Confirmation
Our friend Nichol was visiting and in the background I was playing the first Seo Taiji and Boys album and Nichol stopped midsentence and asked, "Who are you playing?" Hearing the ricochet electro beats, she said, "This is freestyle!" The mournful vocals entered as if to confirm this, and she added, "This sounds like the barrio."
Seo Taiji and Boys "이밤이 깊어 가지만" translated variously as "Deep Into The Night" and "Through Tonight Growing Late," 1992
Seo Taiji and Boys "난 알아요" "Nan Arayo" ("I Know"), 1992
So, someone who isn't me, without prodding, hears the freestyle connection too! You know, I keep pointing this out, how much K-pop draws on freestyle, and I wonder why more isn't made of it. "Nan Arayo," the second of the tracks I embedded, is often credited (on Wikip, anyway) as the song that created K-pop. Obviously, freestyle isn't the song's only source: there's hip-hop, new jack swing, metal. Then again, in the music press of the '80s, the northeast version of freestyle (New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia) was called "Latin hip-hop" at least as much as it was called "freestyle," as being to Hispanic culture what hip-hop was to black.* The freestyle beats themselves were frequently an elaboration on the electro hip-hop that Arthur Baker and John Robie created for DJ Afrika Bambaataa's "Planet Rock." What's interesting is that, while in early '90s America freestyle was basically knocked off the radio and out of popular music by new jack swing and hip-hop and r&b, in Korea freestyle mixed together with new jack swing and hip-hop and r&b to form K-pop, and, while never separating out as a substyle, it's in K-pop songs to this day.**
Anyway, to be precise, Seo Taiji's melody starting at 1:13 of "Nan Arayo," and especially at 1:29 is total freestyle, and the backup there has the sort of flourishes that Elvin Molina and Mickey Garcia could have put on a Judy Torres record in 1987, and dreamy plinks that Tony Butler might have put on a Debbie Deb track in 1983. (You can hear them best at 1:56 of the album version.)
Listening now to this first Seo Taiji album, the rhythm feels more loose-limbed and free yet also actually far more precise than current K-pop does. This may just mean that Taiji and crew got the African American feel better than most of his progeny did. But there is almost a live sense, the music potentially careening all over, despite the use of preprogrammed beats and the aforementioned precision. So this is psychological, something I also remarked on back when embedding DJ DOC's quasi-Caribbean "Murphy's Law." K-pop back then felt as if it could draw on anything and go anywhere. Of course, with the Internet and all, music today draws easily on a much broader anything, while not feeling like it's moving anywhere much at all.*** (But, especially given my limited listening this year, of the many genres and nations I know nothing about, there ought to be some for which what I just said is exactly wrong.) Genres when young feel full of worlds of promise that actually actualized genres usually lack.
*Which is a gross oversimplification, of course. And anyway there were Hispanics in hip-hop itself from the get-go, in NYC.
**This is a simplification too. Not long after "Nan Arayo," Korean dance-pop duo Chuli and Miae sampled "Because Of You" by NY freestyle act the Cover Girls on their freestyle-Eurohouse amalgam "Why You," westernized dance pop already being a part of Korean popular music. I can't tell you if "Why You" was considered part of the same phenomenon as Seo Taiji or not. Seo Taiji and Boys abandoned freestyle by their third album, so I can't speak for freestyle's ongoing presence in South Korean pop music of the '90s, about which I know almost nothing. But if freestyle was ever gone, it certainly was back by the time I started listening to K-pop in the late '00s.
***I mean, Crayon Pop and ilk definitely have a fun sense of adventure, but it doesn't feel like an adventure that will actually take us to new lands or invent new topography.
Seo Taiji and Boys "이밤이 깊어 가지만" translated variously as "Deep Into The Night" and "Through Tonight Growing Late," 1992
Click to viewSeo Taiji and Boys "난 알아요" "Nan Arayo" ("I Know"), 1992
So, someone who isn't me, without prodding, hears the freestyle connection too! You know, I keep pointing this out, how much K-pop draws on freestyle, and I wonder why more isn't made of it. "Nan Arayo," the second of the tracks I embedded, is often credited (on Wikip, anyway) as the song that created K-pop. Obviously, freestyle isn't the song's only source: there's hip-hop, new jack swing, metal. Then again, in the music press of the '80s, the northeast version of freestyle (New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia) was called "Latin hip-hop" at least as much as it was called "freestyle," as being to Hispanic culture what hip-hop was to black.* The freestyle beats themselves were frequently an elaboration on the electro hip-hop that Arthur Baker and John Robie created for DJ Afrika Bambaataa's "Planet Rock." What's interesting is that, while in early '90s America freestyle was basically knocked off the radio and out of popular music by new jack swing and hip-hop and r&b, in Korea freestyle mixed together with new jack swing and hip-hop and r&b to form K-pop, and, while never separating out as a substyle, it's in K-pop songs to this day.**
Anyway, to be precise, Seo Taiji's melody starting at 1:13 of "Nan Arayo," and especially at 1:29 is total freestyle, and the backup there has the sort of flourishes that Elvin Molina and Mickey Garcia could have put on a Judy Torres record in 1987, and dreamy plinks that Tony Butler might have put on a Debbie Deb track in 1983. (You can hear them best at 1:56 of the album version.)
Listening now to this first Seo Taiji album, the rhythm feels more loose-limbed and free yet also actually far more precise than current K-pop does. This may just mean that Taiji and crew got the African American feel better than most of his progeny did. But there is almost a live sense, the music potentially careening all over, despite the use of preprogrammed beats and the aforementioned precision. So this is psychological, something I also remarked on back when embedding DJ DOC's quasi-Caribbean "Murphy's Law." K-pop back then felt as if it could draw on anything and go anywhere. Of course, with the Internet and all, music today draws easily on a much broader anything, while not feeling like it's moving anywhere much at all.*** (But, especially given my limited listening this year, of the many genres and nations I know nothing about, there ought to be some for which what I just said is exactly wrong.) Genres when young feel full of worlds of promise that actually actualized genres usually lack.
*Which is a gross oversimplification, of course. And anyway there were Hispanics in hip-hop itself from the get-go, in NYC.
**This is a simplification too. Not long after "Nan Arayo," Korean dance-pop duo Chuli and Miae sampled "Because Of You" by NY freestyle act the Cover Girls on their freestyle-Eurohouse amalgam "Why You," westernized dance pop already being a part of Korean popular music. I can't tell you if "Why You" was considered part of the same phenomenon as Seo Taiji or not. Seo Taiji and Boys abandoned freestyle by their third album, so I can't speak for freestyle's ongoing presence in South Korean pop music of the '90s, about which I know almost nothing. But if freestyle was ever gone, it certainly was back by the time I started listening to K-pop in the late '00s.
***I mean, Crayon Pop and ilk definitely have a fun sense of adventure, but it doesn't feel like an adventure that will actually take us to new lands or invent new topography.