Some Notes on K-Pop History

I’d been talking to a friend about some of the recent happenings online. She said, “Most kpop stans literally only care about lore and they don't care if it's literally true or not. It's why the posts of yours that get the most engagement are the ones that directly/sharply challenge lore, rather than the straightforward ones that describe early kpop history.”

And it’s true. 

With the outlier of the translation posts I did of Kita Koji’s memoirs which have been very popular in the wake of the Johnny Kitagawa scandal, the rest of my most popular posts are all “challenging the lore.”

* K-Pop Is Not Popular in America

* Johnny’s & Associates Paved the Way

* On Penlights and Light Sticks

Challenging the lore is tricky and can lead to some truly massive pile-ons from upset fans who don’t want you to break kayfabe. The truth is mundane and cynical to the realities of show business; Lore is magical and sacred. The truth involves things like vanity songwriting credits, ghost producers, and a profit motive. That when an idol says, “I love you” to his or her fans, it could be underlaid with a seething hatred. Or fear. It’s understandable that most fans don’t want to think about these things.

But that doesn’t excuse the journalists and academics who should be held to a higher standard than “reinforcing stan lore.” But either they’re stans themselves or they know what my friend pointed out about lore and are happy to spew nonsense for clicks.

There’s the recent piece on Grammy.com written by the mysterious “Bora” (which coincidentally is also the nickname of a prominent quasi-official BTS fan account) that is essentially an attempt at reputation laundering for BTS, trying to explicitly link the group to Black Americans and hip hop as a way of “proving” that BTS is authentic. The way the author attempts to accomplish this is by retconning Seo Taiji to be a kind of mythic figure because in this particular strain of lore it’s received wisdom that “SEO TAIJI INVENTED K-POP THEN PASSED THE CROWN TO BTS.” The bigger and more authentic Seo Taiji is, the more authentic BTS becomes.

The author combines some actual history—the Club Moonlight scene was real and influential—with some slight of hand misinformation on early K-Pop history to make it seem like Seo Taiji was an originator of the scene:

While hip-hop was largely inaccessible to Koreans in the 1990s, there were always dedicated Korean listeners. This young, niche community consisted of members like Seo Taiji, who brought rap dance to the public and became K-pop's first stars. 

Seo Taiji and Boys reportedly learned how to dance from Black American soldiers at Moon Night. (Yang Hyun-suk, who later on became the founder of YGE, and Lee Juno were the "and Boys" component of the trio.) Their example laid the groundwork for the second generation of K-pop stars. 

This is ground I cover in Episode 59 but Seo Taiji was not a regular at Club Moonlight. He encountered hip hop dance when he happened across Club Moonlight regular Park Nam Jung and his backing dancers performing one night and asked one of those dancers—Yang Hyun Suk—to teach him how to do it.

But it’s important for “lore” to establish this Seo Taiji link to the scene at Club Moonlight. And Park Nam Jung has been written out of the K-Pop narrative in English because he is inconvenient. A teen idol doing Club Moonlight dances on television before Seo Taiji cannot exist in the lore, so therefore he doesn’t exist.

Seo Taiji and Boys' 1992 performance of "난 알아요 (I Know)" on a competitive TV show struck a chord with the nation's youth, effectively introducing hip-hop to the general public. The performance also filled a capacious hole left in the Korean music industry after the roll back of Emergency Measure No. 9 (which only allowed patriotic or "healthy" songs to be broadcast), which banned hundreds of songs from the likes of Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash and Eric Clapton. Therein, Seo and company brought a new sound to the previously restricted airwaves. 

In the Grammy.com article, Seo Taiji becomes not only the touchstone of authentic hip hop transmitted directly from the Black G.I.s at Club Moonlight but he’s also depicted as a rebel, breaking through the wall of Emergency Measure No. 9, and bringing the Gospel of hip hop to a grateful Korean public. 
Again, the truth is a lot more complicated. There was Hyun Jin-Young for one thing, who gets a brief mention in the article as “the first K-Pop solo artist,” which is not only not true (see also Park Nam Jung, as well as Kim Wan Sun, etc. etc.) but massively underplays his impact. I wrote more on that over here. The conflation of the massive but consumerist teen hysteria surrounding 난 알아요 (I Know) with broad populist political activism is another bit of rhetorical slight of hand.

