4. K-pop 'Explained'
I tried to write this while making pasta, and I ended up not finishing this on time and overcooking my pasta.
When I first started talking to people about what I wanted this newsletter to be, Will recommended an episode of Vox’s Netflix series, Explained, all about K-pop.
But he also warned me that it wasn’t as strong as a well-researched mini-doc on the subject could be. A Google search tells me that others felt the same: “…how does someone doing research into kpop not know that DSP was part of the Big 3 before YG?” one Reddit user asked; a separate Reddit thread points to a Radiolab episode titled “K-poparazzi” (that I’ve now added to my queue to listen to).
I made the mistake of trying to watch Vox’s Explained episode on K-pop while making dinner the other night, but one thing I forgot to account for is that there would be some subtitles to read.
And, per usual, I got very, very distracted by this dazzling world of music and dance.
“People will talk about K-pop as a music genre,” journalist (and one of my former freelancers!) Tamar Herman says in the episode. “It’s not really a music genre. It’s a music idea.”
So… OK. We started this newsletter series with Steph and Minh telling me that K-pop wasn’t about the music. Tamar says it’s about an “idea.” I’m positive it’s all of those things (and more)… but what does a “music idea” even mean?
The Explained episode traces the roots of K-pop as we know it today to the ‘90s with Seo Taiji and Boys, a group largely credited with laying the foundation for what we know of K-pop today: they included English into their lyrics, rapped, and blended various elements of hip hop, rock, and techno into their music. They also made dancing a focal point of their performances.
Here’s Seo Taiji and Boys in 1992, making their debut on a televised talent show:
They received low scores for their performance. I can’t understand Korean, so I can’t say this for sure, but the YouTube comments tell me that the critique from the judges wasn’t all bad. “One judge said that it has a nice rythym [sic], the next commented on how he had a story to tell and it was a new unique story and then one commented about how he has created a new style because it wasn't strictly rap but it had some alternative and pop in there as well and that it was truly unique,” one commenter wrote.
Overwhelmingly, in the comments, people all agree on one similar sentiment: This was the birth of K-pop.
In subsequent years, Seo Taiji and Boys’ sound and styles shifted through different phases of experimentation. In 1993 while promoting their second album, they were banned from KBS-TV because the members sported earrings, ripped jeans and dreadlocks.
By 1995, the group pioneered what I’ve seen many call the “snowboard look.” Here’s Seo Taiji and Boys that year with “Come Back Home”:
It’s hard to miss the cultures that inspired this, and the impact a performance like this would further have on K-pop as a whole.
Scratch that – not just K-pop. On Korea as a whole, according to Vice:
The group not only shook things up with their sound and look, they challenged the status quo in their lyrics as well, shouting the frustrations of young people and pushing the boundaries of pop music in their country. They were met with pushback from the industry and the older generation, often banned from TV broadcasts, and even accused of sneaking satanic messages in their songs to brainwash young people. But the group and their fans pushed right back, eventually changing censorship laws and industry standards.
Seo Taiji and Boys weren’t just making music to make it; they were using music to broadcast their own critiques of society.
Here’s BTS performing “Come Back Home” more than a decade later with updated lyrics to reflect the frustrations of young people today – which, according to the handful of think pieces I’ve read, aren’t too different from how young people felt when Seo Taiji and Boys sang about it:
So much of learning about these roots of K-pop have led me to understand part of what makes it so different from the boy bands of my own childhood. Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC largely sang about love and parties, and not that Seo Taiji and Boys didn’t sing about that too, but I wasn’t used to my boy band pop groups criticizing society through their lyrics. Those kinds of messages felt reserved for the more “edgy” pop-punk era of the early 2000s.
Seo Taiji and Boys disbanded in 1996. Seo Taiji went solo. “The Boys,” Lee Juno and Yang Hyun-suk, took slightly different paths: in 2017, Lee Juno was found guilty of both fraud and sexual assault, while Yang Hyun-suk went on to establish YG Entertainment, one of the biggest record companies in South Korea.
Next week: YG Entertainment and the “Big 3”