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www.groovekorea.com / October 2014 92 Edited by Elaine Ramirez (elaine@groovekorea.com) muSIC & ARTS Before the 1990s, South Korea heard very little outside music. Despite its rapid economic development with the Saemaeul (New Village) Movement, dictatorships kept the nation’s airwaves heavily censored. When the regime was finally toppled, however, the wall of censorship was dismantled and the young democracy was thirsty for new voices. Punk trickled into the Korean market alongside main- stream rock ‘n’ roll, blues, hip-hop, folk, heavy metal and other genres. “Suddenly, information democratized,” says Jon Dunbar, publisher of the punk magazine Broke in Ko- rea. “They could listen to foreign music; they could go on- line and listen to foreign stuff, so they were introduced to several decades of music all at once.” There were no musical eras, no progression of one style to another. “The first bands that started made music that was kind of a compression of this. The influences would be from all (over),” says Dunbar, 35. The first punk bands in Korea included groups like Crying Nut and No Brain. They didn’t call themselves punk rock, but rather “Joseon punk” — meant to set themselves apart from the West, to say, “We’re not a punk band — we’re playing punk in a Korean way,” Dunbar says. The first punk “clubs” weren’t really clubs at all, but venues with no bar. Club Drug was an early one, and in 2004 Skunk Hell opened. Skunk Hell was all black, with old show posters and graffiti covering the walls. It was “basically a dingy basement,” Dunbar says. “It was never particularly nice.” Club Spot opened in 2007 in a basement across from the Hongdae playground, this time with a bar and a weekly lineup of shows. From 2004 to 2006, Korean punk reached its heyday. Club Drug was running, Skunk Hell was flourishing, bands like Crying Nut, Rux and Samchung were playing weekly and labels like Moonsadan and Culture Scam Organization were pressing CDs and booking bands. The shows were filled with kids in their teens and early 20s, often in full bondage gear and spiky hair, says Trash Yang, the bassist for …Whatever That Means, cofounder of BB Lucky Town in the early 2000s and one of the first women in the scene. It was at Club Drug where she finally got to hear punk live. Before, she had only heard the bands through cassette tapes. “I was really, really happy to see this,” she says. A huge boost to the scene came in the form of one short, energetic foreigner who worked incessantly to get Korean punk noticed. His name was Jesse Borison, and he was Korea’s “punk angel,” in Yang’s words. In the last seven years, the U.S. airman has brought over foreign bands like The Queers and NOFX, put up posters on weekends and introduced countless foreigners to the scene. American Jeff Moses, 33, of …Whatever That Means, first ran into him while Borison was putting up posters for The Queers at the Hongdae playground. “He saw me wearing a Social D shirt and he came over and tried to get me to come to the Queers show,” Moses says. Borison showed him where Skunk Hell was and two weeks later they went to the Ko- rea-Japan Punk Fest. Moses now has a tattoo of Borison’s face on his arm. Borison declined to be interviewed for this article. Another “punk angel” was Won Jong-hee from Rux, a now-legendary band that dates back to the late ’90s. “He did a lot for the scene. He did almost everything,” Dunbar says. “He put on shows, he was in two bands, he apparent- ly made a lot of clothes, he got into tattooing. I mean, you name it, he did it.” But around 2007 or 2008 he burned out. Won also declined to be interviewed. Punk’s boom became its downfall as the overcrowded scene began to rift. Along with Won, key people began to drop out, some creating their own scenes. “Especially around 2006, it was huge, with many punk bands going back then,” says Jin Lee, 28, guitarist for metal band Remnants of the Fallen. “And many actually disbanded because there were too many bands playing too many shows.” The scene began fracturing along genre lines, with bands self-identi- fying as grindcore, hardcore, skat- er punk and so on, playing sepa- rate shows and arguing amongst themselves. Different subcultures no longer play the same shows, says longtime fan Jae Kim, and the scene has suffered for it. “I know this happens worldwide, but (the Korean scene) is too small for that,” says Kim, 26. Pulling in audiences was another problem. “There were plenty of bands, but not a lot of people listening to them,” Dunbar says. “So you’d go to a show and it would seem crowded, but that was because everyone was in another band. No one was paying to get in. That was a big problem in the old days.” This meant huge loss of revenue for clubs, especially those that didn’t serve drinks. People would buy cans of beer at the corner stores and bring them inside, which pulled even more revenue from the clubs, Dunbar says. After eking by on life support for at least a year, Skunk Hell closed in 2009. And like the other venues before it, Club Spot faces closure later this month. The problem persists today. “It’s so strange to live in a city of 20 million and you literally can draw every hardcore punk to a show and you’ve got 50, 60 people in a room,” says Tim Sean, 32, the lead singer for Yuppie Killer. “Our aim is to get 20 people to pay outside of the bands, so that’s very difficult. I don’t know why it’s so hard, or why people are reluctant. Maybe it’s strange to them.” “According to my friends who play in punk bands, the glory of the past days is actually over,” Lee says. “It’s be- come more indie-oriented and they usually play in small venues.” The rise And fAll of Joseon punK ‘Our aim is to get 2o0 people to pay outside of bands, so that’s very difficult. I don’t know why it’s so hard, or why people are reluctant; maybe it’s strange to them.’ Tim Sean, Yuppie Killer