The Rock Star Who Kept Going Broke for Korean Music
Kim Soo-chul made money with rock, spent it on gugak, lost it, wrote another hit — and did it all over again
There is a surprisingly reliable way to finance an unprofitable artistic obsession.
Become a pop star.
Make some hits.
Earn money.
Pour the money into music almost nobody wants to buy.
Go broke.
Make another hit.
Pay off the debt.
Then pour the money into the same unprofitable music again.
Repeat for forty years.
That, in an absurdly simplified form, is the career of Kim Soo-chul, one of the most unusual musicians modern Korea has produced.
Before explaining any of it, listen.
It is unmistakably an electric guitar.
Steel strings.
Pickups.
Amplification.
The physical technology of rock.
But listen to what happens after he strikes a note.
He does not always treat the note as a destination.
He pushes into it.
Bends through it.
Shakes it.
Lets it fall.
Hovers between pitches before finally arriving somewhere else.
Technically, his fingers are using familiar guitar techniques: bends, vibrato, slides.
But after a while, the musical grammar begins to sound less like blues or rock.
**The fingers are speaking electric guitar.
The sentences are becoming Korean.**
That is where Kim Soo-chul’s strange life project begins.
First: What Exactly Is Sanjo?
To understand why the guitar sounds strange, you need one piece of Korean musical vocabulary.
Sanjo (산조) is a Korean instrumental form traditionally performed by a solo melodic instrument with percussion accompaniment.
It usually begins slowly and gradually accelerates through different rhythmic cycles, giving the performer room to shape melody, tension and improvisatory variation.
And despite the aura of ancient tradition surrounding it today, sanjo is not some untouched thousand-year-old fossil.
The form we recognize today developed around the late 19th century, first prominently through gayageum players such as Kim Chang-jo and Han Suk-gu, before spreading to instruments including geomungo, daegeum, haegeum and ajaeng.
That actually makes the Kim Soo-chul story more interesting.
Sanjo itself was already a tradition of adaptation.
One musician shaped a version.
Another developed a school.
Different instruments absorbed the form.
So about a century later, someone eventually asked the dangerous question:
Why not electric guitar?
That someone was Kim Soo-chul.
The Other Word You Need: Sigimsae
There is another Korean musical concept that matters here.
Sigimsae (시김새) is often translated as “ornamentation.”
That translation is useful.
It is also inadequate.
In much Korean traditional music, the way a performer approaches, bends, shakes, raises or releases a note can be almost as important as the pitch itself.
The National Gugak Center describes gayageum sanjo as using the left hand to shake strings strongly, let notes fall and push pitches upward, giving the music much of its characteristic vitality.
So when Kim bends an electric-guitar string, the physical technique may be familiar to any rock guitarist.
But what matters is what the bend is doing inside the musical sentence.
A blues bend and a sanjo-like inflection may use similar fingers.
They do not necessarily speak the same language.
That is why saying,
“This is just rock guitar with Korean instruments behind it,”
misses the point.
At his most interesting, Kim is doing something harder.
He is trying to make the electric guitar learn Korean grammar.
Which Would Already Be Strange — Except He Was a Pop Star
Here is the detail that changes the whole story.
Kim Soo-chul did not retreat into traditional music because his commercial career had failed.
He went there when he already knew how to succeed.
His 1983 song “A Flower That Could Not Bloom” (못다 핀 꽃 한 송이) spent five consecutive weeks at No. 1 on KBS’s influential Gayo Top 10. Songs including “Young You” (젊은 그대) and “Why Don’t You Know?” (왜 모르시나) followed, making him one of Korea’s major male pop stars of the 1980s.
So this was not:
failed rocker discovers tradition.
It was closer to:
successful rocker discovers an extremely efficient way to stop being rich.
That distinction matters.
He already possessed a skill the market would pay for.
He could write popular songs.
He could perform on television.
He could make records people bought.
And then he kept directing the money somewhere else.
Into gugak.
Gugak Is Not Simply “Korean Folk Music”
For non-Korean readers, gugak (국악) is often translated as “traditional Korean music” or even “Korean folk music.”
