Seo Taiji and Boys

On April 11, 1992, Seo Taiji, 20, Yang Hyun-seok, 22, and Lee Juno, 25, made their national television debut on a South Korean music show under the name Seo Taiji and Boys. They were the first of several groups to perform that night, all of which were angling for high scores from the presiding judges. Seo, their leader, wore a grey vest and billowing black pants, while the Boys were decked in overalls and matching green button-ups. The trio delivered an energetic, lip-synced performance of “Nan Arayo (I Know):” a new jack swing single that wove together rap verses, distorted guitars, and lovelorn harmonizing: “I really only liked you/You, who thrust me into sadness’ embrace,” Seo wailed in the chorus. Their dance routine ended in a dramatic pose and cheers and applause came from the audience. But the panel of established industry professionals standing off-stage were less impressed.

“The melody is a bit weak. It doesn’t feel like you put a lot of effort into it,” said one. “It would have been nice to hear something fresh in your lyrics,” opined another. The judges awarded Seo Taiji and Boys the lowest score of any of the acts performing that night. What happened next can only be described as a mass rebuke by the public: “Nan Arayo” quickly shot to the top of the Korean charts and stayed there for 18 weeks, while the corresponding album Seo Taiji and Boys went on to sell 1.7 million copies, not counting an incalculable number of bootleg cassettes. They didn’t know it at the time, but Seo Taiji and Boys would become the prototype for all of the K-pop groups to come. Seo’s fusion of hip-hop, techno, and rock—colloquially termed “rap dance”—had become South Korea’s first homegrown youth music.

Born Jeong Hyun-cheol in 1972, Seo was a problem student, a self-described rebel who dropped out of high school to pour his energy into music. He immersed himself in the Seoul rock scene as he worked odd jobs and learned how to play the guitar and bass. At 17, he was recruited into Sinawe, the heavy metal institution led by Korean rock royalty Shin Dae-chul. But after recording just one album with them, Seo left the band and started to dabble with samplers and MIDI instruments to try and recreate the sounds he was hearing in American pop music.

The early ’90s marked the first time in modern Korean history that teenagers gained access to disposable income, a phenomenon spurred on by the country’s increasingly globalized economy. At the time, Korean music was dominated by acoustic guitar-driven folk music and “trot,” a slow-moving style that predates the Korean War, but the youth—including Seo—had become increasingly obsessed with the music that was popular in America: high-tempo, dance-oriented tracks, heavily influenced by prevalent Black music genres like hip-hop and new jack swing.

Black music was introduced to the South Korean masses in the ’80s, around the time the country began transitioning from decades of various authoritarian regimes to a direct democracy in 1987. Long exclusive to American soldiers, the G.I. clubs of Itaewon—a district in Seoul adjacent to the U.S. military’s South Korea headquarters in Yongsan—began to open up to Korean patrons. New communities developed; in 1990, Hyun Jin-young, a gifted dancer who’d grown up with American friends while living in a village near the Army base, made his debut as the first signee of a budding record exec named Lee Soo-Man (who would later found SM Entertainment). With years of studio experience under his belt, Seo was poised to tap into the burgeoning cultural moment. The only problem was, compared to other hotshots in the scene, he couldn’t dance for shit.

Driven to improve, Seo called upon a rising star named Yang Hyun-seok to ask him for coaching. (As the story goes, Yang took Seo’s money and vanished into thin air. He later returned with the sheepish claim that he had disappeared because he was serving his mandatory military service.) Yang was impressed with Seo’s music and offered his services directly, recommending they form a group with another dancer, Lee Juno. It was an arrangement that was amenable to Seo, who had little interest in the intense spotlight that came with being a solo artist. He liked being able to hide behind the two older Boys on stage, though he understood as well as they did that the success of their partnership was largely contingent upon his own songwriting and studio prowess. Even to fans, it was always clear who was running the ship. The trio agreed to relatively even financial splits for any touring and performance income—but when it came to album royalties, the split went Seo’s direction, 6:2:2.

