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Volume 1 Number 2
  • ISSN: 2632-6825
  • E-ISSN: 2632-6833
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Abstract

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 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.

© 2020 The Author Published by Intellect Ltd
This article is Open Access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC), which allows users to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt the article, as long as the author is attributed and the article is not used for commercial purposes. To view a copy of the licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
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2023-01-16
2024-10-04
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/content/journals/10.1386/ghhs_00020_1
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From Hanok to Hanbok: Traditional iconography in Korean hip hop music videos
Global Hip Hop Studies 1, 249 (2020); https://doi.org/10.1386/ghhs_00020_1
/content/journals/10.1386/ghhs_00020_1
/content/journals/10.1386/ghhs_00020_1
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  • Article Type: Article
Keyword(s): hip hop; idol rap; Korean popular music; Koreanness; locality; traditional iconography

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