first glance, the beats and dancing and videos look familiar, much like a variation of American pop music. But the closer you look and the more you listen, the more differences you notice. Like when I heard a K-pop song in a Barcelona café, I could identify something different about it even before I heard the singers’ language. There is something distinct and special about K-pop. It’s like everything is a little bit louder, the images brighter, the style flashier—it’s just more.
Ever since the modern pop music industry began a century ago, it has been international, from the jazz of the 1920s to the rise of rock ’n roll to disco to the hundreds of types of music we have today. Much of the time, that has meant musical ideas arising in the United States and traveling to the world—but not always. The British Invasion, which brought the Beatles and the Rolling Stones to the United States, is probably the most famous example. Bossa nova, Brazil’s samba-influenced jazz that became very popular in the 1950s and 1960s, is a favorite of mine. Scandinavia has its heavy metal. And, today, Korea has K-pop.
So where did K-pop come from? Although the hip, exciting Seoul of today is rather new, it’s worth remembering that Koreans have long been a very musical people. Chinese diplomats returning home hundreds of years ago commented on how much Koreans love to sing. Even Korean traditional music was unique in East Asia for its focus on free-form, almost jazz-like improvisation and reinterpretation. Western music came to Korea in the late nineteenth century, bringing new scales and instruments, and jazz was quite popular in the 1920s.
In the aftermath of the Korean War of 1950–3, both sides of the divided peninsula were devastated, but soon Korea’s strong-willed, dynamic people began rebuilding their country. By the 1960s, South Korea was undergoing an artistic renaissance, and one of the most exciting aspects of that era was its music. Rock, folk and funk all flourished in the late 1960s and early 1970s as young people became caught up in the excitement of an all-new era. Sadly, though, this era would not last. South Korea’s government was quite authoritarian at the time and none too fond of the counter-culture elements of the day, so it cracked down hard in 1975. Many of Korea’s top musicians were sent to jail or drummed out of the music industry, leaving a very different music scene behind. Tastes also changed, and by the 1980s rock was much less popular, leaving ballads and plenty of cheesy synthesizers and syrupy pop music (not to mention oodles of oversized shoulder pads).
CAPTURING THEIR FAVORITE IDOLS
Through all these changes, Korea continued to transform. Its economy surged and expanded at an amazing rate. The military government came to an end in 1987, and the new constitution that came into being allowed greater freedom of expression and restored democracy. The Seoul Olympics of 1988 were a symbol of how much the country had grown and opened up. And thanks to the growth of the economy and freedom, Korean arts and entertainment were soon recovering.
BTOB IS A YOUNG GROUP BUT IT ALREADY HAS MANY FANS
There was popular music before K-pop, of course. Cho Yong-pil was one of the biggest artists of the 1980s, although he faded in the early 1990s before making a spectacular and totally unexpected comeback in 2013 with “Bounce,” a song that dethroned Psy from the top of the charts. Kim Kwang-suk was an important and influential folk singer, closely associated with the democracy movement. Sinawe was probably the biggest heavy metal group ever, peaking in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Kim Gun-mo was huge for much of the 1990s, although his more jazzy, grown-up pop songs never really fitted the K-pop mold. Shin Seung-hoon was the biggest ballad singer of the early 1990s, back when ballads ruled the charts. But none of these acts were K-pop, at least not the K-pop we would recognize.
The rise of modern K-pop couldn’t be clearer. It began on March 23, 1992, the day that Seo Taiji and the Boys released their first album. Seo Taiji (born Jung Hyun-chul) had dropped out of school at seventeen and briefly played with Sinawe before hooking up with b-boy dancers Yang Hyun-suk and Lee Juno. They formed a hip-hop group heavily influenced by New Jack Swing, but also a jumble of musical ideas, and featured plenty of energetic dance moves. Most older Koreans were confused by this new musical concoction, but young people loved it. “Nan Arayo” (“I Know”) spent most of the year on the top of the charts, starting a music revolution.
Seo Taiji was not the only one dreaming of new musical styles, of course. Another producer trying to figure out the new sounds of a new generation was Soo-Man Lee. Lee had been a popular singer, deejay and television host in the 1970s before leaving Korea to study electrical engineering in California. While he was studying engineering, he was also studying MTV and the biggest trends in American music, and working out how to bring these trends to Korea. Soon after returning home, Lee started SM Entertainment. He tried making stars of several promising young talents but was not quite able to find the magic formula.
MISS A MEETS WITH FANS
CUBE STUDIO
Not until he created H.O.T, that is. With H.O.T—short for “Hi-five Of Teenagers”—Lee combined the energy of new American pop music with a rigorous training system designed to create young stars. Lee realized that stars needed to learn more than just singing and dancing. They needed a whole range of skills, such as humility, attitude, language and the ability to deal with the media. H.O.T exploded on the scene in 1996, selling in huge numbers and whipping young fans into a passionate frenzy. Soon came more bands, such as the girl group S.E.S., Shinhwa and Fly to the Sky.
Lee was not alone. Yang Hyun-suk, one of the members of Seo Taiji and the Boys, started YG Entertainment in 1996. Daesung Enterprise (today’s DSP) had groups like FinKL and Sechs Kies. Park Jin-young launched his solo career in 1994, then started his own music label, JYP Entertainment, in 1997. With each new group, each new producer, K-pop was growing, becoming brighter and better.
It is important to remember that these trends and successes in music were not happening in a bubble. Korean movies, too, were ever more creative and celebrated, setting box office records and winning awards around the world. Musical theater boomed also, and today the live options are almost endless. In the arts, design, fashion and more, young talented Koreans were rewriting the notions of what Korea is and what it could do. And as each field grew, it would influence and fertilize the others, transforming the whole of Korean society.
G.NA
With the turn of the new millennium, K-pop continued to grow. Korea quickly installed one of the world’s best broadband Internet networks, which, while amazing for gaming and transforming day-to-day life in Korea, also meant that the Korean music industry bottomed out. Young people simply stopped buying music. Music stores disappeared. If they were to survive, Korea’s music labels would have to look at other ways of making money. Some pushed their artists into commercials and acting. Others focused more on international sales. Japan, being the world’s second biggest music market, was the obvious target, and SM Entertainment’s BoA was a prime example of doing great there. But many singers increasingly found fame around Asia, thanks in no small part to acting in popular TV dramas. Rain, who starred in the very popular Full House, is a great example of this trend. And China, although still a tiny music market, was growing rapidly, and Korea’s music leaders had their eye on it. This is where the term hallyu came from, coined by Chinese journalists to describe the popularity of Korean artists there. Called hanliu in Chinese and hanryu in Japanese (it’s all the same character, 韓流), hallyu literally means “Korean wave” or “flow,”
