Made in Korea

Studies in Popular Music

Hyunjoon Shin, Seung-Ah Lee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317645733
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Musica

Made in Korea: Studies in Popular Music serves as a comprehensive and thorough introduction to the history, sociology, and musicology of contemporary Korean popular music. Each essay covers the major figures, styles, and social contexts of pop music in Korea, first presenting a general description of the history and background of popular music in Korea, followed by essays, written by leading scholars of Korean music, that are organized into thematic sections: History, Institution, Ideology; Genres and Styles; Artists; and Issues.

PART I
Histories

Part I considers the “histories” of Korean popular music, but the chapters in this part are not organized chronologically. The method taken here is to multiply the history of popular music’s production and circulation by focusing on the systems of stage, record, broadcasting, and communication, in consideration of the complex nature of popular music’s mediation. In other words, this part places equal emphasis on the questions of “what” and “how.” The first three chapters treat a time period, which spans the birth of popular music to the late twentieth century, but the period in focus varies from chapter to chapter. This is because the three media— the stage, the record, and broadcasting—dominated different time periods.

The subject covered in this part is not only Korean popular music but also, more broadly, popular music in Korea. This means that it encompasses not only popular music created and produced by Koreans but also, to some extent, popular music adopted and consumed in Korea. As in other countries, popular music adopted and consumed in Korea includes Korean popular music as well as a significant quantity of imported and transmitted popular music, particularly music produced in the West, including the U.S. and the UK. What is important is that such adoption and consumption make different meanings in a different location through different contexts and environments. Thus, while each chapter narrates multiple histories by considering each of the distinct media, a rough narration of a comprehensive history is needed.

There has been much controversy over the beginning of popular music in Korea in national and international scholarships. But there is an implicit agreement that this music began in earnest in the late 1920s. The first golden age of Korean popular music often refers to the period immediately following this up to the 1930s. That the Japanese colonial rule of Korea (1910–1945) covers this range of time suggests that the birth and development of Korean popular music was influenced by Japan’s hegemonic influence in politics, culture, and economy. Because of this, theorists of the leftist or progressive “song movement” of the 1980s argued that Korean popular music was transplanted by the Japanese Empire. However, more recent theorists have criticized this argument, developing more complex and nuanced interpretations. Indeed, a simple theoretical frame does not easily explain the fact that a lot of Korean-texted music was produced and circulated under Japanese colonial rule and that this greatly appealed to many common people in Korea during and after the colonial period.

What is important here is that Korean popular music during the colonial period took “musical drama” (akkŭk), a distinctive type of stage performance, as the ideal media. Popular music developed in relation to stage art involving theater performances as the commercial potentials of record and broadcasting were not yet harnessed. Musical dramas morphed into a peculiar form of entertainment called “theater show” as they declined from the 1950s to the 1970s due to the popular rise of motion pictures; subsequently, they were transmuted into dinner theater shows in night entertainment establishments. Korean musical drama and show may be considered local varieties of the revue, but particular attention needs to be paid to their relatively long existence, especially in comparison to counterparts in other countries, as well as their distinctive structures and communication styles.

With the outbreak of the Korean War, which followed the national liberation in 1945 and the division in 1948, a massive U.S. military base was stationed in South Korea. This base declined in size as time passed, but still to this day it is stationed in South Korea and its headquarters are located in Yongsan, which lies at the heart of Seoul, the national capital and an international metropolis. I emphasize this because the presence of the U.S. military base provided a condition for the development of popular music in Korea. The influence of the U.S. Armed Forces in Korea was not only politico-military but also socio-cultural in character, and it established a distinctive form of entertainment called “the Eighth U.S. Army show.” This form did not stay within the boundaries of the military base but spread beyond the base, exerting a tremendous influence on Korea’s entertainment industry. The base’s influences also include the music programs of the AFKN broadcasting, which were produced within and transmitted from the U.S. military base in Korea, as well as illegally copied records (the so-called “bootlegs” or ppaekp’an), which were initially produced for American GIs.

