In Korea, Breaking & Beef, Hip-Hop & Free Trade

In the Ibis Hotel in Suwon, a suburb just south of Seoul, the lobby is alive with movement til the early hours of the morning.

Hundreds of b-boys and b-girls from hip-hop's global underground of floor-rockers are here. They are sleepless from hours of travel from Cape Town, South Africa, or Hamburg, Germany, and dozens of other destinations around the world, but they're afire with ideas and moves to share, classic battles to recount and re-enact. They've come to compete in one of the world's biggest breaking competitions, R16, and the energy is luminescent.

Earlier this evening, at an orientation, the hotel ballroom filled nearly to capacity. One of the organizers, Queens native Charlie Shin, ran down a roll call of the countries represented--"Brazil, Netherlands, Israel, China, U.S., France, Korea..." Legendary hip-hop photographers Joe Conzo and Jamel Shabazz exhorted the b-boys and b-girls in the room to get up on stage, and the pictures they snapped were stunning: a beautiful multiculti crowd lifted straight out of an Obama speech, with t-shirts emblazoned with crew names, hot-colored sneakers, and super-mugsy attitude added on for effect.

Shin and representatives from the Korean Tourism Organization had asked the b-boys to respect each others' space on the stage in the upcoming battles, but perhaps they needn't have bothered. There was a lot of respect in that room already.

That afternoon, in the streets of Seoul, there had been a lot of talk about beef.

In a stunning reversal, the Korean government announced it was lifting its ban on U.S. beef. By rush hour, tens of thousands of ordinary Koreans had poured into the streets in protest--farmers, office-workers, mothers rolling their children in strollers. They brought candles and signs that signalled their fears about Mad Cow Disease.

Department stores gave out thousands of bowls of beef soup to protestors. Business-suited demonstrators appeared at Korea's McDonald's headquarters. Labor unions promised to put up blockades at dozens of beef distribution warehouses to peacefully stop the U.S. beef from being sent into the country. News reports made much of the fact that government officials appeared apologetic and ashamed about the decision.

Nine thousand riot police--many of them young men serving mandatory military service--were deployed in Seoul to contain the protests. The American contingent here for R16 watched as police arrested hundreds of demonstrators, and then later in amazement as tens of thousands of people raised their candles in a quiet, powerful show of solidarity.

Why all the fuss over beef? To many ordinary Koreans, the government's reversal is a demonstration of the way the U.S. version of "free trade" has hurt their country.

Fears of Mad Cow Disease focus on the health of American imports, but they point to a greater Korean anguish over the pressures to accept expensive American imports, the destruction of local livestock farming, and displacement of Korean jobs at a moment when the national economy has been in a downward spiral.

Just yesterday the Korean government was forced to back up its currency to prevent further investment flight. President Lee Myung-bak, a conservative in the George W. Bush mold, has seen plunging approval ratings over his management of trade and the economy.

Rallies are expected to spread across the country today, and should continue to pose serious problems for President Lee and his right-wing party, the Grand National Party.

Here at R16, Americans are a decided minority, but there's no angst about that. There's none of the we-invented-it-so-bow-down attitude about hip-hop that Bush and his supporters in both the Democratic and Republican parties seem to take about democracy and capitalism.

Quite the opposite. Heads are here to compete intensely on the floor and leave with respect, returning to their homes with the task of continuing to build a culture that creates possibility rather than displacement.

Would that leaders were wise enough to follow their people.

Originally posted at Vibe.com

Jeff Chang blogs regularly at Vibe.com, Cantstopwontstop.com, and the Huffington Post. He is the author of Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of The Hip-Hop Generation and editor of Total Chaos: The Art & Aesthetics of Hip-Hop.

Comments

[Chavez08]

It's a mistake to align the staus-quo "Free Trade" culture with America or the "West". Those who propogate this global slavery have nothing to do with what this nation was founded on.

"Free Traders" could give a rats-ass about America and they are dissolving borders not only here but world wide to create a global slave-labor resource pool. They are merely bankers who create chaos, war and poverty from their million dollar jets, yachts, fortresses and the U.S. Constitution is a thorn in their side while they're trying to complete their Global Serfdom.

The treaturous criminals who benefit for "Free Trade", like those they have the audacity to call "terrorists", have no grographical base. They move around making it harder to prosecute them for the global terrorism, treason, crimes against humanity that is destroying our planet and turning the U.S. into a 3rd World Country. The East and the West need to work together to end this Corporate sponsored slavery and genocide.

The Keynes model worked, we the paeople should demand that the next president through away this Friedman-ite abomination and go back to the New Deal..

[mulegino]

Good point. And Hip Hop, break dancing and everything rotten about the "American" lumpen culture are additional facilitators of the dumbing down of populations to levels where they can be manipulated like cattle and morphed into a gigantic global garbage dump of slave labor and cannon fodder.

[walk0nwalls]

No. No. and No.

Alright, I agree that the capitalists need to be stopped. I agree that this universal form of enslavement needs to end. But I'd best not hear anything about how Hip-hop and breakdancing are rotten permutations of Americanism.

More than anything Hip-hop and breakdancing have evolved internationally as a reaction to the very culture you speak of. As a breaking away with the modern capitalist culture, a representation of the very revolution you espouse. You might not like it, but Hip-hop and breakdancing more than anything has been a boon to the world in the way that jazz was in the 40s.

Hip-hop's permanent status as a countercultural institution, its near-permanent alignment with a reaction against corporate rationality and conservatism is part of what makes it one of the best international movements of the past few decades. You might not like it, but it remains a now-international art form that to people all across the globe represents a reaction to corporate conservatism, a reaction to systems that rob people of their wealth and agency, and a reaction to the distance between their labor and its effects. Hip-hop is what it is. Hip-hop has been the reaction, and Hip-hop will continue - not as you argue a representation of a burgeoning corporate culture - as a functioning reaction against corporatism, financial rationalism, and all the modern world represents.

And you don't stop.

[JoeSun]

American Beef is cheaper than Korean Beef. Your article is mistaken.

[c1ee]

That's not what he said.

[JoeSun]

Yes it is. He said that there was anguish in Korea to accept expensive American exports...what utter nonsense. Koreans are not pressured to accept expensive American goods. In fact, its just the opposite.

Generally, American goods cost less than Korean goods in Korea. Starbucks costs more, but that is because Koreans like Starbucks. Other products, like American beef, rice, and autos take far less out of the average Korean consumer's pocketbook than comparable Korean goods.

Last year, protestors ran amok raging against American beef. Not because American was expensive, but because it was 1/4 the cost of Korean beef. AS you can guess, most of the protestors were farmers angry at being forced to lower their prices and compete.

The FTA is a boon to the Korean consumer.