{"id":5235,"date":"2020-12-28T21:41:37","date_gmt":"2020-12-29T05:41:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=5235"},"modified":"2020-12-28T21:42:54","modified_gmt":"2020-12-29T05:42:54","slug":"korea-blog-pansori-at-the-disco","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=5235","title":{"rendered":"Korea Blog: Leenalchi’s Pansori at the Disco"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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Last month my girlfriend and I visited Mokpo, a somewhat down-at-the-heels port town on Korea\u2019s southwest coast, hoping to have a look at its Japanese colonial architecture and a taste of its\u00a0tangtangi<\/em>, a local specialty involving raw beef and still-twitching squid. Though Mokpo lacks Seoul\u2019s density of\u00a0screens<\/a>, it has just enough of them to make us notice the same music video playing all over the city \u2014 and that its hot pink-suited dancers were cavorting through the very places we\u2019d put on our itinerary. The production was, of course, part of a campaign to promote Korean tourism; more surprisingly, it had racked up well over 30 million views on YouTube since that campaign launched last summer. Driving the phenomenon was less the video itself, however picturesque and amusing its imagery, than the music, the work of an overnight sensation called\u00a0Leenalchi<\/a>\u00a0(\uc774\ub0a0\uce58).<\/p>

Like all overnight sensations, Leenalchi\u2019s roots run deeper than they appear to; this holds true even in the notoriously capricious popular culture of 21st-century Korea. Some run all the way to 17th-century Korea, where the traditional form of musical storytelling known as\u00a0pansori<\/em>\u00a0has its origins. Though an unlikely source of inspiration for dance music popularized through YouTube, pansori has enjoyed its moments of modern-day popularity, the most notable having occurred after Im Kwon-taek\u2019s\u00a0Seopyeonje<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(\uc11c\ud3b8\uc81c) in 1993. That film takes its title from a regional form of pansori; Leenalchi, in turn, take their name from 19th-century pansori master credited with developing it, Lee Nal-chi. Most of the band\u2019s members have studied under pansori masters themselves, but their music has none of the rigorous purism of government-funded\u00a0gugak<\/em>, or \u201cnational music\u201d: they\u2019re pop artists first, creators of songs to be enjoyed in the moment.<\/p>

This, at any rate, is the line taken by Jang Young-gyu, one of Leenalchi\u2019s masterminds. Long established as a film composer, Jang\u2019s body of work includes the score for Na Hong-jin\u2019s\u00a0The Wailing<\/em>\u00a0(\uace1\uc131), which in 2016 unsettled audiences the world over by repurposing Korean shamanism into the material for modern-day horror. He also played bass in Ssingssing, a cross-dressing \u201cgugak fuion\u201d rock band whose style also partook from shamanistic tradition. This seemingly niche act turned out to have global appeal: it was after Ssingssing receiving a hugely positive response to\u00a0a 2017 show for NPR\u2019s Tiny Desk Concert series<\/a>, of all venues, that Jang came to understand the potential they\u2019d tapped. The next year he and Ssingssing drummer Lee Cheol-hee played in\u00a0Dragon King<\/em>, a pansori-based musical production that put them alongside the skilled vocalists who would become their bandmates in Leenalchi.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Read the whole thing at the Los Angeles Review of Books<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last month my girlfriend and I visited Mokpo, a somewhat down-at-the-heels port town on Korea\u2019s southwest coast, hoping to have a look at its Japanese colonial architecture and a taste of its\u00a0tangtangi, a local specialty involving raw beef and still-twitching squid. Though Mokpo lacks Seoul\u2019s density of\u00a0screens, it has just enough of them to make […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[74,103],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-korea-blog","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5235"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5235\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5240,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5235\/revisions\/5240"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}