Gentlemen rappers: Masculinity and traditional style in Korean popular music performance

Abstract

Across its history, K-pop has put traditional Korean elements to a diversity of uses, including in music, dance and visual style. This article investigates the use of traditional elements in the sub-genre of Korean hip hop and rap performance. In this strongly masculine sub-genre, the cultural meanings invoked in the incorporation and remediation of traditional Korean elements take on a more particular generic significance, one that highlights the hegemonic masculinity enjoyed by the referenced figure of the ‘gentleman scholar’ (seonbi). With this narrower scope of investigation, I argue that the use of traditional cultural elements in Korean popular music can simultaneously function as an element of attraction for global audiences, as has previously been argued, while still maintaining local, genre-specific meanings. In particular, I argue that the gentlemanliness of the ‘gentleman scholar’ comes from and expresses a position of power and privilege.

Keywords

BTS G-Dragon K-pop masculinity YG Entertainment

Across its history, K-pop has put traditional Korean aesthetic and cultural elements to a diversity of uses, with musical, dance and other elements of style incorporated into its ‘glimmering utopian visions’ (Laurie, 2016: 214). BLACKPINK’s 2022 song ‘Pink Venom’ opens with the plucking sounds of the geomungo, played in a futuristic setting in the music video by member Jisoo (BLACKPINK, 2022). The packaging design of Stray Kid’s 2023 album 5-STAR takes design elements from the Korean card game Go-Stop; while BTS member Jimin was presented with an award for his buchaechum (fan dance) in the group’s performance at the 2018 Melon Music Awards (Melon, 2019). As a more specific element of a traditional Korean aesthetic, the traditional Korean dress, hanbok, has been iterated and re-iterated in the K-pop vernacular in costuming across a range of musical subgenres, including in the love song (as in ‘Shangri-La’ by VIXX; ‘Peaches’ by Kai; and ‘Fiancé’ by Mino), the hip hop track (as in ‘Arario’ by Topp Dogg; ‘Niliria’ by G-Dragon feat. Missy Elliott), the girl crush anthem (‘How You Like That’ by BLACKPINK; ‘Hwaa’ by (G)I-dle; ‘Chica Malo (Aniri ver.)’ by Mamamoo+) and other pop songs (‘Tiger Inside’ – SuperM; ‘LIT’ by ONEUS). Beyond music videos, traditional elements also feature heavily in other K-pop media and products, including in Chuseok (mid-Autumn) offerings, such as with BTS’s Dalmajung merchandise collection. K-pop artists have also served more broadly as global ambassadors for traditional Korean culture – including of art forms such as pansori and minyo with the K-Community Festival series on Youtube, sponsored by the Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism.

This deployment of traditional Korean elements as a part of the visuality of K-pop has been the subject of some scholarly discussion, often treated in terms of the K-pop industry’s strategy for differentiation against a Euro-American dominant global popular culture. Kim (2020) argues that the incorporation of pansori musical elements and a variety of other traditional Korean visual cues in BTS’s music video for ‘IDOL’ (2018b) ‘explicitly delineate BTS’s identity not only as a musician in general but also as a K-Pop artist, in particular, in the context of Hallyu (the Korean Wave)’ (p. 239), serving ‘to dismantle what has been assigned to BTS as their identity’ (p. 242). On the whole, CedarBough Saeji (2022) critiques the invocation of traditional Korean aesthetic elements in recent K-pop, arguing that ‘more performers have started to incorporate elements from traditional arts, perhaps to project Korean identity to international audiences’ (p. 139). Saeji argues here that ‘the appearance of tradition continues to be more important than tradition itself’ (Saeji, 2022: 146). The economic allure of Hallyu’s popular reach on kugak (traditional Korean music) artists is described by Yates-Lu (2019), who emphasizes the commonly visual understanding of traditional Korean culture in the Hallyu context, where ‘with its focus on visual spectacle, it is hardly surprising that artists in other genres [such as kugak] choose to adapt by appropriating some of the strategies employed by the dominant culture’ (p. 51). Boman (2020) focusses on the invocation of han (roughly, the sentiment of Korean grief) in recent K-pop as a common ‘striking exception’ (p. 112) to K-pop’s largely ‘westernized imagery and music’ (p. 112).

