earticle

영어

The form of modern Korean popular music, represented by K-pop, was greatly influenced by American popular music. The place where American popular music was spread directly and in earnest for the first time in Korea, and where the search for Korean transformation took place, was around the U.S. military camptown. This paper is to anthropologically reconstruct the process of introduction and change of popular music in the vicinity of U.S. camptown. I believe that the characteristic of modern popular music is the change in cultural sense of sound. Therefore, it examines how Korean musicians have accepted and changed American popular music, especially music using electric instruments. It also reveals that human, physical, and technical relationships surrounding popular musical practice are working, not the achievements of individuals who are musicians. For this purpose, the oral life history of musicians, club officials, and residents who were active at the U.S. camptown in Dongducheon, Gyeonggi-do in the 1960s and 1970s were collected, and the technical and cultural characteristics of electric instruments and the history of at the time were comprehensively considered and analyzed. In here, the border area of the U.S. military camptown was revealed as a space that is neither here nor there. The U.S. camptown was hierarchically a prior space to transmit American popular culture to Korea, and at the same time, it was an inferior space where people who were more familiar with American popular culture had to be brought from Seoul for U.S. military entertainment. Therefore, the Koreanization of American popular music is a process of social, cultural, historical, and spatial interaction and a point that a reflective perspective to critically understand the aspects of cultural clashes and borders is required.