With Seo’s leading role cemented, and soon after that fated TV performance, Seo Taiji and Boys’ career became a runaway train. Conservative critics and traditional gatekeepers like broadcasters and radio stations initially blasted the group for their overt “foreign” musical influences, but nobody could argue with the sales. More music shows started catering to the teen demographic, and soon enough, Seo Taiji and Boys became a regular fixture on television. The release of their first album, and the months of live appearances that followed, established several of the recurrent themes of K-pop and its industry: An undiscriminating approach to genre tropes, emphasis on elaborate choreography, and practices like the pre-“comeback” hiatus period that follows every album cycle, now considered customary.

In the same way that production styles tend to linger on Korean charts a few years past their U.S. expiration date, much of Seo Taiji and Boys owes a debt to musical trends that had become passé in the West by the end of the ’80s. By the time “Nan Arayo” was released in Korea, new jack swing was a well-established sound in the U.S. mainstream, but the song is also clearly indebted to Milli Vanilli’s hit “Girl You Know It’s True,” which was already itself a French-German approximation of American pop. The euphoric, New Order-biting synth-pop of “My Everything” would have sounded dated to American audiences, and a disproportionate number of album tracks are peppered with saxophone runs that would give Kenny G pause. At moments, Seo reaches even further back in time: The end of the original album had a song called “Rock’n Roll Dance (‘92 Heavy Mix),” built around a sped-up sample of the guitar from AC/DC’s 1980 classic “Back in Black.” It’s a throwaway club track, but its inclusion reveals Seo’s core musical ethos: Taking the music that inspired him most and refashioning it to be relatable to Korean youth. He even recruited his old mentor Shin Dae-chul to rip a guitar solo, an olive branch to any rock fans who felt betrayed by his musical pivot.

There were detractors, even among the music community, who were doubtful of Seo Taiji and Boys’ viability. Seo pursued his mission nonetheless—not only because he thought it would work, but because he loved the music. “When I said that I was going to write Black music, someone responded by saying that I’d turned to making charcoal, because charcoal is black,” Seo said in 2014. “That’s how some people demeaned Black music back then. But it was all I cared about.” The frontman’s earnest nature shines on slow-burners like “In the Time Spent With You,” where he delivers breathy, sing-song rap verses and long, drawn-out notes about savoring a moment with his lover, reminiscing on the wonderful, fuzzy feeling he gets when he’s with them. Seo isn’t always the most confident vocalist, but when he bathes his voice in cold, digital reverb, he comes alive.

The huge success of “Nan Arayo” was quickly followed by another single, “You, In the Fantasy,” a raucous dance track about questioning your preconceived reality. It foreshadows the lyrics of more controversial anthems from later in Seo’s career, like “Come Back Home” or “Classroom Idea,” where he reached out to runaway teens and took aim at Korea’s pressurized academic expectations. As the years went on, Seo would only grow increasingly passionate about bringing attention to societal ills and interrogating a national culture that he felt like an outcast in. On the street, though, he was no outcast; he was a cultural prophet.

Like the K-pop groups of today, Seo Taiji and Boys developed an obsessive fanbase, one that clung to his every word. For the rest of 1992, “Nan Arayo” blasted out of speakers everywhere in Seoul, aided by the vendors across the city hawking tapes of the album. Half of the Korean recorded music market consisted of foreign imports before Seo Taiji and Boys, but in the years that followed, listeners became much more willing to take a chance on Korean artists working in Western music styles, and the industry followed suit. By 1997, the market share of Korean-made pop music was double that of international acts. With his success, Seo terraformed the market for Korean artists and became the country’s first teen idol, the primary conduit by which a subculture from half a world away would inform the identities of an entire generation of Koreans.

As Seo Taiji and Boys’ popularity skyrocketed, Korean-made pop acts inspired by rap, R&B, and other Black music replaced singer-songwriter types as the new dominant force in the Korean music industry. In 1994, Seo languished in controversy after radio stations banned the singles from Seo Taiji and Boys III and Korea’s Christian right accused him of hiding demonic messages that would only reveal themselves if a song was played backwards. Suffering from the intense public scrutiny and a lack of inspiration, Seo confessed to Yang and Lee that he wanted to end the group once they released their fourth record.