The first is useful.
The second can be misleading.
Gugak is an umbrella covering a much broader musical world: court traditions, folk forms, ritual music, instrumental traditions, vocal genres and more.
Kim Soo-chul was not simply putting a folk melody over a rock beat.
He became obsessed with the much harder question of how Korean musical grammar could survive inside modern instruments, recording technology and contemporary performance formats.
And the obsession started early.
By 1980 he was already seriously studying Korean traditional music, years before his most famous solo pop successes. His later career would include more than 25 albums devoted to modernizing or reworking Korean traditional musical ideas.
Then he tried to sell one.
That went badly.
Very badly.
His First Gugak Album Sold Exactly 575 Copies
Not 575,000.
575.
Kim recalled that after about seven years of serious study, his first full gugak album sold exactly 575 copies.
The record company called him.
The remaining LPs were going to be destroyed and recycled.
The sales did not even cover basic production economics, and because Kim had financed the project himself, the financial damage landed directly on him. EBS recorded his recollection of that exact figure in a 2007 interview.
Contemporary reports put the resulting debt at close to 100 million won, an enormous amount in late-1980s Korea.
Imagine the clarity of that market signal.
You spend years learning.
You finance an album yourself.
You release it.
The public responds:
575.
The record company responds:
We would like the vinyl back so we can melt it into something people might actually buy.
A rational person learns from this.
Kim Soo-chul also learned from it.
Just not the lesson most people would have learned.
He Did Not Blame the Audience
This is one of the details that keeps the story from becoming a cheap “misunderstood genius” legend.
Kim later said that he did not resent the public for ignoring the album.
His reasoning was more uncomfortable:
if people did not accept the work, perhaps something in the work itself was still lacking.
That changes the tone completely.
He was not standing outside the market yelling:
“You fools will understand me someday!”
He seems to have thought:
Fine. I am not there yet. Back to work.
Unfortunately, going back to work costs money.
And he had just lost his.
So he returned to the thing he knew how to do.
Pop music.
He Needed Money for Gugak. So He Made “Wake Up.”
After the financial failure of his gugak projects, Kim made the 1989 One Man Band project.
The title was fairly literal.
He constructed tracks by playing instruments himself, recording parts one after another in a laborious pre-digital process.
Out of that period came one of his most recognizable hits:
“Wake Up” (정신차려).
Kim later recalled that the hit allowed him to pay off the debt created by the unsuccessful traditional-music record.
Then, remarkably, he went back to making traditional music again.
This establishes the operating system of his career:
**Make commercial music.
Earn money.
Spend it on Korean music.
Lose money.
Make commercial music again.
Repeat.**
As a financial strategy, it is difficult to recommend.
As a cultural strategy, things get more interesting.
Even the Dance for “Wake Up” Was Basically an Accident
The funny thing about turning Kim into a tragic cultural martyr is that Kim Soo-chul does not cooperate very well with the image.
His stage persona was playful, kinetic and often ridiculous in the best possible way.
The now-famous movements associated with “Wake Up” were not originally some meticulously choreographed comeback.
In later interviews, Kim explained that a television producer told him he needed to move more onstage.
He had not prepared choreography.
So he moved around.
He improvised motions that resembled school calisthenics.
Audiences apparently interpreted this as a dance.
Then a new problem appeared.
For the next television appearance, he could not remember exactly what he had done.
So he obtained footage of the previous broadcast and studied himself in order to learn his own accidental choreography.
This is not the behavior of a solemn guardian of national heritage.
It is much better.
It is the behavior of a very serious musician who does not seem to require himself to look serious all the time.
Then He Started Teaching the Electric Guitar to Play Sanjo
Kim traces his first public experiments with what became guitar sanjo to music connected with the 1986 Seoul Asian Games.
By 1987, the name “guitar sanjo” had begun to appear around his work, and he continued developing the idea for years before releasing a dedicated guitar-sanjo album in 2002. His broader national-event work later included the 1988 Seoul Olympics and music for the 2002 Korea-Japan World Cup.