Rather than situating the invocation of traditional Korean elements in the visuality of contemporary K-pop as a part of the Korean music industry’s strategy for global differentiation, this article seeks to explore one specific citation of traditional Korean aesthetic elements in the sub-genre of Korean hip hop and rap performance. In doing so, I highlight that a variety of meanings are produced in each of K-pop’s citations of traditional Korean culture, which can, in some instances, be specified as a part of the workings of endogenous genres. My argument here does not contradict arguments that K-pop invokes traditional aesthetic elements as a part of its strategy in a global music market. Rather, the invocation of traditional Korean aesthetic elements in K-pop not only speaks to the global Other. The citations of K-pop are polysemous.

In focussing on the genre of idol rap performance, I follow Laurie’s (2016) approach to understanding the visuality of K-pop, where he argues that ‘K-pop’s idyllic worlds cannot be measured against the standards of social realism. Rather, K-pop produces its own distinct syntheses of sound and image to produce a utopian and communitarian aesthetic, and its sexual politics develop in relation to these genre conventions’ (p. 214). Similarly, Elfving-Hwang (2022) argues, ‘onstage performances of K-pop masculinity should be understood primarily as part of the K-pop genre’s wider visual aesthetic’ (p. 131). In considering, then, the repeated choice to clothe idol rappers in hanbok on stage, to have them brandish buchae – a traditional Korean fan – and to don the gat – a traditional Korean scholar’s hat from the Joseon period (1392–1894) made of horsehair and bamboo – I continue the argument that stylistic choices in K-pop should not be distinguished in terms of ‘authenticity and fabrication, but rather between different kinds of relationships established between the rules of a game and the desires of its players’ (Laurie, 2016: 215). Here, ‘critical readings must engage with K-pop’s own internal fictions’ (Laurie, 2016: 228). In the context of the subgenre of hip hop and rap performance, especially as stylized by idol rappers, traditional Korean elements are appropriated to signify the genius, intellect and power associated with traditional Korean seonbi masculinity (wen masculinity in the adjacent Chinese context, see Louie, 2002, 2014; Song, 2004) in the genre’s characteristic tit-for-tat between performers. Local meanings, such as of the privilege and artistry associated with the gold embellishment of a fine buchae, or the leisurely contemplation associated with a scholar-official who may have worn a silk hanbok and gat in their travels (or at least imagined as such in the broader contemporary Korean popular culture), are channelled into new genres for relevant purposes.

Korean hip hop and rap: emergence and popular genre discourse

The title of this article takes inspiration from ‘Hip Hop Gentlemen’ (2002), a track from YG Entertainment that celebrates the company’s hip hop brand with then artists 1TYM, Jinusean and Masta Wu, while also signalling to a bright rap future with the appearance of a young G-Dragon of later Big Bang fame. Established in 1996, YG Entertainment had, by the release of ‘Hip Hop Gentlemen’, garnered a reputation for making hip hop-style music widely popular in Korea. The braggadocio of ‘Hip Hop Gentlemen’ (YG ENTERTAINMENT, 2008) speaks to this moment in the company’s history: mainstream popularity had not yet seemed possible for ‘real’ Korean hip hop and rap, yet the company had seemed to have made it with its popular and commercially viable stable of hip hop artists. The rappers of ‘Hip Hop Gentlemen’ are, as the hook of the song repeats, ‘cleaned up and shining bright’ because of their success. ‘Hip Hop Gentlemen’, in contrast to the latter examples that will be discussed, speaks its ‘shine’, however, in the idiom of an American hip hop culture. The performers are dressed in baggy, designer sportswear, bandanas, chains and oversized watches. These men, and they are all men, rap in front of expensive cars, in clubs, while shopping (and spending cash money), and on the graffitied ‘streets’ of an unidentifiable location that looks American more than Korean. The ‘gentlemen’ here are not gentlemanly because of their possession of refined manners, behaviour or taste, but in their newfound economic power, derived from the popularity of their music. They are gentlemen in the Korean music industry because of their ground-breaking, popular artistry and the power that it gives them.

