An Abridged (But Still Very Long) Guide to K-Music

If you’re at all interested in the music scene, you may have seen BTS at the Billboard Music Awards or splashed all over the internet. Although K-pop is just now jumping to the front and center for most mainstream audiences, it has played a major role in my life since long ago. As such, I would like to offer you personal insight into my journey through K-music alongside an abridged guide to the K-music phenomenon. Buckle in for a wild and topsy-turvy ride.

INITIAL FORAY INTO K-POP

For me, a huge part of my initial interest in K-music stemmed from issues of representation. Having been inundated in American pop culture, I was used to seeing everything with a Western lens. Although I lived in a neighborhood with a large Asian population, the characters I saw on the television screen never seemed to be East Asian unless they a) practiced martial arts, b) were in a historical setting or c) were the only Asian member in the ensemble. With the Hallyu Wave of the 2000s, I was finally given the chance to see Asians thriving in the global entertainment industry and being taken seriously in groups as opposed to singular examples.

These are the thinking patterns I identify in hindsight. As a sixth grader listening to the K-pop band Big Bang for the first time, all I thought was, These songs are so damn catchy! It didn’t matter to me that I couldn’t understand the lyrics – having been raised with anime, I was no stranger to reading subtitles. Translation wasn’t strictly necessary either; the music spoke for itself, transcending the boundaries of language. Still, although I found Big Bang and their music compelling, it wasn’t until dipped my toes in the fan culture that I really fell headfirst into the rabbit hole of K-music.

KOREAN FAN CULTURE

The first group I ever got immersed in was DBSK, an acronym that translates to “The Rising Gods of the East” in English. This was a title they would come to live up to as the “kings of K-pop,” selling 14 million physical copies of their album in their first decade, but I had no idea about any of that at the time. I had come across them singing acapella to a Boyz II Men song on YouTube, and I had never heard anything like it before. I was hooked on their effortless harmonies and teamwork, so I knew I needed to listen to more.

So what did it mean to be a fan on DBSK as they were approaching the height of their popularity? It was a lot like having a part-time job. As a DBSK fan, I taught myself how to read and write Korean, memorized lyrics in Korean and Japanese that I can still recall today, and learned fan chants to most of their songs. I watched all the dramas they were in, kept up-to-date with new releases, and made sure to understand all their inside jokes – and all this was before Facebook, Twitter, and a lot of other social media had reached the heights they have today. I could probably tell each member apart by a single body part if pressed. This level of investment wasn’t a lot – in fact, I did less than the average K-pop fan did, which could include anything from buying multiple versions of the same album to donating to a charity in a member’s name. K-pop groups each have their own fan club with a special name and specific color; DBSK’s fan club is Cassiopeia and their color is red, so stadiums would fill from top to bottom in red light sticks. Fans would organize special events at concerts to form coordinated light shows while cheering in sync. The amount of dedication K-pop fans showed and continue to show is crazy and kind of beautiful.

Cassiopeia showing their love!

When you spend a lot of time and energy on anything, you grow fond of the object of your work. With every talk show, music video, and album, I started to feel an intimacy with the members – like they were friends or family. This is true of the K-pop groups I follow today as well – I really start to wish them well and hope for their success, and that’s how fan culture draws you in.

If K-pop fans form a culture that organizes around making their favorite groups (called “bias” groups) look better and show mass support during performances, what’s the downside? Well, Korean fan clubs are competitive and exclusive. Being a fan of one group usually means that you must stay “loyal,” or only support that one group at the expense of other groups. Recently, this exclusion is less of a dealbreaker and fans dictate peace among fanbases. Yet one thing that hasn’t changed about K-pop is the grueling process to “create” K-pop stars.

TOXIC K-POP INDUSTRY

Much like the music industry in America, K-pop does not solely rely on the merit of its music; it also relies on its commoditization of its musical artists and their related merchandise. However, the Korean music industry takes it a step further because it “produces” its artists like real-life doll factories. K-pop record labels train their artists from a young age – thus, these prospective artists are called “trainees” – in various talents like singing, dancing, and learning different languages. This sounds par for the course, but these companies also may force their trainees to diet, exercise, and do plastic surgery to fit a certain Korean beauty standard – a standard where underweight was “pretty” or “handsome.” Since trainees often sleep in dorms run by their companies, they often live in an oppressive environment during their formative years into adulthood. Signing a contract with a K-pop record label is equivalent to signing away years of your life to work non-stop for a shot at stardom. If a trainee does debut in a K-pop idol group, he or she goes through nearly back-to-back seasons of releasing albums and EPs to stay relevant and to sell records consistently. It’s like capitalism on steroids – and those steroids are also being sold with a limited edition booklet, if you call within the next five minutes. The three K-pop record companies that perfected this process were SM Entertainment, YG Entertainment, and JYP Entertainment, known as “The Big Three” of the K-pop realm.