That timeline matters.
This was not:
“Hey, what if I put some Korean percussion under my guitar solo?”
It was a project he kept revisiting for roughly a decade and a half before committing a major version to record.
Listen again.
▶ Kim Soo-chul — Guitar Sanjo, KBS
The challenge is not making a guitar sound vaguely Asian.
That would be relatively easy.
Use a scale.
Add a gong.
Put a traditional instrument in the background.
Done.
The harder problem is this:
Can an instrument designed inside one musical history behave as though it grew up inside another?
Put Kim Soo-chul Next to Kim Duk-soo and the Idea Becomes Obvious
Now listen to this one.
Kim Duk-soo is one of the central figures in modern Korean percussion performance, associated above all with samulnori.
Put his rhythmic force next to Kim Soo-chul’s electric guitar and something interesting happens.
The guitar does not simply sit on top of Korean percussion like a visiting foreign celebrity.
It starts negotiating.
Waiting.
Pulling.
Rushing.
Holding back.
Entering and leaving space according to a rhythmic logic that does not feel like a standard Western rock bar with “traditional flavor” added afterward.
The easy version of fusion asks:
How do we put a Korean instrument into modern music?
The more interesting version asks:
What if modern music has to change its behavior first?
In Kim’s best work, the electric guitar is the immigrant.
It has to learn the local language.
A Correction That Actually Makes His Achievement More Interesting
There is a tempting legend around musicians like Kim:
that he simply learned every Korean instrument himself and recorded everything alone.
It makes a good heroic story.
It is not the most accurate one.
Credits for his guitar-sanjo recordings include specialist traditional musicians — for example, gayageum player Baek In-young appears alongside Kim’s guitar on “Gayageum and Guitar Sanjo.” His large-scale works similarly involved professional performers on instruments such as piri, daegeum, gayageum and Korean percussion.
His achievement was not becoming a one-man replacement for every traditional musician.
It was more sophisticated.
He learned enough of their musical language to compose across the boundary.
A translator does not become every person in the room.
A translator has to understand what the people in the room are actually saying.
Then New York Humiliated Him
One of the most useful events in Kim’s career happened when he was already successful.
He went to New York.
According to his account to EBS, he had recently reached the peak of Korean pop success, with major awards and lucrative opportunities waiting at home.
Then he heard musicians performing on New York streets and in clubs.
And was devastated.
He had been regarded as an exceptional guitarist in Korea.
Suddenly he was hearing unknown street and club musicians whose technical level shocked him.
Kim later described it as one of the events that changed his life.
This is why comparing him lazily to Jimi Hendrix is not particularly useful.
Kim himself listened to Hendrix, Jeff Beck, David Gilmour, Ritchie Blackmore and other major Western guitarists.
But ranking them like Olympic athletes misses the interesting part.
The interesting question is not:
Was Kim Soo-chul Korea’s Jimi Hendrix?
It is:
Why did a guitarist with enough commercial skill to remain a rock star spend decades trying to make an electric guitar understand sanjo?
The direction is more interesting than the ranking.
And Then the Korean State Suddenly Needed Exactly That Kind of Music
Now the story intersects with Korean history.
In the 1980s, South Korea was preparing to present itself to the world through two enormous international events:
the 1986 Asian Games and the 1988 Seoul Olympics.
A modernizing country faced an obvious cultural problem.
If you use ordinary Western orchestral music, you sound international.
But not particularly Korean.
If you simply place preserved traditional music unchanged into a giant modern stadium spectacle, that creates a different set of problems.
You need something in between.
Modern enough to function as contemporary mass spectacle.
Korean enough to be recognizable as more than imported Western culture.
Kim Soo-chul had spent years working inside precisely that uncomfortable middle space.
He composed music for the 1986 Asian Games festivities and the 1988 Seoul Olympics, and later worked on music for the 2002 World Cup draw and opening ceremony.
This is where the economics becomes fascinating.
The Korean state did not invent his laboratory.
It eventually found a use for something he had already spent his own money developing.
