Youth Culture and Popular Spaces in 1990s South Korea

Looking back at the Politics of Youth Culture, Space and
Everyday Life in South Korea since the early 1990s

Keehyeung Lee

Abstract

Popular sites are not simply material or lived spaces. They are also spaces of representation,
imagination, memory, lived experiences and moving bodies which have been shaped through
different elements of social practices and actors. Inspired by the "Birmingham School" and
postsubcultural studies, my paper explores the popular cultural scenes, especially including "the
Hongik University Area" and Apgujungdong in metropolitan Seoul by both critically and
selectively utilizing cultural geography and cultural studies analysis. In doing so, first, the paper
aims to provide series of nuanced cultural analysis and snapshots of Seoul's youth cultural
scenes and popular hangouts. Secondly, it also discusses the possibilities and limits of site-
specific analytic frameworks in illuminating the politics of style, youth, and urban tales.

Cultural Space and Public Sphere in Asia 2006, Seoul, Korea / 96

Popular culture is one of the sites where this struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is
engaged: it is also the stake to be won or lost in that struggle. Stuart Hall.

[popular culture] is neither an authentic working-class culture nor a culture imposed by the culture
industries, but what Gramsci would call a ‘compromise equilibrium… between the two; a
contradictory mix of forces from both ‘below’ and ‘above’; both ‘commercial’ and ‘authentic,’ marked
by both ‘resistance’ and ‘incorporation,’ ‘structure’ and ‘agency.’ John Story.

Culture is never a fixed set of objects, and the meaning of ‘the popular’ as a qualifier is always
shifting… the popular [is] the complex and contradictory terrain, the multi-dimensional context,
within which people live out their daily lives. Lawrence Grossberg

The CCCS itself provided a sustained attempt at applying Gramscian Marxist analysis and,
particularly in Hebdige’s (1979) work, exemplified an important attempt to synthesize these
approaches with structuralism and post-structuralism. Post-subcultural debates have, in their various
ways, taken seriously contemporary critiques of ‘essentialism’ and the concomitant emphasis on
fragmented and contradictory practices and identities… Underlying the move towards post-subcultural
analysis is an argument that sucultural divisions have broken down as the relationship between style,
musical taste and identity has become progressively weaker and articulated more fluidly. Andy Bennett
and Keith Kahn-Harris

Cultural Studies in Korea embraced the youth culture: through the rearview mirror

This paper explores the implications of urban space, popular culture, and changing everydayness
in South Korea through a “space-conscious” cultural studies analysis. I wish to provide a nuanced
analysis of cultural transformations and detraditionalizing trends underway in the local arena since the
early 1990s. Admittedly the landscape of popular and youth culture is notoriously slippery and complex
to map out. In charting the shaping of popular culture in everyday life this paper presents series of
“snapshots” on Seoul’s popular cultural spaces and locations, especially their historical emergence and
changing lived realities, through in large part the so-called “Birmingham style” popular cultural analysis.


This paper will go back to the 1990s, the decade through which popular culture has firmly been on the
map and agenda of cultural studies.

A Snapshot of Youth Culture(s): the Pastoral and Pedagogy of the Streets

In the late 1980s Korean society entered a highly consumption-oriented phase where people have a
consuming passion for foreign travel, a better quality of life, fast cars, and clean bodies (Kendall 2002; H.
Kim 1999). No wonder that there were rising concerns and debates on practices of consumption, life
styles, popular culture, identities, and more importantly cultural politics - the lived and complex effects
of culture in the local arena. Among other things, the dissemination and localization of what Stuart Hall
(1996) calls “global postmodern popular culture,” including the emergence of a shared global cultural
imagery and shared dispositions in the local, undoubtedly provided the main resources and impetus for
studying the popular practices and politics of style in the early 1990s. The expansion of popular culture
and consumption provided the condition of possibility for the emergence of various cultural discourses
and cultural studies at large. In the following, let me introduce the local debates on the emerging youth
culture which was initially mediated by what was locally known as “Apgujung culture.”

Since the late 1980s at the socio-economic level, Korea had achieved a high performing economy.
As a result, its standard of living had been drastically improved. Rapid and profound cultural, spatial, and
technological changes and mutations occurred in local daily life and popular practices. Perhaps no
example was more vivid and pertinent than the spatial landscape of the capital city of Seoul. In the glitzy
and bustling urban scenes and especially in the pleasure-sites and cultural bohemias in Seoul - in
particular, Apgujungdong in river south region, college streets, and Hongdai streets - one could not fail to
miss the fascination with multicultural and Euro-American cultural products, styles, as well as
consumption-oriented practices among youth and young urban professionals. For instance, anyone who
would stroll bustling and neon-drenched streets in the Apgujungdong (district) in south central Seoul or
more youth-oriented sites – Shinchon, Hongdaeaup, Donseungdong - would almost always encounter the
sheer lure and power of consumer culture, the unrestrained commodification, a pandemonium of urbanity,
as well as a vibrancy of the youth-dominant street culture.

Walking along these streets - one of the main streets in Apgujungdong is called “Rodeo drive” by
locals - one could encounter the typical landscape of power: glass and steel office towers and high rise
apartments, well-lit store fronts, glass-fronted sophisticated boutique shops, trendy multishops and
shopping malls, and 24 hour convenience stores, along with numerous glamorous cafes, karaoke bars,
game rooms, cyber cafes, taverns, techno bars, and the manicured American style franchise restaurants


where young adults eat, drink, shop, and hang out. Here it would be easier to find English words rather
than Korean words on neon signs and shop windows. In terms of the architectural styles, Apgujungdong
displayed a bizarre and chaotic mixture of “international style,” “the vernacular,” “neo-classical’”
“multicultural,” and “postmodern” forms. Here architectural forms undoubtedly follows finance. No
wonder that some of these urban forms, more decorative and fictive than pragmatic, were built for the
maximum aesthetic effect, giving material imprints to these already image and consumption-conscious
sites (B. Choi and D. Koo 1995; D. Im 1999). These built forms were carefully crafted and targeted to
appeal to youth and urban professional who desire trendy, carefree, and sophisticated lifestyles. This way,
in Apgujungdong, market would meet popular cultural experiences on the ground. When one would enter
the famous entertainment stripes in Apgujungdong, one would enter not only real spaces, but also
imagined ones shaped by media representations and images created by the culture industries.

Perhaps what was distinctive about the space of Apgujungdong in terms of the “users” or street
walkers was the endless flow of the crowd - mostly the young, fashionable, and perhaps restless - who
seemed to anticipate a sense of “freedom” or chance encounters with strangers (N. Kang 1997; Shields
1997). What intrigued local cultural critics was that this highly commercialized hotspot of youth culture
in Korea also provided a kind of liminal space or “stage” where often the rigid, normalizing, and boring
regulative cultural norms and ideals were temporarily suspended and upset while more diverse, playful,
and tolerant kinds of cosmopolitan, individualistic, and non-traditional conduct, styles, repertoires, and
demeanors were displayed, performed, and mimicked (CCS 1992; 1993; 1994; M. Cho 1997; S. Im
2005).

For instance, in the streets of Apgujungdong and its many hangouts and pleasure-routes for the
youth, one could encounter the young and trendy street walkers, some of whom dyed their hair in various
colors and showed often a sense of outrageous, eclectic, and inventive fashion. Perhaps such an
appearance management could be compared with the technique of collage. It would be also not difficult
to encounter joyriders and moving crowds who didn’t seem to have a particular direction. They would be
constantly exchanging gazes, initiating unscripted interactions while creating spectacles of their own.
These “pleasure zones” in Apgujungdong and other well-known streets in Seoul were composed of clubs,
pubs, karaoke bars, restaurants, and coffee shops where the boundaries between leisure, consumption,
and hanging out were blurred. Among other things, emerging “club culture” became one of the most
visible forms of Apgujung-led youth culture. Western style clubs came to emerge in the early 1990s
where various genres of music - mostly “Koreanized” hip-hop, techno, rock, reggae, and locally
produced pop music [a.k.a. K-pop] - were played live or DJs were playing and sampling a diverse array


of music. And in the clubs, bars, rock cafes and other cultural sties, youth and young urban dwellers
displayed and performed generation-specific culture. If the music culture of the parent generation is
centered on personalized enjoyment, the consumption of music in rock cafés for youth is more
collectivistic. In rock cafes, each individual’s look, dancing, their grotesque sound and bodily acts
become constitutive elements of rock café culture as a festival” (S. Kuk and S. Moon 1994:188) A
number of local cultural critics observed that these clubs provided a new playground of pleasure and “the
delight of being deviant” by local standard - headbanging, moshing, clapping, booking between strangers,
raving, losing oneself in the flow and rhythm of music, etc. In particular, increasingly live and rave clubs
provided vibrant dance scenes and the crowd who would get “lost in” music through dancing, bodily
contacts, “socialized pleasures and individualized desires” (D. Lee 2003).