Unlike its more diverse emergence in the popular cultures of the US, the emergence of hip hop and rap music in Korea has foundational ties to dance in a new Korean popular music genre called ‘rap-dance’. Rap-dance was popularized in the 1990s as Korea solidly emerged into democratic rule with a new generation of youth (sinsidae) benefiting from growing economic prosperity (Jung, 2016: 144). At the time, rap-dance was seen as a foreign music genre in a market full of native ballads, and the rap-dance trio Seo Taiji and Boys’ 1992 song ‘I Know’ is widely regarded as the first Korean rap song (Jung, 2016: 145). YG Entertainment executive producer Yang Hyun-suk himself was one of two dancers in Seo Taiji and Boys, largely performing as a backup dancer, where, for many audiences, the ‘rap’ incorporated into rap-dance songs were ‘often regarded merely as a “condiment” to melodic vocals’ (Park, 2020: 149). Though Seo Taiji and Boys is credited with popularizing hip hop and rap music in Korea (Park, 2020: 101), Seo’s experiments with American popular music genres, including varieties of rap and metal, as well as with traditional kugak sound, placed the group’s music outside the realm of ‘authentic’ hip hop, which was seen to come later in the 1990s with the more complex rhyming techniques of underground MCs, such as Drunken Tiger (Park, 2020: 151). This discourse, of ‘authentic rap’ versus ‘rap as condiment’, has persisted in common popular understandings of hip hop and rap music in Korea to this day (see Hare and Baker, 2017; Im, 2020; Kim and Sung, 2020). The emergent discourse of ‘real’ Korean rap speaks to the perceived inauthenticity of the rap in popular rap-dance music of an earlier era and has since extended into common popular criticisms of the incorporation of rap into K-pop ‘idol’ music today.

What fundamentally structures hip hop and rap sound and visuality in Korean popular music, then, is an understanding that there are ‘authentic rappers’ and ‘inauthentic imitations’. This understanding is reinforced in the music of both ‘authentic rappers’ and purported imitators, such as in expected lyrical jibes from within the rap genre, which includes popular rap as incorporated into K-pop, between authentic and ‘inauthentic’ rappers where ‘rap battles are something like a kind of music sport so that within determined rules, players contend for victory by means of their rap skills and wordplay and by attacking each other’s weaknesses’ (Korean hip hop critic Gang Ilgwon cited in Im, 2020: 169). From ‘authentic rappers’, as Hae-Kyung Um (2013) articulates, an ‘attack on the mainstream music industry and Korean pop (K-pop) by Korean rappers is part of the established genre rules of Korean hip-hop, particularly for the underground, as an act of self-authentication’ (p. 41). This common element produces, in turn, a characteristic and now expected generic retort from rappers of idol groups from major entertainment companies, such as BTS of Big Hit Entertainment, and with tracks like ‘Hip Hop Gentlemen’ from YG Entertainment, where ‘idol rappers’ often ‘rap back’ at the diss tracks of ‘real’ underground rappers.

YG Entertainment, at the outset of ‘Hip Hop Gentlemen’, then, was pitching itself to a specific popular discourse of hip hop music in Korea: they were a major popular music producing company not only successful in their pop music endeavours, but successful, at least commercially, in their ability to make ‘real’ hip hop music. In responding to critics in the language of the genre, that is to underground and ‘authentic’ albeit commercially unsuccessful rappers, the YG rappers maintain a ‘gentlemanly’ cool because of what their resources and popularity allow. To this day, male rap performers debuting with YG Entertainment pitch themselves as ‘real rappers’ though they may be part of idol groups. Some of this authenticity is derived from the company’s closer emulation of American hip-hop genre rules and styles (Um, 2013: 57), but another aspect of Korean hip hop authenticity also lies with the perceived and actual creative music-producing reputation of the company’s artists. Especially since the celebrity of G-Dragon and Big Bang, certain YG Entertainment idols, often rappers, are perceived differently to the highly produced and packaged versions of K-pop that gives K-pop much of its reputation abroad as machinic and formulaic (Shin and Kim, 2013).

