musing on being Korean at the Rave, part 1
These are some of the thoughts I had while preparing to release Inheritance EP earlier this year.
"I wanted to make this EP because I wanted to execute the seemingly simple assignment of making traditional Korean music my way. But in the process of doing so, I realized that it was also a task to hear the sounds of adventure, beach, ocean, river, cabin, sauna, highway, redwoods. This is actually west coast diasporic Corean music as through the lens of me, a west coast diasporic Corean raver.
I have a worry that it is "disrespecting" traditional Korean music. But I figure that there must have been a jumping off point where Korean music became divorced from the social practices of daily life anyway. Somewhere along the line, it had to have happened, because the arrival of industrial technology, pianos, Japan, and tuxedos on the peninsula, was a material threshold that changed the contexts from which this music arose.
I don't know anything about Pansori, taepyeongso, kkwaenggari, or gayageum in an academic sense. I do fantasize that maybe one day I should just go to Korea and study these instruments and their playing conventions. Part of me feels that I need to do that in order to legitimize my perspective. But isn't that just a colonial viewpoint?
These instruments themselves came from the fucking earth and therefore it is my birthright regardless of my credentials. They are skin and wood and metal. The earth, which we too are made of, gave us music. We, or, the earth itself, made music, and we danced and sang songs with our voices. Music is just the earth singing to itself.
I think it is colonial to try and analyze and dissect an othered practice like traditional Korean music. My heart knows, that instead of having to think too hard, the spirit of Korean music lies in just doing it and making it. A drunken noraebang sesh is actually closer to the tradition of Korean music than is a government-funded production of traditional Korean music where professional degree-holders are wearing hanbok and doing the whole she-bang. To me, traditional Korean music is FOLK music. It's the people's music. Performer and audience become one. It's spirit activity.
Rave music, too descends from communal participation and the DIY ethos. My understanding of the Rave as it manifests on the West Coast is inseparable from this idea of "people's music". Therefore, rave music is Korean music, and I had to investigate this overlap.
Now I don't actually even know if all this is true about Korean music. I guess I don't really care at the end of the day otherwise I wouldn't have tried to just make this EP. But I welcome any critiques and I would love to be corrected. Maybe I'm ignorant. I don't know everything, especially when it comes to Korean stuff, since my Korean is so bad. I can't really read Korean primary texts.
But I know what the fuck I feel when I hear these instruments which are made up of the same air and carbon that we all share on this planet. I don't have to read Korean to feel the fucking spirit of a taepyeongso. I don't need to get a degree in Korean music to see immediately that a drum like a janggu is begging to be worn on your body, so you can dance while you drum.
The force with which traditional Korean music moves me is the same as that of the Rave. The Rave makes itself known through an energy that emanates from the natural state of things, described in the language of vibrations. We were meant to move and to be one. It is a marginal, subversive space, the Rave, because by contrast the spatial character of the hegemon (empire) is that of stasis and atomization.
Without empire, there is just the pulsing, dynamic rhythm of daily life, which is where music and all art comes from.
I don't want to fantasize about a pre-imperial past. That's not what I'm trying to conjure. I could never, because I wasn't there, and I never will be.
I think that "cultural preservation" by the Republic of Korea has nefarious intentions. They never explain why they are preserving this culture. Is it like, going away or something? AND WHO IS CAUSING THAT? If the ROK were to answer that question with any genuine honesty then the entire state of South Korea would implode.
I worry that people, both Korean and non-Korean, are going to despise me for making this music. They are going to say that either I am disrespecting traditional Korean music or that I am fetishizing it. They are going to say that I am disrespecting traditional Korean music because I haven't studied it. I don't know all of the musical conventions of Pansori and of taepyeongso and the standard repertoire and history.
Well, if that were so, then I would not be the first Korean person who spun a take on traditional Korean music.
In fact, as soon as the Japanese started dropping pianos on the peninsula we lost that claim to authenticity. Korean people don't even know traditional Korean music anymore. Because we were colonized!! (Note: not that they don't know in the sense that the Japanese or the Americans literally stopped traditional Korean music from being made, although I'm sure that happened somewhere at some point, but rather in the sense that traditional Korean music being born of TRADITION and social context, simply could not exist when the indigenous Korean social fabric was torn apart by Japan and then by the division of the peninsula by the USA. So in other words, traditional Korean music can only exist in a "traditional" Korean context. Another corollary of this: all music made by Korean people is traditional Korean music.)
Sometimes I think I'm too obsessed with this question of like, what does it mean to be Korean at the Rave? But I cannot deny that it's just the most important question of my life right now because both of those things about me have so much influence on my life, I guess.
I'm almost embarrassed about making this EP because it's like, am I being too Korean. Do I care too much about being Korean. I'm a tryhard. I mean. I guess I am. But I am fucking Korean? Hello?? Why the hell am I even having this thought? It's not my fucking fault that I was born here and therefore had a whole lifetime of experiences now ossified into my brain teaching me that yes I am other, and foreign, so yeah I can't help but think about it. Like, most of the time I don't think about being Korean, to be honest. I actually don't and it's quite nice. I can just exist in my body peacefully. But if I'm making music? Then yes it's fucking on my mind because what the fuck??? I'm fucking Korean as fuck. It's like, I'm so Korean that I'm inventing a brand new kind of Korean by just being me. That's basically why I had to make this EP. Because sometimes, a lot of the time, I feel like the only gay and diasporic and Korean raver to have ever existed, who feels like the rave is church and knows that God speaks to us through the redwoods and the Pacific Ocean. And if I'm wrong, and you are reading this, reveal yourself!! (And let's kiss.)"