[Article] Seo Taiji and Kim Hyun Joong : Parallel Lives?

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What do these two men have in common ? Born fourteen years part and yet the life of one seems to mirror the life of the other . They are both musician and dropped from school to follow music ,their passion . Both have risen to become prominent in the field they have chosen and became influential in their own time .

Kim Hyun Joong have long acknowledged his role model was Seo Taijii . Kim Hyun Joong was only five years old at the time Seo Taiji had formed his dance group Seo Taiji and the Boys. That was after he had joined several amateur rock bands ,took the stage name Seo Taiji and became part of Sinawe, a band whose forte is metal . The first single of the Seo Taiji and the Boys, Nan Arayo, became number one in the music chart for 17 weeks -a record said to have remained unbroken up to this time .

By the time Kim Hyun Joong was ten years old,Seo Taiji had become a controversial musician with several albums heavily into heavy metal and rock to his credit, subjected to some sort of censorship due to the message deemed not approprite for the young . However, it only made him more popular, thus ended the censorship. He had also retired temporarily due to pressure given him by his work .


When Seo Taiji returned from his temporary hiatus it was a return to rock music , he came back a solo artist , then released an album which sold more than a million copies reportedly even without promotion in South Korea .At the impressionistic age of twelve KIm Hyun Joong might have already heard of Seo Taiji’s forte who by this time had solidified his reign in the heavy metal ,nu metal as well as alternative rock.

Five years before Kim Hyun joong together with the members of SS501 made his official entry to Korean Entertainment in 2000, Seo Taiji who left the country for the United States came back before thousands of fans in the airport . He had also released the Ultramania and Internet Wars albums who were the biggest hits said to have affected boybands in causing their decline . He next founded the ETPFEST -the biggest rock music festival in South Korea. The rock festival was an annual gathering of of famous and popular boybands up to 2008 where the list of attendees include not only local participants but also from the United States and Japan .

For Kim Hyun Joong Seo Taiji was his inspiration . From him Hyun Joong must have thought he could find answers his young mind sought and followed his footsteps, pursued his love for music to the extent of also dropping from school. Like him Hyun Joong played bass , joined a boyband SS501 though did not organize it like Seo Taiji , but nevertheless played a responsible role in it as as its leader till 2010. In June of the same year after coming back from a Manila concert he went into solo activities and joined Key East,another talent management company. Hyun Joong was a rocker at heart but his former company DSP was said to have strongly discouraged him to pursue that direction. Like Seo Taiji’s group Hyun Joong and the SS501 released their albums and their active presence crowded the competing field of boybands likened to a zero-sum game . To be equals in the playing field , Hyun Joong and the SS501 went abroad for concerts and fanmeets .

Like his hero ,Hyun Joong aspired to be a solo artist , after coming to a conclusion that the SS501 has done already what it should . He wanted to challenge himself futher with other possibilities he knew he had in him. Both were consumed with music. Unlike Seo Taiji he ventured into acting and has feathers in his cap having starred in dramas Boys Over Flowers and Mischievous kiss ,both Korean remakes from Japanese mangas.

Hyun Joong had his wish become an undeniable reality as he has recently debuted as a solo performer.. He was able to sell 100,000 mini albums within two weeks and the number is still going up. He accomplished his promotions in 7 countries both for his music album and international beauty products as official endorser. He was invited to perform for a concert in China middle of September of 2011 .

Hyun Joong ‘s claim to fame extends beyond the music realm as he is a perennial commercial endorcer in products and services sold internationally . Explosive transformations in Social Media and internet technology has also changed the exposure of performing artists and their accessibility to their fans, patrons and sponsors. Image building as well as image destruction are its companions . Celebrities because they maintain high profiles are prone to both .

But Hyun Joong knows that the spotlight will not be on him forever .He returned to school to pursue administration of stage performance -in preparation for another area he will pursue in the very near future. Does the parallel development of their lives end here ? The road ahead is long and winding we don’t know for sure . What we are sure of is that the two are the Sirius, brightest of stars in their own rights .And they will remain jewels in our music sky for a long ,long time.


(thanks to Wikipedia and various internet sources for providing materials for this article )