The K-Poppers Crooning To Unseat Yoon In Korea

It is these women who first brought K-pop light sticks to the protest sites and made waving them a wider protest ritual. They also passed around information on social media such as the location of the protest sites and publicly available toilets, as well as lists of useful rally supplies.

And they collaborated with the older official organizers to rework K-pop soundbites, signs and artifacts into the protest grounds.

This was not the first time that K-pop has intersected with civil protest and social movements. Into the New World was already an anthem for students of Ewha Women's University during nationwide demonstrations in 2016 that demanded the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye. And K-pop has also featured in various forms at the Seoul Queer Culture Festival .

K-pop has resonated with political activists outside South Korea, too. K-pop fan communities in the US, which draw many of their members from ethnic and gender minority groups, contributed to the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 through online donation campaigns and hashtag activism .

And in 2021, a coalition of K-pop fans in Chile mobilized an online campaign on X (formerly Twitter) to support the progressive presidential candidate Gabriel Boric, who eventually won the election. Elsewhere, K-pop and its many fandoms have also operated as a safe space for LGBTQ+ communities .

Civil protest has a long history in South Korea, which was under authoritarian rule from its formation in 1948 to the late 1980s.

A democratic movement consolidated in the 1970s as university students and labor union leaders organized meetings and rallies to contest the extraordinary violations of civil liberties that took place that decade. This movement imagined the people, known as minjung in Korean, as being at the center of the state.

Groups of university student activists organized protests and sang politically conscious songs. They drew on a repertoire of songs known as minjung kayo , or“people's songs”. Circulated through unofficial channels during a time of censorship , minjung kayo were sung by university students , accompanied by acoustic guitars.

Minjung kayo melodies are simple. Their lyrics encourage political awakening and affirm the singers' shared dedication to the democratic cause. An example of this genre, Sangnoksu , enables the singers to come together as an aggrieved community determined to change the course of their nation.

The lyrics include:“We do not have much, but we stand together hand in hand, sharing tears. Though our path is long and dark, we will awaken, go forward, and finally overcome.”

Activists continued to sing throughout the 1980s when the tone of the demonstrations became more serious. In 1980, soldiers opened fire on citizens in the city of Gwangju, who were peacefully demonstrating against martial law. At least 165 civilians were killed.

This traumatic event, which could not be covered in the mainstream media at the time due to rigorous state censorship, gave rise to an anthem called March for the Beloved .

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Written in the memory of two of the victims, this somber tune kept the memory of Gwangju alive among the protesters, with lyrics like:“Dear comrades have gone, our flag still waves. While working for days to come, we will not be swayed. We are marching on. Keep faith and follow us.”

March for the Beloved has defined the soundscape of demonstrations in South Korea since the early 1980s.

In addition to minjung kayo, pro-democracy demonstrations in the past – and, to a lesser extent, the present – have sometimes incorporated folk rituals. This has included pungmul , a traditional farmers' percussion where participants play Korean drums and gongs in interactive formations.

More protests will take place in South Korea over the coming months to put pressure on the constitutional court , which has up to 180 days to adjudicate on the impeachment case. The protests will continue to pay tribute to minjung kayo and the past struggles that are associated with it.

But K-pop and its fans are likely to be at the center of a new generation of musical protesters in South Korea.

Hyun Kyong Hannah Chang is lecturer in Korean Studies, University of Sheffield

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .

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