When Korea pioneered synth-pop

An ad that ran in The Korea Times in the 1970s/2020-02-27(코리아타임스)

By Matt VanVolkenburg

One of the hallmarks of 1980s pop music was the sounds of the synthesizer. According to Wikipedia, synth-pop "arose as a distinct genre in Japan and the United Kingdom in the…late 1970s."

While it lists a number of artists throughout the world, particularly those playing art rock or psychedelia, who used synthesizers to make "proto" synth-pop, no mention is made of any Korean musicians, despite the fact that the first hit synth-pop song was arguably made here. This fact has become forgotten trivia, unfortunately, because while Korean music can influence ears worldwide today, the same was not true in the past.

In East Asia during the Cold War, cultural influence vis-a-vis the "free world" tended to run in one direction only. The U.S. military presence in Korea introduced Korean audiences to American music via both AFKN radio and the "Eighth Army stage" where Korean musicians played for U.S. troops.

It took some time for Korean audiences to develop a taste for rock music, and its first rise to popularity in 1969 coincided with the rise of American psychedelic music, which often featured organs prominently. Keyboards became a part of the Korean musical landscape quickly.

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Trot musicians adopted organs as well. In fact, one group of early adopters of electronic organs was musicians who made albums consisting of instrumental versions of popular trot songs. While many of these are justifiably forgotten, some could be quite inventive and even mixed in danceable beats.

If cutting-edge music in the early 1970s was dominated by veterans of the Eighth Army stage who played psychedelic rock and pop music, by late 1973 it became clear that a younger crop of musicians, many of them university students, was starting to take folk music in new directions.

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Musicians like Song Chang-sik and Yun Hyeong-ju (who formed Korea's first folk group, Twin Folio, in 1967), Kim Se-hwan, Kim Jeong-ho and particularly Lee Jang-hee were at the forefront of this change. What most of these singers had in common, however, was a group of session musicians led by guitarist Gang Geun-sik and organist Lee Ho-jun.

Known in retrospect as "Dongbangui Bit" (Light of the East), their music first drew attention with Lee Jang-hee's late 1973 No.1 folk-rock song "It's you." They were then chosen to do the soundtrack for the film adaptation of Choi In-ho's hugely popular 1973 novel "Heavenly Homecoming to Stars." As part of the film's promotion, the soundtrack, described by one magazine as "avant-garde music," was released several weeks before the film's April 1974 premiere.

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The film, a melodrama mixed with moments of inventive editing, music and references to Korea's burgeoning youth culture, became Korea's biggest film ever, shocking even rookie director Lee Jang-ho.

Dongbangui Bit spent the next year and a half recording numerous albums with folk singers, and also released a number of more experimental, synthesizer-heavy instrumental albums. Perhaps their most enduring legacy was the Golden Folk Album series, of which 14 volumes were released. Volume 11 featured the soundtrack to the next film to be made from a Choi In-ho novel, "March of Fools" (1975). If that soundtrack featured perhaps the most emotive guitar work of the year (in the song "Whale Hunting") it was the next volume which featured the title track to a far more family-friendly film, "Girls' High School Graduating Class," that pointed in a new musical direction. Sung by Kim In-sun, this early 1975 pop song featured synthesizers prominently and could be mistaken easily for a new-wave synth-pop song produced in the early 1980s. It was a hit with listeners, and topped the charts in Korea in late 1975 and early 1976.

https://youtu.be/jOUUYphVBAI

What direction Dongbangui Bit might have taken with Korean music will never be known, however. In April 1975, the government declared Emergency Measure 9, banning all dissent, and followed it soon after with song bans, some of which included their music. The final straw came in early 1976, as almost all of the previously mentioned folk singers, most members of Dongbangui Bit, and film director Lee Jang-ho were arrested as part of the government's sudden crackdown on marijuana use. This conveniently allowed the government to marginalize the more independent-minded musicians and establish almost total control over the popular arts.

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