Masculinity and hip hop identity in Korean popular music

G-Dragon is exemplary of a version of an ‘authentic’ hip hop identity in the workings of the subgenres of Korean popular music and K-pop in particular. Debuting in Big Bang in 2006 under YG Entertainment, the star was considered the King of K-pop at the height of the group’s popularity, known not only as a performer and leader of the group, but as an influential songwriter, music producer, style icon and entrepreneur. Appearing in ‘Hip Hop Gentlemen’ at the age of fourteen in baggy ‘hip hop’ clothes, G-Dragon’s subsequent style with and beyond Big Bang often transgressed the hyper-masculinity of the American hip hop idiom cited by earlier YG company artists. G-Dragon developed a ‘distinct reputation based on a unique, transgressive style’ (Kim and Lopez, 2021: 1982) that marked him as artistic and innovative, where his ‘vibrant and experimental aesthetic choices [took] his gender performance beyond soft and metrosexual masculinities [. . .] to the realm of androgyny, femininity, and genderqueerness’ (Kim and Lopez, 2021: 1982). The artist’s capacity for ‘free gender expression’ is entangled with his identity as a hip hop artist in the Korean popular music idiom. Notably in the article by Kim and Lopez (2021) on G-Dragon’s masculine performance, the occasionally genderqueer presentation of the artist is differentiated from the soft and metrosexual masculinity of other K-pop idols: G-Dragon’s performed gender fluidity is indicative of his artistic spirit, entangled with his reputation for ground-breaking music production and song writing, rather than driven by a commercial imperative to appeal to female fans. One of the key arguments that Kim and Lopez (2021) make about G-Dragon’s diverse masculine presentation, is that he engages in a maintenance of ‘masculine balance’, where ultimately his ‘on-stage persona is associated with a hyper-masculine, swag-rap style’ (p. 1989) that ‘almost totally expunge any question about his heterosexuality stemming from his unconventional aesthetics elsewhere’ (p. 1989).

This complex analysis of G-Dragon’s gender identity and performance highlights some key aspects about the negotiation and presentation of masculinity in popular music more broadly. The multiple masculinities of stars such as G-Dragon, and Hansen (2021) discusses the analogous popular Western musician Pharrell Williams in their article, ‘puts into stark contrast the complications of categorizing masculine representations as either upholding or contesting gender hegemony, because, very often, they can do both at the same time’ (pp. 18–19). In describing the ‘new masculinity’ of Pharrell, Hansen argues in a similar fashion to the argument I want to make about G-Dragon here, that ‘in popular music contexts, as demonstrated by the widespread celebration of artists such as David Bowie and Prince, the act of playing with gender and sexuality is largely accepted as a creative endeavor when it is linked to credible musical practices’ (Hansen, 2021: 26), where ‘Williams’ ability to convincingly frame himself outside of hegemonic masculine practices stems in part from the credibility attributed to him by his achievements in the hip hop sphere’ (Hansen, 2021: 26). Hip hop and rap music genres, in Korea as in the West, often express, on the whole, discourses that support and sustain dominant forms of hegemonic masculinity (see, for example hooks, 2003; Jeffries, 2009; Ogbar, 2007; Song, 2019), a generic space of men and for men, potentially about women but not normatively of or for women. The capacity for artists, such as G-Dragon and Pharrell to demur from the normative masculinity of their musical genres rests on their recognition as ‘legitimate’ artists, and Hansen (2021) warns, we should take ‘caution in taking the positive social change implied by new masculine configurations at face value, because these produce diverse effects’ (p. 27).

Exceptions like G-Dragon highlight the common generic rules of Korean hip hop and rap as a one defined by a relationship to hegemonic masculinity, the ‘most honored way of being a man’ (Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005: 832), with exceptional artistry being the only acceptable circumstance in which ‘real’ rappers may demur from dominant expectations of masculine performance. The ‘idol versus real rapper’ structure of Korean hip hop genres is one that pits feminized masculinities against ‘real’ masculinity or hegemonic masculinity: of men made up for the tastes of feminized consumers (‘idol rappers’) and of ‘real men’ who perceive themselves to be ‘rapping authentically’ and ergo not for feminized consumption. There is a continuum between the two groups of the sub-genre: some idol-rappers attain more legitimacy than others, such as Block B’s leader Zico, who has gone on to enjoy a highly successful solo rap and music production career. Though a member of an idol group himself, Zico too speaks to rules of the genre when he expressed discomfort about rappers wearing smoky eye makeup (Im, 2020: 176). An altercation between underground rapper B-Free and BTS rappers RM (previously Rap Monster) and Suga also centred on the latter’s use of makeup, with B-Free rhetorically asking, ‘you guys could have taken the road towards becoming rappers, but you couldn’t beat that temptation. Is BTS’s music hip-hop? Is wearing makeup on stage like a girl hip-hop’ (Biwiyomi, 2013)? This early incident in BTS’s career energized many of the group’s later diss tracks, including ‘Cypher Pt 2: Triptych’ (2014) and ‘Ddaeng’ (2018a), which will be subsequently discussed. In the performance of tracks like ‘Ddaeng’, the costuming of the rappers in elegant hanbok works to signal a hegemonic form of masculinity, that is a most honourable form of masculinity, traditional seonbi masculinity, that aims to position the rappers not as feminine and genteel, but exceptional, witty and winning.

