Shin Jung Hyun & Yup Juns | |
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Origin | Seoul, South Korea |
Genres | Psychedelic rock, Hard rock, Blues rock, Roots rock, Swamp rock, Southern rock, Country rock, Rock, Rock and roll, Rhythm and blues, Funk, Soul |
Years active | 1972–1975 |
Labels | Jigu Records |
Past members |
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Korean name | |
Hangul | 신중현과 들 |
Hanja | 申重鉉과 葉錢들 |
Revised Romanization | Sin Junghyeon-gwa Yeopjeondeul |
McCune–Reischauer | Sin Chunghyŏn'gwa Yŏpjŏndŭl |
Shin Jung Hyun & Yup Juns (신중현과 엽전들) was a South Korean rock band formed by Shin Jung-hyeon (lead guitarist, vocal), Lee Nam-yi (bass), and Kim Ho-sik (drums). "Yup Jun" is an ad hoc romanisation of yeopjeon ("leaf coin"), a kind of old brass coin with a square hole.
The band's album Shin Jung Hyun & Yup Juns Vol. 1, released in 1974, sold more than one million copies. Its most popular song "The Beauty" (미인, Mi-in), was nicknamed "the song of thirty million" (3000만의 노래, referring to South Korea's total population at the time). It was used as background music in the Lee Man-hee film A Girl Who Looks Like the Sun released that year, one of Lee's last before his death in 1975.
The band's next album, Shin Jung Hyun & Yup Juns Vol. 2, was an implicit rebuke to the dictator Park Chung-hee: according to Shin's son Shin Daechul, Park had demanded that Shin make a song praising Park, but instead Shin and his fellow band members wrote the lyrics of the album's song "Beautiful Rivers and Mountains" (아름다운 강산, Areumdaun Gangsan) about the beautiful natural landscapes of Korea. This led to increasing troubles for the band. In particular, "The Beauty" was banned on 9 July 1975, one of 45 songs banned that day by the Park dictatorship under the censorship provisions of the Yusin Constitution, and remained illegal until it was unbanned on 18 August 1987 just after the National Liberation Day celebrations. "The Beauty" was believed to have become a target for censorship not just due to the political troubles of the band itself and because of the dictatorship's general suspicion of youth culture, but because one line of the lyrics was a popular target for parodies among fans, by replacing "see" (, bogo) with other words:
Specifically, one parody replaced bogo with the light verb hago (), which could be interpreted as merely obscene ("I want to do [her] once", etc.), or could be given a political slant by interpreting it as "I want to be [president] once, be [president] twice, keep on being [president]", a reference to the removal of presidential term limits in the earlier constitution which allowed Park to continue into his second decade as president.