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Since its humble beginnings about three decades ago, South Korea’s national hip hop scene (gukhip) has grown to a formidable industry that runs the gamut from cutting-edge underground artists to mainstream K-pop idol rappers. In recent years, the cable TV audition programme Show Me the Money (SMTM) has become the gukhip industry’s ultimate gatekeeper as many aspiring hip hop artists increasingly depend on making it on the show to advance their careers. In this article, we focus on XXX, an underground hip hop duo who bucks this commercial trend of gukhip in both sound and message. Their noise-filled beats and shifting grooves echo the avant garde aesthetics and confrontational attitudes of industrial music, and their words are harshly critical of the money-driven gukhip culture as represented by SMTM. We provide a musicological analysis of XXX’s own version of industrial hip hop and examine what makes their “outsider” status sustainable vis-à-vis the gukhip industry.

The rise of Asian ODA donors - Japan, South Korea, China - and their divergence from traditional western donors put forward the question if a distinct Asian-style development cooperation is in the making. In this paper, we attempt to characterize the emergent Asian-style ODA based on donors’ own development experiences and assess its effectiveness in terms of fostering “true” ownership of development partners. One particular case, South Korea’s Knowledge Sharing Program to Vietnam, will illuminate the theoretical issues and practical challenges of the Asian-style ODA, which tends to avoid “political interference” while trying to increase capacities of development partners.

Some ten years ago, a group of graduate students in South Korea started reading ‘canons’ of popular music studies, such as those by Simon Frith, Iain Chambers, Keith Negus, Tony Mitchell, and Roy Shuker, among others. No formal discipline, be it music, communication, sociology or economics, embraced the group with open arms. Its members did not even know of the existence of IASPM until a few years later. Being ‘local’ without global connection, at the margins of academia in the periphery of Anglo-American cultural/intellectual centres, was an uneasy position to say the least.

This chapter examines the dynamic interplay between foreign aid management and capacity development of South Korea (hereinafter referred to as “Korea”) from 1945 to 1975. After its liberation from Japanese rule in 1945, Korea suffered from poverty, war, and underdevelopment during the 1950s. However, in a decade, the Korean government successfully implemented a series of long-term national development plans.1 These were national initiatives that required a high level of state capacity. As Rodriguez (2011: 28) put it, creating effective institutions and promoting bureaucratic efficiency were keys to the successful development. At the core of the Korean developmental state was the highly capable economic bureaucracy, with the Economic Planning Board (EPB) at the helm. The EPB had two critical functions — planning and budgeting — that effectively put it in charge of coordinating the work of different government ministries.

It has become almost a cliche within the global ODA (Official Development Assistance) community to stress South Korea’s unique position as a former aid recipient turned into an emerging donor. South Korea received foreign aid of nearly USD 13 billion over the latter half of the 20th century. In 2010 alone, however, it provided to the developing world an amount nominally equal to what it had received (although much smaller in real terms), and plans to increase its annual ODA to USD 30 billion by 2015. Not surprisingly, many developing countries show a keen interest in how South Korea achieved such a feat, and the South Korean government is eager to promote its past development experience as the distinctive strength of the “Korean ODA model.”