Contemporary presentations of traditional Korean masculinity

In perhaps one of the most influential studies of Korean masculinity and popular culture, Jung (2011) articulates the terrain of ‘newly constructed hybrid Korean masculinities’ (p. 3) as a site of transcultural consumption, ‘where South Korean masculinity is multifariously reconstructed and re-identified based on the ambivalent desires of audiences who mobilize mixed cultural practices arising from mugukjeok and the local specificities of each region’ (p. 3). The hybrid masculinities of South Korean popular culture involve the transformation and amalgamation of hegemonic Korean masculinities, defined by patriarchal authoritarianism, seonbi traditions and military service, alongside new, transnational formations of masculinity, such as Japanese bishonen (pretty boy) masculinity and global metrosexual masculinity. Here, seonbi masculinity forms some of the basis for the translatability of South Korean masculinity across Asia, where the traditional seonbi qualities of politeness and restraint are mixed with the contemporary ‘pretty boy’ qualities of Japanese bishonen masculinity. This mixing of gentlemanliness and prettiness explains, as Jung (2011) argues, the popularity of the television drama Winter Sonata (2002) and its lead actor Bae Yong-Joon, in particular, with middle-aged women fans in Japan. Such hybrid masculinity and its re-imagining of traditional scholar masculinity has broader transnational operations and influence. As Song (2016) more broadly argues, ‘Pan-East Asian soft masculinity has its roots in the Confucian tradition of scholar masculinity shared by many East Asian cultures, such as the wen (literary attainment) masculinity in China or seonbi (scholar-officials) masculinity in Korean history. The talented scholar is physically weak, delicate and handsome, with androgynous beauty. He is desirable to women by dint of his knowledge and literary gifts’ (p. 4).

The gentleman rapper, however, enables us to disentangle the specific masculinity of the seonbi from contemporary feminine and/or feminizing desires, a desire which occasionally supports Orientalist notions of K-pop masculinities as ‘less masculine’ in Anglophone popular discourse (see Song and Velding, 2020; Lee et al., 2020). To understand the deployment of a seonbi aesthetics in the masculinist rap genres of Korean popular music that derides the ‘effeminate’ K-pop idol who might wear makeup, we need to remember and acknowledge that seonbi masculinity in its traditional form, as introduced by Jung (2011), was a hegemonic form of masculinity in the Korean historical context. The seonbi’s polite and potentially ‘delicate’ appearance is often combined, in the contemporary context, with other emergent masculinities, such that some of its qualities – like gentlemanly manners – contribute to a contemporary image of pan-East Asian soft masculinity. The ‘softness’ of the historical seonbi, however, results not from a concern for appearance (as associated with global metrosexuality or bishonen masculinity), or for a ‘softer’ relation to feminine genders (as perceived in dramatic characterizations, like Bae Yong-Joon in Winter Sonata), but as a result of the historical gentleman scholar’s separation ‘from the daily work of reproductive and caring labor’ (Jung, 2011: 27). That is, soft skin, lithe bodies and gentlemanly manners reflected the role of the seonbi in society as a powerful man whose influence derives from his distance from physical exertion and labour. As Jung (2011) describes, the seonbi was a Confucian scholar official who, in his role, studied Confucian texts to obtain wisdom, seeking mental rather than physical attainment (p. 27). In terms of masculinity, the means by which seonbi provided for their families did not require physical labour, but also required distance both from the home and reproductive labour. The seonbi was ‘not supposed to degrade himself by engaging in any form of manual labor or any economic activity’ (Jung, 2011: 27) in his pursuit of scholarly wisdom. In this light, we can further disentangle the specific deployment of seonbi masculine signification in K-pop rap performance form other cultural forms in which seonbi masculinity might be invoked, such as in the television drama. The witty rapper, presented in a re-imagined traditional aesthetic style, displays the superiority of a hegemonically masculine subject: one who, because of their intellectual prowess, showcased in witty rap lyrics, need not labour to attain the status of a gentleman ergo powerful man.

