by Korean media and music industry, and how Yon Mi-rae, as an embodiment of Blackness and Han, uses hip hop and her intersectionality as a tool of resistance to both the mainstream American and mainstream Korean racial ideology and discourse. With the growing influence and popularity of K-hip hop globally, the article problematizes the message K-hip hop is reflecting and sending the world about race.

<쇼미더머니>를 통해 본 한국힙합의 계승과 변화

The purpose of this paper is to examine the aspects of desire and resistance inherent in Korean hip-hop. And to understand the current socio-cultural function and position of Korean hip-hop. For this purpose, <Show Me the Money> was selected as a sample of Korean hip-hop. And all the songs released from season 3 to season 10 were analyzed.
 Through this, I tried to understand the desire and resistance inherent in today's Korean hip-hop. And compared with the past from the point of view of 'inheritance and change', and examined what it means.
 As a result, today's Korean hip-hop has the following socio-cultural meaning. First, underground hip-hop in Korea has been handed down as an ‘attitude’, claiming an independent identity and pursuing self-realization. Second, Korean hip-hop has changed from a means for public discourse to a means for personal discourse. Third, capitalism and materialism have shifted from the object of resistance to the object of pursuit. I hope that this thesis can contribute to the formation of a progressive discourse related to Korean hip-hop.

Industrial Hip Hop Against Hip Hop Industry

Industrial Hip Hop Against Hip Hop Industry

한국 언더그라운드 힙합에 대한 문화적 고찰: 하위 문화에서 주류 문화로

The Korean hip-hop genre has undergone a process of hybridization with hip-hop culture originally from the Bronx due to cultural imperialism. After hybridization, Korean hip-hop was divided into two-ways, which was main-steam hip-hop (commercial) and underground hip-hop(sub-cultural). Korean underground hip-hop with sub-cultural characteristics was formed by the PC communication club in late 1990s. This study investigated characteristics of Korean underground hip-hop music based on the sub-culture theory, by analyzing lyrics of hip-hop music released in late 1990s and early 2000, scenes in a hip-hop TV show called Show Me the Money, broadcasted since 2010, and popular video clips of Dingo Freestyle on YouTube. Through Dick Hebdige’s sub-culture theory, this study was able to analyze sub-cultural characteristics of Korean underground hip-hop in the past and the process of Korean underground hip-hop merging with mainstream culture through media. In particular, this study also tried to look into new-media platform to see how Korean underground hip-hop merged with mainstream culture is being handled in the area of new-media platforms such as YouTube. Results showed that the Korean’s underground hip-hop which had sub-cultural characteristics, was integrated with the mainstream culture starting with Show Me the Money. In this integration, the Korean underground hip-hop music adopted the Capitalistic ideology that values only wealth, and placed sub-culture members within society by showing rapper’s family and friend relationships on TV. In addition, the resistance characteristics of culture and fashion bricolage were mass-produced and distributed to the public by the mass media and cultural industries. The mass media and cultural industries also commercialized rappers(sub-culture members) as rapper-celebrities, distributing them to the public so that people could naturally accept the merge with capitalism ideology. Rapper’s commercialization made anti-capitalistic sub-culture as hedonic and showing-off culture, resulting in wide spread of Swag and Flex cultural codes among hip hop musicians and music listeners despite their racial roots. In the platform expansion area, mass contents were produced by using rapper-celebrities who contains the same ideology merged by the mass media before. Capital-friendly messages were created by rapper- celebrities, and mass commercialization of hip-hop fashion bricolage was still shown in the video clips in new-media area. Through this result, it was found that new-media video clips were making Korean underground hip-hop culture more solid as a mainstream, capital-friendly culture to the public.

Rhyming Techniques and Identity in Korean Hip Hop

This article examines the development of Korean rhyming techniques by musically analysing phonetic and grammatical structure in Korean rap. Due to major differences between Korean and English, Korean MCs had to redefine what constitutes “rhyme” in Korean rap, and the conflicting definitions of what it means to rhyme in Korean reflect diverse identities in the Korean hip hop community. Through my musical analyses, I present five types of Korean rhyming techniques: flexible word order, artificial stress accents or artificial pitch accents, rhythmic motives, multisyllabic internal rhymes and translingual rhymes. I close the article by suggesting that there is an inevitable hybridity in Korean hip hop and socioeconomic class struggles that persists in Korea.

