Episode 50: The Rise and Fall of the Hip-Hop Idol
I started working on this episode in response to Tammy Kim’s ridiculous and ahistorical New Yorker article “How BTS Became One of the Most Popular Bands in History.” In particular, it was her description of K-Pop before BTS: “It was unusual for a K-Pop group to start from a base of rap and hip-hop.”
Not only had rap and hip-hop elements been present in K-Pop in one form or other since the days of Seo Taiji but in their formation, BTS strongly echoed one of the most successful boy groups of 2012: Block B. Not only was it not unusual for boy groups to be based in rap and hip-hop, it was right in line with the current trends and on top of that the aspiring rappers in BTS were part of a massive boom of teen rappers looking to make a name for themselves by any means possible. (And—as I lay out in the episode—they were nowhere near the top of the pack.)
The better young rappers in K-Pop today have been kept fairly removed from the Korean Hip-Hop scene—guys like Mark Lee from NCT. And maybe thanks to up-and-coming idol rappers like Mark, we’ll see a new style of K-Pop rap emerging as young trainees learn from their debuted seniors.
The young TOP aka Tempo aka Choi Seunghyun at rap battles and a radio station in about 2004.
Anybody interested in what’s actually popular in Korea versus what is popular among global K-Pop fans would be well served checking out Show Me The Money. I’ve played a few tracks in previous episodes like “VVS” from season 9 and “쉬어“ from season 10 but you can dial up a ton of fun content on YouTube or if you’re feeling morbid you can check out Iron in action.
I didn’t get too deeply into ToppDogg’s dysfunctional dynamics in the episode but needless to say some truly awful stories have come out in recent years. The damage done to these kids is unforgivable. Nabbing Cho PD on investment fraud has strong overtones of Al Capone and tax evasion—that said, it is astonishing how he has been erased from the “K-Pop” narrative in English, particularly in terms of hip-hop. Cho PD may have ended up in front of the Supreme Court but you cannot deny his impact and lasting influence on the early Korean hip-hop scene. If nothing else, without Cho PD, there would be no Psy. Let that sink in.
Last but definitely not least, I want to give a big thank you to Mary who runs BlockB.com and another fantastic Block B update blog for her expertise on BlockB and to AsianJunkie for tracking the ex-ToppDogg members.
The songs played are:
“Arario” by ToppDogg, live on Show Champion, March 12, 2014 and be sure to check out the fantastic MV too!
“Nan Arayo” by Seo Taiji and Boys
“Crank That” by Soulja Boy
“Break Free” by Cho PD
“2U Playa Haterz” by Cho PD (live with orchestra)
“I Love Sex” by Psy
“My Style” by Cho PD (and the MV is really cool)
“Ragga Muffin” by Stony Skunk (I couldn’t resist. I love Stony Skunk and this song.)
“Attractive” by PDIS, performed live on Inkigayo, March 16, 2008
The Dibidibidi Rap, performed by Minho from SHINee on Saturday Night Live and which is something of a running joke among SHINee and their fans.
“Buckwild” (demo) by NBK Gray and Tempo (aka TOP from BigBang)
“Who Am I” by Zico feat. Mino (from Zico on the Block)
“Freeze” by Block B (and check out the official MV!)
“Nalina” by Block B (official MV) which is apparently doing great on TikTok?
“Warrior” by B.A.P. (official MV)
“Fantastic Baby” by BigBang (official MV)
“Bounce” by the JJ Project (official MV)
“Rollin’” by the DaeNamHyup “crew”
“Baba O’Riley” by the Who
“No More Dream” by BTS (official MV)
“Very Good” by Block B (official MV)
“Follow Me” by ToppDogg (official MV)
“Really Really” by Winner (official MV)
“Love Scenario” by iKon (official MV)
“Flower Road” by BigBang
Mino’s rap from Show Me the Money (season 4, episode 2)
“Top Dog” by ToppDogg (official MV)
“My Flower” by JBJ (official MV)
“Her” by Kidoh (official MV)
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Script:
Welcome to the Idol Cast! Hit it! Our opening song day was “Arario” by ToppDogg (RIP), performed live on Show Champion March 12, 2014. If you haven’t seen ToppDogg in action, I’ll link the music video in the show notes. The theme of the track was a fusion of hip hop idol and traditional Korean and the music video showcases ToppDogg in their finest early-2010s idol “gangsta” stage wear while they dance with, around, and in between women in traditional costumes and people playing traditional instruments. The chorus translates to something like “You still don’t know me? The bad boys from the south, ToppDogg.” Well, it’s catchier in Korean.