A ‘Call to Admission’: iKON Bobby and B.I.’s performance of ‘Anthem’ at the 2015 Mnet Asia Music Awards

To provide greater context to the generic signification intended in the sub-genre, here I will discuss two examples in which a traditional Korean aesthetic has been incorporated in popular Korean rap performance. First, in the year of their debut, YG Entertainment group iKON performed at the 2015 Mnet Asian Music Awards, taking home the award for Best New Male Artist, in addition to wins at the Melon Music, Seoul Music and Golden Disc Awards (iKON, 2015). Prior to their performance at the Mnet Awards, the group had featured in two music survival reality TV shows, WIN: Who IS Next (2013) and MIX & MATCH (2014), with the group’s most famous member, rappers Bobby and B.I, having also competed in the popular reality TV rap competition Show Me the Money 3 (2014), with Bobby winning as the first ‘idol rapper’ to do so. Due to their visibility in the Show Me the Money franchise (Show Me The Money, 2012-2022), Bobby and B.I had, even before their debut in the idol group iKON, performed at the 2014 Mnet Asian Music Awards, first in the performance of the ‘authentic’ rap group Epik High’s track ‘Born Hater’, also featuring Beenzino, Verbal Jint and Mino, a track that, according to Epik High rapper and lyricist Tablo, drew hate along sub-genre lines described above, with criticism, in the case of this paper and the invocation of a seonbi aesthetics in rap performance, for the song’s inclusion of ‘idol rappers’.¹ At the same awards show, Bobby also performed alongside his underground rapper mentors from Show Me The Money, Dok2, The Quiett and Masta Wu, in ‘YGGR’ and ‘Come Here’.

As the most visible and popular members of iKON, the 2015 Mnet performance included a separate performance by Bobby and B.I., who performed the rap-only track ‘Anthem’ in between the group’s two hit songs ‘Apology’ and ‘Rhythm Ta’ from the album Welcome Back (2015). Like much contemporary K-pop idol group music production, the rap-only track on an album signals or attempts to signal the rap authenticity of a given group’s rappers, and often, even in instances of less hegemonically masculine, that is less American-influenced ‘hip hop’ groups than iKON, such as perhaps in BTS’s later career – to subsequently be discussed – the rap track takes on a heightened aggressiveness that signals an authentic rap masculinity as described above. Titled Irioneora (‘Call to Admission’) in Korean, ‘Anthem’ lyrically signals the traditional entry greeting for the elite yangban ruling class of a Joseon Dynasty Korea (Kim, 2022), to hail the entry of iKON to the Mnet Awards and the K-pop and Asian music scene. Pitched to be icons hailing from Korea, hence iKON with a ‘K’, the group were certainly positioneded as hallyu stars in a broader Asian market. The 2015 Mnet Asian Music Awards were held in Hong Kong for the sixth consecutive year outside of Korea by the Korean television music channel Mnet, with groups as diverse as Big Bang, EXO and Twice having experienced groundbreaking success across the region with their music going on to showcase performances at the event. In such a reading, the traditional aesthetics incorporated into the performance of ‘Anthem’ speaks, on one level, to an appropriation of gugak aesthetics for the transnational consumption of Koreanness, as described by others (Kim, 2022). Such costume and stage design functions as a beautiful spectacle for an Asian end of year event.