And unlike the original draft of this story, it would be inaccurate to say the state used him once and forgot him.
It returned repeatedly.
Asian Games.
Olympics.
Expo-related work.
World Cup.
The more interesting pattern is not abandonment.
It is that private experimentation came first, institutional demand later.
Call It Cultural R&D
There is no government accounting category called:
Kim Soo-chul Korean Musical Modernization Research Program.
So “R&D” here is an interpretation.
But structurally, the comparison fits remarkably well.
Research and development asks questions before the market knows whether it wants the answers.
Can this combination work?
Can this technology survive another environment?
What breaks when you scale it?
What do you preserve?
What do you throw away?
Kim’s questions were musical.
Can the melodic behavior of Korean traditional music survive electric guitar?
Can gugak rhythm coexist with contemporary recording?
Can traditional phrasing work inside a stadium?
Can Korean instruments and Western orchestra share a stage without one becoming decorative wallpaper?
How long can a sanjo-derived piece remain before a modern audience loses attention?
Those are design questions.
Repeated experiments generate answers.
That is R&D.
And R&D has several unpleasant characteristics.
It is expensive.
Much of it fails.
The person performing the early experiments often cannot capture all the value later created by them.
Which brings us back to:
575 copies.
Failure is not always the opposite of research.
Sometimes failure is the data.
Then, After Years of Failure, Sopyonje Happened
In 1993, director Im Kwon-taek released Sopyonje, a landmark Korean film centered on pansori and traditional artistic life.
Kim Soo-chul composed its music.
And suddenly the musical research that had spent years failing commercially met a mass audience.
EBS reported that the Sopyonje soundtrack sold around 700,000 copies; Kim later recalled its lifetime sales as exceeding one million. The difference likely reflects counting at different points in time, but either number puts it in a completely different universe from the 575-copy disaster.
Kim himself has described Sopyonje as the first traditional-music project through which he actually made substantial money.
The contrast is almost too neat.
First serious gugak album:
575.
Sopyonje:
hundreds of thousands, eventually reportedly more than a million.
But here is the detail I like even more.
One of His Most Famous Sopyonje Pieces Took 30 Minutes — After About 13 Years
The daegeum piece “Cheonnyeonhak” became one of the best-known pieces associated with the film.
According to Kim’s recollection, he had struggled for months over the music.
Then, the day before he had promised director Im Kwon-taek he would deliver it, the piece finally came together in roughly 30 minutes.
This sounds like the classic genius story:
Masterpiece written in 30 minutes!
Not really.
Thirty minutes came after years of work.
Years of failed records.
Years of studying Korean music.
Years of experimenting with orchestration and instruments.
Years of discovering what did not work.
So both statements can be true:
The piece took thirty minutes to write.
and
The piece took more than a decade to become possible.
People like the first version because it makes genius look magical.
The second is more useful.
And Then He Took the Money From Success and Lost It Again
Surely now he had learned how the game worked.
Make accessible Korean traditional music.
Sell huge numbers.
Enjoy the success.
No.
After Sopyonje, Kim expanded the scale of his experimentation again.
For Im Kwon-taek’s film Taebaek Mountains, he worked with more than 100 performers and pursued a more ambitious musical project.
Kim later recalled that he reinvested money earned from Sopyonje into the work.
The film and soundtrack failed commercially.
Again.
At this point the pattern is almost comic.
Success does not produce stability.
Success increases the budget of the next experiment.
Many people use artistic success to buy a building.
Kim eventually joked that he did not own much in the way of real estate because when he earned money he bought equipment and studied instead.
But, he said, he had built plenty of “music buildings.”
It may be the cleanest description of his personal balance sheet.
Money disappears.
Music remains.
The Tripitaka Koreana Made Him Quit Drinking and Smoking
Then came another project no sensible accountant would have designed.
The Tripitaka Koreana — the monumental collection of Buddhist scriptures carved into more than 80,000 woodblocks and preserved at Haeinsa Temple — became the subject of a major Kim Soo-chul composition project in the 1990s.
