Virtual StudioTrek Project and Hanryangsa

I went to Itaewon yesterday which is Jay Kim’s hometown, the man behind JayGear and VSTP. He calls it “the harlem of seoul”. I didn’t exactly know what he meant by that but Itaewon is basically the foreigners district of Seoul. Walking around you see more foreigners than Koreans, store owners and street peddlers know basic phrases in 3-4 languages, and restaurants have picture menus. He met me at the subway station and took me up to his studio. On the way we passed King Club which he said is a club run by blacks (Americans or Africans? He wasn’t clear) and was the first hiphop club in seoul.. but he said its mostly for foreigners with a few Koreans here and there. So we get to the studio and they’re in the middle of a photo shoot for the Hanryangsa Crew, a crew of MCs, DJs, producers and designers. Jay said they’re always busy, doing stuff separately or with a few people from the crew and its really rare to see them all together in one place, so I lucked out.

While they were doing the photoshoot, Jay and I talked about Seoul and Hong Kong since he kept on asking questions about my experience there. (I got his contact information through MC/Designer/Graf Artist, MC Yan, from Hong Kong so that’s probably why). He said a lot of the original hiphop heads got introduced to hiphop through foreigners or going to foreigner clubs that played hiphop.

I tried to find out what the scene was like in terms of underground vs. commercial (prior to coming I was led to believe commercial was the goal of everyone underground- you would be underground for a few years to get cred and then blow up). From what Jay was saying, it seems the scene here is similar to what’s in to be a lot like America- where a handful of the commercial crews still get along with the underground people (those that came from the underground)… but there’s of course the obligatory songs that diss “studio MCs” and people that are in it for the money and fame… He would ask me random questions like if I’d been to jail before and if I had any tattoos. He said he had for a DUI (now they have services here that you can call a guy to drive you and your car home for you, no need to find a DD!). He said jail was really fun because its just a bunch of gangstas hanging out and sharing good stories. He asked about tattoos because tattoo shops are illegal here apparently (If you have a tattoo you don’t have to do the 2 years of military service, you have to do something else for two years still though). He really wants to get more than his single tattoo of a crescent moon on his left shoulder, which he had done in America. But yeah, I didn’t really get into his background aside from him being a graf writer and a skateboarder (He did a series of shirts that said “Inline sucks”...which reminds me of the 90s, do people really still aggressive skate?!) .

He took me to his place and hooked me up with a t-shirt, hat, towel, stickers, and a KeepRoots CD (liner notes featuring record covers of the likes of cannonball adderly, jim hall, zoot sims, nat king cole, abbey lincoln, hmmm nice!).

He was letting me listen to some people like Bobby Kim, Movement, old drunken tiger, and a bunch other people I don’t remember the names of… I need to learn how to read Korean. Apparently it’s very easy since it’s a phonetic language, I just need to sit down and teach myself. He also showed me a Sean2Slow live video from five years ago- apparently he’s a Korean guy from NY and the song was calling out all the studio MCs. But yeah, he said he’d let me copy a bunch of music/videos from his hard drive so I can get versed in my Korean hiphop…. dope.

We went back to round up everyone for dinner. But before we left he showed me the polaroid wall of fame. And now I’ll be up there:

We went to a pork bacon bbq place and drank plenty of soju (the staple alcoholic beverage in korea. Cheap, not too bad, and gets the job done).

me (very drunk), daephal, korea's 2 time freestyle mc champ, dj skip, and some more djs (left to right)

I only managed to squeeze in a little conversation with the freestyle MC (his English was very minimal), enough to find out that he has been the national champion these past two years. We relocated to a soju bar in Hongdae to drink and eat some more (I told you that’s all they do here). I was a bit confused since they were all in a crew but some of them didn’t really know each other.. so they kept going around and doing introductions (which Daephal would translate a bit for me). The female MC with the shaved head introduced herself saying, “I am revolutionary hiphop”, then there was the freestyle MC 2005-2006 champion, a producer introduced to me as korea’s “best funky beat producer”, DJ “Chinese food” - because he looks Chinese, Macho (designer, former urban toy shop owner), DJ Skip, DJ Duo, a DJ involved in the Bboy theater I mentioned (ballet and bboying), and of other DJs that I didn’t get translations for/names of. I’m really bad with names, so not speaking/being familiar with Korean makes it even harder to remember names… so I apologize to all the people I met today but forgot their names… but that’s the problem with meeting too many people at once- not remembering names and only being able to talk to a few… I really need to recruit Christine’s brother to come along with me so he can act as a translator (and hopefully he’ll at least get to meet a lot of people in the scene that he wouldn’t be able to otherwise). So this time I mainly talked to daephal and macho. Daephal was introduced to me as a really good MC- he said he released one single or an album so far. He was the only person that made a point to come talk to me- probably because he was the only one aside from jay and macho that could speak some English. It was funny because the first group he listened to was Wu-tang (which was my first hiphop CD purchase). Anyway, throughout the evening he would say that he was my brother (which ryan told me about- when people take you as their (little) brother, they really treat you like a little brother, in both the good and bad ways)- so i guess i have a new brother.

The rest of the night I think they were having a discussion on the status of the hiphop scene- because it was pretty serious- i wish i knew what they were talking about- but next time i'll hopefully be better prepared. After the two female MC’s left, all the guys started taking off their shirts, not sure what that was all about but it was getting late and I hadn’t slept in awhile so I peaced out. Haha.

Random observation: The commercials/TV shows/stores play really good music! I hear everything from DJ Shadow, Frank Sinatra, Jamiroquai, Earth Wind Fire, Mr. Scruff, and bunch of random things I don’t think I would ever hear in the US on a commercial or just walking around.

Til next time...