Study of Feminism and Womanism in Korean Hip Hop Songs by Female Rappers

Originating in the South Bronx in the 1970s, hip hop started as a subculture that represented the less privileged urban black youth, becoming the perfect platform to signify their resistance. Prominent womanist scholars have wrestled with misogyny in hip hop music, suggesting that female hip hop artists perceive feminism and womanism at street-level, standing up for themselves and, at the same time, sympathizing with black men fighting against the larger society. Hip hop began in Korea also as a youth-driven subculture in the mid-1990s, successfully establishing its ground as the voice of the younger generation and addressing social and political issues. This article examines feminism in Korean hip hop focusing on works by notable female artists. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, popular female rappers, such as Yoonmirae and Diva, openly produced songs about feminist issues. This is less common today as hip hop has received significant recognition in the mainstream K-pop music. Gender inequality has become a hot potato in the giant K-pop industry, and the mainstream hip hop scene discourages artists from engaging in such controversial topics. Still, female artists employ womanist approaches to indirectly address these social issues. Moreover, young rappers continue to utilize the platform to express their own voices, and there are independent artists, led by Sleeq, who openly advocate feminism through their music.

Show me the monolingualism: Korean hip-hop and the discourse of difference

ABSTRACT Today, the ubiquitousness of Korean hip-hop is evident in the popularity of the reality show Show Me the Money (henceforth referred to as SMTM), a musical competition featuring aspiring Korean and Korean American hip-hop artists. While the show has always been a platform for linguistic hybridity, as Korean hip-hop has never been truly “monolingual,” the recent evolution of the show to include Korean American artists has focalized the linguistic and cultural hybridity that inheres global hip-hop more generally and Korean hip-hop more specifically. Undoubtedly, these two matrices of difference, linguistic and cultural, are invariably intertwined, particularly in the Korean context, where being “authentically” Korean itself hinges on proficiency in the Korean language. The analysis develops what Gramling (2016. The Invention of Monolingualism. London: Bloomsbury) terms the “invention of monolingualism,” in particular with SMTM in relation to questions of verbal hygiene and the discourse of authenticity and emulation. We argue that SMTM should not be understood as a mere space for the documentation of various acts of transgressing monolingualism through linguistic and cultural hybridity. Instead, it unveils the social and geopolitical conditions by which the very commitment to, along with the presumed precarity of, “monolingualism” is afforded an ideological platform in the first place.

From Hanok to Hanbok: Traditional iconography in Korean hip hop music videos

Popular culture texts not only entertain us, they shape our understanding of the world and our place in it. This article explores the contradictions and effects of the use of imagined and real Korean settings and traditional iconography in recent videos from Korean hip hop artists with a particularly close reading of the rapper Beenzino’s mid-2016 offering ‘January’, additionally informed by Drunken Tiger’s ‘Mantra’, MC Mong’s ‘Fame’ and Agust D’s ‘Daechwita’. The videos each utilize settings that signify Koreanness and feature significant symbols of Korea. I investigate what symbols and icons are used to take a foreign genre and imbue it with Koreanness within the music video frame. I find that these videos circulate and re-circulate a limited number of icons of Korea, because the images are meant not to portray pre-modern Korea in its complexity, but traditional Korea both as a symbol of national pride and as a (domestic and international) tourist destination wherein the palace is a backdrop and you wear a hanbok to create a visually striking Instagram post. Operating as the king of the music video’s world, the hip hop artist maintains his artistic independence through challenging tradition with juxtaposed elements of the present day.

A Study on the Subculture of Korean Hip Hop

A Study on the Subculture of Korean Hip Hop

Expansion Possibility and Task of Korean Hip Hop from Transculture Perspective: Focused on <It G Ma> and <Eung Freestyle>

본 연구는 현시대가 ‘트랜스컬처’의 시대라는 사실을 전제로 하여 한국힙합 관련 콘텐츠가 본토의 대중들에게 수용된 사건이 지니는 의미에 대하여 고찰한 것이다. 트랜스컬처란 이문화간의 단순한 동화를 초월하여, 일부는 동화되고 일부는 탈피하는 과정을 거쳐 새로운 제3의 문화가 창조되는 과정을 의미한다. 본고에서는 한국힙합의 구성원들이 미국의 힙합을 능동적으로 수용하고 동화와 탈피의 과정을 거쳐 제3의 문화를 창조하는 과정과, 그 결과물이 미국의 대중들에게 수용되고 또 다른 의미가 덧 입혀진 채 재생산되는 일련의 과정을 트랜스컬처의 과정으로 간주하였다. 이러한 관점을 바탕으로 키스 에이프의 <잊지마>와 디피알의 <응프리스타일>을 분석하여 두 작품이 미국의 대중들에게 수용될 수 있었던 요인이 무엇인지 분석해보았다. 또한 재생산된 콘텐츠인 <잊지마 리믹스>와 <제이슨의 테마>에 내포된 미국 대중들의 시선을 분석하여 현재 한국 힙합의 문화적 위치를 가늠해보았다. 이러한 논의를 통하여 한국힙합의 세계화와 관련한 담론 형성에 기여하고자 하였다.This study looked into the meaning of Korean hip hop-related contents being accommodated by the Korean public based on the fact that the modern era is a ‘transculture’ age. Transculture refers to the process of Third Culture creation after the process of assimilation of some cultures and deviation of some other cultures. This study regarded Third Culture creation process after the processes of actively accommodating American hip hop and undergoing the stages of assimilation and deviation by Korean hip hop members and a series of processes of corresponding outcomes being accommodated by American public and being reproduced after additional added meaning as processes of Transculture. Based on this perspective, this study analyzed the factors why <It G Ma> by Keith Ape and <Eung Freestyle> by DPR were accommodated by American public. In addition, by analyzing the viewpoint of American public implied in <It G Ma Remix> and <Jaysn’s Theme>, which are reproduced contents, this study estimated the sociocultural position of Korean hip hop. This study aimed to contribute to the formation of discourse on globalization of Korean hip hop based on such a discussion.

