The activist tradition is necessarily strong in South Korea, and subversive music has always naturally flowed out of the various political movements that have rocked the Asian nation for decades. However, few South Korean bands have tackled political commentary quite like Bamseom Pirates, who spent years protesting both South and North Korea’s societies and governments through aggressively satirical grindcore, and became a frequent presence at protests during their career. And, as a new documentary, Bamseom Pirates Seoul Inferno, shows, the now-defunct duo eventually found themselves embroiled in the very political turmoil that their songs seethed against.
The Pirates raged their way through their career by taking on the inequality they saw around them through their outlandish songs and performances, and provided a soundtrack to many anti-government demonstrations. But in 2012, the Pirates’ producer, Park Junggeun, was arrested for allegedly supporting North Korea after mockingly tweeting the country’s propaganda—and their music ended up being used as evidence in the case against Park’s alleged sympathies. The band has attributed their break up to “creative differences,” but the trial undoubtedly added extra pressure during a tense time.
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“When their album was submitted for evidence on Park’s trial, the prosecutor asked if the album had ever been violated for security law violations,” Bamseom Pirates Seoul Inferno director Jung Yoonsuk told me, referring to South Korea’s ambiguous National Security Laws. “I couldn’t help but laugh at that, because it felt like the prosecutor himself wasn’t even sure if the album was violating the laws or not.”
Jung’s documentary, which premiered stateside at the New York Asian Film Fest earlier this month, begins with a scene of imminent destruction. The two men, vocalist and bassist Jang Sunggun and drummer Kwon Yongman, look through a condemned building for discarded objects they can smash up during their performance that night; the venue is the very same building, slated to be demolished the next day. The unconventional band started in the mid 2000s, and by the early 2010s had become a mainstay of many South Korean protests, hyping up everyone from workers demanding better working conditions to students demanding cheaper, public higher education.
The film, part music doc and part censure of South Korean society, shows the pair leading student protesters fighting against Seoul National University’s planned privatization and verbalizing the demands of Jeju Island locals objecting to the construction of the Jeju Civilian-Military Complex Port being built without respecting the local population or natural environment. With their unhinged music—the pair was known for eccentricities like ending shows with silent encores, second-long micro-songs, and Jang’s penchant for performing in a helmet that he says proclaims “kill all communists”—the Pirates became the inadvertent voice of various protest movements solely by being some of the ones to sing—or scream—about what was wrong.
K-pop is the nation’s most popular South Korean musical export; while indie music has a major following in Korea, Bamseom Pirates didn’t truly fit into that scene. They were too angry, too loud, and too dangerous for all but the most disgruntled members of Korean society to understand and embrace. Economic and social inequality, corrupt and overly empowered politicians, and regularly censored media were all fair play for Bamseom Pirates’ raging lyrics, as was ridiculing North Korea, often through slogans of the Communist state. (Their last album was named Kim Jong Il Is Car Sex.)
“Bamseom Pirates have fans from both the liberal and conservative sides of society. Because they talk about a lot of societal issues, the liberal leaning people like them but because they ridicule North Korea, the conservative side is like ‘Oh, you’re one of us!’” said Jung.
A stone’s throw away from China and even closer to North Korea—which whom it’s technically still at war—South Korea’s burgeoning democracy has seen its fair share of both dictators and pro-democracy movements, many of whom have emphasized military security over personal freedoms. The country’s history of protests surged in the late 80s after decades of authoritarianism, resulting in South Korea’s current democratic parliamentary system; this year saw hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Koreans take to the streets to protest the now-imprisoned former president, Park Geun Hye.
But neither Kwon nor Jang particularly care about taking sides on the political spectrum: anger and bafflement towards the state of politics and socioeconomics in South Korea fueled their creativity. “If South Korea is piss, North Korea is shit,” Kwon tells the camera at one point. He also admits to knowing very little about North Korea, despite using the Hermit Kingdom’s propaganda as inspiration. The Pirates let their vehemence shine through in their songs to depict the tumultuous feelings of a generation stuck between modernity and the need for security in a country that’s balanced precariously on the brink of war for over 60 years.
The cinematic exploration of Bamseom Pirates’ musical ethos is almost comical in the first half of Seoul Inferno, with the band’s lyrics splashed across the screen in rainbow arrays, but come the second half, the freedom of expression and irony that fueled the Pirates’ career was placed on trial. The North Korean propaganda that Park mockingly tweeted out brought down the full force of South Korean nationalistic legal proceedings in 2012. Considered “acts that benefit the enemy” under the ambiguousness of the National Security Law, the tweets emulating and mocking North Korea’s verbiage and imagery landed Park on the road to prison.
Park’s arrest spurred the filmmaker and band alike to reflect on the politics of Bamseom Pirates. They brought their album as evidence against Park’s alleged North Korean alliances in an attempt to prove that the Bamseom Pirates’ and their associates were essentially jokesters saying whatever they could to show what they perceived as the farcical nature of South Korea and North Korea. It didn’t work, and Park was sentenced to 10 months in jail, before the sentence was suspended on his promise that he wouldn’t do it again.
The band and Park believe there was no correlation between Park’s trial. “He got caught because he was being stupid on Twitter!” said Kwon, and Park agreed with the statement.
“Bringing all this evidence into light to prove that I wasn’t serious in a sense, I felt was contradictory and dehumanizing at the same time,” said Park. “It was just because of Twitter.” Jung is less sure, and described Park as a stand-in for the Pirates’ nonconformist music and political views of the South Korean outsider being arrested.
Throughout their career, and the documentary, the Pirates’ had insisted that their noise was beyond party politics or state ideologies. Independents through and through, defining their political identity was meaningless; they’re angry musicians, nothing more, nothing less. But the court wasn’t willing to hear that, and forced the subversive Kwon to lay out his political beliefs. Jung captured a series of moments where Kwon was forced to reveal his political leanings in light of the court case, saying that his views most closely matched the now-inactive Progressive Party, a bit-player in South Korean politics promoting democratic socialism. “I feel like it’s a real problem that people who are in between the spectrum are being oppressed because they’re not pledging allegiance to some political side,” said Jung.
Despite these interrogations and the trial itself, Bamseom Pirates’ insist they were never subjugated to outright silencing. South Korea’s heavily publicized blacklist of artists, many of whom had supported now President Moon during his 2012 presidential campaign, never included the band or their associates, since their sonic mayhem never chose a side. “We’re just kind of in between,” said Kwon. “Criticizing this when it needs to be criticized, and that when it needs to be criticized.”
Seoul Inferno suffers from being too long and at times extremely didactic, and it ends a bit flat, leaving viewers with little more than passing nods to Park’s imprisonment and the band’s disbandment. But its spotlight on the protest music of Bamseom Pirates and the fragile state of independent thought and freedom of expression South Korea is invaluable, shedding light on how civil rights and social welfare fall by the wayside as the Korean Peninsula continues to be divided by ideology and politics.
Tamar Herman is speaking up on Twitter.
