Hated in Korea
I've got one that probably affected 10 000 times as many people as all of your stories combined. It involves full frontal nudity, election tampering, Japanese imperialism, and good old fashioned punk rock.

Where to start? I moved to South Korea in December 2003, and found a place immediately in the local punk scene. It's small, young, and has more than enough to rebel against. The earliest band, Crying Nut, played some very patriotic concerts during the 2002 World Cup, and have become a household name, AKA sellouts. The crop of bands at the time were very opposed to this, especially when one band broke rank and appeared in a very retarded cell phone commercial.

I was briefly unemployed in 2005, giving time to dedicate to photography and making zines. One day I was hanging out with the lead singer of Rux, who also managed all the punk bands, including pogo punk bands Couch and Spiky Brats, both who at the time had the requisite spiked hair and studded jackets. He got a call from Casio, who wanted Couch to appear in a TV commercial, but was having trouble reaching the lead singer. Finally he answered, welding torch in one hand, cell phone in the other, high up in a construction site. He listened to her offer, and replied (in Korean of course), "Fuck it, I won't do it." I later interviewed him for the zine, where I concluded with "You won’t see Couch on TV anytime soon." Couch's singer was quoted saying "If that commercial makes us clowns, I don’t want it." Keep that in mind.

Months passed, and Rux was invited to appear on Music Camp, a "live" music performance show on MBC, one of the main broadcasters in Korea. It's live in the sense it's broadcast live, but the musical elements are mainly prerecorded so it's more like air guitar karaoke. Music Camp mainly featured trashy pop acts, but occasionally would spotlight an underground band. There was probably some opposition to this among the punks, but I don't remember.

On the morning of the show, Rux found out they were allowed to do whatever they wanted on stage. They being typical Korean punks, this meant inviting as many of their friends on stage with them to wave flags and raise banners. I really wanted to go along so I could try taking pictures of how pop stars act backstage. Just before I was out the door, Mrs Traitor started complaining how I always prefer the punks to her. I stayed home and we sorted it all out. Otherwise I would've been on stage at the performance, on live television broadcast nationally.

We turned the TV on but missed the Rux performance, but we watched the rest of the show hoping they hadn't shown it yet. The pop acts were all amateur, awkward. One act which featured some pop star after her return from Africa featured some very awkward dancing in which she was clearly supposed to dryhump some black guys. Their hearts weren't in it. The emcees kept apologising for technical problems earlier in the show.

After it ended, I called Rux's guitarist, to see how it went, and my wife got online. We both found out at exactly the same split second, and shouted "Holy shit, they got naked!"

Here's the moneyshot (NSFW).
www.daehanmindecline.com/transfer/musiccamprux.asx

Or you could watch it on Youtube (but don't judge Rux based on that performance).
www.youtube.com/watch?v=oX8AuyjDAw4

Note that at the time, the Korean punk scene was having a love affair with the Adicts, so the lead singer of Couch was wearing white face. He was literally on TV, being a clown. With his cock flapping around for hundreds of thousands to see. He was joined by the guitarist from Spiky Brats.

And so began the shitstorm, and our story is far from over. Why the performance wasn't aired with a few seconds delay, I don't know. That would've assured that only the minds of the middle school girls in the audience would be poisoned, and not the entire nation's TV audience. I had the Rux guitarist on the phone, and he sounded like someone had just made love to his dead grandmother. The two flashers were arrested, along with the lead singer of Rux, though he was released. For the next few weeks, the media tried to prove that the lead singer put them up to it, so he would be sent to jail too.

Before this performance, nobody in the country knew that punk existed. Now they knew, and they hated us. You'd think that this would've brought out a ton of support from new people, but it didn't. The Korean punks warned me it would be dangerous to wear any kind of punk clothes (not that I particularly do anyway). If you watched the YouTube video, there's one guy with a brightly coloured mohawk and a Clash shirt which features the Japanese Imperial flag. Reports speculated that he was some kind of anti-Korean Japanese imperialist. He shaved the mohawk off and held a press conference to basically tell everybody not to jump to crazy conclusions.

The then mayor of Seoul (now president of Korea) remarked that perhaps the government should run a blacklist of lewd performers, harkening back to the '70s when musicians were routinely jailed.

Music Camp was cancelled (but possibly brought back later. MBC, the network, had been engaged in a very important legal battle against Samsung and the Joongang newspaper. Recordings had been leaked to MBC of the presidents of both companies trying to rig the 1998 presidential election to try and revive the military dictatorship. Evidence had been illegally obtained, but fortunately the CEOs were losing the battle. Then the tables turned thanks to this incident, and it was MBC who was on the wrong side of the law. Some people even speculated that Samsung paid the punks to show their dicks to the country. Traitors walked free, and reporters were jailed.

Then the media shitstorm moved on. There was news that girls 12 years old and younger were being raped at a a kids' summer camp. What's more, the camp was run by the daughter of the previously mentioned '70s dictator. She remarked to the media "What are you so upset about? It's not like they're old enough to get pregnant." I think for once, us punks implausibly had a bit of sympathy for the dictator's daughter and her rape camp.

Shortly after, all lawsuits against Korean punk were dropped. The two flashers were released from jail after having spent three months inside. The lead singer of Couch told me jail was awesome, and the food was so good he gained weight. They were on some kind of probation that forbade them from performing for a year, and they waited a couple months before breaking it.

Things went back to normal, with our small scene struggling to keep afloat in a city of 10 million, and we all faded back into obscurity. But these days if you mention Couch loud enough, you still might get somebody yelling at you.
(racetraitor has an alibi for, Fri 29 May 2009, 4:49, 3 replies)

Now THAT is a story.
.
( girlinthehole, Fri 29 May 2009, 10:37, closed)

Nudity seems to par for the course for the punk gigs I go to
I missed the Twits gig at Shed5 on the Gold Coast where people were having sex on the stage and girls were having sex with each other in commercial waste bins.

I did however get photos of a girl stripping the bass player naked out on the front step of my local which is on a busy road. I do have photos, but you don't really want to see them.
(TimChuma, Tue 2 Jun 2009, 13:38, closed)

Well this country is ruled by Christfucius
The media reported that punk shows here are an orgy of nudity and violence. Sounds a lot more like most hip-hop clubs to me.

A few years earlier, another band became almost equally hated because at a live performance, a guitarist spat at the camera. That was enough to get everyone who watched it to think they'd been personally insulted.
(racetraitor has an alibi for, Wed 3 Jun 2009, 4:10, closed)