No wonder that the first time “Apgujung culture” appeared in the early 1990s, the peculiar
geographical and cultural site of Apgujungdong was immediately associated with cultural diversity,
foreignness, multiculturalism, eventfulness, (temporary) liberation from the normative ideals and often
suffocating restraints in Korea, as well as the imagined good life by young adults. Several bestseller
novels and collection of poetry that portrayed and mocked Apgujung residents and “wannabes” who
converged onto this new “capitalist oasis” appeared. In addition, the emergent culture of Apgujungdong
and its display of wealth and cutting edge consumerism became frequent journalistic subjects and often
sensational reportage. For local conservatives and the intellectuals in the mainstream, the space of
Apgujungdong and its peculiar culture was unfailingly class-specific - that of the exclusive upper classes
– and their lifestyles were obviously morally repugnant, pretentious, and depoliticizing. To them,
Apgujungdong embodied the very “pathology” of the nouveau rich whose life world was far apart from
everyday lives of working men and women. According to Myungkoo Kang (1999:25), the main
consumers and performers of emerging urban culture in Korea locally known as the so-called “Apgujung
tribes” entailed the following characteristics:

Those who consume and practice Apgujung culture come mainly from the ruling bourgeois class.
They enjoy extravagant materialistic life-styles, foreign travel and participating in expensive sports like
skiing and scuba diving, etc. The presence of this Apgujung culture is integral to postmodern discourse in
Korea which advertising agencies appropriate in order to promote consumer culture. 1 Kang’s

1
Some of the notorious features of Apgujung lifestyle, according to local media, often entailed the following things: shopping in

fancy boutiques that sell foreign designer goods, hanging out in membership only clubs and spending thousands of dollars a night,

having cosmetic surgery to enhance one’s looks. The nouveau rich and upper classes indulged in such sumptuous consumption and

leisure activities, the “overconsumtion [Kwasobi]” became a highly politicized signifier in the 1990s. Media institutions and


observation was in line with the dominant sentiments of the mainstream cultural critics toward the
emergence of “non-local” - supposedly “western style” - consumer culture that was popularized and
mediated by Apgujung dong. Left scholars viewed Apgujung culture as the very crystallization of the
“triumph” of Korean capitalism and its twisted structure of distribution and social polarization. Some
well-known left cultural critics put their critical lens on Apgujung culture and its peculiar lifestyle. To
them, above all, Apgujung culture symbolized both a “symptom” and a seductive “window” of
spectacular, nonetheless distorted capitalism that produced “the peculiar structure of desire” (H. Um
1992:159). Apgujungdong symbolized “the cesspool of capitalist desire where the repression [in Korean
society] can be handsomely rewarded.” They also pointed out that the youth who roamed through these
new spaces of consumption and “liberated desires” didn’t seem to carry any memories of turbulent social
struggles of the 1980s:

The youth don’t seem to have any agony regarding [the painful social] “history”[of the
1980s]…They only enjoy their youth just as they follow the slogan on a coca cola bottle - enjoy it. Their
cultural sensibility is centered on secularism, self-defeating nihilism, and self-satisfying cynicism. We
don’t find any hope in them (CCS 1994:20)

To these critics, Apgujungdong’s image as the “exhibitionary window of limitless desire and
corruption,” “avenue of vanity,” “carnivaliesque site,” and “capitalist heaven” had its own subtle and
overt forms of semiotic rules of distinction that only allowed particular groups of people - say, the
nouveau rich, urban professionals and people with the “right looks” (H. Cho: 1992:51; J. Doh 1992:99-
101).
Unlike left and mainstream cultural critics, local cultural analysts approached the space of
Apgujungdong more cautiously. Rather than resorting to a framework centered on commodity fetishism
or social alienation, they set out to interpret Apgujungdong as a complex “text” made of various cultural
as well as material practices in which both reactionary and progressive elements coexisted. Above all,
they viewed Apgujungdong as a new kind of “polysemic” cultural site and “event-space” in which youth
and young urban professionals performed “strong self-expressions” through styles and non-traditional
social behavior. They sought to explore these event sites around the theme of the “transgression” of
social grammars and the desire of younger generation to escape from the constraint of Korean daily life

conservatives called for auditing and cracking down on people who demonstrated such an “irresponsible” social behavior. For more

detailed and gendered study of overconsumption in 1990s Korea, see Laura Nelson (2001). In a similar vein, Naehi Kang (1992-28-

29) suggested, “Apgujungdong demonstrates that [now] Korean society has a mature capitalism and that it can even create a

‘liberating zone of desire’ and symbolic system [pposang chegye] that is highly desired.” Hence local practitioners in cultural

studies found vibrant and progressive elements in Apgujung culture.


(H. Cho 1992:48). In this way, local cultural analysts perceived Apgujungdong as a transitional and
interactive site rather than an isolated commodified oasis in which people utilized - in de Certeau’s terms
an art of “making do” - diverse sets of verbal and non-verbal semiotic and dramaturgical keys/cues for
forging new and perhaps “forbidden” identities:

Apgujungdong is teeming with hitherto-unknown new language and sensibilities of the youth. The
emergence of these new realities signify more than periodic changes. It means the disintegration of the
status quo… What this new cultural politics of sensibility signifies is that youth culture is a form of
existential revolt against the status quo and, even though we cannot clearly explain this phenomenon, this
new cultural sensibility should be regarded as a form of progressive activity (H. Um 1992:161)

Although it was partially true that Apgujung culture contained “post-ideological, depoliticizing, and
juvenile elements,” the practitioners in popular cultural studies cautiously assessed the potential of
Augujung culture as a new form of emerging youth culture that seemed to challenge and “resist” the rigid
social grammar of Korean society in subtle ways (H. Cho 1992).

We are facing a grand kitsch culture [Apgujung culture] and seem to be disillusioned. What worries me
is that in the dominant cultural discourses on Apgujungdong, there is rarely any talk on how to renew and
resituate this particular site for progressive cause. In coming to grips with the Apgujung culture, where
should we begin? If there is something we can do, it is not to make quick judgment on [Apgujung
culture] but to cautiously and symptomatically read off the social symptoms [mediated by
Apgujungdong] (H. Cho 1992:56).

To Haejoang Cho, what was often repressed or not tackled with in the prevailing discourses on
Apgujung culture was more active discourses on “consumption,” “play,” “fun” and new identity politics
that became key resources for “cultural negotiation” staged by youth against mainstream and parent
culture. They argued that though at one level Apgujung culture was clearly (re)produced and regulated
by the capitalist enterprise culture and its profit motive, it also contained new cultural currents and
specific generational “feel.” Cho and other cultural studies scholars took the destabilizing presence of
youth culture as a moment of refusal and disruptive force against the dominant culture and its cultural
hegemony. They launched a series of site-specific studies of youth culture to capture the formative role
of signifying processes, imagination, and desires in social life. In doing so, they attempted to salvage the
utility and creativity of youth and consumer culture that was becoming a new battlefield in the post-
authoritarian era. By putting fun, enjoyment, celebration, play, and empowerment into the emerging field
of cultural politics, local cultural studies practitioners introduced alternative viewpoints and angles that
attempted to break the mould of stern and serious left culturalism. In the following, let me briefly


introduce a landmark cultural studies work in Korea that dealt with the emergence of youth and
consumer culture mediated by a specific local site: Apgujungdong.
.
Apgujungdong Utopia/Dystopia: the Making of a Landmark Cultural Studies Book

It is fair to argue that in the early 1990s Apgu-jung culture and space was deployed as a symbolic
shorthand for large-scale socio-cultural transformations in the making of Korea - including new
effervescent, flexible, and non-traditional sociality as well as emergent cultural formations. It inspired a
wide variety of cultural critics, writers, journalists, and cultural workers. More to the point, in the early
1990s the emergence of new urban popular culture and sensibilities manifested in places like Apgu-jung
dong and other popular/pleasure sites in Seoul presented the very catalyst, - and a welcome, yet perhaps
also seductive - test case to practitioners in cultural studies who were ushering in and grappling with such
new problematics as the politics of consumption, place, identity formation, the body and pleasure which
were mostly non-existent in the intellectual/cultural discourses of the 1980s.

In fact, Apgujungdong in the early 1990s Korea became so synonymous with emergent structures
of feeling and cultural sensibilities that one of the seminal works on cultural studies in Korea was entitled
Apgu-jung Dong: Utopia/Dystopia (CCS 1992). In this much heralded, publicized, and yet criticized
work, local cultural studies practitioners interpreted the social space of Apgu-jung dong and its landscape
as a kind of multi-layered or palimpsestic text on which the spectacular power of Korean capitalism and
consumer modernity are unevenly inscribed. This collaborative work was considered as one of the
loosely defined cross-disciplinary projects in Korea by compiling many genre-bending cultural analyses
at the street level. It used eclectic methods drawn from art, literature, cultural geography, and cultural
criticism. Such cross-disciplinarity or methodological eclecticism was, for better or worse, readily
identified with emerging cultural studies by some practitioners in the popular cultural field and the media.