Yet we can read closer. The performance of ‘Anthem’ at the 2015 opens with the English refrain, ‘iKON is coming to town’, as a bright wall of spotlights floods the stage with light, having been previously dimmed to black following the group performance of ballad ‘Apology’ (4:06). The singing members leave the stage as rappers B.I. and Bobby appear above them atop a set of stairs in front of the wall of spotlights. Though dressed in modern, military inspired clothing – Bobby wears a sequined camo bomber jacket – both rappers brandish gold, decorated handheld fans or buchae, signalling, along with their ‘Call to Admission’ to the yangban class, a playful and arrogant ‘aristocratic’ status in the music world. During the Joseon Dynasty, Azeez (2021) writes, ‘buchae symbolized status among aristocrats and commoners’ where ‘those from the higher class never went outside without a fan and used it when reciting poems to a beat or singing pansori, or traditional lyrical opera’. As Bobby and B.I. descend the stairs while fanning themselves with their ornate buchae, they spitfire a lyrical set of brags and taunts, hailing their momentous arrival to the music scene, taunting that they are ready to ‘take over the area’ and to ‘chew [haters] up like raw meat’. In the background of the performance, female dancers dressed minimally in black, incorporate oversized buchae of red, black and gold into their dance routine, fans that feature dragon and cherry blossom motifs. Here, in combination with the distinctive sound of the double-reeded piri in the track, and the hailing of iKON’s ‘Call to Admission’, the entire performance appears to hail a grandeur of a rising Korean popular cultural sphere, descending upon Asia.

On the one hand, part of the performance’s incorporation of traditional Korean elements speaks to a saleable Koreanness that many scholars have discussed, which I mapped earlier in this article. Part of Bobby and B.I’s taunting is also about their power and influence in a hallyu popular music sphere, one that includes, at a minimum, greater Asia, where the beauty of traditional Korean culture may have aesthetic value alone that is meant to appeal to a wider audience, signifying, perhaps, nothing more than Koreanness. Yet simultaneously, the combined function of the ‘Call to Admission’ cited by the song; the inclusion of arrogant self-fanning and its citation of an upper class Joseon-era Korean identity, with gold fans no less; the leisurely descent of the rappers down the stairs into ‘their’ area or domain; all play with and invoke the hegemonic masculine elements of the seonbi being cited. These are gentlemen who, because of their lyrical wit, ‘authentic’ hip hop creativity and monetary wins, need not labour as other idols do – think here to K-pop’s signature dance ensembles and performances of ‘military-style synchronicity’ (Shin and Kim, 2013; see also Oh, 2023). These are young men who hold power over their domain to which they descend: the Korean popular music scene and its influence in the world. iKON’s braggadocio, through the identities and performance of its rapper members Bobby and B.I., continues a tradition of a particular hip hop masculinity set before them by G-Dragon, and the earlier YG ‘Hip Hop Gentlemen’. The incorporation of traditional Korean elements in the performance of ‘Anthem’ express a continuity rather than a discontinuity with expectations of masculinity in the sub-genre of Korean hip hop and rap.

‘Ddaeng’: a BTS response track

In contrast to iKON, the BTS story is one of rag to riches and shifting masculine presentations in a vastly transforming global popular music and media environment, where ‘digital globalization has promoted the production, distribution, and consumption of pop music across geographic, cultural, and linguistic boundaries’ (Kim, 2021: 1061). Debuting with a smaller and less well-known company at the time, Big Hit Entertainment, BTS was first promoted as a group ‘producing and performing hardcore hip-hop’ (Parc and Kim, 2020: 19). Bangtan Seonyeondan or the Bulletproof Boy Scouts in their original name, were, as mentioned previously, subject to ridicule by ‘real’ rappers as well as mainstream K-pop fans in this earlier period of their career. In this era, the group, like many in the sub-genre, also cited American hip hop style in a claim to hip hop authenticity (see Cho, 2022), but their more mainstream success, in Korea and abroad, came with their Youth trilogy beginning in 2015 which demonstrated an ‘evolving musical style from solely hip-hop to a wide range of genres’ (Parc and Kim, 2020: 20). Much attention has focussed on the BTS fandom, ARMY, who propelled the group to new heights for K-pop in a new popular music environment (Epps-Robertson, 2023), and this global picture partially accounts for the group’s shifting music production – such as with the release of all English tracks since 2020, like ‘Dynamite’, which reached the American mainstream (Neale, 2021). Nonetheless, as with B.I. and Bobby’s ‘rap-only’ tracks with iKON, the ‘rap-only’ tracks of BTS rappers RM, Suga and J-Hope also speak to local generic conventions.