The theme of the episode today is: whither ToppDogg because I’m guessing most people listening would not have heard of the bad boys of the South before. ToppDogg debuted just a few months after BTS in 2013 and in a lot of ways their career trajectory is the fun house mirror version of BTS. Two small companies suffering from financial problems debut similar sounding rap-focused idol groups into a crowded marketplace in 2013. One becomes globally famous and the other disappears. It’s a fascinating story and one that touches on a lot of different pieces of the K-Pop puzzle so I thought it was worth taking something of a deep dive.
I was inspired by Tammy Kim’s recent and now infamous article in the New Yorker in which she says about BTS quote “It was unusual for a K-pop group to start from a base of rap and hip-hop.” You’re about to find out just how untrue that sentence is.
Because this is my podcast we have to start a couple of decades before ToppDogg’s debut in 2013 with a man called “Cho PD” aka Cho Jong-Hoon. Cho PD was born in 1976 in Busan but his family had moved to the US when he was a teenager. By the mid-1990s he was at college studying business but after three years, in 1998, he transfers to Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts (about the same time that Park Jae-Sang aka Psy would have been there.) For anybody unfamiliar with the college, Berklee began as a small jazz school in the 1940s but by 1998 was known as the foremost college in the world for contemporary music, attracting talented musicians from around the world to study performance, songwriting, music business, and music production, among other things.
So, if you remember your idol group history, Seo Taiji and Boys had the first break out Korean rap hit in 1992 with “Nan Arayo” but while the genre had grown in popularity with young people (and elements of hip hop had taken root in teen-focused pop music via groups like H.O.T. and DEUX (pronounced “Deuce”)) in 1998 there still hadn’t been another pure rap artist to really break through to the mainstream.
I’ve talked about this on other episodes but there’s a couple of factors we need to put into context before we can understand what happened next. The first is that Korea never really had the cultural fetishization of the physical album (or physical single) that we have here in the West or that they have in Japan. One of my favorite anecdotes from Hasegawa Yohei’s memoir of living in 1990s Seoul is of him chasing after a trash truck because he spotted a vinyl album he’d been after just sitting on top of the heap of garbage. Whoever owned it had clearly been tired of listening to it so they’d simply thrown it away. Pop music was (and is) disposable. Koreans weren’t concerned with authenticity and consumed plenty of black market vinyl, cassettes, and so on; bootlegged music from America, Europe, and Japan was easier to get than official releases.
The prime example of this is the kilboard. A kilboard (a portmanteau of the Korean word for road “kil” and “Billboard”) was a bootleg cassette containing a selection of hit songs mixed and matched to give you the most bang for your won. Kim Jung Hwan’s 1996 hit “The Reason for Existence” is said to be due to its popularity on these kilboard mixes. It’s said that singers would even lobby the vendors for inclusion on the newest mixes.
What this points to is a general public attitude towards music as a consumable good that’s not tied to physical medium but rather as something that exists in a transitory state. In other words, Koreans were already primed for how music consumption would change as we headed into the 21st Century.
That leads to point two which is that Korea is about a decade ahead of America, culturally, when it comes to computers and the internet. With the collapse of the economy in the wake of the 1998 Asian Financial Crisis, one of the things to pop up were these places called PC Bangs or essentially Computer Cafes where you could hang out for hours at a very reasonable fee and do things like play games and surf the developing internet on a very high speed connection.
You also could do things like download mp3s, which took off in a big way in Korea in the late 1990s, with Samsung even offering one of the first portable mp3 players called the Yepp all the way back in 1998. Sure, it only held 10 songs but the vision was there.
The first rapper to really blow up online in America is said to be Soulja Boy in 2o06-2007 with “Crank That” but in Korea, thanks to their early adoption of the mp3, the first rapper to blow up online was... Cho PD in 1998.
After getting to Berklee, Cho PD anonymously uploaded an mp3 of a song to a rookie singers forum on a web platform called Nownuri. It got over 20,000 downloads in a single week. This anonymous singer caught the attention of the mainstream press and Cho PD was soon fielding offers from music companies. However he decided to release his 1999 debut album, In Stardom--containing both the songs that had gone viral with some new material--under his own label, called Stardom, instead. It sold over 300,000 copies. Not bad for an anonymous college student.
