VOL.69/2024.04

Singer-Songwriter’s Pick

2023.04.03

First and foremost, I chose one book about Korean pop music. There are more foreign readers that know about K-Pop than me these days. So, I chose the story of a master that is like the starting point of K-Pop history. And another book I chose is an interesting non-fiction book about key incidents in modern Korean history. One of my foreign friends that used to be greatly interested in the Gwangju Uprising motivated me to pick the book.

The first book I would like to introduce is Shin Jung-Hyeon’s My Guitar Never Sleeps (Haeto). Shin Jung-Hyeon is a rock musician and producer that led Korean pop music in the 1960s and 70s. His sons – Shin Dae-Cheol, Shin Yoon-Cheol, and Shin Seok-Cheol – also became legendary musicians in Korea. But, I realized that there were many things that I was neglectful of as I only used to listen to his music.
It was right after the end of the Korean War when he first began music. It wasn’t a period where it was easy to buy an album or get a music score like these days. How a great rock musician was born in the barren land of music, where he even had to make a guitar himself, is unbelievable in itself. Shin Jung-Hyeon experienced and learned every single thing in the music world and laid out the foundation for Korean pop music. Another surprising thing is how modern Korean history influenced him. It was astonishing to know that even until the 1990s, when I was so into his tribute albums, it wasn’t a favorable environment for this master rock musician to make music.
This candidly-written memoir is a story about a genius blooming in a barren land and overcoming struggles and hardships. Also, it explains the origin of K-Pop, going through how pop music from the Western world came to Korea and was reborn in an entirely different style.

The next book I want to introduce is A Hotelier’s Song in May (Red Salt Books) by Hong Sung-Pyo and Ahn Gil-Jung. Stories about Gwangju Uprising, a tragic incident in modern Korean history, always make me depressed, and they can only be read solemnly. This book caught my attention as the word “hotelier” was oddly mixed in the title.
This little book is non-fiction based on the journal left by a staff member working at a hotel nearby Geumnam-ro, Gwangju, the site of the tragedy. He was a primary witness to the tragic moments that took place for a week, starting from the time when he was trapped in a building under emergency to the time when he was eventually discovered by martial law troops. He helps injured protesters in the hotel and sometimes makes dangerous trips outdoors. The journal used to be kept for daily duties. But, ironically, the journal is a vivid, detailed memory of how things were back then. So, overall, the book includes episodes about men in power that only hotel staff could know, the troubled social atmosphere discussed between the guests and eyewitness accounts with even rough maps.
The spirit that the people showed during the Gwangju Uprising has gone beyond Korea and made bonds with other countries. Therefore, I would like to introduce this small but intriguing book as an introduction to the democratic uprising that happened in Gwangju.

Written by Kim Mok-In (Singer-Songwriter)