K-pop hits become anthems of South Korea’s protests against President Yoon

W hen South Korea’s president, Yoon Suk Yeol, attempted to institute martial law in early December, the public responded with massive protests. These protests have continued across the country. On December 14, for example, an estimated 1 million people gathered outside the National Assembly in the capital, Seoul, as lawmakers convened to vote on the motion to impeach Yoon.

The sight of young people moving to K-pop’s electrifying beat has become part of the drama of this protest movement. Protest organisers are blasting out K-pop hits, and demonstrators are waving K-pop light sticks (portable devices associated with specific artists or groups), turning the protests into multicoloured musical rallies. An article in the Guardian newspaper noted that parts of the protests resembled “a club dancefloor”.

There are many words from K-pop songs that resonate with the sentiment of the protests. For example, a verse from Girls’ Generation’s Into The New World (2007), which has been one of the most popular songs at the protests, promotes purpose and camaraderie, with lyrics like: “Don’t wait for any special miracle. The rough path in front of us might be an unknown future and challenge, but we can’t give up.”

But K-pop fan culture also connects with community spirit and politics. Observers have noted that the most visible demographic group at the impeachment protests is women in their 20s and 30s. Many are K-pop fans and also discontented with Yoon’s anti-feminist stance, as well as the gender-based violence that is widespread across South Korean society.

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 organisers to rework K-pop soundbites, signs and artefacts 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 mobilised 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.

History of protest music

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 labour union leaders organised 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 centre of the state.

Groups of university student activists organised 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. Written in the memory of two of the victims, this sombre 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.”

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 centre of a new generation of musical protesters in South Korea.

Sources:

▪ This piece was originally published in The Conversation and re-published in PUBLIC SQUARE UK on 20 December 2024. | The author writes in a personal capacity.

▪ Cover: Unsplash/Insung Yoon. (Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.)