11/01/2020 Cultural Post #3

[Jiwon Kang]

For my third cultural post, I listened to and watched a Korean rap song on YouTube. The name of the song is Eung Freestyle. The song is very popular, and I have seen it in a couple of advertisements and in a couple of videos in the past. There are many prominent Korean rappers in the video such as Rich Brian and Sik-K. They all freestyle together into one beat. I listened to it multiple times to fully understand the lyrics. There were a lot of bad words that I didn’t recognize until I actually searched up the lyrics. But I think it was a great learning experience for me because of the fast-paced beat. Similar to many other Korean songs I have listened to in the past, there are many English words being thrown around every few seconds. I think this is because there are no words in Korean for that specific English word. There were also many cognates that I recognized that they broke up into multiple syllables. For example, one of the rappers says, “Stephen Curry.” In English, we say this word with four syllables, but in the video, the rapper pronounces this with five syllables. This is because there is no word in Korean that pronounces the letters “Ste.” Because of this, in order to say the word in the Korean way, you must say “S-te-phen” instead of “ste-phen.” I thought this was really interesting to learn about because this concept can be applied to many different languages. I think that this song was very cool to listen to. It is the equivalent genre of American hip hop and rap, something that I love to listen to. The name of the song is called Eung freestyle and the word Eung means “yes” in Korean. I thought that the freestyle was really well written, and the words flowed really well. It was really cool to see how the rappers incorporated English words into their verses and the flow still sounded perfect. Similar to the word Stephen Curry, there were many other English words that they pronounced with extra syllables to pronounce it in Korean. Overall, this rap really helped with my listening and a speaking portion of Korean because I had to search up the lyrics and read/understand the words. I am very amazed again by how they incorporate English into the songs with Korean and still make it sound really cool and smooth. I know that I could never do that. It is interesting to think how weird it would be if American rappers said one or two words in Korean out of the blue. In Korean rap culture, there are many references to American culture and history but never the other way around. I think this is due to the history of how Korea became a democratic country because of the United States and I think it is fascinating to see how American culture has influenced and been incorporated into Korean rap culture.