In Stardom holds up extremely well today. I’m not proficient enough in Korean to be able to really speak to the content of the lyrics except to say that they were very well received at the time for both Cho PD’s wordplay and the content critical of Korean society. The album was released with the Korean equivalent of a parental advisory sticker and still sold like hot cakes. “Break Free” was the single and you can hear how vibrant and fresh it still feels today, at a distance of almost 25 years.
In every way that counts, the big three of contemporary Korean popular music are not SM, YG, and JYP but Cho Yong-Pil, Seo Taiji, and Cho PD.
After Cho PD’s incredible debut on the popular music scene, he continued to build on his reputation for artistic achievements (and showing his talent for hustling) by staging a live concert with the Seoul Pops Orchestra at the famous Sejong Cultural Center--the first popular music concert to be held there--on February 22-23, 2000 and on top of that, donating the 100 million won fee he had received for appearing in an LG Electronics commercial to the venue’s development fund.
Here’s a bit of the live CD version of “2U Playa Haterz” which in a nod to Seo Taiji, famously included a sample of “Come Back Home”. The entire concert is fantastic and I believe is available on Spotify for the curious.
Appearing with Cho PD on stage were a few rappers that he had brought together under the umbrella of his Stardom label. The name was ironic, these were artists who had been kept out of the mainstream for being too edgy, too real, and not slick enough or clean enough for television. But Cho PD was signaling a different path. Here was a rapper who had become a success anonymously-without showing his face--and without the support of a major sponsor, proving you didn’t need good looks, slick dance moves, or a lot of money to reach people with your music.
Some of the artists he gathered with Stardom--which became Future Flow in 2001--were Digital Masta (who ended up signing with YG Entertainment), Ray Jay, and his old Berklee classmate: Psy.
Here’s a track from 2001, Psy’s first album PSY from the Psychoworld featuring a guest appearance from Cho PD:
The rebranding to Future Flow was a leveling up for Cho PD. He went from being an anonymous rapper to becoming Cho CEO. He had his own studio now and was branching out into funk and R&B. “My Style”, the single from 2001 album Stardom in Future Flow got rave reviews for both the sound and the creative concept of the music video--which showed cyborg humans rapping while being assembled from various plastic parts--but also because it was produced by an up and coming songwriter named Ra.D, who would later go on to produce and write not just for himself but for acts like IU and 2PM. All of this went to further solidifying Cho PD’s reputation as both a forward thinking artist and businessman.
I’ll link to the “My Style” video in the show notes. It is genuinely very cool.
But the wunderkint had overextended himself and both Future Flow and his recording career floundered. He collaborated with up and coming girl group Brown Eyed Girls in 2006 before enlisting for his mandatory military service.
While Cho PD had been known for pushing the boundaries in 2000 as an avatar of brash youth, by the time he came out of the military, he was an adult and--perhaps most importantly--no longer the hot, innovative rapper he had been a decade earlier. Not only had popular music moved on but the economy had hit a major down slump during the 2008 global financial crisis and the 100 million won paychecks for cell phone advertisements were no longer so easy to find.
In 2009, the struggling Future Flow closed up shop and Cho PD merged his business with rapper Rhymer’s label Brand New Productions to become Brand New Stardom. Rhymer brought the good will and community vibes of the Korean hip hop scene; Cho PD brought the knack for media play and his merciless ambition. From the outside it seemed like a good match--rap legend joins rap legend--but the cracks would soon begin to show.
This era was a turning point not just for Cho PD but also for what we now know as “K-Pop”. This is before the big three talent agencies were apotheosized into The Big Three and there was still something of a market free-for-all in popular music as we enter the 2010s. All signs pointed to a white hot market for idol groups but they were still literally and figuratively sharing a stage with domestic hip hop acts and non-idol singers. The physical media market may have been on a swift decline but you could still sell music… and stars. Here’s JYP at a digital media conference in 2009.
While Cho PD had been out of the game in the military, BigBang had shown in a big way that there was a market hungry for an idol group with a strong rap element so I can only assume that when Cho PD was discussing the direction of the company with Rhymer that the formation of a hip hop idol group was one of the biggest things on the table in terms of potential financial gains.
