K-Pop fans are not Music fans
As I’ve been working on my script for the next part of my BigBang series (the last part of which came out a year ago), one of the themes that has started to pop up is that K-Pop fans are not necessarily music fans.
Here’s an example, I’ve been digging through old, contemporaneous reviews of BigBang’s material from forums and, in 2010, when the song was released, music bloggers in Korea clocked GD & TOP’s “High High” as a riff on the Ghettotech genre. (Anyone for Ass and Titties?) If you understand that, then you understand why the song ends with a gleeful chant of GHETTO ELECTRO. They like Ghettotech! Who doesn’t?!
This is how the song has been introduced to current K-Pop fans by “K-Pop Experts” in Billboard:
“High High” as GD&TOP (2011)
T.O.P and G-Dragon joined together in 2011 to form BIGBANG sub-unit GD&TOP and this team’s work has featured some of T.O.P’s most colorful moments as a performer. If “Turn It Up” introduced T.O.P’s swaggering mannerisms, “High High” brought it to a new level with his repetitive raps on this pump up electropop jam. Plus, his chant of “G-H-E-T-T-O E-L-E-C-T-R-O” remains one of the most catchy and baffling moments of Bigbang’s career.
Is it a baffling coda to a “pump up electropop jam” released in 2011 or is it a gleeful call out to the Ghettotech genre released in 2010? I suppose it depends on your point of view.
The move in music writing away from critical expertise and opinion to following a narrative storyline isn’t unique to K-Pop (see also the entire genre of Taylor Swift writing) but K-Pop in this era was what I was focused on so that’s what I’ll talk about.
One of the reasons BigBang was well received when they crossed over to the West in the early 2010s is because they were introduced as artists, not idols. First TOP then Taeyang were serviced to the iTunes store—which young folks today need to understand was as critical to mainstream circulation in 2010 as Spotify is today—as R&B and Hip-Hop. Taeyang’s Solar even hit the top of the charts and it was a novel enough accomplishment to earn a write-up in Time magazine:
Taeyang, who is better known in South Korea as the voice of the Korean boy band Big Bang, released his first solo album, Solar, online last month. It hit No. 2 on iTunes’ R&B sales charts in the U.S. and No. 1 in Canada — a first for an Asian artist. “In the beginning, it was hard to believe I had fans buying my album so far away,” says Taeyang, whose name means “sun” in Korean. He says he didn’t do any promotion in North America for the album, which was recorded in Korean and targeted fans in South Korea and Japan. “The world is smaller now.”
Taeyang and BigBang were at the forefront of this short boom in Korean music—not K-Pop—having a moment in the US in the early 2010s. This brief window included not only the non-K-Pop idol Psy’s bombastic global hit “Gangnam Style” but also boutique label Light in the Attic’s loving retrospective of legendary Korean guitarist Shin Joong Hyun (2011); the Seoulsonic rock tour (long since defunct); legendary indie acts like Crying Nut invited to SXSW; Diplo (pre-allegations) was sending tracks to G-Dragon and TOP; Lady Gaga tapped Crayon Pop to open for her… there was a whole boom that fizzled out and changed into the K-Pop ecosystem we have here today in which K-Pop has divorced itself from music.
I’m not very active on social media but I do scroll through comments and most of what I see is fans bickering about sliced and diced metrics—it used to be YouTube views but now it’s Spotify—or accusing each other’s favorite idols of various crimes real and imagined. Ugly? Gnarly. Plagiarist? Gnarly. Industry Plant? Gnarly. Sex pest? Gnarly. DUI? Gnarly. Tax fraud? Gnarly.
I wrote about this last year but nothing in 2024 was a bigger jolt to K-Pop than the return of G-Dragon and while that’s great for me, personally, it’s not a great sign for the industry, musically, if the big story is the return of a veteran act. IP farming may be the wave of the future but it’s not one I’ll be listening to. Two of the biggest pop hits of the year in Korea are “Golden” and “Iris Out,” neither of which is from the idol industry. “Golden” is basically a cartoon movie song like “Let It Go,” and “Iris Out” is from Japanese vocaloid artist turned mainstream pop icon Yonezu Kenshi.
There’s just something very odd about looking back at the early 2010s when there was all of this musical promise in the K-Pop industry and to see where it’s ended up with songs fans are streaming wildly on Spotify but that nobody is listening to.
I’ve enjoyed a couple of tracks here and there (Kiss of Life) and I’m still holding out hope for Allday Project, who had a really promising debut and their first album is due out soon but in the meantime…