You Call That Music?!

Korean Popular Music Through the Generations

Young-mee Lee, Young-mee Yu Cho, Brandon J. Park, Jean Yoon, Young-mee Yu Cho, Brandon J. Park, Jean Yoon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032149011
• eBook ISBN: 9781000589986
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

You Call That Music?!: Korean Popular Music Through the Generations provides a critical overview of the history of Korean popular music from 1920 to the 2000s from the perspective of cultural history. First published in Korean in 2017 by one of the best-known critics, Lee Young-Mee, this book is a timely and much-needed source of information on Korean popular music of the past hundred years.

Through this English translation, readers are able to make meaningful connections between specific forms of Korean popular music of various periods and the contemporaneous Korean social and political circumstances. Structured around the central theme of generational conflict, the book provides readers with an accessible way to engage with Korea's social history and a greater understanding of how specific musical works, genres and styles fit into that history. Its strong narrative force helps illuminate the connections between modern Korean social history and the particular trends of musical production and their reception through the decades.

You Call That Music?! is an invaluable resource for those researching and studying Korean popular music specifically as well as Korea's cultural and social history.

Chapter 1Generational UnityCause for Celebration?

DOI: 10.4324/​9781003241652-1

Songs the Whole Family Can Enjoy

Whenever a new TV show with multigenerational appeal hits the Korean airwaves, the media rushes to its praise. There’s usually at least one such program on the air—one that teens and adults alike can enjoy, a show that seems to dissolve generational differences and offer something for everyone. KBS Open Concert was that show in the 1990s, but these days, I think the trend has gone overboard. In 2011, the talent competition show “I Am a Singer” rounded up famous contemporary recording artists and showcased their reinterpretations of famous oldies, bygone hits which had long since lost public interest. One prominent example was Jungyup’s unprecedented performance of Joo Hyun-mi’s trot¹ song “Unrequited Love.” From “Immortal Songs: Singing the Legends” to “King of Masked Singers,” several programs are resurrecting old hits for new audiences.

Imagine this scene: while the singers perform onstage, the camera pans over the studio audience. Sure enough, its middle-aged members are all singing along to the oldies hit that this pop idol group of twenty-somethings has refashioned in their own style. Surely this same audience would be watching with stony faces if the group onstage were performing one of their own generation’s hits, but in this moment, these ajummas and ajusshis² are clearly enraptured. The idea of “breaking down barriers between the generations” couldn’t be demonstrated in more clear or touching terms if it were written on-screen.

Breaking down barriers between the generations sounds like a positive thing, doesn’t it? Because on the one hand, you have the middle-aged parents who disdain the songs their teenage sons and daughters enjoy (“they call that stuff music?”) and on the other, those same children, who find their parents’ music so repellent and lame. Isn’t it great if a single song can bring them together for a moment?

For those who study the origins and history of Korean popular music, however, it’s difficult to applaud this prospect straightforwardly. Why? Because if you consider the time-honored tradition of remakes, it might occur to you that remakes gain traction in the absence of truly innovative new music. However refreshing or groundbreaking a remake might be, it’s ultimately just a reinterpretation of the singing, the performance, and the arrangement of an original. In other words, it’s hard to say on the basis of remakes that pop music is making great evolutionary strides. Audiences tired of hearing the same old sounds since the 2000s desired something fresh, and programs that show off performers’ singing talents were brought on to respond to that need. But such programs hardly herald a new era in music. No, the most fundamental changes in pop music take place in the music itself—developments in lyricism, arrangement, and performance—but also, and more importantly, at the macro level of the people and systems driving the music industry.

Generational Conflicts Promote Creativity!

Another point: revolutionary trends in the arts and culture tend to accompany times of intense intergenerational conflicts of taste. In other words, when adults cover their ears and complain, “You call that music?!” they’re usually also implying something like this culture must really be going to the dogs. And they might even go as far in their indignation as to say, “You’d have to be insane to enjoy this stuff, never mind to call it music!”

