Korean Album of the Year: 'Sugungga'
By David Tizzard
In late 2009 I was in the back of a Seoul taxi making my way home from an all-night party, hiding behind my sunglasses and trying to hold my head in a way that didn't make my brain rattle painfully inside. As we passed Euljiro 3-ga and headed up toward the Namsan tunnel, a song came on the radio.
It was Jang Gi-ha and the Faces' “Living the Carefree Life (byul-e ops-e sanda).” At that moment it spoke to me with a great clarity and authenticity. I was awake, alive and here living in Seoul: carefree, indeed.
The memory of asking the taxi driver for the name of the song in my improving Korean has stayed with me, so has the ragged bookmark on which I scribbled the information. I found my way to Hottracks (remember that?), purchased the album and made it my soundtrack for the next six months.
Since then, I've followed Jang Gi-ha and the Faces with great interest and was saddened to see them eventually break-up. I'd seen them live countless times, from small, intimate Hongdae venues to large festival stages. I was also fortunate enough to meet the man himself and have a chat about various things at the DMZ Peace Train Music Festival up by the North Korean border.
My love of Korean music also deepened as I wrote and performed my own original songs and sounds across the country with various bands. A successful stoner rock rendition of the traditional Jindo Arirang recently gave my band one of its more fabulous opportunities here in Korea.
And sharing stages with artists like Galaxy Express, Ska Sucks, and Dynamic Duo has been a window into a Korean culture that I didn't (and still don't) see on the TV. The music scene is honest and, sometimes, political; it swears, it sweats, it drinks, laughs and loves.
And that's what music is like for some of us.
It's not about numbers, bottom lines, YouTube plays, defining genres, or what glitzy television commercials and profit-seeking mega companies tell you what's cool. Music is something that just grabs you. It insists that it is right. Your mind, your inner click track, needs it to move through the day correctly.
And, as artists, we're always looking for that next new sound to grab us. We search for a new kind of kick.
I had that experience again this year with another Korean album: Leenalchi's debut release, “Sugungga.” It was another sound that, as soon as I heard it, I knew I needed to ingest it into my soul through repeated listens, irrespective of my wife's protestations.
To describe it (if only music were ever that easy!), Leenalchi takes deeply modern and infectiously sparse grooves and places history over the top of them. It's fusion. Culture meets civilization ― and then the two put on their classics and have a little dance.
Leenalchi combines house music sensibilities, a crisp drum sound and incredibly prominent bass lines (they have two bassists), with folk lyrics and traditional vocal deliveries. Essentially, a mash-up.
By description it probably sounds rather trite. A government ministry's way of commodifying traditional culture and trying to impress it on a suitably unimpressed foreign audience.
But it's not. And it comes across as the very opposite, avoiding any such pitfalls in both its creation and reception.
Paradoxically, what has been done countless times before in pansori performances and children's stories becomes something fresher and more modern than the Korean idol group's most recently purchased hit from European songwriters and music factories aiming at, and destined for, American charts.
Leenalchi is undeniably Korean, from the sounds, concepts, images and delivery. A loyal turtle is sent to land by an ailing Dragon King of the sea to catch an animal it has never seen before, a rabbit. The rabbit, however, is crafty and is able to trick the turtle to various degrees … and then along comes a tiger.
There's a hierarchy and interplay of nature. There are descriptions of violence, bitterness and deception delivered in musical intervals not always familiar to the Western-trained ear; this is mixed with rap stylings and idiosyncratic syncopated deliveries.
A thing so sadly often unheard in Korean music is also undeniably present: male and female voices singing together. They do so not as a perfectly crafted and isolated duet, but chaotically: jumping in an over each other, reaching for the microphone and center stage just as one might imagine the animals doing.
This is, of course, what society sounds like: A cacophony of tones, pitches, genders and personalities. And this is what makes Leenalchi, to my ears, and despite everything else, sound incredibly real and natural.
I could talk more in detail about the historical nature of the traditional Korean pansori genre and form of musical storytelling, go into great depth about how it was originally a form of folk entertainment later adopted by the ruling yangban class, how it perpetuates “han,” but that wouldn't be really anything to do with why I like the music.
I like Leenalchi's debut 2020 album for reasons that I can't really explain but nevertheless feel desperately real. It was only after repeated listens that I discovered the bassist from The Faces, Jeong Jung-yeop, also plays on this album with Jang Young-gu and Lee Chul-hee from SsingSsing ― perhaps there is something serendipitous in that?
The full album is available to listen to on YouTube if you're interested. But, even if you don't like it as much as I do, I hope nonetheless that you find a Korean album that moves you like this moves me.
Maybe a return to all-night parties and taxis back from late-night gigs might help? Here's to 2021 and Korean music.
Dr. David Tizzard (datizzard@swu.ac.kr) has a Ph.D. in Korean studies and is an assistant professor at Seoul Women's University. He discusses the week's hottest issues on TBS eFM (101.3 FM) on "Life Abroad" live every Thursday from 9:35 a.m. to 10 a.m.