Popular music broke out of the stages of the theater shows and entered the age of broadcasting beginning in the mid-1960s, as the cultural influence of the U.S. army base waned due to its quantitative decline—a development that was also aided by the introduction of commercial broadcasting and the growth of the recording industry. Music show programs directly produced by the broadcasting industry enjoyed popularity with the public and the recording industry built an infrastructure for mass production as it began the production of LPs. The intimate intermediation between record publishing and broadcast media exposure—in other words, the formulae of creating hit songs through the recording media and of popular singers reaching star or celebrity status and selling records in large quantities through the transmission of these songs via the airwaves—became consolidated from the 1960s to the 1990s, despite some differences in forms throughout this period.

Considering this, it is understandable that journalistic literature in Korea treats the 1960s and the 1990s as the commercial golden ages of popular music. The 1960s saw the emergence of new media and the attendant development of popular music and the music industry; and in the 1990s these components matured and flourished. And it is for the same reason that the middle period, the 1970s and the 1980s, is remembered as a time during which the youth (typically university or college students)—a generation living under an authoritarian, oppressive rule and deeply influenced by rock, folk, soul, and other music intimately related to the West’s counter-hegemonic culture or subculture—negotiated and rebelled against the established power and the official society as they developed their identities through national or international popular music. It should be remembered that in this process there existed a musical practice that categorically rejected any influence from foreign powers in the name of people’s music (minjung kayo) or song movement. What is clear is that in any case popular music deeply pervaded the everyday lives of Koreans and that it established itself as a factor that deals in the cultural politics of distinct groups (class, generation, gender, and region).

This has not changed even in the twenty-first century, but there has also been a fundamental break. For some time Korea had the world’s highest rate in high-speed internet network penetration thanks to a quickly developed digital economy, obtained as part of the effort to overcome the sweeping economic crisis in late 1997. With this infrastructural change, the physical distribution of “record” collapsed and was replaced by digital distribution. As a result, after the early 2000s Korea became the first country in which digital music sales exceeded physical record sales. With this, broadcasting—to be precise, terrestrial TV—which had wielded absolute power on popular music media for decades—swiftly handed over its power to new media including the internet.

The practice has changed so much that the local vernacular term ŭmwŏn (“sound source”) has taken root as an official term beyond an industry jargon. The young generation of Korea is no longer familiar with vinyl LPs and CDs and does not use hardware to play music. The predominant method for listening to music is to subscribe to a sound source site with a cellphone and then to listen to music or watch music videos through “streaming.” Korea’s music industry has adapted to this consumption practice whether it wanted this or not, and as a result telecommunication has emerged as the most powerful media of popular music. It has had an impact on international circulation, reaching far beyond the confines of nationwide circulation. For instance, it has provided the industrial and institutional conditions for an artist to cross borders: this artist’s music video, which originally targeted the domestic market, was uploaded to the YouTube channel of his company and then went viral across the world. This is the story of “Gangnam Style.” It may be somewhat inappropriate that such a story is considered in the last chapter of a section that is concerned with “history.” Yet, if we see history as the task of reflecting on the past to take a view of the future from today’s perspective, this is not only appropriate but also timely.

1
The Stage Show and the Dance Floor

A History of “Live Music” in Korea

Hyunjoon Shin

Introduction

Simon Frith stated that “Twentieth-century popular music means the twentieth-century popular record” (Frith 1988, 12). It is difficult to disagree with his view and it is easy to confirm that Korean popular music is no exception to his statement. But I argue that the process by which the record became the hegemonic mediator of popular music is never simple and straightforward.

I began to take an interest in popular music during my academic research in the 1990s. While reading the texts and articles on popular music, I sensed that up until the 1960s, the discourse on Korean popular music was more focused on live, onstage performances rather than on “records” (i.e. Yi 1973; Hwang 1983) in contrast with recent academic studies (i.e. Chang 2006; Lee 2007). The 1980s superstar Cho Yong-p’il stated, “recording singers (rek’odŭ kasu) and stage singers (mudae kasu) are two different things” (Cho 1982, 162).¹ In other words, “stage music” was just as important as “record music” even in the 1980s in mediating popular music in Korea. Popular recordings (and their broadcasting) eventually became the dominant forms of media in Korea in the last two decades of the twentieth century.

