I’ve been wracking my brains, trying to find a way to incorporate kpop into this blog post that’s supposed to link everyday life to my writing, and I’ve finally found something:

I am obsessed (if anyone reading this blog doesn’t know this they soon will) with a very articulate and coincidentally very attractive Korean rapper named Rap Monster, but I will refer to him by his given name: Namjoon. I was never attracted to rap music until three years ago, when I first heard Namjoon growling about societal pressures in South Korea, and the strain that students are under from age six onwards in order to get into a good school. All of the rap music I’d ever heard was demeaning towards women, and even though it took reading translations of his rap to understand what Namjoon was speaking about—since I unfortunately cannot speak Korean (yet)—I instantly connected with him and his message. It didn’t matter that most of his raps were in Korean, it didn’t matter that he was incredibly attractive, what mattered was that I felt drawn to him, and his art made me want to create art.

I really wish that I could tell him in person how much he has influenced my art, how before I knew about him, I avoided talking about societal issues like they were the black plague. As a matter of fact, I’m meeting him tomorrow, in concert, but the signing of an autograph isn’t enough time to tell him everything I want to say, so I’ll just have to keep writing to him, and echoing back his art with mine.

Davis Dubose-Marler, class of 2017