Korea's Most-Streamed Artist Sings a Genre the Country Banned for Two Decades
In 1935 a Korean record company slipped an anti-Japanese line past the colonial censors by submitting it as nonsense that sounded identical when sung. Thirty years later the Korean state banned the same genre for sounding Japanese — using a broadcasters' agreement, a ministry policy measure and three committees, but never once a law. The genre is called trot, and English writing about Korean music has essentially never mentioned it.
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