Old School Korean New Wave

Now, that's a lotta stuff crammed into a title.

It's like New Wave, but it's not the 80's and it's Korea, but I felt the "Korean Wave" before it had propagated anywhere outside of Korea, when pop was certainly "old school."

And for my money, I thought Korean pop music to be more fun back then. Of course, me being younger had something to do with it, but I think the fact that it wasn't hyped, it wasn't linked to notions of national cultural conquest, on top of feeling somehow shinier and newer (it hadn't been too long since mass consumer culture had even existed on this scale) – it just felt much more like a party.

Check out Park Jin Young (I laud him in previous post here), producer extraordinaire (he made "Bi", after all), when he was fresh. This was the middle of my first stay in Korea, and his video and his feeling himself up before periodically slapping his own ass was the talk of the town.

And this song, even alongside the new influence of "gangsta rap" brought in my Seo Taiji and the Boys, still was fun as hell, even and especially with the plain silly-ass shit that Jin Young would wear – cut-off tops, biker shorts, crap like that. And this was when having "yellow hair" (the sign of the peroxified "bad kid") was not at all an accepted thing for people trying to keep a clean-cut reputation.

Oh, and people still didn't kiss on TV.

That should give you an idea of what Jin Young was coming into when he was prancing around with yellow hair, biker shorts, and slapping his ass.

Back when the "Korean Wave" was still limited to the little pool of the peninsula, I was having a blast here, learning a lot, dancing a lot, living it up.

Here's to youth.