Back when I was doing live-club auditions and playing shows, some kid asked if he could come back to my place and have a drink with us — why not, I figured, so I brought him home and we drank all night.
His name was Donghyun. At first he thought I was older and kept talking to me formally for a good while, and he seemed to be getting a little uncomfortable about it.
“You guys can drop the formal talk with me — I’m way younger than you.”
“Huh, how old are you?”
“I’m still in high school.”
“What? No way — your face doesn’t look anything like a high schooler, you look three or four years older than me.”
“I’ve always looked like this, hahaha.”
We ended up calling him “the Farmer.”
A few years later he went off to college, started his own band, and we ended up playing shows together.
He was in a skinhead band called Captain Bootbois, and at some point they asked me to play drums for them.
I already knew the songs since I’d recorded them, but actually rehearsing and playing shows with them, Captain had a whole different energy of its own — the way the songs built up their power was genuinely pretty good.
That rousing, chant-along Oi! melody style actually resembles early punk more closely than anything else out there. In Hongdae, different genres drew different crowds, and even the venues each scene played were slightly different.
Captain moved with the GMC crew — bands like Samcheong Reeducation Camp and Knockdown — and that naturally became my way into knowing that whole crowd.
Half Brothers ran with the skate-punk crowd,
Rux ran with the street/pogo-punk crowd,
Captain ran with the GMC hardcore-punk crowd,
and then there was Town Hall Records, doing old-school hardcore, moving in its own separate orbit entirely.
In this tiny neighborhood, people kept clustering around whoever they clicked with, and little by little the scene split into factions — that’s how things were shifting.
I’m a leftist — an old-school leftist — but I’m fine talking to anyone about anything. Right-leaning, left-leaning, doesn’t matter, I’m all for meeting up, arguing it out, even fighting a little over it. The only ones I’m not interested in are the far-right and the far-left.
There’s no getting through to them. They don’t have opinions, they have doctrine. In the world of “the extreme,” anything that doesn’t fit the ideology they’ve already built is treated as the enemy — there’s zero flexibility in that.
Instead of wondering why someone thinks the way they do, they just write you off as an idiot — so there’s no room for actual discussion at all. It’s just a waste of time. How are you supposed to talk to someone whose whole brain runs on black or white?
Here’s an example. Out of ten Trump policies, I agree with four and disagree with six. That’s a personal call. You’re allowed to like some things and dislike others, personally.
So does 4-to-6 make me a leftist? And if it were 6-to-4, would that make me a rightist?
The “extreme” crowd wants it 10-to-0 or 0-to-10, nothing in between. Isn’t that just stupid? How can you possibly agree with 100 percent of some stranger’s policy platform? It feels like a cult to me. Blind devotion.
If I say 4-to-6, they treat me like some kind of fence-sitting bat. I’ve never seen brainless fuckers this brainless.
“The far-right is just plain simple-minded, and the far-left just won’t stop whining” — that’s my firm political identity, plain and simple.
Skinhead identity has been slapped with a far-right frame by the media, but the skinhead thing I actually knew never meant that in the first place. Still, with this particular GMC crew, all I ended up seeing was that faded, dark side of skinhead culture.
Who the hell pulls seniority and age rank in the 21st century, you idiots.