MY IS MY POWER: POSTCOLONIAL SOUTH KOREAN POPULAR

MUSIC

by

JARRYN HA

Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

May 2018

ii

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES

We hereby approve the dissertation of Jarryn Ha

candidate for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.*

Committee Chair

Robert Walser

Committee Member

Francesca Brittan

Committee Member

William Deal

Committee Member

Susan McClary

Date of Defense

March 26, 2018

* We also certify that written approval has been obtained for any proprietary material

contained therein. iii

Table of Contents

• List of Tables iv

• List of Figures v

• Acknowledgments vii

• Abstract ix

• Introduction 1

1. “Love, Goodbyes, and Tears, All in Four Beats”: The Birth and Develop-

ment of Tŭrotŭ, a Twentieth-Century Korean Popular Song Genre 13

2. Decadent Ruckus, Celebratory Anthems: A

Rock Bands and Their Music 50

3. “My Song”: Korean - Music, the Veneration of

Originality, and Musical Assertions of Sociopolitical Agency 89

4. Girls’ Generation: Idol Vocal Groups’ Performance of Adolescent

Femininities and “Broken Virtuosity” 128

5. Riding the Airwaves in the Age of the : South Korean

Popular Music in the Context of 166

• Bibliography 204

iv

List of Tables

• Table 1.1: The event schedule for the first annual Gwangjingyo Bridge

Festival, 26 August 2017 46

• Table 5.1: A summary of artists featured in Sketchbook and Music Bank

(both KBS-2TV), aired during the week of 15 June 2015 170

v

List of Figures

• Fig. 1.1: Lee Nanyoung, “Mokpoŭi Nunmul” (1935) 19

• Fig. 1.2: Nam Insu, “Ibyŏrŭi Pusan Chŏnggŏjang” (1954),

beginning of verse 19

• Fig. 1.3: Baeho, “Toraganŭn Samgakji” (1967), mm. 11–41 23

• Fig. 1.4: Nam , “Pin Chan” (1982), mm. 5–25 24

• Fig. 1.5: Wangyu, “Chŏnnyŏnŭi Sarang” (1999), excerpt 40

• Fig. 2.1: -hyeon’s 1959 compilation Hiky Shin

Keetah Melodui (Hiky Shin’s ) 55

• Fig. 2.2: The teaser poster image for ’s single “Paektŭpokhaeng” 61

• Fig. 2.3: Poster image for Pumhaeng Chero (Geun-shik Jo, dir., 2002) 62

• Fig. 2.4: Boohwal, “Heeya” (1986), mm. 1–8 68

• Fig. 2.5: YB, “O pilsŭng koria,” hook (mm. 1–8) 82

• Fig. 3.1: An Chi-hwan, “Sarami kkotboda arŭmdawŏ,” opening riff 110

• Fig. 4.1: The syncopated drum pattern from the SNSD remake of

“Sonyŏsidae” (2009) 156

• Fig. 4.2: Sonyŏsidae, “Sonyŏsidae” (2009), mm. 9–16 (verse) 158 vi

• Fig. 5.1: A still image from Muhan Tojŏn (30 2005, MBC-TV) 182

• Fig. 5.2: Still images from the inaugural Muhan Tojŏn 183

• Fig. 5.3: A still image from Hidden Singer (12 October 2013, JTBC) 196

• Fig. 5.4: A still image from Misŭtŏri Ŭmaksho Pokmyŏn Kawang

(27 March 2016, MBC-TV) 198

vii

Acknowledgments

“He lives in the basement and does nothing,” writes English professor and writer

Roger Rosenblatt in an essay in , quoting his granddaughter’s introduction of him to her fourth-grade class.1 The pursuit of intensive, specialized knowledge often renders the pursuer a “misfit,” to borrow Rosenblatt’s word, as the child’s introduction brilliantly captures. In my case, the intellectual adventure and scholarly training that culminated in this writing represent my first major step as an academic, and I owe many thanks to my professors and mentors who have guided me along the way (thus -starting my “basement residency”) as well as those whose love and care have helped me through the process.

I am grateful first and foremost for words of guidance and encouragement from

Dr. Robert Walser, my advisor and defense committee chair. The members of the committee, Drs. Francesca Brittan, William Deal, and Susan McClary, provided not only advice and direction for the research and writing for this project, but also insights and encouragement that helped me grow as a writer, teacher, and scholar at times when graduate school seemed an endless and futile struggle. I extend my warm thanks to my army of knowledgeable and inquiring readers. My colleagues at Case Western Reserve

University spent many hours reading and critiquing portions of this project, and the members of the Southwest Popular/American Association (SWPACA) heard an early version of Chapter 3 at their annual meeting in February 2017. I am grateful for their warm reception and insightful feedback.

1 Roger Rosenblatt, “The Writer in the Family,” The New York Times, 13 May 2012, p. BR43. viii

The time and attention I devoted to research and writing meant I inevitably have had to divert the same from other aspects of life, most often at the expense of my family and friends. Many of them showed seemingly endless patience and grace when my hours odd and my company may have been less than wholly present, and I am deeply grateful. Most importantly, this project would have not been possible without the unwavering support of my parents, who saw and encouraged the scholar in me before I saw him. I extend my deepest love and gratitude to them.

ix

My Song is My Power: Postcolonial South Korean

Abstract

by

JARRYN HA

Ever since South ’s popular entertainment industry began to produce musical talents that appeared less than organic and self-made, questions about the legitimacy of those have plagued the products, as they were, of the industry.

Those questions concern less the mechanics of what constitutes a —a person who engages in music-making—and more the moral judgment that underlies music production, performance, and consumption, regarding what should expect from a worthwhile musical act. The increasing exposure and popularity of a growing subset of

Korean popular music branded as “K-pop” in the West invite the question: what drives so many musicians from to have constructed a musical tradition that so closely mirrors its Western counterpart yet seems different enough from the latter to attract curious foreign listeners?

Questions like this are worth asking because the structure of the post-1990s popular entertainment industry of South Korea, conglomeratized and micromanaged, x effectively ensures that it produces nothing without first vetting and strategically crafting it. The outward-looking, arguably passive mode of reception and standard-setting, I theorize, largely stems from the country’s modern history of having foreign powers determine its political position and fate as a nation: first the Japanese during the colonial occupation that lasted from 1905 to 1945, then the American with their postwar military and cultural influx. This political and cultural climate forms a backdrop to the construction of Korean modernity as well as a Korean sonic national identity that musicians I discuss in this project construct.

In this project, I present ways in which different historical and stylistic moments in Korean popular music—the love song (tŭrotŭ), rock of the onward, folk, and turn-of-the-century idol pop—exhibited what I call the foreign vogue, as well as how the television as the preferred medium for musical consumption reinforces its prevalence.

Each instance shows musicians proactively engaging with expressive vocabulary available to them to construct a stylistic compendium and patchwork of meanings.

1

Introduction

“But are they even real musicians?” One student in the back of the room scoffed in dismissal, following a presentation on the construction of gender ideals in K-pop. Far from uncommon in discourses about contemporary Korean popular music, the question implies not only scrutiny about musical authenticity but also a hierarchy present in : the notion that there is a class division (and, by extension, a moral one) of sorts, between music that one finds worthwhile and music that is cheap, inferior, or unworthy of attention and time. The construction of such ideals and institutions does not happen in a vacuum. In the case of contemporary popular music of South Korea, the postcolonial construction of the nation’s modernity following the Japanese occupation and the shapes the underlying values and ideals, and the structure of the entertainment industry gives rise to the institutional conventions and practices.

Scholarly literature on postcolonial routinely points to the role of modern historical developments and the history of modernization in shaping the construction of cultural ideals as manifested in aesthetic and musical phenomena of many postcolonial today.1 However, the increasing presence and relevance of South Korean popular music in soundscapes abroad notwithstanding—particularly the popularity of K-pop among young Western listeners—the scholarly literature on the music’s development that does exist rarely covers the musical and cultural choices that musicians make in various

1 See, for example, Moses Chikowero, “‘Our People Father, They Haven’t Learned Yet’: Music and Postcolonial Identities in Zimbabwe, 1980–2000,” Journal of Southern African Studies, vol. 34, no. 1 (March 2008): 145–60; Tariq Jazeel, “Postcolonial Spaces and Identities,” Geography, vol. 97, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 60–67; Godwin Sadoh, “Modern Nigerian Music: The Postcolonial Experience,” The Musical Times, vol. 150, no. 1908 (Autumn 2009): 79–84; Imani Sanga, “Postcolonial Cosmopolitan Music in Dar es Salaam: Dr. Remmy Ongala and the Traveling Sounds,” African Studies Review, vol. 53, no. 3 (December 2010): 61–76. 2 genres within Korea’s popular music as well as their implications. However, the upbeat idol constitutes most of K-pop introduced to foreign listeners is only a small subset of the nation’s popular music output, and musicians employ vastly different sonic, compositional, performative, media-presentational, and commercial strategies according to what cultural capitals and affordances they deem desirable for their musical genre and style. I aim in this project to analyze such strategies seen in a few South Korean popular genres, chosen at will to allow for a wide range of musical and culture-historical representation, and situate them in the history of modern Korea in which they originate.

Furthermore, I anticipate that an inquiry of this kind about the construction of musicalized political power and a national sonic identity will build upon and complicate existing musicological frameworks, and ultimately contribute to the long-overdue dissolution of the scholarly boundary between historical musicology usually concerning

Western music and ethnomusicological research that deals with everyone else’s music.

To lay out the implications of this project in more specific terms, I maintain that

Koreans’ relations with foreign powers from the late nineteenth century to today have played a crucial role in shaping the process of their construction of modernity and modern national identity, as well as the priorities and ideals behind expressive vocabularies made available to musicians and other content creators. Although I exercise caution not to reinforce the obsolete and oft-misleading paradigm of the self against the

Others, one must also note that ’ telling of the history of their modernization almost always emphasizes the rationale behind cultural and economic isolationism and its consequences, rarely specifying the intruders beyond “waeguk” (foreign countries) or

“waesae” (foreign powers). Throughout the twentieth century, however, the foreign 3 powers in question turn out to be primarily the Japanese, who occupied the Korean peninsula for thirty- years, and then the American, whose military, political, and cultural presence in the land grew increasingly prominent following the Korean War.

Those two groups of foreigners also had the greatest and most obvious influence on

Korean music, as I will point out at different junctures throughout this project. In short, what Geunshik and Lee Byeongcheon refer to as the Korean postcolonial modernity emerged out of the nation’s forced, arguably passive negotiation of modernity amid imperialist powers’ cultural influences towards the 1905 demise of the last Korean monarchy, Chosŏn, as well as the Japanese colonial occupation and the post-Korean War influx of American culture that followed.2 The modern Korean barometers of desire and success show considerable amounts of foreign cultural influences as a result, often to the extent of disowning the country’s traditional values and regarding them as obsolete and to be supplanted. I will return to a more detailed discussion of this conflation of the native and the old with the morally undesirable in the first chapter.

One must also not overlook the role of the late-1990s restructuring of the South

Korean popular in the shaping of its outputs as multifaceted media commodities produced and marketed as such. The financial crisis that hit several East

Asian countries in the 1990s drove South Korea to resort to borrowing from the

International Monetary Fund (IMF), representing a depression in the domestic economy and the end of the decades-long upward slope of a rapid economic growth following the

2 Jeong Geunshik and Lee Byeongcheon, Introduction to Shingminji Yusan, Kukga Hyŏngsŏng, Hanguk Minjujuŭi [Colonial legacy, establishment of state, and Korean democracy], vol. 1, edited by the Korea Democracy Foundation (: Chaeksesang, 2012), p. 19. 4

Korean War.3 In addition to marking the demise of the development-oriented economic- and social paradigm that had defined the modern nation’s history during the era of postwar reconstruction, as I will discuss in chapter 1, the depression also drove record labels and management companies out of business and led remaining ones to drastic restructuring into what music critic Shin Hyunjoon calls an “in-house system” in which

“all industrial functions such as production, distribution, and management, as well as development [or training] of artists and trainees converge.”4

The increasing fusion of music and other audiovisual media, including large-scale live productions, blockbuster music videos, and televised performances of , also heralded the emergence of large multimedia management companies that could afford and execute the manifold production process independently. The transition of Korean popular music to the realm of visual commodities meant the management model that had sustained it for decades, namely the recording-and-distribution scheme that relies on a few musical masterminds and leaves many details to musicians, would prove insufficient. Combined with the economic hardship that struck many smaller studios and labels, this transition forced an industry-wide restructuring to a vertically integrated system to ensure increased producing power. The resulting star system produces music designed as a purchasable commodity, and I find it only logical to assume that those with decision-making powers within the well-oiled machine strategize

3 For the implications of the pan-Asian economic crisis in question, refer to Yeung Yue-man, “Epilogue: ’s Financial Crisis and Its Implications,” from and Networked Societies: Urban- Regional Change in Pacific Asia (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000), pp. 249–52; Helen Cabalu, “Ins and Outs of Asia’s Financial Crisis,” Journal of Economic Integration, vol. 14, no. 2 (June 1999): 326–45. 4 Shin Hyunjoon, Kayo, K-pop, kŭrigo Kŭ Nŏmŏ [Popular , K-pop, and beyond] (Seoul: Dolbaegae, 2013), pp. 92, 95, 97. 5 the production of music that comes out of such popular entertainment conglomerates to appeal to the purchasing public, regardless of the efficacy of those strategies.

The South Korean government’s pro-culture industry policies ensured that carefully crafted products from such restructured entertainment companies not only sold to domestic consumers, but would transcend the boundaries of the country’s territory as a representative cultural export. As communication scholar Jin Dal Yong writes, the initial phase of the aggressive transnational marketing of cultural products that came to be known as the “Korean Wave,” or Hallyu,

started in 1997 … [after] the government began to apply neoliberal globalization policies to the cultural sector. … Cultural policies in Korea prior to the neoliberal globalization era had been driven by the emphasis on cultural identity through the arts. … The governments after 1993, however, … created a new priority of approaching cultural industries from an economic perspective instead …, resulting in an intensification of the commodification and capitalization of cultural products.5

As a cultural commodity of considerable weight and economic value, South Korean popular music also has seen crucial stylistic changes as well as more fundamental paradigmatic shifts. Shin writes that, more than a decade into the twenty-first century, the transnational consumption that the term Hallyu represents has evolved into “more than a mere replacement of one genre by another within the same geographical region, ...

[namely] the product of transcendental execution called by the Other, … made in Korea for non-Korea.”6 In other words, the term K-pop, as a subset of popular , represents a larger social and cultural phenomenon in which South Korean people define their national identity, in part, in terms of the nation’s place in the world, or how

5 Jin Dal Yong, New Korean Wave: Transnational Cultural Power in the Age of (Champaign, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2016), pp. 27–28. 6 Shin Hyunjoon, Kayo, K-pop, kŭrigo Kŭ Nŏmŏ [Popular songs, K-pop, and beyond] (Seoul: Dolbaegae, 2013), pp. 29, 31. 6 outsiders—particularly Westerners—see them. In this regard, the cultural export from the twenty-first-century South Korean popular entertainment industry represents the transnational cultural consumption having come full circle, to allude back to the obsession of foreignness and foreign material culture persistent among Koreans to this day.

The question then becomes: what do the prevalence of foreignness-as-vogue and the persistence of outward-looking musical styles and trends in modern South Korean popular music say about the people and the culture that produce it? In this project, I present four genre-based case studies and one medium-based one to capture this postcolonial Korean modernity at work. Because the implications of the construction of musical desire and fulfillment as a social phenomenon do not negate the engagement of performers, writers, and listeners alike with the words and the sounds in a musical performance, I center each of my genre-based case studies around textual and sonic- musical analyses in addition to the breakdown of historical and social contexts that accompany those texts. The history of each of those genres and traditions reveals that the music has played a role as a language of expression of the society’s values and ideals, shaped in large part through the history of modernization of Korea, during which its people encountered, incorporated, and reinterpreted the vocabulary of cultural expressions that those with military and political hegemony presented to them. The origins and the functions of political movements, historical events, technological innovations, socioeconomic strata, and other factors that affect the developments of musical styles and conventions often reflect such assimilation or recontextualization of styles and ideas in a more straightforward fashion. 7

In addition, the structure of its media institutions, as well as the practices and conventions prevalent in them, also reflects the power dynamic and ruling ideals within the society upon which its people communicate. In the sole chapter devoted to a media form—the television—rather than a musical genre or style, I will survey the formation of distinctions and hierarchical perceptions among musical genres in Korean popular music primarily as symptomatic of the history of the nation’s negotiation of modernity, in whose shaping the outward-looking tendency may have played a greater and more active role than introspective rationales for national identity formation.7

One must not overlook the power of the empirical—the sonorities and appearances that elicit multifaceted responses from listeners in addition to (and sometimes in spite of) the cultural connotations. George Lipsitz, in the chapter on pop stars in the age of digital capitalism from his book Footsteps in the Dark, paints a picture of how attractions and affordances work in the contemporary popular music industry. He writes that fans do claim some agency in their engagement with the music and with each other; although “boy bands generally draw derision from … their detractors, [who maintain] the success of the boy bands proves only the gullibility and poor taste of of the public that likes them,” in addition to contributing to listeners’ internalization of a distorted, problematic, and often internally-incoherent gender- and class hierarchies, they also “enable young women to negotiate these contradictions.”8 However, he maintains that cases like the Eden’s Crush, developed as part of Warner

7 The emergence of pop vocal within the restructured popular culture industry and its star system, which I discuss in chapter 4, symptomizes these distinctions and cultural strata, in large part because their musical and metamusical outputs assume the primacy of the television as the medium for mass distribution of those outputs. 8 George Lipsitz, Footsteps in the Dark (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), pp. 3–5. 8

Brothers network’s program Making the Band and marketed within the

AOL-Time Warner media machine, indicate that today’s media conglomerates often reduce musicians and their music to mere pawns in the large-scale exploitation of both the producers of the music and its consumers.9

Although the exploitation of the talents and appearances of musicians, as well as the purchasing power of their fans, does indeed constitute the daily operation of such media conglomerates in the , South Korea, and elsewhere, the success of a mainstream recording artist seems to depend on more than just generic, de-racialized

(“muted for commercial purposes”) musical mush, especially in a society far more racially homogenous than the United States like South Korea.10 Listeners do bring to table the cultural gauges and parameters they inherit from their surroundings as they engage with and process the sounds and looks of a musical creation, but the significance of what the musical particularities can achieve must not be trivialized. In addition to analyses of such socially-construed value systems and criteria, therefore, I aim to present sufficient data about how the different genres and styles sound and look in my critique of modern South Korean musical phenomena that follows, as the stakes that my case studies present and wrestle with are not, on a fundamental level, entirely foreign to readers with differing specialties and interests.

I also draw from the existing literature on South Korean history, some generalized and others more specific to music, politics, or foreign relations. Musicologists Lee

Youngmi and Shin Hyunjoon, among many scholars of South Korean music, have produced a body of insightful scholarly work, and I owe to them a large part of the

9 Ibid., pp. 7–11. 10 Ibid., p. 15. 9 direction this project has taken as well as fascinating engagements with musical repertories (Lee) and with conventions in the country’s media- and industrial institutions

(Shin) that have guided my research.11 In this project, I focus on the multifaceted and often ambiguous relationships among the historical events that Korea has faced, the specific musical-, textual-, and sonic choices that its musicians have made, and the reasons why certain sounds have won the favor of musicians and listeners rather than other sounds within the context of the institutional and conventional structures from which the music originates. I aim to demonstrate through this project that the Korean musicians’ construction of good musicianship as a virtue depends on the effective negotiation of what it means to be a celebrity and creative, properly situated in the historical moment, equipped with musical, aesthetic, and commercial strategies.

Syntactical- and other clarifications

Before I proceed, I must establish a few points about terminology and syntax. The first of those involves the use of the term “Korea,” unless otherwise qualified, to refer to either the nation of Korean people prior to the division that shortly followed the 1945

Korean liberation from , or the post-division South Korea, which comprises the scope of the present project’s inquiries. The latter also produces nearly all of the repertory of popular music originating from the Korean Peninsula known to the outside ; by contrast, the isolationist policies of northern Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or , have kept its musical products inaccessible to most listeners

11 Lee Youngmi, Hanguk Taejunggayosa [History of Korean popular songs] (Seoul: Minsogwon, 2006); Shin Hyunjoon, Kayo, K-pop, kŭrigo Kŭ Nŏmŏ [Popular songs, K-pop, and beyond] (Seoul: Dolbaegae, 2013). 10 outside of North Korea and the former Soviet bloc, save a few who have produced scholarly literature on the state’s propaganda music and other forms of state-sanctioned cultural outputs.12 Lastly, the already-common usage of unqualified “Korea” to refer to the post-division southern republic has already produced such widely-used terms as “K- pop” (Korean pop), which originates from South Korea.

Unless otherwise credited, all Korean-to-English translations that appear in the present text are mine. As a native speaker of Korean, I have put to use my linguistic fluency in both Korean and English while researching and writing for this project. All prose and song lyrics that appear in translation reflect my best judgment in preserving the order of phrasing and the meaning of the original Korean texts. When a direct, word-by- word translation produces an unclear or ambiguous phrase, I have provided an alternate translation in brackets.

All Romanization of names, titles, and song lyrics is also the author’s original, with the exception of the name of a prominent individual. I largely follow the South

Korean variant of the McCune-Reischauer Romanization System, the de-facto standard among English-speaking scholars of Korea and the Korean.13 Many group names, song titles, company names, and other terminology circulated in South Korea today include words and phrases in English, another foreign language, or gibberish made to sound like

12 Keith Howard, “Music across the DMZ,” from Music and Conflict (Champagne, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2010), pp. 67–88. 13 I do, however, drop the apostrophe that follows a consonant to denote a plosive to ensure a greater continuity of the text, since I judge the distinction that the omission costs to be minimal. When the name of an individual or a group has an established, preferred alternative to the McCune-Reischauer standard that has appeared in written sources, I follow the alternative. Such exceptions are common among Koreans, as there have been multiple standards for Romanization over the last few decades, some of which preferring a phoneme-by-phoneme approach to transliteration and others a syllable-by-syllable one. As a result, some proper nouns use the Revised Romanization of Korean, a 2000 system adopted by the South Korean government, and others use nonstandard transliterations. 11 a foreign language. I deem this symptomatic of Korea’s postcolonial construction of modern material culture and expressive idioms, and as such this will be a recurring topic throughout the present project. Whenever possible, I will present such words and phrases for the first time both with the Romanization of the Koreanized form and the original from which it was derived. I will then simplify all subsequent instances of such naturalized terms for the sake of legibility.

I intentionally limit the number of musical transcriptions included in the text. Like sheet music publishing during the age of , printed music for modern South

Korean popular songs is a secondary product for collectors and amateur musicians who want to play their favorite tunes on the guitar or the , rather than a primary medium for dissemination of musical materials. Most sheet music and songbooks (of which I was admittedly an avid collector as a teenager) came from small, obscure publishers that may or may not have secured publishing rights for the music, or sometimes without any information about the publisher. The excerpts I present in the text of this project are my transcriptions or reproductions of such printed music whose accuracy I have confirmed.

However, since the primary and authoritative medium for the present repertory is audio recordings and television broadcasts, I encourage the reader to procure and listen to recordings of the songs mentioned whenever possible.

While on the topic of musical transcriptions, I wish to emphasize that while their use helps demonstrate my claims at work, they are not essential for the aim and structure of this project. Many readers with musicological interest and expertise will no doubt benefit from such notations of how a piece of music sounds, and I will certainly make use of the time-proven (though by no means infallible) method of describing and 12 disseminating sonorities throughout the text when I find it useful. This is not a device to weed out “unworthy” readers, however, and I encourage those who feel less comfortable with musical notes—or even those who simply do not care for what the notations have to offer—to read on. I will put all necessary information in prose, and the notated examples will serve as an extra aid only. Additionally, where the written notations fail to adequately convey the complexity of sonorities I discuss (as they are bound to), I urge the reader to locate and listen to audio recordings and music videos of the songs, most of which are available on websites like YouTube. This has to do not only with such practical factors as the affordances of written text and those of online media that seemingly host every human creation, but also with the preferred mode of listening and engagement to which the music I discuss in this document appears to cater. The music, like most of popular music (in most conventionally acceptable definitions of the oft-problematic term) originating in the twentieth-century United States, arose primarily as performance first rather than as notated scores or charts, and only became documented in written form later. I therefore deem it only appropriate (as well as effective) to also prefer the same mode of inquiry for this project, and the written prose as well as its accompanying notational aids to follow the sound of music as performed. 13

Chapter 1

“Love, Goodbyes, and Tears, All in Four Beats”: The Birth and Development of

Tŭrotŭ, a Twentieth-Century Korean Popular Song Genre

When did Korean modernity begin? Though such labels of period designation can often obscure more than they clarify, it is clear in Korean history of the nineteenth century that certain political forces worked to hasten something while others sought to delay it, and Koreans at last experienced that something not in their own terms but rather at demands of foreign powers knocking on their door. The foreigners, including the

French, the Dutch, the American, and the Japanese, saw their efforts culminate in the

Japan-Korea Treaty of 1905, which concluded “Japan [would take] charge of the external relations of Korea,” and the formal annexation that followed years later.1 That something, namely the nation’s participation in global economic and political order, would in turn define Korea’s modernization—whose history aligns closely with that of the country’s . Not unlike the conception of time and self-situation for a

Levinasian subject, Koreans’ construction and negotiation of modern identity on the premise that they “are surrounded by beings and things with which [they] maintain relationships,” except their passive role in the process perhaps more explicit than the philosopher may have conceptualized the self to be.2 In particular, the genre and tradition of emotional love songs called tŭrotŭ, which first appeared during the Japanese occupation, demonstrates how the country’s music reflects the formation and

1 “The Annexation of Korea to Japan,” Editorial comment, The American Journal of International Law, vol. 4, no. 4 (1910): 923. 2 Immanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, translated by Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), pp. 39, 42. 14 proliferation of social ideals and norms in foreign terms. In this chapter, I will outline the ways in which the tŭrotŭ genre exemplifies Korean musicians’ search for musical inspiration and legitimization from the outside, particularly the Japanese and the

American, and how this instance represents the cultural patchwork that is postcolonial

South Korean modernity.

The ’s maneuvering and negotiating of a national identity against external forces dates back, at the very least, to the seventeenth century. Since the Qing invasion of Choson Korea in 1636, Choson maintained isolationist policies, shutting out

Western missionaries and merchants. The neighboring and Japan also adopted similar approaches, respectively called haijin (“sea ban”) and sakoku (“closed country”) against Western colonialists, and their eventual decisions to open their borders in the nineteenth-century led Korea to further solidify its hermit status. In the words of historian

Carter Eckert:

Koreans were aware of the fate that had befallen China as a consequence of continuing clashes with Western nations, such as the Opium War of 1839–1842 and the War of 1856–1858. The Choson government under the Taewongun [“father of the boy king”], therefore, rejected Western demands for trade in the belief that this would prevent such disasters from overtaking Korea.3

However, this self-imposed isolation from newer technologies and intercontinental trades prevented Choson from setting its own pace and terms for interactions with the Western powers as well as China and Japan, which had developed into late-colonial powers by the time Korea began to abandon its isolationist policies. In fact, Korea’s first modern treaty of amity occurred in 1876 when the Japanese, not the much-suspected Westerners, sought

“the same kind of gunboat diplomacy practiced by the West to ‘open’ Korea to unequal

3 Carter . Eckert et al., Korea, Old and New: A History (Cambridge, Mass.: Press, 1990), p. 194. 15 terms of trade and diplomacy […] [as] the logical extension of [its] self-strengthening effort.”4

Korea’s modernization and industrialization during the twentieth century therefore occurred atop its colonial legacy and within a postcolonial context. They provided a backdrop to the construction of prevalent ideals about concepts such as socioeconomic classes, cultural hierarchy, and gender norms. In the words of ethnomusicologist Eun-young Jung:

From the formative decades of Korea’s modern culture, both Western and Japanese influences have been pervasive, due to the long-term Japanese colonization (1910–1945) and the dominant American military presence in Korea since the Korean War (1950–1953), and these influences have changed and continuously complicated Korea’s cultural identities.5

The tŭrotŭ genre first appeared during the Japanese occupation and developed out of political and cultural climates of the colonized land during the first half of the twentieth century, eventually evolving in the decades following the Korean War into a mainstream musical style, an aesthetic compendium, and a musicalized national identity. As I will demonstrate throughout the rest of the chapter, the genre signifies the society’s operating principles of postwar reconstruction, industrialization, and economic growth, whose completion and obsoleteness towards the end of the century also coincide with the demise of the musical genre and the old paradigm of rapid economic growth and industrialization its musical properties and political background represent. Lastly, its legacy lives on through post-tŭrotŭ song genres that inherited and challenged different elements of

4 Daniel Tudor, Korea: The Impossible Country (: Tuttle, 2012), p. 19. 5 Eun-young Jung, “The Place of Sentimental Song in Contemporary Korean Musical Life,” , vol. 35 (2011): 72. 16 tŭrotŭ, as well as its twenty-first-century revival that demonstrates the persistent relevance of its sentimentality.

The musical anatomy of early tŭrotŭ

Tŭrotŭ, a genre whose name comes from the Koreanized form of the English word “trot,” shares few characteristics with the dance form whose name it claims to inherit. Rather, it is a sentimental love song genre that has constituted the backbone of

South Korean popular music for the majority of the twentieth century. Stylistically, in the words of U.S.-based Korean ethnomusicologist Min-jung Son, it features an “abundance of vocal inflections,” and it has received a spotlight in South Korean for its controversially ambiguous origin, possibly traced back to Japanese colonizers.6 One can certainly identify Japanese influences in the style, but it has more to offer to its listeners.

Stylistically, tŭrotŭ juxtaposes vocal performance practices of traditional Korean music with the instrumentation and patterns of , though failing to completely shed certain musical characteristics alluding to Japanese influences.7

The style’s hybridization of various foreign musical influences also reveals that postcolonial twentieth-century South Koreans may have regarded Japanese and American cultural influences as superior, more advanced, and worth integrating into its own mainstream culture, much as in the material realm. The history of this foreign vogue in

6 Min-jung Son, “Regulating and Negotiating in T’ŭrot’ŭ, a Korean Popular Song Style,” Asian Music, vol. 37, no. 1 (2006): 51. 7 The instrumentation of this music consisted of Western instruments in equal temperament, rather than traditional Korean ones. Its use of the yonanuki scale (minor pentatonic consisting of scale degrees 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, and octave) resembles Japanese enka, and the pronounced duple rhythm alludes to Western dances such as foxtrot, the genre’s namesake. Certain vocal ornamentations near the end of the phrases also depart from Korean traditions as heard in most of the surviving minyo repertory. 17 modern Korea dates back to the early-twentieth-century Japanese occupation, during which access to material and cultural imports remained limited to those with political and social privilege, or perhaps even to the final years of the Choson dynasty. In 1897, towards the end of the Choson era, King Kojong declared himself the emperor of the

Korean Empire, thereby signaling the end of the Korean dynasties’ self-identification as a minor nation in the Chinese sphere of influence, but in effect only enabled such foreign powers as the United States, , , and Japan to exert increasing amounts of influence over determining the shape and the course of Korea’s modernization.8

Diplomats from such countries residing in Choson introduced goods from their homeland and allegedly gifted them to the royal family and those attending to them to win their favor, thus introducing Koreans to goods previously unseen or extremely rare in the country and influencing their construction of modern consumption patterns and ideals around the influx of material culture. Journalist and culture critic Taesoo, in his survey of newspaper advertisements and consumption patterns of early modern Korea, points out that the wife of then-Russian to Korea reportedly gifted a variety of yanggwaja, or Western treats, to Empress Myeongseong, and former Japanese Prime

Minister and Resident General of Korea Itō Hirobumi reportedly introduced similar treats to Korean court officials to win favor of those who served the emperor from close proximity.9 Even after the U.S. troops during and after the Korean War introduced more of such products of the industrial West to the general public, material culture of advanced foreign nations signified economic and cultural superiority as well as prestige.

8 Daniel Tudor, p. 19. 9 Kim Taesoo, Kkot Kachi Piŏ Maehokke Hara: Shinmun Kwanggoro Pon Kŭndaeŭi Punggyŏng [Bloom like a flower to charm: Early modernity through the lens of newspaper advertisements] (Seoul: Hwangsojari, 2005), p. 101. 18

Similar trends of deprecation of the domestic and veneration of the foreign also appear in the cultural realm. Symptomatic of this, the development of early tŭrotŭ music collected strands of musical characteristics and performance practices that each generation deemed classy or otherwise definitive of the time, albeit eventually to become a stylistic patchwork far from the musical style of early adopters that it once was.

Lee Nanyoung’s 1935 song “Mokpoŭi Nunmul” (Tears in ) exhibits numerous characteristics of early tŭrotŭ. The song begins with an extended introduction, a common trait in many tŭrotŭ songs that makes them distinct from scarcely-accompanied traditional Korean songs and similar to Western operatic numbers or pop standards with a accompaniment. The trendy musical style, primarily disseminated by radio, thus emulates a live performance on a stage by prominently displaying an instrumental ensemble that would provide an overture to the sung verses.10

10 The harmonic characteristics of this example exemplifies the yonanuki scale prevalently used in the genre. The in D harmonic minor emphasizes the interval of thirds—between the third and fifth scale degrees, and the sixth and the octave. As later examples will also confirm, the typical tŭrotŭ scale resembles Western pentatonic scale, as well as harmonic minor when in a minor key, but it prefers those thirds to the chromatic relation between the leading tone and the tonic as the primary device to assert and stabilize the key identity. 19

Figure 1.1: Lee Nanyoung, “Mokpoŭi Nunmul” (1935).

Meanwhile, the lyrics paint a picture of a heartbroken bride at the Mokpo dock, presumably having sent away her lover, in great detail and parallel to the imageries of elements of nature around the southwestern port city, from the waves of South Sea, peaks of mountains, and Youngsan River that flows through the hills and into the sea.

Nam Insu’s 1954 song “Ibyŏrŭi Pusan chŏnggŏjang” (Goodbye at station) also exhibits many of these traits. Moreover, the big band style instrumental ensemble featuring an accordion accompaniment and an electric guitar solo evokes the flavor of a

Western musical style then associated with the learned, as do Nam’s clean tenor voice and articulated diction.

Figure 1.2: Nam Insu, “Ibyŏrŭi Pusan Chŏnggŏjang” (1954), beginning of verse. 20

Its lyrics are also located in a major Korean city, Busan, though in this instance the text makes no reference to concrete geographical features of the place, aside from the train station as the setting for the farewell scene. Its musical characteristics draw from a variety of styles, genres, and conventions: a Western style, a foreign musical mode, and a universal sentiment of love and sorrow.

The 1947 song “Shillaŭi Talbam” (On Shilla’s moonlight night) by Hyeon In is a relatively rare example of a trot song that departs thematically from the emotional love ballad mold. Its lyrics, written from the perspective of a modern observer of historic sites of the ancient Korean kingdom of Shilla, refer to the burgeoning urban culture that once stood. Many of the markers of the ancient civilization, or points of reference for the construction of nostalgia, involve sonic references: the sound of a temple bell of Pulguksa

(a Buddhist temple in Kyŏngju, the capital of the ancient kingdom), the sounds of traditional garments that people in the courts wore, and the chimes sounding around the city. The lyrics to the refrain urge the listener to join in the singing of “the nighttime song of Shilla.” A historic tribute in a quasi-epic tone rather than a typical love song, this example has made its way into the canon of early modern Korean popular music despite, or perhaps thanks to, its unorthodox lyrical theme.

Moreover, the genre title alludes to a foreign dance genre and the flair of cultural superiority that comes with the foreignness. Foreignness as a category of place- or culture-of-origin has a long history in Korean culture of being equated with superiority, or with quality. Traditional Korean culture, including music, has grown to mean antiquated (and something that advanced foreign culture must replace), and styles and expressive vocabulary from cultural infiltrators define what modern Korea views as hip, 21 trendy, and desirable.11 The last trait arguably crosses over into the realm of moral judgments, as it implies that cultural foreignness can serve not only to make a work of literature or music more commercially successful, but also to deem it a superior or more correct choice. The overlap of aesthetical judgments and morality, or the superimposition of the former upon the latter, is hardly new; Immanuel Kant, in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, writes:

For just as we reproach someone who is indifferent in judging an object in nature that we find beautiful with lack of taste, so we say of someone who remains unmoved by that which we judge to be sublime that he has no feeling. […] We immediately require the former of everyone because in it the power of judgment relates the imagination merely to the understanding, as the faculty of concepts, but because the latter relates the imagination to reason, as the faculty of ideas, we require it only under a subjective presupposition (which, however, we believe ourselves to be justified in demanding of everyone), namely that of the moral feeling in the human being, and so we also ascribe necessity to this aesthetic judgment.12

In other words, Kant argues judgments regarding beauty serve as a propadeutic for those regarding morality because human reason regards both as a matter of right and wrong rather than one of preferences—that is, a universal judgment rather than a contingent one.

In aligning with such a conflation, elements of aesthetic taste continue to bear a weight defined in terms of desirable and despicable in modern Korean popular music. In particular, concrete musical characteristics such as -beat duple rhythm and exotic scales (whether Japanese or Western in origin), as well as abstract signifiers like genre- and style designations, carry a qualitative judgment and define the looks and sounds of

Korean modernity.

11 A treatment of musical conflation of industrialization (or material modernity) and foreignness appears in Lee Youngmi, Hanguk Taejunggayosa [History of Korean popular songs] (Seoul: Minsogwon, 2006), pp. 52–54. 12 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000 [1790]), pp. 149 [5: 266]. 22

Tŭrotŭ as a mainstream popular song genre in postwar South Korea

Midcentury tŭrotŭ shows numerous signs of the music’s development into a working-class genre and of its incorporation of new musical devices and sonic elements from foreign musical styles. Synthesized sounds of instrumental ensembles increasingly replaced real ones during the and the 1970s, as they not only reduced production costs but also brought more distinctly modern timbres into the musical texture. The synthesized instrumental sounds define, to this day, a large part of the sonic identity of tŭrotŭ. Meanwhile, songs from this period also indicate that male tŭrotŭ singers began to abandon vocal styles that resemble those of Western art music, in favor of liberally embellished sounds similar to their female counterparts. Lastly, the lyrical theme of life’s trouble and its emotional weight became common, which musicologist and music critic Lee Youngmi also attributes to the Japenese-inspired early modern popular songs, and criticizes for “removing enlightenment ideals as well as awareness of the society’s reality, [and] singing sadness and meaninglessness but only within the confines of the private sphere.”13

Consider Baeho’s 1967 song “Toraganŭn Samgakji” (Turning around at Samgakji

[roundabout]). The song’s melody, for the most part, makes use of the major pentatonic scale, but the tŭrotŭ thirds from earlier examples no longer play a significant role in this melody, besides as an outline for the melodic contour.