Apgujungdong: Utopia/Dystopia provided refined semiotic and impressionistic readings of highly
visible cultural forms, sensibilities, and styles that vividly convey the “shock of the new” as well as the
rapidly changing cultural currents in Korea. Nonetheless, I think, to be categorized as a solid cultural
studies work, the book/project lacks more contextualized and historicized approaches. In the
Apgujungdong book, the map of (sub)cultural meanings were suggested, yet no serious attempt to
rearticulate the liberating and disruptive elements in popular practices were found. Rarely launching
“thick” ethnographic location-work or detailed geographical studies that tackled the structural questions,
their analysis was often unable to come to grips with more elusive and yet sensuous/corporeal political
economy of bodies and youth who took a multiplicity of subjective positions between home, event-


spaces, school or work.17 Lacking rich empirical data and depending too much on imported theories, the
Apgujungdong project was perhaps to be doomed from the beginning.

The major shortcoming of the Apgu-jung project is that it largely fails to capture the complex
articulations among particular social and regulatory forces as well as cultural and material flows that
converge on the very space of Apgujungdong as the most visible cultural spot of the times. For instance,
these regulating forces and flows include political, developmental, and institutional practices – in
particular state-led urban development and planning as well as rampantly speculative activities staged by
local capital [for more details, see the next chapter]. Together they have created the historically specific
socio-spatial characteristics of Apgujungdong since the late 1970s. In addition, the book was devoid of
informed and multi-sited ethnographic and (auto)biographical approaches to the people who actually live
or those who were evicted in Apgujungdong. Such approached could have included the following:
ethnographies/field work of various cultural sites in Apgujungdong; the use of historical and narrative
analyses into the life histories of the heterogeneous groups of Apgujung residents in the past and present;
archival investigations of the development and transformation of Apgujungdong, and so forth.

In coming to terms with emergent youth culture mediated by cultural sites such as Apgujungdong,
under the influence of metropolitan cultural theories - that of Fiske, Hebdige, Jameson, de Certeau,
Barthes, and others - local cultural critics adopted semiotic, interpretive, and ideological analysis. Hence,
their analysis was in large part centered on the circulating cultural signs, icons, images, and forms -
including their fluidity and volatility - in youth culture and its particular symbolic politics. In doing so,
they tracked down various sites of intersubjective negotiation of social identities. Yet, the infrastructural
level of youth and consumer culture was only minimally engaged. Collectively, their work took a
predominantly textualist position that assumed a relatively simple one-to-one correspondence among
social position, new kinds of social experiences, and styles. In doing so, they used the styles and other
cultural activities of the younger generation as a mediating term between the social and cultural realm. At
the same time, though interruption, avoidance, and resistance of dominant cultural and intersubjective
grammar were traced down in the minute subtleties of subcultural participation, these cultural analysts
located youth and consumer culture as a system of meaning within the bipolar moral economy between
resistance and co-optation. They operated within a linear and flat communicational model.

Throughout the 1990s, not only in the space of Apgu-jung dong, but in a number of urban sites and
cultural bohemias, locals could find both vibrancy and new alternative forms of cultural experiences,
rhythms, styles, and encounters. In these cultural zones of not only cultural/visual consumption, but


cultural performances and hybridization, one could feel the pervasive presence of the cultural politics of
style and pastiche, and something like the “cultural liminality betwixt and between East and West”
(Shields 1997:9). As Shields and local cultural critics point out, it is perhaps misleading to label these
urban sites as predominantly “globalized” local sites or “thoroughly commodified” zones of capitalist
desire and cultural excess.2 In a way these sites can be placed somewhere in between “individual
introspection and the products of commercialized collective fantasy” (Zukin 1992). It is mandatory that
cultural studies practitioners who “read” these cultural zones should be cautious not to make sweeping
statements with regard to the character and mediating role of these spaces as either commodified [or
Disneyfied] or liberating. In a related vein, I think, the layered authenticity and contingency of the
cultural identities and styles emerging out of, negotiated and mediated through these sites should be
carefully and contextually approached. Less rigorous forms of “culturalist” readings of these spaces
through the usual detached “aestheticizing semiotic gaze” can be flawed by readily identifying new
cultural sensibilities and structures of feeling with populistic or celebratory (postmodern) cultural politics
of the “new” and youth. At the same time, it seems that any meta-readings of the urban sites - say, largely
sedentary models of political economy or the conceptual grid of urban planning often imposed from
above - have obvious limitations in grasping the multiple realities and complex urban rhythms of the
young and urban professionals who come to these sites, incorporating and performing their own
interpersonal cultural repertoires and antics.

To sum up, the politics of identity, style, and new cultural sensibilities that came with the
emergence of Apgujug culture in the 1990s were highly visible and concrete enough that they ushered in
a series of heated public discourses on consumption, social manners, and the politics of difference. Into
the middle of the 1990s a number of cultural discourses on Apgu-jung culture have gradually evolved
and diffused into the formation of emerging youth-centered popular culture of the “new generation
[shinsedae].” At the same time intellectual discourses on shinsedae were increasingly incorporated into
larger debates on the shifting nature and potential of cultural politics and politics of everyday life in
1990s Korea.

The Emergence of the “New Generation Culture” as a Catalyst for Popular Cultural Studies

2
Nonetheless, some local cultural theorists undervalued the emerging culture of new generation: “the cultural praxis and the

politics of style adopted by the new generation appear to escape the reach of disciplinary power… yet most of their cultural praxis

and style are more like imported mimicry of their western counterpart…It seems not promising that the emergent subculture and its

style can be articulated with progressive political pragmatics (CCS 1997:41).”


The younger generation [shinsedae] borne after Korea was industrialized must have a totally different set
of sensibilities, likings, and habitus. Naehee Kang

[Korean] newspapers are filled with stories about the New Generation – those borne after 1970 –whose
values and customs seem alien and irresponsible to their elders. These are youth who cut holes in new
jeans, prefer pizza to rice, and don’t believe that the old are necessarily wise. (B. Kim, cited in Morelli
2002:250)

Subcultures, and youth cultures in general, have gradually separated out their particular imagery from the
world of daily labor and immediate social contexts. Allowed to float free of immediate referents has been
a kaleidoscope of styles, and an increasingly sophisticated semiology of goods, that, drawn into an
endless shopping list and an ever more rapid stylistic turnover, has spun right out of the orbit of a precise
subcultural history. Iain Chambers

Heightened consumerism and the rapid growth of the culture industries had created fundamentally
new realities and opportunities for youth and younger generation Koreans who in a sense actively
responded to such contextual changes. Thus, with the phenomenal expansion of consumer and popular
culture in the early 1990s, the long held belief in popular culture’s vulgarity and left critic’s dismissive
attitude toward popular culture which was in large part steeped in reflectionist view on culture was
questioned. Local cultural critics and workers shifted their concern from what might be called the
“massification” of popular culture to the potential, built-in ambiguity, and complexity of popular culture
whose realm was rapidly expanding. A number of local scholars agreed that the emerging”
cosmopolitan” and “mateiralistic” cultural values spread into the daily forms of sociability, socialization,
and sexual mores. The highly sedimented and interlocking relationships and yet irreducible tensions
between the emergent culture spearheaded by the “New Generation [shinsadae]” and the dominant
“parent culture” - collectively formed the much diversified and fundamentally unstable nature of the
national-popular culture in 1990s Korea.

At this point, it is necessary to introduce the social and generational characteristics of the New
Generation. Above all, the new generation was raised on the relative affluence and mass media-driven
consumer culture that was a byproduct of highly compressed and yet impressively successful Korean
capitalism. The New Generation was born in the late 1960s through early 1970s which were the time-
space wherein state-led social modernization was already firmly in place (D. Hwang 1994). They grew
up in an environment in which Korean society already escaped from absolute poverty. At the same time,
they were too young to remember the democratic struggles and deeply-ingrained social wounds of the
1980s. At the same time, they were the generation that was familiar with American popular culture and


media culture, and consumption as a way of life. They were out of high school or entered college in the
late 1980s through the early 1990s in which militant and well-organized leftism centered on “achieving
democracy and national liberation” no longer appealed to students in general (CCS 1994). Unlike their
parent generation who grew up in mostly extended family setting, the new generation grew up mostly in
a nuclear family setting where once dominant collectivistic - Confucian and nationalistic - values were
under pressure in the face of more individualistic and capitalistic cultures. If the parent generation in the
early 1990s - people over forty - still kept the memories of extended family in rural setting before
urbanization was in full gear, the Korean War and rampant poverty, and the personalized memories of
the state-led modernization project, the new generation only remotely could connect such memories of
their parents, uncles, and aunts. The parent generation [kisung saedae] spent their formative years
through the maelstrom brought about by the forced launching of modernization in the early 1960s. They
were taught that “saving rather than consuming is a virtue” and the devotion to their extended family,
region, firm, and nation state was an absolute moral and patriotic imperative. They were hard workers
and their key sites of social disciplinziation were the school, the armed forces, and firms where the
amalgam of Confucian and state-led official nationalism, and militarism as a dominant value system still
coexisted and were vividly felt (Cumings 1999). As Haejoang Cho (1998:316) pointed out, the high
velocity of Korean capitalism created an “unbridgeable gap” between the parent generation who “worked
like ants as the foot soldiers of modernization and their affluent offspring who were floating and
agonizing over their boredom.”3Also according to Enwoo Joo (1994:75-77), “the younger generation
[shinsaedae] defend their “newness” actively… They are different from their parent generation who work
feverishly, restrain their opinions rather than express, and who are constrained by Confucian ethics.”

