Achim Iseul (Morning Dew)

Morning Dew started out with a government prize. Kim Min-ki wrote it in 1971 and it appeared on his debut album, though the singer Yang Hee-eun released her version a month earlier. It was not written as a protest song. It belonged to the category of wholesome songs the state promoted, won the official Wholesome Song Award, and was played on radio in a government-backed cultural program. Then the students took it. The lyrics carry no overt political message, only quiet resolve in the face of hardship, but young activists heard in them a longing for democracy and a rebuke of the 1972 Yushin Constitution that tightened Park Chung Hee's grip on power. Censors read it darker still, taking an image of a red sun rising over a graveyard as a nod to communism. In December 1975 the regime banned it. Copies of the album were recalled and destroyed, covering it was forbidden, and Kim's younger schoolmate Lee Soo-man nearly faced disciplinary action for singing it on stage in 1978. North Korea banned it too. None of that stopped it. Morning Dew stayed a favourite of pro-democracy students into the late 1980s and was sung again and again during the June Democratic Struggle of 1987, after which the ban was lifted. It has been called the anthem of the democracy movement and credited with starting South Korean protest music, and it was still heard at rallies in the 2000s. A gentle folk song that the state once rewarded became the sound of people asking that state for more.