K-Pop takes America: how South Korea's music machine is conquering the world

Gangnam Style

The Verge spent a solid twelve hours at K-Con, an event for K-Pop fans featuring musical guests, panel discussions on things like Korean music and fashion, a number of merchant booths, and over 10,000 ticket holders, according to MNet. The highlight of the night was a concert in the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater where a half-dozen acts performed — many for the first time in the United States.

K-Pop, in case you haven’t been paying attention, is a particularly catchy and calculating strain of Korean popular music that somehow manages to simultaneously sound like just about every contemporary musical genre, a conflation of the various strains of electronic dance music — mostly trance, electro, and dubstep — arranged in conventional pop song structure. In addition to taking off in Asia in a big way, K-Pop has found some popularity in the United States, more as a subculture than as a bona fide phenomenon in the west.

For an American new to the genre, it can be kind of disorienting. Or exciting. K-Pop is where east meets west in a musical Uncanny Valley.

At K-Con we had the pleasure of talking to Simon and Martina Stawski, whose Eat Your Kimchi video blog is apparently very popular (so popular, in fact, that they required a security detail to escort them through the mob of screaming fans). Kimchi began four years ago as a simple series of videos that the couple produced for the family back home in Canada, but now the site's goal "is to document the fun and quirky things we like about Korea," as well as helping first time visitors to the country deal with the particulars of the culture.

"K-Pop is not just a song or a genre, it's an entire culture," explained Martina. "You're really getting involved in a community of people. They all like the same band as you, and you all get to know the same thing, and it becomes a family of people. So that's why everyone's so passionate."

This much is true: K-Pop fans are, if anything, passionate. And at this event at least, they’re almost always teenage girls. But all that really says is that it’s teenage girls that are willing to take the trek to the west coast in order to get autographs from the members of Nu’Est, for instance. According to the event promoter, fifteen international K-Pop fan clubs made the journey.

If you’re like most Americans, and if you know the term K-Pop at all, you first heard it in connection to a Korean rapper named Psy. His "Gangnam Style" is the only song listed in the Billboard Korea K-Pop Top 10 while also appearing on other American charts (for the week of K-Con, he’s charting with Digital Songs (#1), Hot 100 (#2), Pop Songs (#19), Radio Songs (#34), and Dance/Club Play Songs (#49)).

"I know a lot of people think 'Gangnam Style' is opening the floodgates," Simon says, but the song is much different than most K-Pop. "[T]here's a lot of irony and humor in that video, while other K-Pop songs are very serious and sexy and very well crafted."

And of course, this is by design. Your typical K-Pop idol group is composed of several rather anonymous youngsters, so attractive that they’re boring.

"The mainstream success that Psy has," Simon continues, "we don't see that [happening] in other kinds of K-Pop, but we still see a vast amount of success happening on an underground level."

What about the hope, expressed by a number of people in the industry, that K-Pop will be the next big thing?

"[W]e think that it's possible that the bands will be pushed towards marketing in the United States," says Martina, "but we don't think that they'll ever really make it mainstream because Korean music does not reflect North American culture."

Marg Lee is a Los Angeles-based attorney. As a child she and her sister were in a band called T.T.Ma ("Taste The Maximum" or "To The Maximum"). Her experience as a professional pop singer is interesting in that it demonstrates how big the industry is in Korea, and how quickly the large entertainment companies shuffle through its performers. Born and raised in a small town outside of Dallas, Lee’s family moved to Korea when she was in the eighth grade. It was soon after arriving that she was approached on the street in the neighborhood of Apgujeong (where Psy’s "Gangnam Style" video was shot] by a talent agent.

"The next day," Lee says, "I gave the card to my mom and I explained what happened, and my mom thought we should call him." Soon, the whole family was at a karaoke joint, where Lee and her sister auditioned for a place in a pop group the agency was putting together. "I can’t really sing that well," she admits, "but I guess they still wanted me in the band because I can speak English and they liked my look." Both sisters were asked to join, and soon after that auditions were held to fill the three other positions in the group.

After a year of dance, rap, and singing lessons, the group’s debut album, In The Sea (1999) was released. "Over the course of our career, we did interviews, radio shows, game shows, music shows, concerts, festivals, all that stuff. We toured Shanghai, we filmed our music video in Thailand." The experience was like that of an eccentric after-school job for the young student. "I’m actually glad that I was really young when I did it," she says, "the entertainment industry can be really corrupt... [but] because I was so young, everyone in the industry looked out for me."

After two years, when her contract was up, Lee left the business to concentrate on school work and the SAT’s.

"K-Pop is scary!" Says Ellen Kim, a dancer and choreographer also based in Los Angeles. "If I was an artist in Korea, I'd be nervous. The pace of the popularity of the music is quick. You got one song that can last for a week, and that's it... that's really scary. You put so much work into one song, but yet it's going to get old quick. Korean people want something new every week, and I think that's the hardest pressure, probably. To come up with something catchy all the time, a hit all the time, and you've got tons of artists and the lifespan of one song is so short. It's pretty hard."

