This paper aims to examine the disputes between popular arts discourses and those of existing arts by looking into the trends introduced into the music scene and the issues developed by Trot(Yenka) controversies. Trot is one of the oldest music genres in the Korean popular art history and one of the most disputed subjects. In the 1950s and 1960s, its Japanese influence was pointed out and criticized by "elite" musicians, public broadcasting stations and the government who yielded cultural power then. Such criticism was set off in the 1950s by "National Song Movement" and peaked in the ban of THE CAMELLIA by Lee, Mi-ja(the country's most beloved Trot singer) in the mid 1960s. However, Trot musicians didn't come up with any logical response other than a simple emotional one. The so-called Trot Controversies of the 1980s looks similar to the previous ones but are different. Although their main attack was targeted at the genre's Japanese influence, relatively live discussions were exchanged between the two camps with the government and broadcasting stations going out of the scene. One camp offered musical arguments for why they called it Japanese and the other camp came up with counter arguments saying such tracing of the origin was meaningless and showed the disrespect for the genre. In particular, in these controversies, a new liberal view appeared, paying attention to musical culture's political and socio-structural meanings, and therefore, a crack was formed in the simple structure of conflict between "serious" musicians and those of popular musicians. Meanwhile, in the late 1980s when liberal musical movement of the so-called People's Song Movement appeared, there was a discussion over how to evaluate and succeed the cultural legacies of Trot in the people's songs. In the process, there came a realization that the disrespect of the Trot was a product of aversion to the genre by elite intellectuals. Coming through these phases, Trot controversies have proceeded by overcoming two main obstacles, that is, Nationalism and the taste against the Trot. Emotional nationalism and the taste against a specific style were the obstacles to objective and logical appreciation of the subject in question. Emotional nationalism was overcome by political and socio-structural conception of the subject- the Trot- and the taste for the specific style was set to be corrected by pensive and earnest approach toward working class's singing culture. Since the 1990s, relatively objective and academic studies of the Trot was made possible by these processes.