Seo Taiji & Boys

Usually, assigning a start date to a movement or a scene, whether musical or more broadly artistic, is a rhetorical exercise, a need for (over)simplification that deliberately forces contexts and their specificities. It's more unusual for a point on the calendar to mark instead an unmistakable break, demarcating a before and an after, perfectly distinguishable and identifiable from one another. For Korea, that date corresponds to April 11, 1992. Sure, in theory March 23 of the same year could have been a valid choice too, but the performance that led Seo Taiji and his cohorts to become some of the country's greatest cultural icons and to completely overhaul the structure of the Korean music industry marks a turning point too evident to ignore. Because that's what we're talking about here: revolution, the complete overturning of an order and the creation of a new one, the launch of a model and an imaginary that, more than thirty years after its first appearance, still reverberates and inspires the entire k-pop system. Whether you love it or hate it, whether it inspires lengthy sociological discussions or is your very reason for living, the Korean path to pop music is born here, the nucleus that set the fate of an entire nation ablaze. This is the story of a man and his vision, of a challenge and the triumph that followed.

And to think everything could have gone in a completely different way. Of course, history isn't written with ifs and buts, but Seo's artistic path could have taken a totally different turn, and most likely one of lesser impact. With his schooling cut short, and the desire to emerge as a rockstar in a Korea that was struggling toward the end of a brutal and stubbornly persistent dictatorship, Jeong Hyeon-Cheol was one of the many kids who at that time discovered the allure of rock music and threw themselves into a genre that only a few years earlier would have faced the lash of censorship and repression. As protests grew in scale and scope (especially after the bloody events of the 1980 Gwangju massacre) and a middle class with entirely different needs progressively developed, music too went through a period of gradual flourishing and diversification. Whether at the mainstream level (the emergence of the decade's great balladeers, the consolidation of a hybrid, pop-inflected form of trot) or at the underground level, in the rediscovery of the language of the fathers of national rock (first and foremost Shin Jung-Hyeon) and in the growing engagement with metal, many young people and teenagers emerged with force, shaped taste, and adapted foreign cues and influences to their own context.

It was precisely in Sinawe, credited as the first true Korean metal band, that a seventeen-year-old Jeong, who had by then already renamed himself Seo Taiji, cut his teeth as a bassist, backing the band formed by Shin Daechul (son of the aforementioned Jung-Hyeon) during the recording and performances in support of "Four". It was a precious opportunity, one the young man seized with all the intensity the occasion called for, sharpening his skills as a musician and learning to handle the various aspects of life in a band. It was, however, an opportunity destined to close quickly: Shin decided to suddenly halt the band's activities in 1991 (he would resume them in 1995, with a radically renewed line-up), leaving Seo on his own, with a considerably refined technical arsenal but no one to share it with. Had it lasted even a year longer, who knows where the experience might have led him, whether he would have kept insisting on purely metal sounds or lent his talents as a top-tier session player. The suspension of the band's activities would instead prove to be a blessing in disguise.

Alongside the consolidation of a rock and metal scene chomping at the bit to reach a wider audience, the late Eighties saw the gradual emergence of a context increasingly receptive to dance and broadly urban sounds. The 1987 protests, which led to a constitutional amendment and thus to direct presidential elections, gave the country its first glimpse of the possibility of democracy, a step toward a freer, less constrained society. Censorship loosened, the market liberalized, and new sounds and trends began to take hold, thanks to the contribution of a generation of young people finally freed from the grip of repression. Dance crews sprang up like mushrooms, the languages of hip-hop and new jack swing spread like wildfire, and synthesizers and the trendiest software gradually stopped being luxury items in the hands of a rare few enthusiasts.

In this climate, Seo Taiji did not stand idly by; rather, he took the opportunity to pair his study of the bass with a deep dive into Midi technology, which had only recently arrived in Korea, and to hone his compositional sensibility, in a constant exchange between a lifetime's worth of inspirations and new, ambitious recombinations. Just one piece was missing to complete the picture.

