Filmstill: Filmstill Bamseom Pirates Seoul Inferno (Jung Yoon-suk, South Korea 2017)

No Culture, no Money, no Time, but Music

Short Essay

South Korean punk band Bamseom Pirates makes fast, noisy, paradoxical, self-effacing music that plays with the most dangerous subject in South Korea: North Korea. A delicate topic, as both countries are technically still at war. The documentary Bamseom Pirates, Seoul Inferno by Jung Yoon-suk shows how the band uses music to resist the social and political absurdities of present-day South Korea.

«No culture, no money, no time. These are the three problems of the youth», says Jang Sung-gun, bassist of the South Korean duo Bamseom Pirates. In the band’s opinion, the youth of South Korea suffer from the grievous ramifications of globalized turbo capitalism paired with hysteric patriotism.

Trapped between self-optimization, hi-speed digital consumerism, neo-Confucian values, a highly competitive education system, and a job market with poor salaries and dwindling perspectives, young South Koreans face harsh life conditions and growing social inequalities. That leaves them helpless and hopeless – to a life in «Hell Joseon» (as a popular internet phrase from the early 2010s says, meaning that «South Korea is close to hell and a hopeless society»).

Filmstill: Bamseom Pirates Seoul Inferno (Jung Yoon-suk, South Korea 2017)

Escape into and Resist with Music

What are two poor boys to do, but play in an underground band? Jang Sung-gun and drummer Kwon Yongman, aka Bamseom Pirates, deal in a quirky and ear-splitting mix of grind, punk, black metal, and noise, as well as multimedia art performance, savage satire, and splendid self-mockery.

Their songs play with the «most dangerous subject in South Korea, which is North Korea» (Kwon Yong-man). This much is clear in their song titles: «All Hail Kim Jong-il», «The Juche philosophy is full of protein», «Dear Leader, please buy me some chocolate», which alone put them under suspicion of South Korean authorities not amused about what they perceive as bold, pro-communist, and at the same time anti-nationalist attitudes.

The Desire for National Security

Director Jung Yoon-suk skillfully blends the band’s non-conformist music with footage taken from South and North Korean propaganda videos, thus creating forceful criticism of the «invisible power» that takes center stage in the film: South Korea’s National Security Act. An early Cold War relic from 1948, the law has largely remained unchanged and still bans propagating, inciting, and praising on behalf of North Korea or anti-government organizations.

Despite the very recent diplomatic rapprochements between the two Koreas, both countries are technically still at war (the Korean War ended with an armistice in 1953). The desire for national security prevails and has grown extensively during the early to mid-2010s, when the authorities indicted more than one hundred people under the National Security Act as part of a broader rollback of democratic institutions.

Amongst them, the case of Bamseom Pirates’ friend and producer Park Jung-geun is particularly bizarre: he was sentenced to ten months in prison for re-tweeting a North Korean propaganda post – even though the judge acknowledged that some of his tweets were parody. Against the backdrop of blazing censorship, psychological warfare, and social insecurity in contemporary South Korea, Bamseom Pirates, Seoul Inferno makes a compelling case for the right to freedom of artistic expression and creativity.

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Biography

Michael Fuhr is an ethnomusicologist and the managing director of the Center for World Music at University of Hildesheim. He received his MA in musicology, philosophy and art history from University of Cologne and his PhD from Heidelberg University. His research interests include issues of identity and globalization, (Korean) popular music, aesthetics, cultural theory, and the history of ethnomusicology. He is the author of Popular Music and Aesthetics: The Historic-philosophical Reconstruction of Disdain (transcript, 2007), in German, and Globalization and Popular Music in South Korea: Sounding Out K-Pop (Routledge, 2015), and co-author of Asian Pop Music in Cosmopolitan Europe: K-Pop Fandom in the Age of Globalisation (Routledge, forthc.).

Published on December 13, 2018

Last updated on April 10, 2024

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Dissolving in the countries colours, well, nearly: Aidan Moffat / Filmstill: Where You’re Meant to Be (Paul Fegan, Scotland 2018)

Where Swearing Is Polite

Review

by Martin Cloonan

Rude, tender and weird. The film Where You’re Meant to Be of the director Paul Fegan tells a sensitive story about the idiosyncracities of Scotland and its people through the lens of the Folk musician Aidan Moffat. This works well, as Moffat is as eccentric as the people he meets.

Pissing Off the Old Generation

Where You’re Meant to Be is a very Scottish film. Not the Scotland of the past, of tartan, shortbread and kilts (although the latter does appear), but the recent, the real Scotland. And what better way to do that than Aidan Moffat does in this film – tour the country singing traditional, rural, songs rewritten for a modern, urban generation – while sometimes pissing off the older generation in the process.

The tour goes to the backroads of the country. Aidan Moffat, who is the narrator of the film, is just one of the main performers, besides the country itself and especially the eccentric people: There is the man who locks his dog in a phone box. A kilted man dancing drunkenly at a gig in an old graveyard which is now someone’s garden. The grief stricken widower, bereft after loosing the woman who had been «the wind in my sails» for 58 years. And the two Loch Ness monster hunters who have fallen out and are reconciled during the film. While the documentary is too often male led, this is a Scotland of warmth and tenderness.

Aidan Moffat and Sheila Stewart / Filmstill: Where You’re Meant to Be (Paul Fegan, Scotland 2018)

Allowing Old Songs to Evolve

The film’s tone is ever respectful, never patronising, but often also very rude. Moffat has never avoided swearing and profanities litter most of the songs here. Of course, for this is how a large swathe of the Scottish population speaks. To deny the swearing would be to deny these people a voice, something which this democratic film would not allow.

There could be no better place to end the film than at Glasgow’s Barrowland Ballroom. Located in Moffat’s adopted home, the «Barras» might be still the best venue in the world. Here Moffat is amongst his own, only to be upstaged by Sheila Stewart, a traditional singer who died between the making of the film and its release. In a film where Scotland’s ethnic minorities do not appear enough, it is significant that Stewart is from a traveller background, her partial outside status echoing Moffat’s endorsement of society’s outcasts. She finds Moffat’s version of the songs «disgusting», but is slowly won over to the idea that the songs can evolve.

At the end she mounts a one woman stage invasion following the end of Moffat’s version of the traditional song «The Parting Song». A song, which is very dear to her and creates a magical, unscripted moment. Stewart, the old stager, performs her version of the song and the new generation assembled in the Barras acclaims her. Here, Scotlands past and present meet and are reconciled.

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