13 Lee Youngmi, Hanguk Taejunggayosa [History of Korean popular songs] (Seoul: Minsogwon, 2006), pp. 57–59. 23

Figure 1.3: Baeho, “Toraganŭn Samgakji” (1967), mm. 11–41.

Lyrical, cantabile passages receive far more attention, their stepwise ascents and descents

(mm. 15–17, 31–33, etc.) complemented by intricate yet formulaic embellishments (mm.

20b, 21b, 24b, etc.) whose alternating upward-and-downward movements along the scale resemble guitar riffs. The melismatic embellishments allow the singer to convey and, in many cases, exaggerate the emotional magnitude of the lyrics. In fact, the emotion-filled delivery of lyrics even undermines the typically tŭrotŭ pentatonic scale

(m. 35), where the sorrow and unfulfilled desire of the subject derail the melody at the emotional peak of the song, albeit temporarily. This exemplifies the rise of what I will call tŭrotŭ sentimentality, which in later tŭrotŭ seems to replace the aforementioned musical traits as the defining elements of the style.

Nam Jin’s 1982 song “Pin Chan” (Empty glass) exhibits characteristics of tŭrotŭ as an increasingly stylistically diverse pop genre, with the Japanese influences over the 24 early tŭrotŭ all but gone.14 Thematically, the song of separation describes the musical subject bidding farewell to a deceased lover. However, the central emotion appears that of post-hoc loneliness of the lover left behind rather than the sadness or remorse associated with the separation itself. Particularly, the phrase “After all, life is to drunkenness with an empty glass in one’s hand” (mm. 17–20) seems to reorient the subject’s expectation rather than to reminisce about the ideal status of being in love that he left in the past.

Figure 1.4: Nam Jin, “Pin Chan” (1982), mm. 5–25.

The sonority and the structure of the song parallels this. The song’s structure and harmonic progression also departs from the ordinary within the genre, as it arguably

14 The song’s 12/8 time signature complicates the traditional tŭrotŭ syntax with its blues-like triple groove in place of a straight, four-beat rhythm. This song’s melody has departed almost entirely from the yonanuki scale, as the fourth and seventh scale degrees in the minor key have made a full return. 25 shows blurred boundaries among verses and the refrain. The two clearly identifiable parts of the song, the first and the final four-measure lines, also mark the only instances of the occurrence of the i–iv–V7-i progression. The first line fails to resolve to establish a stable tonic (m. 8), and leads instead to a D minor chord a measure later, marking the beginning of a thirteen-measure-long winded passage of harmonic struggle in parallel to the subject’s emotional struggle. Lost in the grief and the emptiness that follows, the subject roams through a series of chords consisting mostly of the subdominant and the dominant, over the words that convey emotions of pity (mm. 11–12), vain attachment from desperation (mm. 13–16), and acceptance (mm. 17–20). The tonic fails to last when glimpses of a resolution do appear (mm. 12, 13, and 15), and even the extended dominant

(mm. 17–19) falls short of building up a false sense of anticipation and arrives at the subdominant instead. The arrival coincides with the subject’s acceptance of the fundamental vanity of emotional attachments. Only then returns the regular chord progression, this time to establish firmly the tonic, as the subject pleads the lover to “pour any remaining sorrow in [his] empty glass” (mm. 21–25).

As a developing stylistic compendium of influences that make up South Korea’s cultural landscape, and an emotional song genre that defines the emotional tone that speaks to its public, tŭrotŭ by the developed into the definitive stylistic vocabulary of mainstream South Korean popular music and the standard for other subsequent musical styles. It promulgates a hybrid of voices of foreign powers whose aesthetics and, by extension, sociopolitical ideals have shaped South Korea’s postcolonial modern identity. This stylistic hybrid, ethnomusicologist Son Min-jung writes, comes in large part from the anticommunist and nationalist sentiments that drove much of the country’s 26 state-led initiatives at the time.15 It also reflects the principles at work behind the latter’s economy since it caters primarily to, and speaks in of, working-class adults with sufficient purchasing power. The sensation of the late 1990s would successfully challenge this, reflecting a shift in the primary demographic of its patronage and also prompting a shift in the target demographic of mainstream pop music. However, the shift of the primary target audience for tŭrotŭ from the middle-class elites to the working class, as the genre evolves into a mainstream compendium of styles, reflects the socioeconomic transformation of the South Korean society at the time, and warrants a closer look.

Ppongchak: A musical descriptor, an aesthetic shorthand, and a culture-class designation

“Ppongtchak,” a phrase derived from a verbal imitation of the pronounced bass- snare backbeat pattern of tŭrotŭ, has been a dubious synonym for tŭrotŭ in South Korean vernacular usage. On the etymological and most immediate level, the term describes and mimics a specific sonic property, namely a duple rhythmic pattern, commonly found in tŭrotŭ songs. The syllables ppong and tchak correspond to, respectively, the kick bass and the snare beat. Those familiar with early twentieth-century American instrumental music have seen the same naming convention at work in the case of -woogie.

However, in the case of ppongtchak, the term does not sufficiently cover the tŭrotŭ genre, nor does it seem to be a strictly value-neutral descriptor, as I will discuss momentarily.

Although the simple duple meter remains predominant in the genre, many tŭrotŭ songs

15 Min-jung Son, “Regulating and Negotiating in T’ŭrot’ŭ, a Korean Popular Song Style,” Asian Music, vol. 37, no. 1 (2006): 58. 27 also feature triple and other complex time signatures. As described earlier, the most recognizable characteristics of tŭrotŭ are the pentatonic-based scale and, more importantly, its amalgamation of foreign musical styles into a Korean mainstream popular .

On another level, the term ppongtchak refers more abstractly to a musical style that predominantly—but theoretically not necessarily—features said rhythmic characteristic. Although many usages of the term treat it as an interchangeable synonym of tŭrotŭ, it has also taken on numerous, often more specific, definitions. For instance,

Lee Yongseok, a charter bus tour guide-turned-tŭrotŭ singer who has released recordings of his -ppontchak hybrid (dubbed “tech-pon”) in Korea and Japan, defines it as a subgenre of South Korean popular music that combines elements of tŭrotŭ and of the 1980s.16 This mashup style thus features accompaniments by a and an electronic organ, in the case of his recordings, instead of a big band or a modern-rock-style instrumental ensemble. This incorporation of the electronic instrumentation reflects both the musicians’ positive response to the advent of early techno music in the United States at the time, and their need for an inexpensive, portable means to provide instrumental accompaniments in the studio and in live performances, just as Western music provided its creators. It delivers such a means, and also shapes the distinct electronic sonority of ppongtchak—driven primarily by electronic drum sounds and a harsh yet pronounced saw- or sine tone, whose mechanical precision of pitch and rhythm compensates, perhaps, for lack of subtle

16 Lee Nari, “Ppongtchak Tekŭnoŭi Wonjo Shinparam Epaksa” [‘Shinparam’ Dr. Lee, Ppongtchak-techno’s trailblazer], Shindonga, August 2000. http://shindonga.donga.com/Library/3/06/13/100661/. 28 expressions and nuances that human instrumentalists could offer. Moreover, it also provided the genre with an impression of cheap, mass-produced music.

The third, and arguably most crucial, level on which to make sense of the term ppongtchak concerns this political implication. The Doosan Encyclopedia describes ppongtchak as not only a synonym for tŭrotŭ, but also a “derogatory term that [one should] avoid using in a musical context.”17 Ppongtchak, in other words, also acts as a shorthand for qualitative judgments about a musical style. It occupies a low spot in a class hierarchy of culture, as musicians’ self-fashioning of the genre and mass media’s portrayal of it make clear, because of its design intended to appeal to the masses, as well as its audibly mass-produced origins—which, as I will describe in later chapters, musicians and producers in other genres obscure more coyly and strategically. At any rate, the association of the musical style to a cultural value judgment indicates the fall of an era’s underlying principles for the society and the rise of new ones, by which one would look down upon the musical and ideological relics of the past.

In ppongtchak, as well as the cultural distinction at play in contemporary South

Korean popular music more broadly, the primary conflict, or source of tension that justifies the placement of a musical style within the hierarchy (such as the highbrow- lowbrow distinction in Lawrence Levine’s and others’ writings), concerns the construction of the modern Korean national identity as a conundrum, being both domestic and foreign, introspective and outward-looking. The fact that the mainstream love song genre in question first emerged as a learned style at the pinnacle of musical development and global awareness, only to evolve throughout the second half of the twentieth century

17 “Tŭrotŭ/Trot,” Doosan Encyclopedia, Doopedia. Accessed 17 October 2017. https://www.doopedia.co.kr/doopedia/master/master.do?_method=view&MAS_IDX=101013000802520. 29 into a cheap, mass-produced patchwork of domestic and foreign styles, indicates that the place of a genre or style within the cultural hierarchy is in flux and determined by what constitutes and defines the society’s modernity at its core—in this case, the country’s response to external powers and events. The process involves the incorporation of a novelty culture into the mainstream, which resembles that of a subculture’s assimilation according to Dick Hebdige, although the tŭrotŭ as an elite cultural phenomenon never quite had the same political charges or connotations as the punks, mods, or Teddy .

Regarding the process of subcultural incorporation on the commodity level, he writes that a subculture assimilated into the mainstream

… communicates through commodities even if the meanings attached to those commodities are purposefully distorted or overthrown. It is therefore difficult in this case to maintain any absolute distinction between commercial exploitation on the one hand and creativity/originality on the other … Each new subculture establishes new trends, generates new looks and sounds which feed back into the appropriate industries.18

At that point, it picks up additional stylistic and aesthetic features and becomes mass produced. Once made so easy to reproduce and distribute to the masses, the culture gains reach to a wider audience at the expense of its ideological potency—or, in Hebdige’s words, “invariably ends with [its] simultaneous diffusion and defusion.”19 In this case, if early tŭrotŭ arose as the colonized elites’ romanticized from the political and ideological reality and an act of musical masquerade as their colonizers, postwar tŭrotŭ developed as the general public’s escape from the emotional reality.

The shinpa sentimentalism and the value of emotions in tŭrotŭ

18 Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (New York: Methuen, 1979), p. 95. 19 Ibid., p. 93. 30

Son Min-jung, in her writing on genre negotiation and regulation in tŭrotŭ, defines it as a “South Korean sentimental love song style.”20 Although the genre may include some songs that lie beyond the thematic scope of love songs, it certainly involves plenty of sentiments, both in its lyrical content and its place in the contemporary collective memory of Koreans, to such an extent that “sentimental” needs no further justification. The aforementioned examples, with the exception of Hyun In’s “On Shilla’s

Moonlit Night,” display the abundance of sentimentalism in the tŭrotŭ genre. Far from subdued, the songs’ emotional contents exaggerate affections and perils for a cathartic listening experience.

Such unabashed sentimentalism constitutes part of a larger trend in modern

Korean culture. Consider, for instance, a similar trend in melodrama called shinpa.

A transplanted form of Japanese shimpa, the melodrama genre most notably features, in the words of Golden Age Korean film scholar Soyoung Kim, an “overdose of sentiment,” or excessive and hyperbolic depictions of reality that fuels emotions to overcome, behind the fourth , reason.21 Similarly, Korean television networks have long saturated the airwaves with drama series to jerk tears of immersed viewers through such controversial tropes as “affairs, betrayals, revenges, birth secrets, and sudden deaths” as well as unlikely turns of events and sensationalized lines, to such an extent that national news outlets have identified them as a potentially harmful media content, for instance in a

Korea Broadcasting System news story from 2016.22 The trend of exaggerated

20 Min-jung Son, “Regulating and Negotiating in T’ŭrot’ŭ, a Korean Popular Song Style,” Asian Music, vol. 37, no. 1 (2006): 51. 21 Soyoung Kim, “Questions of Women’s Film: The Maid, Madame Freedom, and Women,” from South Korean Golden Age Melodrama: Gender, Genre, and National Cinema, edited by Kathleen McHugh and Nancy Abelmann (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), p. 192. 22 Park Hyeonjin, “Makjang Tŭrama Ŏdikkaji?” [How far will the ‘makjang dramas’ go?] KBS News 9, Korea Broadcasting System, 10 April 2016. http://news.kbs.co.kr/news/view.do?ncd=3262048. 31 sentimentalism, then, may be a broader media phenomenon rather than an isolated fad found in any one medium.

In other words, the tŭrotŭ sentimentalism is part of a larger cultural trend in midcentury South Korea that favored exaggerated emotional expressions, allowing for viewers’ or listeners’ cathartic experience, over sentimental verisimilitude. The shinpa drama provides the mass with an escape clearly marked as temporary, in which the audience can soak for a period of time and walk out. Modern popular art of the West, in the words of Theodor W. Adorno, reinforces the status quo social order by presenting conflicts whose outcome “is pre-established, and [therefore] … are mere sham.”23 He further writes:

The stories teach their readers that one has to be “realistic,” that one has to give up romantic ideas, that one has to adjust oneself at any price, and that nothing more can be expected of any individual. […] And the message is invariably that of identification with the status quo. This theme too is not new, but its unfailing universality invests it with an entirely different meaning. The constant plugging of conventional values seems to mean that these values have lost their substance, and it is feared that people would really follow their instinctual urges and conscious insights unless continuously reassured from outside that they must not do so.24

The shinpa drama, in contrast, assumes such an unrealistic, heavily exaggerated tone of expression as to make clear the fictitiousness of the universe, and the emotional turmoil and daring decisions amidst it become demarcated as off limits to the audience in the real world. Instead, it becomes a space in which to vicariously experience liberation from inhibitions and purge emotional baggage through immersion in condensed sentimentalism.

23 Theodor W. Adorno, “How to Look at Television,” The Quarterly of Film, Radio, and Television, vol. 8, no. 3 (Spring 1954): 220. 24 Ibid. 32

Tŭrotŭ, taking a less overtly dramatic medium, seldom features plots or characters that serve the same goal as those in television series or . However, the music does provide the listener with a clearly exaggerated sentimental experience in the same vein as shinpa films and dramas. Songs about falling in love, falling out of it, mourning a dead lover, and adopting an escapist lifestyle of drinking and sins, among other themes, all offer to provide the listener with an emotional roller-coaster ride impossible in real life.

In the meantime, the extravagant vocal inflections and embellishments, as well as a larger-than-life wall of sounds from the instrumental tracks, emphasize the fragility of the emotional escape, making the experience sound less real than it would be were the singing style closer to natural speech. The audio-only medium, already possessing less potential for verisimilitude, therefore ensures the emotional relief that a song provides remains temporary.

The lyrics to Song Daekwan’s 1998 song “Nebakja” (Four beats) refers to the tŭrotŭ genre’s characteristic sentimentalism. Far from concealing or obscuring the sentimental sensitivity that makes the genre stand out, the lyrical content of the song praises its musical embodiment of everyday, relatable emotions that acts as a point of identification for listeners.

Nega kippŭl ttae, naega sŭlpŭl ttae When you’re happy, when I’m sad Nuguna purŭnŭn norae Everyone sings the song Naeryŏbonŭn saramdo, wirŭl ponŭn saramdo Those who look down, those who look up Ŏchapi kungchagirane After all, [it’s all] in the kungchak

Kungchak kungchak kungchacha kungchak Kungchak, kungchak, kung-chacha, kungchak Nebakja sogae In those four beats Sarangdo ikko, ibyŏldo ikko Are love, goodbyes, Nunmuldo innae And tears Han kujŏl han kobi kkŏkkŏ nŏmŭl ttae Phrase by phrase, each break and turn Urinae sayŏnŭl tamnŭn Carries our stories Ulgo unnŭn insaengsa yŏngŭk katŭn sesangsa Perils and joys, dramatic happenings Sesangsa moduga nebakja kungchak All the world’s happenings in four beats, kungchak 33

The four beats of the duple-meter style, the song goes, contains emotion-filled events like “love, goodbyes, and tears,” as well as “all the world’s happenings.” The lyrics compare life’s theatricality to the heavily decorated vocal contours, in a straightforward tone. In the meantime, the tune of the song pays homage to the now- declining genre, displaying harmonic, rhythmic, textural, and vocal-technical devices characteristic to the style: an expanded tŭrotŭ minor scale centered around the minor pentatonic, a straight backbeat rhythm, a synthesizer-driven instrumental track that mimics the sound of a large ensemble, and vocal inflections including bending and vibrating notes. Musicians involved in producing these songs therefore are aware of the connection between the rich emotions and the concrete musical devices. They show no interest in playing it cool, and the sentiments appear openly, unobscured.

This kind of musical sentimentalism that offers an emotional escape to listeners, enabling them to soak, cry, and rally, permeates the tŭrotŭ style and comprises a central thread in popular culture geared towards adult consumers in modern South Korea.

Outward-looking sentimentalism beyond tŭrotŭ: The ballad craze of the 1990s and beyond

The escapist sentimentalism in tŭrotŭ seems to have become relevant in other, stylistically distinct genres. In particular, the palladŭ—or ballad, which rose to mainstream popularity during the late 1980s and early 1990s to succeed tŭrotŭ’s dominance—exhibits many of the latter’s key characteristics. The contemporary ballad most notably follows in tŭrotŭ’s footsteps as a musical style reflective of foreign 34 aesthetics’ cultural significance in South Korea, and also as an emotional escape for the listener.

This musical shift, in its profundity of impact, signifies more than a mere turn of a fad. As musicologist Shin Hyunjoon puts it, “If the dominant vocabulary and syntax used in discussing the music industry changed, as did the rules for discourses, what social changes does that imply?”25 The late 1980s, when the emerging, younger musical styles began to render tŭrotŭ outdated, also saw the decades-long military rule make way to a civilian government, and television was also becoming a primary medium for dissemination of popular music, giving rise to a structured mass media industry complex.

On a more fundamental level, however, the material and ideological world of typical

Koreans at the time looked radically different from that of their parents and grandparents, who had driven the formation and propagation of dominant popular cultural styles. In

Shin’s words, “This genre or style [tŭrotŭ] was viable because most creators of music started their career during the colonial occupation, and because those who could listen to recorded music at with a receiver set were urban, middle-class adults.”26 The young

Koreans who think, act, and engage with their surroundings differently from the previous generations would also produce and consume commodities differently, including popular music.

The palladŭ as a mainstream genre of emotional love songs has appeared in some scholarly literature. John Lie’s monograph on K-pop mentions the palladŭ as a cultural phenomenon that predates and has coexisted with the recently emerging current of

25 Shin Hyunjoon, Kayo, K-pop, kŭrigo Kŭ Nŏmŏ [Popular songs, K-pop, and beyond] (Seoul: Dolbaegae, 2013), p. 78. 26 Ibid., p. 143. 35 export-oriented K-pop (to be discussed in chapter 4), and Eun-young Jung discusses the prevailing sonic, sentimental, and visual vocabularies in the genre in her article on sentimental songs’ significance in contemporary Korean musical life.27 Although Jung situates the palladŭ as a genre with a universal appeal, “appropriately fitting in between overtly emotional, old-fashioned tŭrotŭ and youth-oriented [dance music] in the late

1980s’ triangular system of Korean pop music,” the emotional amplitude of the ballads does not appear to differ much from that of tŭrotŭ songs, as later examples will demonstrate. In other words, the palladŭ arguably constitutes a retrofitting of the older sentimental song genre into a more modern style, and aligns more closely with the tŭrotŭ genre, rather than any significant move away from it.

Stylistically, the palladŭ sheds the tŭrotŭ’s characteristic scale and vocal inflections in favor of diatonic scales (often minor) and rock-inspired singing techniques.

Jung explains that “the flexibility and simplicity of easy-listening music [of the U.S.] led many Korean pop singers in the 1960s to adapt the genre and to avoid the singing techniques involving bending and vibrating notes found typically in tŭrotŭ and Korean folk songs.”28 In addition to the updated vocal style, the newer palladŭ style also features acoustic instruments or more modern , rather than the audibly artificial rudimentary synthesizers that help made tŭrotŭ sound cheap and mass-produced. Those signifiers of the golden age of industrialization, in light of the newer musical developments, seem out of place and tacky. The new ballad style coincides with

27 John Lie, “How Did We Get Here?” from K-Pop: Popular Music, Cultural Amnesia, and Economic Innovation in South Korea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), pp. 7–65; Eun-young Jung, “The Place of Sentimental Song in Contemporary Korean Musical Life,” Korean Studies, vol. 35 (2011): 71–92. 28 Eun-young Jung, “The Place of Sentimental Song in Contemporary Korean Musical Life,” Korean Studies, vol. 35 (2011): 76–77. 36 extramusical references to the synthesized sounds and shiny suits in comical, ironic lights. The youth culture evidently seeks to overthrow, rather than complement or adopt, that of the previous generations.

Despite the updated sounds and musical conventions employed, the palladŭ genre hardly departs from the sentimental intensity that makes tŭrotŭ songs so easily relatable, instead falling back to sadness for sadness’s sake, so to speak, a mode of musical sentimentalism abstracted from what tŭrotŭ songs exhibit, even when surrounding contexts do not warrant the emotional depths. In other words, the music ceases to paint the text and sound that the lyrics convey, and instead follows standard style of the genre. The expression of such sentimentalism became slightly subdued, however, and Jung again attributes the shift to American musical influences:

… Although both easy-listening and tŭrotŭ were centered in romantic, often sad, [emotional expressions,] easy-listening love songs illustrated a mood of sadness and loneliness through obscure words in a less emotional way […]. In other words, unlike the typical tŭrotŭ expression of tears as heart-wrenching despair (or life and death relations) from the earlier periods, easy-listening songs in the 1960s held a temperate expression of sadness. 29

I argue, however, that this “heart-wrenching despair”-mode of expression persists in the newer ballad style more than Jung acknowledges. In addition to the musical and lyrical examples that follow, the relatively quick and easy success of the new musical aesthetic supports this claim. Even Jung admits that “Korean palladŭ could not possibly continue to enjoy the high level of popularity that has been evident for this genre for decades if they [sic] did not reflect and shape Korean sentiment.”30 The creators of the palladŭ style may have juxtaposed an unfamiliar aesthetic with a familiar sentimental principle to

29 Ibid., p. 77. 30 Ibid., p. 87. 37 produce a feasible commodity for consumption and enjoyment by the public that had grown accustomed to a particular brand of musical sentimentalism.

Byeon Jin-seop’s 1989 song “Nŏegero Ttodashi” (Back to you) is an example of an early Korean palladŭ song. It features the sounds of a piano, a processed and synthesizer pad. The characteristic tŭrotŭ pentatonic scale, or its harmonic minor expansion, has largely disappeared, with a cantabile melodic line along a natural minor scale replacing it. The minor key sonority provides an emotional backdrop of sadness, although the source or justification for the sadness is not immediately clear from the lyrics. The emotional depth of the subject reunited with the lover only vaguely translates to the emotionality of the song.

Kŭ ŏlmana oraen shiganŭl How long Chitŭn ŏdumesŏ sŏsŏnggŏryŏnna Did I spend in the dark wandering? Nae maŭmŭl tadadun chaero With my heart shut closed Haemeida hŭllŏgan shigan The time I spent meandering

Ikko shibdŏn modŭn ildŭrŭn to forget Ttaeron ijŭndŭshi saenggak twaetchiman Often seemed to have been forgotten Kogae chŏŏdo ttŏorŭnŭn kŏn But I couldn’t shake off the memory of Narŭl podŏn chŏjŭn kŭ ŏlgul Your face, drenched, looking at me

Amurŏn mal opshi ttŏna pŏryŏdo Even when [I] left without a word Ttaeronŭn mojin mallo mŏngdŭrimyŏ ullyŏdo Even when [I] bruised you with hash words Nae kipŭn panghwangŭl pyŏnhamopshi Through my deepest agonies, constantly Ttattŭthan nunŭro chikyŏbodŏn nŏ You stood by me with love

Nŏegero ttodashi toraogikkajiga For me to come back to you Wae iri himdŭrŏssŭlkka Why did it take so long? Ije nanŭn arassŏ, naega chungnŭn nalkkaji I know now, until the day I die Nŏl ttŏnal su ŏpdanŭn kŏl I could never leave you … …

The emotionally rich sensitivity of those genres has become a default mode of expression for the more modern genre, which in essence marries the emotional relatability of tŭrotŭ love songs to an updated musical style and sonority as well as a slightly fashionable, indirect way to phrase the sentimentality in lyrics. 38

The up-to-date sonority may have been sufficient, or at least instrumental, for the newer palladŭ style to stand out in distinction from the older, popularized tŭrotŭ. The natural-sounding instrumental accompaniments as well as rhythmic patterns and sonorities derived from rock and render the palladŭ a young, hip style in comparison to the tŭrotŭ of the previous generation. More than a typical fashion of emergence for a musical style geared towards youths, this dynamic owes its significance to the new style’s coolness that originates, once again, from foreign musical styles whose influx determined the shaping of a contemporary domestic style. In other words, the palladŭ style seems far from having emerged as a native response to musical developments that preceded it, but rather as a regurgitation of foreign musical responses that could viably form a contrast to the mass-produced, synthesizer-heavy sonorities and rampant, oft-tacky sentimentalism of tŭrotŭ, or perhaps the mainstream of the previous generation more generally. What, for instance, constituted the American responses to the mass-reproducible, electronic musical vocabulary of disco? What about those to the straightforward sentimentality of ’s lyricism and vocal techniques?

The sounds of acoustic instruments and the straightforward, simple musical texture of the Korean palladŭ style resembles the American styles of post-disco and rock in reaction to the disco craze. The absence of synthesizer sounds (or, given the actual production processes, the absence of conspicuous synthesizer sounds) comes off as authentic and sincere, and evokes the musical fluency and technical mastery associated with performers of American soul and music, whose fans sought to protest the extreme and sudden popularity of a musical style they argued lacked them. In addition, the lyrical content of a typical palladŭ song featured a brand of emotional richness 39 familiar to the tŭrotŭ-listening Korean audience but phrased in more roundabout fashions than that of a tŭrotŭ song would, and thus provided a subdued, more natural alternative to the intense sentimentalism of tŭrotŭ that may come off as excessive, tacky, or insincere.

Palladŭ songs also feature vocal lines that are more virtuosic, or at least more difficult to sing than most popular song styles that precede it, and thus highlight the singer’s skills and abilities. Not only does this shift in compositional principle add further to the sense of musical capital and authenticity, but it also replicates some of the effects typically associated with other genres that also emphasize technical fluency and musical flashiness, such as rock. One example is a loosely defined subgenre of palladŭ aptly named “rak palladŭ (rock ballad),” which incorporates many sonic and stylistic characteristics of while maintaining thematic and compositional philosophies of palladŭ music. This hybrid, designed to be an easy-to-disseminate popular style, affords the musician both the virtuosic spotlight of a rock star vocalist and the accessible sentimentality of a tŭrotŭ-singing entertainer, without the hassle of leading a live band consisting of multiple instrumentalists.

Park Wangyu, formerly of rock band Boohwal, made his debut as a solo vocalist in 1999 with the single “Chŏnnyŏnŭi Sarang (Love of a thousand years).” I will deal further with the culture-political implications of rock band vocalists making solo debuts in the South Korean popular music landscape in the later chapter on rock bands. For the purposes of the present discussion, note the harmonic vocabulary, lyrical theme, and instrumentation of the song, and which of them resemble (and may have originated from) the mainstream sentimental song genres and which of them rock music. Though no clear criteria set apart the subgenre of rak palladŭ, this example falls squarely into the 40 category, marrying the aesthetic qualities of rock-and-roll with the harmonic and thematic languages of tŭrotŭ and palladŭ genres. The song, set in the key of A minor, features

Park’s husky chest voice in the foreground and an instrumental accompaniment in the back, consisting of a string section, a piano, overdriven electric , a bass guitar, and a heavily-processed drum kit.

Figure 1.5: Park Wangyu, “Chŏnnyŏnŭi Sarang” (1999), bridge and refrain.

Texturally, the string section, a less common element in guitar-driven rock than in tŭrotŭ, plays an essential role in shaping the song’s sonority, whereas the distorted electric guitar remains relatively passive except for the solo following the first refrain.

The contour of the melody line forms a linear, upward motion, dramatically building up

(literally and figuratively) towards the two lines of the refrain. Besides allowing for a flashy display of Park’s vocal range and flexibility, the upward melodic trajectory also aligns with the flow of drama and emotions easier for the listener to grasp.31

31 I will visit another example of such linear dramatic-melodic contour, found in protest songs transmitted orally and sung by masses, later in chapter 3. 41

Harmonically, the song never compromises the stability of its key, even throughout section and the guitar solo, which emphasize the VI (F major triad) while in the subdominant key area; the subdominant, in both cases, leads ultimately to the minor tonic, via iio7 (B diminished seventh) and V7 (E dominant seventh). The “sad” minor-key sonority in this example, again, arguably serves no other end except the minor-key sonority itself, in line with the earlier palladŭ example. In terms of harmonic characteristics, the rak palladŭ resembles the post-tŭrotŭ palladŭ songs more than it does the rock genre.

Idaero nŏl ponael sunŭn ŏpdago I can’t send you like this, Pamŭl saewŏ kanjŏlhi kidohatchiman I stayed up all night praying, but Tŏ isang nŏl saranghal su ŏpdamyŏn If I cannot love you any longer Charari nado taeryŏga I would rather follow you

Nae majimak sowŏnŭl Even if my last wish Hanŭri kkŭnnae morŭnchŏk chŏbŏrindaedo Goes unanswered [unnoticed] by God Pulkkotchŏrŏm kkŏjiji annŭn sarangŭro My love, like a flame that can’t be put out, Yŏngwonhi nŏn kasŭmsogae taorŭltaeni Will burn forever for you

Narŭl wihaeso nunmuldo chamaya haettŏn Holding back all your tears for me Kŭdonganae nŏn ŏlmana himi tŭronni How difficult it must have been for you Chŏnnyŏni kado nan nŏrŭl ijŭl su ŏpso I will not forget you, even in a thousand years Saranghaekki ttaemunae Because I loved you … …

The lyrical theme also resembles more closely the Korean love song genres of tŭrotŭ and palladŭ than it does rock-and-roll. Although rock musicians, without a doubt, are capable of experiencing love and singing about it, this stands out because most South

Korean rockers grabbed on to the rebellious, anti-authoritarian themes and personae of

American rock music and appropriated them at the height of military authoritarian rule during the 1970s and the 1980s, often in an act of defiance against sentimental love themes of mainstream popular songs and the powers that deemed them inoffensive and wholesome. (I will discuss this in further detail in the later chapter dedicated to the music 42 of South bands.) The thematic resemblance also appears in another example of rak palladŭ, “Hanŭl Kkŭtesŏ Hŭllin Nunmul (Tears from of heaven),” a 2001 song by the band Junyfore. This ode to a deceased lover sounds eerily similar to the earlier example of “Pin Chan.”

I chopŭn sesangae narŭl namgyŏdugo With me alone in this small world Hollo ttŏnagiga ŏlmana himi tŭronni To leave alone, how hard it must have been Moddahan sarangŭn Our love we could not yet have, Chamshi kasŭme mudŏdwŏ Save it in your heart Mŏji ana urin tashi mannal taenikka Because we will be reunited soon

Naeiri omyŏn ne koun nunpitto Come tomorrow, your beautiful eyes Chuŏgŭro namŭl taejiman Will just be a memory Amu kŏgjŏng ma But don’t worry Ibyŏl ŏmnŭn taŭm sesangaen In afterlife, where there are no goodbyes Nega mŏnjŏ kasŏ kidarimyŏn twaenikka You will be waiting for me

Hanŭl kkŭtesŏ hŭllin nunmuri When your tears from the edge of heaven Pidwaeŏ naerimyŏn Come down in Narŭl purŭnŭn nŏe mogsori Your voice calling for me Chaja haemeida Will have me wander

Nado nŏrŭl ttarasŏ sesang ttŏnanŭn nal Until the day I die and follow you Kŭttae hangorŭme naege tallyŏwa When you will run to me Nae pumae angyŏjwŏ And into my arms … …

Most notably, however, Junyfore belts and cries in a vocal range and a singing style that match the emotional intensity, unlike Nam Jin’s contained, composed expression of the sentiments. These ballad songs, despite some stylistic innovations and newly introduced expressive vocabulary, quite clearly inherit the emotional approach of the mainstream popular song genre that precedes it.

Tŭrotŭ now

As cultural critic Ma Jungmi pointed out as early as 2000 in an article in the weekly news magazine Hankyoreh21, material and technological advances in modern 43

South Korea have created an awareness of differences between then and now and, in turn,

“a sense of nostalgia that reincarnates in the form of kitsch.”32 Indeed, the 2000 film

Panchigwang (“The foul king,” i.e., king of foul plays), Ma’s example, portrays material, musical, and cultural artifacts from the 1970s like professional wrestling franchises with certain fondness. The film’s commercial success, Ma notes, helped generate more secondary references to similar time-traveling simulacra in such forms as television commercials. As a result, such appeals to the public’s nostalgia saturate the contemporary mass culture landscape with relics created in the styles of the past. Music is hardly an exception, and rather than laboring over the kitsch-ness of contemporary cinematic, aesthetic, and musical simulations of past styles based on the profundity of their engagements with the surrounding world à la Milan Kundera, I would like to focus the current discourse on the implications of the recent reemergence of tŭrotŭ.33 Specifically, I will consider in the paragraphs to follow the return of the sentimental song genre and its apparent popularity among listeners of all ages, including those a generation or two away from those who comprised its original target audience during its heyday, in the contexts of the contemporary South Korean star system, the assimilation of intergenerational aesthetics in Korean popular music around the common thread of sentimentality, and locative specificity of live music consumption.

When Yun-jeong released her debut single “Ŏmŏna!” (Oh my!) in 2004, the

24-year-old had few peers specializing in the genre, and it became the first tŭrotŭ song to

32 Ma Jungmi, “Chonsŭrŏumŭi Midŏgŭl Chajara” [The search for tackiness as a virtue], Hankyoreh21, vol. 298 (9 March 2000): 26. 33 In Kundera’s view, kitsch is a term that opponents or decriers of a cultural construct would call it, for constructing an idealized past or impression and promulgating it in isolation from the here-and-now. For an instance of this notion, see Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, translated by Michael Henry Heim (New York: Harper & Row, 1984). 44 top the MBC-TV chart in twelve years.34 Whether it was the young and personable singer with favorable television exposures, the song’s catchy melody, or its lyrical portrayal of a youthful (and even infantilized) girl as the musical subject that helped the song earn a spot in the youth-oriented popular music market as more relatable and accessible than older musicians singing from the perspective of seasoned lovers, Jang marks the beginning of a handful of singers in their twenties and thirties specializing in tŭrotŭ in twenty-first-century South Korea.

Ŏmŏna ŏmŏna irŏji maseyo Oh my, oh my, you can’t do this Yŏjaŭi maŭmŭn kaldaeramnida A girl’s heart is like a reed Andwaeyo, wae iraeyo, mutchi marayo No way, why do you? Stop asking Tŏisang naegae wonhashimyŏn andwaeyo You shouldn’t ask me any more

Onŭl chŏŭm mannan tangshinijiman We just met today, but Nae sarangingŏlyo You are my love Haeŏjimyŏn nami twaeŏ Even though once we say goodbye Morŭn chŏghagaetchiman We will be strangers again

Choahaeyo, saranghaeyo I like you, I love you Kŏjinmalchŏrŏm tangshinŭl saranghaeyo My love for you is unreal Sosŏl sogae, yŏnghwa sogae Though we’re not meant to be protagonists Tangshin chuingongŭn anijiman From a novel, or a movie Kwaenchanayo, malhae pwayo It’s okay, just say it Tangshin wihaesŏramyŏn ta chulkkaeyo I’ll give it all I have, just for you … … The once-antiquated style juxtaposed with lyrics and a face that match the primary demographic that drives today’s Korean popular music industry, namely teenagers and young adults, certainly gains power. More significantly, however, those behind the new incarnation of tŭrotŭ adjust the genre to the terrain of today’s entertainment industry and the rules of its star system. Unlike her precursors, Jang and other young tŭrotŭ singers have talent agency affiliations, and therefore receive training,

34 Yonhap News Service, “Tŭrotŭ Kasu Jang Yun-jeong, ‘Ŏmŏna’ 1-wi” [Trot singer Jang Yun-jeong’s ‘Ŏmŏna’ places first], Hankyoreh, 6 February 2005. http://www.hani.co.kr/arti/culture/culture_general/9239.html. 45 care, and management from their label’s in-house staff. As I will further discuss in

Chapter 4, this pattern resembles how idol singers become crafted and manufactured for the highly monetized market more than it does how most tŭrotŭ singers built their careers largely on tour gigs and studio recordings, while signed to oft-disorganized labels that offered little systematic support or proper training. Those singers’ appearances on various music and entertainment programs on television also indicate that they also reach and appeal to similar demographics as their dance-pop-singing peers.35

The persistent ballad genre’s refusal to depart from the tŭrotŭ sentimentality also contributed to the wide public appeal of the resurrected style. In other words, young listeners find tŭrotŭ accessible in part because the mainstream popular styles, such as the valorized and legitimizing genre of palladŭ, never strayed far from the overt, exaggerated sentimentalism of the genre’s original manifestation. Therefore, musical styles of different generations merge and converge, the emotional intensity and potency that arch over decades of Korean popular music act as the uniting factor for listeners, and the stylistic difference become secondary.

Narŭl sarangŭro chaewŏ jwŏyo Fill me with your love Sarangŭi paetŏriga tadwaenna pwayo My battery of love is running low Tangshin ŏpshin mossara I can’t live without you Chŏngmal nanŭn mossara I really can’t live without you Tangshinŭn naŭi paetŏri You’re my battery … … Onŭl naŭi waeroun shigan sogaesŏ Today, in the midst of my loneliness Nŏŭi songiri piryohadan kŏl nan nŭkkyŏssŏ I realized I need your loving touch … … Since I don’t have you [Since I don’t have you] Naegae torawa nŏ ŏpshin tan harujochado Come back to me; even a day, without you, Nan salsuga ŏpsŏ I cannot live

35 Jang, as well as her peers like Park Hyunbin and Hong Jinyoung (both also born in the 1980s), have made appearances on music programs such as Heeyeol’s Sketchbook (KBS-2TV) and entertainment- comedy shows like The Radio Star (MBC-TV), building credentials as singers with skills, witty entertainers, and relatable media personae. I will revisit the premises and implications of these television programs, as well as the significance of the television medium to Korean popular musicians, in chapter 5. 46

… … For instance, Hong Jinyoung’s “Sarangŭi Paetŏri” (Battery of love), an upbeat tŭrotŭ song about a lover that rejuvenates the subject like a battery pack, embodies emotions in a way not much different from the way the song “Naegae Dorawa” (Come back to me) by the rock band Transfixion does, and a young listener accustomed to the sentimentalism of the latter may not find the former incompatible with the existing emotional world. Similarly, elderly audience members in the television studios for programs like Pulhuŭi Myŏnggok ( songs) on KBS-2TV will clap and dance to covers of classic songs, often in temporally mismatched styles, in part because they find familiar the mode of sentimentality.