Enter the trainees. The kids coming in were all born between about 1990 and 1993 and they were from a generation who would have come up listening to that first boom of Korean hip hop from guys like Tiger JK and his Movement crew (founded in 2000) and would have been very familiar with both Cho PD and the artists he’d brought up over the years as well as the roster that Rhymer had gathered under Brand New Productions which included very respected rappers like Verbal Jint, as well as guys like Skull (half of groundbreaking Reggae duo Stony Skunk; Kush, the other half, remained at YG Entertainment).
So, it’s really easy to see how Brand New Stardom would seem like the agency for aspiring idol rappers. These weren’t pop guys. They were real rappers. But at the same time, the landscape had already changed enough around Korean hiphop and rap that it was being folded into the mainstream music industry. There was no rap agency for guys like Cho PD or Psy to have been trainees back in 1997. That’s why Tiger JK needed the Movement Crew. But now, increasingly, rap had a mainstream footprint. And because this era of the mid-to-late 2000s hadn’t yet spun off quote unquote K-pop really into its own thing yet, you could still see Cho PD himself performing an (unsuccessful) attempt at a comeback on shows like Inkigayo in 2008. The March 3, 2008, episode he performed on also featured former H.O.T. member Kangta, girl group Jewelry, dance music group 3rd Coast; and vocal diva Gummy.
To give you a taste of Cho PD in this era, when he was well into his 30s, the song he performed on Inkigayo that day infamously featured a “diss” of the then-rookies BigBang.
It had little impact on stopping the juggernaut that was (and is) BigBang, the first group that crafted the perfect synthesis of idol and hip hop. Thanks to the influence of first generation groups like H.O.T. and DEUX, many if not most idol groups would have a member designated as the “rapper” but that member rarely had any sort of ties to the hip hop scene. BigBang was different, with member T.O.P. making the rounds of the underground club scene before joining his school friend G-Dragon as a YG trainee. Here’s a bit of the young T.O.P. from a demo he recorded in 2003-2004ish with rapper NBK Gray when he (T.O.P.) would have been about 16 years old.
The group racked up some big hits in 2007 and 2008 with “Lies” and “Haru Haru,” followed by Heartbreaker, G-Dragon’s monumental solo debut in 2009. So, clearly the appetite was there for hip hop-based idols and I don’t think it’s that big of a leap to imagine that a talented, hip hop obsessed 18 year old kid like Woo Ji-Ho (soon to be known all over Asia by his stage name, Zico) would find himself doing idol-style training at Brand New Stardom with the understanding that it would lead him to a much bigger platform than he could otherwise get on his own without losing credibility or authenticity.
Like T.O.P., Zico had also been performing at underground clubs as a teenager and even recorded an independent single with his friend Kyung before they both got an offer to join Cho PD and Rhymer at Brand New Stardom in 2009. Not only did they train in the typical idol skills like dancing but as part of their training, the kids were mentored by the veteran rappers at Brand New Stardom and encouraged to release their own mixtapes and collaborate with the other trainees, as well as with their company seniors. It seems like an extremely rich creative environment. Here’s a song off of Zico’s pre-debut 2010 mixtape Zico on the Block featuring another soon-to-be-famous trainee: a kid by the name of Song Min-ho.
By 2011, the core group of trainees had been narrowed down to seven--three rappers and four vocalists, with writer-producer-wunderkint Zico as the leader. This is Block B: Zico, Park Kyung, P.O, B-Bomb, U-Kwon, Taeil, and Jaehyo. (Song Min-ho had been forced out allegedly he says because of a contract dispute between his parents and the company but don’t worry we’ll meet him again later.)
Cho PD, ever the showman, hyped up the group to the press as “the Eminem Project,” not so much for the rapper himself but what he represented (to Cho PD’s eyes, at least) as a white man succeeding in a traditionally black genre--straddling the worlds of “authentic” rap music and mainstream society. Essentially positioning the seven member Block B as the most “authentic” version of hip hop idols that Korea had ever seen.
Block B made their live debut on April 15, 2011 with “Freeze,” the official video for which was deemed “too racy” for Korean television and has since become something of an inside joke for Block B and their fans because of how over-the-top idol-y it was. I’ll link to the video in the show notes but it appears to have been shot in a striking duplicate of the infamous SM Garage set with the members decked out in their best imitation of TVXQ-at-their-height costuming and make-up.