He stayed around Haeinsa, recorded environmental sounds and worked on translating the atmosphere and historical weight of the woodblocks into music.
During the process, he gave up alcohol and cigarettes.
Kim explained at the time that he wanted to approach the work with an appropriately disciplined state of mind.
Again, his career resists easy categories.
Pop star.
Rock guitarist.
Film composer.
Traditional-music obsessive.
National-event composer.
And now:
a man wandering around a Buddhist temple recording sounds because 80,000 ancient printing blocks needed a soundtrack.
At some point “eclectic” stops being useful.
He Did Not Even Like Treating Gugak as a Dead Museum Category
This helps explain something fundamental about Kim’s project.
He was not simply trying to “preserve tradition.”
Preservation matters.
But preservation was not enough for him.
His goal was to make Korean musical language behave like a living contemporary language rather than a cultural artifact placed behind glass.
That distinction matters enormously.
A preserved language can be admired.
A living language can make jokes, write new novels, absorb slang, argue online and invent words that did not exist yesterday.
Kim wanted something closer to the second condition for Korean music.
Electric guitar was therefore not a betrayal of tradition.
It was a test:
Can the grammar survive when the instrument changes?
If yes, the tradition is not dead.
It can travel.
Guitar Sanjo Eventually Traveled Too
Kim continued developing guitar sanjo and performed it internationally, including at a United Nations-related event in Bonn in 2002.
KBS later revisited that part of his career in a documentary segment.
There is something elegant about the strategy.
If you want to introduce Korean music abroad, one option is to bring an unfamiliar Korean instrument and explain everything from zero.
Kim sometimes did something different.
He used an instrument international audiences already understood:
the electric guitar.
Then changed the grammar.
The vocabulary looked familiar.
The syntax did not.
That is translation at a deeper level than simply replacing one instrument with another.
And Then in 2023, at Age 66, He Did It Again
This is the detail that prevents the whole story from becoming charming 1980s mythology.
In 2023, Kim prepared a 45th-anniversary concert at Seoul’s Sejong Center.
The central idea was enormous:
a 100-member orchestra combining Korean and Western instruments, bringing together decades of his experiments.
He had reportedly wanted to stage something like it for around fifteen years.
The problem was familiar.
He could not secure enough corporate sponsorship.
So he used the solution he had been using since the 1980s.
His own money.
The production cost approached 1 billion won, and Kim covered most of it personally. Paid seats sold out, while a daytime performance included large numbers of invited firefighters, police officers, sanitation workers and others — and Kim still described the production as financially loss-making.
He was 66.
The first failed gugak record had appeared in 1987.
Thirty-six years had passed.
The financing model had barely improved.
The music had.
Why?
Asked why he continued pouring money into music that did not reliably make money, Kim’s answer was essentially:
someone like me has to exist.
He also made clear that he did it because he liked it and because he believed Korea needed living, modernized cultural forms of its own.
This is where I would resist turning the story into tragedy.
Korean cultural writing has a bad habit of dragging han (한) into every difficult life.
Suffering.
Suppression.
Unresolved grief.
The noble artist carrying centuries of sadness.
Kim does not fit comfortably inside that frame.
Watch him.
He jokes.
He jumps around.
He wears hats.
He plays loud electric guitar.
He accidentally invents dance routines.
Even when discussing decades of financially irrational decisions, he often sounds less like a martyr than someone who is still fascinated by his experiment.
In 2007, after decades of work and repeated failures, he described himself simply as happy because he had spent his life doing what he wanted to do.
That does not erase the financial cost.
It makes the story more interesting.
**He was not trapped.
He chose the trap and kept renovating it.**
Which Is Why “Little Giant” Becomes Such a Good Name
Kim has long been known in Korea as “Little Giant” — Jageun Geoin (작은 거인).
The name originally came from the rock band Little Giant, which he formed in the late 1970s.
Over time, the phrase became attached to Kim himself.
Small frame.
Enormous musical range.
Cute enough.
But after looking at his financial history, the nickname begins to sound different.
A society often becomes very generous with adjectives after someone has already paid the bill.
Master.
Pioneer.
