The request used to arrive on a slip of paper. A customer at a table in a music coffee house wrote down a song and sent it up to the DJ in the raised glass booth, who answered over the mic. The slips worked like a messaging system. These days the requests come to me on phone screens shoved over the booth rail.
Korean nightlife history usually gets served in slices: a nostalgia piece about coffee house DJs, a nineties piece about rock cafes, and club journalism that starts around 2000 as if the scene fell out of the sky. They’re one story: the Korean DJ moving from the music dabang (음악다방) to the go-go club, the rock cafe (록카페), the Hongdae (홍대) basement and the club booth, and every one of those rooms was licensed as something other than a place to dance. I can tell the last stretch with some authority because it’s my career. Where the record is thin, I say so.
한국어 요약
음악다방의 유리 부스에서 클럽 DJ 부스까지, 한 줄로 이어진 역사
저는 이 계보의 마지막 구간을 직접 살아온 사람으로서, 따로따로 이야기되던 한국 밤문화의 조각들을 하나로 이어 보고 싶었습니다.
예전 DJ는 종이 쪽지로 신청곡을 받았고, 저는 부스 난간 너머로 내민 휴대폰 화면으로 받습니다. 60년, 다섯 개의 공간, 하나의 직업입니다. 한국은 2000년에 클럽 문화를 수입한 것이 아니라 스스로 길러 냈다고 저는 생각합니다.
잘못된 정보나 바뀐 날짜를 발견하셨나요? 연락 주시면 확인 후 바로 고치겠습니다. 현장에서 보고 들은 이야기도 언제나 환영합니다.
Korean Nightlife Began in a City Not Allowed to Dance
In 1937, a group of Seoul women connected to the record industry petitioned the colonial government with a demand that has become famous in Korean cultural history: permit Seoul a dance hall. The petition was refused, as Kyunghyang’s history of Korean dance venues recounts. Dancing in this city started out as something you had to ask permission for, and that has never entirely stopped being true, as anyone who has read my piece on the no dancing signs knows.
Sixty Years, Five Rooms, One Job
How the glass booth of the music dabang became the club booth, one licence at a time
음악다방의 유리 부스에서 클럽 DJ 부스까지
| The dabang booth1960s to 1980s | The club boothtoday | |
|---|---|---|
| Requests | Written slips from the tables | Phone screens over the booth rail |
| The licence | Tea house, the one on offer | Restaurant, for the same reason |
| The DJ’s value | Records the room could not get | Crates of imports the city had not heard |
The pointKorea did not import club culture around 2000. It grew it, room by room, and every room was licensed as something other than a place to dance.
After the war came the cabaret era, and by the sixties the words nightclub and go-go had entered the Korean press. Turntables and the people who worked them arrived with the go-go boom. That era has its own Korean history, and it’s a good one. Chapter three of Shin Hyunjoon and Choi Ji-sun’s Archaeology of Korean Pop 1970 (한국 팝의 고고학 1970, revised 2022) is titled 고고 클럽, 한밤의 혁명 혹은 하룻밤의 꿈 (gogo keulleop, hanbamui hyeongmyeong hogeun harutbamui kkum), roughly go-go club, a midnight revolution or a one night dream. Its sections run from the clubs’ own subculture to the song purification campaign (가요 정화 운동, gayo jeonghwa undong) and the crackdown on what the state called decadence.
For ordinary young Koreans, though, the room that mattered was the coffee house.
The Music Dabang Invented the Korean DJ
From the sixties into the eighties, the centre of Korean youth culture was the music coffee house, with its raised glass booth and its wall of vinyl. Its DJ played written requests from the tables, and the dabang is where Korea invented the DJ as a public figure. The top booth men were followed like radio hosts, and musicians dropped into the rooms to hear what was moving.
Several dabang and music hall DJs graduated into legendary radio careers. One veteran of that circuit, in a Kyunghyang profile, listed the generations the booths produced, from the founding radio DJs of Korean pop broadcasting to people like Lee Soo-man (이수만), who went from DJ work to building SM Entertainment. Follow that thread and the whole K-pop industry has a coffee house DJ booth somewhere in its family tree.
The dabang also set the deal that still defines Korean nightlife: the music room that’s officially something else. It sold coffee, the law saw a tea house, and the customers came for a DJ. Swap coffee for fried chicken and you have the arrangement I described in the kitchens article, fifty years early. Colour television weakened the format through the eighties, and the noraebang finished it. The booths came down and the DJs scattered, some to radio, some to the discos and nightclubs (나이트, naiteu) of the eighties, which is its own gaudy chapter.
A few booths never came down. Hi-Mart Music Listening Room (하이마트 음악감상실) in Daegu opened in 1957 and is now run by the third generation of its family. Visitors still get paper and a pen to write requests, and the owner pulls them from a record room of roughly 4,000 to 6,000 albums, Maeil Shinmun reported in February 2025, adding that the room has seen more visitors in the past two years.