In a vacuum, it does make sense as a marketing choice for a rookie idol group but it was a poor fit for the group Block B was becoming, as well as for their “Eminem Project” image. Their debut single and album did not do much to set the K-Pop world aflame. Even worse for Block B than a soggy launch was that they were making their debut in the wake of a major upset in their company. Brand New Stardom, an unwieldy structure from the beginning, was collapsing. By September 2011, around the time Verbal Jint’s album Go Easy was released, Rhymer would take all of his hip hop artists to a new company called Brand New Music. Cho PD remained with Block B and rebranded as simply: Stardom.
Judging from the interviews and press coverage I could find, the split appears to have been caused by personal conflict between Cho PD and Rhymer… and possibly also Rhymer’s good friend Verbal Jint, who apparently was known to dislike Cho PD intensely. Not an uncommon sentiment judging by the sheer amount of beefs Cho PD seems to have gotten himself into for absolutely no reason. But the show must go on.
Block B came back in a big way with “Nalina” in February 2012, their first big hit, with a sound and style that would become their trademark. Written by Zico and produced by Delly Boi, it’s a loose, energetic, and extremely fun party song with an infectious hook. No matter what your native language, you can’t help but sing along to the chorus: Goo goo ga ga goo goo ga ga. This streak of hits would continue on into the future with “Nillili Mambo”, “Very Good”, “Jackpot”, “Her”, “Toy”, “Yesterday”... before they would go on hiatus as a group.
Seems like your typical K-Pop group trajectory, right? Well, buckle up, friends, we’re just getting started.
Let’s pause right here in 2012 and take a look around at “K-Pop” generally. Only four years removed from when Cho PD was performing next to H.O.T.’s Kangta on Inkigayo the entire landscape has changed. Not only do you have a flood of new debuting idol groups, you also have a flood of hip hop entering into the idol sphere. There’s the explosive debut of B.A.P. with “Warrior”; YG Entertainment’s BigBang comes back in a huge way with Alive and especially their global, monster hit “Fantastic Baby”; M.I.B. had a breakthrough hit with “Celebrate”; Psy released “Gangnam Style”; there’s the debuts of BtoB, C-Clown, and Rhymer’s new boy group: Phantom; JYP put forward the JJ Project (the members would become part of GOT7); and, most importantly, in June 2012, the K-Pop focused channel MNET begins airing the first season of a rap themed competition/reality show called Show Me the Money.
Show Me The Money has young rappers go head to head in battles while experienced rappers act as mentors, judges, and sometimes even collaborators. It remains extremely popular domestically in Korea. At the time I’m writing this, in summer 2022, there are still fully 8 hits from the most recent season, season 10, which aired in 2021, sitting in the top songs of 2022 according to the new Circle chart and 7 songs either by or featuring the winner of season 10, rapper Be`O.
YG Entertainment in this era was hoovering up mid-career acts snapping up Psy in 2010 and Epik High in 2012 (they’d also get first generation group Sechs Kies in 2016), which means rap-focused YG trainees would have had the benefit of working closely with not just their immediate seniors like G-Dragon, T.O.P., and CL, but also guys like Tablo from Epik High, as well as relative old timers like Teddy from 1990s hip hop group 1Tyme and Kush from Stony Skunk (who I mentioned earlier). That crop of YG trainees included a talented kid named Bobby, who would end up in rap focused group iKon and the guy I mentioned earlier who almost ended up in Block B: Song Min-ho, who would debut as “Mino” in 2014 as part of a group called Winner. Both Bobby and Mino would go on to compete and do extremely well on Show Me the Money, with Bobby winning Season 3 and Mino as the runner up of season 4. He would be the last idol rapper to make it that far.
Around this time, 2012, you also had a small company called BigHit Entertainment, an offshoot of JYP, preparing to launch their own hip hop boy group, built around a kid calling himself “Rap Monster.”
“Rap Monster” aka Kim Nam-joon had been a precocious tween hanging out on rap message boards online. Fully two years younger than Zico, he was scouted to join BigHit Entertainment as a trainee in 2010 when he would only have been about 16 years old.
Unlike Brand New Stardom or YG Entertainment, BigHit was not a rap or hip hop focused label or even known for having strong ties to the domestic hip hop scene which means that unlike Zico or Mino, the young Rap Monster would not have had the benefit of training with or getting direct mentorship from guys who knew the scene like Skull, Tablo, or Verbal Jint. BigHit, if known for anything, was known for… well, not having much success. Back in 2010 they were hanging to solvency thanks to JYP Entertainment's loan of vocal group 2AM and, as far as I can tell, BigHit’s plan moving forward at that time was to capitalize on the idol wave by gathering up a bunch of new trainees and then debuting a girl group followed by a boy group. The girl group, GLAM, would debut in 2012. The boy group, yes, Bangtan Sonyendan, aka BTS, would debut in 2013 and would end up being built around that precocious teen--Rap Monster.