People tend to remain fond of the music they loved as teenagers; the tastes one forms in adolescence often endure for life. So if I tell you the names of the recording artists I loved when I was young, you’d probably be able to guess my approximate age. Usually at a point in a person’s thirties, tastes begin to solidify and resist drastic change, growing more obdurate with age. Now in my forties, I’m hard-pressed to name a single artist or group enjoying the present-day spotlight, and I probably couldn’t follow along with one of their hit singles even if I listened to it ten times.

I was born in 1961, so I was in my early thirties when Seo Taiji & Boys rose to fame in the 90s. Confident of my understanding of music, I felt fairly sure that if I just listened to their songs a few times, I’d be able to perform them passably in a noraebang (Korea-style karaoke). But even after listening to “Dreaming of Balhae” five times, I couldn’t sing along at all—I fared all right with the melody, but the rap just left me in the dust. My god, I’ve gotten old! I thought to myself with a shock.

As surely as children grow into adolescents, conflicts in taste are inevitable between the older and younger generations of every era. Youngsters always come off as disrespectful and disorderly in the eyes of the elders, and the music they like always grates on older ears, reminding the geezers that their moment has passed. It’s a perennial tension.

Anxiety over antiquation aside, at several points in Korean history, a critical mass of the older generation protested so strongly (they ought to ban that garbage music!) that their outrage actually moved the needle of public taste. However, such instances are hardly the status quo—it’s only when the major structures of pop music shift that such commotion flares up.

Take, for example, the 1990s. When terms like “new generation” and “new culture” enter the vernacular, it generally means that there’s considerable discord stirring in the “old generation.” The early 1970s were similar, during which “youth culture³” was the talk of the town—meaning, of course, that conflict was brewing against the culture of the “establishment generation.”

I can’t imagine how upset parents in the early 90s must have been when their preteen children mouthed off to them, “Ok ok ok ok ok, enough with the moral preaching!”⁴ It was a similar situation in the early 70s that drove police into the streets, armed with scissors.⁵

Was the tyrannical Korean government of the time acting in all kinds of oppressive and awful ways? Absolutely! But weren’t the adults of that era doing the same when they cracked down on long hair and miniskirts? Hush, don’t point that out. Perhaps those people, Koreans in their forties and up, thought to themselves that they were taking the moral high ground, crusading to straighten out the crooked world.

At such junctures, the aggressive culture clash between generations tends to push popular music to new heights and breakthroughs. In the present day, creative energy harnessed from the cultural battle with the older generation of this era will likely fuel the K-Pop industry for the next twenty years. Put differently, an era whose music appeals to the sensitivities and tolerance of its grownups is probably not going to be an era of sweeping social change.

The Ebb and Flow of Generational Conflict

At this point, you’ve likely guessed what this book will be about. Over the course of these pages, we’ll take a deep dive into the cultural influences that have shaped modern Korean popular music and examine the trends in style and taste that have shaped its reception, whether celebrated or conflicted, from generation to generation.

From the 1920s onward, the evolution of Korean popular music and its conventions of lyrics writing and arrangement can be divided into distinct eras. There have been eras of innovation and conflict, when the music of the moment polarized the younger and older generations. Conversely, there have also been moments when multiple generations shared the same tastes and sensibilities. The early 1970s and early to mid-1990s were times of intense generational conflict, whereas the 1980s—in essence, the era of Cho Yong-pil—was a time of intergenerational sympathy and compromise, when audiences of all ages seemed to agree with each other and see eye to eye.

If the latter era was largely one of cultural agreement, the former periods were relatively unstable times during which Korean music was also breaking into fresh and novel territory. Groundbreaking changes in the styles and sounds of pop music often accompany periods of multifaceted social change. On the basis of those changes, new norms proliferate—new performance styles gain traction, and then demonstrations of expertise take priority. Then the productions of professional jaengi gradually overtake more experimental and revolutionary stylings, and the music flatlines—as was the case in the 1980s. I believe that examining the cycles of these trends throughout the history of Korean popular music will shed some light on the contemporary state of music and culture.

