Ethan Waddell, PhD’24, who studies intersections between popular music and literature in the twentieth century, draws a line from Korean rock music of the 1960s to the contemporary K-pop scene.

Many scholars “stress how K-pop is discontinuous from other forms of Korean popular music,” arguing that the contemporary genre is not influenced by earlier Korean popular music, says Michael Bourdaghs, Robert S. Ingersoll Professor in East Asian Languages and Civilizations. Waddell’s “work challenges that by showing writers moving back and forth through time.”

Part of the continuity is how people experience the music.

“The history of recording in Korea is quite brief. And for the most part, up until the eighties, the primary mode through which people consumed music was through live performance,” says Waddell. Though these dynamics have shifted, live performance remains a crucial part of Korean music culture.

Rock rose to prominence in Korea in the mid-twentieth century through live performance. “Nearly all of the first generation of rock musicians got their chops at American military base shows.” The pay could be significantly higher than what a musician could make performing in other venues, but “there was this whole system of auditions.… There were rankings. You had to pass these tests every month to ensure that you were staying on top of the current popular music canon.”

Today the fandom surrounding K-pop artists similarly depends on live performance, says Waddell, offering the coordinated chants you’re likely to hear at a BTS concert as an example of the “participatory culture” that characterized music reception then and now.

Another parallel Waddell identifies has echoes in literary history. Scholars have argued that Korean writers during the Japanese colonial period used translation to develop their own styles. “And that practice holds true as well in the music industry,” he says.

Rock musicians “were taking the songbooks that they received for American military base shows and then rerecording those songs with Korean lyrics,” Waddell explains. “It’s through these adaptations, at least in the early days of rock, that musicians really got their bearings in the genre.” Waddell sees similarities in how K-pop artists have interacted with American hip-hop in recent years—for example, in BTS’s “School of Tears,” an adaptation of Kendrick Lamar’s “Swimming Pools (Drank).” “I don’t think pop music of the past is any less globally influenced than the present K-pop. It’s just a different set of influences,” he says.

In literature, too, hip-hop references have taken on a more prominent role, particularly as a vehicle for social criticism, “whether it be through lyrics or through the literary transposition of songs into fictional narratives,” Waddell says. The role this genre plays in contemporary literature adds a new layer to his project on intersections between Korean music and literature.