The real potency of tŭrotŭ lies beyond televised performances, and any treatment of the genre would be incomplete without mentioning its place as a centerpiece of various gigs, or haengsa, of wildly diverse kinds and sizes. Virtually all such events, especially those that local governments organize to advertise their products (tŭksanmul), culture, or historic sites (yujŏk), feature musical performances, and though hardly documented by scholars in Korea or abroad, such events comprise a significant site and occasion of musical consumption in South Korea, particularly for middle-aged and older audiences and music geared towards them. For example, when Seoul’s Gangdong District Office presented the first annual Gwangjingyo Bridge Festival on 26 August 2017, its schedule looked like the following according to the event posters (Table 1.1):

47

Time Main Stage Street performances Vendors

15:00-17:00 Youth dance and choral performances A-zone, 6 teams

17:00-18:00 Interactive kite-flying segment B-zone, 6 teams

18:00-19:30 Parade, opening ceremony

19:30-20:00 Opening performance (Hong

Jinyoung)

20:00-20:30 Seoul’s street performance corps A-zone, 2 teams

20:30-21:00 B-boy performance B-zone, 2 teams

Table 1.1: The event schedule for the first annual Gwangjingyo Bridge Festival, 26 August 2017.

The 2017 Apple Festival’s program also featured numerous performance slots throughout the fifteen-day-long event:

• Saturday, 14 October 14:00–15:00: Pre-ceremony performances 15:00–16:00: Opening ceremony (topical performances) 16:00–17:00: Opening performance … • Sunday, 15 October 12:00–13:00: Special performances (local art groups) … • Saturday, 21 October 13:00–14:00: Special performances (local art groups) … • Sunday, 22 October 10:30–12:00: featuring Mungyeong’s local musicians 13:00–17:00: Chuhŭl Mountain Music Festival … 48

• Tuesday, 24 October 13:00–17:00: Mungyeong Agricultural Cooperative presents “Apple Day”: featuring Hong Jinyoung, Lady T, Vista, Hwijae, and more

Such taxpayer-funded events highlighting regional cultures provide musicians with a steady source of income and stage spotlights not subject to television’s production conventions, while creating venues for citizens of the locality or region to share a listening experience in the same space. They democratize access to live music, albeit with the caveat that the event organizers determine what musicians would appeal to attendees, and tŭrotŭ acts seem universally favored. Ethnomusicologist Son Min-jung’s observation at a local festival dedicated to a famous singer captures a typical fashion of audience engagement and experience at such events, though the event that she observed falls under a slightly different category:

Big-name singers were invited to the festival only for their performance, while the younger ones came to engage in other activities, including guiding the older singers around the stage area … The audience of the festival was mostly composed of senior citizens and middle-aged people. As the excitement increased, a group of old men came to the front yard right below the stage and danced along with the music, while the rest of the audience clapped together. They shared their togetherness through this particular song style, tŭrotŭ.36

I suspect that the aforementioned example of the rural Mungyeong Apple Festival included its program more concert spots and, particularly more idol acts in addition to tŭrotŭ singers, than the earlier example from metropolitan Seoul in part in order to compensate for the relative scarcity of live concert access in rural regions. The inequality in exposure to live music among regions warrants a more in-depth, specific inquiry.

36 Son Min-jung, “Regulating and Negotiating in T’ŭrot’ŭ, a Korean Popular Song Style,” Asian Music, vol. 37, no. 1 (Winter-Spring 2006): 71. 49

Characteristics of the tŭrotŭ genre shape South Korea’s mainstream pop music to this day, not only in terms of stylistic elements such as the rhythm, texture, and , but also in having established the kind of musical sentimentalism that subsequent styles have preserved. As a musical style whose development goes hand-in- hand with the nation’s construction of modern identity and represents its modernity’s ideals, tŭrotŭ represents the first significant step in the construction of a modern Korean sonic national identity. Its significance remains relevant and current, as the palladŭ genre, still popular and even valorized for perceived authenticity and musical legitimacy associated with it, inherits the tŭrotŭ brand of sentimentalism. Lastly, the recent reemergence of tŭrotŭ powered by the next generation of musicians also confirms its relevance.

50

Chapter 2

Decadent Ruckus, Celebratory Anthems: A History of Korean Rock Bands and

Their Music

From Buddy Holly and to , Pink Floyd, Nirvana, and , music of rock bands constitutes a major part of many retellings of the history of rock music. In mid-twentieth-century South Korea, rock-and-roll music of those bands arrived as an obviously-foreign cultural import and novelty at first, detached from its American origins in rhythm-and-blues and country music as well as the social contexts of racial and class relations surrounding its development, and connected to the new environment around it. As early Korean rock musicians imported and appropriated the sonic, syntactical, and visual language of Western rock music mostly through records and associated artifacts such as record sleeves and photographs, the partially transplanted expressive vocabulary evolved into a musical tradition related to, yet distinct from, rock music of the United States and the rest of the . Responding and contributing to the unique political, social, and cultural climate of the time, the musicians ultimately shaped a musical genre that, its foreign origin notwithstanding, constitutes the nation’s sonic identity. Today, the rock virtuoso remains one of the most prominent types found in Korean popular music, having gained both an elevated cultural-political status as musical artisans and media visibility as celebrities.

The rock virtuoso in its current form emerged during the 1960s amidst diversification of rock-and-roll, whose earliest incarnations many reviewers and critics complained remained “far less sophisticated” and its content more “spare” than 51 mainstream pop standards of the time.1 In defensive response to such reactions, some musicians began appropriating the concept of virtuosity from Western art music traditions in an effort to establish themselves as elites-by-association in juxtaposition to other musicians who, in comparison, lacked in musical literacy and technical savviness.

In the words of John Kovach, the author of Understanding Rock, what distinguishes the most cutting-edge of bands from other music groups is none other than their “significant evocation of art music.”2 Robert Walser, furthermore, follows the development of the heavy metal virtuoso in the United States in his book Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in , in which he writes:

The power chord seems simple and crude, but it is dependent upon sophisticated technology, precise tuning, and skillful control. (p. 2) … Engaging the listener with the conventions of tonal progress and then willfully manipulating his audience’s expectations, [Eddie] Van Halen reiterates Vivaldi’s celebration of the rhetoric of the virtuoso. Though it certainly exists elsewhere, this kind of individual virtuosity is a conceptual model of musical excellence derived from making. (p. 75)3

Most readings of rock virtuosity have until recently focused on the electric guitar, with such names as Joe Satriani, Yngwie Malmsteen, and Steve Vai gracing the long list of technically proficient and flashy rock guitarists. Along with well-known instrumentalists on other positions, such as Mike Portnoy, the former drummer and a co-founder of

Dream Theater, and Geddy Lee, the bassist, lead vocalist, and keyboardist for Rush, they have certainly pervaded a prominent genre in today’s popular music and constitute an important type or category of musicians that make up the music scene, despite

1 Albin J. Zak III, I Don’t Sound like Nobody: Remaking Music in 1950s America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), pp. 190–91. 2 John Covach, Understanding Rock: Essays in Musical Analysis (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 5. 3 Robert Walser, Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1993), pp. 2, 75. 52 maintaining a distance from the trends that drive the charts. Walser writes, and almost any casual observer would agree, that this rock virtuosity has its roots in Western art music traditions, and the appropriation hand in hand with the borrowing of the latter’s elite, high-art status.4

Lawrence Kramer, in discussing Franz Liszt’s virtuoso concert career, describes modern virtuoso as a conundrum, situated paradoxically between “establish[ing] music as a popular entertainment medium” geared toward “a mass public” and “establish[ing] music as a fine art.”5 To adopt the virtuoso trope in popular music only intensifies the paradox further: it is to seek recognition and legitimacy in the public sphere as an object of adoration, through positing oneself as belonging to a different (albeit supposedly superior) arena. How, then, does this trope play out in a culture in which professional music-making historically has had little transcendental value as a high art associated with it, and many things associated with the Western world hold an increased cultural and political value?

Susan Fast, in her entry for “Rock,” in the second edition of the Grove Dictionary of American Music, defines rock music as qualified by “particular musical characteristics and sociocultural underpinnings.”6 The remainder of this chapter will demonstrate how the two elements morph, disconnect, and reconnect as the musical style and ideology travel from one culture to another. Musically, Korean rock closely follows common idioms found in -and-roll, which migrated across the ocean in the form of

4 Ibid., pp. 62–63, 101. 5 Lawrence Kramer, Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History (Berkeley & : University of California Press, 2002), p. 69. 6 Susan Fast, “Rock,” The Grove Dictionary of American Music, 2nd ed., Charles Hiroshi Garrett, ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Emphasis added. 53 audio recordings and influenced local musicians. Sociopolitically, however, it picked up a slew of new meanings and contexts in the land, sometimes seemingly at odds with circumstances of the style’s origin. A further discussion about this appears later in the chapter.

Even before the heavy metal virtuosos of the 1970s and 1980s about whom

Walser writes, however, flashy instrumentalism from the blues, jazz, and traditions caught the attention of aspiring musicians in South Korea who incorporated musical languages they heard on records imported by Americans stationed in Korea. For those musicians who performed at venues for foreigners temporarily living in Korea, virtuoso instrumentalism was not only a way to transcend barrier, but also a workaround to the quasi-colonial disadvantage they had. Performing well at what one does, as well as advertising it, became a virtue and a shot at upward cultural and economic mobility and appears to remain as such.

Twentieth-century Korean modernity, from ideological, socio-structural, and cultural points of view, exhibits characteristics of post-colonial hybridity.7 The expansion of Japanese imperialism in the beginning of the century established an influx of social conventions, institutions, and cultural practices while the occupation’s police state kept the underlying ideologies from manifestation. During the latter half of the century, and arguably to this day, American military presence as well as cultural takeover drove a rapid Westernization of the aesthetic and cultural norms prevalent in the country’s mass culture and lay lives. The resulting cultural hybrid meant that early Korean rock

7 Jeong Geunshik and Lee Byeongcheon, Introduction to Shingminji Yusan, Kukga Hyŏngsŏng, Hanguk Minjujuŭi [Colonial legacy, establishment of state, and Korean democracy], vol. 1, edited by the Korea Democracy Foundation (Seoul: Chaeksesang, 2012), p. 19. 54 musicians, similar to the Korean folk musicians I visited earlier, expressed homegrown sentiments and messages through the imported musical styles and conventions newly available to them. Rather than to suggest a discrepancy or disconnect between the two, this points to the negotiation and layering of meanings that take place as musical forms and contexts travel. As I shall use the remainder of this chapter to demonstrate, the transplanted musical genre of rock has developed a niche subtype of musicians that actively advertise virtuosity and technical proficiency, bringing such virtues into vogue in

Korea and eventually using them to vocalize their political power within the domestic sphere. Also, the postcolonial and male-dominant power dynamic of Korean rock virtuosity represents the dynamic of larger Korean society, and epitomizes the inequality among different demographic groups’ voices in it. In short, the history of South Korean rock bands and their music demonstrates the process by which foreign styles undergo naturalization and assimilation into the sociocultural fabric of postcolonial Korea, while at once shaping and reflecting the nation’s cultural priorities.

“Keetah melodui” [guitar melodies]: Shin Jung-hyeon and the conflation of midcentury

Korean rock music with cultural decadence

South Korea’s authoritarian military regimes, extending from the early 1960s to the mid-1980s, sought to construct a nationalist mass culture that looked back on strategically selected parts of the nation’s history, in order to justify where they aimed to situate the country within a tumultuous political dynamic surrounding the Korean peninsula and to legitimize their rule in implicit, and later explicit, contradiction to the state’s constitution. Such effort to construct a single nationalized, historicized past often 55 conflicted with the youth culture of the time which took expressive conventions

(including musical styles and devices) of foreign origins and exposed the Korean public to aesthetics and contexts that the regimes deemed too politically potent. The case of

Korean rock guitarist Shin Jung-hyeon (sometimes Romanized as Shin Joong-hyun) exemplifies the development of Korean homegrown rock in midcentury Korea amid the state’s authoritarian government pushing its nationalist cultural construct.

Figure 2.1: Shin Jung-hyeon’s 1959 compilation album Hiky Shin Keetah Melodui (Hiky Shin’s Guitar Melodies). Courtesy of MNet Archives.

Shin made his stage debut in 1955, at age seventeen, as a performer for the Eighth

U.S. Army, stationed in Seoul and the surrounding areas. The seventeen-year-old guitarist, under the “Hiky Shin,” reportedly was a popular act on American 56

Army bases and in foreigners’ districts across Seoul.8 Shin’s band Add4, whose name alludes to the Beatles’ nickname “The Fab Four,” featured prominently Shin’s virtuosic guitar playing and composition style, and marks Shin’s formative step in shaping what

Korean music historian and critic Lee Youngmi calls Korean , which builds upon the musical language of blues.9

Guitarist Haam Choon-ho and singer-turned-musicologist Cho Taeseon identify the sonic vocabulary of Shin’s music as quoting heavily from that of American rock music of the 1950s and 1960s, arguing that his “earlier work merely mimicked the external properties of psychedelic rock … [but] once he understood what the psychedelic embodies, his lyrics became about freedom, and he abandoned psychedelic rock’s typical forms and styles of in favor of his own.”10 Haam and Cho find Shin’s use of overlapping riff patterns and irregular phraseology, as well as of the spatially ambiguous guitar tones and drawn-out instrumental solos akin to those in contemporaneous

American psychedelic sounds, as means to achieve dreamlike, shifted temporality in such songs as “Hetnim” [The sun], a Shin composition that appears in Kim Jungmi’s 1973 album Now. Similarly, Kim Chooja’s 1971 song “Kŏjidmariya” ([It’s all] a lie), another work written and produced by Shin, displays a hybrid vocal style that resembles that of

American soul musicians at first while incorporating the rough yet forceful vocal exertion and intricate decorative inflections.

8 Lee Youngmi, Hanguk Taejunggayosa [History of Korean popular songs] (Seoul: Minsogwon, 2006), pp. 265, 269. 9 Ibid., p. 270; Son Min-jung, “An Odyssey for Korean Rock: From Subversive to Patriotic,” Asian Music, vol. 43, no. 2 (Summer/Fall 2012): 49. 10 Haam Choon-ho and Cho Taeseon, “A Study on Characteristic [sic] of the Psychedelic Rock Focusing on Shin Joong-hyun,” Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial Cooperation Society, vol. 2015, no. 1 (Spring 2015): p. 550. 57

It has become a cliché to label such musical endeavors as a proactive cultural concoction made of foreign and domestic musical elements. Even so, it is worth pointing out that the imported musical style and the cultural contexts it accompanied found a new home in midcentury South Korea as its artists sought available conventions and languages, partly aided by a post-colonial tendency to admire many things foreign, especially American. As Lee Youngmi points out, the post-liberation influx of American popular music flooded Korea “accompanied by the authority of occupying military forces and material riches,” and the mesmerization contributed to a trend of musical and thematic exoticism, mimicking the perceived sound of the world outside Korea.11 Shin’s effort seems interested less in absorbing and repurposing foreign musical vocabulary as an end in itself, and more in creating a new expression using stylistic elements available for use, to compile a musical style clearly distinct from tŭrotŭ, which itself features elements from the Japanese enka and Western standard pop à la cabaret performers as outlined in the previous chapter. At any rate, the assimilation of the imported musical genre and convention-set entailed the collision and hybridization of musical styles, conventions, and meanings.

The imported countercultural conventions and their repercussions did not incite a favorable response from the country’s authoritarian regime during the 1970s. President

Park -hee occupied office from 1963 to 1979, including the latter seven years as the dictator of the Fourth Republic of Korea following a self-coup in 1972. The government led a heavily nationalist campaign toward economic advancement, triumph over the communist-turned-monarchic North Korea, and so-called cultural restoration—

11 Lee Youngmi, Hanguk Taejunggayosa [History of Korean popular songs] (Seoul: Minsogwon, 2006), pp. 142, 150. 58 or fabrication of a submissive, obedient proletariat culture distinct from what it identified as Western decadence or from anti-authoritarian liberalism, which Park called in a 1975 cabinet meeting “rust within the national spirit [or attitude]”.12 Park, in what arguably constitutes an executive overreach, ordered the maximum prosecution permitted by law for marijuana use, which he deemed to “wreck the country in such a critical time as

[then], when against the [North Korean] Communists could determine life and death,” and targeted celebrities with high mass media visibility, using the anti-drug law to fight the cultural decadence.13 The cultural aspect of this government campaign culminated in the blacklisting of numerous musicians including Shin and the already- introduced Cho Yong-pil, retroactively enforcing an anti-drug piece of legislation to prosecute artists who allegedly used marijuana. Such government crackdown effectively destroyed the youth culture that had thrived and prospered since the turn of the decade, as evident in the popularity of music festivals, brass bands, and American folk musicians.14

Such institutionalized effort to fabricate a nationalist, myŏngrang (“sound” or

“cheerful”) culture produced a few consequences. First, it defined a lay culture whose supposedly nationalist undertone effectively contradicted the country’s position in international politics. During his term as president, Park pursued restored diplomatic relations with Japan, beginning with the signing with the Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea in 1965, which defined the terms of war reparations the Korean government would demand from the Japanese. Meanwhile, the

12 Park Tae-, “Kwangbok 70-chunyŏn Tŭkpyŏl Kihwek: 21. Yŏnyein Taemacho Sakŏn” [Korean liberation’s 70th anniversary special series, part 21: The celebrity marijuana scandal], , 26 August 2015. 13 Ibid. Also see Lee Youngmi, “Taemacho Sakŏn: Kŭ 1975-nyŏnŭi Ŭimi” [ marijuana incident and its implications], Yŏksa Pipyŏng vol. 112 (Fall 2015): 206–31. 14 Son Min-jung, “An Odyssey for Korean Rock: From Subversive to Patriotic,” Asian Music, vol. 43, no. 2 (Summer/Fall 2012): 48, 50. 59

United States also continued to grow its presence on the Korean peninsula as a military, cultural, and economic influence. Ko Won, a Professor of Humanities at Seoul National

University, writes in a volume compiled by the Korea Democracy Foundation that the

United States Army military government that took over the postwar Korean peninsula, albeit steered partly by the Korean public’s mixed responses, shaped the political institutional structure of modern Korea.15 As he writes, the “policies of the U.S. Army military government retained the institutions put in place by Japanese imperialists and their status quo dynamics,” and the groups that led the effort to establish the modern

Korean nation-state “were fundamentally pro-Japanese and pro-American, even as the new nation-state claimed to be a nationalist one succeeding the independent spirit behind the March 1st movement.”16 As a result, the colonial legacy of the Japanese rule followed by the American influence remains never adequately addressed, and the modern Korean state’s failure to identify its post-colonial ties and practices fade the reliability of its claims to foster a national spirit.

Second, it defined the prevalent culture that it aimed to construct in terms of reactions, or responses, to external forces and threats. In other words, the Park administration sought to promote a culture that had little substance that represented or reflected Korea despite the nationalist label, instead defining the culture in terms of what it was not. To this day, an anti-Communist sentiment prevails in the southern part of the

15 Ko Won, “Yŏkdongjŏk Chŏhang—Yŏkdongjŏk Sunŭng: Yijungsŏngŭi Chŏngchi Tonghak” [Proactive resistance and proactive adaptation: twofold political dynamics], from Shingminji Yusan, Kukga Hyŏngsŏng, Hanguk Minjujuŭi [Colonial legacy, establishment of state, and Korean democracy], vol. 1, edited by the Korea Democracy Foundation (Seoul: Chaeksesang, 2012), pp. 68–69. 16 Ibid., pp. 54, 72. The March First Movement of 1919 was a “series of demonstrations for Korean national independence from Japan,” which was, while it “failed to bring about its paramount goal of national independence, … significant in strengthening national unity, [and led] to the birth in of the Korean Provisional Government.” (Encyclopædia Britannica) 60 divided Korean peninsula to a considerable degree, having constituted the core of the

Korean right- ideology since the early twentieth century and, in turn, the ruling ideology of the postwar South Korean government from its inception.17 The greatest success for the construction and dissemination of the nationalist myŏngrang culture, perhaps, is a revived interest in studying traditional Korean culture and incorporating aspects of it into contemporary art. Such efforts extended beyond music, of course; a surge of biographies and period dramas reintroduced historical figures to the general public, and the Korean Folk Village (Hanguk Minsokchon), a living museum and theme park, was founded in 1974 with the Korean government as a major sponsor.18

As part of this highly strategic construction of a nationalist Korean past, contemporary contributed original works to the minyo (“folk songs”) repertory, and some prevalent musical traits of the genre made their way into mainstream popular music, such as the widespread use of the minor pentatonic scale and vocal inflections, based on oft-politicized musicological research during the colonial and postcolonial years.19 However, such rekindling of connection to the past largely remained selective, and only parts of the traditional folk culture that would help further the governmental agenda toward unnatural soundness and positivity made the cut, leaving

17 For a history of anti-Communist patriotism’s place in modern Korean nationalism, see Jeon Jaeho, “Hanguk Minjokjuŭiŭi Pangong Kukgajuŭijŏk Sŏnggyŏk” [Anti-Communist patriotism in Korean nationalism], in Shingminji Yusan, Kukga Hyŏngsŏng, Hanguk Minjujuŭi [Colonial legacy, establishment of state, and Korean democracy], vol. 1, edited by the Korea Democracy Foundation (Seoul: Chaeksesang, 2012), pp. 129–66. 18 Timothy R. Tangherlini, “Chosŏn Memories: Spectatorship, Ideology, and the Korean Folk Village,” from Sitings: Critical Approaches to Korean Geography, edited by T. R. Tangherlini and Sallie Yea (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008), p. 61. 19 Lee Youngmi, Hanguk Taejunggayosa [History of Korean popular songs] (Seoul: Minsogwon, 2006), pp. 95–96. Also, for more on the various regional minyo styles and their characteristics, as well as which of those constitute the modern reconstruction of minyo traits, see Keith Howard, “Capturing the Folk,” from Perspectives on Korean Music, vol. 1 (Aldershot & Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 81–98. 61 out politically potent themes such as empowerment of the masses and sentiments like longing and remorse. When compared to German nationalists’ similar effort to construct a single German history and tradition in the nineteenth century, this Koreanness has seen a striking failure to gain popularity and momentum as a living cultural movement, despite the success and persistence of the regime that created it and its political successors.

Today, the contemporary minyo repertory largely remains in the state-controlled music curriculum and occasional performances, far from the musical currents of the day.

Musical characteristics adopted from minyo have fallen out of listeners’ favor, difficult to find in contemporary pop songs. Contemporary artists and musicians often quote the aesthetic of the myŏngrang culture, but usually in an ironic or nearly condescending tone, with such artifacts as PSY’s album covers and the film Pumhaeng Chero (“Manner zero,”

Geun-shik Jo, dir., 2002) reflecting not only the construction of nostalgia but also an aesthetic, political, and moral judgment of devaluing a cultural current born out of an obsolete political regime’s conflation of aesthetic, behavioral, nationalistic, and ideological values to gain grounds for its actions.

Figure 2.2: The teaser poster image for PSY’s single “Paektŭpokhaeng,” featuring a cartoon style and a block font reminiscent of state-sponsored advertising campaigns. Courtesy of YG Entertainment. 62

Figure 2.3: Poster image for Pumhaeng Chero (Geun-shik Jo, dir., 2002), courtesy of KM Culture.

Third, and perhaps of the greatest significance for the purposes of the current inquiry, it disarmed the youth culture and subdued its political potency by fabricating a sound, content-with-the-status-quo culture and painting the latter as virtuous.20 Legal

(and quasi-legal) as well as political crackdown on celebrities promoting the liberal

Western culture, such as the marijuana scandal of 1975, stemmed from this ongoing, society-wide campaign of demonizing and marginalizing the youth culture and what

20 Kim Jiyeong, Maehogae Kŭndae, Ilsangŭi Mohŏm [Charming modernity, adventurous mundanity] (Seoul: Dolbaegae, 2016), pp. 274–84. 63 contributed to its vocabulary, which happened to include much of American mainstream culture and counterculture.

The myŏngrang culture as well as its ideological backend stressing correct behavior and sound spirit also shaped the codified moral and ethical standards disseminated through state-designed public school curriculum, best summarized by the title of the ethics textbook for first- and second-grade pupils, “parŭn saenghwal” (correct life). This standardized moral system effectively discouraged political dissension as much as it denounced moral and cultural digression, and categorized much of the Korean rock music and musicians discussed in this chapter as unsound and undesirable, since they were decadent or non-Korean, if not both. Rock music in Korea, as a result, largely remained underground and off the highly visible plane of mainstream popular music, and occupied a second-rate position in the history of modern Korean pop music until recent years, when music festivals and television programs brought rock bands and their music back into the spotlight.

The passive, wholesome, and fundamentally Korean lay culture that the Park regime aimed to construct proved dubious as a nationalist movement, yet effective as an act of consolidating political power because it was selective in its denouncement of foreign culture. Western art music, while never actively praised as a cultural brainchild of the regime to the same extent as the traditional folk culture, hardly received the kind of persecution that rock and pop music did. In contrast, Shin Jung-hyeon subscribed to a nationalist value similar to what the Park administration appeared to advocate, claiming to further the development of a uniquely Korean rock sound, still at odds with the Korean government during and since the 1970s. Rock and rock-influenced musicians since Shin 64 also strengthened the nationalist trope; Cho Yong-pil implemented the vocal timbre and techniques from into his sound, while Kim Dokyun, the guitarist for the rock band Baekdusan whom I will revisit shortly, pioneered guitar sanjo (a Korean freeform instrumental genre). In the end, the government agenda amounted to a systematic, institutional crackdown of politically potent youth culture in the name of combating foreign cultural influences that corrupt. This kind of cultural protectionism set the tone of the South Korean government’s response to youth culture for the decades to come, with its rationale found behind such longtime practices as state censorship of recordings and registration requirements for labels and record distributors, both of which remained in place until the 1990s.

Battle of the bands: The narrative of the primacy of the guitar

As in the United States, guitar-driven rock bands dominated the rock music scene in Korea in the 1980s. Although Korean rock bands, still with the stigma of decadence, corruption, and suspiciously foreign, never penetrated the mainstream charts and mass media programming to the same extent as their American counterparts, their live shows attracted devoted fans and their songs occasionally competed with adult contemporary ballad, tŭrotŭ, and folk-pop numbers that saturated the airwaves. Cho Yong-pil churned out chart-topping hits heavily infused with rock sounds, and Jeon Ingwon of the band

Deulgukhwa released the solo single “Kŭgommani nae sesang” (Only that is my world) in 1984 before the release of the full album by the band a year later. The second half of the decade saw a slightly greater representation of rock bands on pop music charts, but band music remained largely out of reach for lay listeners whose primary exposure to 65 contemporary popular music occurred through television and radio, which preferred solo standard pop acts to rock bands, because the former made the production process easier and came with less political risks. In addition, the scarce discography of many popular rock bands from this time suggests that they preferred live shows to mass media appearances, perhaps to retain as much control as possible over the sound and the visual, as well as to avoid forgoing the high energy of the corporeal live concert experience in which the performers and the listeners share the same space.21

Most rock bands from that era maintained little more than local followings and unstable lineups, but a small percentage of them did manage to sustain steady careers and to reach mainstream audiences, often thanks to star personalities and catchy tunes allowing for easier crossover ventures in the pop market. Three bands in particular enjoyed commercial success and wide, lasting popularity with guitar-driven band rock:

Boohwal, (pronounced “SHEE-nah-wee”), and Baekdusan. Each of these three bands, while representing a broad spectrum of musical styles and conventions often swept under the “rock” category, happens to be centered around one guitarist-songwriter whose playing and composing style has largely decided the sound of the respective band.

Kim Taewon of Boohwal, Shin Daechul (son of Shin Jung-hyeon) of Sinawe, and Kim

Dokyun of Baekdusan each has remained the backbone of his band’s musical creativity albeit not always in the front of the stage. In Korean popular music, disproportionate amounts of attention and fame go to the vocalist of a band, exemplified by the fact that commercially successful bands often have their careers jeopardized or truncated because

21 Of course, the emphasis on the visual is not to be taken lightly. The thrill of seeing (I use this word intentionally) a virtuosic rock musician comes largely from, in a literal sense, seeing the performance. This alludes again to early virtuosos in the Western art music tradition, whose “visual excess” the public adored (Kramer, p. 71). 66 industry pressure encourages the vocalists to seek solo careers. As a result, the guitarist as a strong steering force behind a band’s music may sound contrary to the dynamic of the music scene, but in fact is nearly inevitable at least among rock bands, instead frequently rendering the frontperson and vocalist as a supporting musician of sorts, secondary in terms of musical agency and influence in shaping the band’s sonic identity and stylistic language.

The instability of rock band lineups and constant, one-directional crossover into pop also lead to the increasing influx of rock repertory into mainstream pop. Boohwal’s song “Hoesang III,” released in 1987, appeared again in ex-vocalist Lee Seungchul’s first solo album two years later in a truncated form under a new title, “Majimak Konsŏtŭ” (the last concert); the latter version cuts guitar solos, focusing spotlight on the vocalist alone, who now has an uninterrupted, continuous part. The shortened length of the track, at four minutes and twenty-four seconds compared to the nearly six-minute-long original, also made it palatable for general pop listeners and playable on the radio. Similarly, “Heeya,” from Boohwal’s debut album with Lee on vocal, appears on Lee’s first solo album in a truncated form. Here, the extended verse-refrain structure gives way to a simple verse- refrain structure without repetitions or instrumental solos, again concentrating the spotlight on the vocalist. The resulting track cuts the runtime down to barely over two minutes, from the original’s five-and-half minutes. Now that the instrument solo has disappeared and the instrumental ensemble has been reduced to but a background accompaniment, often replaced by a tape playback, the spotlight now shines the solo singer, rather than being shared among the members of a band. 67

Such subordination of flashy, eye-catching instrumental parts to a mere part of the backing track parallels the manner in which solo pop vocalists delivered their songs, on or off the air, which often kept the instrumentalists offstage or replaced them entirely with prerecorded tracks. As a result, it was a common practice in mainstream Korean pop to anonymize and genericize instrumental parts in a song and keep musicians who play them as session musicians. Rock bands go against this pattern, and therefore often struggled to claim their space in the ears of listeners accustomed only to catchy vocal melodies and in television whose production equipment, personnel, and conventions often prohibited effective delivery of instrumental brilliance.

The earliest materials from Boohwal, which began as a cover band during the first half of the 1980s, sound more like blues-influenced than heavy metal as the band’s promotional materials and interviews claimed. As Kim Taewon, the group’s guitarist, reveals in a televised interview, the group attracted criticism from bands like

Sinawe and Baekdusan, as well as their fans, for lacking in its music lyrical and sonic properties characteristic of rock and heavy metal, such as hard, heavily distorted power chords and virtuosic guitar riffs.22 Perhaps indicative of Kim’s priority, Moore’s

“Parisienne Walkways,” whose primary lead guitar line consists of a series of simple walk-downs along the harmonic minor scale, has appeared frequently in Kim’s live performances in part and in its entirety. Moreover, several of Kim’s compositions for the band feature melodic, harmonic, and sonic choices that hint at a musical direction closer to mainstream pop-ballad than the music of most rock bands. The aforementioned track

22 Kim Taewon, televised interview, Nollŏwa, MBC-TV, 2 February 2009. 68

“Heeya,” from the band’s first album, for example, exhibits numerous traits of a pop song played on rock instruments rather than those of a rock number.23

Figure 2.4: Boohwal, “Heeya” (1986), mm. 1–8.

This ballad-oriented approach that Boohwal took differs in tone and, to a degree, in attitude from other bands that stayed closer to their underground rock roots, in terms of musical style and economic model. Sinawe, for instance, remained close to the musical conventions and vocabulary of metal for eleven years after its 1986 debut album, aptly titled Heavy Metal Sinawe, until its sixth album Ŭntwe Sŏnŏn (“Retirement announcement”), released in 1997, began to display signs of the band’s shift to an alternative-rock style similar to what many American band adopted a few years earlier.

Its title track “Ŭntwe Sŏnŏn,” for instance, departs from the band’s previous metal-based syntax and sound, and the sound of overdriven electric guitars with ample reverbs and delays replaces that of crisp, heavily distorted guitars. Vocals sound less piercing and

23 The song begins with a subtle note on the tonic played on the electric guitar, upon the backdrop of (prerecorded) sound of raindrops. The vocal entrance by Lee Seungchul clarifies where the lies, and immediately complicates the stability of the tonic by leading the harmonic move from the major tonic to the major mediant. This rise to a chord that hints at the relative minor key occurs on the first syllable of the word “shiltago” (to dislike, to reject, or to say “no”), a word central to the subject’s interpretation of the dead lover’s departure as a rejection, foreshadowing the lyrical development throughout the rest of the song. The bridge section set in relative minor, which follows the major-key verse, reveals the lover’s departure was by death rather than by a breakup, and the extended chorus-vamp hybrid that follows returns to the home key area on a cry for the deceased lover. The melodic line also remains linear and conjunct, and its delivery retains an airy, bright quality, escalating only along with the dramatic intensity of the lyrical content. This thematic thread as well as the drama-driven construction of musical contour resembles characteristics of mainstream tŭrotŭ and palladŭ, which many rock musicians equated with the flawed status quo of the society and aimed to abandon. 69 more distant, and syncopated rhythms in the melody as well as off-beat snare drum strikes introduce rhythmic variation. More importantly for the present argument, the overall texture of the hardly seems to highlight the lead vocalist any more than each of the other instruments that constitute the band. This production decision parallels the band’s approach to shaping and constructing its sound, making its musical language less accessible to lay listeners of contemporary pop music but possibly allowing the group to remain a collective musical subject rather than a (perceived) accessory to a lead vocalist.24 In other words, if Boohwal’s choice to foreground the vocals made the band’s sound more familiar or even more palatable to lay listeners accustomed to the sonic landscape of pop music, Sinawe maintained a collective identity as a band.

That is not to suggest a thoroughly egalitarian band dynamic or the absence of a spotlighted member. In live performances, the frontman and lead vocalist, of which there have been many, takes the center stage. However, in terms of musical agency and creative direction of the band, guitarist and chief songwriter Shin Daechul spearheads most decisions and receives media spotlight. The primacy of the guitar and the guitarist, a norm in many (though not all) American and European rock bands, remains the case with both models, and both bands have had numerous vocalists throughout their years.

However, Sinawe’s band identity resembles that of an independent rock band more than

Boohwal’s, and their provocation of genres and choice of production strategies contribute majorly to the differing dynamics.

24 Although Boohwal’s guitarist and leader Kim Taewon remains in charge of songwriting, arranging, and even recruiting the lead vocalist, the band’s musical style shifts drastically with every new vocalist to suit the voice of the band, and its sonic syntax and mix foreground the vocals enough to contribute to the impression that the rest of the band serves a secondary role supplementing the voice, similarly to a solo singer’s backing band. 70

The notion of the guitar’s primacy deserves a more thorough treatment. Not only is the electric guitar, in the words of Robert Walser, the “most important aural sign of heavy metal” and the “most important virtuoso instrument of the past three decades,” it has also attained the status of a sonic and visual necessity, it seems, in most rock bands.25

In particular, the versatility of the electric guitar sound, aided by the relative ease of manipulating the output signal and the variety of available effects (to which none but the synthesizer compares), contributes to the primacy and the prevalence of the guitar in the music of rock bands, and allows the guitarist to steer and direct the band. To add to the discourse, a close look at these Korean rock bands suggests that rock virtuosity they construct and seek after seems to be based primarily on flashy instrumental techniques above all else.

Moreover, the discourse of rock virtuosity focused primarily on the guitarist causes one to lose sight of performative flaunting in vocal and other instrumental parts.

Robert Walser’s treatment of heavy metal virtuosity and Mandy Smith’s work on virtuosic drumming highlight no-strings-attached contributions to rock music performance and provide a point of departure.26 However, in many cases those parts appear to have remained secondary in discourses of Korean rock bands in question, with regular bassists, drummers, and keyboardists of those bands often receiving little more spotlight than session musicians, and the vocalist-frontperson receiving most attention.

Since band music hardly occupied the central spot in South Korean popular music, in which easy-listening standard pop, tŭrotŭ, and later palladŭ have maintained stronghold,

25 Robert Walser, Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1993), pp. 41, 50. 26 Ibid.; Mandy J. Smith, “Drumming is My Madness: The Primitive in Late 1960s Rock Drumming,” International Association of the Study of Popular Music annual meeting, February 2015. 71 rock bands often suffer low mass media visibility and frequent lineup changes amid vocalists’ departures to pursue a solo career, as Lee Seungchul and Park Wangyu of

Boohwal have, as well as Kim Jongseo and Yim Jaebeum of Sinawe. From the perspective of an aspiring solo artist, the band membership often represents a stepping stone, despite (or perhaps because of) the disproportionate amount of attention the vocalist receives. Exceptions such as Taiji, once Sinawe’s bassist; Kim Changwan, co-founder and drummer of Sanullim; and Namgung Yeon, formerly a touring drummer for Baekdusan and later a bandmaster and radio host, all arguably rose to fame and popularity for their creative activities outside of their roles as back-row instrumentalists rather than as band members, and at any rate those exceptions remain few and far between.

The implications of this division of labor and spotlight go beyond mere genre labels used to categorize musical groups. A June 6, 1974, Ilgan Sŭpochŭ article observes that

amidst the recent rise of music of the youth, particularly of rock music and other new styles like it, a group of young instrumental performers have been enjoying a heightened influence […] no less than that of the most popular singers of the day. While tŭrotŭ and folk musics revolve around the singer, rock music puts an equal if not greater emphasis on instrumentalists, hence the present phenomenon.27

Such redistribution of attention, or of musical agency as far as the audience can see, clearly is a natural consequence of the instrumentation of band-driven music, and contributes to visual and auditory perceptions about rock music. However, it also represents a shift in the power dynamic in music-making, one that differs from what the

27 Quoted in Shin Hyunjoon, “Hangukjŏk Ragŭi Yusangwa Yusan: 1974–75” [The legacy and the artifacts of Korean rock, 1974–75], Weiv, vol. 4, no. 24 (December 2002). Accessed 23 December 2017. http://www.weiv.co.kr/view_detail.html?code=series&num=1836. 72 singer-songwriter phenomenon represents (see chapter 3) but constitutes another part of the complex auditory and sociopolitical patchwork that is today’s Korean popular music.

In other words, this political shapeshifting affects how a listener hears, sees, and engages with any music, and the rock band dynamic as shown to the audience keeps intact the collective, communal aspect of music making, which becomes lost in musical styles that devote the spotlight to the vocalist.

The visible communality of music making also contributes to the perceived rawness and naturalness of band music, particularly rock, because all parts of creating sounds seem to be taking place where the audience can see it. However, the source of the musical legitimacy goes beyond that. In its manifestation, outward expressions of virtuosity and technical mastery tap into the preexisting power dynamic in heavy metal and numerous other musical traditions, as Walser writes, “wherein power itself is construed as essentially male.”28 I suspect the male-centered musical genre kept traditional Korean notions about patriarchy and its realizations alive and reinforced.

Musicians who make and perform rock music, especially instrumentalists, have remained predominantly male, and the structure and dynamic of rock bands such as Boohwal,

Sinawe, and Baekdusan resemble that of a family centered around a patriarch.

