Brother Is a Street Musician

Long before K-pop filled stadiums, Korea's popular music was taking shape under Japanese colonial rule in the first half of the twentieth century. Zhang Eujeong, a scholar of Korean popular music and a musician herself, goes back to that first chapter, working from the archives to examine the earliest popular songs, the new recording industry, the first generation of modern musicians and composers, and the emergence of a mass audience of listeners and buyers.

Running through it all is one sharp question: how did a colonised people build a popular culture that was distinctly their own? Now translated into English by Seulbin Han, this is serious, rewarding scholarship for anyone curious about where Korea's global sound came from, and for students of music, colonial history and cultural studies who like their pop with deep roots.