I began exploring these ideas in my 2011 book, Singing Trot with C’est Si Bon and Seo Taiji (Lee, 2011). The current volume picks up the threads I started in that book and takes a closer look at the 1960s and 1980s, periods of relative intergenerational harmony in music taste. Additionally, in this book I focus more on analyzing and discussing those relationships and less on specific representative artists or works.

On this journey through the decades and generations of Korean popular music, our treatment of the contemporary pop music scene will have to be brief. This is because reading recent developments in an objective light is impossible without sufficient “historical distance.” We can speak reasonably confidently about the 1930s to the 1990s, which are well behind us, but drawing conclusions about the ongoing period from the 2000s to the present is trickier.

Nonetheless, a thorough understanding of the past can be a very helpful lens through which to look at intergenerational conflict and harmony with regard to music. At the very least, an informed perspective might serve to quell the worry that “When I was young, music was great, but how can these kids nowadays be listening to such garbage? It must be ruining their minds—what can I do?” Or it might relieve you of the vexation that the hits of today, indecipherable to older folks, are signs that the world is going to pieces—in fact, you might discover that those very songs offer some joy and ease.

After all, these novel, strange, and vulgar sounds could be the wellspring that nourishes the Korean music industry for the next two decades.

Notes

1. Taking its name from the musical genre of foxtrot, trot is a Korean musical genre that originated in the first half of the 20th century. Trot hybridized Korean traditional music with Western styles, employing a pentatonic scale, and was influenced by Japanese popular music. Also known (somewhat derisively) as ppongjjak, so called for the sound of its distinctive two-step rhythm.
2. These terms, left transliterated from the Korean, connote middle-aged women and men—akin to non-familial “aunties” and “uncles.”
3. Later referred to as cheongnyeon culture (Chapters 8 and 9)
4. “Classroom Idea,” Seo Taiji & Boys
5. This refers to incidents in the 1970s of police cutting young men’s long hair in the streets because men’s long hair was considered decadent and inappropriate.

Reference

• Lee, Young-mee. (2011) Singing Trot with C’est Si Bon and Seo Taiji. Seoul: Duri Media.

Chapter 2Grownups in the 1930sShocked by the New Pop Music

DOI: 10.4324/​9781003241652-2

What’s Your Groupchat Profile Pic?

Are you disturbed by the music that your teenage children like?

You’re probably in your forties, right?

Now allow me to guess a few more things about you.

You probably loved the K-dramas Reply 1994 and Reply 1988. And in your KakaoTalk groupchats, you probably have lots of friends whose profile pictures feature them in hiking gear, right? And I bet you’re in a few group chatrooms where everyone regularly makes long posts of five or six sentences. “Who doesn’t fit this description?” you migh...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Author’s Preface
• 1 Generational Unity: Cause for Celebration?
• 2 Grownups in the 1930s: Shocked by the New Pop Music
• 3 Was Trot Really for Teens?
• 4 Mambo Dancing in Mambo Pants: In the Aftermath of the Korean War
• 5 American Standard Pop Patches Up Generational Differences: The Early 1960s
• 6 The Late 1960s: The Period of Easing Generational Conflict
• 7 Trot Lifts the Spirits—But Wait, Is It Japanese?!
• 8 The Explosion of Generational Conflict: Youth Culture
• 9 Decadent Acoustic Guitars and “Backwards” Ppongjjak Collide
• 10 Cho Yong-pil Brings Generations Together
• 11 The Seoul Olympics, Globalization, and “Underground” Music
• 12 The 1990s: The Era of Seo Taiji and Generational Conflict
• 13 Reversal, Resistance, and …?
• 14 Epilogue: When Will an Age of Conflict Come Again?
• Index