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# Rock 'n' Roll, Becoming a Bird Without Feet — Chapter 002
## 1. Poverty, Destitution, Hardship (1)
The legendary alternative band Nirvana's Kurt Cobain once said this.
I'd rather be hated for who I am than be loved for who I'm not.
I'd rather be hated for who I am than be loved by becoming someone else.
When I was young, there were times when I pounded my fists and lamented that Kurt, that girlish bastard, had ruined rock music all over the world. But those words alone brought me comfort.
Fifty-eight years old this year. Single.
No, to be precise, I had been married once, but I was divorced, so I suppose calling myself single isn't exactly right. Single means someone without a spouse, or a state of having no spouse, so perhaps it isn't entirely wrong either.
Anyway, even after growing old enough to be nearly sixty, I had no savings. I was living in a tiny monthly-rent room that cost only three million won a year, sitting there like a potbellied man clutching the belly button that had popped out from his stomach, fondling guitars that were more expensive than my rent.
That idiot middle-aged man was me.
* * *
Jongno Hwanghak-dong Flea Market.
Known to the MZ generation as Pungmul Market, it is a place where, if you're lucky, you can have fun buying all sorts of antiques or secondhand clothes at cheap prices.
Hwanghak-dong is said to have gotten its name because yellow cranes once flew to this place, which used to be fields, and settled there to raise their young.
Alongside Cheonggyecheon, there was a backstreet market that had been formed since the Japanese colonial period as a place where the poor could live and make a living.
A place that stood in stark contrast to Seoul's dazzling nights, where the city never seemed to sleep.
There was a neighborhood packed with tiny rented rooms where the modern-day poor lived.
"Mr. Baek, you still haven't sold that thing? Just sell that guitar already, will ya? You don't even have money to buy yourself a bowl of ramen right now, so why are you going on about some guitar?"
They say people from Gyeongsang Province don't speak in such a heavy dialect these days.
An auntie wearing a rough Gyeongsang dialect as coarse as a sailor's stood on a yellow-brown wooden platform lined with tiny rented rooms. She walked over and sat beside the long-haired middle-aged man who was sitting with his head lowered.
"I've been dealing with antiques for thirty years, since my father's time. Mister, instruments like that don't get more expensive just because they're old, you know? So sell it while you can still get a proper price for it."
The long-haired Baek raised his head and looked at the woman.
Her words were rough, but her heart was warm. She was the owner of these rented rooms. I had heard that her family had run an antique shop here since her parents' generation.
In 1986, when the 86 Asian Games were held, the government established an antique shopping district in Janganpyeong to attract foreign tourists and relocated a large number of the antique stores in Hwanghak-dong.
At that time, the number of antique shops, which had once reached as many as 130, was drastically reduced to around twenty, and the antique market itself disappeared along with them.
The auntie had closed down her shop then and turned the property into rented rooms.
"Forget it. Don't worry about it and just give me a bottle of soju."
The auntie flinched when she heard Baek's voice. It was so deeply hoarse that calling it merely husky would not do it justice. It sounded as though his vocal cords had developed nodules.
"I can never get used to your voice, no matter how many times I hear it."
He would have liked to go to a restaurant and have a drink, but these days, that was an impossible luxury. The world had reached a point where a single bottle of soju at a restaurant cost six thousand won.
Some expensive places even charged more than seven thousand won. It was ridiculous. Back in 1974, when he used to run errands to buy soju for his father, a bottle cost only ninety-five won. Just how many times had the price gone up?
Baek handed over a crumpled five-thousand-won bill. The auntie looked at him pitifully, sighed, and took a chilled bottle of soju from the refrigerator that was secured with a padlock before handing it to him.
"Don't drink too much, will ya? Good grief, I don't care anymore. Otherwise, I'll just upset myself."
"Not the blue one. Give me the one with the red cap."
"……"
The auntie switched the soju with an displeased expression, got up, and went into the kitchen.
Baek stared blankly after her, then opened the soju and put the mouth of the bottle directly to his lips without even bothering with a glass.
He gulped it down.
"Ah."
Was this even alcohol?
Liquor in the old days was stronger and tasted better. Alcohol these days was so bland that he couldn't tell whether he was drinking liquor or water.
"Hoo."
Sitting on the wooden platform outside his tiny rented room and drinking straight from the bottle, the long-haired middle-aged man, Baek, gazed at the sky and sank into memories of his youth.
It felt like being anesthetized by music, slowly losing consciousness.
Whenever he stood onstage, shook his head, and roared while playing a frenzied guitar,
it felt as though he were singing in the middle of a herd of livestock, with cannons and tanks forming the backdrop.
He simply could not escape the ecstasy of the stage.
People stomped their feet to our music.
They raised their hands above their heads and clapped.
But in the end, I could never open the world of truth hidden inside people's hearts.
And it only got worse as time went on.
The band that first made me want to pick up a guitar was Deulgukhwa, a legendary Korean band. Of course, rock had existed before then. The problem was that I had listened to it without even knowing it was rock.
The first time I listened to rock music and thought it was good was when I heard the songs of Shin Jung-hyun, the eternal godfather of Korean rock.
The song "Woman in the Rain" by ADD4, the first band Teacher Shin ever formed. In modern Korean spelling, it would correctly be written as "Woman in the Rain," but that was the title under which it was released at the time.
I still respect him deeply, not merely because he was the first person to achieve success through rock music and therefore earned the title of the father of Korean rock music, but because of his creative efforts to embrace overwhelming Western culture while still trying to establish a distinctly Korean identity within it.
But back then, Teacher Shin was already a distant star, so far beyond the reach of someone as young as me that I could not even dream of meeting him.
