Songs of the Multitude: The April Revolution, the 6.3 Uprising, and South Korea's Protest Music of the 1960s

Abstract:The decade of the 1960s is remembered for worldwide political upheavals, with South Korea's April Revolution of 1960 being one early episode. Protesters of the April Revolution appropriated a variety of songs, including the national anthem, Korean War songs, school songs, and children's songs. But these appropriated protest songs have received scant scholarly attention. Four years later in 1964, college students launched a protest movement known as the 6.3 Uprising to stop the military government's implementation of a deeply unpopular normalization treaty with Japan. The movement added a few original songs to the protest music repertoire, but they have since fallen into obscurity. Protest music scholarship in South Korea has largely overlooked the legacy of the 1960s, favoring more polished musical interventions by the pre-Korean War leftist movement and the People's Song Movement of the 1980s. This paper examines the forgotten protest songs of the 1960s from daily newspaper archives and other sources. Recognizing the multitude who pushed forward the April Revolution, I argue that South Korea's protest songs—"people's songs" or minjung kayo—are best understood as songs of the multitude.