挖唱片應該是很多音樂愛好者最喜歡樂趣，韓籍美裔製作人
the seOUL avengeR帶來了他的韓國挖寶紀實，如果你有去韓國，去看看吧。
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Traditional Korean Vinylby Joyce Cho (soon to be a Chung muhahahah )
What I learned from this trip to Seoul and buying vintage records: you need a functional command of the language, and you'd better be a Korean national or be in good with someone who is, otherwise you're stuck buying from high-priced brokers at the few remaining stores in Seoul.
Bootlegging is a Korean tradition that goes way back and it's not enough to go by the cover art; you have to be careful and read the track listings as a lot of albums look similar or the same. And naturally almost everything is in hangul.
With the recent decision to allow non-Latin alphabets be used for website addresses, it could become even more difficult for outsiders to access these works of art. Someone made a good comparison somewhere of this being a sort of modern-day reiteration of the Hermit Kingdom thang.
The first store I went to was promising; we'd been communicating via email over a few months and had told the owner that I was going to be in Seoul for a few weeks.
The store was right in the middle of one of Seoul's many underground shopping arcades. Upon meeting the owner/manager, I could see a game of "go" on his computer screen. "Oh yeah, I got your email but I've been really busy and haven't had a chance to respond," he said as he IMed his friends and moved his chess pieces on the screen. "But here are the prices for some of these records. Most of them won't be easy to find."
I came back a few days later and combed through their small kayo section. Most of the records were quite old and more in the Japanese or ballad styles. There was nothing under $100.
But I spotted another, tiny record shop displaying some Kim Jungmi albums. It was closed, but I figured I'd try to call the owner. He said he was on his way and would be there in 30 minutes.
This guy was really nice, knowledgeable, and his store was very neat and well organized (this isn't a pic of his store btw). Over the course of about 30-45 minutes he gave me a brief history of Korean vinyl that went something like this:
Re: rarity of recordsIn postwar Korea through the 1980s the quality of life here was very poor. People didn't have the money to own their own turntables at home so they would go to the dabang (tea house) or coffee shops and listen to records there. Well naturally these records would get played over and over and wound up getting damaged, worn out, and eventually thrown away.
With artists like Shin Jung Hyon who got busted for smoking marijuana the authorities under military dictator Park Chung-hee actually seized as many copies of his albums as they could gather and destroyed them or scratched them to render them unusable. For a while listening to or buying his music was against the law.
Re: prices of the records todayIn the beginning, it was the Japanese. They came here to buy records and Koreans said, "10,000 won [$10] please" and the Japanese bought without hesitation. After awhile it became "100,000 won [$100] please" and they still didn't flinch. And now it's "1 million won please" and the records still sell.
As a result, it's very likely that most of the world's Korean kayo records are in Japan. Koreans had originally thought that it was the guitar parts of these Korean psychadelic rock bands that was what caught Japanese kids' ears, but it turned out it was the DRUMMING.
Now there are people buying these records not just from Japan but New York, Europe, and South America. These record prices are small change for them.
But there's still the element of a group of Koreans who are holding on to their records, expecting the prices of them to continually climb. They have them, but they're not letting them go.
Well to all those ajusshis that tried to hustle me--you gotta be out of your head if you think another Korean is gonna abide by your Waygook prices! The Cheap Gene is within us all!
These are coming back with me to Cali! (Except for the Kim Jungmi, that stuff is damn near impossible to find. And the Psychadelic Xmas. But I will find them one day!)
This couldn't have been done without the help of my cousin and his wife btw thanks Unni and Oppa!
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