Pil Ho Kim, assistant professor of Korean in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, The Ohio State University, presents a virtual lecture, "Industrial Hip Hop against Hip Hop Industry: The Critical Noise of XXX," at 4 p.m. Eastern time.
Since its humble beginning about three decades ago, South Korea’s national hip hop scene (gukhip) has grown to a formidable industry that runs the gamut from cutting-edge underground artists to mainstream K-pop idol rappers. In recent years the cable TV audition program Show Me the Money (SMTM) has become the gukhip industry’s ultimate gatekeeper as many aspiring hip hop artists increasingly depend their careers on making it on the show. In this presentation, my co-author Wonseok Lee and I focus on XXX, an underground hip hop duo who bucks this commercial trend of gukhip in both sound and message. Their noise-filled beats and shifting grooves echo the avant-garde aesthetics and confrontational attitudes of industrial music, and their words are harshly critical of the money-driven gukhip culture as represented by SMTM. We provide a musicological analysis of XXX’s own version of industrial hip hop and examine what makes their "outsider" status sustainable vis-à-vis the gukhip industry.
