Stuart Heritage is the co-founder and editor of hecklerspray.com, the entertainment news channel that strides the globe like a pissed off dinosaur.

Korean hip hop is a lot like American hip hop, only with far less references to guns and bitches. Actually, that might be a lie. I can’t really speak Korean very well. What sticks out about these songs is the rhythm of the flow. And the bits where they break into English to say things like “Everybody in the house clap your hands.” But for anyone with an open enough mind, these songs can provide more than a slight distraction.

DJ DOC - Street Life

This was all over Korea last year. DJ DOC started off as a K-Pop group, but drifted into hip hop. This song samples a disco tune, so it’s as cheesy as you’d probably expect it to be. But what’s better - cheesy pop that you don’t understand or cheesy pop that you do? At least this bunch aren’t rocking the traditional boyband “Higher/fire/desire” rhyming scheme.

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Dynamic Duo - Excuse Me

Formerly of Korean group CB Mass, Choiza and Gaeko broke away to form Dynamic Duo in 2004. Their big hit was ‘Ring My Bell’, but we’ve done the disco knock-off already, so you can have this. ‘Excuse Me’ isn’t as frantic as the DOC track, it’s based around some Jackson 5-style piano. Lyrically, who knows? I think the chorus is quite polite, and I made out the Korean word for ‘ass’ somewhere in there, as well as a reference to the ‘rock, paper, scissors’ game.

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Drunken Tiger - Omji Songarak

Drunken Tiger are the veterans of Korean hip hop, and this is the closest thing to traditional fare here. It’s easy to dismiss a group who claim to be so groundbreaking when they’ve only been around for six years, but Drunken Tiger genuinely did help liberalise Korean culture. This song, if you can get over all the references to ‘the hood’ (Which hood is that, anyway? The Apgujeong hood?), is something to do with thumbs.

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