The Rock Cafe Is the Missing Link
Ask Koreans in their fifties about the early nineties and you will hear the word 록카페, rock cafe, usually with a grin. Ask English language club journalism and you’ll hear nothing at all. It’s the least documented era of this lineage and the most important, because it’s where the dabang turned into the club.
The rock cafe took the dabang’s format, a cafe with a DJ and no stage, and did the one thing the dabang never dared. People stood up. In the boom years around Sinchon (신촌), Apgujeong (압구정) and the early Hongdae strip, rock cafes were cafes in name and drinking rooms in practice, with DJs playing rock and dance records to a floor that was, against the rules, dancing.
I call it the missing link because it explains what outsiders never understand about Korean clubbing: why the scene has always lived inside food and drink businesses instead of purpose built venues. Korean dance culture descended from the coffee house, through the rock cafe, carrying the no dancing sign on the wall the whole way. The sign still hanging in Seoul venues today is a rock cafe artefact as much as anything.
Hongdae Built the Template the City Still Runs On
In the mid nineties the lineage split. One branch went big and commercial, into the Gangnam (강남) nightclub industry whose rise and fall I have covered separately. The other went underground, into Hongdae basements, and that branch is mine.
The early Hongdae club generation, the live rooms and the first dance basements with names like Drug (드럭) and Baljeonso (발전소), built the template the city still runs on: small rooms, cheap doors, resident DJs with record collections instead of light shows. The last chapter of Archaeology of Korean Pop 1990 (한국 팝의 고고학 1990, 2022) by Shin Hyunjoon, Kim Hak-seon and Choi Ji-sun follows those years, with a section on the rivalry between Baljeonso and Drug and another titled, roughly, more creators, more clubs, more labels.
The scene lost one of its founding figures in August 2026. Yoo Baek-yeol (유백열), the DJ everyone knew as Uncle, started in 1970s US Army clubs, worked the music dabang and nightclubs, opened MI near Hongik University in 1995, and later ran M2 and the monthly Club Day. His death was covered by the national press as the passing of the man who led Hongdae club culture’s golden age. I knew him. He gave me my first chance to play a big stage in Seoul, at M2, and I’m still thankful and honoured that he did.
M2 opened in May 2004 when three early Hongdae bars, Matamata, Hodgepodge and M.I., combined forces, and it was one of the first modern clubs built around electronic music rather than the nightclub format. M2 in Hongdae and Mass in Gangnam, with the promoters around them, put Seoul on the international map well before 2012. Musicologist Kim Min-oh makes a related argument in a 2020 paper in the journal 트랜스- (Trans-): that the Hongdae sound should be read as a place based music movement, set beside the Eighth US Army stage sound of the 1950s and 1960s, when Korean musicians auditioned to play for American troops and picked up the newest Western pop along the way.
Two Kinds of Booth, One Job
When I arrived in 2002 there were still plenty of rock and roll bars, the places people visited in the evening as a first or second stop. The old style Korean nightclubs ran on a completely different kind of DJ. A DJ would perform for thirty minutes and then drive to the next club: very fast, very high tempo, nineties and 2000s K-pop dance music, a lot of talking on the microphone and sometimes a dance contest. Then the music would stop for ten or fifteen minutes so the booking (부킹, the table introductions waiters arranged) could start again and get people mixing.
In the house and electronic scene none of that applied. Nobody used a microphone in house. You could see the change begin with M2, and slowly, over the following years, others opened across the city. Both booths descend from the dabang; they just kept different halves of the job. The nightclub DJ kept the mic and the patter. The underground DJ kept the records nobody else had.
Put the eras side by side and the match is almost eerie. The dabang DJ took requests on paper; I take them off phone screens. The dabang operated as a tea house because that was the available licence; the venues I play operate as restaurants for the same reason. The dabang DJ’s value was access to records the audience couldn’t get, and for my whole early career that was exactly what I sold, crates of imports this city hadn’t heard. Streaming ate that particular moat. Korea grew its club culture at home, out of a coffee house, long before 2000, and I consider it a privilege to be somewhere far down its family tree. The current chapter is mapped in Going Out in Seoul.
How to Hear the Old Format Now
The music dabang isn’t entirely gone; it moved to places nobody thought to look. 동작FM, a community station in Seoul, runs a weekly show built on the old format: a DJ, request slips read out on air, and records chosen because a person asked. It’s the clearest surviving demonstration of what the booth sounded like.
On screen, Go Go 70s (2008) dramatises the go-go club era and the Devils, and it’s the only widely available film that puts a camera inside that stage of the lineage. For the era around it, the Korean Film Archive channel streams more than a hundred classic Korean films free and legally, and the 1970s titles carry more incidental footage of tea rooms, cabarets and record shops than any documentary does.
