SAN E: BAD YEAR

Another research I could take from Korean hiphop is the use of puns and homonyms in some tracks. Particularly, I found a song by rapper SAN E 'BAD YEAR'- the track at first glance can be interpreted as a track about a relationship breakup however reading between the lines the song is actually about the recent political scandal that happened it South Korea. It may be seen as a way of rappers to tone down but on the other hand it can also show their level of creativity of using homophones to mean other things.

*Ex-President Park Gun Hye was found to be committing political corruption and abuse of power in 2016 leading to Park to step down of her position as President.

The track title itself is a pun. Bad Year or 나쁜X in Korean can mean two different things 'X' being 년 (nyeon) and with 'nyeon' meaning 'year' or 'bitch', regarding the bad year the country suffered and the ex-president.

The track is also packed with puns all throughout, and I've found a website that dissected the track entirely *https://hiphopkr.com/translated_lyrics/interpretation-san-e-bad-year/

MAIN POINTS

• 하…야…, 내가 이러려고 / 믿었나 널-  (1:39)
  Sigh … hey …, did I trust you / for this? 

(First two syllables (하야 'haya') when put together mean resignation and the second part is likely to be a proxy of Park's public apology.)

• 병신년아 빨리 끝나 제발 - (2:00)
  Year of the Fire Monkey, please be over already

(2016 is year of the fire monkey according to the Chinese Zodiac system is is pronounced as 'byeongshin nyeon(병신년) which can literally mean 'dumbass bitch').

There's so much more on the article but I've picked these out as it seemed the most significant. What I want to take away from this research is the use of homophones in order to puns. I don't really specially wanna focus on the political part as I think it would make my idea too complicated. Therefore, I just want to take the most important part and the pat that I was originally interested and fascinated about which I can then use to think of design ideas from because from previous modules I found that I took an idea put tried to put as much in it making it really complex while I could just look at it from a wider view or take away the most important base that is involved.