The article then jumps from this domestic scene of the 1990s to how RM (formerly “Rap Monster”) learned about hip hop (read: American hip hop) online.

Online, Koreans could explore hip-hop even further. In BTS’ book, Beyond The Story, RM recounted learning  about hip-hop through interviews and documentaries about rappers posted on YouTube as a teen. His interest in hip-hop would later cause a ripple effect that would lead him to his current position in BTS.

What this recounting leaves out is the ground I cover in my episode 50. Yes, it’s true that hip-hop was spread online but hip-hop had also become domestic. Cho PD, Stony Skunk, Tiger JK, Psy… this was beyond online. Kids and teenagers could even see them on television music shows.

If you look back at early BTS interviews, before they pivoted to the current lore, they mention these guys as inspirations. 

Because I never miss a chance to play this song, the song that inspired a young Suga:

(Mentions of Stony Skunk in the Grammy.com article: 0)

So then we move from the “rap dance” era (mentions of Deux or Clon in the article: 0) to 2003 which is the date given as the “the start of the second generation” with no further context.

By the second generation of K-pop, which roughly begins in 2003, the days of "rap dance" had fizzled out in favor of a distinct K-pop sound. However, hip-hop’s presence in the genre remains in the form of creating a designated rapper in each idol group. 

Because for this Lore to make sense, you have to ignore that the second generation begins with S.M. Entertainment’s premiere boy group TVXQ and that they had nothing to do with hip hop. I covered their early years extensively in a series of episodes I just released but they worked in the SMP sound and style in Korea as well as the Avex R&B ballad style in Japan. TVXQ were not particularly associated with hip hop at all. In fact, S.M. Entertainment famously swore off any ties to the hip hop scene after Hyun Jin Young caused them some massive financial difficulties. 

Hip hop re-enters K-Pop with BigBang in 2006 (one throwaway mention in the article as the group G-Dragon is associated with) and again see Episode 50 for more details on this. But it’s with BigBang’s success that you start to see the dedicated rapper position really take hold and then once you get to 2011-2012 there’s a massive boom of these hip hop idol groups, especially the very popular Block B and their wunderkind main rapper: Zico. When BTS debut in 2013, they are essentially a knockoff Block B with RM as the knockoff Zico.

Then, rather than discussing Korean rappers or the Korean hip hop scene, the article pivots to linking Black American rappers with K-Pop groups as the true marker of legitimacy for those K-Pop groups.

One group in particular has a slew of hip-hop collaborations – BTS. It doesn’t come with much surprise, since the septet’s CEO has openly stated "Black music is the base" of their musical identity. BTS and its members have collaborated with the likes of Nicki Minaj, J.Cole, Wale, Desiigner, Juice WRLD, and Lil Nas X (with whom they performed at the 2020 GRAMMYs). Recently, Jungkook, the youngest member of the group, made his solo debut with the song "Seven" featuring Southern rapper, Latto. The song hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.

“One group in particular”... and here we get to the actual point of this article. Trying to build a case for BTS as authentic hip hop rather than what they actually are: a bog standard K-Pop boy group that cycles through “concepts” as assigned by the company. (Which is not to imply that their execution of those concepts is bad; I happen to really like their Block B knockoff era.)

You can make up your own minds about the quality of these touted “collaborations” but the framing here is what caught my eye. The collaboration with the American act is taken as more legitimizing than say, for example, performing well on domestic hip hop competition show Show Me The Money, on which most idol rappers wipe out early, or idol collaborations with actual Korean artists. The author spends a lot of time on J-Hope’s soggy collaboration with soggy American pop singer Becky G on a ill-advised cover of “Chicken Noodle Soup” but neglects his collaboration with Crush, which even to my anti-BTS biased ear, is not only far more listenable but was also much better received.

When it comes right down it, why should a Korean idol group be expected to be fully conversant in and tied into mainstream American popular music? 

The article ends: 

Over the past three decades, hip-hop has become part of Korea’s public consciousness resulting in the K-pop we see and hear today. The spark that Black American GIs, Seo Taiji, and hip-hop-loving Korean youth lit has exploded into a billion dollar industry. Although it can come at the cost of misappropriation and well-meaning appreciation, it ultimately shows the influence of hip-hop and Black popular music around the world.