This strange marriage of traditional and foreign ideologies and practices is juxtaposed in Korean rock music with something that pervades modern Korean culture at large and whose manifestations I have mentioned a number of times thus far in this project: the obsessive valorization of foreignness.

28 Robert Walser, p. 76. 73

Imported good(nes)s: Valorization of foreignness and pseudo-foreign cultures

From store signs to names of musical groups, foreignness—especially

Westernness—saturates modern Korean landscapes and soundscapes. Western names and

English-sounding words (whether coherent or broken) began to appear in the foreground of contemporary Korean popular culture as a chic thing, first in the postwar years and more visibly so near the end of the twentieth century with the explosive growth of the popular culture industry. A number of studies point to the fact that fluency in the increasingly determines Koreanness on the individual level, especially when it comes to a Korean or diaspora descendant qualifying as (sufficiently)

Korean.29 In a separate though simultaneous phenomenon, stores, musical groups, bars, companies, songs, restaurants, films, and numerous other publicly-visible entities began to bear a name in English (or made-up pseudo-English) immediately following the postwar years.

Musicologist and music critic Kim Changnam attributes the abundance of English words in songs to democratization, which brought about the end of state censorship laws that prohibited domestic songs with foreign-language lyrics from over-the-air broadcasting, and to a paradigmatic shift in the songwriting process:

Folk music of the 1970s was centered around lyrics; wrote the text first, and then the tune to match it. But dance music of the 1990s onward prioritizes the tune, later to be matched loosely with lyrics that rhyme. As a result, the importance of the meaning of the lyrics or communication of a message has

29 Gao Fang, "Identity and Multilingualism: Negotiating Multiculturalism among Ethnic Korean Teachers in China," from Minority in China: Balancing Unity and Diversity in an Era of Critical Pluralism, edited by Leibold James and Yangbin Chen (: Hong Kong University Press, 2014), pp. 259–76; Jeon Mihyon, "Korean Language and Ethnicity in the United States: Views from within and across," The Modern Language Journal, vol. 94, no. 1 (2010): 43–55; Adrienne Lo and Jenna Kim, "Manufacturing Citizenship: Metapragmatic Language Competencies in Media Images of Mixed Race Men in South Korea," Discourse & Society, vol. 22, no. 4 (2011): 440–57. 74

decreased. Lyrical meaning amounts to little more than that of sound effects or sonic devices, so it matters little whether [the lyrics are] in English or in Korean.30

However, as addressed in greater detail in chapter 1, foreignness as a source of modern

Korean vogue dates back to far before the 1990s, and Kim’s explanation leaves a large portion of the phenomenon unaddressed. Lee Youngmi attributes the exoticism, or the trend of cultural whiteface, to “popular music’s tendency to follow the ever-changing culture that produces it, and on a more fundamental level, [to] the desire of the urban public for upward social mobility, to keep up with the worldly currents and not fall behind.”31 Kang Junman even goes as far as to suggest that Korean people “worship the

English language,” because the linguistic fluency signifies a position of power.32 If the degree to which one is well-versed in the language and culture of a powerful foreign country translates to their cultural power, the society in question exhibits an outside- facing, externally-driven system of values and priorities, and symptomizes postcoloniality. This cultural current of (post-) colonial exoticism, whose hints I see as long ago as the beginning of the twentieth century, marks a linguistic parallel to a similar phenomenon in the material realm. In other words, that postcolonial amalgam observed in musical styles and lyrical themes pervades the larger contemporary Korean culture.

Moreover, since misspelt, mispronounced, ungrammatical, or downright made-up foreign words seem to carry the same kind of coolness as real ones do, this cultural capital must depend not on some sort of practical cultural exchangeability, but on the

30 Quoted in Lee Jeongmyung, “Kkok Yŏngŏro Pullŏya Mashinga,” [Does it have to be sung in English?] The Joongang Ilbo, 9 December 2006. http://news.joins.com/article/2532131. 31 Lee Youngmi, Hanguk Taejunggayosa [History of Korean popular songs] (Seoul: Minsogwon, 2006), p. 159. 32 Kang Junman, Hangugingwa Yŏngŏ: Hanguginŭn Wae Yŏngŏrŭl Sungbaehanŭnga [Korean people and English: Why Koreans worship the English language] (Seoul, Inmulgwa Sasangsa, 2014). 75 commodity of the exotic heard—and to an extent—seen. English-derived words and phrases introduced the phonetically unfamiliar to contemporary Koreans’ vocabulary, and

Korean pop songs written and recorded for domestic listeners began featuring English- language lyrics to an increased resemblance to American pop.33 By the early 1990s, Shin

Hae-chul’s song “Annyŏng” [Goodbye] from his first solo album featured an extended rap break in English in the middle of the song, and such infiltration of foreign influences had become a norm.34

Korea’s sudden introduction to the modernized world under heavy, politicized influences of Japan and the United States in the early twentieth century led to the country’s passive exposure to transnationalism and cultural globalism, defining its postcolonial modernity in terms of conformity to Westernness. The resulting prevalence of foreign and pseudo-foreign words in contemporary South Korea, as well as that of other such cultural signifiers as musical genres and styles of foreign origin, thus has an inherent bias that suggests that the imported culture is superior or, at least, more up-to- date and cool.

In contrast, the expression of patriotic, national pride that partially surfaced in cases such as Kim Dokyun’s guitar sanjo appeared in mass-oriented rock performances more broadly, especially around the turn of the century and onward. Chosŏn Pŏnkŭ

(Choson punk), a 1999 compilation album featuring numerous independent punk bands

33 By this, I refer to songs written and performed by Koreans for Korean listeners, rather than foreign tunes sung with new Korean lyrics, as covered in chapter 1. 34 For a similar trend in television commercials, see: Jamie Shinhee Lee, “Linguistic Constructions of Modernity: English Mixing in Korean Television Commercials,” Language in Society, vol. 35, no. 1 (February 2006): 59–91. For mass media critic Kang Junman’s analysis of the English language and fluency therein as a signifier of power and cultural privilege in postcolonial South Korea, see Kang Junman, Hangugingwa Yŏngŏ: Hanguginŭn Wae Yŏngŏrŭl Sungbaehanŭnga [Korean and the English Language: Why Koreans Worship English], Seoul: Inmulgwa Sasangsa, 2014. 76 based in the district of Seoul, explicitly put a musical genre characterized by resistance and rejection of readily established values and methodologies alongside the name of a historical Korean dynasty, which summarizes the unlikely combination of nationalist sentiments during economic and political turmoil and youthful, rebellious ruckus. This recent rise of what I would like to call “neo-patriotism,” centered around massive, often playful celebration of national pride by masses, constitutes the public’s reclamation of nationalist sentiments from state authorities that once used them to control people’s behavior. Mass street watch parties during the 2002 FIFA World Cup and other subsequent large events exemplify this phenomenon. I will momentarily return to the topic of the place and role of rock music in them.

Instrumental rock virtuosity: Postcolonial, male-dominated, and more

Foreignness as the source of coolness, or the defining measure of it, has been at work since the earliest years of modern Korean band music. Since the days of state- imposed limits on cultural imports, musicians sought access to recordings of Western popular music on trend that would have been available via listening rooms, U.S. Armed

Forces radio programs, and bootlegged records and pirated copies sold in the grey market.35 The Western musical trends influenced the repertories and playing styles of

Korean instrumentalists; in fact, several of the bands already mentioned began their careers as cover bands playing foreign tunes, some for foreign audiences residing in

Korea, Shin Hyunjoon writes.36 This mode of mediation, in short, arose to meet the

35 Shin Hyunjoon, Kayo, K-pop, kŭrigo Kŭ Nŏmŏ [Popular songs, K-pop, and beyond] (Seoul: Dolbaegae, 2013), pp. 144–45. 36 Ibid., pp. 137, 140. 77 demands that foreign nationals stationed in Korea created, and promptly evolved to cater to domestic consumers once the hotbed of intercontinental military conflicts moved away from the Korean Peninsula.

To this day, citing foreign musicians as musical influences and having a technical mastery of their tunes seem to determine one’s status as an instrumentalist in Korea, for accomplished mainstream pop musicians and aspiring school pupils in garage bands alike. Kim Dokyun of Baekdusan, for example, has publicly stated ’s influence on his music, and has frequently included Clapton’s “Wonderful Tonight” in his set lists at high-profile public shows like his set at the 2016 Pentaport .

Kim Taewon of Boohwal likewise has consistently cited Gary Moore as a primary source of inspiration, covering his tunes on television and in concerts, and even incorporating a riff from Moore’s “Parisienne Walkways” into his arrangement of a Korean tune titled

“Mujŏng Pŭllusŭ” [The heartless blues], as performed at numerous live shows including the band’s thirtieth anniversary concert in Seoul on 16 May 2015, as well as in televised performances such as Boohwal’s set in the 25 January 2009 episode of Konsŏtŭ 7080

(KBS-1TV).

This tendency of referring to foreign musicians in one’s repertory in order to attain musical legitimacy as an instrumentalist may go beyond the leaders of bands seen on television. Amateur rock bands, an increasingly popular extracurricular activity for high school students and weekend pastime for college students and adults, seem to regard foreign band and instrumental music as a superior category of musical influence, judging in part from what I observed at band performances and competitions between 2002 and

2008 in Korea. Songs by artists like Nirvana, Muse, the Beatles, Pink Floyd, and Maroon 78

5 would dominate many such bands’ set lists. Though organized, published data remain scarce on how a broader aggregate of Korean amateur musicians view domestic and foreign musical influences, I suspect that the pattern among mainstream musicians, of which we can be more certain, remains more or less true among amateur musicians. For them, it would be a step up in musical ambition to directly pursue the foreign musical influences that those high-profile domestic musicians cite, rather than getting secondhand access to them through the latter.

To turn to another glaringly obvious tendency, most members of the rock bands thus mentioned in this chapter are men. One may argue that rock music has never really been gender-egalitarian anywhere, and it is true that it largely remains, to borrow the words of Susan Fast, “the music of white, straight men.”37 However, it is worth pointing out that the same proves true in the context of South Korean rockers in part because the longtime patriarchal culture expects women to behave and excel in the public sphere in ways not conducive to thriving in the highly artisanal realm of music in comparison to, for example, solo vocal performance.

These two patterns suggest that the act of playing an instrument well, which the instrumental band sound highlights, comes with certain cultural power. In the postcolonial order of cultural transmission, the supposedly superior, foreign influence possessed such power in the same way that those imports did in the material, industrial realm. Lee Youngmi, in a side note in her discussion of the generic identity of tŭrotŭ, writes that the “abundance of [Western] pop music, that of Japanese popular songs, and that of Korean pop songs and [tŭrotŭ] which imitate them are all different manifestations

37 Susan Fast, “Genre, Subjectivity, and Back-Up Singing in Rock Music,” from The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Musicology, edited by Derek B. Scott (Farnham, Surrey: Routledge, 2009), p. 174. 79 of the same essential issue, namely Korean popular song culture’s lack of autonomy.”38 It has been more than mere abundance, I may add, but having the foreign cultural and economic influence at any given moment in Korea’s modern history also determine and define the very frontier of the nation’s musical creativity. In other words, the recurring pattern of cultural imitation or mirroring in mainstream popular music in Korea therefore represents a facet of a larger phenomenon whose aspects manifest themselves more clearly in areas like fashion, social and consumerist norms, language, and economic policy, namely self-consciously following and imitating non-Koreans, and often

Westerners more specifically. Since playing an instrument well in front of an audience constitutes as political an act as committing an action in any of those areas listed above, the cultural power dynamic in it mirrors that in those other realms of Korean society.

Likewise, female rockers remain rare or become novelties because rock virtuosity seems to entail the kind of dominating power that they do not possess in the culture. Most of the few women associated with Korean rock bands, such as Kim Yoona of Jaurim and Cho

Youjeen of Cherry Filter, are vocalists rather than instrumentalists, and thus operate in a slightly different mode of display.

Jaurim’s “Hahahasong,” from their fifth album All You Need is Love released in

2004, showcases strengths of Kim’s voice, characterized by her techniques such as well- supported belting in chest voice, vibratos that take advantage of the head voice-chest voice transition, and downward portamento that concludes a belted passage.39 The song employs a sharp contrast between the verses, set in a minor key and with sparse block

38 Lee Youngmi, Minjok Yesul Undongŭi Yŏksawa [The history and theory of national arts movement] (Seoul: Hangilsa, 1991), p. 281. 39 Jaurim, “Hahahasong,” words and music by Kim Yoona, from All You Need is Love (Seoul: T- Entertainment, 2004). 80 chords, and the refrain, set in the relative major and with an upbeat rhythm and pronounced backbeats. Kim’s singing closely follows this musical framework, with the verses sung in a low, whispery, and theatrical voice and the refrain in a brighter timbre with minimal vibrato. Both match the contour of the song’s lyrics, which traces life’s trouble and trials in the verses and the subject’s positive attitude in response in the refrain. In terms both of such conformity to the song’s dramatic narrative and of the audio mix, which leaves a considerable amount of instrumental tracks in foreground, the band’s sound features Kim’s voice as one of the ensemble parts, carrying an equal weight as its instrumental counterparts, rather than the only foregrounded voice like a typical solo vocal. However, the sort of transcendentally valued artisanry that follows instrumental virtuosity lacks in most portrayals of rock vocalism in recordings, live concerts, and television programs, save what programs like Nanŭn Kasuda have done to partially address it; a more detailed treatment of these television programs follows in chapter 5.40

Although vocal performance no doubt requires an artistic and technical mastery as does its instrumental counterpart, it does not appear to carry the same air of craftsmanship or artisanry as the latter, which allows instrumentalists to occupy a position of power onstage. Perhaps the notion that singing constitutes a more natural human activity than playing an instrument, hence a gentler initial learning curve, contributes to it. At any rate, the heightened level of transcendental power makes instrumental virtuoso more open and accessible to men, who have enjoyed a more natural

40 I use the term “transcendental” here to refer to the idea that virtuosity, especially instrumental virtuosity, seems to carry a greater value than a merely utilitarian craft; the virtuoso possesses, in other words, more cultural and often institutional power than the mechanical act of playing a may warrant, as someone with a mastery of the art and the status of a craftsperson-worthy-of-attention. 81 presence and greater room in the public sphere in Korean culture.41 The mode of public presence that instrumentalists onstage ought to exhibit, one of transcendental cultural power, therefore remains far from natural for women.

Korean rock bands in the age of city square democracy and entertainment television

The FIFA World Cup of 2002, jointly hosted by South Korea and Japan, marked the blossoming of a new kind of public sphere in Korea. Tens of thousands of football fans filled public streets including the main thoroughfare at the center of Seoul, watching live broadcasts of games on large screens and cheering on their national team together.42

In a shift that anthropologist and Korean scholar Rachel Miyung Joo describes as one

“from repression and censorship to openness and freedom,” the mass public reclaimed those public spaces as a venue for open, public gatherings, rather than a state-controlled avenue selectively open to motor traffic only.43 Such reconciliation of the public with public spaces would expedite the advent of kwangjang minjujuŭi (city square democracy), characterized by the masses’ occupation of city squares and streets for demonstration and exchange of political ideas when significant current events warrant nationwide discourse.

41 There have been numerous historical moments when women did get to pursue a public life and advance their social standing, particularly until the first half of the Choson dynasty era (before the Confucian patriarchal ideals firmly set in) and in the years following the Korean War (when economic hardships forced women to join the workforce). Exceptions include women such as Kim Mandŏk (1739–1812), who flourished as a merchant on the and became recognized and praised for her humanitarian work particularly during a 1795 famine. However, women’s role in Korean society in recent centuries remained secondary and auxiliary to men, for whom the public sphere was to be the proper realm. 42 Rachel Miyung Joo, “Consuming Visions: The Crowds of the Korean World Cup,” The Journal of Korean Studies, vol. 11, no. 1 (Fall 2006): 44–45. 43 Ibid., p. 43. 82

Organizers of these mass watch parties also brought music into the mix to keep the crowds excited and energized. Not just any music, but high-energy dance music and upbeat rock anthems to facilitate mass singalongs, alluding to large-scale shows. Yoon Dohyun’s band YB gained a wide, mainstream audience during the 2002

World Cup as the arranger and performer of “O pilsŭng koria” (O, victorious Korea), an anthem built around a simple cheer chant as its hook, as well as their rendition of

Aegukka, the Korean national anthem. The youth’s use of national symbols such as the

Korean flag and Aegukka in the context of the perhaps irreverent, adrenaline-filled street parties with rock music blasting from loudspeakers radically redefined ideological norms governing the public sphere and the use of public spaces, as well as rock music’s relationship with the society’s ruling ideas. Even though not all Koreans partook in such widespread, prominent, and playful display of national pride, it remains true that rock music occupied the center stage in mass patriotic ceremonies that the public organized and state authorities sanctioned rather than prohibited.

Figure 2.5: YB, “O pilsŭng koria” (2002), hook (mm. 1–8).

“O pilsŭng koria” first emerged to South Korean public visibility as part of the

Puchŏn SK football club’s repertory of cheer anthems some time before it became an anthem for the Korean national football team during the 2002 World Cup. Featured in 83 broadcast-friendly recordings of anthems as a hook, the chant circulated and echoed through the crowds gathered in the streets of Seoul during the aforementioned mass watch parties. Its implications are twofold. First, its provenance and distribution history demonstrate and complicate what I discussed in the introduction to this project about the primary textual authority of recordings rather than written music in most of the repertories discussed in the project. In the case of this anthem, though the recordings’ appearance on national television and radio must have helped the public hear and learn it, not even those recordings can claim the textual authority as the Urtext. The explosive dissemination of this anthem and its likes marks a highly uncommon instance in modern

Korean history in which a body of musical literature first conceived as an unwritten, unrecorded text attain a virtually ubiquitous access and presence throughout the country with state-sponsored campaigns for it, rather than against.

Second, the anthem’s widespread circulation also exemplifies, as does the prevalence of concrete national symbols such as the national anthem and the flag at the street watch parties, the seeming reconciliation of the once-offensive rock music and the theme of nationalistic patriotism, or at the very least the incorporation of the former into the latter’s expressive vocabulary. The possibility of the juxtaposition of patriotism with lax playfulness has a relatively short history in South Korea, following the long history of the authoritarian state’s monopoly on anything nationalistic; the youth culture of public play that emerged as an observable cultural phenomenon around the 2002 FIFA World

Cup, however, seems to have been instrumental in the country’s public reclaiming the patriotic symbols and sentiments. 84

The unlikely marriage of countercultural musical styles and mass displays of patriotism goes beyond YB. Park Jaesang, or PSY, a Korean singer and producer best known to many Western listeners for his 2012 breakthrough single “,” shouted “Taehanminguk mansae,” (Hail, the Republic of Korea) while appearing on The

Today Show on 3 May 2013, and regularly displays patriotic themes and tropes in his concert titles and media interviews, the title of his 2012 outdoor concert “Taehanminguk, tashi ttwija” (Korea, let us run again) being one example. His public image as a performer and celebrity, however, has been far from a sound, esteemed, law-abiding role model associable with patriotic sentiments and state-sponsored advertisement campaigns.

Since his debut in 2000, his music and visual presentations have consistently borrowed from, and alluded to, the lower side of culture: play and entertainment rather than diligence and productivity, adrenaline rushes rather than contained sentiments, and old- fashioned, crude aesthetics rather than refined ones. One example is his first single “Sae”

(Bird), which featured Park’s raw rap track atop a loop sample from Shocking Blue’s

“Venus,” with female background vocals that make the loop sound more like the

Bananarama version of the song than the original. He also has spent most of his career involved in, and recovering from, events that put him at odds with state laws and authorities, first prosecuted for marijuana-related charges shortly after the release of his second album in 2001, and then in controversy surrounding the circumstances of his alternate military service assignment that led to the court’s nullification of his service and his commitment to a new, two-year term of service.44 Why, then, would a former drug

44 The Republic of Korea requires all men over the age of eighteen to enroll in the military or carry out an equivalent, alternate service, and the assignment depends on factors such as physical examination results. 85 convict who had to carry out military training and sings about nightlife in unrefined language proudly wear his patriotism on stage at home and abroad?

Another example, albeit exaggerated for comedy, appears as a character in the

1999 film Juyuso Sŭpkyŏksakŏn (known as Attack the Gas Station! in the United States).

Mudaeppo “the Bulldozer,” one of the four delinquent young adults robbing the gas station, terrorizes and holds captive the business’s owner and employees in the office using a wooden kendo stick as a weapon. The stick has a handwritten mantra written on it in permanent marker, reading “Daehangukin,” or “[citizen] of the great Korean nation.”45

In Korea, militarized public school education long remained common and mandatory, and state-designed ethics curriculums still remain firmly in place even after the fall of military regimes. Meanwhile, resistance to those regimes, as seen in the previous chapter, occurred primarily in and around educated elite circles such as universities. As a result, I theorize, one’s conformity to and proud display of patriotic, good-law-abiding-citizen ideals both signifies the person’s lack of (or abstinence from) critical questioning of the prevailing order that upholds such ideals and represents his or her urge to counter deviation in other areas of life. The latter seems to become more urgent a need for high- profile celebrities such as PSY, since a successful and socially acceptable public career, even for a willingly and playfully controversial singer, requires him to fall within an acceptable range of conformity to existing social norms and to participate in keeping them alive.

Such association of rock music, once dubbed youthful decadence, with patriotic ideals occurred at times when most mainstream mass media found it beneficial to paint

45 Yu Ohseong, Juyuso Sŭpkyŏksakŏn, directed by Kim Sangjin (1999). 86 the picture of an artificial reality, of a homogenous public opinion. When the earlier example of “O pilsŭng koria” came to be, for instance, media portrayals of the Korean public “hailed all Koreans as national citizens who supported the national football team,” which Joo writes exemplifies “hegemonic representations [that] persist in Korean society.”46 As such, the rock music nationalism seems to represent a larger phenomenon that resembles subcultural incorporation and assimilation according to Hebdige.47 In other words, rock musicians may not have aimed explicitly to lean nationalist and patriotic, but the popular trend of national pride entailed a political or economic benefit or enticement to many of them.

This process loosens the one-to-one correspondence between a sign and a meaning, or in this case a set of musical conventions and greater sociopolitical implications, but the new relationship between rock music and patriotism on display is far from one-dimensional. Jeon Inkwon’s rendition of the South Korean national anthem in front of estimated 600,000 protesters gathered on streets in central Seoul, demanding the ouster of then-President Park Geun-hye, juxtaposes Jeon’s piercing voice and his band’s musical style derived from with the public’s concern for its homeland.48 Jeon’s performance thus differs from, for example, ’s rendition of “Star-spangled

Banner” at Woodstock, which troped the anthem to convey a dissenting opinion and sentiment to values it embodied at the time. The straightforward performance without

46 Joo, pp. 43–44. 47 Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979), pp. 92–99. 48 Yonhap News Service, “Park Kŭnhye Twoejin: Nebŏnchae Chumal Chotbuljiphoe Yŏlgi Chŏnguk Twidŏpŏ” [Oust Park Geun-hye: Candlelight protests cover nation for fourth weekend], 20 November 2016, Web. http://www.yonhapnews.co.kr/bulletin/2016/11/19/0200000000AKR20161119046952004.HTML. 87 much added flash or musical troping also allowed the crowd to sing along, an impromptu team-building exercise and reclamation of national pride by the public.

Although the song remains intact in this case unlike Hendrix’s treatment of the

American national anthem, the subversive power is not lost. Jeon sings the anthem in the key of D, a major third higher than the standard score that many recordings and performances seem to follow. This allows Jeon to highlight the upper register of his voice when the range peaks near the end of every line, which he makes more piercing by using little vibrato or other vocal decorations. His execution of the anthem, in other words, comes across as screaming rather than proper and respectful singing. The sparse instrumentation, consisting only of synth pad underneath him and the lead guitar taking a half-verse-long solo, further emphasizes the vocal. Lastly, Jeon’s use of the Korean national anthem, historically used by the state to teach and reinforce passive, obedient citizenship, at a massive gathering of citizens speaking out against the incumbent head of state achieves musically what the mass’s reclamation of public spaces did spatially.

If the power that comes with instrumental virtuosity epitomizes the meritocratic principle that supposedly makes up the foundation of today’s Korean society, then the valorization of foreignness, compulsive nationalism, and gender discrepancy all point to the inequality of opportunities and voices present in the same society. Korean rock musicians’ act of using foreign-made (musical) materials and styles, assembling them, and producing a genre both reactionary and contributing to the nation’s modernity represents a different part of the construction of a Korean sonic national identity from tŭrotŭ love songs, and perhaps one that has been more at odds with the dominant social 88 order and its norms. Korean rock however has earned recognition as made by and for

Koreans to the extent that the music has partially departed from its ideological roots of resistance and rebellion, often associated without much resistance with contemporary

“neo-patriotism” of twenty-first century South Korea. A similar pattern emerges in a distinctly different genre with its own set of aesthetic and expressive priorities: the music of folk- and post-folk singer-songwriters in Korea.

89

Chapter 3

“My Song”: Korean Singer-Songwriter Music, the Veneration of Originality, and

Musical Assertions of Sociopolitical Agency

What does the music of a singer-songwriter sound like? The term, which one may think should signify nothing more than the fact that a person sings and writes his or her own materials in a generically neutral fashion, seems to have acquired a few more implications about the music’s style and sonic properties here in the United States and abroad. The iTunes , for instance, has a “Singer-Songwriter” section along with “Pop,” “Rock,” “Jazz,” and “Electronic.” Sirius XM, a service provider covering the continental United States and , also offers a channel called

“Coffee House,” specializing in “fresh brews of acoustic singer-songwriters,” according to one of its prerecorded on-air channel descriptions. The provider’s website lists such musicians as Jack Johnson, , , and as representative of the station’s predominant sound. A similar genre-formation also occurs in contemporary South Korea. MelOn, a website that provides digital downloads and streaming of music, lists “Singer-Songwriter” as one of categories for its weekly

“changrŭ/sŭtail chatŭ” (genre and style charts) on its website, alongside “ballad,”

“dance,” “acid & fusion jazz,” and “Brit pop.”

Music that appears under this category has a number of common characteristics, many of which it shares with American music with the same label: a sparse, minimalist instrumental texture, a solo voice (sometimes featuring a second voice on a part or as a duet partner), a slow to moderate tempo, and certain production conventions such 90 as a generous use of reverb and delay effects in compensation for (or in exaggeration of) the sparse texture. Regina Spektor’s 2009 song “Eet,” for instance, features in addition to her vocals the piano and the drum kit, both heavily processed with a compressor and a reverb effect processor to sound both intimate and full, despite the sparser instrumentation than typical rock and pop tracks. In Ingrid Michaelson’s 2006 song “The

Way I Am,” the bass guitar, percussions, and overdubbed vocals, only later joined by the acoustic guitar, contribute to the construction of perceived rawness or “unplugged-ness,” even though not in the least bit unplugged or unprocessed. The recent rise of deliberately low-fidelity audios, often achieved through the use of ambient microphones in simultaneous ensemble recording sessions (rather than individual tracking of each part, which results in a cleaner but more “artificial” sound), also represents the pursuit of a raw, intimate sonic color.

However, an equally if not more significant development concerns the term’s apparent association with cultural values and economic characteristics that seems to make it desirable and sought-after by an increasing number of musicians. In other words, why does it matter so much that a musician writes her or his own materials, and what makes this independence or self-sufficiency in musical authorship so important to many? The emphasis on artistic self-assertion through musical authorship, similar to the Western notion of the romantic genius, allows songwriters and composers with performance careers to claim a connection or succession to the Korean popular music canon, as well as musical authenticity or naturalness. As a result, the artists gain an elevated status in cultural hierarchy. The process of constructing this kind of musical authenticity and 91 placing a transcendental value on the creative process, as well as how the artists look and sound, constitutes a large portion of the remainder of this chapter.

Music and writing as a virtue of the Princely Man: A historical perspective

I have yet to encounter a substantial body of scholarly literature on the Korean sonic past, but where the few English-language articles and books leave gaps in the picture, one can deduce the rest from a variety of sources ranging from history textbooks to writings and musical compositions that survive. What follows is my brief survey of the history of the notions of authorship and musical creativity in Korea, to properly situate the subsequent discussion of the music of contemporary Korean singer-songwriters.

As in European art music, the notion of musical authorship in Korea had hardly any romantic, transcendental value attached to it besides the utilitarian idea of possessing a craft, until the modern era. Historically, Koreans have placed a tremendous emphasis on the art of literary composition; the sociopolitical structure and ideology of the Confucian

Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1905) held, for the most part, literati and scholars (sŏnbi, or mun’in), their scholarly ideal, and the acts of writing and reading in high regard.1

However, music largely seems to have remained outside of the creative textual forms and media that such gentlemen-scholars deemed worthy, and most of the era’s orally- transmitted musical repertory remains anonymous, without records of authorship that survive to this day.2 Even traditional court music, which usually bears traceable records

1 Sun Jung, Korean Masculinities and Transcultural Consumption: Yonsama, Rain, Oldboy, K-Pop Idols (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011), pp. 27–28. Also see Wan Gee, The Traditional Education of Korea (Seoul: Ewha Womans University Press, 2006). 2 See Keith Howard, “Minyo in Korea: Songs of the People and Songs for the People,” Asian Music, vol. 30, no. 2 (1999): 1–37. 92 of authorship, does not promote or stress the significance of composers’ creation of original materials. Most surviving musical works from the court of the Chosŏn dynasty and earlier originates from either Chinese courts or scholarly circles, where the literati commonly pursued music as a secondary interest. The first category includes music that falls under a category called A-ak, such as the Cheryeak, used in rituals in the

Confucian shrine, whereas music played during courtly feasts and royal processions such as Yŏminrak, composed by King Sejong, falls under the second. Neither category seems to have room for the as a serious or full-time figure, or for the notion of as anything more than a utilitarian task and secondary part of a greater ideal of the well-rounded, educated scholarly man.

The postwar formation of contemporary (in this case synonymous with

“Westernized”) popular music in South Korea, fueled largely by the influx of American armed forces and their culture during and after the Korean War, entailed the

Westernization of notions about music as an independent medium and about its creation as a romanticized activity, arguably continuing what had begun with the introduction of

Western music around the turn of the century and during the Japanese occupation. The rise of underground musicians and rock bands during the 1970s and the 1980s further accentuated the creative aspect of musicianship, as one’s career relied on and was defined by an upward culture-political mobility by the virtue of their skills and fluency as a performer, composer, or both. Numerous Korean musicians, including such household names Cho Yong-pil and Yi Mi-ja, now part of the South Korean popular music canon, have reached their decades of high-profile career virtually from namelessness, in large part owing to the cultural meritocracy. 93

Moreover, the performance careers of competent composers and songwriters such as Kim Changhwan, Joo Yeonghoon, and Bahng Shihyuk (also known as “Hitman

Bang,” his pseudonym as producer), who also benefited from such merit-driven culture, exemplify another tendency: the apparent hierarchy among merits that favors composition and songwriting over performance. Numerous musicians known primarily as prolific writers have enjoyed successful careers despite not being, arguably, the most technically proficient performers of their times. Their writing skills, in other words, seem to have overshadowed what they lack as fluent vocalists or instrumentalists, and their media portrayal likewise emphasizes their roles as “independent” creative artists, as songwriters, composers, producers, and so on. Conversely, this notion has also influenced a seemingly commonplace perspective that looks at performers as inferior to writers and composers, regarding singers, especially idols from large management companies, who do not write original materials as mere vehicles for delivery occupying a lower place on the map of cultural hierarchy of musicians mentioned earlier in this project.

In one sense, South Korean folk- and singer-songwriter music inherits this veneration of writers of original music, as well as numerous other traits, in part because the music first made an appearance in the history of modern Korean popular music as an openly imported and grafted musical genre. Beyond that, however, the sound and the cultural priorities of this tradition also reflect its past as a decades-long struggle by musicians to assert their agency as political and musical subjects amid the increasingly factionalized South Korean society and, in turn, construct a musicalized, sonified national identity.

94

Singer-songwriters of the late 1960s: Transplanted American music

The first wave of Korean singer-songwriters, in the modern sense of the phrase, emerged from the underground music scene mentioned in the previous chapter. The economic unviability of pursuing an extensive mainstream distribution network, along with the risk associated with the politically oriented grassroots music movements in which many of the musicians were involved, pushed the singers to gather in circles of friends, comrades, and close acquaintances. The gatherings centered around live venues, specifically those called ŭmak kamsangshil (listening rooms) operated by a member or supporter of the circle. Often featured in films set in the era such as Pumhaeng Chero, the listening rooms consisted of a tea room and a who would receive and play requests from clients, interpolating the songs with spoken commentaries to entertain the guests, much like a mixed-format radio show.3 Listening rooms initially rose to prominence during the 1960s, when radio receivers and record players remained scarce, introducing Western music supplied through United States Army bases to small groups of active listeners. The venues remained intact even as other, non-locative means of accessing music (such as radio sets and turntables) became more commonplace during the 1970s, but those listening rooms that catered to niche crowds such as singer- songwriters and those in their circles remained popular, and evolved into centers of musical and political activities.4

3 Jo Geun-shik, dir., Pumhaeng Chero, 2002. 4 Lee Baekcheon, Lee Baekcheonŭi Ŭmak Yŏhaeng: Tonggita, C’est Si Bon, Pokŭ 50-nyŏnŭl Malhada [Lee Baekcheon’s musical journey: Acoustic guitars, C’est Si Bon, and fifty years of folk] (Seoul: Nami Books, 2014), pp. 87–88; Lee Youngmi, Hanguk Taejunggayosa [History of Korean popular songs] (Seoul: Minsogwon, 2006), pp. 225–26. 95

One such listening room, Ssesibong (C’est Si Bon), opened in 1953 in

Mugyodong, a neighborhood in the Junggu district of central Seoul. It served as a venue of distribution of latest Western pop music, as well as of live performance by Korean folk and pop musicians. This meant that two separate, albeit related, phenomena occurred in

C’est Si Bon: most of the admission-paying audience gained access to the latest Western popular songs that the disc jockey played there, and a community of Korean native singers and songwriters developed in the venue, thanks to a supportive and well-listened audience, a site conducive to live performances, and a common set of musical influences, whose records spun in the listening room.5 The audiences for those likely overlapped, and some of the listeners of the played-back music also found themselves on stage playing their own songs. Moreover, some of those homegrown performers would come to define the trend of domestic Korean popular music in the decades to come, with such musicians as Song -shik, Yoon Hyong-joo, Kim Se-hwan, and Cho rising to fame and renown as regular members of the music group at C’est Si Bon. While they may no longer occupy the forefront of the idol group-dominated Korean popular music scene of the 2010s, the former C’est Si Bon regulars’ long, successful careers as singer- songwriters highly visible in the music industry have lasted four decades. Upon the disbanding of the group based in the listening room, Song and Yoon formed the duo

Tŭwinpollio (Twin Folios), while Kim and Cho each pursued a solo career.

The records that DJs played at C’est Si Bon and other like venues, Shin Hyunjoon writes, imported by individual travelers and military personnel from the United States, defined the musical trend among youths in Korea without first having reached the masses

5 Shin Hyunjoon, Kayo, K-pop, Kŭrigo Kŭ Nŏmŏ [Popular songs, K-pop, and beyond] (Seoul: Dolbaegae, 2013), p. 146. 96 at large.6 Lee Youngmi points out that “in the early years of the rise of new cultural traits from foreign powers as a standard and ruling trend in Korean popular culture, those who adopted [such trends] were students at prestigious universities, among the best educated at their time.”7 However, it seems that the C’est Si Bon performers’ music developed as a transplant of American popular music, spanning in genre from standard pop and folk to country and rock, but largely detached from the political moments of the performers’ own country and era. Such context for the development of midcentury Korean folk-pop music at C’est Si Bon and other like venues as a middle-class elite cultural movement resulted in the irony that a musical genre and style still called “folk” formed and evolved in considerable isolation from minjung kayo, or “people’s song,” which grew and thrived amongst the folk culture at the center of social and political struggles. Those involved in the Korean folk scene, such as those who performed at C’est Si Bon, did face considerable governmental sanctions during the decades of South Korean militarized authoritarian regimes, but rarely posed a serious, potent threat to the regimes politically unlike those involved in insurgent circles such as Kim Min-ki, Yang Hee-eun, and their successors. The latter sprung up on university campuses and on the streets in connection to student movements for democratization, and therefore had political potency in their lyrics and purposes. The fact that the relatively less politically charged C’est Si

Bon performers also faced similar governmental prosecution and oppression reveals more about those authoritarian regimes’ brutality and intolerance toward any organized social

6 Ibid., p. 145–46. 7 Lee Youngmi, Hanguk Taejunggayosa [History of Korean popular songs] (Seoul: Minsogwon, 2006), p. 224. 97 movement outside of their militant tropes than about the political force of the musicians’ work.

One may find a correlation here to of the 1960s, in which musical developments and contemporary political events worked in tandem and heavily influenced each other. Songs that resonated through Greenwich Villge cafés remained directly connected to the world around them, and even when folk purists protested Bob

Dylan’s betrayal of the acoustic folk sound for electric folk-rock, their issue had more to do with musical vocabulary and sonic symbolism than with Dylan’s departure from the political grounding of folk music at the time. His adoption of -and-roll’s signature electric guitar sound undoubtedly came across as selling out to the values and institutions that drove the music’s success, justifying the political ideals that many folk musicians and fans thought their music ought to reject and fight. However, C’est Si Bon performers’ music exemplifies the way in which the folk music movement in 1960s

Seoul, or at least what the public saw of it, adopted musical idioms of the highly political

American folk music scene and still remained largely apolitical and middle-class, seldom addressing the urgent political issues of the time, domestic and international, or being part of events and groups that did.

For instance, Cho Yeongnam made his mainstream solo debut with “,” a translation of the 1968 song by Tom Jones.8 The practice of translating (pŏn’an), with varying degrees of faithfulness to the meaning of the original text, helped launch the careers of numerous Korean folk artists at a time when writing and performing original

8 Lee Baekcheon, p. 94. 98 works would have come at too high a financial and creative risk.9 The influx of American popular culture had a direct and forceful impact on the formation and development of contemporary Korean youth culture. Lee Youngmi attributes this to the rise of a postwar generation and paradigm at the turn of the 1960s, a generation that grew up immersed in

“the importance and oughtness of democracy and liberty,” that is, exposed to American ideologies and material culture rather than those of Japanese colonialists.10 Given the historical trend of generational shifts in the primary foreign cultural influence, namely from China to Japan, then to the United States, this diagnosis is quite viable and convincing. However, the focus on the external influence runs the risk of losing sight of the internal happenings, or the rationale behind the decisions that artists and listeners made, as well as of the particular compositional strategies that yielded the music the composers produced. Translated songs represent a point in a larger history of what

Korean artists and listeners made of their negotiation with reality using imported expressive vocabulary, and the repercussions of the negotiation become clearer once the borrowing ceases to be so direct and turns more obscure.