In addition to simple, catchy melodies and a limited repertoire of subject matter, video and choreographed dancing play a huge role in the creation of a song.

"A lot of K-Pop singles are dance tracks, the majority of them," Relic says. "So you have to take that into account. Can someone make a good choreography at a song at this tempo? Or the flow? It's almost like half and half — the choreography and presentation's equally as important as the song. If one's not good, everything falls apart. I definitely try to write stuff that lends itself to the choreography."

"I think that the music in K-Pop has to go hand in hand with the choreography," agrees Ellen Kim. "I think that's the difference between American music and Korean music. The Korean people really want their fans to be in the music as well. That's why as choreographers we have to simplify movements. It's actually harder to think of moves that non-dancers can do, that dancers would appreciate at the same time. When you go to concerts you have the ability to do little movements that make you feel like you're part of the song and the performance."

Indeed, a K-Pop concert is extremely interactive. Fans will bring balloons and glow sticks to match their band’s "fan color." Even more impressive are the fan chants. These are complex chants — backing vocals and countermelodies — that the audience sings in unison, along with the band’s performance. As Simon from Eat Your Kimchi explained, "the record labels will actually release a song to the official fan groups before it hits the actual airwaves. The fan groups can memorize a fan chant of a song, so at the actual debut performance of the song they can sing along with it. It's a crucial part of the marketing."

Walking around the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater prior to the big concert, snatches of music came in and out of range. I’d hear what sounded like Def Leppard, and then as I focused on the source, it would turn out to be some K-Pop tune, of course. All day and into the night one could hear ghosts of K-Ci & JoJo, Smash Mouth, One Direction, T. Rex, LCD Soundsystem, Abba, and many more — all constructed on a foundation of contemporary dance beats.

According to everyone I talked to, the internet — and specifically YouTube — has been essential in the spread of K-Pop to the US, and not just because it is an extremely visual genre.

Ann Lu, Mnet America’s VP of Marketing, says that since YouTube came along, "the entertainment sphere has completely changed. The landscape is so different. When they talk about entertainment, source of entertainment, I think television counts for only maybe 30-40 percent. For sources of content, a lot of [our viewers] watch stuff on YouTube, watch stuff on the internet. They're on the internet all the time. Because of YouTube, foreign content is readily available [to viewers in the states]. There's no national boundary or language boundary. When it comes to music, language is less of an issue."

K-Pop blog Soompi cited a report in early 2012, stating that "K-Pop videos were viewed [on YouTube] nearly 2.3 billion times worldwide in the past year, breaking the previous year’s record of 800 million views by nearly threefold." Of all those views, American views measured in at the 240 million mark, second only to Japan’s 423 million views.

YouTube lets American fans discover and share K-Pop amongst themselves without dealing with language barriers, paywalls, and DRM. At the same time, it just might be that the internet — and YouTube — are what will prevent K-Pop from getting any bigger than it already has.

The term that musicologists use (in fact, it’s been borrowed from agriculture) is "monoculture." There was some debate in the blogosphere last year about the bygone days when the United States had what was essentially one monolithic culture. There were only a few TV channels and everybody watched The Cosby Show on Thursday nights. Writing in Salon, Touré put it something like this:

Back when MTV played videos, it functioned like a televised boombox. It was the central way for many people to experience music they loved and learn about new artists. Thus MTV directed and funneled the conversation. Now there’s no central authority.

"Wait a minute," you’re probably thinking. "Central authority? He’s talking about communism!"

OK, you’re probably not thinking that. But maybe you’re thinking about when you went to school and found out that overnight all your fellow students had converted to the church of Nirvana, the morning after the "Smells Like Teen Spirit" video premiere. (Or, in my case, you were remembering where you were when you first heard "Eat It" by Weird Al Yankovic.)

Monoculture nostalgists argue that limited options for news and entertainment (three or four TV networks and a couple shitty record stores in your town) brought everyone together. When an album like Michael Jackson’s Thriller came out it was a huge deal for everybody. They say that the internet, while giving us endless entertainment and news options, somehow divides us as a nation by denying us the opportunity to bond over the same movies and record albums and episodes of Seinfeld.

Whether you buy this or not (I’m not sure that I do) what is clear is that record labels are selling a lot less new music, in part due to piracy and streaming media, and in part because there are just so many more options available for consumers online than there were in brick and mortar shops like Strawberries or Record Den. Not only is a pop group now competing with almost every other pop group in existence, they’re also competing with almost every group that has ever existed in the past, thanks to the endless reissues and recycling of record label back catalogs.

As a result, instead of a few dominant artists, consumers have a great number of niche genres to choose from. Including K-Pop.

The same internet that has brought K-Pop to the attention of mainstream America will probably prevent it from ever being more than an underground phenomenon.