Rappers as hip-hopers: the remaking of authenticity and construction of the future by Korean underground rappers

ABSTRACT Contemporary Korean hip-hop has made its way into the mainstream of youth culture, and Korea’s hip-hop scene has emerged as a significant social space in which the voices of the young generation resonate vividly. When compared with the rest of their cohort, emblematized as the so-called ‘Give-up Generation’, the optimism of rappers provides a fascinating subject for exploration. In order to answer the question of why young Korean rappers profess their dreams in the age of no-hope, we interviewed six underground rappers, delving particularly into the following two themes. First is the inquiry into the rappers’ logic of hip-hop practices, under the conceptual rubric of ‘remaking authenticity’. We found that by inventing their own figurative ghettos and symbolically becoming black, they actively reinvent Korean hip-hop authenticity. Second is the inquiry into the principle of their practices. Our findings show that the fundamental motor force which drives them consists of their aspiration for a better future. The dreams of these rappers derive from three distinct sources. The first source is the illusio (Bourdieu) of the Korean hip-hop field; the second source is the musical form of hip-hop itself; the final source is the communities of dreamers to which the rappers belong.

Linguistic Practices and Resources as Components in the Construction of Sociolinguistic Identity :The case of Korean rappers

This paper focuses on the construction of authentic rapper identities among Korean rappers throughout the history of rap in Korea. The first part of this study describes the historical development of linguistic practices and available linguistic resources that were commonly exercised and exploited by Korean rappers over time, while the latter part demonstrates how those practices and resources become components constituting and constructing various rapper identities through Eckert's (2008) framework of “indexical field.” The exploration of the Korean rappers' linguistic practices reported that Korean rappers have developed a number of creative and innovative practices throughout the history of Korean rap and hip-hop. The second part revealed that Korean rappers' innovations and creative practices have become more and more complicated over time for more sophisticated rapper identity construction and projection.

Keepin’ It Real: Authenticity, Commercialization, and the Media in Korean Hip Hop

This article examines authenticity in South Korean hip hop culture. Building on subcultural theory and cultural hybridization theory, it explores authenticity dynamics in this scene, and the role o...

The poetics of resistance and the politics of crossing borders: Korean hip-hop and ‘cultural reterritorialisation’

AbstractThis paper examines the ways in which hip-hop has taken root in Korean popular culture. The processes that began in the early 1990s include appropriation, adaptation and ‘cultural reterritorialisation’. By looking at recent Korean hip-hop outputs and their associated contexts, this paper explores the ways in which Korean hip-hop has gained its local specificities. This was achieved by combining and recontextualising Afro-American and Korean popular musical elements and aesthetics in its performance and identification in the context of the consumption and commodification of Korean hip-hop as a ‘national(ised) cultural product’.

Between globality and locality：Emerging Korean hip-hop

Between globality and locality：Emerging Korean hip-hop

Globalization of African American Vernacular English in popular culture

This study examines crossing (Bucholtz 1999; Cutler 1999; Rampton 1995) in Korean hip hop Blinglish as a case study of globalization of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) in popular culture. Blinglish in Korean hip hop can be understood as a prime example of “English from below” (Preisler 1999) to informally express subcultural identity and style. The findings of the study suggest that AAVE features appear at different linguistic levels including lexis, phonology, and morpho-syntax in Korean hip hop Blinglish but do not demonstrate the same degree of AAVE penetration, with a frequency-related hierarchy emerging among these linguistic components. The area of Korean hip hop Blinglish with the heaviest crossing influence from AAVE is found to be lexis followed by phonology. The presence of AAVE syntactic features is somewhat restricted in type and occurrence, indicating that the verbal markers in AAVE are considerably varied and intricate, and syntactic elements are not as easily crossed by non-AAVE speakers as lexical items.