Teen Rap Monster was a member of a hip hop “crew” (read that in scare quotes) of aspiring rappers calling themselves DaeNamHyup, and because this “crew” has gained mythic significance in fandom circles, I’d like listeners to keep in mind that Rap Monster and his friends formed this “crew” when they were in middle school. These guys were not out at the clubs. They were making rap songs in their nice middle class bedrooms.
Here’s a song called “Rollin’” from the “crew” featuring Supreme Boi, Kyum2, Marvel J, and Rap Monster.
Is it good? Well, he sounds like a precocious teen sitting around in his bedroom. Does it show promise? Sure. And you can understand the appeal for a young company without a strong reputation like BigHit to snag themselves a wunderkint rapper just like YG did with G-Dragon and Brand New Stardom had done with Zico.
DaeNamHyup would later rebrand themselves as the Rockbottom Crew (you can hear them get a shout out in BTS member J-Hope’s first mixtape, Hope World) and the most famous--or rather infamous--member outside of Rap Monster is the late rapper Iron who was the runner up to iKon’s Bobby on season three of Show Me The Money. (I won’t go into Iron’s troubled history, which you can google although… trigger warning for domestic violence.) The other members of note include Supreme Boi and Kidoh, both of whom would join Rap Monster and the late, troubled Iron as BigHit trainees. Supreme Boi would end up becoming one of BigHit’s in-house producers (he’s currently working with their girl group LeSserafim) but let’s look at what happened to DaeNamHyup’s Kidoh.
Well, Kidoh abruptly leaves BigHit for Cho PD’s Stardom in the fall of 2012 in a true out of the frying pan into the fire situation and debuts a few months after BTS in 2013 as part of a new Stardom group called ToppDogg.
Record scratch. Freeze frame. It can’t be that easy, can it? Two members of the same teen “crew” debuting as idols in rival groups in 2013? Let’s review how we got here.
2009 - Zico is snapped up by Brand New Stardom
2010 - Rap Monster goes to BigHit, brings his “crew” with him
2011 - Block B debuts
Later in 2011 - Rhymer abruptly breaks with Cho PD for unknown reasons
Early 2012 - Block B have a breakthrough with “Nalina”
Summer 2012 - BigHit’s girl group GLAM debuts
Fall 2012 - Block B have an even bigger hit with “Nillili Mambo”
Also Fall 2012 - rumors spread that one of the members of GLAM is a sasaeng or stalker fan of Super Junior member Leeteuk and it turns into a major scandal and she’s forced to quit dealing a major blow to the struggling BigHit who really needed a success.
ALSO Fall 2012 - It’s around this time Kidoh leaves the struggle bus at BigHit for the greener rap pastures at Stardom.
January 2013 - Block B, as a group sues Stardom for unpaid wages.
*record scratch* Wait whaaaat?
Yes, that’s right Kidoh jumps ship from one troubled company to another that turns out to be, somehow, in even worse shape.
So, in January 2013, Block B filed an injunction against Cho PD’s Stardom to end their contract claiming that not only had they not been paid, not only had they (and especially member P.O’s family) been supplying everything themselves, but also that the group members’ parents had been scammed out of 70 million won by the CEO of Stardom. Stardom claims it’s all a big misunderstanding, that the members are “puppets” to some outside force, and essentially saying, “CEO him? We don’t even know him!”
In March of 2013, Cho PD and Stardom are sued by concert production company Shownote for taking advance money for a Block B concert tour that clearly isn’t happening.
Then in May, the CEO-not-a-CEO is found dead in his basement.
On June 7, Block B’s lawsuit is tossed out of court for insufficient evidence but the group vows to fight on.
On June 13, BigHit’s 7 member boy group in the style of Block B debuts.
In August, Stardom is forced to pay back the advance fee to Shownote and Block B announces they are moving to new management, a company formed specifically for them called Seven Seasons.
On October 1, Block B, under new management, gets their first chart topping album with Very Good and leaves our story on a high note.