Legend.
Giant.
These are beautiful words.
They are also extremely cheap.
Calling somebody a giant does not reimburse the failed records.
It does not finance fifteen years of experimentation.
It does not pay for rehearsals.
It does not cover a 100-piece orchestra.
So “giant” can sometimes sound less like an award and more like:
a way of settling an unpaid invoice with an adjective.
This Is Not Just a Story About One Korean Musician
Now step back.
Every culture that successfully travels outside itself needs translation infrastructure.
Not literal translators.
Cultural translators.
People who answer questions nobody has properly funded yet.
How much can a tradition change and still remain itself?
What survives when the instrument changes?
What disappears when the format becomes shorter?
Can something designed for a small room survive a stadium?
Can local rhythm survive global pop production?
Can an outsider understand it without removing everything that made it local?
Those questions require experiments.
Most experiments fail.
And failure is expensive.
This is why markets are often bad at funding the earliest stage of cultural translation.
The demand does not exist yet.
You cannot calculate a proven audience for something that has not yet become legible to an audience.
A finished bridge can charge tolls.
A person deciding whether a bridge is even possible cannot.
Kim Soo-chul’s Pop Hits Were His Research Grants
Seen this way, his career becomes surprisingly coherent.
“A Flower That Could Not Bloom.”
“Young You.”
“Wake Up.”
Commercial songwriting.
Television.
Film scores.
These generated income.
The income financed experiments.
The first gugak album sold 575 copies.
Debt followed.
“Wake Up” helped erase the debt.
Then he went back.
Sopyonje finally succeeded.
He reinvested.
Another ambitious experiment failed.
He kept going.
He developed guitar sanjo.
He wrote music for the Olympics.
The World Cup.
The Tripitaka Koreana.
Then, in his sixties, he financed a 100-member orchestra because no sponsor had adequately solved the problem for him.
So here is one way to describe his career:
Pop music was Kim Soo-chul’s venture capital fund for Korean traditional music.
Founder:
Kim Soo-chul.
Investor:
Kim Soo-chul.
Chief researcher:
Kim Soo-chul.
Person responsible when the experiment failed:
also Kim Soo-chul.
And when the lab ran out of money?
The sales department went back on television and wrote another song.
It is an objectively terrible corporate structure.
Somehow, it lasted decades.
But No, Kim Soo-chul Did Not Single-Handedly Invent Today’s Global Korean Culture
This is where the romantic version needs brakes.
It would be nonsense to claim that modern K-pop’s comfort with Korean sounds, imagery and traditional references exists because of Kim Soo-chul alone.
Korea had many composers, performers, gugak innovators, samulnori musicians, fusion experiments and cultural institutions working through the same decades.
Modern Korean cultural confidence has thousands of parents.
Kim is not the origin.
A better description is:
prototype.
Proof of concept.
An early demonstration that a Korean traditional musical grammar and contemporary mass-media format could meet without one necessarily destroying the other.
And importantly, he tested that proposition for a very long time.
With a lot of his own money.
Successful Prototypes Have One Terrible Problem
Once something works, it begins to look obvious.
Today it is not shocking to see Korean percussion on a pop stage.
Traditional clothing appears in global music videos.
Korean phrases remain untranslated in international hits.
Traditional visual motifs coexist with synthesizers, hip-hop and electronic production.
Modern Korean culture has become comfortable mixing eras.
That familiarity creates an illusion:
surely it was always this easy.
It was not.
That is why 575 is such a useful number.
575 copies say:
there was a point when this was absolutely not obvious.
There was no guaranteed audience waiting politely for the future to arrive.
Someone had to make the thing while it was still awkward.
Listen Again
▶ Kim Soo-chul — Guitar Sanjo, KBS
▶ Kim Duk-soo × Kim Soo-chul — Guitar Sanjo
The steel string rises.
Bends.
Shakes.
Hangs for a moment.
Then releases.
Technically, it is guitar technique.
Listen long enough and it begins to feel like something else.
A note is no longer just a point.
It is a route.
How you enter it matters.