Translated songs indeed began to lose public favor once South Korea’s homegrown popular music grew in popularity, rendering more substantial Korean singer- songwriters’ claim to the label and, in turn, to greater authorial agency. However, much

9 One notable exception is Han Daesu. His career began at C’est Si Bon around the same time as those mentioned above, although he did not record his first mainstream album until 1974. His earliest repertory, consisting entirely of original songs, shows his interpretation of the New York counterculture and its sound, still actively developing at the time. Radio host and music critic Kwon Oh-seong refers to him as the founder of Korean modern folk [music], in a November 2012 article published in the Yeongnam Ilbo. His music marked a transition, albeit far from all-encompassing throughout the genre, from transplanted American folk music to homegrown Korean folk. For more on Han’s music and its implications, see Lee Baekcheon, pp. 96–99; Lee Youngmi, Hanguk Taejunggayosa [History of Korean popular songs] (Seoul: Minsogwon, 2006), pp. 225–31. 10 Lee Youngmi, Hanguk Taejunggayosa [History of Korean popular songs] (Seoul: Minsogwon, 2006), p. 223. 99 of the lyrical content that the C’est Si Bon artists and their peers produced still remained largely apolitical and isolated from the social and cultural dynamics of contemporary

Korea, as Yoon Hyong-joo’s “Piŭi nagŭne” (The wanderer of [in] the rain) exemplifies:

Nimi oshina, pam pi naerinŭn sori Is it my lover, the sound of night rain Nim palchauk sori, pam pi naerinŭn sori The sound of [his] footsteps, of night rain

Nimi kashina poda, pam pi kŭchinŭn sori My lover is leaving, the sound of rain ceases Nim palchauk sori, pam pi kŭchinŭn sori The sound of [his] footsteps, of night rain

Pam pi ttara wattaga pam pi ttara toraganŭn [He] comes with the rain, and departs with it Nae nimŭn piŭi nagŭne My lover is a wanderer of the rain

Naeryŏra pampiya, nae nim oshigae naeryŏra Come, night rain, so that [he] will come Churuk churuk naeryŏra, kkŭt ŏpshi naeryŏra Come and pour down, without ever ceasing

Nimi kashina poda… My lover is leaving, …

Such systematic, large-scale dissemination of Western musical language and decontextualized, apolitical lyrics that refused to respond to or address contemporary social issues did not help mend the gap between South Korean middle-class folk music of the likes of C’est Si Bon regulars and the country’s sociopolitical terrain and made this musical momentum, albeit representative of and central to the musical developments in

Korean folk of the time, largely a bourgeois pastime that lies at the extension of self- proclaimed “pure art” music of the West. However, the politically tumultuous and socially dynamic nation would also see a series of musical movements that do develop and evolve in close connection with its public sphere, aspiring to trigger changes in the latter.

Singer-songwriters of the late 1970s: Songs of the people 100

In the meantime, another strand of the Korean folk and singer-songwriter tradition developed in close connection with sociopolitical movements. As mentioned briefly earlier, the minjung kayo (“people’s song”) developed as a protest song genre, and its evolution maintained close proximity politically, lyrically, and geographically to student circles and activist groups involved in the democratization movement of the 1970s and the 1980s. In 1970, Kim Min-ki, an art student turned folk singer-songwriter, wrote

“Achim Isŭl” (morning dew), still widely sung today, and based his blossoming music career in music groups on university campuses. The lyrics to “Achim Isŭl” provide poetic imagery, emotionally subdued and abstract yet apparently still with the power to unite those longing and laboring for social change.

Kin pam chisaeugo Like morning dews after a long night Pullip mada maetchin On every leaf of grass Chinjuboda tŏ koun achim isŭlchŏrŏm More beautiful than pearl

Nae mamae sŏrumi Drops of sorrow Arari maetchil ttae Condense on my heart Achim tongsane olla chagŭn misorŭl paeunda And the morning hill teaches me how to smile

Taeyang ŭn myoji wiae The red sun rises Pulke ttŏ orŭgo Over the cemetery Hannadje chinŭn tŏwinŭn naŭi shirŏnilchira And the blazing heat of the day shall be my anguish

Na ije kanora Now I go Chŏ kŏchin kwangya e Into the wild desert land Sŏrŏum modu pŏrigo na ije kanora Having shed all sorrow, now I go

The song’s popularity within circles of democratization activists led the Park regime to ban it shortly after the song’s release. However, the case against this song- turned-anthem-for-liberty as a praise to the dictatorial ruler of North Korea, as the allegation went, crumbles soon upon a closer investigation. While from an iconographic point of view the red, rising sun frequently represents the North Korean ruler and his 101 regime in its propaganda, the sun in this song serves as an adverse signifier, responsible for the subject’s suffering. The cemetery also bears a negative image, unsuitable to signify a triumphant revolution. Most likely stemming from little more than the military regime’s paranoia about anything marginally identifiable as connected to the communist- turned-monarchic North, the song’s ban only helped reinforce its popularity as an anthem of the democratization movement. The songwriter’s interview with music critic Kang

Heon suggests that the song may in fact concern the subject’s frustration and powerlessness as a young, educated elite, having to return to the routine of reality after struggle with an adverse power responsible for the death of many of his comrades in activism.11 The public appears to have projected its frustration and shared hope of civic freedom to the subject of the lyrics, turning the song into a grand anthem of hope for a better future.

The song assumes an AA’BC form, which better suits a narrative of progress than the typical, catchy AABA form. All of the sections, demarcated by line breaks in the translation above, are in the major tonic key area except for the B section in relative minor. The melody rises in pitch range with each subsequent section, the highest note in the final line being a major tenth above the lowest note of the first section, contributing to a sense of a gradually building momentum and overall progress toward a better future.

Meanwhile, the melody of the song begins on the fourth scale degree, clashing against the

C major tonic, and that first measure is a pickup. The final section, in contrast, displays such stability that the melody lands on the root of the chord for the beginning of three of the four lines, and returns to the tonic for the conclusion of the song. This kind of linear,

11 Lee Youngmi, Hanguk Taejunggayosa [History of Korean popular songs] (Seoul: Minsogwon, 2006), pp. 260–61. 102 dramatic contour in form that parallels the anticipatory sentiment prevalent in the activist circles, as already mentioned, helped the song rise to become a well-known anthem for the movement.

Kim’s songs and dramatic works quickly caught the attention of Park Chung- hee’s authoritative military regime, which banned the distribution of his and prohibited his creative activities in public, often by the use of militarized police force.

However, he still developed a scope of influence among musicians and university noraepae (song collectives). The song collectives constituted the driving force behind the continuously evolving, overtly political minjung kayo scene, where no organized production and distribution network could exist until well into the 1990s. The collectives’ music aims to move and persuade the listener with poetic yet explicitly political lyrics, and has simple song structures to be orally transmitted, performed by amateur musicians, and sung in unison by large groups.

Singer-songwriters of the 1980s and beyond: Sociopolitical agency, musical nationalism, and political songs

The 1980s in South Korea began amidst increasing sociopolitical tension following the 1979 assassination of longtime dictator Park Chung-hee and a military coup less than two months later. The masses’ demand for a democratic, civilian government fueled the Kwangju uprising in May of 1980, which the military government silenced and subdued by force.12 One response to this from those involved in minjung music entailed a crossover to the tightly controlled and censored mainstream music scene. Kim Min-ki

12 For a more detailed description and critical analysis of the uprising, see Kim Yŏngtaek, 5-wŏl 18-irŭi Kwangju [Kwangju on the 18th of May] (Seoul: Yŏksa Konggan, 2010). 103 brought together a number of music collectives in the capital region in 1983 to form a project group named Nochatsa (short for noraerŭl chatnŭn saramdŭl, or “people who seek music”), one of the first movements of its kind to write and perform for the masses, often choosing rather to sacrifice the potency and directness of politically charged lyrics, than to remain in the legal and social grey area.13 However, the increasingly tenuous social dynamic at the time made their tamed songs, edited for legality, unfashionable, as social and political movements in which the music originated grew increasingly radical and at times violent. The mainstream crossover also made obvious the limitation of amateur musicians who participated in such collectives and project groups, and Nochatsa, which at its conception had twenty-three members, eventually downsized to twelve.

Several of its former members, however, pursued professional, full-time music careers after their Nochatsa tenure, including Kim Kwang-seok and An Chi-hwan.

The increasingly heated, constantly expanding topology of democratization movement also made clear the various subsets or factions with distinct goals and interests. The aftermath of the Kwangju uprising brought to question the root cause of

Korean society’s struggles, or its fundamental paradox, and those involved in social activism turned to foreign-born ideas like Marxist and post-Marxist theories of sociopolitical progress in an attempt to establish theoretical, well-structured justification for their movement and to address fundamental, systematic issues that the nation was facing. Following a multi-year debate that began with a series of articles printed in a 1985 issue of Changjakkwa Pipyŏng, a literary journal, the forces pushing for democratization

13 Shin Hyunjoon, Kayo, K-pop, kŭrigo Kŭ Nŏmŏ [Popular songs, K-pop, and beyond] (Seoul: Dolbaegae, 2013), p. 191. 104 split into a number of factions with distinct answers to the question.14 Of the two large factions that emerged in the end, one group, labeled minjung minju (People’s Democracy, or PD), viewed societal conflicts through the lens of class struggles, while the other, minjok haebang (National Liberation People’s Democracy Revolution, or NLPDR), placed an emphasis on the issue of the nation’s division, and sought a nationalist path to conflict resolution.15

Song collectives and minjung kayo likewise followed this dynamic. As Lee

Youngmi describes in her book Norae, the nationalist NLPDR shunned all imported musical genres and forms of expression, regardless of whether they signified the establishment or the counterculture, and instead turned to traditional styles and sonorities from Korean music prior to Westernization. This faction therefore produced music aspiring to succeed grassroots forms of expression embodying Korean nationals’ spirit and sentiments. The resulting musical vocabulary, while rarely devoid of Western instruments and song forms, does reject conventional uses of and modes in favor of a reconstructed historical Korean sound. A number of examples come from folk singer-songwriter Jeong Tae-chun.16 His music, while still expressed in the conventional language of guitar-driven folk music imported from America, presents an emotionally restrained, lyrically rich take on mid-tempo, minor-key folk songs.

14 The debate took shape in a collection of articles printed in Changjakkwa Pipyŏng, vol. 57 (October 1985). Economist Park Hyeon-chae’s article advocates for state-driven capitalism of the faction later known as minjung minju (People’s Democratic Revolution), while Lee Dae-geun’s theory of South Korea as a periphery capitalism spoke for the more moderate shimin minju (Civil Democratic Revolution), which eventually lost favor to the radical, nationalist minjok haebang faction. 15 Kang Junman, Hanguk Hyŏndaesa Sanchaek [Walk through modern Korean history]: the 1980s, vol. 4 (Seoul: Inmulgwa Sasangsa, 2003), pp. 127–32; Kim Woon-hoe, “Chugŭn Pyohyŏnyangshigi San Chonjaeyangshigŭl Kusokhada” [Dead forms of expression confine living forms of existence], Pressian, 15 August 2012. Accessed 15 September 2017. http://www.pressian.com/news/article.html?no=39426. 16 Lee Youngmi, Hanguk Taejunggayosa [History of Korean popular songs] (Seoul: Minsogwon, 2006), pp. 286–87, 326–27. 105

Jeong’s song “Pukhankangesŏ” (On North ), released in 1985, exemplifies the signature sound of this construction of a Korean sound. As for the song’s structure, it rejects the standard verse-chorus form in favor of three full strophes that span the whole length of the song, without any clearly demarcated refrain. The verses, each in

AABC form, appear to focus on accommodating the lyrics rather than on forming regular, symmetrical phraseology. Phrase A, the only part of the tune that returns in a single verse, concludes in a descending motion in the melody in both iterations, and a iv-

VI-i ending instead of a stronger dominant resolution. The B part features a stepwise ascending movement in the melody to the dominant, which remains suspended for two measures before falling to the tonic. However, this apparent resolution to the tonic in fact sounds hardly complete or satisfactory for a number of reasons. This harmonic movement occurs at a place in the song where the dynamic and affective energy would climax were the song in the standard sixteen-bar form. Also, the tonic fails to assert itself firmly beyond the measure (m. 12) and the melody’s immediate fall back to the fifth scale degree later in the measure. In the shorter C part that follows, the song moves through a iv-V-i progression to conclude the verse, and the tonic played in arpeggio by the guitar fills the void left by the melody that refuses to linger beyond the arrival at the tonic (m.

15).

The musical unfolding of the shorter C section, affectively anticlimactic and somewhat inconclusive, parallels the words that the part conveys, as the first two verses see the increasingly obscuring fog by the river. Similarly, the first two verses, lacking any clear teleological motion or sense of progress harmonically and dynamically, follows the subject’s introspective reflection and meditative reconciliation with the nature, away 106 from urban cityscape and human relationships they find “unfamiliar” and confusing. The text for the final verse presents nature as the giver of a “fresh new ,” and the fog finally clears at the end. However, Jeong’s musical subject does not appear to arrive at this inner peace by laboring to resolve a conflict and have the harmonic subject, or tonic, triumph heroically. Rather, the blissful epiphany arrives calmly and gently without much fanfare. In lieu of a grand resolution of built-up tension, the musical material presents virtually no change between before and after the clearing of the fog. In other words, it is the subject that undergoes renewing change, not the surroundings. Jeong’s Buddhist belief may have influenced the song’s theme as well as several references in a number of songs that refer to Buddhist concepts, worldview, and terminology such as ŏkgŏp, dosŏlchŏn, and haetal.17 While uncommon in contemporary Korean popular music, this and other attempts to look back to a time in the philosophical and ideological terrain of

Korea before Westernization constitute a common theme in music that the nationalists claimed and supported.

Singer-songwriters of the 1980s and beyond: Political sectionalization and the rise of people’s songs

Those associated with the People’s Democracy front, in contrast, incorporated a wide range of musical styles and vocabularies to their repertory. The democratic socialists’ emphasis on class struggle as the fundamental conflict of the society meant that, unlike the nationalists, they would not hesitate to take Western genres and trends

17 These terms are Korean transliterations (i.e., read in ) of Chinese words meaning “one hundred million kalpa,” “Tuṣita” (one of the six heavens according to Buddhist cosmology), and “nirvana,” respectively. 107 and make them their own. As a result, noraepae and other musical endeavors associated with the PD formed a patchwork or stylistic compendium of expressive possibilities, incorporating aspects of musical and cultural languages of American counterculture, as well as the imported sounds of rock-and-roll and folk music. The aforementioned project group Nochatsa, for instance, produced music whose harmonic and lyrical vocabulary does not depart dramatically from that of American commercial folk and pop music. The group’s former members who transitioned to full-time music careers had greater success perhaps because their musical language fit in more easily to

Korea’s commercial music scene, which at the time Western musical conventions and styles dominated.

An Chi-hwan, a folk singer-songwriter formerly of Nochatsa, exemplifies such trend among song collectives and their members under the PD camp umbrella. Having come to public visibility in 1980 with “Sora sora purŭrŭn sora” (Pine tree, pine tree, evergreen pine tree), he crossed over to the mainstream popular charts in the early 1990s.

Most of his songs, with or without political messages in lyrics, closely resemble commercial folk and pop songs imported from the United States and, in turn, made popular in Korea. The words to “Chŏrŭi nodongja” (Workers of steel), one of his most overtly political songs and a staple anthem in mass demonstrations to this day, focuses on the theme of workers’ solidarity and camaraderie.

Minju nojo kitbal arae Under the banner of the democratic union Wasŏ moyŏ mungchisae Come, let us join forces Ppaeatkin uri pittamŭl Join in our fight to recover Tujaeng’ŭro twechajŭsae Our blood and sweat [whose fruit] taken away

Kangchŏl katŭn haebang ŭiji Come, let us fight for our will to freedom Wasŏ moyŏ chikisae That is strong as steel Tujaeng sogae saraissŭmŭl Fight to feel with our whole bodies Onmomŭro nŭkkyŏ bosae That we are alive 108

Tankyŏlmani salkiriyo Unity is our way to survival Nodongjaga salkiriyo Workers are our way to life Nae harurŭl sarado Let us live [valued] as humans Ingandapgae salgo shipda Even for one day

Ah minju nojo uriŭi sarang Ah, the democratic union shall be our love Tujaeng’ŭro irun sarang That has been won through our fights Tankyŏl tujaeng uriŭi muki Unity in times of struggles is our weapon Nŏwa na chŏrŭi nodongja You and I are workers of steel

The march-like song uses simple chords and easy-to-sing melody to accommodate mass singing by demonstrators. In contrast, his love songs and other ballads that sing about humanity and human connections incorporate the smoothly flowing lyrical and melodic properties commonly found in typical mid-tempo folk songs, even heavily decorated and virtuosic at times. “Naega manil” (If I were…), a 1995 ballad from him that became a mainstream hit, features a simple texture of An’s vocal accompanied by an acoustic guitar , with the bass guitar and the drums entering at the first occurrence of the refrain, and the tenor saxophone during the instrumental break before the second verse. In the song’s asymmetrical verse-refrain form, the refrain notably departs from standard musical practices by never returning to or resolving any of previously introduced musical motifs. Lyrically, it is a love ballad about longing to be anything for the romantic interest.

Naega manil hanŭriramyŏn If I were the sky Kŭdae ŏlgurae muldŭlgo shipŏ I would cast a reflection on your face Pulke muldŭn chŏnyŏk chŏ noŭlchŏrŏm Like the orange sky at the sunset Na kŭdae ppiamae muldŭlgo shipŏ I would cast a reflection on your cheeks

Naega manil shiiniramyŏn If I were a poet Kŭdae wihae noraehagessŏ I would sing for you Ŏmma pumae ankin ŏrinaichŏrŏm Like a child in its mother’s arms Na haengbokhagae noraehago shipŏ I would sing of happiness

Sesang’ae kŭ muŏshirado Whatever in the world Kŭdae wihae twaego shipŏ I would be for you 109

Onŭlchŏrŏm uri hamkke issŭmi Today spent together with you Naegaen ŏlmana kŭn kippŭminji Is the greatest delight to me

Saranghanŭn naŭi sarama My love, do you know Nŏnŭn ani irŏn naŭi maŭmŭl That this is how I feel … …

The lyrics form a poetic parallel between a host of “If I were —, I would — for you” pairs in the verse and the direct statement confessing the subject’s love in the refrain. The extra four measures at the end of the refrain, responsible for the asymmetry in phraseology, concludes the analogy thus formed up to the moment with a corresponding rhetorical question to the lover, “My love, do you know this is [how] I feel?” While the song’s form resembles that of “Achim isŭl,” with a linear trajectory that lacks recurring or developing primary motifs, the harmonies display a greater stability and, perhaps, predictability.

His song “Sarami kkotboda arŭmdawŏ” (People are more beautiful than flowers), released in 1997, makes use of a harder rock sound with retro elements invoking nostalgia. The treble-heavy synthesizer pad, resembling the saw wave tone of the

Yamaha DX7, opens the song outlining the following basic chord progression: the tonic major triad, tonic major sixth, tonic dominant seventh, and a return in reverse to the triad.

While this progression does not support any of the sung portions of the song, it returns at future instrumental breaks. The sonority featured in the opening measures invokes the sound of anthems, which by the time of the song’s release already constituted part of the musical past. An’s use of his voice in this song also sounds considerably more rough and raw than in such ballads as “Naega manil,” with heavier use of growly and guttural sounds. However, An’s invocation of a musical past, not to mention a borrowed one, hardly remains passive or uncritical, as the anthem departs in a number of significant 110 ways from the established musical conventions while still alluding to a shared nostalgia associated with the genre and style.

Figure 3.1: An Chi-hwan, “Sarami kkotboda arŭmdawŏ,” opening synthesizer riff.

After four measures of the aforementioned synth pad, the heavily distorted electric rhythm guitar enters, first introducing a dissonance on the minor third, then returning to the power chord on the tonic reinforcing the bass pedal played by the synthesizer riff. The verse consists of a simple I–IV chord progression, played by muted rhythm guitar and electric bass atop a straight eight-beat rock rhythm on the drums. The pre-chorus bridge section builds up momentum with the tonic’s move toward the dominant, before descending to the tonic for the first ending, leading back to the second verse, and driving the built-up momentum to the refrain the second time. The refrain begins in the subdominant and features it heavily, which would in a typical rock anthem suggest that it is a bridge anticipating the refrain on the landing on the tonic from the dominant. This release, however, never occurs. In fact, the refrain stubbornly refuses to provide the V–I harmonic resolution, while making it clear with the sparse phrasing along with the vocal call and response that it indeed is the climax of the song, rather than a bridge section where the subdominant would normally reign. Even the conclusion of the refrain consists of two measures of suspended subdominant “resolving” to the tonic, avoiding a clear, strong harmonic resolution.

The song, in short, avoids strong harmonic motions in a linear trajectory toward a goal in favor of slow-moving chords moving in a progression less predictable than 111 commonly found in the musical convention, each chord suspended underneath a largely uneventful melodic material. These compositional decisions create a multilayered effect.

The song invokes a musical genre associated with a forceful, angular sound and strong harmonic motions between clearly demarcated and hierarchical key areas by its use of the genre’s sonic vocabulary, while juxtaposing the sound with An’s approach to songwriting that favors the poetic text over the remarkable, memorable music that seizes the listener’s attention. In other words, the less assertive music, even stagnant at such times as near the end of the refrain, contributes to an increased clarity of lyrical communication. Combined with the song’s thematic digression from topics and subject matters most commonly associated with the genre, love ballads and anthems of freedom mostly from a masculine point of view, An’s brand of rock anthem he demonstrates in this song effectively serves and adds to his musical world, in which the beauty of humanity and poetry reigns, and sociopolitical agency of the poetic and musical subject remains uncompromised.

Kim Kwang-seok, perhaps one of the last singer-songwriters from the Korean folk tradition to make a lasting impact on the musical terrain of mainstream Korean pop music, also began his career as a member of Nochatsa while attending Myeongji

University for a degree in management. Throughout his subsequent music career, first as a founding member of the amateur folk music collective Tongmulwŏn (zoo) and then as a solo artist, his music combines a primarily guitar-driven folk music style with poetically rich texts, whose topics range from love ballads to musings about the meaning of life, dreams, and aspirations, much of which reflect his Buddhist beliefs and the religion’s views on existence, universal oneness, and reincarnation.18 “Naŭi norae” (my song),

18 For more on the philosophy behind Kim’s lyrics, see Kim Yongseok, Kim Kwang-seok, Uri Salmŭi Norae [Kim Kwang-seok and the songs of our life] (Seoul: Chŏnnyŏnŭi Sangsang: 2016). 112 featured on his third full-length album released in 1992, for instance, sets a text about a persistent sense of hope that music brings amid discouraging life circumstances and events to an upbeat (♩=168), major-key tune driven by the acoustic guitar, bass guitar, and drums. The acoustic guitar strum pattern, which remains faithful to the rhythm of typical guitar-driven folk songs in fast twos, plays simple chord progressions of I–V–IV–

I–vi–V–IV–I (verses) and I–V–IV (refrain). The similarly simple melodic material carries the lyrics, whose message culminates in the lines of the refrain: “My songs are my strength, my songs are my life.” In another song, “Sŏrŭn chŭŭme” (At near-thirty), released in 1994, Kim sings about his youth and memories of past lovers fading away with time even as “seasons return every year, … though [he] never let them go, and [he] never left them.” While possibly too heavy for popular songs, these topics he introduced appear to have resonated with listeners who had grown weary of typical love ballads saturating the airwaves at the time, though it is not to suggest that Kim never wrote love songs. In pursuing these topics and lyrical themes, Kim continues what he and his fellow members of Tongmulwŏn began: to diversify the thematic terrain of Korean popular songs, otherwise saturated by formulaic love songs of adult contemporary and tŭrotŭ singers.

Kim’s use of his voice maximizes the affective results of such lyrical themes.

While his nasal tone, narrow range, inconsistent breath support, and poor resonation of vowels, common among untrained singers, would arguably render him far from a virtuosic vocalist in a conventional sense, the calm, effortless vocalization along with underlying vibratos as though to weep through the notes sets the tone for perhaps heavy, yet sincere and unassuming, lyrics. Maximizing the effects of such a plain yet to-the- 113 point vocal style, Kim enunciates each word carefully with crisp consonants, refusing to compromise the clarity of the text in favor of flashy vocal decorations. For instance, the word “hŭrgiyŏ” (the exclamatory objective form of “dirt,” or “earth”), commonly mispronounced with a single soft “g” consonant after the first syllable (i.e., “hŭgiyŏ”), appears in Kim’s version of “Kwangyaesŏ” (In the field), clearly and correctly enunciated. Where An Chi-hwan made the use of simple chord progressions and melodic lines to bring out the lyrical contents, Kim Kwang-seok strategically uses his unadorned, mundane vocal style to construct the sound for his poetry. This voice that he constructs for his music parallels an affective development in which the tension and the subsequent catharsis rarely explode, but the potency of the built-up energy pushes the emotional narrative gradually but firmly.

His song “Nŏmu apŭn sarangŭn sarangi aniŏssŭmŭl” (That love too painful was never love) from the 1994 album exemplifies these characteristics of many of Kim’s songs. The song, set in the key of E minor, begins with an extended, unaccompanied harmonica solo that remains modally ambiguous until the acoustic guitar enters on the

III–VII♭–i progression, which makes up the remainder of the song. The possible and sonically imminent rise to the relative major key fails time and time over, and the harmony settles back on the minor tonic, maintaining a consistent level of harmonic tension. Likewise, the palm mute technique keeps the guitar sound from resonating freely, and a subdued, controlled dynamic prevails throughout the song.

The lyrics, whose structure that of the music follows closely, consist of regretful reflections on a past romantic relationship in the verses, and more specific instances that remind the subject of the ex-lover in the refrain. The third and final iteration of the 114 refrain, however, which follows the eight-measure-long harmonica solo, reflects on the experience from a more emotionally removed perspective, vowing not to meet in future lives as lovers, or to even reminisce about the memories as romantic. The closing hook or arguably the second half of the refrain, from which the song’s title originates, falls back from the heightened emotions of the preceding phrases, concluding that romance too painful in the end does not count as love. Melodically, the verses feature each phrase rising briefly and then falling back onto the minor tonic, remaining within the range of one octave for their entirety. The refrain, which begins on an elevated note of D4, peaks briefly on the G above it before descending back to the calm, whispering lower register and concluding on the minor tonic. The uppermost note of the final refrain falls on the phrase “… come to this world [as lovers],” the emotional peak of the song, before descending back to the register in which the song began, arriving at “love that ended unfinished [i.e., prematurely].” Throughout all of this, the low, weeping voice, generated as Kim seems to swallow the sound inward rather than project it outward, infiltrates the entire song.

Kim’s vocal techniques, as the song exemplifies, remain far from ideal by the standards of properly trained singers from diverse traditions, but they nonetheless constitute a central part of the affective outcome of his songs. This resembles the vocal style of , who departed from prevalent technical conventions that constituted sound vocal performance and thus constructed his sonic and affective world in connection with his place in time, space, and social context. However, for Kim, his expressive vocabulary as composer and performer not only situated him at a point in 115 space and time, but also defined his take on Koreanness at a historic moment, using musical devices that originated overseas and repurposing them.

Kim shares such musical and political agency with a number of singers and songwriters emerging from the Korean folk scene and song collective traditions, such as

Jeong Tae-chun and An Chi-hwan from earlier. This agency also marks one of the most marked distinctions that set apart musicians affiliated or connected with democratization, anti-dictatorship, reunification, or other social movements from those whose music remained largely disinterested and depoliticized, such as the C’est Si Bon performers mentioned near the beginning of this chapter. The first category of musicians, in other words, have maintained a sense of active and organic involvement in their political, social, and musical surroundings in a way that the latter did not, and this distinction separates the former’s politically charged, potent, and proactive music from the latter’s disinterested, largely bourgeois music, imported and regurgitated. In this regard, in the history of Korean singer-songwriters, to write music entails politicizing it.

Singer-songwriters in the star system era

The year 1996 saw the death of Kim Kwang-seok and, perhaps not entirely by coincidence, the beginning of the end of modern Korean folk music as people knew it.

Modern folk and folk-influenced rock music gave way to the increasingly popular dance and ballad music, not unrelated to the aforementioned industrial restructuring during the

Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s. Singer-songwriters on live stages largely fell behind the rapidly changing trends of visualized, televised popular music and vertically integrated music production. Idol groups produced by large talent agencies and their 116 dance-pop music filled the void they left, but questions lingered among listeners and critics alike regarding perceived and actual musical authenticity—that is, whether the musicians in recordings and on television amounted to much more than empty puppets, performing songs written and produced for them and lip-synching to the recordings onstage. While the blame partially falls on insufficient sound systems in television studios or poor acoustics in stadiums, the crux of the criticism is one that dance groups and singers in the United States should find familiar. , for instance, encountered public criticism of various degrees of harshness with each successive , once dubbed “blatant, lip-synching” in a 2009 report.19

Eurodance duo even, rather infamously, carried out all of its mainstream music career based on lip-synching to recordings made by virtually unknown studio singers, resulting in the revocation of their Grammy Award in 1990 and a series of lawsuits.20

Dance groups that began to emerge in South Korea since & Boys’ success in the early 1990s introduced to the Korean public the same debate, saturating music programs on national television with lip-synched performances and provoking countless vocal opponents to the widespread practice. The opponents pointed to the blatant lack of musical authenticity in the contemporary popular songs, not only in their writing and production but also in their performance, which they appear to have deemed a fundamental violation of basic musical trust. The resistance came as an understandable reaction to the shift in the music industry dynamic, in which the formerly visible

19 M. Tye Comer, “Reinvigorated, Lip-synching Spears Wows N.Y. Fans,” Reuters, 13 March 2009. 20 Chuck Philips, “Milli Vanilli's Grammy Rescinded by Academy,” , 20 November 1990; Ulysses Torassa, “Suit Seeks Refunds for Ohioans who Bought Milli Vanilli Album,” The Plain Dealer, 22 November 1990. 117 songwriting and production processes now occurred behind closed doors of talent agencies, and the sound of music as well as the context of its creation felt artificial and estranged from the makers and the listeners of music. Listeners find it crucial, as the Milli

Vanilli incident makes evident, to get in a piece of music, a musical recording, or a performance what they believe they should get. Musicians, producers, and talent agencies have pursued a number of solutions to this lack of perceived transparency. One increasingly popular approach involves various types and styles of “reality”-themed television programs (not to be confused with what those in the United States and other

English-speaking regions have dubbed reality television) that observe celebrities’ daily life and interactions in situations not strictly scripted, offering to paint the otherwise distant stars as genuine human beings just like us. I will dedicate part of chapter 5 to further address the rise and proliferation of this television genre and their ramifications in

Korean popular music. For now, I shall focus on another important approach: musical and marketing tactics of fabricating musical authenticity and evoking nostalgia by tapping into the pre-existing notions about singer-songwriters. The implications of this reach far beyond mere mimicking of musical styles.

Before I proceed any further, I wish to clarify that my objective here is not to paint a comparison between an authentic past and an inauthentic present that merely copies the outward appearance and sound of the former. Rather, one must not lose sight of the fact that producing a musical act has become a dramatically different, far more sophisticated process under the contemporary star system, and the singer-songwriters and their acoustic music make obvious references to a moment in the musical past. In other words, the recent resurgence of singer-songwriters and musical styles associated with the 118 tradition means what it does because of a shared past to which the current phenomenon refers.

IU, born Lee Ji-eun, is one such example. Signed to Loen Entertainment, she underwent intensive pre-debut training, and has every aspect of her recordings and performances perfected by staff producers and trainers at the label, like most idol singers and vocal groups today. Such close management remains the norm in the industry today as mentioned repeatedly thus far, and aspiring singers expect it from the management when they audition, as Lee did several times before she finally reached an agreement with Loen and began her career as a trainee there. “Boo,” her first single from her 2009 album Growing Up, reflects her label’s decision to highlight her bright, teenage girl side with an upbeat dance number, departing from the guitar-playing, ballad-singing musician that she had first constructed and has since firmly established as her . The way that Loen, as well as other comparable labels in the industry today, strategizes its stars suggests that Lee’s career, while an obvious tribute to the singer-songwriter tradition of previous decades, constitutes a different economic and cultural phenomenon from the latter, even if Lee’s musical interests and abilities closely resemble those of her musical predecessors.

Her guitar playing, which occupies a central place in the spotlight in nearly every one of her appearances, refers to the Korean modern folk singers who came before her and have been the subjects of inquiry throughout this chapter thus far.

Though most of her televised performances feature a prerecorded instrumental track, she frequently plays sparser, more stripped-down when appearing on late-night music programs and at her live concerts, accompanying herself with a guitar. Similarly, 119 the nearly omnipresent publicity about her interest and active involvement in writing her lyrics and music by herself, no doubt also carefully orchestrated and coordinated, helps paint her as an independent agent in the creative process. Such claims, while factually true, do less to communicate the fact and more to situate Lee within the genealogy of singer-songwriters that occupy a certain place in the cultural hierarchy, that is, to afford her an elevated status above idol singers who do not play such an active role in music- making. “Choŭn Nal” (A good day), one of Lee’s biggest hits and most recognizable songs to date that she wrote, topped numerous charts, saturated airwaves, and won the

2012 Korean Music Awards’ song of the year. The repackage issue of her 2013 album

Modern Times includes “Kŭmyoire Mannayo” (See you on a Friday) as the first track, the lyrics and music of which Lee wrote by herself. She undoubtedly has superb abilities to write and compose songs that compel and draw in listeners. The crux of the present argument, however, lies in Korean cultural industrial complex’s powerful and well- strategized emphasis on Lee’s persona, or one may even argue her identity, as a singer- songwriter. The fact that the more upbeat, typical pop numbers in Lee’s discography, such as the aforementioned “Boo,” also earned her an “idol singer” descriptor seems to hardly change the tide. Lee, though remarkably successful and popular, remains far from a lone example of farm-raised singer-songwriters following the footsteps of their predecessors from the wild.

Kwon Ji-yong, better known as his stage name G-Dragon, makes up one fifth of the Big Bang, produced by YG Entertainment. In addition to being dubbed a child and promising rapper since his participation in the 2001 issue of the hip- hop compilation series Taehanminguk at age 13, he has built a reputation as a producer 120 and composer, as a major creative mind behind his group. Today, he has grown to be the author or co-author of 160 songs, according to the Korea Music Copyright Association

(KOMCA)’s database (on which he appears under the ID number W0726200).21 His name appears in the group’s album sleeves and concert brochures as a songwriter, composer, fashion coordinator, and stage director. His case exemplifies the effectiveness of the contemporary Korean star system in polishing and raising young talents to suit the formula for success that it has already established. While Kwon’s background as an idol star raised within the star system compromises, or at least transforms, the air of musical authenticity surrounding his credential as a singer-songwriter, the alignment of the author and the performer in contemporary Korean popular music remains refreshing and perhaps welcomed. In addition, the well-greased machine of the entertainment industry system effectively and masterfully finds, trains, prepares, and markets talented aspiring musicians who seek discovery, exposure, and success within the system. The ideal of multifaceted idol stars like Kwon, to whose credentials musical authorship remains central, aligns with YG CEO Yang Hyun-suk’s aspiration for the group at the time of its debut in 2006 to “counter [or cancel the impact of] existing idol groups” by bringing together “promising talents who will become leading songwriters, composers, vocalists, rappers, dancers, and fashion coordinators.”22

Seemingly peripheral is the fact that writing credits often mislead the reader about the extent of the artist’s involvement in the creative process that one would associate with authorship. While no major scandal has broken out surrounding Lee’s exaggeration or

21 The KOMCA website (komca.or.kr) does not generate static links to search results as of the time of writing, despite being the primary and most credible source for this kind of information. 22 Kim Won-kyum, “Shinin kŭrŭp konggae Yang Hyun-suk: Komudŭn ton, inkimanŭl chotchi anketta” [Yang Hyun-suk on the new group: Will not go after children’s money or fame], Star News, 30 June 2006. 121 outright fabrication of her composition and songwriting skills, writing or co-writing credits have long comprised a central aspect of numerous Korean pop musicians’ publicized credentials as serious musicians, and Lee’s case continues this relatively new tradition of singers’ self-promotion along the hierarchy of musicianship by grafting themselves onto authorship and therefore artistic autonomy. This tendency to exaggerate a singer’s involvement in songwriting and production goes beyond products of the star system. Yoon Jong-shin, who has evolved from a guest vocalist featured in the producer collective 015B’s first album in 1990 to an established singer and now a producer and songwriter, regularly works with professional composers and arrangers who have proper education and experience to produce reliable, syntactically sound results out of his melodic and harmonic motifs. Out of the 33 songs released in 2014 and earlier that have

Yoon listed as an author, according to the KOMCA database, Yoon (W0104800) wrote and composed only two without co-composers or arrangers.

In other words, while Yoon boasts the ability to write compelling lyrics and produce catchy melodies, the frequent spotlight placed on his songwriting abilities and credentials aims to highlight a musician’s engagement in the creative process at the expense of detailed yet crucial distinctions between a singer who actively participates in the process and a composer or arranger who orchestrates musical idioms and languages to put together a coherent piece of composition. This pattern of creative inflation of creative credits, I suspect, manifests itself more frequently among idol stars arising from today’s entertainment industry system, who typically start their careers at a lower position in the culture-political hierarchy of purported musicianship. This is because contemporary idol singers’ credibility as active forces in the creation of music largely remains invisible 122 behind closed doors of management companies and their legitimacy contingent only on the claims of the latter, unlike many of their predecessors whose musical growth as creative agents the public witnessed. By creating, or fabricating, ties to the tradition of musically autonomous singer-songwriters, these contemporary musicians aim to have the public associate them with musical as well as political self-sufficiency.

Moving up the cultural hierarchy by association often takes a more literal turn.

