Thursday, December 26, 2019

Rock and folk songs in the Korean top 10, 1974-1975

One of the features of the 1960s and 1970s weekly magazines I’ve been going through is the weekly top 10 music chart, and I realized a while ago that I had full set of charts from 1969-76 (mostly from the Weekly Hankook). Here's an example of one from Sunday Seoul magazine, dated February 9, 1975 (with Shin Joong-hyun's song 미인 topping the chart):



I decided to chart the rise and fall of rock and folk music during that time as well as make playlists of these songs in the top 10 from 1974-75, at the height of ‘70s youth culture in Korea. Here they are, broken up into 6-month increments.

Early 1974 rock, pop, and folk songs in the Korean Top 10:



Late 1974 rock, pop, and folk songs in the Korean Top 10:



Early 1975 rock, pop, and folk songs in the Korean Top 10:



Late 1975 rock, pop, and folk songs in the Korean Top 10:
(Note the move into synth-pop; Korea was rather ahead of the curve in that regard.)




1 comment:

Sam Nordberg said...

I was thinking they were really off about matching titles with artists there in that chart until I saw that last line.