About

Love Hurts / Beautiful Doll is the 5th and most prominent record by the He6, the frontrunner band of the 1970s golden age of ‘group sound’ bands in Korea. It features the band’s notable funk/psychedelia track ‘Beautiful Doll (Get Ready)’ which was sampled by DJ Shadow in ‘the Number Song’. Also includes ‘You Don’t Know’, the hit number driven by Choi Heon’s soulful vocals, as well as another must-listen He6 original tune, the perky brass rock number ‘I Can’t Tell’. The definitive reissue of the historical 1972 masterpiece of Korean rock!’

-

Amid the various modes by which pop cultured developed in the various regions of East Asia as they modernized, the path followed by postwar Korea was a very unique one. Due to the outbreak of the Korean War shortly after the peninsula’s liberation from Japan, American pop culture came to hold major sway on Korean pop culture. The conscious/subconscious aspirations and critiques regarding this fact have continually given rise to various layers of subculture in many fields, thus generating an energy that propelled the possibilities of local culture. In particular, the spectacular growth of pop music, which sprang from the peculiar background that was the ‘US 8th Army scene’, was recorded in the form of numerous records since the mid-60s. These include such unique rarities that stand out not only among the history of rock/pop music in Asia but throughout the world, foremost among them the works by Shin Joong-hyeon and the Add 4, Key Boys, and the He5.

-

To better understand this history takes a closer look into the background and influence of the ‘entertainment scene’ that was formed around the US 8th Army bases at the time. The ASCOM (US Army Support Command) located in Bupyeong was a military complex providing combat support for the USFK, and comprised a sprawling array of facilities whose massive scale and varied functions earned it the nickname ‘ASCOM City’. The entertainment scene that encompassed 12 on-post clubs and the more than 20 clubs that were located off-post served as transmission channels for jazz, standard pop, and rock n’ roll. The multitude of musicians – including Bae Ho, Han Myeong-sook, Yoon Hang-gi, Shin Joong-hyeon, and Kim Hong-tak – conveyed the newest western musical styles such as jazz, blues, country, and soul and played a critical role in introducing them into Korean pop music. American authorities applied tighter quality controls during the roughly 10-year heyday of the ‘8th Army show scene’ since the mid-60s, leading musicians to pick up the newest repertoires even more swiftly. Meanwhile, the sheer diversity of styles and genres as required by the various stages, as well as the rapidly shifting trends in repertoire, encouraged musicians to further hone their chops while also broadening their musical spectrum. The unique facets of ‘adaptation’ and ‘transfiguration’ that arose as musicians from a jazz/big band background took in rock/psychedelic influences ended up being key drivers behind establishing locality. – Light In The Attic