Aware that music is also presentation, and that without it the right goals are hardly ever hit, Seo went hunting for the right talents from whom to take lessons in dance, naturally the most fashionable kind, the one closest to the urban contexts he had studied so closely. It was thus that, at the close of his experience with Sinawe, a Taiji on the lookout for the right people ran into Yang Hyeon-Seok, a talented dancer who, by his own account, was simply blown away by Seo's music. It would be Yang himself who put the musician in touch with Lee Juno, a dancer already famous for his skills and equally impressed by the music Seo played for them. Formed in this way, the trio took the time to record, put together an album, and shape their aesthetic from top to bottom, on stage and off. Seo took on the task of composing and playing, while Yang and Lee handled the choreography and the performances: even so, the trio's name leaves no room for doubt. Seo Taiji & Boys, that was the name chosen, the title behind the album's release on March 23, 1992, with no frills to speak of, but with a full awareness of just how disruptive an offering it had in store for the audience.

As is still customary in Korea (albeit through suitably updated formats), promoting one's music also means going through TV shows and competitions where artists and bands vie against each other for an award or accolade. For the trio, this is a golden opportunity to debut on one of the era's most important TV stages and impress both the audience and the judges. What happens next turns out to be far more than just an impression.

Coordinated in attitude and style (with just a hint of contrast separating Seo from Yang and Lee), armed with an intricate choreography that combines acrobatic flourishes with room to breathe for the vocal parts, the three make their debut on the aforementioned April 11, 1992, on an MBC talent show with "Nan arayo" (trans. "I Know"). They're the first of many acts to perform that night, and theirs is already a blend that sets them clearly apart from the other contestants: the track is unmistakably new-jack-swing in cut, its base inspiration rooted in hip-hop as befits the trio's keen interest in the genre, yet there's more than just a Black-music matrix at play: the exquisitely emotional pop touch of the chorus and the sudden bursts of industrial-rock-tinged guitar suggest a sonic and compositional palette that goes well beyond a simple rehash of their own influences. What comes through instead is a recombinant attitude that won't be stopped by any obstacle, one that actually thrives precisely by shunning genre precision. Even so, and despite the audience's enthusiastic applause in the studio, nothing will help the band rise above a dismal last place: the lyrics are deemed too trite, the melody lacking in momentum, and so on with the critical remarks from a jury that spares no effort in justifying its verdict.

Last in the talent show, Seo Taiji & Boys are first in people's hearts: whether it's the freshness of a rap attitude that, until then, had never had such a platform, or the decades-/centuries-old ties to the love-song tradition that here finds renewed interpretive drive, the audience's response is nothing short of explosive. In the most literal sense of the word. Almost in defiance of the jury's verdict, the song becomes a piece of popular culture capable of uniting an entire nation.

Seventeen consecutive weeks at number one, an emblematic choreography, a rap attitude bolstered by unexpected romanticism: it's this mix of qualities that makes "Nan arayo" the point of no return for Korean song, the passage from one expressive universe to a new one, with its own rules and its own organization. It's also the launching pad for an album that flew under the radar in its first few weeks, but which, following the single's staggering rise to fame, shoots up to colossal sales figures. A million copies in a month, not counting the countless unofficial copies circulated via radio and boomboxes across the entire country, a figure that would nearly double over time: "Seo Taiji & Boys" further cements the trio's name and turns them into an unmissable fixture between TV appearances and live shows. It matters little that critics detect heavy foreign influences at play. There's no turning back from here: youth culture takes center stage, and with it a gaze no longer satisfied with homegrown contributions alone, one that wants to look decisively abroad as well.

Be careful, though, not to dismiss "Seo Taiji & Boys" as an album devoted to a mere reshuffling of imported trends. While it's true that the underlying dance-rap framework reflects Seo's passion for Black-music prototypes, the author remains sufficiently tied to the Korean context not to forget its weight, not to build the framework of his compositions without it. It's not just a matter of giving a much-needed shake-up to the entire love-ballad system, the genre of choice throughout the Eighties: the character of Seo's music runs deeper than that, whether in its lyrical stance, its unorthodox references, or its subversive outlook, toward a society in which he had long struggled to feel like an integral part and which now treats him almost like a demigod.

