Tommy

ABOUT TOMMY

Born and raised in Seoul, Korea until moving to the United States for middle school, Tommy Song is a journalist, historian, and multi-instrumentalist. In 2015, Tommy was signed to the Korean music label Juice Media Korea. Below, you will see Tommy's rendition of one of the most famous Korean folk songs (which has countless variations), titled "Arirang." Tommy plays the Spam canjo, a fretted one stringed instrument made from a Spam can, while our mutual friend Xander Browne sings along. It is fitting that Tommy's performance features a beloved friend: Tommy told me in conversation that collaboration is one of the most important parts of his music-making, especially when it comes to expressing and sharing his own Koreanness while in diaspora.

Spam...has become a symbol not only of local pride and continuity, but [also] of the ability to appropriate the culture of the exploiter and to turn it into an artifact of local identity (Lewis 91).

If Satan had used

SPAM to tempt Eve, would we now

Live in Paradise?

--Anonymous


U.S. troops arrive,

And with them, M.R.E.'s. Blight

Spreads through Bosnia.

--Martin Booda

Downed U.S. pilot,

survival kit full of SPAM,

eats ants, sucks wool socks.

--R. Kaufman


While the appeal of Spam may be called into question, these poets show nonetheless show us the controversial lunchmeat accompanies U.S. military occupation.

If you're interested in reading more Spam haikus, better known as "Spam-kus," click here: http://web.mit.edu/jync/www/spam/archive.html

"Perhaps the most iconic Spam dish in South Korea is a spicy soup known as budae jjigae, or army stew. After the war, Koreans used U.S. Army rations — sometimes smuggled off military bases or donated by soldiers — to make the deep-red dish." (NPR).

Tommy ate Army Stew all throughout his childhood.



A Variety of Spam in a Korean Supermarket

photo taken from NPR


"War is probably the single most powerful instrument of dietary change in human experience" (Mintz qtd. in Curtis 64)


Spam has a deeply entrenched relationship with the American military, spanning decades and continents. The canning of meat for army use was perfected in the United States during the Civil War, and it was during that time that it came to be associated with working-class culture (Lewis 85). During World War II, the United States sent enormous amounts of Spam to allied troops abroad, thus “indelibly linking it to the American war effort” (85). The lunch meat made its way into South Korean cuisine during the U.S. military occupation in the post World War II era, and then in the early 1950s with the Korean War (97). Today, Korea is the leading foreign exporter of Spam (97). While Americans associate Spam as a working-class object linked to an earlier time of “innocent-but-hokey pride and patriotism” but also something to be “collectively embarrassed about,” Spam takes on new meaning in Korean cuisine (87). Its rooted working class orientation is effaced: it is eaten across class lines, and has come to simultaneously symbolize “the lure of luxury goods from overseas while also affirming (or at least meshing with) traditional Korean dietary culture, which which already values similar meat products as appropriate for special occasions and as symbolic of high status” (101). In this way, the lunch meat is foreign but also thoroughly indigenous.

The interesting paradox of occupation is that it simultaneously energizes rupture and continuity. This is the hinge on which instruments are indigenized and traditions are invented.

Spam makes sense in Korean cuisine, even though it was introduced by the American military. It was chosen for a reason. P'you yuk, a hefty piece of beef or pork which is "boiled, covered with a cloth...pressed into a loaf" and then "cut into thin slices" and topped with sesame sauce or fermented shrimp sauce is an "important precursor" to the lunchmeat in Korean culture (Lewis 99). We can argue more broadly that new foods must be "familiar to the ancestors" or at least "similar enough that they can be substituted in traditional dishes" (101). In the case of Spam, we can understand it to be both "daring" and "traditional" at the same time (101). Incorporation of new elements out of moments of rupture, continuity of old ones.

The canjo also makes sense for Tommy to play a Korean folk song on. Though the canjo itself to my knowledge has not particularly made its way into a Korean music scene, I noticed that the way that Tommy held the instrument vertically, while the majority of canjo players that I have come across hold it at a slant, like a banjo or a guitar. This made me realize that the canjo has a sonic resemblance and structural similarity to the haegum, a Korean two stringed fiddle with a hollow sound box at the bottom. I pointed this out to Tommy and told me that he actually plays the Haegum, which is why holding the canjo vertically felt the most "natural" to him. This serves as a good reminder that individuals themselves drive social phenomena in under-recognized ways: the actions of an individual are a product of broader social forces, the same way that mass changes and adaptations are. Consequently, it is important to conceive of any individual as a potential site of ideological and cultural changes. This brings to mind Gramsci’s construction of the “organic intellectual,” which refers to an individual in a community not thought of as intellectual in Western/elitist terms, but who is doing the work of explaining the culture to itself, advancing it, and acting as a bridge between it and other cultures (Gramsci 1971). Tommy's project, however small, succeeds in doing this work. His individual project can thus be easily compared to other broader processes of indigenization. We an incorporation of new elements out of moments of rupture, and continuity of old ones.

Henry Hoover, the creator of the Spam Canjo, taken from his Facebook Page


Every cowboy needs a CANJO (or a Spanish guitar)!!

Let's talk more about the origins of the instrument we see Tommy playing. The canjo, as well as other related one string instruments such as the fretless diddley bow associated with blues and bluegrass music—is debated by a number of music historians and ethnomusicologists. Robert Lake presents a more commonly spread narrative that DIY one-stringed instruments, like the banjo "came to America with the slave trade during the 1700s and eventually converged with the Scots-Irish culture of the southeastern United States and Appalachia" (Lake 83). Fetzer Mills Jr. and Tom Rankin tell a similar story: the comment that numerous blues musicians, among them Elmore James, Big Jack Johnson, Eddie Cusic, and Lonnie Pitchford "began their musical careers by learning as children to play a one-stringed homemade instrument," which " probably evolved from a musical bow commonly found in most of sub-Saharan Africa but particularly prevalent on Africa's west coast, from which most American slaves were taken" (Mills Jr. and Rankin 50).

