Image: Still from Yaeji – Drink I’m Sippin On
There’s something happening in Korea and amongst the girls of the Korean diaspora, and they’re making some really good dreamy house music. Are these two things connected? I have no idea. My colleague at work Stella put me on to Yaeji a few months ago and I’ve been really enjoying her music and overall aesthetic for a while. There are many great examples for Yaeji so I’ll let you enjoy falling down that particular internet hole, but I’ll highlight this one:
The video is a terrific blend of smooth, subby deep house aesthetic (or a kind of internet idea of deep house in 2019) and a cleverly satirical take on the YouTube makeup tutorial genre with text like “This product is called depression and it stays on for 24 hours”. It’s contemporary, witty and weirdly intimate. I don’t want to lump Yaeji in with this movement because I’m not sure of her relationship to it but the evocation of the makeup tutorial brings to mind an interesting recent feminist movement in South Korea called the “take off the corset” or “corset free” movement, a movement by young women against the oppressive culture of plastic surgery, makeup and conformist feminine expression which is very strong there. Many young women are destroying their makeup and cutting their long hair into the movement’s signature short bowl cuts. South Korea is the plastic surgery capital of the world and one could argue that there is a very real violence being inflicted upon these women by the male gaze and internalized misoginy. The fact that we are seeing a reaction against it and conformist gender identification is a hopeful sign in my opinion as Asia has long been a difficult place to be a woman or girl (not to say that the rest of the world hasn’t).
Another young Korean woman making great house music is 박혜진 park hye jin (which is confusingly the name of a male South Korean actor as well I think? Or so Google suggests). Again, I don’t know her political position, but the attitude and energy present in I Don’t Care feels rebellious. The track is great and the combination of Korean and English sing-rapping over deep house tropes is fresh and interesting. I’m enjoying it a lot.
