On Writing Hyun Jin-Young back into the K-Pop Narrative

I listened to a few episodes of K-Pop Dreaming, a podcast series from the LAist done by journalist Vivian Yoon. Much like other work on K-Pop from second generation or diaspora Korean-Americans, such as Euny Hong’s Birth of Korean Cool, it is a mixed bag. The valuable part of works like K-Pop Dreaming (and the Birth of Korean Cool) are the first-hand accounts of being in the diaspora, of the immigrant experience, of memories of Seoul in the 1980s, and of the tensions felt growing up as a Korean-American in the wake of the 1992 LA Riots. Less valuable is the actual work done on, you know, K-Pop. 

And I get it. K-Pop as K-Pop, as music history, is really only of interest to music history nerds and for someone like Yoon, she is clearly more interested in hearing her parents’ memories of 1980s Seoul than in digging into the minutia of the genre. And there is nothing wrong with that. But it does mean “K-Pop Dreaming” is less “K-Pop” and more just “Dreaming.”

One of the things Yoon handwaves in her episode titled “Moon Night” is the career of 1990s dancing king, Hyun Jin-Young. I covered him briefly in Episode 4 of my podcast but it’s worth looking back again just because of how completely he’s been written out of the K-Pop narrative in English.

Today, the common K-Pop history narrative begins like this: 

• 1992: Seo Taiji debuts and shocks a nation that had previously only been listening to trot and government-approved patriotic schlock.

The reality is that the burgeoning teen pop scene had actually begun a few years before, in the mid-1980s. Kim Wan-Sun, the Korean Madonna, was shaking her hips on television to slinky electro-pop as far back as 1986. The first K-Pop boy group, Sobangcha, were dazzling audiences with their pop stages back in 1988. And it was into this electro-dominated teen pop scene that Hyun Jin-Young debuted in 1990 with New Dance 1. 

Hyun Jin-Young came out of the scene in Club Moonlight in Seoul (and this is a great history of the place from Maekan.com). The dance club was frequented by Black American soldiers posted to Seoul and it’s where young Korean men like Hyun Jin-Young and Yang Hyun-Suk (aka “YG”) picked up new Black American dances like the Running Man and the Roger Rabbit.

Here’s Hyun Jin-Young and Wawa with the early K-hip hop song “Sad Mannequin” in 1990 (aka pre-Seo Taiji’s debut). Does the formation look familiar?

The formation of one center guy with two backing dancers was taken from Bobby Brown’s “Every Little Step” video and it would also form the basis of, yes, Seo Taiji and Boys’ performance style.

Here’s Seo Taiji and Boys two years later: 

Some of the guys who came out of the scene at Club Moonlight were:

* Hyun Jin-Young

* Koo Jun-Yup (half of Hyun Jin-Young’s backing group Wawa, then later debuted as half of Clon)

* Kang Won-Rae (the other half of Wawa and then later Clon)

* Yang Hyun-Suk (half of Seo Taiji’s “Boys” and later founder of YG Entertainment)

* Lee Juno (the other half of Seo Taiji’s “Boys” and later a solo performer)

* Yoo Young-Jin (R&B singer turned SM Entertainment super producer)

* Park Nam-Jung (teen heartthrob)

* Lee Hyun-Do (second generation of Wawa and then half of hip-hop duo Deux)

* Kim Sung-Jae (the other half of the second generation of Wawa and then of hip-hop duo Deux, who passed away quite shockingly)

* Lee Sang-Won (a member of Sobangcha)

Seo Taiji was not a part of the Club Moonlight scene but, as the story goes, he was fascinated when he encountered it by chance one night after catching a performance by Park Nam-Jung and Friends. The “friends” happened to include Yang Hyun-Suk aka YG, who offered to give Seo Taiji lessons in hip-hop dance. Alas, Yang Hyun-Suk enlisted before he could make good on his promise but after he was discharged, he got back in touch with Seo Taiji—who had spent the intervening time writing hip-hop style songs—and that is the origin of “Seo Taiji and Boys.”

So, you may be asking how Seo Taiji and Boys could be shocking a nation if guys like Hyun Jin-Young (and Park Nam-Jung) had already debuted with their hip-hop dancing and style.

Well… here’s the thing. Park Nam-Jung, despite his cool styling and dance moves, was essentially still singing trot-influenced songs. And if you listened to my episode 4, you may already know that Hyun Jin-Young’s New Dance 1, despite being an excellent early K-hip-hop album, was a bit ahead of its time and to make matters worse, the poor kid was arrested in 1991 on stage while performing for the horrific crime of SMOKING MARIJUANA. (I know, I know.) 

So, Hyun Jin-Young, at about 19 years old, in 1991, was sent to jail. It’s actually a really, really sad story and one I won’t dwell on here but to give you the TL;DR this is when he was introduced to much harder drugs than marijuana. Just say no, kids.

And here’s the other thing. On February 17, 1992, a tragic crowd crush happened in Seoul at a New Kids on the Block concert and a teen girl was killed and about 50 others were hospitalized. My impression is that this incident was formative for teen pop fans of the time and the emotions in the aftermath of first the concert and then the tragedy helped feed into the frenzy that was unleashed when Seo Taiji and Boys popped up a couple of months later in April 1992 with a contemporary sound and cool dance moves that were not only great but also, importantly, in the right place at the right time.

By all accounts “Nan Arayo,” the seminal Seo Taiji and Boys debut track was everywhere that first half of 1992 and then something big happened. After some encouragement from his Club Moonlight-era buddy Yang Hyun-Suk, Hyun Jin-Young, fresh out of jail, came back big time with New Dance 2 in August 1992, and the title track “You, in my Cloudy Memory” (it’s given various English translations) knocked “Nan Arayo” to the dust and crushed the charts for the rest of the year into 1993. 

Seo Taiji and Boys vs Hyun Jin-Young (and Wawa) was the original K-Pop chart battle. The BTS vs EXO; the H.O.T. vs Sechs Kies of the early 1990s.

1993 should have been an incredible year for both artists with Seo Taiji and Boys 2 vs New Dance 3, a massively hyped pop star battle royale. Alas, things would take a very dark turn for Hyun Jin-Young in late 1993 and the course of K-Pop music history would change forever.

Hyun Jin-Young may have been erased from the English language K-Pop histories and memory-holed as inconvenient to the narrative but he’s still an integral part of understanding K-Pop and its roots. He’s been back in the Korean media in recent years, telling his own story in his own words. Unfortunately, nobody in the English language K-Pop Media has bothered to translate any of it for global fans (*cough* hacks) but if you’re curious you can at least watch and see old photos and videos and so on. He’s an interesting man and a talented musician and deserves to be written back into the K-Pop narrative.

I’m not dismissing the incredible impact of Seo Taiji and Boys, who were an excellent group, just hopefully putting that early scene in better context. Seo Taiji and Boys didn’t emerge out of nowhere and Hyun Jin-Young is part of that story.