This interdisciplinary panel examines cultural histories of popular song in Korea across the twentieth century, moving beyond dominant scholarly focus on contemporary K-pop industries and fandom cultures. While recent studies have significantly advanced critical understanding of global success of Korean popular music, they often leave unaddressed the broader historical and cultural formations that shaped popular song practices prior to the twenty-first century. Expanding the definition of what constitutes Korean popular song culture, this panel foregrounds understudied archives, transmedial practices, and interdisciplinary approaches to illuminate the diverse roles that popular songs have played across moments of political upheaval, social transformation, and cultural production.

Amid Korea’s turbulent modern history—marked by liberation from Japanese colonial rule, the Korean War, rapid industrialization, military dictatorship, and democratization—the term “popular song” (kayo) emerged as a dynamic and multifaceted cultural form. Far exceeding its narrow English translation, kayo functioned variously as objects of sonic commodity, tools of state propaganda, and media of collective resistance. Kayo both shaped and were shaped by processes of adaptation of mainstream and subcultural genres in global circulation, formation of collective identity through musical innovation, and collective performance of resistance poetry as protest song. Foregrounding such adaptational, discursive, and transmedial practices, this panel brings together four scholars whose research into kayo crosses conventional historical, geographic, and disciplinary borders. It aims not only to broaden historical and intersectional understandings of kayo cultures in Korea, but also to reconsider the pre- and post-democratization divide across which popular song cultures have conventionally been historicized.

Seulbin Han examines the emergence of Korea’s domestic record industry in the immediate post-liberation period (1945-50), an understudied yet formative moment in popular song history. Through analyses of “Be Gone, 38th Parallel” (1948), “Moonlit Night of Silla” (1949), and “One Moon One Sun” (1949), Han demonstrates how early recordings captured the emotional landscape of a society grappling with division, uncertainty, and the looming realities of Cold War geopolitics. These songs, many of which were lost during the Korean War, reveal how popular music served as a medium for the Korean masses to channel their sorrows, confusion, anger, and outcries against division and for reunification.

Moving into the 1960s and 70s, Ethan Waddell investigates the intersections of music and literature in the early works of novelist Pak T’ae-sun. Drawing on Pak’s engagements with African American and third world literature, Waddell argues that Pak’s incorporation of popular songs into his body of writing enabled the representation of affective experiences of everyday life under rapid economic development and geopolitical realignment which could not be depicted otherwise. Through this literary-musical analysis of Pak’s early writings, Waddell traces the incipient formation of a theory of authentically Korean forms of popular song that would later inform cultural activism in the 1980s, highlighting the role of literature in mediating ephemeral sonic practices.

Susan Hwang turns to the 1980s student movement to examine poetry that circulated as song prior to their discovery in print. Conceptualizing this process as “reverse adaptation,” Hwang argues that singing functioned as the primary mode through which poetry of resistance was embodied, remembered, and mobilized. Drawing on concepts of textual “afterlife” and “acoustic palimpsests,” the paper traces Yang Sŏng-u’s “When the Blue Mountains Come Calling” (1981) and Kim Nam-ju’s “Song” (1989) from their musical adaptation in the 1980s to their afterlives in contemporary South Korea in the 2000s, demonstrating how each performance adds new affective, historical layers to earlier ones.

Finally, Eunyoung Song reconceptualizes the music of Seo Taiji and Boys as a key site in the discursive formation of a new generational identity in the 1990s. Drawing upon Mannheim’s theory of generations, Song argues that the group’s incorporation of rap, hip-hop, and metal did not merely signal the mainstreaming of global genres, but articulated a shared sense of liberation among youth in post-authoritarian Korea. The paper demonstrates how popular music actively shaped the cultural conditions under which a new generational identity became socially legible and politically meaningful.

Each of the four presentations will be 13-15 minutes in length (55-60 minutes total), followed by 15 minutes of comments from the discussant and open discussion. The panel brings together scholars at different career stages and diverse institutions. The participants include two assistant professors, one PhD student, one associate professor, and one research professor. The panel is also international in scope, with participants traveling from a wide range of geographic locations: South Korea (Song), the Midwest (Han and Kim), the West Coast (Hwang), and the Mountain West region (Waddell).