A K-pop Playlist for the February 2020 Issue

For our February 2020 playlist, we asked contributor Mia You, whose poem “Gangnam Beauty” appears in the issue, to curate a selection of music for us. Click here to open the playlist in your Spotify app.

The Academy Awards take place this month, and everyone knows the great Hollywood success story that is Parasite. I loved Parasite, but Bong Joon-ho’s earlier film, Memories of Murder, is my all-time favorite, in part because it is exquisitely, transcendentally provincial. The true-crime story, which begins in 1986, takes place in a rural region on the western coast of South Korea—and whether you are a moviegoer in Seoul in 2003, one of twenty people in a mostly empty theater at a screening in Amsterdam in 2006 (as I was), or a newly-converted member of the #BongHive catching the film in its post-Parasite re-release, the film’s setting initially will seem far removed from your everyday life. And yet somehow Bong still brings you right into the middle of the film’s world, with Song Kang-ho becoming the Korean Everyman you didn't know you already knew. And that series of terrifying crimes that propels the plot? By the end of the film the case remains unsolved, but what’s changed is that you’re also a local now, don’t you see, and there’s no such thing as a “safe distance.”

The way film, literature, and art can make us feel local, and can redraw the lines that define it, is something I think about constantly, because I’ve never been a local anywhere. Or rather, I’ve only felt like a local in places (and periods) I don’t really belong, such as the London of The Waste Land, the California composed by Joan Didion, the Seoul sung by Seo Taiji. I was born in Seoul, but when I’m there I hear that I look like I’ve been drinking foreign water. This is a good way to put it, because it’s true. In my Northern California middle school, I did a presentation about South Korea and brought in a cassette tape by Seo Taiji and Boys to play for my class. My classmates thought it was terrible and giggled at the nonsensical English lyrics. A few years later I was writing for the teen website of the San Jose Mercury News, and when I said I wanted to review the first album by H.O.T. (short for “Highfive Of Teenagers,” obviously), my editor responded with the nineties’ version of, You do you. Later she told me she just couldn’t understand how much traffic that article got. I believed I was maintaining the aesthetic integrity of K-pop by not telling her I had posted the link to a fan forum. Even in those early days, the Internet was essentially sixty percent porn, thirty percent K-pop, and ten percent “other.”

A Dutch colleague who specializes in English linguistics makes his students listen to K-pop songs in one of his courses. He’s interested in how English is used when the target audience is non-English speaking—when the point is not to communicate in English to Anglophones, but rather to communicate in Korean, or Japanese, or any other language, but with the use of English words. How are those words chosen? What meanings do they carry into or out of these predominantly non-English contexts? What are the new grammars that are produced?

As K-pop grows as a global phenomenon, as more and more people everywhere experience it as part of their everyday lives, how do these local grammars begin to affect English “proper?” Throughout my own life, have I listened to K-pop as a local, or have I listened to it as an Anglophone who is two-thirds foreign water?

For the February 2020 issue of Poetry, I created a playlist that assigns one K-pop artist/group to each poet. If a poet has one poem in the issue, there is one song by their K-pop artist in the playlist. If there are four poems (Jack Underwood), there are four songs (T-ara). What connects each poet to each K-popper varies widely. I thought it would be a good idea to begin with BTS, so I found two songs by the group that might speak to themes raised by Zach Linge’s two poems. Jesus Govea’s poem is called “Bruh,” which resonates with the use of the Korean word hyung (older brother) in the collaboration by Dumbfoundead, Dok2, Simon Dominic, and Tiger JK. Some connections were even more literal: CL could be an abbreviation for Caoilinn (Hughes). And “Who Gets the Silverware?” Obviously, “The Baddest Female.” I also found myself Googling “K-pop songs about bees.” Other connections were more associative. I read Angela Jackson’s “More Than Meat and Raiment” as a spell, so I linked it to Brown Eyed Girls’ classic “Abracadabra.” Nome Emeka Patrick’s poem confronts depression and death through the poetry of Sylvia Plath, which brought to mind Lyn’s gorgeous remake of “Gathering My Tears” by Seo Ji-won. The original song was released in 1996, after Seo committed suicide at age twenty. As Patrick’s poem concludes: “yet even with honey disguised in holocaust, who, tell me, wants to die this young?”

Between Girls’ Generation and G-Dragon, the playlist also includes Peggy Gou, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (Karen O), indie-rock-meets-spoken-word, nineties hip hop, fifties doo-wop, and a breathtaking folk song accompanied by the gayageum, a traditional Korean string instrument. There’s also an exemplary array of strange Englishes (see Clazziquai’s “Beat in Love”). Both “K” and “pop” are very liberally (un)defined here. But that lack of center feels to me to be the watering hole I can visit as a local.