Korean Pop Music: Riding the Wave

Korean popular music has in the last decade become a significant model for youth culture throughout Asia. Yet, although the Korean music industry is both vibrant and massive, this is the first book-length work devoted to the subject to appear in English. The book offers a comprehensive account, written by thirteen scholars of Korean Studies, enthnomusicology and popular culture, charting Korean pop from the 1930s to the present day, from genres imitative of early twentieth-century European and Japanese styles (‘trot’ and ‘yuhaengga’) to contemporary punk clubs, rap bands and music television shows. Consideration is given to South Korean singers who catered for US troops in the aftermath of the Korean War, to acoustic guitar songs and their use in the 1970s’ student protest movements against military dictatorship, to state propaganda pop, and to the explosion of global styles that marked the 1990s. Lyrics and dance, media packaging and stage costumes, song rooms and singing doctors, highway songs and new folksongs, as well as the impact of the Internet are all explored. The book also includes extensive discussion of North Korean popular music and chapters on the ‘Korean wave’ that swept Taiwan and the Chinese mainland at the start of the new millennium.