When foreign bars go wrong...

Tonight is the beginning of Chuseok, which for the layman is the Korean equivalent of Thanksgiving where everyone visits their hometown to pay tribute to their ancestors, and for the beginning of the four-day weekend I decided to join a few teachers in hitting up Soul Train, one of the foreigner bars in the Pusan National University district. Now there's a part of me that's already decided that this place sucks; in the four times that I've been, only once did I feel that GI's hadn't swarmed there, and while I do my best to be a good American and keep my "Support Our Troops" ribbons in mind, most of the time I'm really turned off by the way military folks act. We've been through this, and if it makes me a piece of shit so be it.

Anyways, tonight, I made a bold move and made a request; Korea's anti-American enough where I was confident that they would have one (if not both) of the Kanye West records, and so with only the slightest degree of confidence did I request either "Slow Jamz" or "School Spirit" off of the College Dropout album; either song would get the dancefloor moving far more than the shit they were playing previously.

(Sidenote: Koreans seem to love Will Smith, and there's no awareness of just how ridiculous his musical career is at this point in the United States; this comes across as both pure and retarded)

When you request a song off of College Dropout, I think you go into it praying to God they don't play "Through the Wire", since that technically is the big single off of the album. Still, any sane DJ would understand that a song about getting your face fucked up in a car accident isn't exactly a dancefloor smash, and I guess I just hoped that the DJs here would trust me by my pasty skin and Western demeanor. I decided to rest against the pool table and wait out my request; Punjabi MC came on during this time, and at that point, I had nothing but faith in the DJ... surely he understood the power of "Slow Jamz".

Fuck that. The moment I heard Chaka Khan's chipmunk voice delivering the opening bars of "Through the Wire", I immediately envisioned the dance floor clearing out, people throwing their hands up in frustration, openly bitching about the lack of "Gettin' Jiggy with It". And everything happened almost as planned. After the second chorus, when Kanye Killa delivered a long diatribe about just how fucked up his face was, the DJ cut it short and segued into the Red Hot Chili Pepper's "Otherside"; to put it bluntly, it felt like my dick was ripped off. The foreigners who were there went crazy, and I quickly exited the dance floor to find the beer that I had set down. Maybe DJs throughout the world just don't understand just how much of a buzzkill "Through the Wire" is... any song that suggests that the MC looks like Tom Cruise in "Vanilla Sky" or Emmett Till just isn't going to work well for the crowd, and I don't see how the person in charge of the floor wouldn't understand that. Good single? Sure, it set the Kanye mythology into place, but if I want to dance, I want to hear something else off of the album.

Anyways, I didn't lambaste the DJ or anything... I didn't have the heart. Still, any possibility that I would do flying splits off of the wall was exhausted at that point, and now I'm here writing this post to you. I wish you all well, and Merry Chuseok.