I have a piece in the magazine this week about K-pop—Korean pop music—which has taken over much of Asia in the course of the last fifteen years, and lately has reached our charts, with “Gangnam Style.” K-pop is largely video based—one of the things that’s interesting about the genre is how it has spread around the world largely without the help of radio—and a lot of this piece was reported on YouTube. I’ve stuck to videos that I referred to in the article.
For me, the founding K-pop video is the 2009 video for “Gee,” by Girls’ Generation. I love how fast the beat is. It’s the beat of Seoul.
In second place is “Mr. Taxi,” which always makes me smile when the hook comes around and the girls do that steering wheel move. I like the Japanese version best.
This is the stuff my twenty-one-year-old niece discovered me watching one day, and, as I say in the piece, dubbed me ”Uncle Pervy.” I tried to explain that Girls’ Generation weren’t pervy. The J-pop group AKB48, on the other hand, was:
See the difference? O.K., it’s true I sometimes strayed to Hyuna’s “Bubble Pop!”—but mainly for those Lichtenstein mouths:
I also liked 2NE1, who definitely have more swag than Girls’ Generation. But maybe they’re too Western?
In the piece, I go out on a limb and say that no Korean boy band will ever make it big in the States. SHINee or Super Junior, huge though they are in Asia, will never appeal to more than a small fraction of the audience here.
SHINee is too androgynous:
And there’s too many guys in Super Junior:
Though some guys clearly like them:
If any boy band stands a chance it’s BigBang:
G Dragon, the blond, is the Kanye of K-pop:
Here is Lee Soo-man, the creator of the idol system and a large presence in the piece, speaking about “Cultural Technology,” which is the science behind K-pop:
Chairman Lee put together S.M.’s latest boy group—EXO-M and EXO-K. Six are Mandarin speakers and six Korean speakers, and they release songs and videos at the same time, but tour separately—they’re sort of band franchises. Even the videos are the same.
Here is the EXO-K:
And the same song by EXO-M:
The Wonder Girls lived in New York for two years, trying to break into the U.S. market, unsuccessfully. This was their big song when they toured with the Jonas Brothers, in 2009. It’s a nice song, but too retro to be a hit.
Then PSY came along—”Gangnam Style” is the most liked video ever on YouTube! But the irony of “Gangnam Style” is that its success comes at K-pop’s expense. PSY is making fun of K-pop’s vacuous fixation on the superficial, and after you’ve seen it, the video forces you to notice how silly a lot of K-pop is. Though “Gangnam Style” put K-pop on the map in the U.S., it might also make it harder for K-pop to catch on big in the long run.
Those are some of the videos I watched in writing the piece. It is notable that I never bought any K-pop songs, and I had no desire to listen to the songs without watching the videos. Whether or not K-pop succeeds in the West, Korea has taken the music video deeper into the essence of the song than we ever did.
Finally, I also took some video at the SMTOWN show I attended in Anaheim, which you can see here:
Read John Seabrook’s piece on K-pop.
Photographs by Matthew Niederhauser/Institute.