The New Generation that appeared in the 1990s displayed significantly different sets of socio-
cultural conducts and interpersonal repertoire. Above all, the new generation was characterized by their
radically new, “outrageous,” “free-wheeling,” and “deviant” - from the viewpoint of dominant parent
culture - social conducts and attitudes. The following observation was made by a progressive daily paper
on the general characteristic of the New Generation:

The New Generation is emerging in the 1990s. It seems that though not radically expressive as the
[American] Hippies [of the 1960s], the youth is moving from the cultural margins onto the mainstream in
the midst of the disintegration of the cold war order, the transition to “post-industrial” society, and the
confusion and conflicts in moral values. They are differentiated from their parent generation who had to

3
Cho aptly poses a question regarding the radical difference of the two generation (1998:316): “Is there a form of play or

entertainment that the parents who grew up on the rural soil and their offspring who enjoys in-lining skating on the concrete?” The

answer seems highly unlikely.


live with war, developmental dictatorship, and industrialization. They are also different from the thirty
something generation who live through the turbulent 1980s and formed similar socio-political sentiments.
The characteristics of these twenty something “new” generation are: they are the generation that pursues
post-authoritarian, liberal, and open values. They pursue more individualistic self-realization over
collective forms of values and self-realization (Hangyoreh Daily January 1st, 1993)

The emergence of qualitatively different structures of feeling of youth, their distinctive and
spectacular politics of style, and everyday geographies animated new intellectual interests. Local cultural
critics and workers came to launch a series of subcultural work and in doing so they broke with
traditional views on the “youth question” which had been concerened predominantly with questions of
“the policing and education of youth” through established social grammars and disciplinization. In
exemplifying the faultline between the parent culture and New Generation Culture, no example was more
telling than emerging local hip-hop culture and the cultural phenomenon called “Seo Taji and the Boys”
to which I now turn.

Seo Taiji Phenomenon: Youth Culture Explosion and the Making of the Fandom

For youth inhabited a place in the social order which demands that they live daily life according to
someone else’s maps, someone else’s dreams, someone else’s trajectories. Youth was subordinated to its
already defined place within a social narrative that was told before it arrived. … youth could construct its
own places in the space of transition between these institutions: in the street, around the juke box, at the
hop (and later, at the mall). Phil Cohen

His [Seo Taiji’s] hip-hop music concretely embodied the transformation of “ghetto culture” [in
Korea] beyond the curious experimentation. The transformation of hip hop culture [in Korea] may be the
“obsession” that tries to find a new form. It can be an example of the resistance and deviance of youth
culture against the dominant culture. Dongyeon Lee
By foregrounding the question of subculture, Suh Taeji threw a new issue to the terrain of popular culture
in the 1990s. Hyunsup Kim

Music cultures were significant elements of popular and youth cultures. For a broad spectrum of
Korean youth and college students, listening to music stations on radio and the Internet, buying their
favorite albums and [of late] downloading their favorite songs as MP 3 format from the internet became a
key feature of growing up and coping with anxieties and boredom in life. Listening to music is one of the
most common leisure activities to youth. In the preceding section, I briefly sketched emerging club
cultures and the cultures of youth dominant pleasure zones in Apgujungdong. The dominant genres of


music played and favored by youth in these sites were localized hip-hop, rock, techno, and dance music.
In the early 1990s, Korean music and popular cultural field faced the new breed of musicians who were
“cultural producers” of special kind. Up until early 1990s, local popular music field was dominated by
three types of genres: gayo [popular music] that were consumed by adults; foreign pop music imported
and circulated by local music industry that had more wider appeal; and mellow ballad music - “love
songs” - that were popular to young urban professionals.

In the summer of 1992, there occurred a significant popular cultural event that left an indelible
mark in local cultural history. Seo Taiji, who once played for an underground hard rock band in the
second half of the 1980s, came literally out of nowhere with what was agreed as the first and most
influential localized hip-hop album of the decade. The album and music video were a huge hit - more
than 1.5 million albums were sold within a month from the release date -, and the band took all the music
awards at the end of their debut year (H. Kim 2001). Critics who were initially skeptical of the potential
of rap music and other “hybrid” generes – such as the mixing and sampling between rap, rock, and
techno music - were shocked by the immediate acceptance and the ensuing enormous popular support of
Seo Taiji’s music. Before long, many local music critics came to accept that Seo Taiji’s albums with two
supporting members - hence the name of the group was “Seo Taiji and the Boys” - were not only
“aesthetically” groundbreaking, but also highly transgressive of the received rule of local music
production in a number of ways. In a moment, I will return to this point.

Above all, by experimenting with, sampling, and popularizing different styles of music that were
marginal in the local popular music scene - from dance to trash metal to rock to punk to hip-hop - Seo
Taiji placed new style of music firmly onto the local music map and shook the established musical
hierarchy. As Dongyeon Lee (1999:65) pointed out, to mix rap and rock was a “dangerous [and gutsy]
adventure,” and technically it was also a daunting task. No wonder that the local music critics were
skeptical that such a new music form could obtain popularity or find a “niche.” Against such a skepticism,
Seo Taiji was the first artist who attempted to “koreanize” rap music and articulated it with dance music
which was accompanied by break dancing and group dancing. Though he mainly experimented with rap
music, Seo Taiji was also keenly aware of the popularity of dance music and its potential value: his
albums had both slow shouted rhymes and power-chord punctuation of rap that was still tuneful enough
to dance (D. Lee 1999:113). The signature characteristics of rap and hip hop - its use of boasting,
bragging, and preaching, style that embodied the Afro-diasporic oral tradition (Rose 1994) - was fresh
and highly appealing to young people who would listen to ballad music and locally produced adult music
for years.


At a different level, according to Keith Howard (2000:9), Seo Taiji’s music appeared to be
influenced by “the eclectic mix of music which characterized the youth of Tokyo as well as the streets of
Los Angeles, places where there were substantial Korean populations. These influences reflect increasing
access [to transnational culture].” In a way, Seo Taiji’s music and style were an embodied form of
“ethnoscapes” in the local setting and a new form of cultural appropriation (see Appadurai 1997). Seo
Taiji innovatively put together hip-hop imagery in which rap signified a series of “authentic” Afro-
American street culture and its pronounced cultural derivatives - breakdancing, tough masculinity, ghetto
imagery, graffiti, etc. Though some cultural critics viewed that imported “rap” music was an exemplary
case of cultural imperialism and a mere reflection of worrisome “trash” music culture in the local zone
that preferred “inauthentic foreign sound,” youth embraced rap as not only their favorite genre of music,
but also their favorite cultural style. Seo Taiji successfully tapped into such a structure of feeling of youth
and their taste culture in the making. Youth accepted rap and hip-hop as a distinctive marker of
generational difference. Local media reported that:

The majority of people over thirty said that they could not sing, follow, or listen this new style of
music [rap] youth enjoy. It is not an overstatement that the popular songs of the 1990s can not create
shared emotional structure between generations. Rather it reflects a gap between generations. Segye
Daily January 14th, 1993 (cited in K. Jeon 1994:96)

Against the critics in the mainstream and left camp who despised hip-hop music, cultural studies
practitioners drew attention to its localized production and complex history of mediation on black
imagery. According to Kyuchan Jeon (1997:67):

Rap should not be considered simply transplanted culture or the trash that symbolizes cultural
imperialism. The ‘black culture’ in Korean society is more like a field of struggles in which the
commercializing strategies of capital, regulation strategies of the established generation, and the
emerging cultural sensibilities and consumption strategies of youth generation collide and at the
same time create a series of alliance.

At the same time, in terms of fashion style, Seo Taji was one of the leading musicians who
inventively adopted and mixed different fashion codes. He knew how to appeal to youth’s craving for
new “multicultural” fashion and was quite successful. He popularized a series of distinctive fashion –
including what was locally called the “snowboard look,” wearing ski hats or baseball cats backward, ski
parkers, and dark sunglasses, “Rastafarian hairdo” and dreadlocks as well as oversized baggie pants and


shoes, which were the markers of hip-hop fashion.4 Such fashion codes readily became a dominant style
among teenagers and young adults. Seo Taiji created a series of “hybrid” cultural looks through his
distinctive fashion sense and outlandish hairstyle. Seo Taiji’s fashion and hair style hugely appealed to,
and fit into the emerging particular taste culture of the New Generation who had been already familiar
with multicultural fashion styles through media and foreign travel. In reality, they were active consumers
who, with significant discretionary income, had developed distinctive sense of taste and consumption
culture. In other words, the New Generation Culture exhibited distinctive “stylization of life” by actively
responding to media images and cultural styles - for lack of a better term the “Benetton-style”
multicultural fashion - by local and global fashion industries churned out. Their sources of information
were local, Japanese, and American magazines – such as Nonno and Cosmopolitan – and youth-oriented
and highly image-conscious “trendy dramas” in which fashion codes were crucial elements of its misen-
en-scene. As a number of local cultural critics pointed out, the New Generation was the first one who
actively used the print and electronic media to keep up with the latest fashion trends and yet could
reappropriate mass-market styles for individual diversity (H. Kim 2001; see Willis 1990). As Kyuchan
Jeon (1998:156) pointed out:

Whereas their parent generation tend to expect neat and acceptable fashion codes, youth challenge
that with their outlandish fashion style - hip-hop fashion, mini skirt, and teared jeans… between two
groups, there goes on a game of border-making.

