EVERY GENRE PROJECT - May 11 - K-Pop

Genre of the Day - K-pop

Album of the Day - Max & Match by LOONA / ODD EYE CIRCLE (2017)

May 11, 2024

Today is a particularly special day for this column. K-pop is not just any genre. It is perhaps the genre to end all genres, a megagenre, a gigagenre, a media juggernaut that stretches every single component of pop music imaginable to the extreme. 

I feel a certain pressure that isn’t always present with some of the more niche genres on RateYourMusic. At the same time, I know that I’m one of the smaller fish in the ocean of music scholars analyzing K-pop’s impact. What do I have to say that others haven’t intricately dissected? Just one search on JSTOR reveals a litany of journals analyzing its cultural impact on Romania, Peru, Brazil; K-pop as parallel to Korean Americans’ increased visibility in politics; the complicated intersection of the globalization that helped K-pop come to form and historical resistance music. While these all demonstrate just how many implications K-pop has had culturally, it also provides a nice overview of the biggest conversations about K-pop—and the scrutiny it’s been placed under compared to other international pop genres. This is not some fluke: this saturation is the dream of any middle power’s media companies. 

K-pop in its modern commercial iteration can be traced back to the early 1990s. Younger musicians began to break away from the traditional, soppy love ballads that dominated Korean pop in the 1980s and instead incorporate the danceable styles of hip-hop that were beginning to take over the world. This combination quickly began to strike a chord with the youth, creating a union that still provides K-pop’s sonic basis today. As a liberalizing Korea began to increasingly look out to the world, singers like Kim Gun Mo experimented with all sorts of hybrid fusions sung in Korean, like his hit “Wrongful Meeting” combining hi-NRG, house, and reggae. Much of the willingness to embrace the sounds of groups like Seo Taiji and the Boys, the first group to bring hip-hop elements to Korean pop, is arguably due to the high saturation of American cultural media among the upbringings of Koreans who’d been born in the ‘70s. The frequent use of hip-hop visual aesthetics alongside musical elements has raised many a question about the appropriation of genres formed out of Black American struggles by foreign musicians, though. A producer’s love for trap is one thing; wearing cornrows as someone with Korean hair is quite another. It’s a debate I am surely not equipped to address with the scope of this column, but it is a common criticism worth mentioning with a genre that’s quite musically reliant on sounds coming from the US. 

Major entertainment companies like SM Entertainment, founded in 1995, began to latch onto these trends to form the early idol groups, a tradition that was not uncommon in other East Asian countries, especially Japan. However, these companies went the extra mile to ensure cross-national marketability. Idols had to be able to sing, to dance, to command a stage, and they had to excel at the visual presentation aspects—a process made easy through in-house auditions and long-term, rigorous training programs that developed the idol machine as we know it today. Record companies carefully selected producers to masterfully emulate popular western sounds, chose snappy, memorable English names for songs and albums, and developed standards of flawless marketing and packaging. K-pop is arguably the most commercially optimized and strategized music genre of our time—success was almost guaranteed. 

While K-pop’s influence began to reverberate through China, Japan, and Taiwan in the 2000s, the US needed something particularly bizarre to kickstart its commercial visibility. That came in the form of PSY’s world-conquering video for “Gangnam Style.” As someone who was 8 or so when the video became viral, I can barely begin to convey just how everywhere it was. Revisiting it, it makes total sense: the song is an earworm, with its dramatic buildup, the irresistible, easy-to-say but still foreign-and-thus-mysterious hook, the perfection and even elevation of the metallic Euro synth melodies dominating American airwaves, the recognizable but easy dance, with loads of visual spectacle and memeable silliness to match. “Gangnam Style” became a chart success as much as it was a viral one: it reached number two on the Billboard Hot 100. The visibility of other K-pop groups began to increasingly percolate. 

I feel that BTS was able to enter the American media market at a perfect time when groups like One Direction and Five Second of Summer had fallen apart or declined, music marketing transitioned to social media, and they had the impeccable visuals, traditional showmanship, and meticulous choreography that most male American stars had abandoned by that time. Thus, as BLACKPINK debuted, an easy group for the American media to hold up as a counterweight to the formerly male-dominated crossover acts list, and since around five years ago you increasingly see groups like TWICE, NewJeans, and Stray Kids everywhere. I believe increasing amounts of people began to pivot towards being fans of K-pop because the companies are so intent on building a world for each group: personalized, intimate stories of the struggles of each idol, a narrative emphasis on the grit it takes to perform at such a high-grade level, and innovative production choices to keep you tuned in. I can't say I didn’t appreciate the BLACKPINK Netflix documentary. And K-pop songs are now hard to escape here: I have “Seven” by Jungkook in my head as I type, though I love some songs by acts that haven't had as much American success like SHINEE and Loona.

Loona had a TikTok hit with “Girl Front” in the app’s early days, but they’re a great case study into the bewildering world of idol groups. “Girl Front” does not come from Loona as a whole group, but a subunit of the group. Once you tap into the lore, I see why it’s easy to become a fan: there’s so much thought behind each album (often found in minis to build hype and feed the fans in small doses), each era, down to which member is given each line and solo dance based on demeanor.

Anyway, Loona as a whole is something of a megagroup, with twelve members. To get any semblance of more personal music, you have to shrink down here and there, thus why this album is sung by the three members Kim Lip, JinSoul, and Choerry. With this characteristically slick and 25-minute swift collection of future bass and electropop-influenced K-pop, they rise to the top of the RYM K-pop charts—no easy feat among over 10,000 releases. “Sweet Crazy Love” punctures through any skeptical ears with its irresistibly dynamic synthesized string intro and energetic take on nu-disco. The album is pretty cohesive in terms of melodic motifs, just another stamp on the intricate thought process behind any release, but where it goes most haywire is on the aforementioned “Girl Front.” It’s a delirious explosion of hard-hitting bass, bubbly synths, and frenetic piano alongside the personality-rich voices of the girls of ODD EYE CIRCLE. No K-pop article would be complete without a mention of stan Twitter (could truly be its own article, but just know that K-pop fans are the most devoted in the world), and in describing this song I think of an oft-retweeted video of Whitney Houston saying “Songs like they are stories that people can identify with. You know what I mean, anybody. Children were singing the song at graduations. At weddings. At funerals.” “Chaotic” is a dripping, more R&B tinged love-stricken tune with rich synthy bass. Though short, it’s a great, catchy entry into the K-pop rabbithole.

PS. Fans of K-pop groups often make these cute, color-coded videos to assist you in knowing which vocalist is singing which line. The dedication is immense.

PPS. As a picture into Loona’s K-pop cult classic status, here’s a different subunit’s collab with Grimes.