How you disturb it matters.
How you leave it matters.
Kim Soo-chul spent decades teaching an electric guitar to travel those routes.
Before most people were interested.
Before anyone knew exactly what the market was.
Sometimes before anyone could even explain what the result was supposed to be.
The Balance Sheet Never Really Balanced
The first album sold 575 copies.
It left nearly 100 million won in debt.
He made pop music again.
Paid the debt.
Returned to gugak.
Sopyonje finally made money.
He spent more.
Some projects failed again.
He composed for the Asian Games.
The Seoul Olympics.
The World Cup.
He kept developing guitar sanjo.
He made music around the Tripitaka Koreana.
He released more than two dozen gugak-oriented albums.
And in 2023, after more than four decades of this, he put most of the money into a concert costing close to 1 billion won because he still could not find enough outside sponsorship.
At some point this stops looking like a sequence of bad financial decisions.
It becomes a system.
Some People Have a Day Job That Funds Their Real Job
Kim’s version happened on an unusually large scale.
But the pattern is everywhere.
A programmer maintains an open-source library used by thousands of companies after work.
A linguist spends weekends recording a disappearing dialect.
An archivist digitizes documents nobody is paying to preserve.
A designer keeps publishing an experimental format that will probably never sell enough.
A musician makes commercial work during the day so they can finance impossible music at night.
The common structure is simple:
the work that earns money finances the work that does not.
And twenty years later, society sometimes discovers that the unprofitable work was infrastructure.
Unfortunately, research funding does not travel backward through time.
Recognition does.
So the Next Time Someone Is Called a “Giant,” Ask a Slightly Rude Question
Who paid for the person to become that large?
Sometimes institutions did.
Sometimes patrons did.
Sometimes markets did.
And sometimes the answer is:
they did.
Out of their own income.
Out of debt.
Out of time nobody purchased.
Out of commercial work they were good at but did not consider the final destination.
This is why I like the phrase “Little Giant” more after learning the financial story.
It begins as a band name.
It becomes a compliment.
Then, eventually, it starts looking like a unit of measurement.
Not:
How famous was he?
But:
How much of what he could have kept did he put into something that would outlive the transaction?
Do Not Read This as a Tragedy
That would flatten him.
Kim Soo-chul was not simply a victim of an uncaring society.
He made choices.
Repeatedly.
Sometimes absurd ones.
He failed.
He went back.
He learned.
He made money.
He spent it.
He laughed.
He played.
He kept going.
Decades later, when asked why he still bothered with music that made little commercial sense, the answer was not complicated.
He liked it.
And he believed someone should do it.
That is harder to sentimentalize.
And much more interesting.
One Last Time: Listen to the Bend
Put on the guitar sanjo again.
There will be a moment when the electric guitar stops sounding like a Western instrument decorated with Korean ideas.
The string bends.
Not toward a flashy climax.
Toward another way of thinking about a note.
That bend contains years.
Failed LPs.
Debt.
Pop hits.
National ceremonies.
Film scores.
Traditional musicians.
A trip to New York.
An accidental dance.
A temple.
A World Cup.
A 100-piece orchestra.
And one musician repeatedly deciding:
**I made some money.
Good.
Now I can afford to lose it on music again.**
His books may never have balanced properly.
His catalog did.
That may be why the most useful way to remember Kim Soo-chul is not as a martyr, and not even merely as a “Little Giant.”
Think of him as a musician who turned his own career into a private research institute.
The successful songs paid the electricity bill.
The unpopular records were experiments.
The failures became data.
And the laboratory stayed open for decades.
So tonight, search YouTube for “Kim Soo-chul Guitar Sanjo.”
Then search “Kim Soo-chul Kim Duk-soo.”
Listen until the steel string begins to sound like it remembers wood and silk.
When that moment arrives, do not call it magic.
Someone paid for it.
For a very long time,
that someone was mostly him.
Read next: Cute Face, Vampire Fangs, and a Scream From Hell — the Korean water deer, globally vulnerable and locally everywhere.
More Korea, past the obvious: Culture · Society · Language
