Reinventing Tradition: T’urot’u and "Highway Star"

I found this week's readings and audio samplings to be fascinating, and each piece was very much connected. A main theme running through all of the essays and music is the idea of "reinvented tradition" that is so prevalent to all of the texts in our class. T’urot’u, for example, is a music style that has been reinvented with each generation since its formation in the 1920s. Whether infused by the sounds of Japanese popular music or American rock, t’urot’u has been reinvented many times, and has been able to maintain some form of popularity in Korea. In "Regulating and Negotiating in t'urot'u, a Korean Popular Song Style," Ming-Jung Son writes, "t’urot’u has had different meanings and different sounds throughout history, and these have been negotiated within the relationships existing between the music, politics, and the public consciousness" (73).
I found the trend of t'urot’u bus performances during highway tours to be particularly interesting. Not only did this phenomenon reinvent and repopularize t’urot’u, but it also connected turot’u with pride and appreciation for the Korean landscape, which was once war torn and inaccessible for Koreans to see. By developing this association between t’urot’u with Korean landscape, t’urot’u became clearly established as a uniquely Korean art form, despite the outside influences that played a role in shaping this musical style.

The idea of performers singing t’urot’u and dancing up and down bus isles perplexed me, and I really wanted to see what this looked like. Unfortunately, I was unable to find any videos of this on the Internet, but I did come across a trailer that I find very interesting! Thus trailer is advertising a Korean film from 2007 titled "Highway Star." Here is the description I found of the film on global.yesasia.com:

Stuck in a small town, aspiring rocker Dal Ho (Cha Tae Hyun) makes a living reluctantly playing trot at local clubs. When small-time recording company head Jang (Lim Chae Moo) offers Dal Ho a contract, he eagerly grabs the opportunity, believing that his time has finally come. After he signs, however, Dal Ho discovers that he won't be rocking after all. Instead, he will be singing trot. Unable to back out of his contract, Dal Ho takes to the stage behind a mask to hide his embarrassment, and ends up an overnight sensation. The wannabe rocker seems to have found his true calling, but doing music he dislikes. With the help of Jang and a certain cute trot singer (Lee So Yeon), maybe he'll actually learn the passion of trot.

This film description provided me with information that I did not get from Ming-Jon Sun's essay. Although I realized from her reading that t’urot’u is associated with an older generation, I did not get the sense that this music is stigmatized as being "dorky," maybe in the same way that Americans of our generation find disco (no offense to disco lovers) ?

The trailer to this film can be found at this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oniAAqMVTVM. Although it is Korean without English subtitles, something major comes across- the background music is OPERA! It is Bizet’s Carmen. This is an example of opera being used in popular culture, and being taken out of the realm of being solely for the upper class. But why use this song in a Korean film trailer? Both opera and t’urot’u are cultural traditions that have been around for generations. Could it be that the filmmakers are suggesting that like opera, t’urot’u is associated with an older, (stuffier, stricter?) generation, but is possibly making a comeback? "Highway Star" is another example of t’urot’u being reinvented- now in the media of popular film. An entirely new generation will experience t’urot’u through this film. Similarly, the use of opera music in the trailer reinvents opera. It is not an art that is reserved for rich, white Americans, as it once was, but is now being exposed to Korean middle-class audiences.