Korean Underground Music This page is provided to introduce modern Korean music and musicians who are often outside the mainstream pop music industry. They may not all fit into the category of "underground" but I feel they are all deserving of extra attention.
The Korean music scene.
The Korean popular music industry, whilst dominated by forgetable dance music aimed at a teenage market has some very creative and noteworthy elements derived from a rich heritage of musical and creative expression.
While the term underground in English brings to mind images of avant-guard acts that may shun wide popular acceptance, in Korea the term is applied to musical acts that do not appear on the regular popular music television shows. The musicians banded together under the Korean label of underground do not necessarily aim at producing music for the arcane tastes of an intellectual clique. It may simply be that they have a sincere commitment to the producing quality music. They may also hold contempt for the popular music industry and prefer to avoid it's dubious values.
For many years live music in bars was banned by paranoid military regimes as a potential source of subversive activity as well as decadent morality. It was probably during this period that the interpretation of underground began as a result of the distinction between sanctioned artists promoted through mass media and those involved with music on a more clandestine basis. As the political climate loosened up and market forces gained greater influence over the media, the nature of the acts operating in the different arenas changed.
Obviously any categorisation applied to human activity will be fairly arbitrary. I am not attempting to define the nature of the artists described but merely using the label of Underground to indicate a general theme or direction for this page. --MichaelGlass
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