Dream Perfect Regime LIVE
the birth of Korean Hip-Hop
By Sungyun Kim
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| It's a dream |
K-Hip hop is not just a music genre, but a culture and lifestyle. And to understand it we’re going to have to ask a much more basic question than what is hip-hop or what is Korea; instead, we’re going to have to understand the origins of Korean hip hop and how this genre ever happened in Korea. To do this, we must delve into the strange cultural interchange between American and Korean popular music. For those of you who don’t know, hip-hop is the name of an American music genre that started in the United States. It was pioneered by socially disadvantaged African-Americans in the United States, who suffered from the poverty, violence, and indemic racism of the 1970s. They wanted to depict their lives as they actually experienced the world and to express a spirit of resistance. We should also say that it started in the form of party entertainment, cheap enjoyment designed to liven up any party. In any sense, hip-hop has developed into a culture of resistance and conflict as well as huge best-selling music that is a reflection of specific American social conditions and cultural conflicts.
However, in Korea hip-hop operates under completely different set of conditions. Young Koreans perceived hip-hop as a sophisticated popular culture in the United States, a kind of aesthetically advanced art form that is revolutionary and alive. Koreans miss or don’t intuitively feel the specific social conditions that created American Hip-hop. In the same way that most cultures miss what produces the work of other cultures. But that doesn’t mean that Koreans view hip-hop as static, it’s just that they have other concerns and uses for the music.
In Song Myung-sun's book "Hip hop" (2016), many rappers claim they first encountered hip-hop through the US military broadcasting (AFKN). Song fell in love with hip-hop legend rapper Tupac Shakur and the Detroit-based, white rapper Eminem, which led him to embrace DJ culture. But he wasn’t the only one: an entire generation of young men became obsessed with American Hip-hop in The 1990s. You could call them the first generation of Korean hip-hoppers, at least twenty-five years behind their American cousins. As you might guess, it would take a while for Korea to produce Hip-hop on the level of the best American rappers, but it was coming…
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| The Godfather of S(e)oul |
And when it came, it came twenty years later in the form of DPR, dream…perfect…regime or Hong Da Bin to his parents. “DPR LIVE was born … on 1st January 1993 in Pocheon, South Korea. At the age of five, his family relocated to Guam, a US territory and island in Micronesia, where he lived until he was in the tenth grade.” A year after moving to Korea, Hong joined the Korean Army to fulfill his two-year military service. In addition to learning how to be patient and focus better while serving in the military, he also used the opportunity to evaluate what he really wanted to do in life. Having developed a passion for writing, he began writing lyrics based on what was happening around him, his feelings, and imagination. After two years of military service, Hong got to work and released his first single titled, "Till I Die" through SoundCloud on July 27, 2015, followed by a music video on August 22, 2015. He combined the observational qualities of American rap with an approach to producing music borrowed from K-Pop. It is this blending of American and Korean cultural values that makes the music so potent and explosive.
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| Jasmine album |
DPR LIVE has attracted attention for its stylish blend of vocals and a groovy kind of rap. In “Jasmine”, he sings and raps in the style of someone like Frank Ocean. It is this boundary between rap and r & b that has opened up Korean Hip-hop musically and culturally. Producer Code Kunst creates a dreamy indie rock feel using slow beats with a hip-hop texture. The beat romantically harmonized with DPR LIVE's rap-singing, creating music that is subtle but pleasant. This is quite far from the roots of American hip-hop, but catches a great deal of the cultural tensions in Korea. The way the song goes back and forth between the rough hewn and the elegant is a tension one could say that is deep within Korean culture, in the same way the Bong Ho’s Parasite catches the violence and beauty of class conflict. Even if you listen to DPR LIVE's music merely for pleasure, you can feel its disparate elements coming together under one sensibility.
DPR LIVE seems to actively reflect trends in hip-hop. He is not particularly a storyteller. Instead, the songs drift along in a kind of thematic tension. Short English words, smooth beats, and two or three lines of Korean lyrics scattered around the periphery like fragments. It can be said that there is a lack of lyric content, but if you look at the overall balance of the song, it feels richer and more powerful than other hip-hop tracks. This is because the focus is on the way the harmony, rapping, and rhythm come together, rather than mere storytelling.
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| Martini Blue Album |
"Martini blue" is the title track and one of the most fascinating songs of DPR LIVE. The title "Martini blue" is derived from the blue martini with martini blue liqueur, one of the most famous cocktails in Korea. The song begins with a bass beat that feels like a sound of a xylophone playing under the sea. The bass line plays and the standard tempo soon speeds down and the melody drops almost instantaneously. As if diving into the middle of the sea, a second of silence follows as the tempo accelerates again, and all the instruments burst through together. That’s the first hook.
The rhythm of the rap and the melody are exquisitely combined, and whenever there is a gap, you feel the push and pull of the tension between the song’s competing elements. These unusual and unique sound mix and blend together to create a new art form from both the sound of American hip-hop and Korean hip-hop.
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| The whole gang |
©Sungyun Kim and the CCA Arts Review
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