After reading a post over at Scribblings of the Metropolitician about Park Jin-young and seeing his name in the news recently, I started feeling nostalgic and decided to delve deep into the vault for footage of video I took in 1997 at a Gangnam “Rock Cafe” called Venturi. For those who don’t know, “rock cafes” are/were underground clubs. There weren’t any “dance floors” per se. People simply danced near the table where they were sitting - much like many of the clubs in Hong-dae today. The mid-90s were the heyday for underground clubs in Gangnam. Hong-dae was around back then, but it was nothing near the scene that it is today. If my memory serves me correctly, there were about five or six of these clubs in Gangnam back then. My favorites were Venturi, Lexus I, and Lexus II. Oh the stories I could tell about what went on in these places. But I won’t. Don’t ask.

You’ll notice in the video that things weren’t too much different from what they are like nowadays. One thing that was different was that there was a specific dance that accompanied each Korean song. It was kind of fun…and funny…to watch everyone performing the same moves. Also, whenever a foreign song came on, many dancers sat down because they didn’t know how to dance to it. Not much freestyle back then. You’ll notice in the video that there are four foreigners doing the dances. When they weren’t dancing, they were working the bar at Venturi. The four were American soldiers. That was a relatively new development at the time - soldiers roaming out of the Itaewon area, that is. At least it was new for Venturi.

It was fairly early in the evening when I shot this video, so the club wasn’t too crowded. Usually it was quite packed. Alas, as time went on, a few Korean-style “booking” clubs opened up in Gangnam and as the crowds started moving there, the rock cafes slowly lost customers until they finally disappeared; the one exception being 4X, a late arrival on the scene.