Outside Seoul, the Busan Modern History Museum (부산근현대역사관) ran the second Gwangbok Record Fair (광복레코드페어) from 31 October to 2 November 2025, themed on the group sounds of the 1960s to the mid 1980s, with DJ sets, a talk on the history of Korean rock and a session named for Mua, a Gwangbok-dong music listening room. In Daegu, Hi-Mart still takes requests on paper.
Frequently Asked Questions
What came before nightclubs in Korea?
A chain of formats, each one legally something other than a dance venue. Music coffee houses, the 음악다방, dominated youth culture from the 1960s to the 1980s with professional DJs playing requests. Rock cafes, 록카페, took over in the late 1980s and 1990s as cafes where people danced anyway. The modern club scene grew out of Hongdae basements and the Gangnam nightclub industry in the 1990s and 2000s.
What was a Korean rock cafe?
A format of the late 1980s and 1990s, biggest around Sinchon, Apgujeong and early Hongdae, that was licensed like a cafe but ran DJs and a de facto dancefloor. It sits between the music dabang and the modern club in Korea’s nightlife lineage, and it’s where the no dancing sign became a fixture. English language coverage of the era is close to nonexistent.
How did Korean DJ culture start?
In the music dabang booth. From the 1960s, coffee house DJs curated Western and Korean records for audiences with no other access to them, took written requests and became local celebrities. That generation fed Korean radio DJing and parts of the music industry itself. A few listening rooms, such as Hi-Mart in Daegu, open since 1957, still take requests on paper.
Is Hongdae still important to Korean club culture?
Historically it’s the underground’s birthplace. Today most of the main strip is Korean pop, chart pop and hip hop bars for students and young tourists, but a handful of serious rooms remain, including The Henz Club, Modeci, vurt., Club Horn, Macaroni Funky Club and Channel 1969. The death of first generation figures like DJ Uncle in 2026 was marked in the national press.
Further Reading
- Seoul Museum of History: Sinchon youth culture exhibition (2018): the museum’s show on Sinchon from the 1970s to the 90s, covering the music tea rooms and rock cafes this article joins up.
- Seoul Urban Life Museum: Seoul’s Youth and Popular Music (2024): how young Seoul’s music hangouts moved from Jongno and Myeongdong to Sinchon, Apgujeong and Hongdae.
- Kyunghyang, 홍대 앞 클럽문화의 ‘오늘’ (2003): a snapshot of Hongdae club culture written in the Club Day years, before hindsight tidied it up.
- Newsis on ten years of Live Club Day (2025): an organiser’s account of how the live side of the Hongdae club night survived.
- Live Club Day on YouTube: performance footage from the monthly night that carries the Club Day idea on.
- Boiler Room: Seoul: streamed sets from the city’s current rooms, the far end of the line that started in the glass booth.
- How the dabang request slips worked
- Seventy years of Seoul clubs, mapped
Sources, Archives and Listening
Kyunghyang on the history of Korean dance venues, from the 1937 dance hall petition onward
Newspim on forty years of Korean club formats
Belocal on how Hongdae formed as an alternative culture district
Street H on Hongdae club culture
Seoul Shinmun on the death of DJ Uncle, who led the Hongdae golden age
Maeil Shinmun on Hi-Mart Music Listening Room and the return of listening rooms, February 2025
Twig24 on the 2025 Gwangbok Record Fair, Busan Modern History Museum, October 2025
The regional picture, which almost never gets told in English: how Gwangbok-dong’s dabang DJs built Busan’s pop culture and the 1960s and 70s pop boom in Gwangju. Seoul wasn’t the only city with booths.
Old photographs. For the dabang era, search 다방 and 음악감상실 in Seoul History Archive (서울역사아카이브). For the rock cafe and early club years, Seoul Photo Archive (서울사진아카이브) holds street photography of Sinchon, Apgujeong and Hongdae through the eighties and nineties. e영상역사관 national archive photography carries the national newsreel footage of the same period.
Books and papers. For the go-go club era, chapter three of Archaeology of Korean Pop 1970; for the Hongdae club decade, the final chapter of Archaeology of Korean Pop 1990; and Kim Min-oh on the Hongdae sound and the Eighth US Army sound, in 트랜스- (2020).
Picture Credits
Night cherry blossom crowds at Changgyeongwon, 1971
공유마당, via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: KOGL Type 1. View the original file and its full licence terms.
Historical images on this site are used under the licence stated for each file. KOGL Type 1 is the Korean public sector open licence permitting commercial use and adaptation with attribution; public domain items carry no restriction. If you hold rights in any image here and believe it has been used in error, get in touch and it will be removed.
Written from Seoul, by someone who has been in the booth for more than twenty years. More on the site, or book a DJ.
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