“Forever” by BewhY (비와이), Saturday, March 30, 2024

I talked about yesterday how Beenzino started my appreciation for Korean Hip-Hop. That appreciation turned into a love for the genre in 2016 when I joined a Korean gym, and it was mostly because of the winner of the fifth season of the massive reality program in South Korea called Show Me the Money, BewhY (비와이). By 2016, South Korea was fully in the middle of peak Hip-Hop culture. My students weren’t listening to Idol music but knew all the words to the rappers who were on Mnet’s Show Me the Money series. I found it kind of funny how the show censored Korean profanity while English f-bombs were allowed to be broadcasted! In the midst of the profanity storm that came with Korean Hip-Hop (no judgment intended), devout Christian BewhY’s rap career started.

I’M SO INDEPENDENT. Lee Byeong Yoon (이병윤) is a charismatic performer. Some music critics have compared his melodic rapping to Drake, but when I heard him, I’d never heard anything like it. Much of BewhY’s sound comes from famed Korean Hip-Hop producer Gray. BewhY’s songs don’t follow a particular song formula. Rather than verses and chorus, intros and outros, and bridges that connect most song hooks together, BewhY’s songs are more about ebbs and flows of energetic bursts. Tempos and tunes change in a way that I can only describe as a scene change in musical theater or opera. BewhY’s music uses funk bass and often takes jazz and classical samples. Often his songs lack a chorus, which makes his music seem like it wouldn’t work commercially, yet the hooks laid throughout the songs keep listeners guessing. And driving these interesting compositions is BewhY who raps with passion and conviction, almost desperation to make his point. To English speakers, though, the message filters through only in the selected English words.  

MY FAITH AND EGO HAVE DEFINITELY GOTTEN STRONGER. BewhY has been outspoken about his Christian faith from the beginning of his career. He told The Korea Times in 2016 that he does not use “slanderous” or “blasphemous” lyrics in his songs. Some of BewhY’s music has been described as Christian Hip-Hop, particularly songs like “David,” “Neo Christian Flow,” and “In Trinity,” just to name a few. Unlike the Christian music scene in America, though, BewhY’s lyrics use profanity and bear “explicit” labels. Last year I looked at Zior Park’s “Christian,” which seems to be a parody of Christian morality culture. And while BewhY seems to be far from hedonistic in his somewhat private life, the virtues he raps about in some of his songs, unironically, seem to represent a materialistic Christianity inline with Hip-Hop’s culture of showing off money. Songs about his Christian faith come across as arrogant, as if his faith declaration makes him a spiritual patriarch in the pluralistic country of South Korea. So my experience of listening to BewhY has changed. I can feel his passion; I love the music and it motivates me to feel a similar conviction the artist feels. But the underlying message, when I read the translations, makes me a little sad. It’s something that I don’t understand having read the words of Jesus and his message against the love of money. It’s something I don’t understand after reading about Peter and his betrayal. It’s something I don’t understand as a kid growing up equating self-esteem with arrogance and doing the work to see my self-worth. 

Read the Korean lyrics on Genius.

Read the English translation on musixmatch.