ABSTRACT
I cull the first passage above from 'God Save the Queen' by The Sex Pistols, one of the world's most famous punk rock songs. A venomous attack on royalty and the government, the song appeared in 1977, the Queen's Jubilee Year, and topped British singles charts despite being banned by the BBC. The snarled lyrics of its unsettlingly cathartic climax ('no future for you, no future for me') captured for many the economic despair of a generation and heralded the arrival of punk, a confrontational musical and social movement whose iconoclastic followers rebelled against the institutions of British society.ii In the last few years a punk rock scene has emerged in South Korea (henceforth Korea) as well, but to little fanfare. A smattering of clubs clustered for the most part in Seoul's fashionable Hongik district feature punk bands who play to a small but devoted following, composed predominantly of high school students. Unlike England in the late 1970s, Korea's economic prospects had (until the collapse of the wōn in late 1997) grown progressively brighter through the 1990s; moreover, democracy has taken an ever firmer foothold in the nation. The second passage comes from 'Taehanmin'guk Punk Kid' ('Republic of Korea Punk Kid'), a song that opens the first CD by 18Cruk, one of Korea s most successful punk bands to date.iii While the lyrics speak of an alienation from society at large similar to that in 'God Save the Queen', they also demonstrate a startling transformation, as the Sex Pistols' bitter denunciation of England yields to a firm pride in Korean identity.