And then on October 23, 2013, Stardom debuts the massive 13-member rap focused boy group ToppDogg. The members were PGoon, SeoGoong, Jenissi, our boy Kidoh, Hansol, Sangdo, A-tom, Xero, Nakta, Yano, Gohn, Hojoon, and B-Joo.
And here’s where we get to the meat of the episode.
In 2012 the market was absolutely flooded with new idol groups. By 2013 the hip hop boy group concept was no longer fresh and exciting. And as you get more and more kids entering the idol world--fueled in large part by the money rolling into the export idol business--the ties to not only the Korean hip hop community but also what the domestic Korean audience is actually listening to begin to snap.
If you check the digital songs charts from Gaon aka Circle from 2010-2012, you’ll see idols like BigBang, 2NE1, Girls Generation, Wonder Girls, T-ara, and Beast. But in 2013? The highest charting groups aren’t those “Big 3” idols with the high album sales, it’s the sexy girls groups: Sistar from Starship and 4Minute from Cube. And that trend continues to this day with only the occasional girl group song and even more occasionally the odd boy group song breaking through to what normal Korean people are listening to.
And those boy groups? Winner (featuring our almost Block B member Mino); iKon (featuring winner of Season 3 Show Me the Money, Bobby); and, of course, BigBang. Not to mention Zico’s own fantastic solo work which is very popular in its own right.
Poor ToppDogg with its massive-at-the-time 13 members was left without a unique concept or even a clear artistic vision. And as the market got more and more saturated I think you begin to see the real limits of what idol rappers can do without those ties to the Korean hip hop community. We’d see idol rappers, including members of ToppDogg, try and try again at Show Me the Money only to wipe out embarrassingly in the early audition rounds.
In an extremely embarrassing turn for the lads in ToppDogg, Mino even calls them out during season four, in 2015, saying (not my translation):
“Topp Dogg Evol Kidoh
Candle Yano Shiho
PD Hyung rhymer hyung all missed me
They're having a hard time
Make your kids copy rap more
if you want to put them with me”
(At which point the camera cuts to Zico cracking up, which, you know, fair. By that point he’s definitely earned it.)
Despite Mino’s pointed diss, I don’t think ToppDogg’s rappers were untalented but it is true that they didn’t have the grounding in the hip hop scene like their immediate seniors in Block B had had. Still, ToppDogg put out some great tunes. I’m particularly fond of the Hallyu-themed “Arario” which I played at the top of the episode and the futuristic sci-fi classical music themed “Amadeus” is also great. Like their classmates BTS at the time, ToppDogg were a perfectly serviceable mid tier hip hop themed boy group. They just had one major problem--they were managed by Stardom.
ToppDogg fans were rightly furious at what they perceived as poor management as ToppDogg were trotted out for a grinding world tour of first Japan in 2014 and then off to the United States and Europe in early 2015. Meanwhile they had no new releases or Korean television appearances.
Then in July 2015, Stardom merged with a company called Hunus Entertainment, which from what I can tell was the brand new entertainment division of Hunus Holdings, a company dealing in the import and export of industrial chemicals. Nobody was missing a chance to get into the booming idol market and perhaps the industrial chemicals guys, not being from the music industry, were unaware of Cho PD’s reputation.
They would soon find out.
Our boy Kidoh and another member, Gohn, both used the merger as a chance to get out of their contracts, allegedly suing for freedom. Although Hunus/Stardom claimed never to have received any papers, the two parted ways with the company at that time. And ToppDogg limped along through 2015 into 2016, dropping member Jenissi along the way as he also ran for the exit door, and then as we get into 2017, the members scatter into various reality competition shows. With A-Tom even re-debuting as part of JBJ, one of my favorite of the short lived Produce 101 units.
ToppDogg would reform as a five-member group, Xeno-T, in 2018 before officially disbanding for good in 2021.
And what about Cho PD? Well he gets accused of having pocketed a large sum of money from both ToppDogg’s 2014 Japan tour as well as a nice chunk of change from the merger with Hunus and he becomes embroiled in a legal dispute with Hunus over those funds before finally being convicted of fraud in late 2018.
To put things in perspective, let’s look at what ToppDogg’s 2013 classmates, the now globally famous BTS had been up to. Well, they had done a reality show on MNET where they go to America to study rap (which is actually a very fun watch if you can find it) and were plugging along doing pretty well in that tranche of mid-tier groups alongside ToppDogg and then as 2014 comes to to an end, BigHit, their company, gets hit with a massive scandal of their own. Do you remember their girl group GLAM, the ones who had had the member who was the sasaeng stalker fan? Well, one of the other members had been outed as trying to blackmail actor Lee Byung Hun--you might remember him from the G.I.Joe movies--and in January 2015 she was sentenced to prison. GLAM disbanded.
