Anarchy in the S.K.

Seoul National University students are a reserved bunch of people, on average. No one shuffles to class in pajamas and a t-shirt like they might at GW, no couple dares to do more than hold hands in public, and the chic daily dress code leaves me looking like a country bumpkin. So when I heard that the music department was putting on a rock concert, I had to see exactly how some of the most tightly wound students I've ever met manage to cut loose.


I went to the concert this past Friday night with some other international students and a Korean friend. From the stares we got as we entered the hall, I don't think many foreigners come to the shows.

The music department at SNU, like every other department of the university, attracts some of the most talented young people in the country. Since the band deserved a screaming crowd, my friends and I had to oblige, even if the rest of the students there seemed to have a different way of enjoying rock concerts.


Picture half a dozen foreign students yelling their heads off to covers of Fall Out Boy, the Vines, and "Myeongdong Calling" (rather than London, Myeongdong is a district in Seoul) as well as a bunch of homegrown rock songs, (don't know if they were covers or the band's creation). The rest of the audience gave us a wide berth, creating a ten foot buffer zone between the rest of the SNU students and the crazy foreigners.

The guy in the black shirt just above has to get a lot of credit for getting us excited, he was a drummer for a different band who just couldn't stop jumping around. He and a friend seemed ecstatic that there were exchange students there who seemed to love the music as much as they did.The bassist works in the international sutdent office, I barely recognized her out from behind a desk and up on stage. The biggest surprise was the singers for the two bands that played that night, two guys about my age who acted as though the audience was thousands, not a few dozen. In between writhing on the floor during solos and screaming out a pretty good Bon Jovi impersonation, they managed to jump down from the stage and dance with us.

It was great to see that Korean students have the same love of live music and personal expression that exists on my home campus. I have to say that seeing such a different side of the student body reassured me that I wasn't studying with the pressurized human automatons that a lot of stories at SNU had me believe.

The fact that many songs were in English really threw me for a loop. There were some other international students and many SNU native students there who can understand English, but I was the only native speaker there. Here I was, five thousand miles from home, listening to the same songs I used to play on my ipod on the way to high school.

I'm sure the SNU student band isn't the only one of its kind in the country. Somewhere out there are other bands who belt out solos of 80s glam rock to an audience that may not even understand what they are saying, but who still love the songs.

(photos courtesy of a friend of mine, Iris Youh)