Product details
- ISBN 9781978844964
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 156 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 11 Aug 2026
- Publisher: Rutgers University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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The history of the Korean popular music industry dates back a century before the beginnings of K-Pop, to when the Korean peninsula was still under Japanese rule. Though Koreans didn't have an independent country, they were still able to use recorded music to assert a distinct cultural identity.
Brother Is a Street Musician chronicles the development of Korean popular music over the first half of the twentieth century, examining both industry trends and talented composers and performers like Nam Insu and Yi Nanyǒng. Drawing from rare archives of gramophone records and lyric books, musicologist Zhang Eujeong shows how Korean musicians drew from folk traditions to create totally new genres, ranging from comic songs to Western-influenced jazz records. She also includes English translations and detailed analyses of lyrics from some of the era's most popular songs.
A landmark study of Korean music, now available in English for the first time, Brother Is a Street Musician tells the inspiring story of how a colonized people developed their own form of popular music, planting the seeds for an industry that would grow to export Korean culture around the world.
Zhang Eujeong is a professor of liberal arts at Dankook University, South Korea. She has published thirty books and over ninety essays on Korean popular music, popular culture, and oral tradition, including Brother Is a Street Musician (originally published in South Korea in 2006), Tearooms and Cafés, the Sanctuaries of the Modern Boys, and Introduction to K-Pop History.
Seulbin Han is a journalist, editor, and translator for the U.S.-based K-Pop media outlet allkpop by 6Theory Media. Brother Is a Street Musician is her first full length translation. She is based in Durham, North Carolina, USA.
Pil Ho Kim is an associate professor of Korean at The Ohio State University. He is the author of Polarizing Dreams: Gangnam and Popular Culture in Globalizing Korea.