Contemporary singer-songwriters frequently perform duets with other musicians, feature better-established artists in their tracks, and star as guests at others’ concerts to solidify artistic and professional ties with one another and association with artists who already have earned a status of legitimacy. Lee appeared as a featured singer in the song

“Sogyeokdong” (titled so after a village in metropolitan Seoul) in Seo Taiji’s ninth album

Quiet Night, released in 2014. Seo released the version of the song featuring Lee before the one sung by him, and they performed the song live together a number of times, including at the M.Net Asian Music Awards ceremony later that year. Sharing the stage with an iconic and historically significant figure such as Seo, who as an alumnus of the rock band Sinawe and later the frontman of the group introduced rap and teen-oriented pop music to Korea’s musical landscape then saturated with tŭrotŭ and adult-contemporary ballads, serves as a cultural capital and asset for Lee as she strives to continue ascending on the cultural hierarchy of Korean popular music.23

In another example of such association, Lee appeared in 2011 in a television commercial that juxtaposed a video of her filmed in front of a green screen to an archived

23 See: Lee Dong-yeon, Seo Taijinŭn Uriegae Muŏshiŏnna: Seo Taiji, Taejung Ŭmak, Hawimunhwa [Who was Seo Taiji to us?: Seo Taiji, popular music, and subaltern cultures]. Seoul: Munhwa Kwahaksa, 1999; Chigŭmŭn Radio Shidae, MBC-FM, 15 July 2009; Lee Youngmi, C’est Si Bon, Seo Taijiwa Tŭrotŭrŭl Purŭda [C’est Si Bon sings Seo Taiji and tŭrotŭ]. Seoul: Duri Media, 2011. 123 footage of the late Kim Kwang-seok from a live concert. The advertisement campaign for the mobile carrier SK Telecom’s new nationwide LTE network, bearing the title

“Hyŏnshirŭl nŏmda” (transcending reality), featured the two singers performing side by side, with Lee harmonizing over Kim’s part, overcoming the limitations that reality places on the dead and the living, whose careers never overlapped. The association exemplifies efforts to elevate her status as an artist closer to the level of those who make up the Korean popular music canon. These kinds of ties to the musical past amount to more than a mere one-time advertisement stunt or a fun special performance, and they influence the light in which the public views the musicians in question. Readers from the

United States and the surrounding regions may recognize similar patterns in highly visible collaborations, from and ’s “FourFiveSeconds,” which featured Paul McCartney as a co-writer, co-producer, and featured guest artist, to Justin

Timberlake’s technologically-aided duet cover of, or “completion” of, the late Michael

Jackson’s song “,” released in 2014. The cross-genre collaborations at awards ceremonies also fall under the same category, as sites of exchange of cultural capitals. Not only do established musicians enjoy performing with their peers and those aspiring to follow them, the latter get to share the stage floor with ones who have made it, claiming a similar caliber to them. The last thing those performances achieve, regardless of intentions or acknowledgements, is benign, apolitical celebration that produces no lasting repercussions for participants.

Making the contemporary genius: Implications of the resurgence of singer-songwriters 124

This kind of fabrication of musical authenticity and genius that has produced the likes of Lee and Kwon, a predictable response to the rise of the star system which obscures the creative process from the general public, has implications reaching beyond mere presentations of musical savviness, the musical language commonly associated with singer-songwriters, and the syntax of authorial self-sufficiency. Many of the consequences of the current generation of singer-songwriters with mainstream visibility from, or constitute remnants of, their predecessors and often have loaded implications. In other words, today’s Korean entertainment industry simply maintains and recontextualizes the often problematic implications of previous generations of singer- songwriters, rather than fundamentally changing the stakes as some may assume.

One trend that remains from the pre-1990s era of Korean singer-songwriters involves the historically gendered connotations associated with artistic creativity, known especially in the Western civilization in the instance of the romantic genius and virtuosity linked with the feminine, the irrational, the pathological. Between the increasingly common studies of how the romantic musical genius came to be such as Charles Rosen’s

Romantic Generation and Susan McClary’s treatment of Romantic-era notions of femininity and madness, we gain an insight into the historical subjugation of femininities as an anomaly in the age of reason, the repercussions of which still linger to this day.24

While one should exercise caution not to commit the error of applying the Western framework directly and blindly to the cultural atmosphere and practices of contemporary

Korea without regard to its cultural and historical specificity, the same mistrust of the feminine and of the seemingly supernatural act of artistic creation seems to lie beneath

24 Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 83–84. 125 both. For one, more female musicians claim part in the still-mystified act of writing music, but not the concrete oversight and authority associated with being a producer. The territory of hands-on musical authority in the studio and onstage largely remains reserved for men, and few female artists advertise expertise or interest in production in the same way as their male counterparts across genres. This gender disparity manifests itself not only in genres traditionally associated with masculinity such as rock and hip-hop, but also in acoustic folk and pop music, in which no female idol musician has claimed the role as an active, involved producer in the same way as Kwon Ji-yong and the likes. The virtual absence of female producers and proliferation of male ones help reinforce the masculine domination of the studio dynamic and recording process, linking masculinity with directorial authority and subjugating the agency of performers.

Also, female singer-songwriters who claim musical proficiency and creative agency seem to have to defeminize themselves or at least minimize their sexuality, in stark contrast to the hyper-feminization of girl groups that I will discuss in chapter 4. The relative prevalence of mid-tempo and slower songs in the former’s repertories, as well as the less significant role of the body and how it is coordinated and visualized in performances of their music, must contribute to the subdued femininities of those musicians, but at any rate the musical cultural capital appears to replace the position that sex appeal plays in the looks and the sounds. Luna of girl group f(x), for example, consistently features in the foreground of her performative persona adolescent and playful girlhood or hypersexualized femininity, depending on her group’s overall concept at a given moment. Singer-songwriter IU downplays or at least deemphasizes the feminine factor, though both women, born in the same year, do emphasize their youth to 126 an extent. The de-feminization does not necessarily entail metrosexuality or a boyish chic, but rather an apparent de-prioritization of gender in the exterior of a performer’s public identity.

Singer-songwriters often seem to occupy a place in the entertainment industry terrain of being alternatives to corporate-produced idol groups supposedly pre-situated as

“the establishment,” even though they too comprise the capitalist patronage structure as artists often signed to the large entertainment companies. The music’s maximized musical rawness, to which vocal techniques, instrumentation, compositional decisions, and production techniques all contribute, gives the music of contemporary Korean singer- songwriters a sense of intimacy, a flair of personality. This strategic construction that suggests the music may be genuinely and personally that of the musician alludes to a shared, and sufficiently recent, musical past when such sincere musical expression went hand in hand with political, socioeconomic, and artistic agency. In contrast to the longstanding fear and air of mystery surrounding artistic genius in Western art music traditions, which made virtuosity at once fearsome and demonized, elements of the current state of Korean popular music make it beneficial to embrace the cumbersome load that is musical agency and claim to be heirs of a musical tradition associated with it, enabling Korean singer-songwriters to enjoy an elevated status in the musical-political hierarchy.25

Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, the singer-songwriters use the musical devices and affordances at hand to assert their political, social, and economic

25 Maiko Kawabata, “Virtuosity, the Violin, the Devil: What Really Made Paganini ‘Demonic’?” Current Musicology, vol. 83 (2007): 85–108; Susan McClary, “Excess and Frame,” from Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). 127 agency, as Korean rock bands from the previous chapter do. Their compositional and performative choices, therefore, reflect and symptomize their standing within the society, including those who have emerged in recent years from the Korean popular culture industry’s star system who are far from powerless or devoid of musical agency. With the apparent sterilization on the surface might, then, come a step toward truly succeeding an ongoing, potent movement deeply empowering.

Shin Hyunjoon argues that the “politics of culture, epitomized by the minjung kayo of the 1980s, … never provided an adequate explanation for the complex, often paradoxical relations between the political awareness expressed in messages and the cultural sensibility expressed in sounds.”26 Not only does the message-centric interpretation of musical meaning and expression fail to account for the seemingly shaky political foundation of Korean rock music I discussed in chapter 2, but it also risks a too simplistic interpretation of the new, frequently hybridized sonorities and styles from the

1990s and onward. The dramatic expansion of expressive and stylistic possibilities that post-minjung kayo Korean popular music exhibits, as well as contemporary musicians’ negotiation of musico-political agency through said possibilities, presents the need for a multifaceted inquiry about the construction of musical meaning in the new styles and genres.

26 Shin Hyunjoon, Kayo, K-pop, kŭrigo Kŭ Nŏmŏ [Popular songs, K-pop, and beyond] (Seoul: Dolbaegae, 2013), p. 201. 128

Chapter 4

Girls’ Generation: Idol Vocal Groups’ Performance of Adolescent Femininities and

“Broken Virtuosity”

“The hottest term in Korea at the moment is none other than ‘girl group,’” a headline in a state-funded, English-language magazine reads.1 It indeed seems so. Girl groups, perhaps the most visible members of what constitutes the subgenre of idol group pop, indeed dominate and define mainstream South Korean popular music today.

Members of those groups appear regularly not only on televised music programs, but also on numerous yenŭng (entertainment) television programs, in films, and in advertisements, transcending their primary role as performers of music and into actors, models, talk show hosts, and all-rounded entertainers. This has not always been the case, however, since idol groups in Korea only rose to prominence around the mid-1990s. The history of their evolution and domination of the field, albeit short, gets at the crux of the formation and development of South Korea’s popular music industry as we know it now. Most important, the success of these idol vocal groups, particularly girl groups, stood on the foundation of socially codified ideals about femininity and adolescence. The success of these groups depends, in large part, on the widespread acceptance in contemporary South

Korea of ideals and norms that their music, “made in Korea for non-Korea[n audiences],” affirm and reinforce.2

1 Jeong Deok-hyeon, “Swept up by Girl Groups,” Korea, vol. 6, no. 3 (March 2010): 45. http://www.scribd.com/doc/27645458/KOREA-magazine-March-2010-VOL-6-NO-3. 2 Shin Hyunjoon, Kayo, K-pop, kŭrigo Kŭ Nŏmŏ [Popular songs, K-pop, and beyond] (Seoul: Dolbaegae, 2013), p. 31. 129

Because the story of the rise of those idol groups involves more than the sounds of notes and chords in their songs, I must engage with the range of modes of self- fashioning and expression artists find available. In particular, the ways in which girl groups negotiate their gender identities through musical and semi-musical devices deserve a close and thorough inquiry. The girl groups’ mode of constructing and presenting an alternative virtuosity distinct from what constitutes the archetype of the successful, wholesome femininity of full-fledged, grownup womanhood, has influenced the options available for young female singers in Korea in terms of where they place on a spectrum of musical legitimacy, and in turn helped shape the public perception of categories, or a cultural hierarchy, of female singers.

Furthermore, the above process hardly occurs in a vacuum. As the quote appearing at the beginning of the chapter proclaims, the “girl group” may indeed be the hottest term in contemporary Korea, but anyone reading these words must also keep in mind that they come from a quarterly publication put out by the South Korean government for non-Korean-speaking audiences to publicize its policies promoting culture and tourism in Korea. While such origin of the quote certainly does not negate the claim about the momentum that Korean girl groups have gained or the importance of the present inquiry about them, it certainly contextualizes the phenomenon as more than simply a successful commercial franchise. In particular, it parallels the rise of the commercialized adolescent femininities that the idol girl groups embody, understood and reinforced through moral codes and institutionalized habitus on a nationwide level. I will use a large portion of this chapter to present a breakdown of the stakes in the construction 130 and valorization of such femininities, pointing to the cultural affordances and affective outcomes of the girl groups’ strategies.

In a broader sense, the way these groups produce, perform, and become marketed commodities reflects the priorities of today’s South Korean society at-large. Consider the release of girl group KARA’s 2010 EP Lupin, a DSP Entertainment production, for instance, which involved far more than the distribution of the songs and physical records.

Naver, a major South Korean web portal, released a teaser clip of the for the first single from the EP during the week before the EP release, and the full video quickly found its way to terrestrial and networks as well as websites, along with elaborately staged live, in-studio performances. The group’s members also unveiled concepts for their personae for the promotion of the album at live events prior to the release. The visual elements of their album promotion, consisting of a short “bob” hairstyle, minimalist dresses that reveal much of the members’ backs and abdomens, and dark, angular makeup choices, formed a stark contrast to the cute, nearly juvenile looks that the group’s members adopted while promoting the preceding single. Such contrast, paralleling the shift in musical aesthetic and style from the prior single to the one in question, suggests that a conscious, strategic designing and planning of the visual to accompany the sonic aspects of the music and to maximize the effectiveness of the affective outcome. The tight orchestration of every aspect of these multimedial cultural creations owes to the entertainment industry of South Korea, whose present form and structure arose, as outlined in the introductory essay, from neoliberal government policies following the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, favoring the formation of industrial integration by media giants, and in turn concentration of political and economic forces to 131 produce cultural products suitable for sale in domestic and international markets. As

Korean popular culture scholar Shin Hyunjoon argues, creators of K-pop, as this particular strand of Korean popular music has come to be known, targeted foreign audiences as its primary consumers since its conception.3 The resulting exportable package, distinct from popular music intended for domestic consumption before and after the rise of the K-pop brand, undergoes a meticulous production system that manages every detail from talent discovery to staging and dictates the coordination of the highly theatrical stage personae.

The rise of a new breed of vocal groups

No more than a handful of scholarly analyses and reviews exist of the structure, function, and visual and sonic traits of Korean vocal groups. However, the limited amount of literature, as well as some works that do not address pop groups directly, does offer some insight into those groups, whose music and aesthetic choices draw from Western vocal groups and artists from other traditions. In particular,

Jacqueline Warwick’s work on girl groups in 1960s American popular music sheds a light a range of topics from the significance of vocal timbres in the construction of girlhood to the gendered power dynamic in the creative process.4

The structural and practical changes in South Korea’s entertainment industry around the turn of the twentieth century, in which extra-musical elements of music and musicians became objects of rigorously articulate craft and highlighted commodities on

3 Shin Hyunjoon, Kayo, K-pop, kŭrigo Kŭ Nŏmŏ [Popular songs, K-pop, and beyond] (Seoul: Dolbaegae, 2013), pp. 31, 52. 4 Jacqueline Warwick, Girl Groups, Girl Culture: Popular Music and Identity in the 1960s (New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 30–32, 128, 145. 132 mainstream mass media, led to the rise of groups with clearly defined kŏnsep (concepts), or thematized personae, to fame and visibility, backed by the well-oiled machine of the star system. These groups thus build upon the successes of several prominent vocal groups in the history of contemporary Korean popular music, such as the Hee Sisters of the 1970s and the Seoul Sisters of the 1980s. Musical heirs of American girl groups of the 1950s and the 1960s like and , they sang multipart harmonies with the lead vocalist singing the melody, peaking in dynamic and intensity around the climax of the song.5 This means that, in this model of arranging voices in a vocal group, one rarely hears the melody by itself in isolation in the most memorable, catchy parts of . The lead-and-harmony texture both suits the musical style in which they specialize, and effectively highlights the lead singer of the group. The latter proved effective in promoting one of the most visible end consequences of those vocal groups, namely paving the way for the lead singers’ solo careers, though small, disorganized labels that produced and managed the groups under control of individual owner-producers seldom had the structure or influence to promote their acts effectively.

The vocal groups of the post-1990s era, however, differ from most of their predecessors in a number of ways. First, they largely claim the genre of upbeat dance and pop music rather than adult contemporary music similar to that of cabaret singers. This has largely to do with the rise of teenage consumers as a potent target audience. A noteworthy implication of this change in audience and musical genre-style claimed has to do with the texture, whereby the three- or four-part harmony texture in support of a lead singer gave way to a single melody supported by an instrumental backing track. The

5 Ibid., pp. 19–22. 133 single-part melody often has multiple voices delivering it, in which case each person’s voice becomes functionally less independent.

Second, they emerge from an industry complex that has a dramatically different structure and set of practices from the culture industry of the early 1990s and earlier. The conglomeratized mass culture industry of today integrates numerous steps of production, systemically managing and micro-managing nearly every detail of the looks and sounds of the vocal groups, as I discussed in the introduction. Any given decision in composition, production, or performance that an artist of the 1980s Korea would have made alone or in consultation with a colleague or fellow artist may now depend on a dedicated group of in-house specialists affiliated with the management company. This structural change has led the new generation of vocal groups to possess a more stable lineup, now organized and sustained by an external force with economic interests via binding legal contracts.

This consolidated production process allows artists to make a mainstream debut at an early age, since intensive in-house training replaces, or at least heavily supplements, trials and errors that they would otherwise undergo before they have gained a firm handle on their art and attained popular and commercial success. Most Korean singers before the rise of the star system made a mainstream debut through one of four avenues: underground music scenes centered in Seoul, independent rock bands that performed in clubs and theaters, musical groups in universities and social movement circles, and club bands and entertainers catering to foreign, mostly American, military personnel stationed in Korea. -shik, a defining figure in the 1980s underground circuits, only established himself as a commercially successful, recognized name in mainstream 134

Korean popular music at age twenty-six. Yang Hee-eun, who emerged from folk scenes at age nineteen, counts as one of the youngest debuts, as does Lee Seon-hee’s debut through the MBC Kangbyŏn Kayoje (“Riverside song festival”) at age twenty. Both Kim

Jong-seo and Yim Jae-beom made their debuts through Shin Dae-chul’s heavy metal band Sinawe, and they were both twenty-four years old at the time of their debut release with the band. Park Wan-kyu, who made his way into the music industry through exchanges with U.S. military personnel and musicians in Songtan (now Pyŏngtaek), and

Yoon Do-hyun, from Paju, only attained mainstream recognition at ages twenty-four and twenty-two, respectively.

The star system, which replaces the struggles, trials, and errors in early stages of the musician’s career with intensive in-house training, allows for much earlier debuts, and the group released its first single in 2007, when three of its five original members were only fifteen years old, already having spent years as trainees. This approach resembles strategies used in such facets of the American star system as AOL

Time Warner’s WB, which produced the girl group Eden’s Crush on the television series

Popstars in 2000, and the Disney Channel, whose tween-oriented programs launched many high-profile singers’ career.6 Tyler Bickford writes that Disney’s production of idol singers represents the company’s effort to attend “more directly to the ambiguity that characterizes tween audiences,” and that programs such as Hannah Montana and High

School Musical do so by covering age-appropriate topics and being aired on age-targeted

6 A thorough treatment of Eden’s Crush appears in George Lipsitz, “Pop Stars: The Hidden History of Digital Capitalism,” in Footsteps in the Dark: The Hidden Histories of Popular Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), pp. 1–25. Also, for an analysis of the Disney Channel’s contribution to the flourishing tween-oriented music industry, see Tyler Bickford, “The New ‘Tween’ Music Industry: The Disney Channel, Kidz Bop and an Emerging Childhood Counterpublic,” Popular Music, vol. 31, no. 3 (October 2012): 417–36. 135 media vehicles.7 The South Korean idol singers in question share a number of these traits, but their strategies in reaching their target audience differ in that most Korean idols do not make their debut as a product of a primary media enterprise, which may be an audition-themed television program like or a Disney-like musical series for which the singers would be cast. In fact, it has been the norm for South Korean idol singers to undergo highly secretive training- and debut processes under the management company’s supervision, eventually to compete in the mainstream popular music market against adult singers, rather than to perform for a niche audience in a protected, age- specific bubble; the closest Disney counterpart may be the in this regard.

Exceptions in the Korean tween- and scene only began to appear in the 2010s, with the emergence of audition-themed television programs that either show or actively facilitate the process of forming and developing idols.8

This goes hand in hand with the increasingly young primary audience of the music. It would certainly be far too simplistic to say listeners in their teens and twenties have completely ousted the older adults as consumers of popular music in Korea, or upbeat dance music did ballads, rock, and tŭrotŭ; however, a particular incarnation of dance pop music that combines sung and spoken (rap) sections split among multiple singers, à la Seo Taiji and the Boys of the 1990s, constitutes the most visible and dominant section of contemporary Korean pop music. The emphasis on adolescence and youth, evident in the names of popular idol groups that refer to boys and girls rather than men and women, as well as many of their personae, parallels the predominantly young audience to whom they speak. In the meantime, however, the aforementioned absence of

7 Bickford, pp. 424–25. 8 I will discuss these television genres in greater detail in the next chapter. 136 an adolescent bubble in the media ecology seemingly counters the youth-adult distinction. South Korean adolescents to which these idol singers cater seldom enjoy an isolated bubble in which to consume specialized media products and explore their identity as a cocoon of sorts, but rather are treated as little adults; their stars appear on television, store shelves, and sales charts alongside those of their parents. This ambiguity,

I maintain, represents the difference in notions regarding youth and adolescence between the United States and South Korea, whereby the latter’s treatment of young people may suggest to a Western viewer a fragile, obscure distinction between youths and adults, as well as disorganized identity politics. Let us examine this issue more closely through concrete musical examples in the paragraphs to follow.

These idol groups capitalize on youth and adolescence through aesthetic concepts and lyrical themes. In particular, the conflation of youth and adolescent femininity, or girlhood, plays a major role in shaping performative personae of female idol singers, as it contributes to an infantilized musical subject. In a previously published article in the

Journal of Studies, I argued for the possibility of reinterpreting these young female singers and the adult male followings they gather.9 These singers and their fans, I wrote, do not merely retell and perpetuate the traditional relationship between the objectified and the objectifying, but also represent the latter’s effort to partially reverse the societal norm in contemporary Korea of expecting grown men to refrain from being part of the cycle of conspicuous consumption, considered childish, feminine, or unproductive. Having established that possibility, I must clarify that this possibility of reinterpreting the artist-fan dynamic does not preclude the systematic objectification and

9 Jarryn Ha, “Uncles’ Generation: Adult Male Fans and Alternative Masculinities in South Korean Popular Music,” Journal of Fandom Studies, vol. 3, no. 1 (2015): 43–58. 137 fetishization of the young women. The viewer’s gaze, to borrow the now-familiar framework of visual narratives in cinema, is not only a male gaze but also one of an adult.10 The age-political dynamic between the adult and the adolescent becomes an additional factor in the existing relationship between the male and the female, the observing and the observed. Let us take a closer look at the reinforcement of the aged power dynamic at play through lyrics that the women sing.

Lyrics of girlhood

The fetishization of adolescent girlhood takes on many forms. Lyrically, many of such girl groups’ love songs posit the subject as the passive, often vulnerable character in the relationship, whether the romance is blooming or dying. Others sing of remorse in romantic situations. Love songs from groups such as KARA and Sonyŏshidae (Girls’

Generation) often share these larger themes, as well as hints of social and emotional instability that point to young lovers rather than matured ones. In KARA’s 2013 song

“Suknyŏga Mot Doae” (“[I] cannot be a lady”), for instance, the subject expresses a wild, unrestrained set of post-breakup emotions of confusion and frustration in a fashion not common in songs sung in the voice of a mature lover:

Kŭrae, na mot doae No, I cannot be Suknyŏga mot doae I cannot be a lady … … Naman ppaegon modu haengbokhan gŏt It seems everyone else is happy but me katŭnde Ŏnjengan nidŭldo kyŏkke doel kŏda One day this will happen to all of you, too … … Na pangŭm ipyŏl haettan maliya I just broke up Nado cham choatsŏttan maliya Things were going so well for me Nan chigŭm irŏke apŭnde nidŭrŭn muŏga I am hurting so much. What are all of you so choa? happy about?

10 Multiple works inspired by, or in response to, Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen, vol. 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1975): 6–18. 138

… … Saengak hae polsurok hwaga nŏmu chimirŏ The more I think about it, the more upset I get Nanŭn ni mal ttara sŏngsukhaji mot haesŏ As you said, I am not mature enough Nŏrbŭn maŭm ŭro wusŭl suga ŏbnŭngŏl To smile and be understanding … … Youth serves in many instances as justification for these uncapped emotions and insecurities, normally unacceptable in fully grown adults. In other words, the singers’ lyrics paint the adolescent subject, much like the performed selves of the artists who sing the songs and, it is assumed, their primary target audience.

The Wonder Girls’ 2008 single “So Hot” shows another face of the adolescent self. The subject here acknowledges her beauty and men’s gazes it attracts in public with an acknowledgement of her youthful mischievousness, in a way that would sound humorously self-absorbed were it told in a fully-grown voice:

Wae chakku chŏdaboni, wae Why are you staring again, why? Naega kŭroke ippŭni Is it because I’m so beautiful? Amuri kŭrotago kŭroke chŏdabomyŏn But the frequent stares Naega chom ssugsŭropchani Are making me blush

Naega chinagal ttaemada Every time I walk past them Kogael tollinŭn namjadŭl All the men turn around and stare Tuiessŏ nŭkyŏjinŭn ttŭgŏun sisŏndŭl I can feel their gazes behind me Ŏttŏke hamyŏn choŭlchi What do I do?

I’m so hot, nan nŏmu yeppŏyo (I’m so hot) I’m so hot I’m so fine, nan nŏmu maeryŏk issŏ (I’m so fine) I’m so fine I’m so cool, nan nŏmu mŏtchyŏ (I’m so cool) I’m so cool I’m so, so, so hot (hot) (I’m so, so, so hot, hot) … … Choyonghi salgo shipŭnde I wish I could live in peace Tarŭn yŏja aedŭl chŏrŏm Like every other girl Ŏmmanŭn wae nal irŏke naasŏ Why did I have to be born this way Nae sarmŭl pigon hagae hanŭnji To live such a tiring life? … … The song’s questionable lyrics take on an unmistakably playful, tongue-in-cheek color once set to the upbeat dance tune and sung by the group of five teens and twentysomethings. The subject, under the viewer’s gaze, more closely resembles a young girl with a relatively new sense of self-awareness than it does a grown woman uttering 139 the words in a serious tone. In both of these instances, as well as numerous other examples not mentioned here, the subject dons fragile, immature girlhood rather than mature womanhood.

Besides love songs, lyrics that carry positive and uplifting messages aimed at cheering up the listener and making her feel empowered constitute another popular topical trend among songs of idol vocal groups, possibly due in part to their primary audience demographic of formative teenage listeners. KARA’s 2010 song “Lupin” is one example. The song’s title most likely comes from the fictional character from Maurice

LeBlanc’s series of stories, though it is difficult to gather any concrete relation between its lyrics, much of which consists of meaningless syllables sung in unison, and the famous gentleman thief. Those parts of the song’s lyrics that do carry words with meanings seem to aim to empower and encourage the group’s mostly teenage listeners:

Nopi olaga (yeah yeah yeah) Climb higher (yeah yeah yeah) Sesang ŭl ta kajyŏ bwa (yeah yeah yeah) Claim the whole world (yeah yeah yeah) Never back it up, back it, it up (Never back it up, back it, it up) Never turn it up, turn it, it up (Never turn it up, turn it, it up)

Ije chagŭn chagŭn kŏrŏ naga bwa Take one step at a time Sesang hana hana chŏnbu dama bwa Take the whole world, one step at a time Tŭgbyŏl hagil wŏnhani, ne gŏshigil barani Do you want to be special, be in control? Shijak hae, oh yeah, yeah! Start now, (oh yeah, yeah!) … … Given the production, performance, and songwriting customs in contemporary Korean pop music that tend to construct mysterious, semi-divine selves for performers, songs like

“Lupin” that communicate messages to their audience in a somewhat transparent and straightforward manner occupy a significant place in the topology of South Korean popular songs. Singers take advantage of this category of songs to demystify themselves, much in the same vein as starring in “reality” television shows, to appeal to the mass as relatable, real human beings. In examples such as “Lupin,” the songs allow the singers to 140 speak to their lay peers as teenagers (or young adults) just like them. The construction of relatability and personal authenticity in their personae thus is crucial.

This song belongs to the same topical thread as many others by male, female, and mixed vocal groups. An example better known and more commercially successful from this category of songs would be “Ch’otpul Hana ([Light of] One candle)”, a 2000 single by the five-piece male pop group G.O.D.:

Sesangen wuridŭlboda gajiji modhan ŏryŏun There are friends in this world who do not chingudŭri mansŭbnida have what we have Chigŭmdo himdŭrŏhago issŭl kŭ chingudŭrŭl We dedicate this song to them amid their wihae ii noraerŭl purŭbnida present struggles … … Wae irŏke sanŭnge himdŭlkiman hanji Why is life so difficult? Nuga insaengi arŭmdabdago malhan kŏnji Who said “life is beautiful”? … … Talajil kŏt katchi ana, naeil tto morae Change seems impossible, tomorrow and beyond

Hajiman kŭromyŏn an twae But you should not Chujŏ anjŭmyŏn an twae You should not collapse [and give up] Sesangi chunŭn taero, kŭjo chuŏjin taero Taking what life gives you as it is Irŏke pulgongpyŏnghan sesangi chunŭn taero What the unfair world gives you as it is Kŭjo patkiman hamyŏn modŭn kosŭn kŭdaero Would get you nowhere … … Sesang appe kogae suggiji mara Don’t let the world get you down Kijukji mara Or discouraged Kŭrigo uril pwara Look at us

Chichigo himdŭl ttaen naegae kidae When you’re tired and weary, lean on me Ŏnjena nae kyŏte sŏ issŭlge I will stand by you always Honjaranŭn saengaki tŭlji anke When you feel alone Naega nŏe son jaba julge I will hold your hand … … This G.O.D. song begins with a dedication, similarly to their previous hit “Saranghae kŭrigo kiŏkhae (I love you, and remember [me])” from their second album, released in

1998. The latter example differs in a crucial way, however, in that they dedicate it to “all who had to let their loved ones go,” the song being a more conventional love song. The present example takes the form of an uplifting message to listeners amid struggles from 141 the singers who, per their autobiographical narratives made public, have endured years of hardship and persisted.

The introduction to the song is but one example of the group’s repeated, open discussion about its members’ past, a strategy of transparency unusual for a Korean idol group. The group has maintained the same approach in its published interviews and segments in televised entertainment programs.11 In other words, the members’ pre-

G.O.D. lives become part of their personae, penetrating their lyrics, visual aesthetics, and extra-musical public appearances (including appearances in television talk shows and general entertainment programs), and as such they possess relatable human façades with the past, present, and the future, rather than being suspended in a timeless, mystical air of idolhood. This strategy works because of the group’s target audience, its primary affective concept and performative personae, and its arsenal of media devices available for promulgating such personae and schemes.12

To return to songs of girl groups, the use of such lyrical themes to invoke a particular type of subjectivity is hardly new. For instance, Hans’ Band, a three-piece rock band consisting of sisters, famously sang of a teenage crush at a teacher in their song

“Sŏnsaengnim saranghaeyo” (“I love you, teacher”), an example that dates back to 1998.

Although it has remained common for women to begin a performing career at a young age and sing songs with lyrics reflective of their age, the systematic construction and

11 For example, in the 16 February 2015 episode of Naengjanggorŭl Putakhae (“Take care of my refrigerator”) on JTBC, and the 28 June 2017 episode of Radio Star on MBC-TV, members of G.O.D. discussed their pre-debut anecdotes of sneaking into a nearby village and poaching corn and chicken from fields when the management company left them in neglect in a company-provided house as trainees. 12 The entertainment-comedy hybrid genre, predominant in South Korean television, is an effective tool for these groups and creators behind them to canonize and disseminate extramusical contexts such as the backstories mentioned here. I will discuss these television genres and practices, as well as their roles in shaping today’s musical conventions and strategies, in the final chapter. 142 perpetuation of the standardized girl type by the entertainment industry, found in the aforementioned examples and many other songs by idol singers, constitute a relatively recent development.

Another part of this process involves a linguistic device intrinsic to the Korean language. The polite voice in the Korean language is a linguistic feature that transforms the verb suffix of a sentence when the speaker addresses an elder, a stranger, or a mass audience, or aims to express respect to the listener, in a way similar to a usage of the second-person plural vous in French. The use of this voice, while nearly nonexistent in lyrics sung by a male subject, appears markedly more frequently in songs sung from the perspective of a (particularly young) female. This kind of textual age play not only describes a stereotypical, more socially acceptable age gap in relationships between an older man and a younger woman in the context of the narratives of individual songs, but it also reinforces the idea of the female as the younger, immature sex.

The lyrics of these idol groups, to summarize, make use of the media industry institution and its conventions to reinforce society-wide ideals and biases that determine the adolescent singers’ place in the social dynamic, and by extension, those of the fans and the listeners. Messages of encouragement and empowerment comprise a significant thematic thread, in addition to the standard love song repertory, but any substantial momentum for sociopolitical critique and change is largely absent. The creation and dissemination of their music and extramusical elements of their performance are contingent to the country’s mass culture industrial complex, whose means of distribution are not limited to audio recordings. In fact, the significance and prominence of television 143 as a medium for mass dissemination of music highlight visual aspects of what these performers execute. A further discussion of this follows in the next chapter.

Looks of girlhood

In addition to the aforementioned textual factors, aesthetic strategies play a major role in constructing girlhood in the spotlight. For instance, brightly-colored hair, in a country largely lacking in racial and follicular diversity, marks an eye-catching departure from the dominant looks of the previous generations and their norms. While celebrities of all genders and sexes color their hair in a variety of hues and shades, bright (and visibly artificial) colors remain notably more common among teens and younger twentysomethings, thus having a greater weight as a signifier of youth and, in turn, desirability in the constructed girlhood in question here. Lighter hair also contributes to the perceived foreignness, particularly Western-ness, of a person’s look. Visual, sonic, and linguistic pseudo-Western-ness constitutes a vital part of contemporary (post-) modernity and hipness in South Korea, and the hair color is but one example. In a similar way, Western musical genres and trends have significantly influenced the stylistic developments in Korean music, and sounding like (presumably superior) Westerners counts as a cultural capital in many genres and styles in contemporary South Korean popular music.

The Korean pop girlhood also asserts itself through the appropriation of the kyobok (school uniform) and stage costumes inspired by it. The appearance of the average kyobok inherits and blends elements of the Japanese military uniform and the

Western suit, indicative of the nation’s major influences during the twentieth century. 144

Though details vary by school, it usually consists of a dress shirt, a vest, trousers, and a jacket (worn in winter months) for boys, and a blouse, a jacket, and a skirt for girls, with prescribed seasonal variations to account for the country’s hot, humid summers and often brutally cold winters. The primary purpose of the kyobok, of course, is to visibly separate and distinguish students as not fully adults, to “represent the role of a student[,] and also to restrict the scope of action for the student.”13 In other words, it constructs student-ness visually, conceptually, and behaviorally. It is therefore crucial that the introduction of a kyobok uniform, for most Korean students, coincides with the transition from the often- laxer primary school to middle school and its usually stricter enforcement of rules and student codes of behavior. The construction of habitus in this manner consists of creating an implicit, yet concretely enforced, set of collective codes of conduct and rules, which makes its way into part of the group’s identity.

Though male idol stars often appear in kyobok commercials as models, boys’ kyobok does not seem to have as many weighty and gendered connotations as girls’ uniforms.14 While boys’ kyobok resembles aesthetically and functionally the contemporary Korean men’s semi-formal dress, the uniqueness of girls’ uniforms to the middle- and high-school years, as well as their exclusivity and, arguably, impracticality, indicates girls’ kyobok by design specifically reinforces standardized adolescent femininity in a behaviorally and aesthetically codified manner. The specificity of the girls’ uniforms and the implications of the attires on the gender norms reinforced,

13 Hae-joo Choi, “Yŏja Kodŭnghaksaeng Kyobok Chagyongshiltaewa Sŏnho Tijain Yŏngu” [A study of the actual wearing conditions and preferred designs of school uniforms for high school girls], Journal of the Korean Society of Costume, vol. 62, no. 4 (June 2012): 207–17; Abstract. 14 A more detailed analysis of kyobok commercials’ contents and connotations appears in Han Cha-young and Namgung Yun-sun, “Symbolic Meanings of the TV Commercials for Korean School Uniforms,” Journal of the Korean Society of Clothing and Textiles, vol. 31, no. 1 (2007): 11–20. 145 including that of reservation and passivity, both contribute to the formation of the uniformed teenage girl as a visual and moral heuristic charged with culturally defined meanings. As more grown women in professional jobs tend to opt for pant suits or more casual outfits, the skirt kyobok has become an exclusive symbol and signifier of the teenage years as well as the unavoidable but unobtainable adolescent, in the grey area between childhood and maturity.

The adolescent femininity, typified and embodied in the school uniform as stage costume, presents a conundrum concerning the perspective with which the viewer sees the women. As Warwick illuminates in her discussion of American girl groups of the

1960s, production decisions of mostly male producers imposed on young women often entailed both empowerment and exploitation, in the ways the industry-sanctioned stage personae would allow the performers to “signify all the stereotypes of girlness writ large, showing their audience how to play with these clichés,” and would “work with naïve, professionally inexperienced, and usually non-white young females who were willing to follow his direction unquestioningly.”15 Twenty-first-century girl performers from South Korea demonstrate a similar dilemma. On one hand, they dominate stages and screens proudly donning unmistakable signifiers of adolescent femininity, speaking to their peers and providing them with ways to explore boundaries of the cultural position they are afforded as women in their teens and twenties. On the other, they do so at the direction of mostly male, often older producers, to satisfy the demands of viewer-listeners whose demographic extends well past fellow teenagers and young adults. Consider, for instance, kyobok-inspired stage outfits that real-life students would never wear because

15 Warwick, pp. 87, 123. 146 teachers and school officials would deem them too impractical or immodest. Could there be more to the kyobok aesthetic’s incorporation into mainstream popular culture than peer empowerment?

The kyobok has cautiously and gradually, yet firmly made its way onto the nation’s pop music stage. Such an unmistakable, thoroughly-established aesthetic signifier of youth and femininity, the typified school uniform has appeared in numerous stage performances, photoshoots, and music videos. The kyobok on the onstage objects of desire long remained a risky code to wear because the socially conservative Korean culture regards adolescent female sexuality as off-limits for overt sexualization (by adults), and a series of government regulations that have led up to the current Adong-

Chŏngsonyŏnŭi Sŏngbohoe Kwanhan Pŏbryul (“Protection of Childhood and Adolescent

Sexuality Act”) have reinforced the social norm by the means of legal codes. Sexual objectification of female youth through the universally recognizable fashion style closely associated with Korean female adolescence, therefore, to this day entails some possibility of a strong backlash even when no explicit violation occurs, and mass media representation involves a degree of paranoid cautiousness. The state-mandated threshold to the objectification and commodification of adolescent subjects represents a larger, society-wide paranoia about violating children and teenagers, particularly in overtly sexual manners. As a result, producers and other decision-makers involved in presenting young women in stage costumes have distanced their work from anything resembling child pornography or staged age-play (including “schoolgirl” erotica popular in Japan and elsewhere), openly and with near compulsiveness, and the mass media incorporation of such aesthetics, sonorities, and lyrical themes that signify adolescence remains well 147 within the confines of industry-sanctioned musical expressions, in self-imposed censorship of sorts.

Girl group Twice appeared in a 2015 advertisement campaign for the kyobok brand Sŭkulluksŭ (“School looks”) with Park Jin-young, the founding producer of JYP

Entertainment. The campaign quickly attracted public criticism for emphasizing the waist-reducing properties of the brand’s “corset kyobok” for female students as well as the models’ bodily contours and feminine sex appeal, as the Korean daily newspaper

Kyunghyang Sinmun reports in its October 14, 2015 issue.16 While many of the critical voices pointed out negative effects of weight loss techniques and tight, contour- modifying clothing to young women’s health, far more remarks were directed toward the campaign’s overt sexualization of girls, regardless of the models’ age.

Despite the risqué status of mass media representations of adolescent femininities, girl groups of the 2010s have employed unapologetic kyobok looks as part of their self- fashioning as girls (rather than women) to an unprecedented extent. The six-piece group

Yŏjachingu (“girlfriend”), for instance, donned a fairly standard set of kyobok as the stage costume for their 2016 single “Shiganŭl Tallyŏsŏ (“Running through Time”).

Another girl group chose a stage costume alluding to cheyukbok (“gym clothes,” usually referring to a school uniform for physical education classes) instead.

Though the costume’s bright, primary colors and contour-concealing properties created a comically campy aesthetic rather than sexualizing the singers in a conventional sense, the use of any kind of school uniforms and its derived styles invokes adolescent femininities

16 Jeong Dae-yeon, “Pak Chinyŏng, JYP Kŏlgŭrup Tŭwaisŭwa Chigŭn Kyobok Kwanggo Sŏnjŏngsŏng Nonran” [Park Jin-Young and JYP girl group Twice in controversial school uniform advertisement campaign], Kyunghyang Sinmun, 14 October 2015, p. 21.

