Monday, August 24, 2009

CLON

A couple of videos by CLON, a Korean duo of the 90s. They were especially famous for their dancing, and their career came to a screeching halt when one of them, Kang Won Rae, was paralyzed in a motorcycle accident. This much I'd learned from Korean Pop: Riding the Wave (Global Orient, 2006), edited by Keith Howard. According to a commenter on "Come to Me", after years of therapy he returned to make a fifth album, Victory, with his partner Koo Jun Yup, which included a song for a project which "highlighted the struggle for disabled rights in South Korea. For both of the videos and for the limited live performances done for the album, Gu and Gang developed dance routines incorporating wheelchairs." If I find the videos, I'll add them to this post. But "Come to Me" really impressed me -- the female lead singer is magnificent -- as well as filling me with nostalgia for the days when I loved to dance.





The articles in Korean Pop introduced me to a number of Korean pop acts I hadn't heard of before, and I'll be writing about them in the near future.

P.S. I haven't found the wheelchair routines yet, but I did stumble on this TV performance by Ku Yun Jup of Clon and Rain, the young Korean singer/dancer who's been trying to break through to a US audience. The song is called "Nan," Korean for "I." Rain seems abstracted, and Ku exudes an authority and confidence that's very, um, appealing. Notice the double-headed male symbol in the Clon logo, though; I guess it expresses their testosterone-pumped dancing pretty well, but still.