ABSTRACT
Arguably, the word that best sums up twentieth-century music is “recording.” Despite its seemingly terminal decline, it has not been long since “recording” was the dominant musical mediator. It is said that the spread of electric recording and playback technology during the twentieth century is responsible for several profound changes in music that we now take for granted, the transformation of music into a mass product (Wall 2003, 41); the emergence of new sounds, aesthetics, and styles such as rock, house music, and hip-hop (Frith 1986; Harley 1993; Zak 2001); and the production of new ways to listen to and consume music (Dibben 2003, 201). However, to some extent this statement only applies to certain wealthy countries in which the practices of collecting records and listening to music at home were fully established everyday practices. “Recording” had different uses and impacts in other parts of the world in which the record markets were not as well-developed and record-buying less common. Focusing on pop records, this chapter will attempt to chart how “recording,” as a socio-technical object, was produced via mediation and translation in the peripheral context of twentieth-century Korea; examine how it differs from the ideal-typical “recording” in the dominant discourse of popular music; and how this object ordered the assemblage of Korean pop music in a particular way.