Knowing how terrible and manipulative the K-pop industry is, how could anybody support K-pop? I have a simple answer: it all comes down to the artists. Even though I don’t condone the practices of these record labels, the artists are individuals who work hard to achieve their dreams, and their efforts shine through their performances. I appreciate these efforts, and therefore I am willing to purchase the fruits of their labor – especially because the music and choreography are good, as it should be after years of fine-tuned practice. Unfortunately, this response is exactly what K-pop companies bank on for their funding. Contributing in any part to K-pop sales perpetuates the methods of the money-making machine despite good intentions.

It’s a lose-lose situation, really.

K-POP CONTROVERSIES

If you think that the K-pop industry is sounding more and more problematic by the second, you would be correct. Of course, one of the major controversies that exposed the public to the depth of these problems revolved around SM Entertainment, one of the Big Three companies, and one of its best-selling groups – you guessed it – DBSK.

In 2009, three of the five members of DBSK sued SM Entertainment for tying them down to what were essentially slave contracts. In these contracts, the members were required to stay with the company for at least 13 years, received a very small percentage of what they made for SM (including talk shows, concert DVDs, and album sales), and forfeited their copyrights to their songs to SM. The members could not break the contract without spending an exorbitant amount of money – triple the promotion fees and twice the profits they made SM. SM claimed that the members knew what they were getting themselves into, as they signed the contracts with their lawyers at the beginning. This legal ordeal stretched all the way into 2012, with the three-member subunit (JYJ) signing to the Japanese Avex Entertainment and being banned from mainstream Korean music shows, while the two-member subunit (still called DBSK) continued under SM Entertainment. So like I said before: problematic.

SM changed their “slave contracts” shortly after, but this dispute raised awareness of the injustices perpetrated by major labels even on their most famous breadwinners. Of course, SM Entertainment wasn’t the only company that mistreated its artists or faced scandals. Park Bom from YG Entertainment got caught in a scandal for smuggling drugs from America to South Korea. Although the news came out later that Bom was legally cleared to take the medications because of a mental health issue, the initial backlash made her take a hiatus from the entertainment industry and led to her band, 2NE1, disbanding. YG declined to renew her contract. In late 2009, Jay Park, the young leader of JYP Entertainment’s boyband 2PM, faced public outrage when a media outlet dug up his old MySpace conversations from 2005. In a correspondence with a friend, he wrote “Korea is gay” and contemplated returning back to Seattle, his hometown. The media took a typical cringey message from the MySpace days and escalated it into a controversy, leading to Jay Park leaving Korea and 2PM. Although the public had a change of heart after the circumstances surrounding the comments were revealed and even signed a petition to rejoin 2PM, JYP terminated their contract with Jay Park in 2010.

The Korean public deserves some of the blame for allowing these scandals to blow up, but it’s important to consider the cultural divide between our nations – insults aren’t taken as lightly and respect is ingrained in societal constructs. Still, these Big Three labels actively refused to stand by their constituents even when there was a clear medical reason or when a member said something as a stressed trainee facing culture shock. It’s hard to reconcile that being anything other than ruthless business and politics speaking.

ALTERNATIVE MOVEMENTS: K-RNB, K-HIP HOP

When DBSK disbanded, I temporarily left the K-pop scene in favor of greener pastures with less drama, but Korean music continued to evolve in its own way. With the restrictions on the lifestyles on K-pop idols, many aspiring musicians saw K-pop as an unappealing career choice and rightfully so. Although hip-hop had always been present in the background of the music scene, seeing a parallel rise with that of K-pop and present stylistically in groups like Big Bang, independent hip-hop artists didn’t usually go as far in their careers.

Remember Jay Park, the guy who was kicked out of JYP’s group 2PM? After a stint with dancing with his b-boy crew and doing odd jobs in Seattle, he returned to Korea to continue music. With an honest apology on his tongue and an equally apologetic audience in Korea receptive to his talent, Jay Park went from covers on his Facebook page to a multi-platinum solo EP in Korea in 2011. Now, in 2018, Jay Park runs two record labels in Korea, AOMG and H1GHR MUSIC, and recently signed to Roc Nation in America. As CEO, he has complete creative control of his music from the composition to the production to his collaborations, giving him a signature sound that sets him apart from the carefully rehearsed world of K-pop.

