Regulating and Negotiating in T'urot'u, a Korean Popular Song Style

Abstract

T'Arot'u (its name derived from the Korean pronunciation of the English, trot) is a South Korean sentimental love song style performed with an abundance of vocal inflections. While this popular music has existed in the music scene of Korea for more than eight decades, it has been received differently at different times throughout its history. For instance, t'irot'u enjoyed its heyday as the dominant Korean popular music until the 1970s, and it remains popular particularly among older adults (s6ngin) and working people (s6min). According to a survey by the Seoul Broadcasting System (SBS) program Kayosho (Popular Song Show) in 2003, 64 out of 100 of the all-time favorite Korean popular songs were t'arot'a songs.' Hence, this grassroots popular music genre can be easily heard in such spaces as taxis, buses, marketplaces, local festivals, and noraebang (private rooms for karaoke). In addition, the social meaning of t'Yrot'a has been complicated by its relations to successive ideological structures of Korea, such as the elite nationalism of the Japanese colonial period (1910-45), the cultural imperialism of the Cold War period (1950s-1970s), and the strategic essentialism of the military dictatorship (1960s-1980s). In the beginning, even though the song style was well accepted particularly by the urban bourgeoisie during the period of modernization, the early elite nationalists considered it to be a cultural threat. Since the nationalists during the Japanese colonial period intended to canonize traditional Korean music as a high-modern Korean culture, they worried about the impact of modern popular music and favored the resurrection of traditional musics (Robinson 1998, 372). Later, in 1984, the early elite nationalists' standpoint strongly influenced the postcolonial debate over the nationality of t'arot'a.2 In fact, the postcolonial argument has relentlessly been the main issue of t'arot'a since the introduction of governmental censorship in the 1960s. During the dictatorship in the 1960s and 1970s, the government viewed t'arot'u as a cultural vestige of the Japanese colony that needed to be erased. As seen in a number of cultural theses