148 and their unstable status as the object of mass sexualization and commodification. Given the group’s characteristic concept as playful, youthful jokesters, their choice of a stage outfit alluding to school gym clothes may be their take on the preexisting kyobok aesthetic, ultimately reaffirming the significance and persistence of the latter. The use of cheyukbok in this case also contributes to the construction of adolescent playfulness, an important aspect of girlhood as distinct from a more mature womanhood.

As Jenny Sundén writes, playfulness in the world of serious intentions and actions possesses potency as a subversive, threatening force.17 The subversive potential of the particular instance of Crayon Pop remains debatable and a complicated topic, and perhaps warrants a closer inquiry in a separate project. The diversity of approaches and responses to the codification and commodification of adolescent femininities, at any rate, clearly demonstrate the untamable energy and political potency of girlhood. The incorporation of its signifiers into contemporary South Korean idol pop music has brought its audience a mixed bag of implications. Although I, as a grown man in his twenties, may not be one to weigh in on whether school uniforms onstage empower adolescent women or objectify them, the demographic of the music’s listenership as well as the tone of visual, textual, and musical communication seems to suggest that the interactions at least partially involve industry-sanctioned dissemination and exploration of adolescence selfhoods to the extent that a capitalist cultural industry affords them. As much as the ruling ideas and institutions inevitably limit how far one can go in the process of identity formation and experimentation, such media representations of

17 Jenny Sundén, “Play as Transgression: An Ethnographic Approach to Queer Game Cultures,” Breaking New Ground: Innovations in Games, Play, Practice and Theory, proceedings of Digital Games Research Association (2009). 149 symbols recognizable as youthful and adolescent certainly provide the young adults who perform and their peers with space in mainstream media to rehearse their notions of self, identify with each other, and socialize (and be socialized) out loud.

The sound of girls

The girl group sound also frequently employs a kind of vocal techniques and timbres that appears less common, if not discouraged, among other singers. I regard the underlying tendency of all of the musical properties as that of anti-virtuosity, in which a singer’s refusal or failure to conform to the established set of standard techniques represents immaturity, brokenness, and inadequacy as fully adult. The girlhood constructed in Korean pop music consists of conscious references to sonic and aesthetic properties of mature, supposedly-proper femininities, and the singers’ use of their voices is no exception. Prevalent vocal techniques in this vein of feminine sounds would raise a few eyebrows among voice teachers, as many singers rely heavily on chest voice with an upper register that sounds fragile and brittle, as opposed to a fuller, well-supported voice.

Vibratos and other vocal embellishments commonly found in the “mature voice” in contemporary Korean popular songs, heavily influenced by rhythm-and-blues and soul vocals, remain rare.

Jeong Siro, a producer and singer-songwriter, describes the girl group vocal style as a reference to tongyo (“children’s song”), a technical and idiomatic category distinct from those associated with tŭrotŭ or rhythm-and-blues, more mature genres.18 Indeed, lead vocalists of idol groups such as Park Gyuri of KARA and Yuna of A.O.A. often

18 Jeong Siro, personal interview with author, July 2013. 150 violate a number of basic principles that most female voice students learn to internalize, even to the point of sounding unstable.19 In many instances, their vocal delivery juxtaposes virtuosic passages in the climax of a song with such, one may say, anticlimactic techniques. The straightforward, unadorned singing parallels the undecorated, even vulnerable femininity of the girl. Not to be confused with singing out of tune or simply failing to vocalize properly, such vocal techniques afford the singers a cultural capital: their adolescent, not-quite-fully-adult construct of femininity and musical subject. Therefore, the tongyo analogy goes further than the vocal techniques. The singers’ textual, aesthetic, and music-stylistic strategies all contribute to their placement on the age-gender plane as well as cultural and affective powers associated with it. A deliberate abandonment of, or departure from, the prevalent notion of virtuosity underlies the aesthetic and the music of these singers.

How, then, does virtuosity (or anti-virtuosity) play a role in the girls’ gender construction and self-negotiation? Shin Hyunjoon, a Korean popular music critic and professor of cultural studies at Sungkonghoe University, presents a point of departure: that the construction and performance of pop personae always occurs within the context of social norms and in response to them. He writes:

Therefore, particular aesthetics in K-pop assumes as a prerequisite particular morality. K-pop idols are portrayed […] in the public sphere as benevolent, humble entities. Their ‘neat’ appearances and ‘correct’ behaviors demonstrate how the dominant moral system of Korea has been internalized in popular musicians.20

19 The terms “lead vocalist” and “main vocalist” appear in descriptions of roles within Korean vocal groups frequently, but their meanings have become increasingly ambiguous and arbitrary. These terms seem to be designators for the sake of designation, with little musical substance. However, such use of the terms does indicate to an observer (who may otherwise be unfamiliar with a group’s music) that a member referred to as such primarily performs sung parts rather than rapped or spoken passages. 20 Shin Hyunjoon, Kayo, K-pop, kŭrigo Kŭ Nŏmŏ [Popular songs, K-pop, and beyond] (Seoul: Dolbaegae, 2013), p. 60. 151

This goes beyond the merely aesthetic aspects of such personae, however. Musically, every strategic decision has implications that reach the external world surrounding the musical developments. The example Shin cites, the rise of the folk rock-influenced

Korean underground music into the mainstream during the 1980s, parallels the present phenomenon:

And as Tŭlgukhwa and Shinchon Pŭllusŭ finally achieved commercial success with their 1985–86 albums, the term “underground” became a household name, and the groups’ frontmen, Jeon Ingwon and Kim Hyun-shik, rose to represent Korean popular music of the 1980s. Their songs, widely well-received by university students, did not exclude romantic love ballads and approached politically charged messages with care. Rather, they differentiated themselves from writers of mainstream popular music by authoring profoundly poetic lyrics that passionately and unabashedly express hope in the time of hardship. The emotional dimension made it possible for the “underground” music to reach a wide audience beyond university students in urban communities and the educated middle class, unlike folk music of the 1970s.21

Occupying a doubly negative place in the social terrain by being not male and not fully adult, the girls depart from the sets of behavioral norms perceived as mature, as well as from musical maturity, which frequently entails a mastery over one’s art and fluent, skillful delivery.

One major defining feature of the girl group sound comes from a common characteristic among many other vocal groups: their multi-voice texture. However, the

Korean vocal texture differs from what other categories of multi-voice ensembles typically arrange their voices. Where the conventional rock band lineup assigns each member to an instrumental and/or vocal part, and -style American girl groups feature more prominent (“lead”) singers and others whose parts largely backed up and supported the former’s melody line, Korean idol pop groups opt to simply

21 Ibid., p. 191. 152 divide up the sole melody part (or rap line) among its members. In other words, having multiple voices available does not always lead to employing more than one of them at a time, and tightly-knit harmonies remain rare. As a result, there may be a series of voices in succession singing a given passage, rather than one delivering it continuously. In other words, within the scope of a song, voices coexist horizontally rather than vertically.

Of course, this method of vocal placement and arrangement goes hand in hand with the musical genre with which those groups are typically associated. However, one should not overlook that the choice of the genre and the development of its musical vocabulary go beyond a mere, value-neutral stylistic decision. The vocal group, whose music relies largely on outside writers, composers, and producers, seems to occupy a relatively low place on the virtuosity spectrum, regardless of its members’ fluency with the use of their voices. Rock bands and hip-hop crews still remain adverse territories for women, and predominantly female groups in those genres much rarer than male ones. A recent exception, the five-piece rock band AOA Black, consists of members of AOA, a seven-piece idol group that acts as an umbrella, and constitutes a spinoff or side project of the larger group, building on the successful early career of AOA. On the contrary, idol girl groups (or their mostly male producers) rarely attempt to tackle the difficult task of establishing legitimacy and recognition as virtuosic musicians, instead relying heavily on extramusical devices such as aesthetic kŏnsep, often infantilizing their members, and specializing in the now-formulaic K-pop idol that helps them avoid the question of virtuosity.

This way of strategizing voice placement renders questionable the traditional use of terms such as “lead singer” and “main vocalist,” since the distinction between lead and 153 harmony parts largely have become nonexistent or irrelevant in the unison-heavy musical style, leaving the most common sonorities texturally different from the musical styles that led to the rise of such terms describing a member’s role within the group.22 The role labels do indicate that some members specialize in pitched singing parts and others in rapped or spoken passages, and also imply that the lead singer receives the most virtuosic singing passages in each song, often ad-libbed parts supported by the rest of singers singing the melody. Also, idol group members to whom those terms refer often tend to pursue solo careers as singers during or after their time with the group, whereas transitioning to acting, modeling, comedy, or emceeing remains popular among those who do not identify primarily as vocalists. Above all, however, such descriptions primarily serve as part of Korean vocal groups’ complex and highly systematic construction of group kŏnsep, in which each member has specializations and roles within the group, a requisite to be part of a larger whole.

The girl group sound, or that of Korean idol groups in general, also has developed certain sonic-stylistic idioms. Minor-key dance songs that feature a wall of sounds of sorts with alternating sections of pitched singing and rap became a standard with the first generation of idol groups in the late 1990s, heard in songs like H.O.T.’s “I Yah!” and

G.O.D.’s “Aesu” (Sorrow), both released in 1999. The latter, for example, is a upbeat dance song set in a minor key featuring a recurring, sung refrain and two rapped verses.

The alternating structure helps the groups utilize members with various strengths and specialties, while also contributing to a greater dynamic contrast and a wider scope of styles featured in the compendium of musical influences. As a result, Korean idol groups’

22 Jacqueline Warwick, pp. 17, 34, 37, 46. 154 musical style developed to make use of vocalists and rappers available, into a stylistic hybrid that blends rock, pop, , gangster rap, and . Groups without proficient rappers, such as most girl groups mentioned in this chapter, still often subscribe to the established stylistic standard and replace the rapped sections with sung verses.

“Sowonŭl Malhaebwa (Genie)” by Girls’ Generation (2009) exemplifies the sonic and musical characteristics of girl group songs that build upon the dance-pop style that late-1990s idol groups first made popular. Upbeat dance tunes are still frequently in minor key, occasionally shifting to the relative major for the refrain, though brighter, more cheerful major-key exceptions exist. Instrumental tracks often feature multiple layers of synthesizer sounds emphasizing heavy bass downbeats and repetitive riffs, along with electronic drum patterns reminiscent of Western played in clubs. The typical vocal mix highlights the lead singer’s virtuosic passages near the climax of the song and provides a fuller sound where multiple singers sing in unison.

The result juxtaposes the singers’ vocal styles and visual-aesthetic strategies that suggest adolescence rather than full adulthood, to choreography, musical styles, and genres associated with grown-up sociocultural contexts.

Generation of girls, and broken virtuosity

“Sonyŏshidae” (“era of girls,” or “girls’ generation”), first appeared as the title track of Lee Seung-chul’s 1989 album Il-chip, Patŭ Tu (“volume one, part 2”). The album, along with its “part one” counterpart released the previous year, marked the singer’s successful transition from the vocalist of the rock band Boohwal (resurrection, or 155 born again) to a solo artist. The text of the song, told from the perspective of a younger woman (or possibly a girl in the late teens) responding to teasing remarks of her older love interest, outlines the woman’s desire to be taken seriously as a romantic prospect worth a pursuit. Its juxtaposition to the stylistically eclectic, upbeat dance tune and the voice of a man in his twenties creates a complicated dissonance, but the song achieved a significant commercial success and arguably became part of the (however loosely defined) canon of Korean popular music, frequently covered and recreated by musicians that came after Lee.

One such musician is a nine-member girl group Sonyŏshidae (commonly referred to as SNSD, or Girls’ Generation in English-speaking parts of the world), taking its name from the song. The group’s remake of Lee’s song appears on its eponymous, first full- length album released in 2007. Of course, one should not overlook the fact that the gender and the assumed age of the subject finally match those of the singer in this version, but it has more far-reaching implications. The SNSD version brings to the song many up-to-date conventions in arrangement and production, as well as sonic traits that define K-pop as a mass-appeal commodity and a subgenre of Korean popular music at- large.23 Many of the aforementioned aspects of Korean pop girlhood also manifest themselves in this instance, as described below.

Rhythmically, the remake does not depart dramatically from Lee’s original, preserving much of the latter’s electronic drum pattern.

23 For a more extensive discussion about the uniqueness of K-pop (as opposed to “Korean pop”) as a musical and syntactic brand, see Shin Hyunjoon, Kayo, K-pop, kŭrigo Kŭ Nŏmŏ [Popular songs, K-pop, and beyond] (Seoul: Dolbaegae, 2013), pp. 30–32. 156

Figure 4.1: The syncopated drum pattern from the SNSD remake of “Sonyŏsidae” (2009).

The only major and lasting departure from the pattern occurs in the second bridge section, a new addition in the remake. The temporary break from the syncopated backbeat pattern, seemingly alluding to the disco craze, allows for another buildup of momentum and rhythmic tension that leads up to the return of the chorus eight measures later. This additional curve in the contour of energy level marks another instance of an up-to-date convention in contemporary Korean popular songs and a common feature of

K-pop dance numbers of the century, adding yet another cycle of tension and release to the classic with two verses and a returning chorus.

In contrast, other aspects of the song do not appear so focused on the same goal of reinforcing the conventional use of a tension-and-release (or, rather, tension-to-release) dynamic to solidify the dominance of the musical subject. Lyrically, for instance, the use of honorifics situates the subject’s relationship with her romantic interest as possibly awkward and formal or, more likely, that between a younger woman and an older man, as the text suggests.

Nal ajig ŏridago malhadŏn The cheeky, greedy lover who used to say yalmiun yogshimjaengiga I’m still [too] young Onŭrŭn wenil inji for some reason said to me today saranghae hamyŏ kissŭhae chuŏnnae “I love you,” with a … … Nŏmu nolla pŏrin nanŭn I was caught off-guard amu maldo haji mottago and was at a loss for words; Hwarŭl naelgga usŏ pŏrilgga after debating whether to be upset with him saenggakhadaga or to laugh it off [, I said:]

Ŏridago nolliji marayo “Stop playing with me because I’m young,” sujubŏsŏ maldo mottago I was too embarrassed to say [what I wanted] Ŏridago nolliji marayo “Stop playing with me because I’m young,” 157 sŭchoganŭn yaegil ppuningŏl only in passing … … The subject therefore takes on an unstable, adolescent subjectivity, and this age play contributes to her love interest, assumed to be a fully-adult male, occupying a place of domination and stability in the relational dynamic, rather than the subject. Furthermore, the multi-voice texture of the vocal ensemble means that no single voice embodies and vocalizes the musical subject wholly, as a result of the aforementioned multi-voice, single-line texture. The resulting division and abstraction of the vocal representation of the subject renders her further alienated and destabilized. If one were to follow the text, told in several different voices and various combinations of them, vocal and narrative continuity suffers greatly, and the song arguably becomes secondary to the people who perform it. In other words, the music’s legitimacy and worthwhileness become dependent on the celebrities in spotlights, and one may argue that a person listens to the music primarily because of the faces attached to it, rather than because of the value or attractiveness of its textual and musical narrative.

The song also lacks a clear harmonic resolution, and the tonic key area fails to assert its place. Assuming the song is in a minor key, the chord progressions for the verses (i–VI–i–VI) and the bridge (iv–v–VI–VII) make the song’s key ambiguous, while the chorus (VI–VII–i) fails to deliver the major resolution that the bridge section anticipates and instead lead the song back to its never-ending harmonic loop. The melody also does not lead to a proper cadence, with the closure of every major section consisting of an expectant, inconclusive whole step movement. Together, these traits construct a sonority that fails to properly establish and stabilize the dominance of its primary key area, remains stagnant and stuck in a cycle, and thus sounds confused, unsettled, or 158 tentative. A resolution or telos that the sequence of chords suggests remains withheld, and even a listener not committed to a harmonic analysis can hear and feel the wandering circularity of the form.

Figure 4.2: Sonyŏsidae, “Sonyŏsidae” (Girls’ Generation), mm. 9–16 (verse).

Does this make Korean girl group pop an aesthetic, political, textual, technical, and harmonic failure not worthy of attention, because of its many shortcomings to be proper? Why should one pay attention to such instances of inadequacy? I used the term

“anti-virtuosic” earlier when describing a trend in vocal techniques of the girl groups, but do they simply fall short of proper virtuosity? One common response to this question, also heard frequently in other parts of the world, concerns the artists’ failure to “do enough” to fit the existing ideas of virtuosity, or to earn the title of a talented, hard- working artistic genius-master, the perpetuation of which began with the nineteenth- century obsession with the Romantic genius and continues to this day.24 The above- mentioned system that manufactures, as it were, total cultural products makes it easier to criticize the increasingly passive role that the artist plays in the production of an album, a

24 Scott Burnham, Beethoven Hero (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 3–28; Joseph N. Straus, “Normalizing the Abnormal: Disability in Music and Music Theory,” Journal of the American Musicological Society, vol. 59, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 157–60; Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 699–706. 159 track, or a concert. In fact, assertions of musical autonomy or technical mastery remain rare in contemporary Korean popular music, and management companies that produce and maintain these groups largely determine their musical and aesthetic identities. This, however, is not to say these vocal groups are not virtuosic, or incompetent. Countless television programs and live concerts showcase their musical abilities and skills, which the entertainment industry in fact demands via the rigorous talent training processes that have now become an industry standard.

However, the stake goes beyond mere apologetics defending the pop singers and fitting their art into the existing mold of abstracted notions about virtuosity. Rather, I propose that what their music, looks, and social implications exemplify amounts to much more than an inferior shadow of a virtuosic adult, and their anti-virtuosity, or rather broken virtuosity, deserves detailed analyses and scrutiny in its own right. Jack

Halberstam argues in The Queer Art of Failure that many films and other works of art that may seem a frivolous, second-class aggregate of things whose narratives and technical completeness leave much room for improvement, in fact possess potency because their so-called failure “[refuses] to acquiesce to dominant logics of power and discipline,” while “[recognizing] that alternatives are embedded already in the dominant and that power is never total or consistent.”25 In other words, these instances of apparent failure on public display inherently bring to question the status of dominant notions of success and properness to question. Halberstam’s viewpoint builds on Stuart Hall’s privileging of experiences and phenomena over high theories:

We expose ourselves to serious error when we attempt to “read off” concepts that were designed to operate at a high level of abstraction as if they automatically

25 Judith [Jack] Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 88. 160

produced the same theoretical effects when translated to another, more concrete, “lower” level of operation.26

The question, therefore, becomes one about cultural hegemony and the acquired, learned behavior of looking for worthwhile things in certain places or contexts. The abstractly theorized notions about what constitutes virtuosity and properness and what they look and sound like may in some instances help one understand certain phenomena and works of music, while leading to erroneous readings and understanding in cases of other cultural texts. In the context of the present study, these concepts on a highly abstracted level hinder us from understanding the phenomena at question. Fans and lay listeners find the musicians and their music attractive not as mere failures at conventional virtuoso but rather as something that makes itself worthwhile, as its own brand of girl anti-virtuoso, and not as a group of women aspiring to conform to some sort of acceptable notion of highbrow virtuosity to no avail.

When members of idol groups go solo, they undergo the process of establishing legitimacy as a musician in their own right, but the transition has more to do with acquiring cultural capital than with attaining technical fluency. Also, those television programs and live concerts that extract some or all members of a given idol group from their usual performative personae and musical repertories appear to promote virtuosity in the conventional sense, when the musicians’ skills and proficiency existed prior to the contextual shift. Therefore, the stake for these pop idol groups has to do with their place in the cultural hierarchy, and the context, rather than technical proficiency, frames how one views those groups and their music. Moreover, given the intensive production and

26 Stuart Hall, “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,” Journal of Communication Inquiry, vol. 10, no. 2 (June 1986): 7. 161 strategic planning processes I visited earlier, one cannot reasonably assume that the end products fall so short of the supposed goal of conventional musical virtuosity and political legitimacy with such consistency. The failure is intentional; I call the ideal behind the seeming inadequacy “broken virtuosity.”

One should also note that, on a more fundamental level, the broken virtuosity in adolescent pop star personae indicates that they pose no threat to the ruling class and ideals, since the young idols themselves have not constructed the ideal type of personae for which they strive, but rather they respond to conventions and demands with excellence. As Shin Hyunjoon puts it,

K-pop has become a collection of attractive but safe components from the history of popular music. and would be considered a threat to the society’s ruling system of morality, but not 2NE1 or 2PM. Or, to turn to examples from the past, American rock of Kiss or Alice Cooper was a threat, but of Abba or Boney M was safe. … Their “yongmo tanjŏng” (neat appearances) and “pumhaeng pangjŏng” (wholesome conduct) suggest that the ruling moral standards of the mainstream Korean society have been internalized by popular musicians.27

Adolescents, in a literal or figurative sense, lack the maturity and social standing to potentially challenge the ruling class’s values, and thus remain subjected to adults’ rules, including the commodification and exploitation by market forces. In addition, the declawed or de-fused potency of adolescent pop stars that exhibit such broken virtuosity makes for an easier product for most consumers of popular music, as their senses of morality and social class ideals remain undisturbed and unquestioned, but the music retains sufficient stylistic edge.

27 Shin Hyunjoon, Kayo, K-pop, kŭrigo Kŭ Nŏmŏ [Popular songs, K-pop, and beyond] (Seoul: Dolbaegae, 2013), p. 60. 162

Girl meets (the music) world: What makes a musician?

Recent years saw an increasing tendency among Korean idol pop groups to emphasize musicality, virtuosity, and their legitimacy as musicians, in part in response to wide public discounting and disavowals of idol singers and their place in the music world that followed them since the beginning. One of the most prominent kind of attacks targeted singers who lip-synced while appearing on television having so heavily emphasized visual aspects of their performance that they had sacrificed live performability. Even the mainstream press picked up some viewers’ derogatory use of the term kŭmbungŏ (“goldfish”), comparing the idol stars dancing onstage while merely moving their mouths to the recording to the silent puffing of the aquatic creature’s mouth, to criticize the widespread practice of lip-syncing on music television programs.28 These debates surrounding lip-syncing on television raises questions regarding the primacy of live music, the function of music programming on television, the seemingly inherent inferiority of visually-oriented pop music, and even the desolate state of sound systems in most television studios that would also prevent proper live performance. It is clear, however, that the critical scrutiny of idol singers concerns more than the mere complaint that they do not sing live while appearing on television, but rather gets at the question of what makes a musician good, bad, legitimate, a sellout, worthwhile, fake, and so on.

One common approach to this quest for legitimacy entails attaching oneself to the existing conventions, contexts, and performative practices associated with older artists who already possess appropriate cultural capital as legitimate musicians. This takes a variety of forms including performing covers of well-known songs and doing joint

28 Oh Kwangsu, “Pomi Onŭn Kilmok Hankkŏt Mul Orŭn Norae” [The road to spring and ripening songs], Kyŏnghyang Shinmun, 25 February 1997, p. 33. 163 performances with such artists in live and broadcast settings. I will discuss these activities in greater detail in the following chapter on televised popular music, but one particular strand of them deserves a mention here, in regards to idol stars’ showcasing of music- technical fluency and conventional virtuosity. An increasing number of idol singers participate in televised game show-like competitions among already established (and, arguably, respected) singers as well as other programs that reinforce the middlebrow distinction of being elevated slightly above the disreputable commercial pop music of idol groups. One such program, Pulhuŭi Myŏnggok (“Timeless songs”), features singers of all ages, genres, and ranks performing in-studio covers of songs by a featured “legend” singer per episode, competing for audience votes. The premise of the program has the winner of one round face a new challenger in subsequent rounds until eliminated. It thus becomes clear that the order in which the singers perform heavily influences the outcome, and that the competitive element of the program retains some degree of superficiality.

This allows many singers, generally younger in age and often part of the idol star system, to gain some cultural capital as “real” singers by association with the featured legends and their music, part of the Korean popular music canon. The program also features a fairly regular, albeit not fixed, pool of recurring contestants from one episode to another, contributing to the stability of such status. These programs create an atmosphere conducive to idol stars decontextualizing themselves as such, instead aligning themselves with singers already recognized as possessing the cultural position different from, and slightly more dignified than, theirs.

The girl group , for instance, has appeared on the program as a complete group a total of twelve times between January 2015 and November 2017, far 164 more than any other idol vocal group featured on the show. The group’s rendition of

Yoon Suil’s 1986 song “Hwangholhan Kobaek” (Wonderful confession), aired in the show’s 30 April 2016 episode, not only won the first place among the episode’s contestants with the votes of 443 of 500 audience voters but also helped associate the group’s name and retro kŏnsep with the readily-established Korean popular music canon.

Another strategy, often employed in tandem with reliable, consistent live vocal performance and the ability to play instruments, seems to entail writing one’s own songs.

The term “singer-songwriter” has come to mean more than its literal meaning in Korean popular music scene, and numerous members of idol pop groups, trainees, and producers have attempted claiming the label and emphasizing their skills and facilities as composers, to various degrees of success. Such conformity to the conventional, and

Western, notions of virtuosity and musicianship affords those musicians a dramatically different set of opportunities, public images, and cultural capital. These singer- songwriters enjoy a systemized support gaining an early start in their career and sustaining it, unlike many of their predecessors mentioned in chapter 3.

The signifying codes in Korean pop’s brand of girlhood, and the messages behind them, certainly have aesthetic, political, and musical potential to subvert. They bring to scrutiny the seemingly unshakable hegemony of stable, fully-grown adulthood, dominant masculinity, and passive, submissive femininity by presenting alternatives in a public, visible, and loud fashion. Musically, these idol vocal groups question what constitutes a good musician and what validates those criteria. Whether these codes achieve the subversion in the context of mass-produced, mass-distributed cultural products, much like 165 a subculture that has been incorporated into the dominant culture, remains unclear.29

However, one must not overlook the sheer impact of their dissemination of the divergent visual and sonic codes to the general public, including teenage girls whose formation of self-image the codes undoubtedly influence. Moreover, the construction of the adolescent femininity and the capitalization of the finished musical artifacts both symptomize recent developments in the outward-looking formation of cultural ideals and phenomena explored in this project thus far. In this regard, one cannot simply dismiss the girl group pop merely as an ideologically void fad. Rather, this subset of today’s South Korean popular music reflects how its people form and project identities, and how the contemporary trend builds upon, and is shaped by, what precedes it. Even with all of its flaws and shortcomings in overthrowing the status quo, the phenomenon in question may indeed represent an era of girls, the girls’ generation.

29 Dick Hebdige, pp. 96–99. 166

Chapter 5

Riding the Airwaves in the Age of the Korean Wave: South Korean Popular Music

in the Context of Television

Growing up in South Korea in the 1990s, I heard countless anecdotes from my parents and elders around me about the scarcity of just about everything material in the postwar years, including that of television sets. Neighborhood children, they said, would flock to the television-equipped house in the village for communal daytime entertainment, courtesy of the well-off family who often set up the precious machine to face the yard for such spectators to watch together. Only a couple of decades later, television sets have grown to be a common household object, and the medium has become a primary means of mass communication, including dissemination of popular music. On the material front, the unprecedented, rapid economic growth of the nation during the 1960s and 1970s, which brought up its gross national income per capita from mere 110 U.S. dollars in 1962 to 2,080 in 1982, made it feasible for nearly every household to own a television receiver, if not many, by the late 1980s.1 According to historian Hwang Kyung Moon’s account, “In 1969 just over 200,000 television sets were in operation in South Korea … [and] ten years later, the number was almost 6 million.”2

In the meantime, the midcentury Korean authoritarian regimes’ efforts to foster the growth of a centralized mass communication system, through such measures as Chun

Doo-hwan’s controversial 1980 executive order merging several broadcasters with the

1 World Bank, “World Development Indicator,” accessed 1 March 2017. http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GNP.PCAP.CD?locations=KR&view=chart. 2 Hwang Kyung Moon, A History of Korea (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 244. 167 state-owned Korean Broadcasting System, yielded fewer yet mightier mass media giants, capable of producing quality (albeit politically biased) programming and broadcasting it nationally.

As a result, televised music performances quickly replaced public concerts as the primary medium of dissemination and public consumption of popular music in South

Korea, and faced little pushback until the recent return of large-scale public concerts and music festivals to the foreground of the nation’s music scene. This shift in music consumption pattern and resulting dispersion of the concert-going public must have elated military regimes, eager to control and restrain large public gatherings. In the meantime, the characteristics of the television medium as well as production techniques and conventions at the time shaped the predominant sound of mainstream popular music and influenced performance practices.

At the same time, characteristics of the country’s popular music and the industry that produces it also shape distinct musical and meta-musical television genres, such as daytime popular music shows and late-night concert programs, whose differences lie less in the time of day of airing and more in the skillful reinforcement of the cultural hierarchy that I introduced in the previous chapter. In the meantime, the increasing timeshare and popularity of comedic entertainment television programs in South Korea have both diversified music-related television programs and encouraged many musicians to appear on non-musical ones, primarily comedic talk and variety shows. Neither of these trends are unique to television, however, since they have also held true with the radio, an older medium that still retains a small but loyal, consistent listener base. At its core, these phenomena are manifestations of how the country’s entertainment industry 168 has shaped its star system and mass media landscape, in light of how musicians and producers in it view themselves and others (the latter of which I discussed in the chapter on rock bands). I will thus devote a portion of this chapter also to Korean popular music and musicians on the radio, followed by a broader treatment of the cultural hierarchy at work to conclude the discussion.

Battle of the bands in the television era

Late-night television programs that specialize in recreating the atmosphere of music concerts have long been popular in South Korea. The adult-oriented Kayo Mudae

(popular song stage) and Yŏllin Ŭmakhoe (open concert), on air since 1985 and 1993 respectively, contribute to the canonization in South Korean popular music by historicizing old adult contemporary songs and keeping the musicians and songs that they choose in mass media visibility. Conversely, Lee Soraŭi Pŭropojŭ (Lee Sora’s proposal), aired on the state-owned KBS-2TV from 1996 to 2002, Yoon Dohyunŭi Lŏbŭletŏ (Yoon

Dohyun’s love letter), which assumed the former’s time slot until 2008, and the incumbent Sketchbook hosted by songwriter and producer Yoo Heeyeol, have established a slightly different approach to late-night music programs. A house band comprised of drums, bass guitar, electric guitars, synthesizers, background vocals, and occasionally a brass section replaces Kayo Mudae and Yŏllin Ŭmakhoe’s big band and symphonic orchestra, sometimes omitted altogether in favor of prerecorded instrumental tracks, as the primary instrumental force. Each episode features three to four artists, each of whom plays a mini-set of select songs with a talk segment with the host, rather than the musician’s older repertory or covers of Korean popular music canon, and the artists 169 featured are also younger and more current than those invited to perform on the former category of shows. These television programs differ also from daytime music programs like Music Bank, Sho Ŭmak Jungshim (Show! Music central), (Popular songs), and in that they highlight musicians whereas the latter do songs, and treats each artist’s segment as a miniature concert set rather than a series of decontextualized song performances selected from the weekly sales- and airtime chart. As a result, the attention span of the program extends considerably, and each featured artist receives more time and attention in the planning and production processes.

N.EX.T’s performance of “Here I Stand for You” on Lee Sora’s Proposal on 6

January 2001 exemplifies the priorities of these late-night music programs. The 1997 song is a slow ballad featuring standard rock ensemble instruments with extensive synthesizer overdubs and, near the end of the track, piano and saxophone. The television mix foregrounds Shin’s edgy, bright vocal and puts the instruments mostly behind it, not unlike most palladŭ songs whose textural spotlight falls squarely on the singer. The song also departs from the common verse-chorus song form, which affords television producers greater flexibility to edit or truncate performances, in favor of a linear, gradual build throughout the song that resembles the linear protest song structure covered in chapter 3. The song maintains the instrumental texture and rhythmic pattern of a synth- driven ballad until the final few lines of the chorus, which explodes into a heavy rock song, despite the consistent tempo. The drummer adds a steady backbeat and syncopated cymbal hits, and Shin’s vocal melody leaps upward by over an octave over the words

“Please come back, lest I get weary of waiting and fall.” 170

Although this particular performance of the song still suffers an interruption towards the end by the show’s credits scrolling up the screen and full-screen graphics showing its sponsors, unedited performances of extended, band-driven songs like this remained rare at the time, and would have been impractical, if not impossible, on daytime music programs. The increased time allotted for each artist also means, from a production standpoint, programs can more viably feature full instrumental bands and provide setup time and audio configurations that each of them demands. Such practicality, along with the possibly generalizing fact that the late-night programs may have attracted an older demographic of viewers than the daytime counterpart’s younger, pop-listening crowd, allowed these programs to feature artists that depart from the mainstream broadcast setup of (sometimes) live vocals and background playbacks.

Sketchbook, 19 June 2015 Music Bank, 19 June 2015

Lee Seonhee

Lee Seunggi KARA

Oksangdalbit (Rooftop Moonlight) 2PM

Kim Taewoo (formerly of G.O.D.)

Sleepy

Mamamoo

MBLAQ

EXO

Big Bang

…

Table 5.1: A summary of artists featured in Sketchbook and Music Bank (both KBS-2TV), aired during the week of 15 June 2015.

171

For instance, a late-night music program and a daytime one, on the same day, featured a differing lineup of musicians as outlined above (with idol groups listed in bold). On Music Bank, which features a greater number of artists who perform, each musician appears for much shorter periods of airtime than do those on Sketchbook.

In addition, the advancements in broadcasting technologies also allowed for a higher quality of production and transmission, widening the frequency range that a medium could adequately communicate. High-definition television broadcast became the norm around the turn of the century, with the three major national networks rolling it out in the fall of 2000, and analog broadcast fully gave way to digital in 2012.3 The higher fidelity of transmission that the new technologies afford, as well as the upgraded sound capturing and processing equipment in television studios, has made it feasible to feature a live band performance in the studio and put it on the air, live or prerecorded.

The listening experience that these late-night programs offer resembles a live concert more closely than do their daytime counterparts, and the added degree of authenticity—however fragile and abstractly-defined the concept may be in the context of televisual transmission—seems to also bring a sense of cultural prestige. While certainly not belonging in the realm of high art with kugak (traditional Korean music) and Western art music, the music and people featured in these programs enjoy an elevated status as high-end popular culture, evident both in the explicit statements made in the context of those programs (the host referring to his or her program as prestigious or kopumkyŏk

[high-quality], for instance) and the emphasis that featured musicians seem to place on

3 Chung Hwanbo, “Anallogŭ Pangsong Kkŭt—5-man Kagu TV Modbwa” [Analog broadcast ends, 50k households left without TV access], Kyunghyang Shinmun, 31 December 2015, p. 11; Yeop, “Pangsongdo Tijitŏrida—TV 3-sa Shihŏmbangsong” [Broadcasting goes digital too, three major networks begin testing digital broadcast], Dong-A Ilbo, 2 September 2000, p. A23. 172 musical authenticity while appearing on them. An alternative to current popular music programs that count down the commercial album sales- and charts primarily featuring dance groups and ballad singers, programs like Sketchbook appeal more to songwriters and singers who wish to emphasize their side as serious musicians. These artists use take advantage of the format’s cultural connotations as well as of the extramusical exposure that the talk segment provides to help them assert their musical agency and distinguish themselves from idol groups whose words beyond lyrics to their songs viewers seldom get to hear.

One important development that led to the rise of programs like Sketchbook involves the dramatic improvement of the quality of audio recording and transmission achievable in a television studio. Because a high-fidelity broadcast of contemporary pop songs requires precision in both the performance and its capturing, the equipment in a typical television studio could hardly facilitate a quality live performance. In fact, numerous singers and producers spoke out against the unfavorable studio environments and equipment for live performances, such as Shin Haechul of N.EX.T, who stated on his radio shows FM Ŭmak Toshi (FM music city) and Kosŭtŭ Neishŏn (Ghost nation) that performers may sometimes need to resort to lip synching on television because of inadequate audio equipment and production practices in studios.4 Numerous popular music programs up to the early 2000s, whose countdown format allowed each featured singer (or group) only enough time to perform one song anyway, thus forced bands to resort to using instrumental tracks for vocalists to sing over and pantomime-like “hand- synching” for instrumentalists. The resulting performance treats a rock band as little more

4 FM Ŭmak Toshi, MBC-FM, 30 January 1997; Ghost Nation, MBC-FM, 18 July 2006. 173 than a vocalist in spotlight as usual, accompanied (only figuratively) by a multi-person backdrop, using instruments as little more than stage props. In contrast, the late-night music programs took a more extended, in-depth coverage, providing each guest star with a twenty- to thirty-minute slot and necessitating change in production practices and environments to make them more conducive to live band performances. This change therefore went hand in hand with a paradigmatic shift in music programs on television, moving away to an extent from regarding musical performances as little more than vocal performances, especially in prerecorded programs that can afford sufficient setup and editing time. It has even brought some visible changes in the studio. Along with advanced, affordable technologies available, this paradigmatic shift has made in-ear monitoring onstage a commonly sighted element on most music programs on Korean television. In-ear monitoring provides greater sonic isolation and precision when the musical style or production environment calls for them.

The repercussions of this increase in band presence on television extended beyond late-night concert programs. Top Band, aired nationally on KBS-2TV, is a competitive audition program akin to (resembling the latter part of its season, after the contestant lineup has solidified), and featured independent bands specializing in rock and other genres as its contestants, working with experienced musicians serving as mentors.

Other programs in competition format that feature musicians with already established careers also began to invite a greater number of bands. For instance, Nanŭn Kasuda () on MBC-TV featured the aforementioned television host and musician Yoon

Dohyun as a contestant since the program’s inaugural episode, and later changed the lineup to include his band, YB, rather than him as an individual vocalist, effective the 174 inaugural episode of the first full season, aired on 1 May 2011.5 Revitalization of live band music scenes in Seoul and other major urban areas as well as the aforementioned technical improvements in television studios thus contributed to the notion that musical performances broadcast on national television ought to consist of more than primarily vocal performances merely accompanied by live or played-back instruments.

Although live band music has always remained present in contemporary South

Korea even after television’s rise to the primary mass dissemination medium, its growth out of underground concert venues and amateur music competitions—such as Taehak kayoje (university music festival, 1977–2012) and Kangbyŏn kayoje (riverside music festival, 1979–2001) and onto mainstream music television broadcast in connection with large entertainment corporations defines a crucial moment in the development of musical tropes. If the standard pop song texture gave the singer’s voice a monopoly on the musical foreground and relegated the instruments to a secondary position, the band music’s redemption entails a wider breadth of what can come into the spotlight in a mainstream popular song texture. If the scope of a viable musical text at first only encompassed the vocalist (or vocalists) with standard pop songs, to such an extent that the band often played from offstage or was replaced with a prerecorded backing track altogether, and many televised performances of ballad singers as early as the time of the aforementioned N.EX.T performance (the late 1990s) featured instrumentalists largely as a backdrop, the recent emergence of bands as a musical unit and subject in South Korean musical television represents a dramatic shift in how Korean viewers and television producers conceptualize popular songs and music making.