To a certain degree, the New Generation was inventive and self-conscious “bricoleurs” who
created culturally dominant and spectacular styles in the realm of fashion, cultural images, and music. It
can be argued that such a “rebellion in style” had a particular subversive function in the local arena
where the dress codes of performers on television and films were often policed by the state agencies and
television stations. Youth used hip-hop and dance music as a rallying cry, symbol, and cultural vehicle
around which they expressed socially shared meanings and awareness of their own social plight.

Moreover, what made Seo Taiji as a widely popular idol and “the” spokesperson of the new
generation went beyond the paticular style of music he played and composed was use of highly
politicized lyrics. He covered a number of hithero-undealt “political” issues that ranged from education
to teen angst to social issues to unification. Schooling in Korea at a high school level has been geared

4
In particular, hairstyle in Korea has a long history of one of the most visible markers for generational conflict and a sign of

“freedom.” Under the repressive Park Chung Hee regime (1961-1979), long hair was considered as “morally repugnant” and “anti-

social.” Hence the policemen carrying a measure stick literally checked the length of young people’s hair in the street corners. Once

they were found to have longer hair, punishment was swift.


toward training the students to enter into top universities. It is commonplace that an average high
schooler in the local tend to study more than ten hours a day, and take a number of private lessens
[kwawe]. Considering the fact that out of almost half a million college applicants only less than twenty
thousand students are admitted into these top universities, the anxiety level of youth in high school runs
high. Those who do not get into the desired schools are stigmatized in a social context up until lately the
diploma from prestigious universities meant getting a coveted job in the extremely competitive job
market and gaining almost automatic upward mobility. Hence, literally high school is “hell.” In this
context, “good” parenting entails saving the significant portion of household income and spend it for the
expenses for college entrance exams. In his one of the most well-known songs, “Classroom Idea,” Seo
Taiji vividly captured the pressure cooker situation most of local high school students were in:

Stop it! Stop it! No more such lessons! No more.
It’s enough now; it’s more than enough!
Every morning, by seven thirty early in the morning
[They] push us into a small classroom, and
Put exactly the same things in every head
Of nine million kids all over the nation
In the dark classroom, walled, tightly walled, and gulping down us all,
My youth deserves better than being consumed here. (cited in H. Kim 2001:210)

From a related angle, the post-authoritarian 1990s were the decade of political conservatism and
cynicism. Political parties in the arena of institutional politics were mired in a series of in-fightings and a
number of scandals broke out, furthering people’s cynicism in politics. At the same time, politicians and
administrators who implement educational and cultural policies still viewed youth through a normalizing
lens. In his another well-known song “Sidaeyugam [“Feeling Sorry about the Age”], Seo Taiji criticized
the pervasive political corruption and the disbelief of youth in the norms of the adult world:

The era of the honest is gone
Today you can hear screams and cries in all the pretense.
How much do you think you can fly with your broken wings
I hope we can uproot everything for the new world.
You burnt your conscience and hid your sharp claws. (cited in Morelli 2002:252)

The mainstream media and conservatives regarded youth’s passionate following of rap music as a
twisted form of “low culture” copied from American culture which was at the same time “abnormal” and
“deviant.” They argued that Seo Taiji’s rap music and styles - its “black imagery” that came with it -


contained the “threatening” elements that were against the development of “healthy” cultural
development (K. Jeon 1994). In the dominant discourses that centered on and essentialized the
“normalcy,” “authentic Koreanness,” and “social integration,” there was little room for embracing
cultural multiculturalism embraced by youth. Reflecting such an alarmist view, the state acted swiftly
when Seo Taiji appeared on local television music show with “black hairdo and ghetto-style clothes.” His
band was barred and upon facing such a pressure, Seo Taiji and his band crews succumbed to the
pressure and finally appeared with a “normal” look: wearing short hair with less outrageous clothes. It
was no wonder that the Korean censorship board banned part of the song and the group first released the
song as an instrumental. Later different versions of the song appeared in their albums, and one version
replaced the outlawed lyrics with bleeps so that the listeners could aware that the song was censored. Seo
Taiji’s fans acted quickly and staged a letter writing campaign to the government. When the media
covered this censorship issue, civic groups launched a series of public debate on the artistic freedom of
expression and problematized the state intervention in the field of arts and culture.

As Morelli (2002) notes, Seo Taiji’s performed a multifaceted role – his ability to interweave
different genres of music from rock to dance music to hip hop; his business-savvy sense of self-
promotion and control of his music, and his “political” stance that brought to the fore the often neglected
issues surrounding youth and their highly stressful life. In doing so, the specific effects of his music
across the popular terrain were far-reaching. Almost immediately, youth and young adults started to
endorse Seo Taiji’s music and idolized him. Fan clubs, magazines, fanzines, and webzines devoted to
Seo Taiji emerged.5 Before long he became a cultural icon that symbolized the spirit of the New
Generation Culture (H. Kim 2001; D. Lee 1999). The chain of meaning and style which emerged from
Seo Taiji’s music as a powerful signifying and affective tool interacted with other emerging modes of
new generation’s structure of feeling and alternative value system (D. Lee 1995; 1997). Using
Grossberg’s expression (1992), Seo Taji successfully tapped into the “mattering maps” of youth. In this
respect, Seo was nothing short of one of the most inventive and controversial cultural producers who left
a legacy in the local popular cultural field. For youth, Seo Taiji’s music gave a transitory moment to
avoid the dominant structures of everyday life by empowering themselves. As local media suggested:

To the established who wants to maintain the status quo, he [Seo Taiji] is a dangerous figure since
his songs continuously challenge it and at the same time attempt to replace it with a new order [Chosun
Daily, November 18th, 1995, cited in H. Kim]

5
Seo Taiji’s loyal followers were the adolescent youth and young urban professionals who were media-savvy and highly dedicated.


Perhaps such a view was exaggerated. Nonetheless, as a number of local cultural critics suggested,
Seo Taiji’s role and artistic work in the popular cultural field animated a series of subcultural work to
which now I turn.

Learning from the “Birmingham School” and the Emergence of (Sub)cultural Analysis in the
Local Arena

In the historical making of cultural studies in Korea, initially “the youth question” had been a
relatively minor matter. Though in the early 1990s highly visible youth cultures - embodied through the
aforementioned Apgujung culture - emerged, the detailed subcultural studies of new cultural forms and
subjects were rarely launched, the local cultural studies field has been still dominated by theoreticism –
represented by postmodern cultural theories and semiotics - rather than concrete and detailed “location
work” or “scene studies.”

Various culturalist, interpretive, and semiotic approaches to the emergence of “subcultures” and the
lived trajectories of particular groups of youth who would navigate specific urban sites and locations
slowly emerged. Into the mid-1990s popular and “subcultural” studies slowly became a legitimate sub-
field in local cultural studies. Junior scholars and cultural critics drew attention to the culture of youth as
a distinctive way of life that were expressed through their particular styles, habits, customs, cultural
symbols, and meanings. In particular, the creation of new subjective meanings and more open and
multicultural styles were interpreted as a collective cultural statement by youth. The aforementioned
drastic difference between the parent and youth culture spurred on this cultural transformation.

In various cultural studies circles, the New Generation Culture became a protean metaphor to
conveying the various interpretations of post-authoritarian transformations in the area of everyday life
and culture - in particular, the emergence of relative affluence and civic freedom as well as the
qualitative shift in popular consumption. The result was that local cultural critics engaged exclusively
with the consumption, leisure activities, and the adopted styles of the middle class youth and young
urban professionals. Here, emerging culture was conceived as sets of socially-organized and patterned
responses to the new material and social conditions. Moreover, they readily identified such a middleclass
oriented research with subcultural analysis. Thus, studies of working class subcultures and intra-
generational dynamics/conflicts between the aforementioned parent culture and youth were put aside or
disregarded. Unlike in the “Birmingham/CCCS tradition” where the distinctive cultural activities and
habits of a range of relatively bounded groups of working class youth - Teds, Mods, Rockers, Punks, and
Skinheads, etc – and their “revolting styles” and “class solidarity” were explored through detailed case
studies and “literary ethnography,” youth and popular cultural research in Korea has been predominantly


centered on urban middle class youth and young urban professionals who were considered the key
members of the emerging New Generation Culture. Studies of working class youth and different
subgroups - especially economically disposed and socially marginalized ones - only minimally
appeared.6 At the same time, locally launched popular cultural and subcultural analysis drew attention to
the expressive means - different cultural and fashion styles, attitudes and group behavior, youth
following of stars and fandom, etc. - deployed by the subordinate groups to negotiate with and
(temporarily) subvert the dominant culture by creating and expressing their own cultural meanings and
expressions. In doing so, local cultural studies practitioners attempted to provide hitherto unavailable
“maps of meaning” which looked closely into the life styles, emerging and alternative cultural habits and
norms, consumption and leisure patterns of youth and young urban professionals. They were the first
generation that entered the seductive world of commodities and their desire to own consumer items and
create specific leisure activities were perceived as richly textured “cultural activities.”

