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Lectures in Musicology: Pil Ho Kim, Ohio State

Hip hop artists FRNK-Dilla
November 9, 2020
All Day
ONLINE (Registration required; link at bottom of page)

Guest speaker Pil Ho Kim, assistant professor of Korean at the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, The Ohio State University, presents a virtual lecture, "Industrial Hip Hop against Hip Hop Industry: The Critical Noise of XXX," at 4 p.m. Eastern time.

This lecture is co-sponsored by the East Asian Studies Center and the Institute for Korean Studies. Lectures in Musicology is co-sponsored by The Ohio State University Libraries.

Since its humble beginning about three decades ago, South Korea’s national hip hop scene (gukhip) has grown to a formidable industry that runs the gamut from cutting-edge underground artists to mainstream K-pop idol rappers. In recent years the cable TV audition program Show Me the Money (SMTM) has become the gukhip industry’s ultimate gatekeeper as many aspiring hip hop artists increasingly depend their careers on making it on the show. In this presentation, my co-author Wonseok Lee and I focus on XXX, an underground hip hop duo who bucks this commercial trend of gukhip in both sound and message. Their noise-filled beats and shifting grooves echo the avant-garde aesthetics and confrontational attitudes of industrial music, and their words are harshly critical of the money-driven gukhip culture as represented by SMTM. We provide a musicological analysis of XXX’s own version of industrial hip hop and examine what makes their "outsider" status sustainable vis-à-vis the gukhip industry.

 

Pil Ho Kim

 

Pil Ho Kim is assistant professor of Korean at the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, The Ohio State University. A sociologist by training, he has been studying and teaching a wide range of topics related to modern Korea, including popular music, cinema, and urban regeneration/gentrification. He is currently working on a monograph tentatively entitled Gangnam: Global/Polarization of South Korea’s Dreamland, which casts a new light on the global rise of South Korean economy and popular culture by focusing on its geographic symbol, Gangnam. He is the chair of the Korea Branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM), and the co-chair of the Academic Committee for IASPM’s 2021 biennial conference in Daegu, South Korea.

 

Attendance is free, but online registration is required. Registered participants will receive an email with the Zoom meeting link.

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