We can define “record music” as music that primarily features recording artists, and “stage music” as music that is featured in live onstage performances. However, notice the gap in the process of translation here—since there have been many different institutions, practices, and customs of popular music in different parts of Korea, “stage” (mudae) is defined not only as the physical setting for musical performances and the like, but also as a symbolic space for musical mediation. This chapter will examine the different stages of the history of Korean popular music—how it came to be and how it was popularized. The main focus of this chapter will be on Korean popular music from the 1940s to the 1970s.

The Periodization of Popular Music in Terms of Musical Mediation

Since mass media was firmly consolidated in Korea after the 1980s, there is the problem of periodization before the 1980s.² I will briefly examine the cases of Korea and Japan from an inter-Asian perspective on this topic.

According to the Japanese scholar Touya Mamoru, there have been four different types of media, which were at some point in the twentieth century the dominant form of mediating popular music in Japan and East Asia: “staff notation,” “US military base,” “mass media,” and “multimedia” (Touya 2008, 118). Among these forms, Touya states that the “US military base,” which was seldom considered “mediator,” was the most powerful form of mediation during the period. Touya even suggests that “US military base” constituted a global or transnational media network during the Cold War and exerted great influence throughout the period (Yoshimi 2003; Touya 2005). Mass media culminated in the 1970s due to the fact that the “system of music industry of the U.S. military during the occupation period was transmitted into TV culture since the 1960s” (Touya 2008, 126). In Japan, Anglo-American pop music was the dominant form of music prior to this period, while Japanese pop (kayōkyoku) blossomed in the later periods.

Can Touya’s argument be applied to the case of Korea and East Asia at large? Yes and no, considering cultural differences between Japan and Korea. To begin with, color television was introduced much later in Korea than in most other countries. There was also a merger and abolition of the media which reduced the number of national broadcasting stations to only two public stations in 1980. Thus, it was not until the 1980s that color television was popularized on a national scale. Considering that color television had been introduced in 1960 in Japan, Korea was comparably late in the popularization and enculturation of mass media.

Furthermore, the power of “US military base” was still strong in Korea in the 1960s, while it was simultaneously in decline in Japan. While “American military facilities became more and more invisible in the urban areas of the Japanese mainland after the 1960s” (Yoshimi 2003, 443), they were practically ubiquitous in Korea. We therefore sense that the influence of American popular culture had become more indirect in Japan after the 1960s, while simultaneously becoming more direct and immediate in Korea. By this time, “U.S. military base show” reached its height in popularity in Korea; different genres of 1960s pop-rock (e.g. soul, folk, psychedelic) were thereby introduced. “US military base” and “mass media,” which Touya suggested were different mediations of popular music culture, have coexisted during the early Cold War period. At this point, multiple forms of mediation were interconnected.

Moreover, “US military base” cannot be defined by concepts like “staff notation” and “mass media.” According to Antoine Hennion, “music has nothing but mediations to show: instruments, musicians, scores, stages” (Hennion 2003, 83). He compares different types of music and genres from the basis of media and modes of performance—between classical and jazz, between jazz, rock and rap (Hennion 2003, 87–89). In addition, I will discuss how the stage in Korea has not only mediated producers and consumers, but has also mediated social relations through popular music.³

The Age of Akkŭk and the “U.S. Military Base Show”

“Stage music” (mudae) is a “Western” invention in Korean and East Asian contexts. Its or...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction: The Road to Popular Music: Regulation, Resistance, and Negotiations
• Part I: Histories
• Part II: Genres
• Part III: Artists
• Part IV: Issues
• Coda
• Bibliography
• About the Authors
• Index