Yet Gramscian theories of hegemony that are exemplified by Paul Willis’s and Dick Hebdige’s
work rarely appeared in subcultural analysis in Korea. Willis’s pursuit of “lads” and their “counter-
school culture” was imported and debated. Yet local subcultual analysis never seriously pursued overtly
political analysis of the subculture and its many acts of “insurrection” beyond the domain of style and
signification. Hence, local cultural analysts did not consider subculture as a “crisis within the dominant
culture.” It was more like a “noise” in the socio-cultural relations rather than a full-blown revolt against
conformity and dominant social relations. Local scholars took the symbolic forms of negotiation and
resistance at the cultural level as their starting point. “Style,” “subcultural choice,” “identity,” and
“attitude” became operative words. For one thing, style was interpreted to express and reflect sets of
social and interpersonal conflicts and contradictions. Local cultural analysts attempted to examine the
various ways youth culture disturbed and negotiated with the settled socio-cultural assumptions. They
focused on the ways youth culture broke out of the given social boundaries and norms through which
they were defined. Collectively, the Birmingham subcultural studies can be characterized by its use of
detailed ethnographic methods. In Korea, though ethnography at the theoretical level was discussed,
actual research based on detailed and principled ethnographic analysis was almost non-existent. Instead,
local cultural analysts tended to deploy textual analysis – informed by Barthesian semiotics and Levy-
Strauss’s concept of “bricolage” – and some naturalistic methods – participant observation techniques
and interviews. Their approach to popular and subculture was that of “thin” culturalism. On a different
level, what was notable about local subcultural studies was that “generation [saedae]” rather than class
emerged as a distinctive marker and formative category in cultural and intellectual analysis. Such a trend

6
In South Korea this would have included groups of high school dropouts, runaway kids, and the kids who usually work in the

“informal sector” or service industry.


reflected the widespread intellectual structure of feeling in post-authoritarian 1990s: intellectuals both
willfully and unconsciously avoided class-centered analysis. Especially, in the area of cultural studies,
generation became a privileged social agent that symbolized a rapid shift in socio-cultural life under
booming Korean consumer capitalism (K. Jeon 1997; M. Kang 1993). Taken together, class as an
analytic category became almost invisible in the vocabulary of local cultural studies and “generation”
and “youth” became new units of analysis.

Though being limited by these shortcomings, local cultural studies in the latter half of the 1990s
launched a series studies of subcultural styles, fandom, and various sites of youth interaction. Whereas
the mainstream “law and order” society persistently looked into youth culture through its framework of
“deviance” and “social problems,” cultural critics regarded them as an emerging social force and cultural
phenomena that warranted serious research. In launching more culturally refined analysis, local cultural
critics took issue with both econocentric and moralizing criticism of the New Generation. As Jeon
Kyuchan (1998:55-58) suggested:

Even if we agree that the New Generation Culture was created for the reproduction of capital at an
advanced stage, we cannot reduce all the positive responses toward the New Generation Culture to such
an econocentric perspective… the intention to regulate the New Generation and its desire to create new
realities in the realm of popular culture often collide…The parent generation tries to place all the things
about the New Generation within its power of surveillance. Whereas the youth cunningly avoid the
established moral order and at the same time develop various subcultures…When we perceive style as an
intended form of social communication, we can not underestimate the symbolic charge made by youth
which is mediated by their deviance from norms. (Italics mine)

In coming to terms with the New Generation Culture and its place and function in the overall social
field, Jeon and other cultural studies practitioners took a cautious “middle path” between cultural
skepticism of the left and the elitist moralism: both scholars on the left and mainstream critics considered
the new cultural sensibilities and styles of the New Generation as radically new, but problematic habits
that merely mimicked and were dependent on imported foreign cultures (K. Jeon 1998). Mainstream
media and conservative cultural critics argued that however vibrant and iconoclastic the New Generation
Culture was, it would be destined to be reappopriated into commercial and consumer culture. Though
local cultural studies practitioners generally did not disagree with the latter view, they nonetheless
criticized the left position that emphasized the regulation and co-optation of popular culture by external
forces – such as culture industries and state power rather than looking into the complexity, creativity, and
ephemerality of youth culture. They argued that the left was still immersed in its problematic “rearview
mirrorism” which privileged the “authentic and grassroots culture of the people” and did not pay any


significant attention to youth culture and its symbolic practices (See Bennett 1986). Against such a view,
local cultural studies practitioners drew attention to the multiple ways the New Generation Culture
negotiated or “won” over the intermediary domain from dominant ideologies and parent culture. At this
point, Jim McGuigan’s following view is highly suggestive (1992):

The importance of spectacular subcultures… is not that they represent the whole of “youth” in
some homogeneous “youth culture” but, in their practices of “winning space” within and against the
hegemonic order, they constitute fragile, transient and minority forms, issuing symbolic challenges to the
dominant culture and its definitions.

Influenced in large part by the pioneering work of the Birmingham School - especially the work of
Cohen (1980), Hall and Jefferson (1976), and Hebdige (1979) on British sub- and counter-cultures -
throughout the 1990s Korean cultural critics came to explore the phenomenal form of the New
Generation. They focused on the role of the New Generation Culture in pioneering and experimenting
with new popular forms and intersubjective norms by interpreting the system of style, dress, music,
gestures, slang, postures, and other rituals of youth. In doing so, they perceived the New Generation
Culture as an “imaginary” or “magical” attempt to resolve collectively experienced problems resulting
from contradictions in the social structure. As Hebdige (1979:17-18) suggested, subcultures “carry secret
meanings: meanings which express, in code, a form of resistance to the order which guarantees their
subordination.” Such an approach became a widely shared methodological premise in local cultural
studies work.
By using participant observation, interviews, combined with semiotic and interpretive analysis,
local cultural practitioners tracked down the ways the New Generation Culture disrupted, dislocated, and
denied the dominant culture in subtle, self-conscious, and yet highly visible ways (H. Kim 1999; D. Lee
2002). In doing so, they gave a much needed legitimacy to the sub-cultural groups as newly ordained
social agents who embodied “forbidden” identities and who exercised significant symbolic power and
create new cultural currents through their subcultural styles and use of “subcultural capital” – a specific
cultural capital which youth could not obtain at school (see Thornton 1999). As Kilsup Koh (1999:158-
68) pointed out, young people in the 1990s demonstrated distinctively “creative productivity” through
their involvement in the extended cultural sphere and their distinctive politics of style and fun. To a
significant degree, they generated highly visible and concrete
cultural effects that were dispersed across the social domain. Youth successfully created their own
cultural territories, thereby empowering themselves. They popularized “indie” [independent], techno,
hip-hop, and dance music culture. As was exemplified in Seo Taiji phenomenon, cultural “fandom”
became one of the emergent keywords - sometimes perhaps over-hyped - that could vividly illustrate the
active involvement of youth as “cultural producers” and owner of keen cultural knowledge in


popularizing particular genres of music and dominating the music market by emerging as the dominant
buyers of music albums. And it was young people who appropriated dyed hairstyles and much loose and
“loud” fashion codes into universities, homes, and streets.

In addition, in the middle of impressive informationalization of society [for more details, see
chapter 5], youth even took new technology as their new ground of interaction: they were the main users
of news and chat groups on the Internet that have been devoted to their “stars” and favorite popular
genres on the Internet. Their colloquial and jargon-inflected “net-talk” became more than generation-
specific language that has gained a wider acceptance among their elder users. In this way, young people
took over the emerging web culture. By blending and appropriating a wide range of dissonant
commodities, styles, and cultural objects, and placing them in a distinctive symbolic ensemble, youth
also became trend-setters, consumers with significant purchasing power that local culture industries
could not fail to ignore. No where was the power of youth more visible than the popular entertainment
sector, especially popular music and advertising. To them cultural consumption was a form of
“production” and an expression of their identities. They injected elements of “transgression” of the
received socio-cultural norms through their excitement. This was a culture that was fickle and literally
played at life. Through their richly textured cultural activities and consumption, youth created their own
norm: right to be different and demonstrate different cultural tastes. In other words, “cultural diversity”
became new “indicator of their culture [munhwaui jipyo]” (K. Koh 1998 :159). I believe that the majority
of local cultural critics who explored the rise of youth culture seem to share the following view of Dick
Hebdige, whose ground-breaking book, “Subculture: the Meaning of Style,” was a source of inspiration
and a frequent reference point in the local cultural studies scene:

I have tried to avoid the temptation to portray subculture (as some writers influenced by Marcuse
were prone to do) as the repository of ‘Truth’, to locate in its forms some obscure revolutionary potential.
Rather I have sought, in Sartre’s work, to acknowledge the right of the subordinate class… to ‘make
something of what is made of (them)’ – to embellish, decorate, parody and whenever possible to
recognize and rise above a subordinate position which was never of their choosing.