BTS has released many rap-only songs across their discography, but the one described here is an off-record track titled ‘Ddaeng’, originally uploaded to SoundCloud in 2018 and performed as a part of the annual BTS fan event ‘FESTA’ in the same year held in Seoul, recorded and uploaded to their second Youtube channel BANGTANTV (2018). Similar to ‘Anthem’, the invocation of traditional Korean elements is not only visual: ‘Ddaeng’ opens with the traditional sounds of the piri, as the hangul for the word ddaeng appears on screen in a clockface. The three rappers, stroll out onto the stage with the traditional sounds opening the song, wearing traditional dress in various states of tidiness and historical authenticity. RM wears a traditional hanbok of blue, white and gold with the jacket (jeogori) slightly open. Wearing Rayban Wayfarer sunglasses throughout the entire performance, he fans himself with a buchae decorated with flowers and grass as he leisurely raps. J-hope’s costume is a less decorative version of the styling, in darker hues of navy and maroon and cut with a much lower neckline than customary (or costume-ry): he wears gold necklaces and bracelets in a modernizing K-pop twist. Suga appears on stage in what looks like a black dressing gown and a full, two-piece silk pyjama set in pink. He also wears the gat, the traditional Korean scholar hat. But rather than wearing the gat on his head as a seonbi on official business might, he wears it casually strung around his neck with the hat hanging loosely behind his head. Unlike RM, Suga tends does not tend to open his buchae during the performance, using it as a prop to emphasize his pointing when lyrically gesturing towards ‘haters’. Like Bobby and B.I.’s performance at the Mnet awards, synchronized dance choreography is also absent in this rap-only performance. The attention here is, rather, to the lyrics and rap style of each member.

There is an extensive and compelling breakdown of the lyrical references in ‘Ddaeng’ available in English (see DKDKTV, 2018) that further highlights the deployment of traditional Korean references that speak to the clever lyrical retorts of the group’s three rappers to their audience of imagined haters. The visual presentation of the performance of the song at the 2018 FESTA event enhances and emphasizes the witty local historical meanings of the song’s lyrics, and it is clear too, that the hanbok, buchae and gat are stylized to signify ‘gentlemanliness’, not in terms of men of manners and restraint, as incorporated into pan-East Asian soft masculinity, but rather, in the language of privilege and intellect, a seonbi so casual of his power, influence and intellectual capacity, that he needn’t take off his sunglasses or fasten his clothes or hat properly or address his ‘haters’ politely. Again, the song speaks to the rules of the genre. J-Hope, for example, raises some ‘authentic’ rapper’s criticisms of the group (‘Hip hop? Rap Style? Just a rapper. Bangtan. In Reality. Worldwide. Above the charts.’) and answers ‘Ddaeng’ in each instance, an onomatopoeic sound that can simultaneously mean both right or wrong, that it doesn’t really matter if BTS is really ‘hip hop’ or not. The casual staging and appropriation of traditional Korean finery in the performance of ‘Ddaeng’ here is, as it was for Bobby and B.I. of iKON in the previous example, merely play for the group in the generic tit-for-tat between players of the sub-genre: the BTS rappers have the riches and fame to dress, rap and perform as they please, which their haters, such as the aforementioned underground rapper and critic of the group B-Free, could only ever hope for. Even if they are ‘inauthentic’ they are powerful and can relax and play with that power. This is one important level of the signification entailed in the choice to costume and stage idol rap performances in a traditional Korean aesthetic.

Conclusion

In this article, I have mapped the workings of masculinity in a specific sub-genre of Korean popular music – hip hop and rap – in order to show how the appropriation of traditional Korean cultural elements in contemporary Korean music performance can retain locally-specific generic meanings as much as they may be intended to also work in a global visual economy that favours spectacle. Seonbi masculinity, which has also been re-imagined in hybrid transformation with contemporary pretty boy (bishonen) and global metrosexual masculinities in other Korean popular cultural forms, appears in the sub-genre of idol rap performance to signify a hegemonic form of masculinity: one that is not polite or restrained, but relaxed, arrogant and privileged. The examples discussed speak to the way two artists, iKON and BTS, have incorporated traditional Korean elements in their rap music performances as a part of their response to generic understandings of ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ rap in Korean popular music, genre cues that are heavily entangled with norms and expectations of masculinity.

Footnotes

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Vivien Nara

Notes

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