When Stephen Epstein first began visiting Korea in the 1980s, the only music he ever heard was bland Korean pop and Western soft rock.
“I kept hearing the same song by the Carpenters,” he said. He said he wished he could point his finger at the speakers and make them explode.
Then, following a tip from a friend, in 1998 he discovered Drug, a club where the Korean punk rock scene was starting. Epstein, director of the Asian Studies Institute at the University of Victoria of Wellington, in New Zealand, fell in love with the music, inspiring him to return the following year and film a documentary, which he screened and discussed on campus Tuesday.
With names like Crying Nut, Rux, 18 Cruk and Lazy Bones, Epstein said Korean punk bands possess an identity that straddles the music’s Western origins and the Korean national identity.
“It was creating a new space for Korean youth, where they can stand proud,” Epstein said.
Many of the high-school and college-aged people in the documentary, “Our Nation: A Korean punk community,” expressed attractions to punk similar to their American and British counterparts.
“At first it was really strange,” Jin-Hee, a student and Drug devotee, stated in the film. “The punk rock was so different than the music I knew.”
The sound and clothes of Korean punk rock resemble that of contemporary pop-punk acts, such as early Green Day and NOFX, and the shows are full of moshing and crowd surfing. There is even an all-female punk band, Super Market, which is reminiscent of Sleater-Kinney.
Epstein said the Korean kids shared the disaffected attitudes of their Generation-X counterparts, particularly pressure from parents and school.
“It’s a different world for them when they go down into that space,” the music critic noiZe said in the film.
These feelings led the Koreans to so-called slacker-rock bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam, which introduced them to late ’70s punk groups like the Sex Pistols and the Clash. A poster of “London Calling,” the seminal Clash album, hung above the entrance to Drug.
Here is where the similarities begin to break down. Epstein said the Koreans’ early British and American counterparts were intensely political and anarchic, in part because of their working-class backgrounds, while the Korean punks were often unconcerned about the government and complicit to the parents and schools they railed against.
“The kids that are talking about rebellion, how should I say, they’re spoiled,” Kim Ju-Wan, a Korean sociologist, told Epstein in the documentary.
The closest they came to politics was their Korean pride, not in its government, Epstein said, but in its people and identity.
Instead, the music served as a release from the pressures of everyday life.
“Drug was appealing to a lot of the kids who just wanted some freedom,” Epstein said.
This led some people to accuse the bands of straying from the true sounds of punk. But Epstein felt these critics were defining punk by its musical terms, not its ideological ones. For Epstein, the sentiment of the crowd was more important than the speed of the guitars, and many of the bands embraced this image.
“We’re fake punk,” Cho Hae-Joang, leader of the extremely popular Crying Nut, said in the documentary. “We’re authentic fake punk. We’ve been fake punk since the day we were born.”
Since the heyday of Korean punk popularity, which happened to coincide with the filming of “Our Nation,” Drug closed in 2001 because of a fight between the owner and the bands over the direction of the punk scene.
It reopened a year later as a collective run by the bands under the new name Skunk Hell. The sound, Epstein said, is more in-line with traditional punk rock, thanks to Koreans’ increasing awareness of a variety of punk groups, but this new sound lacks the character of the earlier acts.
“They see themselves as punks first, Koreans second,” he said of the bands that sound like copies of Rancid or Suicide Machines. “Whereas the earlier bands wanted to be Korean first.”
Still, Epstein sees no end in sight to the music.
“I think you almost have to measure Korean popular culture in dog years,” he said. “It moves that fast.”