5 Shin Jeongsu, dir., Nanŭn Kasuda, MBC-TV, 1 May 2011. 175

The increasing frequency and visibility of live band performances on television, given the medium’s dominant role in music dissemination in contemporary South Korea, both represents the expanding market for band music and, in turn, contributes to its growth. Large entertainment companies that shaped the teenage idol groups’ dominion during the 1990s and the first decades of the twenty-first century have increasingly marketed their group acts as bands, F.T. Island and C.N. Blue being two well-known examples. Lack of the authenticity factor notwithstanding, they situate themselves in the same rock band tradition as the preceding generations of (supposedly) self-made bands.

For instance, F.T. Island’s frequent inclusion of Green Day songs “Basket Case” and

“Wake Me Up When September Ends” in its live concert sets demonstrates its aspiration to associate itself with Western rock bands for musical legitimacy, in the same way as their predecessors aimed to establish themselves as competent musicians in the imported music genres by covering foreign tunes.

These bands’ song styles and instrumentations also resemble those of established

American rock groups, as many such vocal groups venturing outside of the realm of dance or ballad music characterized by multiple layers of vocal parts seemingly opting for guitar-driven rock band instrumentation without much scrutiny. In other words, when idol vocal groups define non-vocal ensembles in the sense of the antithesis of idol groups as a guitar-centered rock band featuring a drum kit and, often, a piano or synthesizer, they further solidify the dominant status of Western pop and rock music within the nation’s culture and among its musicians.

Thinking atop the box: Television as a means to an elevated cultural status 176

These late-night television programs, which carry an elevated status in the South

Korean cultural terrain in comparison to daytime music shows like Music Bank, Sho

ŭmak jungshim (“Show! Music central”), Inkigayo (“Popular songs”), and M Countdown, can help some idol singers appeal to a wider audience, as the Sketchbook example above shows. The concert-like design of these programs allows the singers to appear besides live bands and collaborate with other artists, bringing back the hands-on and communal aspects of music-making into the picture.

The notion that privileges hands-on instrumental performance as a factor that contributes to musical legitimacy, as I mentioned in chapter 2, no doubt has a long history, dating back to the notions about art as a craft, or teknē, prior to the dominance of modern Western high art aestheticism.6 On the contrary, the emphasis on communal music-making, although not without an impression of being a cheap political maneuver, adopts and assimilates idol musicians (and sometimes even those without a full-time music career) into the realm of musical legitimacy by association, exemplifying an affective device that has gained back popularity in recent years.

Consider, for example, girl group AOA’s set on the 26 June 2015 episode of

Sketchbook. Their performance of “Shimkunghae (Heart attack),” in addition to recreating the studio recording’s heavy use of overdubbed synthesizers and drum machine sounds, makes use of the house band present onstage, whose sounds the backing track complements. The result is twofold: visual and sonic. Visually, when the program features a vocal-dance group like AOA onstage alongside the house band consisting of instrumentalists, departing in most cases from the canonic visual text of its music as

6 Paul Metzner, Crescendo of the Virtuoso: Spectacle, Skill, and Self-Promotion in Paris during the Age of Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 113. 177 standardized by music videos, the group assumes the aura, so to speak, of the musical genres and traditions higher in the hierarchy. Albeit temporary, this elevation of status has consequences so definite and drastic that idol groups’ appearance on the late-night, middlebrow music programs may no longer seem surprising or out of place to most viewers. Sonically, this assimilation brings the group’s music closer to the instrumentational and textural characteristics of established middlebrow genres and the likewise highly-valued tradition of live band music. The added layer of association with socially-agreed-upon representations of musical authenticity, or “sounds-like-real-music- ness,” helps the group defend and qualify itself as a worthy member of the ruling cultural institution.

Suppose that idol singers merely sing and dance to played-back music written and performed by others, and have their success dependent on the capital and influential power of their labels, as the idol-and-non-idol dichotomy would have it. Presentations of those singers in this light ends up challenging many of the assumptions, and given the intensive planning and crafting that goes into every mass media effort in Korea, it is most likely the shows’ aim rather than an incidental effect. In other words, when singers who normally do not get to diverge from the prescribed and fine-tuned performance routine of a song in the piece-by-piece configuration of daytime music programs and, by extension, digital single marketplaces appear on a stage that allows them to reveal their musical agency and desires, their song-based public personae break down or, at least, dramatically extend. If the digital downloads, daytime music television, and radio broadcasts of their songs, all of which treat each song as the smallest independent musical unit, do little more than replicate the artists in the recording studio, the television 178 programs that operate on the basis of concert-like sets allow a glimpse into their presentation outside of the studio and beyond the recordings.

Could it be, then, that the moments during which these singers do not perform from their usual key repertory enrich their personae and help the case of their status as worthy or real musicians? It seems from the observation thus far that the idol singers’ climb up the cultural hierarchy in large part depends on elements of their televised performance that depart from their studio recording, the implicitly canonized musical text. Live session musicians onstage, collaborative efforts with other artists, and talk segments with the host that humanize the idol singers are all examples of such extra moments that add dimensions to their personae. In large part, it is their departure from the recorded musical text that marks their upward mobility along cultural strata.

In addition to pop musicians’ departure from the musical text, their diversions from musical contexts on television have also become increasingly frequent in recent years. The most noticeable trends include musicians’ regular and frequent appearances on nonmusical entertainment programs and side ventures as radio hosts.

Video revived the radio star: Beyond musical programming on television (Or, extension thereof)

Bands like Boohwal and Baekdusan from last chapter have enjoyed a newly revived popular visibility, thanks in part to the recent trend in national South Korean television of featuring musicians in entertainment (yenŭng) programs. These entertainment television programs, while varying in format, build upon celebrity panelists’ interaction with each other in response to the minimal situations or contexts 179 that producers prescribe. Though the genre developed out of stand-up comedy and sitcoms of the 1980s and 90s, they often create affective results that are more complex and multidimensional than merely comical. A perceived sense of authenticity therefore is crucial to the premise of the genre, the assumption that celebrities who appear in these programs (even non-comedians) and interact with each other are humans with multifaceted emotions and intents. The increased sense of authenticity benefits both parties; it helps musicians complicate and demystify their stage personae, and gives entertainment television and its viewers access to comic talents whose native tongue, so to speak, is not comedy.

Kim Taewon of Boohwal has been a recurring guest on MBC-TV’s Radio Star, and the show’s portrayal of him demonstrates how this crossover works. To preface, the show first aired in 2007, and featured singer-songwriter Yoon Jongshin (who appeared briefly in chapter 3) and comedians Kim Gukjin, Shin Jeonghwan, and Kim Goora as co- hosts for the first four years. The show departs from the norms of primetime entertainment television in its choice of guest stars, having featured in addition to idol singers and actors starred in recent films musicians who rarely appear on television and those whose prime has arguably passed.

Kim Taewon first appeared in the 24 September 2008 episode of Radio Star, as such an unknown figure to average viewers that the show’s producers accompanied every close-up cut of him with a subtitle reading “Kim Taewon, the leader of group

‘Boohwal.’” His appearance on the show no doubt made him known to viewers unfamiliar with the band, since (to refer back to last chapter) the general public likely only knew the band for its few hit songs, and even then only the lead vocalist took the 180 spotlight. He certainly did what one should expect a musician to do on a high-rating television program in a rare moment of public visibility, publicizing his band’s recent releases, funny anecdotes from touring and recording, playing the band’s well-known song on guitar (“Never Ending Story” from its eighth studio album, released in 2002), playing someone else’s well-known song on guitar (Led Zeppelin’s “Babe, I’m Gonna

Leave You” from 1969), and so on. In this regard, featuring artists like Kim appears to qualify Radio Star as a “kopumkyŏk ŭmak pangsong” (classy music broadcast [program]), a tongue-in-cheek slogan frequently used to describe the show. The emphasis, however, seemed to be on something else: witty quips, jokes, and mildly offensive exchanges with the hosts and other guest stars. In other words, his role extended beyond that of a musician in a foreign territory acting as a passive participant amid comedians who run the program, into one of an entertainer crossing boundaries of television genres and carrying an equal weight in constructing an on-camera dialogue.

Kim’s case is but one of numerous instances in which today’s South Korean entertainment television extends the role of musicians and blurs the boundaries among fields or genres. Programs that fall into this genre no longer aim exclusively to deliver jokes or comical skits as do traditional comedy shows, but rather to construct a realistic yet fictional universe in which relatable characters’ interactions challenge the fourth wall.

Such development complicating genre divisions, beginning in the mid-2000s, partially accounts for the gradual rise of the new, preferred, and all-encompassing genre designator, yenŭng (entertainment), as opposed to show or comedy.

What do these programs do, and how do they differ from other programs that aim also to entertain, such as Kaegŭ Konsŏtŭ [] and SNL Korea? They provide 181 entertainment by offering a voyeuristic view into human interactions of stars appearing in the program, usually in the context of a mission-driven game show, light drama, or talk show. Muhan Tojŏn in its current format, perhaps representative of the genre based on the program’s longevity, high ratings, and influences on Korean mass culture at-large, portrays regular and guest cast members (consisting of comedians and celebrities from other areas of mass culture) interact in various games and action-film-like missions, often blending fast-paced jokes and one-liners with contextual humor. Its 30 April 2005 episode, for instance, puts its cast members and guest stars in 100-meter races on a residential street against subway trains running along the track parallel to the filming location.7 The episode’s focus lies less on the successful fulfillment of the mission and more on the cast’s interaction with each other, inserting the viewer in a sitcom-like scene that aims to be perceived as a genuine exchange among friends. Its presentation of the celebrities talking to each other rather than to the viewer, as well as the realistic universe of sorts that it constructs, gives it a sense of authenticity similar to what many reality television programs achieve: perceived authenticity.

7 Kwon Seok, dir., Muhan Tojŏn [], MBC-TV, 30 April 2005. 182

Figure 5.1: A still image from Muhan Tojŏn (30 April 2015, MBC-TV).

Musicians featuring in these programs either as a one-time guest or a regular mainstay, as a result, are afforded opportunities to show the general public aspects of them their musical performances do not highlight. In particular, Muhan Tojŏn’s biennial kayoje (music festivals) feature musicians otherwise foreign to the entertainment television genre as running mates and musical counsels to its regular stars, simultaneously boosting the program’s musical credentials (and ensuring the quality of music presented by the amateur musicians) and the musicians’ mass media exposure.

Muhan Tojŏn began to organize and air these musical special features in 2007 as a larger and more ambitious special feature than its initial endeavors. I would even argue that, in addition to the expansion in scale and production value, these musical festivals aim to deliver something categorically distinct from the subway train race or, as the program’s 183 very first episode featured, a tug-of-war against a bull.8 The inaugural music festival, aired over two episodes, consisted of the makings of all presented songs and a single-day concert in front of a small audience at an outdoor location.9

Figure 5.2: Still images from the inaugural Muhan Tojŏn music festival (14 July 2007, MBC-TV).

The concert at the culmination of the festival, shot in a public parking lot under a bridge in Seoul, still appeared in an intentionally low-quality, low-budget fashion according to the program’s self-deprecating humor pattern. However, it does deliver an affectively compelling gimmick of a communal effort toward a goal, a result made possible by a loyal fan base and years of character development. It also marks the first appearance in an entertainment variety program for composer Yoon Ilsang and producer Ahn Jeonghun, and the first of many such appearances by collaborating musicians in subsequent kayoje.

In the 2009 installment of Muhan Tojŏn’s kayoje, Jessica of the female vocal group Girls’ Generation (mentioned in chapter 4) collaborated with comedian and recurring panelist Park Myungsoo in the song “Naengmyŏn” (cold noodles), written by

8 Kwon Seok, dir., Muhan Tojŏn, MBC-TV, 23 April 2005. 9 Kim Taeho, dir., Muhan Tojŏn, MBC-TV, 7 July 2007 and 14 July 2007. 184

E-Tribe, another high-profile composer rarely seen on entertainment television.10 In the aired performance of the song, Park makes a mistake early in the song and never recovers from it, for which the rest of the cast members taunt him from offstage. In digital sales, however, the song rose to the top of charts in the days following the episodes’ airing, and outperformed 2NE1, Girls’ Generation, and many others.11 Quite possibly thanks to its success, Jessica began to appear more frequently on entertainment television afterward, and composer E-Tribe also became a recurring collaborator in subsequent installments of

Muhan Tojŏn kayoje.

Another musician who has crossed over to the entertainment TV realm is singer- songwriter Yoon Jongshin. He also contributed a song to the 2009 kayoje, but his crossover ventures date further back, when he hosted radio programs in 1991 (Urinŭn

Haitin [we are upper-teens] on MBC-FM) and appeared on television sitcoms since 2003

(Nonstop IV on MBC-TV). One of his longest-running regular appearances, the aforementioned Radio Star on MBC-TV, also represents entertainment television’s crossover into the realm of music, and it deserves a closer look in this regard.

The program’s premise as a comical talk show with a musical depth and authenticity necessitates someone like Yoon, who has used his radio-proven humor and his expertise as a singer-songwriter, composer, and producer to bridge the two seemingly disparate television genres. As comedy and variety programs became increasingly popular, they also diversified in style and genre; the crossover between comedy and

10 The hanja characters for “noodle” and “face” sound identical. The word “naengmyŏn” refers to a Korean cold noodle dish popular during the summer, but the title of the present song, accompanied by the subtitle “Chagaun ŏlgul” (cold face), is a word play on the double meaning. The song’s lyrics describe the object of the narrator’s affection as conveying little emotion through facial expressions and coming across as cold, hence the phrase “cold face.” 11 Kim Songhee, “Myungca Drive on Sho Ŭmak Choongshim [Show music central],” MBC eNews, 27 July 2009. http://enews.imbc.com/News/RetrieveNewsInfo/2475. 185 music programming is part of this diversification. Radio Star, an entertainment show promoted as a “classy music program,” however tongue-in-cheek the claim, represents the generic convergence in today’s Korean television and the fluidity of both genres.

The 11 November 2009 episode of Radio Star, dedicated to the late Kim

Hyunshik, demonstrates its manifold aims and traits. In this episode, the show’s regular cast hosts musicians who worked with, or followed in the footsteps of, the late singer on the occasion of the nineteenth anniversary of his passing: Lee Seungchul, who attributes the formation of his musical identity to Kim (and who appeared earlier in chapter 2), and

Kim Jongjin and Cheon Taekwan formerly of Kim’s band. The guest stars present anecdotes involving Kim and how he influenced their musical styles and philosophies, and the regular emcees provide the platform for the guests’ stories as well as questions and prompts. As a result, this episode departs considerably from what is usual for the program: relatively casual, lighthearted conversations about then-recent musical ventures and partially playful inquiries about scandals and rumors involving everyone featured, including the hosts.12

Three elements make this episode stand out from other comedy programs from a musical point of view. First, the hosts, including those without a full career as musician

(Kim Gukjin and Kim Koora), partake in each choosing a favorite Kim Hyunshik song and singing it. This crossover from the TV comedy realm into the musical one is deliberately incomplete, from mediocre singing to the karaoke accompaniment and persistence of laugh tracks. However, it does represent the extension of musical

12 They joke about Lee Seungchul’s past marijuana-related prison time when he appears as a guest in the 9 January 2008 episode, and about the host Kim Gukjin’s divorce and associated gossip in multiple episodes. Both had occurred more than a decade earlier, and most television programs would avoid such topics. The Kim Hyunshik tribute episode involves a different approach altogether. 186 programming on South Korean television beyond what it has been for decades, namely reproduction of live concert-like performance and experience and, within the genre of entertainment television, mere playback of music videos usually at the end of a program slot as the credits scroll up the screen. Despite the comical and lighthearted undertone,

Kim Koora singing a Kim Hyunshik song to accompany an anecdote certainly falls outside of the conventional idioms of televised comedy.

Second, as much as the comedians cross over into the musical realm, the musicians also do the same into the entertainment one. The episode features the former bandmates of Kim Hyunshik and those musicians who cite him as an influence (including the hosts Yoon Jongshin and Shin Junghwan) transcending the genre boundary to make a rare appearance on an entertainment program. Although the program, particularly this episode, topically lies outside of conventional televised comedy, it remains uncommon and infrequent that viewers see such musicians in the context of casual chatters. In this regard, the episode in question benefits from the realistic yet staged nature of yenŭng television, offering a voyeuristic peek into supposedly genuine interactions among celebrities; the music-related conversations take place on this platform of the entertainment television genre. This provides musicians with musical authenticity and a human dimension to their performance personae, as well as with a mass-disseminated medium to reach a wider audience than concert tours can.

Third, this episode and subsequent, similar tribute episodes serve to verify the program’s claim, though often tongue-in-cheek, to being a show about music. This episode transcends the normal idioms of entertainment television, and shows a different aspect of the program from what a reiteration of its slogan, “kopumkyŏk ŭmak pangsong” 187

(classy music broadcast [program]), achieves, usually accompanied by a laugh track or even a guest star’s objection. If this and other heavier episodes of Radio Star do not quite mediate musical performances in the same way that Love Letter or Sketchbook does

(since no such music program would feature a panelist’s mediocre singing or have all performances accompanied by a karaoke machine), they surely facilitate discourses about music, comprising a metamusical television genre of sorts. It is a genre that allows and even encourages the blurring of medium-specific and genre-reinforced labels; on this show, actors sing, comedians talk about films, and singers and producers crack jokes.

Radio Star shows how musical programming can extend beyond the traditional

ŭmak pŭro (music programs), which aim to faithfully recreate the live concert experience, and create new ways to disseminate music via the medium that is hardly new. In cases like Yoon Jongshin, even musicians with longtime careers often enjoy a boost in public visibility and popularity in a secondary career as a television entertainer and talk show professional.

“This is the radio era”: Musicians as radio mainstays

The FM radio in South Korea remains a popular medium and, compared to most of American radio, one that features far more human voice and interactions. Differences in geographical and cultural makeups of radio listenership, as well as the prestige and agency associated with hosting a radio program, keep the radio a popular and strategically significant medium for South Korean musicians today. Numerous musicians maintain their own radio show on a metropolitan terrestrial station, and the crossover 188 seems to benefit both the station and the host, in several ways including upward culture- political mobility for idol singers.

Most American top-40 music stations over the decades have increasingly maximized the music playtime, automated the process of selecting and programming music, and favored pre-recorded and pre-produced segments, all of which allows for easier syndicated dissemination and more efficient use of playback rights. On the contrary, Korean FM radio stations widely employ news announcers, voice actors, musicians, and full-time radio hosts for their programs, throughout which their voices remain prominent; most programs air live during the daytime and evening slots. Many

FM stations program music-centered shows prominently, in addition to news and talk, whereas AM stations feature the latter genres more heavily. Possibly succeeding AM news, weather, and traffic information, FM radio programs across the genres have taken advantage of real-time broadcast by encouraging listeners to participate via telephone and text messages, following the age of postcards and online message boards. As a result, the radio in contemporary South Korea serves less as a jukebox broadcast over the airwaves and more as a medium for mixed-format with a distinct human touch.

A large part of the stations’ ability to have maintained such a high level of humanness stems from the high density of the country’s population. As of the 2015 census, 49.5% of the 51 million South Koreans reside in the Seoul metropolitan area, which comprises the coverage area of most major terrestrial radio stations.13 In other

13 Statistics Korea, “Complete Enumeration Results of the 2015 Population and Housing Census,” Press release. http://kostat.go.kr/portal/eng/pressReleases/8/7/index.board?bmode=download&bSeq=&aSeq=356507&or d=1. 189 words, a radio station would need relatively few transmission facilities, on-air personalities, and production personnel in the capital region to reach up to approximately half of the country’s population. The region’s extensive public transit system includes thousands of buses and taxis whose drivers turn to the radio for entertainment and information, joining commuters in personal vehicles in listenership. The massive, consistent listener base in turn sustains an active “imagined community” and attracts steady, large-scale advertisement revenues and sponsorships.

The resulting media ecology seems to serve different aims and characteristics from those of the depersonalized top-40 popular in the United States, as mentioned above, delivering a mixed-format entertainment package rather than a mere playlist of one song after another. The host of a show also plays a wider role than selecting and shuffling through the playlist, as the emcee of the variety entertainment show that mixes music, interviews, comic skits, participatory events for listeners, and banters. I theorize since the radio DJ in such an environment occupies a highly visible spot in the planning and execution of the program, listeners come to associate the role with agency and control. This effect appears most prominent with hosts who either accumulate cultural prestige as an active agent in the production process of the program, or take over a show from a host with such a reputation. This reputation resembles Pierre

Bourdieu’s cultural capital, “which is convertible, on certain conditions, into economic capital,” but its institutionalization takes the form of mass media credentials and renown rather than educational qualifications.14

14 Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” from Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, edited by John Richardson (New York: Greenwood, 1986), p. 242. 190

This is particularly true for certain longstanding programs that have accumulated sufficient renown through multiple successive DJs’ tenures to justify their longevity and even to help boost the credentials of subsequent hosts. MBC-FM’s afternoon program

Chigŭmŭn Radio Shidae (This is the radio era), on air since 1995, exemplifies the mixed- format radio programs common in South Korea, blending music and light talk to cater to diverse listeners including commuters and public transportation drivers—the latter of whom facilitates a mass, shared listening experience in buses and taxis during the evening rush hour. Co-hosted by singer Cho Youngnam (see chapter 3) for more than nine years until May 2016, the program relies on the hosts’ wit and, frequently, acting skills to deliver for entertainment, and thus resembles televised variety shows more than typical music programs on the radio. The hosts’ extensive talk time and their direct engagement with listeners via phone calls, text messages, and web message boards make them seem to possess considerable control and power over daily operations of the program.

Meanwhile, the nighttime program Pyŏri Pinnanŭn Pamae (On a starlit night) from the same station represents a more straightforward musical genre of radio programs.

First aired in March of 1969, the show has comprised teenage students’ and commuters’ nightly from 10 p.m. to midnight. Singer Lee Moon-sae, who hosted the program from 1985 to 1996, established the program as a cultural phenomenon and an imagined community of engaged listeners. Kim Seungwol, a former MBC radio producer who directed On a Starlit Night, writes that the program’s two signature methods of audience engagement and community building—open studio broadcasts on Sundays and annual omnibus concerts titled JAM—began and peaked in popularity during Lee’s 191 tenure as its host.15 The program during his tenure showed a number of aspects reflecting his already-established career as a singer, most notably the musical cues and title sequences that the host himself recorded and contributed. For example, he wrote and sang a short song, live in the studio, before introducing postcards from listeners whose birthday fell on the day; the song later appeared in his 2002 album in an extended form.16

Meanwhile, having a nightly radio show meant a way for him to maintain a high mass media visibility between album releases, and to construct a multifaceted public persona that extends beyond the studio recordings.

Aside from the extent of the host’s influence and technical involvement in the making of a live radio program, having one’s radio show seems to be a sought-after asset in the field that boosts one’s persona or public image as a musician, while also providing the radio program in question with credibility or diversity. The continued popularity of full-time singers as radio hosts in spite of an extra schedule commitment, often at the expense of proper delivery and smooth emceeing that a trained announcer would provide, indicates that this crossover may indeed benefit both parties. If the radio station’s gain seems more straightforward, since putting a well-known musician with an established fan base on the airwaves helps bring expertise and loyal listeners to the program, how does the other party benefit from this, aside from the increased mass media visibility?

For early crossover hosts such as the aforementioned Lee Moon-sae and Bae

Chulsoo, the radio may have provided an outlet for the host’s metamusical aspirations and curiosity that the recording studio cannot fulfill. For instance, MBC-FM’s Ŭmak

15 Kim Seungwol, Radio Pŭrogŭram Pomat [Radio program format] (Seoul: CommunicationBooks, 2013), pp. 31–32. 16 Kim Seungwol et al., dirs., Pyŏri Pinnanŭn Pame [On a starlit night], MBC-FM, multiple episodes. 192

Kaempŭ (Music camp) has afforded its host Bae Chulsoo, the former frontman of

Songgolmae, opportunities to showcase his knowledge about music and musicians outside of Korea and to interview Pat Metheny (9 May 2011), (27 March

2008), (25 April 2008), Jon Lord (10 April 2009), Kirk Hammett of

Metallica (18 January 2017), and Scorpions (6 August 2015). The program has benefited from, and contributed to, the elevated cultural status that Western popular music has in

South Korea. The prestige that a pop music program on the terrestrial radio carries has sustained itself, and the former guitarist-vocalist of a rock band, which had just released its final album to date, took the opportunity to ride the wave of the Western-centrism that

I discussed earlier in the chapter on rock bands. Today, the program features longtime panelists including Lim Jinmo and Kim Taehoon, both music critics and authors, who join the host in discussions about current musical trends outside of Korea and behind-the- scene anecdotes about songs that listeners request. Moreover, its Monday feature focuses on music in cinema, and a considerable portion of Saturday episodes introduces singles on the Billboard Top 20 chart for the week.

Even the program’s opening theme reinforces this notion of prestige, or, of being more prestigious than average domestic popular culture. Since the program’s inception in

1990, it has begun virtually every episode with a version of the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t

Get No) Satisfaction,” but specifically the one performed by the Vienna Symphony as part of its Vienna Symphonic Orchestra Project. In the words of Bae Suntak (no relation), one of the program’s script writers, those behind the program openly aims for a “time- proven classic.”17 The pursuit of perceived classiness, or the cultural middlebrow,

17 Bae Suntak, “Radio-ŭi Miraerŭl Chikinŭn DJ, Bae Chulsoo” [Bae Chulsoo: DJ who sustains the future of the radio], Sisa IN, 26 March 2015. http://www.sisain.co.kr/?mod=news&act=articleView&idxno=22762. 193 assumes an established cultural hierarchy. As with Korean rock bands’ construction of musical legitimacy by association with Western musicians and musical styles, the cultural distinction also accompanies signifiers not native to the land. It further supports my theory that South Korean modernity has developed, as did the country’s modern sonic national identity, primarily in terms of the country’s perception of supposedly superior foreigners, and that the degree to which something resembles the Western world determines its placement in the hierarchy within the culture.18

Bae Chulsoo’s Ŭmak Kaempŭ continues to include references to the host’s hands- on involvement, and numerous sources (including Bae Suntak’s book) emphasize that he remains one of the last radio hosts to operate the audio console without delegating the task to a staff engineer.19 Such references indicate that one’s hands-on involvement in the creation of art, as well as the technical savviness and knowledge of the craft, continues to influence judgments of a musician’s legitimacy and professional worth even beyond the recording process.

The four-piece male vocal group Sweet Sorrow exemplifies a unique manifestation of this standard. Having formed out of a men’s glee club at Yonsei

University, the singers’ alma mater, the group gained popularity and media visibility when it won the second season of MBC-TV’s program Showvival in

2007. Following a number of recording releases and guest appearances on television, the group’s members hosted Tentenkŭllŏp (10-10 club) on SBS Power FM from 2009 to

2011, broadcast daily from 10 p.m., to midnight in the Seoul metropolitan area.20 The

18 Refer back to chapter 2 for a more detailed treatment of this hypothesis. 19 Ibid. 20 Lee Dajeong, “Sŭwitsorou, Tentenkŭllŏp 2-nyŏnman Chajin Hacha” [Sweet Sorrow leaves 10-10 Club after two years], Sports Choson, 19 March 2011. 194 program under their reign consisted of comic exchanges among the co-hosts and listeners’ contributions, typical of a radio talk show; their conversations with guest artists during the Saturday feature “Mari Piryo Ŏmnŭn Laibŭ” (Live, no descriptions necessary) exhibited their continued commitment to pursuing music seriously. The program’s most unique element, arguably, came at the beginning of every nightly episode, when the four vocalists would select one winning story from a listener, call them on the air, and perform an impromptu a cappella rendition of the requested song.

In this example, the anticipation of a possible win helps engage listeners, and the spontaneity of the performance accentuates the group’s musical abilities and their commitment to the listener community as hosts. With of the phone call broadcast live on the airwaves, featuring the surprised and awestruck reaction of the listener, the phone call element helps extend the phone call beyond the two parties on the line and bridge the distance, both geographical and culture-political, between the hosts and each listener. The hosts use the radio show, in other words, to at once flaunt their mass media-proven musical savviness and reinforce the perceived genuineness of their presence disseminated over the air—a strategy similar to those appearing in variety entertainment television programs. Effectively, the quartet hosted a yenŭng on the radio, in four-part harmony.

To summarize, the style and production practices prevalent in South Korean FM radio, still a relevant medium and in several ways a precursor to entertainment television, reflect the pattern of the nation’s urban development heavily centered around the capital city of Seoul, the type and extent of audience engagement that the average mass media consumer expects, and the public’s (and the media institution’s) conception of what 195 makes a musician legitimate or worthwhile. The ability and technical proficiency to perform music is a necessary condition for it, but an upward culture-political mobility requires certain additional (i.e., sufficient) criteria, and diversifying one’s performative persona via such mass media roles outside of the conventional delivery of musical performance makes for a common, often effective, strategy.

From music seen, to music heard: Hierarchy of the senses, or fragility of televised music

JTBC’s Hidden Singer, first aired in March 2013, rests on a simple set of premises: each episode features one singer with an established renown and a sizable hit song repertory, and five to six contestants join the singer onstage, each person in an enclosed booth. The contestants, who are lay impressionists of the featured singer selected in an audition and provided vocal training, take turns to sing one hit song by the featured singer, phrase by phrase, per round.21 Up to halfway through each song, the identity of each singer remains unknown to the studio audience, who must vote to eliminate the singer who sounds least like the original singer. The slogan “poinŭn

ŭmagesŏ tŭnnŭn ŭmagŭro” (from music seen, to music heard) appears regularly throughout every episode in subtitles and emcee remarks.22 Judging by the show’s premises and the slogan, its supposed aim must be to restore the supremacy of the hearing over the sight in the musical experience in the era of television.

21 Cho Hongkyung, radio interview, Kim Hyunjung-ŭi News Show, CBS-FM, 4 November 2014. 22 Cho Seungwook, dir. Hidden Singer, JTBC, 21 December 2012–16 January 2016. 196

Figure 5.3: A still image from Hidden Singer (12 October 2013, JTBC).

It does propose a game in which the stakes depend on the sound rather than the visual, partially challenging the primacy of sight in modern society, the effects of which conventional television production practices should normally seek to maximize.23

However, the show’s production- and editorial decisions also produce an end result full of visual cues that distract from the viewers’ aural perception. Audience shots highlight studio spectators’ reactions that hint at their confidence or lack thereof in their guesses, and onscreen captions augment the hype of the artificial mystery, overlaying speech- and thought bubbles of visibly confused or awestruck audience members. Along with repetitive replay scenes that highlight the surprise identity reveals, which distract the viewer from an immersive listening experience, these videocentric elements of the show suggest that music on television may remain primarily music seen, after all.

MBC-TV’s Misŭtŏri Ŭmaksho Pokmyŏn Kawang (“King of masked singers, a mystery music show”) takes a slightly different approach to the dominance of hearing in

23 Veit Erlmann, “Introduction: The String and the Mirror,” from Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality (New York: Zone Books, 2010), pp. 9–28; Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, edited and translated by Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 197 musical television programming. It involves audience votes and round-by-round eliminations, but no impressionists or onstage enclosures. Instead, singers, actors, comedians, and other celebrities perform cover songs in competition against each other while each wearing a handcrafted mask. Out of eight contestants per episode, the final winner faces the reigning kawang (singer king). Each performer’s identity remains hidden until he or she loses a match by audience vote and takes off the mask, akin to wrestlers in lucha libre. The reigning singer king, therefore, stays masked between and during episodes until he or she loses the title. All in-program references to performers yet to be unmasked call them by their stage name, often descriptive of their mask.

The emcee’s opening remark at the beginning of each episode, “we reject any and all prejudices,” shows that the program’s primary stake lies not in curbing the dominance of sight in televised dissemination of music, but rather in leveling the ground for competition by setting aside preconceived notions about genres, popularity, categories of musicians, and how viewers may preemptively associate varying degrees of good musicianship and musical worth with those factors. In other words, what this program claims to battle gets at the cultural hierarchy that penetrates the South Korean entertainment industry today and has been central to the present project, whereby different classes of artists face varying expectations regarding their inherent artistry and creative agency, and employ different strategies of legitimization. EXiD’s Solji, the winner of the pilot episode, remarks that her appearance on the program was the “first time in the ten-year career that [she] was acknowledged and celebrated solely on the basis of musical accomplishment.”24 Preconceptions about the origins of a musician and his or

24 Heo Solji, television interview in Min Chulgi, dir., Misŭtŏri Ŭmaksho Pokmyŏn Kawang, MBC-TV, 18 February 2015. 198 her music do seem to result in the same class struggle as what I discussed in the previous chapter, manifest in production practices of many television programs and now the central premise of the present show.

Figure 5.4: A still image from Misŭtŏri Ŭmaksho Pokmyŏn Kawang (27 March 2016, MBC-TV).

The program’s format also implicitly entails the assimilation of idol singers into the realm of established, proper popular music, rather than a value-neutral competition model. Cover performances of listener-proven, well-known songs from the past produces no culture-politically significant outcome for singers who already belong to the realm, and a shot at upward mobility in the hierarchy for those who do not. The program thus serves as a deliberate redemption system for musicians whose commercial stakes overshadow their craft, by separating, albeit temporarily, the music-producing person from his or her performative persona. To that end, the program seems to fulfill its purpose well. Although singers from ballad or rhythm-and-blues, genres that highlight their accomplishments as vocalists, do continue to perform well and appeal effectively to 199 the voting audience, idol singers whose craft rarely receive the spotlight also perform well in the competition and appeal effectively to the audience.

These two programs thus reveal that, though they both belong to the same recent trend of Korean television stations introducing various twists to their musical programming, seeing (or not seeing) the singer’s face has implications that reach far beyond merely what appears on the television screen. King of Masked Singers does something that the Hidden Singer does not, because its central premise acknowledges and challenges the cultural hierarchy at work in the entertainment scene, however temporarily. The significance of the “music seen,” whose prevalence seems to persist despite the claims of the Hidden Singer and the likes, concerns not just images of faces on the screen, but rather what the viewer knows or thinks about the faces and their music.

Moreover, the implications of this cultural hierarchy based on the public’s apparent disdain for commercial, popular art may just be the driving force behind the nation’s contemporary entertainment industry.

What you see is what you get: The cultural class struggle as the industry’s governing principle

This cultural dynamic manifest in musical programming on South Korean television symptomizes several of the characteristics of the country’s popular music, production practices, and postcolonial modernity thus far explored in this project. Though the criteria for this class division concern more economic factors than musical, it has resounding effects on how an average listener conceptualizes and experiences music.

Moreover, the unmistakable reality of the persistence of the division hardly stops those 200 who belong to the entertainment industry from initiating, and capitalizing on, attempts to challenge the hierarchy. In other words, idol singers from major labels know how an average listener views them and what their background as artists affords them, but they nonetheless still employ musical and extramusical strategies explored in the earlier chapters toward the nearly-unachievable end of upward mobility and full musical legitimacy.

Consider, for example, idol vocal groups’ and rock bands’ strategies of musically associating themselves with musicians who already have an and acclaim in their respective tradition, as discussed in chapters 2 and 4. Singers, especially those from low- ranking genres or talent system traditions in the hierarchy of musicians, know their current place on the ladder and what cultural capitals it affords them. The reaction by rock bands and singer-songwriters to the dynamic of popular culture, which parallels that of the material culture and political events of the country during the latter half of the twentieth century, indicates that the formation and development of the country’s popular culture show a close resemblance and connection to its history of modernization. Idol vocal groups’ way of placing itself in the mass media terrain resembles South Korean manufacturing corporations’ sales campaigns in that they both employ strategies that operate on the basis that they occupy the position of an underdog in the industry dynamic, which requires such extra-industrial factors as preferential government policies and marketing tactics such as kuksanpum aeyong’undong (campaign to buy Korean-made goods). As I pointed out in the introductory essay, the rise of Hallyu, or the Korean

Wave, began as a state-led initiative to transform the country’s culture industry into one capable of generating significant export revenues to supplement the traditional industries, 201 which also owed their growth decades earlier to the government’s favorable policies.

Musicians who participate in the system, similarly, employ the musical and extramusical strategies, some of which I have laid out in the present project, with the knowledge of their places in the hierarchy, often striving to move up to a higher class. Although the upward mobility often proves impossible or unsustainable, this effort provides the material for the teleological narrative behind those musicians’ mass media maneuvers.

In this project, whose timeline spans about five decades, I have laid out a brief history of people and moments in South Korean popular music in proactive response to the country’s social and political climate, as well as its musical-aesthetic manifestations.

Emotional love songs have constituted the backbone of South Korean popular music genres since the early twentieth century, and the history of the tŭrotŭ tradition as well as its distribution tells the story of the shaping of a singular, identifiable sonic national identity, the standard against which subsequent genres compare. Rock bands claim musical legitimacy by stressing organic music-making, instrumentalism as a high- precision craft, and a connection to Western musicians from whom the genre originates.

The singer-songwriter tradition of the 1960s and the 1970s mixed and fused elements of

American folk and pop music, and appropriated them to gain power and momentum in the domestic political scene of the time in pursuit of democracy, civil liberty, and a viable national identity. Decades later, with fruits of the democratization movement more or less in place, aspects of the earlier musicians’ strategies appeared repurposed as contemporary ones’ devices of self-representation and empowerment within the institution of the capitalist entertainment industry. Idol vocal groups also emphasize the authenticity of 202 their labor, but their efforts presume a cultural hierarchy to their disadvantage as well as a public disdain for cheap, mass-produced culture, which prompts them to adopt mass media strategies like participation in competition shows or other entertainment programs to combat passive performative personae.

As I hope to also have made clear in this project, in all of those genres, the quest for musical authenticity and legitimacy reveals consequences of neoliberal governmental policies that have contributed to the entertainment industry’s growth and of the postcolonial, outward-looking ideology behind the country’s modernization following the liberation and the Korean War. Strategies that musicians choose in order to attain them reflect the originating society’s ruling ideologies, which in turn reflect its history and internal political dynamic; such strategies, in turn, help shape the public’s perception of the artists (e.g., how an average viewer or listener would view a singer who belongs to an idol group and the star system, and one who does not). In much the same way as the struggle among socioeconomic strata propels the exploitive capitalist structure, so does the class dynamic among musicians in the contemporary Korean popular music industry fuel its institution and contents that it produces.

South Korean popular music, like all culture, reflects its society of origin. In particular, the way its listeners categorize and classify its musicians, as well as how the cultural hierarchy—institutionalized or perceived—prompts specific decisions regarding musical strategies, promotional tactics, and mass media practices. To return to the question I quoted at the beginning of this project, asking whether an idol singer (or anyone) is “a real musician” therefore demands less a yes-or-no response and more an in- depth inquiry of what musical and political threads have yielded such a question. That 203 inquiry will inevitably concern much of modern historical developments that have shaped today’s South Korea and continue to affect day-to-day experiences of its people. 204

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