Until quite recently, there was tangible evidence for Koreans that working hard would bring results – if not for you then for your children. Put differently, grunge was not aspirational. Which in the early 90s was a sizeable chunk of people.īut not in Korea.

The music was dark, about despair rather than proclamations, and cynical in the way only someone who’d had their heart broken by their own expectations could appreciate. The ripped jeans and second-hand flannel drew their aesthetic from the Salvation Army shops of the northwest where Kurt Cobain used to shop. The end of the USSR and the end of history, the tightening vice of neoliberalism, and the sense that right here, right now was not the best place to be after all meant that pop music needed to channel a new authenticity. There was bound to be a reaction the early 90s recession only quickened it.

Bombast, melodrama and balls-to-the-walls excess only made sense in an environment of greed and aspirational individualism. The bloated spandexed, sneering, over-coiffed corpse of late-80s corporate rock keeled over and died of its own accord. Grunge music did not have to kill off hair metal in the U.S. He’s excellent at what he does, and that’s enough. It’s not creative, but that quality isn’t prized in Korean business, either in the tech or music industries. Singer Miljenko Matijevic is incredibly proficient at hitting the high notes. It gives “Courageous Korean Gymnast Screams For 10 Minutes” a ring of truth:Īs an example of the power ballad genre, She’s Gone is very good. But this is not a deformity my girlfriend explained that in Korea it represents the will to achieve. When I first saw this photo I was a little repulsed. She worked as a principal dancer at the Stuttgart ballet and is widely admired for her strength, agility and beauty:īut in Korea, the most popular photo of Kang is not of her dancing.

The concept of an innate talent exists but is mediated by effort: the understanding that if you try – I mean really hard, hours of daily practice for years at a time – you can succeed.įor example, consider ballerina Kang Sue-jin, a master of her field. Steelheart has eclipsed even the much more lovable Anvil as being – metaphorically at least – ‘big in Japan’ (I can’t find any Japanese covers.) Since nobody seems to have an explanation, here’s mine. If you don’t like it, don’t listen to it, as the pundits of youtube say – and I don’t.īut a lot of people in Korea do, and not just here. Steelheart is a second-string faux glam band with a power ballad, identical to any other band of the era, churned out as they were according to the diktats of record company executives (as Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snyder explains.) I hated this music in the 80s and I hate it now: it’s formulaic, non-creative garbage. My question – to which I’ve been unable to get a satisfactory answer – is why.

And it’s become a noraebang (karaoke) standard. Comedians make fun of She’s Gone because everybody knows it. In Korea, my girlfriend remembers hearing them constantly growing up in the 90s. Steelheart – and She’s Gone in particular – remain massively popular. Steelheart are an also-ran, overshadowed by Guns n Roses and Motley Crue and then eclipsed when grunge music, with its air of authentic working class desperation, forced most hair metallers into a long over-due rest.īut not in Asia. It’s bog-standard, paint-by-numbers 1990 hair metal. Or, for those with delicate ears or who hold an aversion to cheese, this is Steelheart, singing their hit She’s Gone. Listen to this as you read and this post will make a lot more sense.

Steelheart she gone lyrics