1995’s Seo Taiji and Boys IV was a commercial hit, driven by the Cypress Hill-esque “Come Back Home,” but Seo once again found himself butting heads with censors, who reviewed the album before release and forbade him from including lyrics that were critical of the government on the song “Sidae Yugam (Shame of the Times).” He refused to change the lyrics, instead opting to delete his vocals and keep the song as an instrumental. Fans were enraged and went so far as to protest the censorship with a letter-writing campaign—but Seo had had enough. At the beginning of 1996, he called a press conference: Seo Taiji and Boys were retiring, effective immediately. In a cinematic exit, Seo took a helicopter from the conference hall and went directly to the airport, hopping on a flight to Guam, and eventually, America. Millions of fans were devastated. Mobs of his most faithful trekked to his Seoul house to protest the decision. One student, speaking to The Kyunghang Shinmun at the time, compared it to the assassination of a politician: “The death of Seo Taiji is the death of us all.”

The music industry scrambled to fill the void that Seo Taiji and Boys left behind. Long beholden to the whims of TV broadcasters, Korean record labels had consolidated more independent power for themselves in the years since Seo’s debut. Now, it was up to them to figure out how to rebottle his magic and build upon the playbook that was established during the band’s brief but substantial run. Thus, the Korean idol business was born. The Boys parlayed their fame and experience into positions of power in this nascent ecosystem: Yang started his own company YG Entertainment, the powerhouse behind iconic acts like Big Bang, while Lee became a notable producer. (In 2019, Yang resigned from YG following allegations of drug abuse, corruption, sexual assault, and other crimes. Lee was found guilty on charges of sexual assault and fraud in 2017.) By the end of the ’90s, SM Entertainment’s boy band H.O.T. had made serious inroads in China, kicking off the global Korean Wave (hallyu) of exported cultural soft power that continues to the present day. At some point between Seo Taiji’s debut and H.O.T.’s rise, overseas listeners began to popularize the umbrella term used to this day: K-pop.

With their debut, Seo Taiji and Boys upended the pre-existing power dynamic in South Korea, where broadcasters were the ultimate gatekeepers and songwriters rarely veered away from making music that would fit the norms of the day. For a brief period, the power shifted to the artists, who were incentivized to experiment with different Western genres and build new communities. But as the newly established Big Three companies—SM, YG, and Park Jin-young’s JYP Entertainment—began to dominate the market, new standards emerged. Instead of government censors or disdainful television moguls, the industry became beholden to music conglomerates, powered by trainee pipelines so stringent, they make Berry Gordy look tame by comparison.

The entirety of K-pop owes its existence to Seo Taiji, but the long tail of his influence can be felt most directly in the global force that is BTS. In 2017, during a massive 25th-anniversary concert in Korea, Seo—the de facto “president of culture”—named the group his unofficial successors. Their music draws from myriad influences, with songs that critique Korean society, while individual members like the multifaceted songwriter/producer SUGA take after the DIY auteur archetype established by Seo. His super-fans, the “Seo Taiji Generation,” fought government censorship on behalf of their idol; today, the BTS ARMY and other K-pop fandoms have proven themselves a force to be reckoned with. At his peak, Seo’s influence was largely limited to Korea. BTS are on the world stage, reaching previously unthinkable heights. They are his legacy.

After Seo decamped to America at 23, he became just another face in the crowd. It was a needed change of pace for the notoriously private superstar, and it allowed him to write songs for what would become his first solo LP: a true rock album, a return to his roots. When Seo finally went back to Korea in 2000 to resurrect his career in earnest, his people were there waiting for him—literally. Over a thousand fans mobbed the terminal at Gimpo International Airport, eager to welcome their hero home. They sang his songs and held up signs; one of them read, “We Grew Up a Lot, Didn’t We?” The origin of K-pop is a tale of global capitalism and cultural cross-pollination through American imperialism, but it’s also the story of a flunkie metalhead who was told for years he’d amount to nothing, and then reshaped the course of music history.

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