The band I could at least see performing live around the country, and meet if I had a little money, was Deulgukhwa. "March," a song that reflected the spirit of that era, remains a masterpiece even today.
Later, the leader released a solo album and produced countless hit songs, but I still haven't forgotten the moment when I first heard Deulgukhwa's music back then.
Then why couldn't I make music like that?
"Those damn bastards."
It was because of two bands that debuted in 1981 and 1984.
Back then, I wasn't pursuing music. I was pursuing the study of music.
I didn't simply listen, feel, and enjoy it. I wanted to know more than other people, and I felt superior whenever I listened to things that others didn't know.
And at the end of that road stood those two bands.
Of course, neither band was guilty of anything.
They had simply made music sincerely in places where there were plenty of fans who understood and appreciated their music.
But from the perspective of someone who came later, I couldn't help feeling as though I'd been stabbed in the back after believing that I, too, could reach the outskirts of the place where the bands I worshipped like gods had arrived.
Baek sat on the platform and glanced at the open door of his tiny room.
Several gleaming guitars that didn't fit his impoverished circumstances were visible inside.
The first one that caught the eye was a 1964 Fender Stratocaster.
It was the same model Bob Dylan used, and back then, Baek had spent more than a year doing hard labor at construction sites just to buy it.
Of course, once he passed thirty, he hardly touched that guitar anymore. The music he wanted to pursue at the time required a type of sound that could not be produced with that guitar.
Standing beside it was another guitar.
It had such an unusual shape that, because he couldn't find a suitable stand for it, he had driven a nail into the wall and hung it there. It was a Dean USA Dime ML Far Beyond Driven.
It was also the guitar once used by Pantera's late guitarist, Dimebag Darrell.
Even the models being produced now would probably easily cost more than five million won, but this particular guitar was a 1987 model.
And then there was the last guitar.
It was an LTD guitar once used by Slayer guitarist Jeff Hanneman.
It was the cheapest model among the guitars he owned, but even if he bought one now, it would cost more than 2.3 million won.
Whether relatively expensive or cheap, none of these were things an old man living in a tiny rented room should own.
And that wasn't all.
What about his effects?
If you added up the price of all the effects filling his amplifier and pedal board, it would easily exceed ten million won.
He had collected them since he was young, and some had acquired premiums simply because they were models that were no longer being produced.
Why was he suddenly going on about the prices of guitars?
Because he wanted to say that the auntie who owned the rented rooms wasn't entirely right.
The reason old instruments didn't necessarily increase in value simply because they had aged was probably because these weren't instruments like violins, violas, or cellos, whose sounds become richer as they age after being crafted by master artisans.
But these guitars were different.
Every one of them was a renowned guitar, so their older models became more valuable as time passed.
"At least they'll cover my funeral expenses."
He was alone and had no one to hold a funeral for him, so he had to think about what would happen to him in the future himself.
Buying a grave was out of the question. Who would look after it?
All he needed was enough money to have himself cremated and scatter his ashes into the sea. He figured he could somehow manage that by selling the guitars.
"What a pathetic sight I am."
Even so, he had been fairly successful when he was young.
He had even had a fan club.
When he first started rock music in the late 1980s, there weren't any clubs specializing in rock.
It was a time when even Deulgukhwa was performing at civic halls, so there was no need to say how things were for an unknown musician like him.
He rented a warehouse in the Mullae-dong metalworking district, personally went around handing out flyers, gathered people, and held live performances.
Still, about three years after starting music, he began to gain regular fans. There were even grateful people who came to see him every time he performed live.
Then, in the mid-1990s, Nirvana became a huge hit in America, and rock clubs began appearing in Korea as well, centered around Hongdae.
Of course, even then, the rock clubs didn't accept his music.
His music, consisting of nothing but shouting in a thick, rough voice that made it impossible to understand what lyrics he was even singing, was completely rejected by the public.
Punk, consisting of three or four chords and something anyone could play after picking up a guitar for just a month, was the trend.
Even when the world changed drastically and rock became mainstream, his music was never accepted in South Korea.
When he was fired from the live club where he worked because he was pushed aside by a high school band that played punk rock, it felt as though the world had collapsed.
I blamed them.
Who?
The world, of course.
I thought it was a spectacle of ignorance performed by idiots who didn't know how to listen to music.
That's exactly what I thought.
If I had been in America, things would have been different.
They would have understood my music.
What a crazy thing to think.
It was complete bullshit.
It was nothing more than self-consolation for a failed life.
Had anyone ever forced me to make music like that?
Or had anyone insisted that I only make music in Korea instead of America?
Without even trying to move forward, without even attempting anything, I spent my life blaming the world until my entire life scattered into thin air.
At that moment, a middle-aged man dressed in a suit approached the area around the wooden platform of the rented rooms.
"Excuse me, are you perhaps Mr. Baek Chang-hyun?"
"……"
Baek, who had been deeply lost in his thoughts, raised his head.
It had been a very long time since he had heard his own name.
"Who are you?"
The man flinched slightly at his extremely hoarse voice, but quickly composed himself and spoke.
"Ah, are you Mr. Baek?"
"I am."
"I'm this kind of person."
The middle-aged man pulled a business card from inside his jacket and handed it over.
Baek stared at his hand for a moment. Just as his embarrassment was reaching its peak, he took the business card and examined it.
It was a music label company whose name he had never even heard of.
Baek Chang-hyun placed the business card on the ground and asked,
"What is this about?"
The middle-aged man pulled up his trousers and exhaled through his nose.
"I heard some rumors around the industry and came here. I heard you're an exceptional rock guitarist. Would you be interested in working with us?"
"……"