Local practitioners in cultural studies shared the methodological premise offered by Hebdige
(1979:133): “subculture [can be regarded] as a form of resistance in which experienced contradictions
and objections to the ruling ideology are obliquely represented in style.”7 They argued that the emerging

7
To use another useful definition of subculture, youth cultures refer to “meaning systems, modes of expression or life styles

developed by groups in subordinate structural positions in response to dominant meaning systems, and which reflect their attempt to

solve structural contradictions rising from the wider societal context” (Blake 1985:8).


New Generation Culture contained progressive and “transformative desires and impulses [sangsungjeok
yokmang kwa him]” in that they challenge the normative world in hitherto unimagined ways (CCS 1992;
1994; D. Lee 2002). What the New Generation Culture ushered in was an awareness of a new kind of
“political economy of desire and imagination” - though this phrase was more like a slogan than a
concretely defined problematic - that was displayed through young adults’ street-savvy and corporeal
culture (CCS 1994). Above all, the youth-centered politics of style enabled their peers and others,
especially the adolescent and young urban professionals, to reevaluate and “counter-identify
[bandongilsi]“ with the deeply-entrenched ideologies, cultural icons, moral and belief systems of their
parent generation.

Looking Into the Current Popular Cultural Scene: a Snapshot of Hongdae culture

Up until this point, this paper has attempted to deal with the emergence of, and heightened
interests in popular and youth culture in Korea since the early 1990s, illuminated by the spatial shaping
of urban consumption and pleasure sites, as well as by the explosion of popular music, spearheaded by
Seo Taji and the localization of hip hop.

Now let me briefly provide a snapshot of current popular cultural scene around Hongdae culture
[hongdaemunhwa]. To begin, Hongdae, Hongik University traditionally has a strong fine arts program.
No wonder that near Hongik University Area there are a number of arts institutions, cafes, and bars.
Beginning in the mid 1990s, around Hongik University area, there emerged clubs, in particular punk and
modern rock clubs where youth could listen and dance to new types of music while interacting with one
another (D. Lee 2002). Influenced by alternative or grunge music and performed at such clubs as Drug
and Jammers, new breeds of musicians, Deli Spice, Crying Nut, and My Aunt Mary, etc., gathered and
created what has collectively called “indie music scene” around Hongdae.

Indie as distinctive expressive musical form and particular cultural practice here refers to rock-
centered experimental music that are produced and performed outside of mainstream popular musical
circuit dominated by television and big business. Production-wise musicians and bands who performed
and created indie music have often operated outside or, on the fringe of commercial musical circuits and
managements. Also unlike their predecessors in the local rock tradition or by extension underground
culture who usually played and copied canonic AngloAmerican rock music, indie music bands produced
their own work, often creatively mixing, poaching, and sampling several subgenres and styles of music.
It can be argued that indie music of the mid 1990s as such has actively attempted to appropriate and
experiment with foreign musical style and influences through innovative bricolage and at times mimicry.


Before long, several live clubs around Hongdae as performative stage for indie music and scene
have emerged and begun to draw youth and young adults, creating what is often referred as “the Hongdae
scene” to outsiders and the media. Here, the scene seems to be a fitting label in that a diverse range of
musicians and audiences have gathered who seemed to share a specific common frame: taste for indie
music and desire for alternative space of interaction and having fun from ordinariness and boredom (M.
Lee 2005). Youth and Young adults have flocked to Hondae clubs where perhaps cultural freedom,
hybridity, and musical diversity have been the name of the game. Put differently, Hongdae club scene
includes relatively new and heterogeneous forms of “taste communities” centered on alternative, punk,
modern rock, heavy metal, R&B, hip-hop, acid, techno and other kinds of music (I. Cho 2005). K, music
critic in an interview recently told that:

I believe in Hongdaeap there exists something like widely shared sentiment of what I might call
“cultural liberalism [munhwajeok jayujjui].” I mean a diverse range of musical styles and conducts are
allowed here without being bothered, and people like that…

These clubs have increasingly become a magnate and playground for young adults who crave for
free wheeling individualism and freedom as shared interpersonal grammar. It seems that at Hongdae the
majority of them tend to demonstrate or own what Sarah Thornton calls “subcultural capital” and identity
through which their distinctive musical and stylistic preferences are shaped, expressed, and lived out.
What is distinctive about the club scene is that unlike other forms of youth or popular culture which are
normally not associated with particular location, Hongdae has become the location-specific (imagined)
site for alternative musical scene of production, performance, and gathering where a diverse range of
audiences who are between young teens to urban professionals would come and help to create distinctive
form of culture.

It is often assumed and revealed that in the tradition of Birmingham-style subcultural analysis,
particular social groups, especially class-centered ones, form distinctive forms of subculture which revolt
against both parent and dominant consumer culture (Muggleton 2000). And traditionally critical
subcultural analysis would focus on subculture’s resistance “through rituals” [a. k. a. “magic solutions”]
and transgression of dominant culture through semiotic and signifying practices (Hall and Jefferson
1986; Willis 1978). In Hongdae case, indie culture is formed mainly in and around the particular locality
and site where youth with heterogeneous social backgrounds and status would come. Indie music around
Hongdae, utilizing Paul Willis’s familiar phrase, has been symbolically creative, and yet it has not been
dominated by any particular form of class-based cultural sensibility or imperative. It is separated from
overt forms of resistant subculture and class-based subculture which was popularized by the Birmingham
school. To a degree, Hondae indie scene seems to resemble “neo-tribal cultural scene,” suggested by


Maffesoli in that rather than class or working class subcultural solidarity (of mods, punks, teddybears,
rockers, etc.), generation, belongingness, freewheeling and pluralistic subcultural styles play constitutive
role in shaping its culture and musical textures. I wouldn’t argue that Hondae culture can be defined as a
some type of “postmodern hyperindividualism” here. Neither do I argue that Hongdae culture is merely a
lifeystyle enclave of specific kind. Rather, Hongdae culture has signaled that something like a “post-
subcultural” community emerged, and that such an emergent microcultural formation requires rethinking
of dominant Birmingham approach. This is a culture based on loose networks of membership, subcultural
attitude, and a certain cultural/musical insiderism which at the same time does not express overt forms of
political resistance.

Nevertheless, indie music scene at Hongdae has shown certain features and particular aspects of
non-compromising subcultural sensibility and practices of its own: it is in large part performed, craved,
consumed, and shared outside of commercial music circuit and drive to commodification. Not as political
as its romanticized counterparts of the heroic subcultural days in AngloAmerican settings, nonetheless,
Hongdae culture has often pursued semi-autonomous cultural and musical autonomy and artistic freedom
while it is relatively free from the influences of corporate music culture. Those who have become the
members of the (imagined and real) Hongdae scene have attempted to maintain cultural and musical
autonomy from such commercialzing pressures (D. Lee 2005). What is memorable about the Hongdae
scene is that even in contemporary Korea the dominant Birmingham subcultural framework needs
extensive rethinking and recontextualization.

Critique of “Popular Subculturalism” and the Emergence of Post-Subcultural Work

Looking back, through imported “Birmingham” frameworks on youth culture and subculture,
local practitoners in cultural studies have continuously provided new sets of methodological tools,
languages as well as research agendas. Considerable attention is paid to “decoding” the meanings of
different – new and cosmopolitan – modes of subcultural signs and activities of youth at the surface level.
Local researchers give attention to the “semantic disorder” of (sub)cultural activities and their
momentary subversion or disruption of the established grammars. Perhaps what local cultural studies
practitioners pursued and found is resistance and transgression on a micro level - in the minute subtleties
of “illicit” activities, poaching and appropriation of signs and styles, stylistic non-conformity, pursuing of
bodily, emotional, and tactile pleasures.

