아침이슬 (택시운전사 OST)

Few songs carry the specific gravity that "Morning Dew" carries in Korean cultural memory. Kim Min-ki wrote it in 1971 as a young songwriter responding vaguely to a sense of impending darkness, without knowing precisely what he was forecasting — and then the military government banned it almost immediately, which transformed a folk song about dew evaporating in morning light into something much larger. The arrangement is disarmingly simple: acoustic guitar, a melody that moves in gentle arcs, a voice that is clear and unadorned, almost naïve in its delivery. That plainness became the song's power. The image at the core — dew forming overnight, glittering briefly, then burning away in the rising sun — carries an entire emotional universe within it: fragility, beauty, the knowledge that what is precious is also temporary, and yet the dew still forms again the next morning. Generations of Korean students and activists sang this at rallies and candlelight vigils, often not knowing it was banned, and its appearance in *A Taxi Driver* functions as a kind of historical suture — stitching 1971 to 1980 to every moment of resistance in between. The song does not sound like a protest anthem. It sounds like a lullaby that learned what the world was really like. You can hear it in the middle of the afternoon and feel it land with the weight of decades.