John Troutman, however, calls this connection "tenuous," commenting that folklorists and historians began to link these instruments to West and Central Africa during the Civil Rights era in an effort to create scholarship that "neatly calibrated with celebrations of African American culture," and more particularly its ties to the African continent (Troutman 27). Troutman instead suggests that we can trace one stringed instruments to the Hawaiian slide guitar. Native Hawaiians, Troutman reminds us, influenced the earliest generation of blues slide guitarists (38). New Orleans was a important destination spot for Hawaiian vaudville tours, and Jim Crow laws may have actually "created opportunities" for African Americans to socialize with Native Hawaiians who likely had to board in houses for African Americans while they "toured the segregated South" (37). Troutman succinctly sums up this relationship by recalling an interview folklorists Lynn Summers and Bob Schier had with blues musician Little Milton: Summers and Schier asked, “'Was your first instrument the proverbial piece of baling wire strung up on the side of a house?'” to which Milton responded, “'you had wire [on] the side of the house, on the wall or something, with a brick on one end maybe and a bottle on the other, then you use a nail in a bottle and you sound like a Hawaiian type'” (45).

If one-stringed instruments like the diddley bow and the canjo do indeed have their roots in the Hawaiian guitar, then it is important to note that the slide guitar itself developed via a variety of forms of occupation of Hawaiian land. By 1820, American missionaries as well as entrepreneurs "increasingly sought souls for salvation, and lands for plantation," and foreigners brought in various trade goods, including Spanish guitars (Troutman 29). A nineteenth century newspaper claims that Spanish guitars first arrived in Hawaii from Mexico in the early 1800s, and Troutman comments that Latin American cowboys hired to maintain cattle herds brought various music traditions as well (29). Portuguese and Latin American sailors brought guitars—and with them, different techniques— throughout the early to mid nineteenth century (47).

The Spam canjo itself has a contemporary relationship with missionary endeavors: when Tommy received the canjo in the mail, it came with a song book featuring Christian hymns and the well known minstrel song "Dixie," as well as a pamphlet about the important role of music in the bible. The maker—Henry Hoover— also drew a cross in permanent marker on the back of the instrument.

Fascinatingly, we can also link the canjo to a more recent military occupation by the United States: the 2003 war in Iraq. The Porch Music Store attributes the birth of the modern canjo to instrument-maker Herschal R. Brown, though he never copyrighted his particular design. After his death, his son "continued the tradition" by sending canjo's to American soldiers in Iraq.

Occupation of Korean land brought Tommy Spam, and occupation of Hawaiian land ultimately brought Tommy the canjo. Spam has also been thoroughly indigenized into Hawaiian cuisine due to American occupation as well: today the food "cuts across—and unifies—the multi-ethnic cuisines and cultures of Hawaii" (Lewis 92). Tommy, a Korean living America can find a linked struggle as well as linked creative practices with indigenous Hawaiians.


Image of Korean Military band taken from Wikipedia


It has now been made clear that Spam was popularized in Korea primarily during the Korean War. Since this project is concerned with "militant folks," it is important to note that the Korean Military band— which formed as a Western-style military music structure in the 1880s— had a major role in the war, with a complicated relationship with "musical nationalism" on the one hand, and "transnationalism" on the other (Kim in Reily and Brucher 90). According to Kim music gained an "increased importance" during the war, because it both "boosted morale" and also marked the "emergence of new musical developments from the ashes of war" (80). During the war and the decades that followed, the military band increasingly incorporated "Korean indigenous musical elements" (96). Once again, we see a cultural formation simultaneously born out of foreign influence and indigenous practice.



“We have a national Anthem, but Arirang is the real song of our people” -Tommy Song, 2021

Tommy's song choice reveals yet another layer of a musical formation born out of occupation. It is generally agreed that the Korean folk song "Arirang," which is played both in North and South Korea, first became popular in the 1860s and 1870s when workers from the country travelled to Seoul to help rebuild the royal palace (Howard n.p). The song lyrics evoke workers' longing for their home villages and families while looking over Arirang pass, which faced the northeast of the city walls (Howard n.p.). The song came to be associated with a struggle for sovereignty during Japanese colonial occupation (1910-1945). Interestingly enough, the song became wildly popular both in Korean populations and in Japanese ones: the songs' themes spoke both to Koreans' loss of independence, and to the "ravaging effects of modernity on traditional lifeways" in Japan. Because of this, the song served both as a "mirror for self-contemplation" and an "'ethnographic lens' for gazing upon the other (Atkins 645). The song, then, can be understood as a "product and a means of commentary on the conditions of ‘colonial modernity'" (Atkins 648).

Kim Shi-Op's writing on the song is deeply concerned with this ambivalent history of the song, and he argues that Koreans must discard the "wrong practice of refusing to consider the song as an expression of our modern popular art on account of an inertia originating in colonial rule” (Shi-Op 14).

It is clear that Tommy's performance engages with a multitude of complex and overlapping histories, including this one. His performance effectively embodies an affect that is simultaneously melancholic and determined— evoking the Korean struggle for independence.

“The Japanese bound all our folk songs with the shackles of feudal ethics represented by ‘loyalty and filial piety’ in order to promote their imperialism [sic] expansion and strengthen their Fascist colonial rule" (Shi-Op 13).