Thursday, April 8, 2010

+/- Korea

Amanda extensively documented the good and the bad about living on this strange peninsula, but I am one of those men who constantly peer over their partner's shoulders to interject loving, irritating, constructive criticism. One day when I say, oh honey it's its not it's, I swear she'll turn into a dragon and tear my head from my shoulders. So it goes. Here's a plus and a minus about Korea that she failed to mention.

Korea +1 Bonus Point-uh: Health Care. Korea has phenomenally inexpensive health care. I guess that's to be expected from a country where many parents systematically force their children into the medical profession. Not only is it cheap, but it ain't half bad. Now they might be skeptical of diseases like clinical depression, ADHD, or really anything that doesn't manifest itself physically, and most people believe that kimchi cures cancer, but these problems have more to do with the culture at large than the medical professionals who are generally well informed. I mean, it's not all that great for a non-Korean speaker who would like to actually talk to the doctor about treatment options or to read the test results, but that's just part of being an expat. The great thing about the health care is, you can just walk in, be seen by a doctor almost immediately, and pay next to nothing at the end of it. I walked into a clinic without insurance, got a blood test and two consultations for 4.50. Amanda was in the hospital for a week (with insurance) and it cost her 500 dollars. I had Lasik surgery done for 1500 dollars. That's a deal and a half.

Korea -1 (maybe 5) bonus point-uh: Music. Korean music makes me want to put my eyes out with a rusty ice cream scoop. There are only two types of music, old people music and young people music. I'm sure there's traditional music too, there are traditional instruments like harps with two strings and such, but I've never heard it.

Old people music is terrible, but it's certainly the lesser of two evils. This music can be heard every day, accosting the innocent from the 10 motherfucking speakers on the bus, this (music or talk radio, blaring on the bus) could be it's own -1 point for the Korean peninsula, or out of bongo flatbeds carrying precarious stacks of empty glass bottles on the way to wherever they go. Here's what happened, at the end of the Korean war the Americans wanted to give the Koreans a present, a housewarming for their new country. Who knows, maybe we felt bad about greasing them up for the IMF like it was deliverance. So we decided to give them musical instruments, but the only ones we could find were trombones. Fuck it. We airdropped some trombones for them to fuck around with, many died, but how would you know it's the Americans bringing democracy, or culture to your country if no one dies, it's like our calling card. When they started figuring out the instrument the first band formed. They decided that they would find the person in town who sounded most like a seagull committing suicide and make him the singer. Then they decided that their backing sound would be 20 trombones playing the same measure over and over. Since in Confucian culture it's almost unthinkable to create your own way of doing things, all bands for the next 20 years followed this exact formula, giving old people music a sounds that in all places, at all times is like music created by a collaboration of a crack addicted Lawrence Welk and Brian Setzer with severe cranial hemorrhaging. Still it's preferable to what the youth obsessively poison themselves with.

While the music for the old is uncreative and tone deaf. The music for the youth is far more insipid, it's a commercial burdened with as many nonsensical, sugary, syth blips as can be stacked on top of one another. How many cultures have ubiquitously popular groups singing songs about cell phones. Their names aren't names anymore they've become words with dictionary definitions, spurring nonsensical English catch phrases that are repeated with parrotlike ignorance by every school child in Korea who barely knows the alphabet. I had a kid in class the other day trying to sing a song that goes, "listen to my heart... beat." But I thought he said, "Listen I have her... pes." It's compositionally nonsensical, like a Britney Spears producer after an 8 ball of coke. It's expressionless, gutless, and in the words of Stephen Morrissey, "Says nothing to me about my life." I guess I should expect that it says nothing to me about my life, I'm not Korean and I never will be. My feeling is sadness, and a deep loss of respect for humanity when I consider that this puerile, commercial nonsense masquerading as music could say something about anyone else's life.

I suppose I might take music a bit too seriously, but in my opinion art is one of the most serious things there is. The drive to self-expression is inviolate and an essential element of our humanity. The music, art, and literature we produce, not as a means to an end, but as an honest expression of our experiences as a human being are as vital to life as air. And when honest expression gets drowned out by aggressive marketing and the herd mentality of people who are suckered into a culture of vapid commercialism and infantile pandering, my faith in humanity dims, because we ARE the art that we produce and consume. There are exceptions to these rules, there is actual music on this peninsula, a punk band from Busan I saw at Speakeasy. But one punk band that really just played covers from classic American punk bands from a city the size of Los Angeles, doesn't make a dent in the fact that this monoculture is suffocating creative expression for the profits of corporations. It happens in the US too, but never to this extent.

So I leave you with just a pinch of this horror that passes for music on this peninsula.

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