2015 would see BTS reach their artistic high point with the excellent The Best Moment in Life parts one and two but behind the scenes BigHit was struggling with both the loss of one of their two tentpole groups as well as the negative publicity associated with having a BitHit idol sentenced to prison for blackmail. And things were about to get even worse.
BigHit was accused of manipulating sales numbers because there appeared to have been an unexplained and very sudden bump in sales for The Best Moment in Life in the spring of 2015. The suspicion is deepened by the fact that BTS’s sales numbers are bigger than superstars BigBang who by every other metric--including personal lived experience--were dominating popular music that year with their groundbreaking M.A.D.E. series. BigHit has denied the accusations.
And then, like their 2013 classmates ToppDogg, BTS is also trotted out on a cash grab American tour in fall 2015 and one that gets their own fandom furious over mismanagement. The second rate American promoter that BigHit partnered with in 2015 oversold venues, didn’t deliver on the expensive VIP packages, had some weird tie-in with a fashion company that involved mandatory purchase of a T-shirt, and apparently neither they nor the group told fans that BTS was only going to be performing four songs. Fans were furious. The entire spectacle was massively unprofessional, even by K-Pop standards.
And then in December 2015, BigHit’s own wunderkint--Rap Monster--is called out for plagiarism. He issues a non-apology apology explaining that he often copied and pasted interesting phrases into his notes app on his phone and, oops, sometimes he loses track of what is his and what isn’t.
BTS and BigHit enter 2016 in a better position than ToppDogg and Hunus/Stardom but only by the grace of BigHit’s personal connections to massive entertainment conglomerate and organizers of the KCON convention: CJ ENM (BigHit founder Bang PD’s cousin is the founder of gaming company Netmarble of which CJ ENM is a major stakeholder) and the group spends most of 2016 grinding on the road before coming back in October with their answer to both the K-Pop tropical house trend and Vixx’s literary concepts: “Blood Sweat and Tears.” From which we can date the modern era of BTS.
So whither ToppDogg? The boys from the South have mostly scattered to the winds. Their group is still fondly remembered by fans but has otherwise been lost to the mists of time. Even Cho PD is barely mentioned these days.
What I find so fascinating about this story--and especially the similarities with BTS--is that it just illustrates so clearly the massive rush to cash in on international, global, export K-Pop in the early 2010s and how few checks and balances there were on the industry at the time. The bad side of that is obviously the exploitation of the idols themselves and of the fans. The good side is that the playing field was essentially wide open to anybody who could assemble a team--whether they were a washed up 1990s back dancer or an arms manufacturing company. It took money, sure, but the bar to entry was far lower in 2013 than it is today.
Of course, it may just be coincidence but that golden era of about 2010-2012 came to an end around the same time as BTS began their global rise in 2017-2018. Boy groups that had previously dominated the scene went on hiatus for mandatory military service or simply disbanded as their seven year contracts came to an end and the members wanted to pursue other career paths: BigBang, SHINee, BAP, 2PM, Beast/Infinite, Teen Top, VIXX, and, of course, Block B.
The sums of money needed to play the game are now too large for the underground-adjacent characters of the 2000s to think about fielding a new idol group and on top of that the burden of representing Korea on the global stage means idols must project a squeaky clean image which for most new generation idols means keeping a pretty big distance from the Korean hip hop scene. As the 2010s came to a close you definitely start to see fewer of the types of scandals that plagued BigHit and Stardom hit the mainstream press but that doesn’t mean these companies are all clean. The damage done to former idols is very, very real. Anybody looking into K-Pop as an industry should be aware of the murky roots lurking beneath the glossy surface presented at the United Nations and the White House.
We’ll go out with a song from our guy Kidoh, who I became very fond of while researching for this episode. Kidoh joined up with his old crew--including Supreme Boi but minus Rap Monster--for some international promotions in 2016 and seemed set to launch himself on a nice solo career before getting booked for marijuana with the late, troubled Iron (again, just google him) and another petty thug friend in 2016. Song titles like “Weed You” hinting perhaps at their extracurricular activities.
Here’s Kidoh with 2017 digital single, “Her”.