Response to the terrible Rolling Stone list of “Greatest” (lol) Korean Pop Songs

The discourse around that Rolling Stone list of “greatest” (lol) K-Pop songs has mostly died down and while I’m loathe to revive it, I did have a few more thoughts rattling around that I needed to write down.

There were a number of large problems with the list that go beyond just song selection and bickering over ranking. The first and biggest is the conflation of export K-Pop (BTS and BlackPink) with Korean pop music, something I’ve discussed at length over numerous episodes and posts. What exactly is it that ties the artists of the 1970s campus folk music circuit who were making songs by and for young Koreans like themselves with an act like BTS whose biggest “hits” were C-grade bubblegum pop songs written by American and European songwriters, with English nonsense lyrics, for a global audience.

The introduction says the list “spotlights artists throughout the 20th century who were the ‘idols’ of their day.” Really? Guitarist Shin Jung-Hyun is an “idol” just like one of the kids from ZB1? It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what it is K-Pop idols are actually doing and, honestly, just calls bullshit on the entire project. What ZB1 has to offer absolutely has real value and deserves to be recognized but you cannot grade it on the same scale as actual musicians. It’s apples and oranges.

I’m not saying K-Pop cannot produce good songs and good music—obviously it does. BUT that’s not the primary function of the industry and while there is overlap with domestic Korean pop music, that overlap has gotten smaller and smaller and smaller. A list like this Rolling Stone one attempts to use artists like Shin Jung-Hyun to throw a fig leaf over what is almost certainly advertorial for Hybe, while at the same time pushing the current English language media package kayfabe that “Seo Taiji invented K-Pop and then handed the crown to BTS.”

The list of important songs in K-Pop will have some fuzzy boundaries with Korean pop music, especially in the 1980s and 1990s. But as we head into the late 2010s and into the 2020s, global K-Pop has become almost completely divorced from domestic Korean pop music. Korean album sales are 99.99% fan driven (and include a large number from overseas fans) and the practice of global fan groups streaming on domestic services can also skew the metrics on streaming services like Melon. The practice of zombie hours streaming is usually a good tell—fan groups around the world can boost their favorite idols’ songs in the charts by streaming like crazy at 11 p.m. on a weeknight when normies are in bed, boosting these songs to the top of the charts only to have the ranking fall in the morning when normal users take over again.

If this list was meant to capture a snapshot of Korean popular music, why was an export K-Pop group like TXT on there, a group with very little domestic presence, rather than a song (any song) from the popular rap competition series Show Me the Money, whose songs tend to dominate normie-hours streaming. Do LeSserafim and NewJeans really have more impact on young Koreans than Be’O’s “Limousine”? Really?  

And where the fuck were the drama OST songs? “Perhaps Love” by J & Howl (2006, from Princess Hours) is a song deeply embedded into popular consciousness. There are a billion covers if you search the title. Look, I like Aespa but you’re telling me that “Next Level” is a “greater” Korean pop song than “Perhaps Love”? Yeah, okay, sure.

If they wanted to make a list of clickbaity K-Pop songs that had an impact, they should have just done that. Melon put together a decentish list chosen by Korean critics that looked at impact, global and domestic. That would have been a good starting place. There are also lists of classic Korean albums put together by Korean critics that are ranking on musical merit. This Rolling Stone list wouldn’t commit to a side and was worse off for it. How seriously are we really supposed to take a list of “greatest” Korean pop songs that puts “idols” like BTS above an “idol” like legendary guitarist Shin Jung-hyeon. It’s insulting.

But then again when the list of “experts” is extremely light on musical expertise and heavy on grift, what can you expect? 

I mean where was Park Jin-Young?

Where was 2PM?

Where was “Crooked”?????? G-Dragon is still the most influential “K-Pop” star Korea has exported. I will die on that hill.