Having said this, it should be pointed out that the local adoptions of the Birmingham approach
have been severely limited. Above all, their research collectively focused on the “transgression” and


“revolt” in the styles and symbolic rituals of subcultural groups which were constructed as having an
internal homogeniety and unity. Heavily shaped by semiotics and “thin” descriptions of the leisure
activities and consumption patterns of youth as well as their appropriation of cultural items to
communicate new and alternative meanings, some versions of popular and subcultural studies have
closely interpreted expressive cultural styles and stylistic codes as their key objects of study. In doing so,
often they fail to track down a complex chain of socio-cultural relations that involved the lived
contradictions of youth at a socio-economic level. Without producing richly textured empirical studies -
especially “thick” [or literary] ethnography and (auto)biographical studies - of various subculure and fan
groups, local studies have been, in large part, theory-led and often put the political wish of researchers
into their studies. In other words, local cultural studies practitioners have worked on the broad theme of
the “politics of style” and signs and attempted to capture “imaginary” and “magical” solutions and
“tactics” of youth in their battle against the dominant and parent culture. In doing so, they have focused
on the ways youth “resisted” or “subverted” the established norms in society. Yet resistance was
predominantly derived from the symbolic level. This certainly allowed the dominant mode of subcultural
studies or cultural studies of popular culture in the local arena open to the charge of “populism” and
“theoreticism.”

Second, by mostly focusing on the middle class youth, local cultural studies practitioners have a
tendency to conflate youth culture, subculture, and the New Generation Culture and did not provide
class-specific and group-specific readings of a range of heterogeneous subcultural formations in the
making. Certainly, youth is not a unitary category. As Osgerby aptly pointed outs (1998:201-203),
“rather than being perfectly formed entities, subcultures have always been fluid and fragmented ‘hybrids’
in which cultural allegiances have been mutable and transient. Instead of making a firm set of stylistics
commitments most youngsters have instead cruised across a range of affiliations, constantly forming and
reforming their identities according to social context.” Local cultural studies scholars would rightly give
due attention to the young adults as the bearers of specific symbolic powers in particular sites and
bricoleurs at the street level, which has been a long neglected subject in local cultural criticism.
Nonetheless, they rarely explore internal differences and the subcultural mobility through which groups
of youth could adopt different subculural positions. Another problem that was not often debated was: the
absence of gender and the role of female youth in subcultures.

Third, youth and subculture can also be manifestation of self-expressions that are closely
associated with one’s own “mattering maps” and “feeling of life.” Youth as fans construct the particular
forms of affects, intensities, moods, empowerments, fun, and desires through their investment in and use
of various popular cultural forms - music in particular - and sites - clubs and streets - they navigate.
Affect cannot be easily read off from the texts. According to Larry Grossberg (1992:81), “affect is what


gives ‘color,’ ‘tone,’ or ‘texture’ to our experience… it operates within and, at the same time, produces
maps which direct our investments in and into the world. ” Local subcultural work has utilized
predominantly semiotic and interpretive methods to explore the political significance of new cultural
styles youth appropriate and “poach” from the dominant culture. In doing so, it was relatively insensitive
to explore the ways youth put such high energy and investments in popular cultural forms and care about
particular forms of subculture so passionately. To take an example, the aforementioned gap and tension
between the parent culture and New Generation Culture could not be approached through a relatively
“static” and “cold” ideological or semiotic analysis. Obviously, it mattered tremendously to youth to own
and pursue particular forms of popular texts or practices, and in so doing, they were empowered by
generating new forms of cultural participation as well as emotional and affective investments in popular
culture. Affective play and alliances formed by youth in their everyday cultural life provided key
biographical and social resources for alternative forms of identities. What is often missing in the
dominant form of “interpretive” subcultural work was properly articulated analysis of the articulations
among youth’s passion for particular favored objects, icons, and texts that formed their personal -
potentially political - significance, as well as their different “affective economies” which created socially
constructed differences.

Fourth, what is also rarely raised in subcultural work in the local arena is the different socio-
symbolic position and the analytic distance between the intellectuals who performed subcultural analysis
and their “subjects” who are often “othered” and “frozen” through various semiotic, dramaturgical, or
interpretive grids which the intellectuals utilized. Dongyeon Lee, one of the leading practitioners in the
popular cultural studies field who has launched a series of pioneering research on the New Generation
Culture and fandom, confessed that his predominantly theoretical work on local subculture is literally
shattered when he would meet the “objects” - or the imagined other - of his research in the streets and
specific social locations: rock and roll manias, underground band members, runaway kids, teenage
prostitutes, elderly people, the homeless, etc. He provides a telling tale and candid response to his own
research practice in the following way (1999:72):

It seems that my previous use of subcultural concepts don’t seem to either effective or proper. Are
these people subcultural subjects? Who are they after all? Runaway kids? The kid who did headbaning
[in a club]? The homeless guy? … They didn’t think they are subcultural subjects. Nor did they know
what subculture means. A kid told me that I should not judge them with such a concept. I have realized
the gap between my theorization on the subcultural space, style, identity and its generational specificity,
and my encounter with them in specific sites. [in my research] I did not seriously consider such a gap, and
my work became an incomplete report.


Though he did not elaborate further on his encounter with subcultural others, nonetheless, I think
Lee touched upon the crucial institutional questions – to be more exact the “imagined subjectivity” and
institutional privilege of the academics as “scholar-fans” who perform subcultural studies that were
rarely tackled in local studies of subculture (see Hills 2002). Certainly, Lee and others put the youth
question and its often undervalued symbolic politics on the cultural studies map. As a result, youth,
consumer, and fan culture are no longer considered as either “scandalous categories” or “inauthentic
cultural formation” created and co-opted by culture industries. Subcultures, fandom, and the social sites
of youth interaction became “legitimate” academic topics. Having said this, local cultural analysts only
occasionally put a “reflexive lens” on their own use of cultural and symbolic capital as well as their often
“detached” work. Without being equipped with such due reflexivity and any kind of collaborative work
between the researchers and subcultural others, locally produced studies of subcultures or popular forms
rarely confronted the deeply-seated moral dualisms in their research.

In Lieu of a Conclusion: going beyond subculturalism and popular tribalism

Looking back, a number of texts produced in the name of cultural studies since the mid1990s have
paid scant attention to grounded ethnographic methods that can substantiate the larger theoretical claims
and outlooks. The overly textualistic trend and theoreticism in some cultural studies works in Korea is
often accompanied by another trend - what might be called “subculturalism.” Subculturalism has
included various studies of emergent forms of urban subcultures and the rearticulation of transnational or
global popular culture by local producers or users who are viewed as bricoleurs or cultural poachers.
Accordingly, practitioners in cultural studies in Korea has found new interests in various
popular/subcultural sites, the cultural underground, material cultures, and new cultural tribes who
navigate urban space and surf on the net. They are seen as displaying new energy, alternative cultural
sensibilities, and a potentially transgressive or non-conforming politics of style (CCS 1993; D. Lee 1997;
1999).

For instance, since the mid 1990s loosely qualitative and marginally participatory studies on a
variety of topics have appeared in academic and newly formed popular journals, magazines, and books:
on the shopping malls and streets, on the different spatial grammars of the urban, on club cultures and
fandom, as well as on cultural/gendered identities. However, not many studies of popular cultural studies
in Korea would employ reflexive and multi-sited ethnographic approaches. Instead, these works are
largely and perhaps unevenly influenced by Williams’ model of “dominant, residual, and emergent”
culture(s), Hebdige’s “politics of style,” and the Geertzian method of “thick description.” For this heavy
reliance on “experience-based” models, on dazzling authorial semiotic skills and proficiency in popular


culture, some versions of popular cultural studies in Korea can be criticized for being too literary,
superstructural, or populist. On the latter, some cultural studies practitioners have implicitly shied away
from making informed and situated political judgements, evaluations, and interventions for progressive
change. As Mike Featherstone (1992:ix) argues, “there is nothing wrong with high level speculative
theory, except if it becomes presented and legitimated as having surpassed or succeeded in discrediting
the need for, empirical research.” The main problem with local subcultural analysis has been that due to
its lack of rich, detailed, and principled ethnographic investigation of its key subjects under analysis - the
life styles and symbolic repertoire of adolescent kids, young adults, and middle class consumers - it could
not convincingly legitimize its research results. Rather it was often the case that the “political wish” and
particular version of “subcultural ideologies” of cultural critics who search for “decipherable signs of
cultural transgression and resistance” are imposed on the exploratory or pilot research. Without forming a
local tradition in sustained ethnographic and qualitative analysis of everyday culture, popular cultural
studies in the local arena could not shake off the charge that it is often “populist.” By largely holding
onto theoretical analysis of popular and subcultures a la the Birmingham approach rather than engaging
with “out-there subcultures” at the empirical level or collaborating with various subcultural others,
popular and subcultural analysis have been theory-led and methodologically underdeveloped. The
commitment of local cultural critics to the ethnographic studies of lived cultures is perhaps still relatively
weak to launch a more comprehensive ethnographic research. Their methodological baseline that
subculture is resisting or transgressive – seems to be still formulated and grounded at a level of
abstraction which is somewhat removed from the everyday context where people move through a range
of different subcultures and adopt various forms of subcultural styles as is illustrated in Hongdae culture.
I believe what is required at current juncture is more self-reflexive, location-specific, and collaborative
popular cultural case studies and will to take more genuinely ethnographic work.


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Keehyeung Lee’s interviews with local clubbers, cultural critics, and musicians.


Youth Culture and Popular Spaces in 1990s South Korea

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