I discovered hip-hop and rap music to be a significant topic of scholarly study from the analysis of music videos, lyrics, culture, and controversial themes. Conrad, Dixon, and Zhang (2009) conducted a content analysis on controversial rap themes, gender portrayals, and skin tone. The common themes of materialism, misogyny, violence, and love was adopted in my study, along with the methodology of content analysis (Conrad, Dixon, Zhang, 2009.) In 2010, the same authors also performed another content analysis of the female body as a theme in rap music videos (Conrad, Dixon, Zhang, 2010.) From their study, I added misogyny as a category to explore in Korean hip-hop and rap.

 

It was clear Korean music was a field of study scholars were interested in but I discovered the sub-field for Korean hip-hop and rap was limited. Most scholarly work set its eyes on Korean pop (K-Pop.) While most studies disregarded hip-hop, Oh’s 2014 study caught my interest as she drew from theories of performance and critical race studies to understand how K-Pop has appropriated hip-hop (Oh, 2014.) As an American researcher and hip-hop listener, I learned to be open-minded about the local context of Korean music and the racial hybridity as Oh argues. Oh also analyzed an artist from YG Entertainment, a major Korean record label that is featured in my study.

 

Globalization and cultural hybridization are concepts from Hare and Baker’s 2017 study on the authenticity of Korean hip-hop culture (2017.) I will reviewed globalization and cultural hybridization to explain how American hip-hop music and culture has traveled from the streets of New York to the towers of Seoul. Although their methods were not applicable to my research, a look into the commodification and authenticity of artists provided me with background on the genre. To also understand the background of Korean hip-hop, I had to understand the adoption and adaption of African American hip-hop by Koreans which began in the 1990s as a new wave of Koreans were exposed to Western culture and developed into a massive music industry  (Um, 2013.) Hare and Baker noted how most scholarly work have neglected Korean hip-hop and hope for further research on the genre, which I am excited to do (Baker, Hare, 2017.)