Come Back Home

"Come Back Home" is a song by South Korean boy band Seo Taiji and Boys, from their fourth and final self-titled studio album, which was released on October 5, 1995. The group's foray into gangsta rap, the song's lyrical content addresses the societal pressures on young people that push them to run away from home, while the refrain conveys the perspective of the runaways' parents. Following its release, "Come Back Home" was met with success in South Korea, and achieved the top positions on music program charts for multiple weeks. It won several awards, including the Asia Viewer's Choice Award at the 1996 MTV Video Music Awards. In 2007, music webzine Music Y ranked it as the fourth best Korean song of all time. Music and lyrics "Come Back Home" is a song that is rooted in gangsta rap; according to The Korea Foundation, it provided the grounds for hip-hop music to take root in Korea. Its lyrical content revolves around the problem of the increasing number of teenage runways around the time of its release, as Seo Taiji often ran away himself while he was younger. In an interview with The Chosun Ilbo in 2008, Seo revealed that he often ran away from middle school and almost dropped out due to corporal punishment in the classroom; however, he credited his third year middle school teacher for guiding him and abolishing physical punishments in his class. He said that "When making 'Come Back Home', I put everything I felt when I was in third grade in that song." The song's chorus line supports the perspective of the parents' worries, thereby serving as a sort of mediator between the teenagers and parents. While the majority of the song was written in Korean, assistant professor of music at University of Hildesheim Michael Fuhr wrote that the function of the English words that were used in the title and the refrain: "you must come back home", served as an attention getter. Fuhr said that the code-switching between English and Korean represented the generational gap between parents and youth, whereas the English chorus formulates a greater appeal to younger generations than it would with Korean words.