Drag artist dives into songwriting

Hurricane Kimchi performs at Jebi Dabang in western Seoul. / Courtesy of Kang Josae

By Jon Dunbar

Hurricane Kimchi, the drag name of local artist Heezy Yang, has expanded into music. Teaming up with Jinho, the bassist of garage punk band The 1234-Dah!, they released their first single "Stronger Than You Think," Aug. 9.

After his best friend and work partner moved away earlier this year, Yang started getting more serious about his music. He started out at drag shows, accompanied by Jinho on guitar or bass, singing covers by anyone from Nirvana or Green Day to Britney Spears or Whitney Houston. Eventually, he decided to start writing songs, and Jinho helped him through the process.

"It's sort of like, one door closes, then another opens ― like they say. My best friend Ali left Korea and I was left with no close friends and I was sad, but it made me make new friends who do music, and finally got me into making music," he told The Korea Times. "So during the time I was self-quarantined at home for some weeks when the first COVID-19 wave was hitting the country, I just started making stuff up, not knowing how it's supposed to work or how it's gonna work out."

Yang has years of experience performing at LGBT events and rallies, sometimes in drag and sometimes as Heezy. He got into drag in 2014, before it was a regular thing, and chose the performer name Hurricane Kimchi, mimicking BoA's song "Hurricane Venus" and also a blatant nod to his Korean heritage. "Even if it's a bit cheesy, I wanted to have a very obviously Korean drag name, for representation reasons," he said.

A still from Hurricane Kimchi's music video for "Stronger Than You Think" / Courtesy of Kang Josae

In the music video Yang appears in some scenes in drag, vivid red from head to toe but appears in others out of drag, dressed casually in jeans, a T-shirt and a cap. "I wanted to tell people that someone who looks so different or weird ― me in drag, LGBTQ people ― is actually just a human and the same as others/you/me out of drag, and that we are everywhere in their everyday life, whether they noticed it or not," he explained.

"All these things I do in drag ― singing, dancing, lip-syncing, talking ― I can do it out of drag as well… it's like part of the stage production. The makeup and outfits bring more attention to your performance and give more power to your performance, so I use them. Well, that's one thing, and another important reason is to play around the gender norms and breaking gender stereotypes. Meaning, there shouldn't be any silly rule such as men cannot wear makeup or dresses."

Yang co-founded Seoul Drag Parade in 2018, and has been working hard to normalize the public presence of sexual minorities in Korea. As the Queer Culture Festival has spread from Seoul to six more cities nationwide and acceptance and acknowledgement has increased, so have displays of hatred and discrimination. But Yang says the country is headed in the right direction.

"We still see all these negative things and old-fashioned and conservative thoughts and systems ruining it for a lot of us, in the news every day, but if you think about it, all these issues were not even issues before because they were not noticed, recognized or considered existing," he said. "All these things are coming up to the surface because now people acknowledge them, and I can assure you it's happening not just naturally as times goes by. A lot of hardworking activists are doing so much every day and night to make us ― LGBTQ people ― and the issues that we face visible. And to fix what's wrong."

As COVID-19 has made public gatherings unsafe and led to many events being canceled, postponed or moved online, including this year's Seoul Drag Parade and Seoul Queer Culture Festival, Yang is set to keep making music.

He is busy composing songs and writing lyrics, with plans to release more music later this year and early next year. "My next single is going to be more pop-rock and fun," he said. "My first single is ballad and that was such a Korean thing for me to do. I love pop-rock and rock as well, so my next single has got to be more rock!"

Visit hurricanekimchi.com or find him on Instagram @hurricanekimchi for more information.

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