Does it though? Does it? 

One might argue (and I have) that rather than this Lore of SEO TAIJI INVENTED K-POP AND HANDED THE CROWN TO BTS, “K-Pop” is more correctly seen as coming from the domestication of the Japanese idol group format with H.O.T. (first generation K-Pop) and then a rebirth of the format with TVXQ (second generation K-Pop), followed by a consolidation of the major idol group companies into a K-Pop guild in response to the TVXQ lawsuit (third generation). And then a further consolidation under Hybe and pivoting to data mining fans and loot boxing (fourth generation).

Which is a nice segue to me reading the most recent post from Patrick St. Michel, and seeing that he pointed to a post from a well known K-Pop Journalist that theorized the generations of K-Pop were… not that: 

K-pop as we know it began in the late 1990s, and there have been a series of eras that have defined the music industry. Typically, until around the early 2000s we were operating in the first generation, the second generation took off in the late 2000s, and the third generation arrived in the mid 2010s. There’s usually been some overlap, and generation demarcations are rarely precise. But by general consensus, we are now in the 4th generation and soon to be, but not yet, shifting into the fifth generation.

A lot of people have different definitions of what makes a K-pop generation. The most popular definition, though one I’ve never been satisfied with, is the nature of music. To others, it’s based around the artists coming out of different entertainment companies, because if the biggest players are all getting competitive around new acts, it’s likely a sign there’s a shift in the winds. To me, it’s pretty straightforward: generational change in K-pop is based on technological advancements.

I’m not going to say technology is not a good demarcator but the broad timeline the author lays out is pretty wildly ahistorical:

First gen: analog/broadcast (localized to Asia)

This overlooks the role of the early Internet in organizing fan communities both in Korea and abroad, as well as the very important role of the global diaspora. When Rain sold out Madison Square Garden in 2006, it wasn’t because of analog/broadcast media in Asia but because the diaspora (and fellow travelers like myself) were able to keep up with what was popular in Korea via the Internet.

Second gen: digital content/start of YouTube (Begins global growth)

Not sure what this is pointing to exactly. The author earlier says “late 2000s” which would maybe point to the era kicked off by Wonder Girls in the United States with “Nobody”? With “global” here meaning “America”? This overlooks essentially an entire decade where apparently nothing happened except analog broadcast television in Asia?? Or maybe the author means 2006 when BigBang first popped up with the first-of-its-kind online reality show documenting their formation? Or maybe the author means 1998 when Cho PD had the first purely online hit with “Break Free”?

Third Gen: Era of social media and digital streaming platforms (DSPs) (Global growth takes off)

Again, fuzzy boundaries here. Is this the era of global fans whipping votes via fan groups on places like FaceBook for things like BigBang at the European MTV Awards in 2011? Psy going global thanks to Twitter in 2012? The era of global fan armys competing for American Spotify streaming records and “Billboard All Kills” which really kicks off post-BTS in 2018 or so? 

Fourth Gen: Shortform video (ie Tiktok/Reels), direct engagement (ie Bubble/LYSN/Weverse) with artists, world tours, and creative IP content are defining features. The corona-19 pandemic is also a major influencer, but is totally different than other generations so not comparable.

Fourth generation… okay, sure. I’ll take it. This is basically where we are today with IP farming and attempting to funnel fans into paid engagements via apps like Weverse. The author then goes on to discuss tech and the Fifth Generation of K-Pop.

But again, what struck me was this reframing and over simplification of early K-Pop history in an attempt to boost the Lore—in this case, that K-Pop = Tech. In order to create a linear narrative, the 1990s are retconned as “analog” and the 1980s completely erased. In this retelling fans of H.O.T. were only able to consume the group via their television screens or in person at concerts. The world depicted in Reply 1997 where fans were shown writing H.O.T. fanfiction online must be erased. Cho PD’s cracking open the online music market in 1998 must be erased. The popularity of earlier acts like H.O.T. and TVXQ and Rain in places like the United States is erased.

But who cares about history and domestic context, right? All hail the Lore.