Aside from the opening track (thirty seconds that would open every single album by the group) and the closing one, which functions almost like a theatrical accompaniment to the central theme, Seo's entire universe, as the group's sole composer, unfolds over half an hour, more than enough to attest to its honesty and exploratory nature.

The album's second single, "환상 속의 그대" (trans. "You in the Fantasy"), is acid techno-pop full of pauses and sudden restarts, a broken phrasing that wriggles between soul-diva vocal bursts, out-of-context samples and sharp bursts of guitar, a parallel world well captured by the lyrics. "You live in a fantasy, even as everything around you is collapsing, you're still living in a fantasy, you reject your true self," and further, "your illusion is dangerous, you keep saying you're perfect, you keep shouting you're perfect, but truly look at yourself": in years that were still far from fully free, such an attack on a prearranged world, a system of illusions built specifically to foster conformism, doesn't exactly sound like the most conciliatory view of society. Defiant stances set against catchy textures: it's a blueprint Seo will use to great effect (indeed doubling down on it) in his subsequent work too, drawing the ire of the establishment but ever-growing favor from the public. Even areas closer to tradition don't remain entirely immune to this treatment.

However much the grand romanticism of "그대 함께한 시절 속에서" (trans. "In the Time I Spent with You") links Seo's pen to that of celebrated songwriters like Lee Moon-Se and Byun Jin-Sub, in an exercise of sophisti-pop with a subtly new-age attitude, " 난 알고 있어요" (trans. "My Everything") goes for the genre's jugular in a refined exercise of deconstruction and reconstruction that makes the most of synthesizers' epic quality to speak of shame, reluctance, indecision. That there's also a new guitar contribution here is yet another demonstration of a paradigm that doesn't much care for clear-cut labels, preferring instead to operate within a continuum where dance, hip-hop and rock can all coexist without any friction.

And that's how the undisciplined dropout, the metalhead struck by a hip-hop epiphany, becomes the icon of a nation, the figure to look up to, whose every single move people try to interpret. Over the course of the four albums released with Yang and Lee, Seo Taiji won't give up a single ounce of his personal ethics and will increasingly take to heart issues central to Korean society. Above all, he'll never abandon his passion for rock and metal, aiming instead for ever more pronounced hybrids from one release to the next. The push from the public, by now rallied into a fiercely devoted fanbase, will trigger a revolution of such magnitude that almost everything that was previously popular gets increasingly pushed to the sidelines.

From Deux to Kim Gun-Mo, many new performers and musicians will take to the stage, bringing to the fore genres previously unthinkable like r&b and house, and ushering in a radical shift in aesthetics, performance and subject matter. Sure, an umbrella term like k-pop had not yet been coined (we'd have to wait until the end of the decade for neighboring Japan to coin it), but the ferment generated by "Seo Taiji & Boys," the genre-blending nature of its music and the sense of anticipation generated by every release still reverberate today across the packed, hyper-competitive contemporary music landscape.

Of course, from a ferment generated by musicians capable of overturning the stranglehold of TV broadcasters and achieving decisive victories in matters of freedom of expression (1), control would then pass into the hands of increasingly restrictive talent agencies. Yang Hyeon-Seok himself would found YG at the end of his run with the Boys, becoming one of the major players in popularizing and spreading k-pop, first across Asia, then throughout the rest of the world. This, however, can't be laid directly at the feet of a musician who would go on to be dubbed the President of Culture, who would abruptly cut short the trio's adventure like a Korean Paul Weller, in favor of a solo path better suited to his needs. For better or worse, amid the proliferation of boy bands and girl groups and the explosion of hallyu, the Korean Wave that has swept across the world like a tsunami, Seo Taiji still stands as the honorary godfather, the eminence grise who, more or less unwittingly, changed the fate of an entire country. If that's not being a milestone figure...

(1) The abolition of the pre-censorship law would come about precisely following the Korean Broadcasting Ethics Committee's request to alter the lyrics of "Shidae yugam," featured on the final Seo Taiji & Boys album.

Sources used for this article:

Kim Chang Nam – “K-pop – Roots and blossoming of Korean popular music”

John Lie – “K-pop: Popular music, cultural amnesia, and economic innovation in South Korea”

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23/07/2023