Jay Park wasn’t the only one seeing new popularity, although he was the one I was most familiar with because of his 2PM days. Show Me the Money, a 2012 Korean rap competition and reality show, elevated the hip-hop, rap, and R-n-B scene to the mainstream, promoting solo artists like DEAN, Heize, and Zico. People were starting to see the value in alternative, freer styles of music.

NEW GENERATION K-POP

Not everyone turned away from K-pop. In fact, the early success of the Hallyu Wave raised a generation of aspiring idols and oversaturated the industry to the point that even hardworking trainees struggled to make a name in the field. Survival shows like Produce 101, The Unit, and Who is Next: WIN appeared to give these up-and-coming artists a chance to perform and gain publicity. As industry professionals had to pick from overqualified crowds of trainees, groups expanded to include greater numbers of members – the norm was no longer 3-5 members, but now 7-12 members. Most of these artists still came from the Big Three companies, but that’s perhaps how BTS came to stand apart from the crowd.

BTS is a seven-member boyband cut from a different cloth. They are signed to a small record label outside of The Big Three called Big Hit Entertainment. Although the band’s future was less guaranteed since they came from a no-name company, they enjoyed more freedom in terms of musical direction and production; two of the band’s members, Namjoon and Yoongi, were even underground rappers who had dabbled in independent music making before joining the group, providing prior experience in the field. As a result of BTS’s autonomy, their discography departed from the rinse-and-repeat of love songs – or at least, included tracks centered around struggles they faced with authority, growing up, and lost youth along with the basic love song repertoire. Their music videos began to feature a running storyline around the members given in abstract fragments and based in literature, challenging fans to come up with theories on what the narrative was and where the narrative was heading. The members also have vibrant personalities that seemed to pop through the screen, made more evident by their active social media presence on different platforms – for example, the eldest member hosts an eating live stream, and the youngest member Jungkook often covers popular English songs on Soundcloud.

Yet most importantly, BTS comes off as authentic in a way that many Big Three artists do not. All of their members speak frankly about their issues through their music, but also in real life. Jimin doesn’t shirk away from admitting that he had an eating disorder that caused him to collapse offstage. Yoongi shared a time during his trainee years when he was too afraid to tell his company about an accident in which he could have died for fear of getting dismissed from the group. Tying together all those components with characteristically sharp K-pop choreography and visuals, you get an accurate picture of what rocketed BTS to the worldwide acclaim they enjoy today.

That’s not to say that other groups don’t compare – the members of BtoB could probably double as professional comedians alongside their music careers. My favorite girl group, Mamamoo, constantly challenges gender roles in their videos and nails live vocals. And GOT7 is definitely up there in terms of personality, diversity, and talent, with members hailing from Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Thailand, and Korea. Each of these new generation groups brings something unique to the table, and once again, the true K-pop experience is as much about the music as it is the familial bond cultivated within groups and the inspirational work ethic of each member. Seeing people my age work tirelessly towards their dreams motivates me to try harder and remember what really matters to me. Against all odds, K-pop has heart.

Jackson from GOT7 talks about changing his career path from Olympic hopeful to entertainer.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Congratulations on making it through this behemoth of a piece! I totally forgive you if your eyes glazed over some parts and you ended up skimming. All half-serious remarks aside, K-music is something near and dear to me despite its flaws. Whether or not this post discourages or encourages you to participate in K-music culture, I hope you gained some perspective into its rich history and garnered appreciation for the meaning it holds for people all over the world.

-Monica

P.S. Was this blog post a long-winded way to promote the new GOT7 single? Maybe. Listen to their newly released deep house track “Lullaby” off their third studio album, Present: YOU, by clicking here. Is R’n’B or hip-hop more your thing? DEAN’s debut EP 130 mood: TRBL showcases his soulful tenor. Jay Park recently released an album under Jay-Z’s label Roc Nation, but if you want his best songs, I’d direct you to his 2016 album Everything You Wanted.  Do you prefer the sound of real instruments? DAY6 plays alternative rock, and they have a concert coming up in Philly on November 16 – my favorites from them are You Were Beautiful, Wait, and Letting Go. Where are the female musicians? IU, dubbed as Korea’s Little Sister, sings with a sweet and lilting voice on her Alice in Wonderland-themed Chat-Shire, and Ailee is a power ballad goddess.