ABOUT THIS BOOK

The history of the Korean popular music industry dates back a century before the beginnings of K-Pop, to when the Korean peninsula was still under Japanese rule. Though Koreans didn’t have an independent country, they were still able to use recorded music to assert a distinct cultural identity.

Brother Is a Street Musician chronicles the development of Korean popular music over the first half of the twentieth century, examining both industry trends and talented composers and performers like Nam Insu and Yi Nanyǒng. Drawing from rare archives of gramophone records and lyric books, musicologist Zhang Eujeong shows how Korean musicians drew from folk traditions to create totally new genres, ranging from comic songs to Western-influenced jazz records. She also includes English translations and detailed analyses of lyrics from some of the era’s most popular songs.

A landmark study of Korean music, now available in English for the first time, Brother Is a Street Musician tells the inspiring story of how a colonized people developed their own form of popular music, planting the seeds for an industry that would grow to export Korean culture around the world.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

ZHANG EUJEONG is a professor of liberal arts at Dankook University, South Korea. She has published thirty books and over ninety essays on Korean popular music, popular culture, and oral tradition, including Tearooms and Cafés, The Sanctuaries of the Modern Boys, and Introduction to K-Pop History.

SEULBIN HAN is a journalist, editor, and translator for the US-based K-Pop media outlet allkpop by 6Theory Media. Brother Is a Street Musician is her first full-length translation. She is based in Durham, North Carolina.

PIL HO KIM is an associate professor of Korean at The Ohio State University. He is the author of Polarizing Dreams: Gangnam and Popular Culture in Globalizing Korea.

REVIEWS

"Zhang’s forensic account of the Korean popular music industry during the first half of the twentieth century has long been a standard go-to text for Korean writers. Now made accessible for all in translation, it brilliantly dissects issues surrounding genre, origin, and influence, usefully provides lyrics of important songs, and convincingly argues for a continuum running from the past to today’s all-conquering K-Pop."

— Keith Howard, professor emeritus of music, SOAS University of London

"An instant classic when originally published two decades ago, Brother is a Street Musician stands as a highly important and indeed pivotal record of Korean musicology. I strongly recommend it to anyone interested in Korean modernity, the rise of celebrity culture and fandom, and the transnational nature of the music industry in its formative years."

— Roald Maliangkay, author of Broken Voices: Postcolonial Entanglements and the Preservation of Korea's Central Folksong

"In a touchstone study that charts the birth of modern Korean popular music, Zhang provides a virtuoso performance that analyzes a range of colonial-era musical genres, revealing through an eclectic range of sources how trot, jazz, and sinminyo songs transcended entertainment to become vital, resonant comforts for a people navigating the complexities and contradictions of colonial modernity."

— Hyung-Gu Lynn, AECL/KEPCO Chair in Korean Research, University of British Columbia

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword: O Brother,
There
Thou Art: An Odyssey
to Colonial (Pre)Modernity in Korean Popular
Music
vii
PIL HO KIM
Translator’s Note xi
Preface to the 2006 Korean Edition xiii
Preface to the 2026 English
Edition xix
1 Introduction 1
Why Popular
Songs from the First Half of the Twentieth Century?
1
The Birth of the Consumer Public and Popular
Songs 4
Beyond the Limits of Autogenous Generation and Transplantation 8
Recorded Album
History by Era 11
Close Examination: The Faceless Singer 13
2 The Gramophone Record
and the Creation of Popular
Songs 21
Why the Focus on Gramophone Records?
22
The Emergence and Distribution of the Gramophone Record
23
The Characteristics of Domestic Record
Labels and Their
Transformation in Each Era 33
The Creators of Popular
Songs 40
Types of Popular
Songs and Their Characteristics 45
The Creation and Development of Popular
Songs 54
Close Examination: Kisaengs Became Popular
Singers? 86
3 The Consumption of Popular
Songs 91
The Attitude of the Consumer Public 93
The Perspectives of Critics 114
Close Examination: Who Was Korea’s
First Singer-Songwriter? 131

4 Literary Expressions of Popular
Sentiment 133
The Search for Pleasure
in Jazz Songs 136
The Comedic Traits of Manyo 144
Fulfillment and Deficiency Expressed in Sinminyo 166
Loss and the Will
to Overcome One’s Struggles
as Reflected in Trot 187
Military Songs in an Era of Darkness 228
Close Examination: A Look at Korea’s
Very First Popular
Song 236
5 The Historical Status and Significance of Korean Popular
Songs from the First Half of the Twentieth Century
239
Traditional Songs and Their Tendency to Inherit the Past 240
Characteristics for Future
Survival 248
The Future
Path of Popular
Songs 253
Acknowledgments
257
Notes 259
Bibliography 291
Notes on Contributors 303
Index 000