On Western Validation and English

The first Bollywood film I ever saw was Lagaan (2001). Lagaan wasn’t just an Indian film, it was a real Bollywood film with songs and an intermission and all that real Bollywood stuff. The reason that I, a white American, was able to see Lagaan (with English subtitles no less!) in my local movie theater was that it had been nominated for the Best Foreign Language film at the 2002 Oscars. Lagaan didn’t win but the nomination alone was enough to carry the film into the art house/independent film theater circuit--bringing it to people like me, who otherwise would have had no access to Bollywood film in 2002. 

In Bollywood film circles, the conversation around Western success is equally if not more fraught than what currently rages on in K-Pop fan circles and it has been far more fraught for far, far longer. Aamir Khan, the star of and auteur behind Lagaan, has been asked repeatedly over the years what he should have done differently with Lagaan so that it could have won the Oscar. And Aamir--always my favorite of the “Three Khans” for a reason--said he wouldn’t have changed a thing. He did have this to say about Oscar though: “It gives a window of opportunity for your marketing. Because the film was nominated a whole lot of people in the world said, what’s this film that was nominated? Let’s watch it.” 

And do you know? He was right. The real winner here is me, who got to see Lagaan in a movie theater when I otherwise wouldn’t have. Oscars, Grammys, honestly, Aamir has the right idea--who cares about a trophy? The goal is to get your art in front of people who otherwise wouldn’t have even known it existed.

Lagaan is a full, proper Bollywood film although it does have some nods to an English-speaking global audience. The way the narrative and songs work is a bit closer to linear western film than the more masala end of Bollywood (to include a song with English lyrics) but the heart and soul of the film was made with Indian audiences firmly in mind. What Aamir accomplished with Lagaan is something that hasn’t been duplicated since: he brought real Bollywood to the American film elite and demanded it be taken seriously on its own terms… made for a mass domestic Indian audience, with proper song picturizations, and at a glorious full test cricket match length. 

Contrast Lagaan with the full-English language Slumdog Millionaire (2008), which won Best Picture at the Oscars, and you can easily see the difference between a proper Bollywood film and a film made by and for western audiences. Slumdog borrowed a Bollywood theme and an Indian setting but the film was made by and for outsiders. It was not domestically popular in India and had very few ties to the domestic Hindi-language film industry in Mumbai. Slumdog rehashed common themes done far, far better in films like Parinda (1989, also starring Anil Kapoor), the style of acting from the main leads was not the style of acting found in Indian film, and the pacing of the film was not what one typically finds in Indian films. When one has seen the work of directors like Vidhu Vinod Chopra, let alone films from the great Tamil auteur Bala, why would you even bother with Danny Boyle’s take on “Bollywood”? 

I’ll tell you. 

There’s two big reasons.

1. As an outsider, you need to make an effort to find which films are considered to be the greats, domestically, like Parinda. And 95% of the time these are not the films that are being served up to you, as an outsider, as representative of the country’s artistic output. For the most part, you’re going to be served up things that have been judged by outsiders or against some nebulous “global” (read: American middlebrow) criteria as the best of the best. 

2. Once you do find what are considered the classic works, domestically, you need to make the effort to understand these works on their own terms. Engaging with art from outside your own cultural context means there will be references you don’t understand--or may not even notice. Nods to historical events, current political questions, references to previous films or songs you have never heard of or references to the actors' private lives that everyone else watching will understand intimately, like fish swimming in water while you’re floundering around in the shallow end with a snorkel. In a famous example, the opening to Farah Khan’s Om Shanti Om (2007) is just a giant parody of this scene from Rishi Kapoor’s Karz (1980). Sure, you can enjoy Om Shanti Om without knowing that but how can you truly judge the film good or bad--let alone understand it--without that cultural knowledge? 

It’s far, far easier to just watch Danny Boyle serve up something vaguely Bollywood-themed done in a narrative style you understand with actors who are acting in a way you understand and call it a day. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that… but it’s not Bollywood. Even if Slumdog Millionaire had been with the actors speaking Hindi, it wouldn’t have been “authentic” Bollywood.

I don’t think we’ve seen a K-Pop equivalent of Lagaan although BigBang’s Alive (2012) might come the closest. And I suspect we’ll continue to see attempts at a K-Pop blockbuster Slumdog Millionaire as we move into the future. As the debate over English lyrics and “western validation” rages on in K-Pop fan circles, I’ve been thinking a lot about these two films recently and especially about Aamir Khan and his attitude towards Oscar. 

Part of the problem in trying to discuss English lyrics and K-Pop is that as the target audience for K-Pop has changed over the past few decades so has the use and meaning of English lyrics. 

The first generation groups of the 1990s like the mega-popular H.O.T. were singing and performing primarily for a Korean-speaking audience, both domestically and in the Korea diaspora. Not that they didn’t have American and other English-speaking fans but their primary audience was a Korean-speaking one. Listen to their peppy pop megahit “캔디” (Candy)--not a single English lyric to be found.

That changed as K-Pop began to aim increasingly at an export audience. The use of English language hooks made it easier for fans in places like Southeast Asia and fans in the non-Korean Asian diaspora in the West to sing along. The exception is Japan, of course, which has a large enough domestic market that acts would release material specifically for that audience but at the end of the day, “Ring-ding-dong” is a nonsense phrase in every language and all fans, globally, can sing along confident in the meaning.

When Korean idol BOA crossed over to Japan and began releasing Japanese material, her target audience was mainstream Japanese pop fans and she was accepted more or less as a J-pop singer. Watch her here in 2002 at 15 years old interacting with the hugely popular Japanese idol Domoto Koichi from the Johnny’s & Associates group Kinki Kids. There’s no English subtitles but the gist of the conversation (done entirely in Japanese) is about her make-up routine and they banter about how old they think they look. There’s absolutely nothing special about how BOA was presented that would separate her from a Japanese pop idol.

This domestic-facing presentation held true for K-pop idols in Japan through the early 2010s more or less. The target was mainstream J-pop audiences and for these K-pop acts to be accepted alongside domestic Japanese pop acts. And they succeeded. Groups like Girls Generation (少女時代), KARA, and, yes, BigBang released Japanese language versions of K-pop hit songs like “Genie” and “Fantastic Baby” that were known to broad mainstream pop audiences in Japan. They were domestic hits, despite being K-pop songs not because they were K-pop songs. There are probably as many--if not more--people who could sing a bit of “Mister” by KARA than any of the AKB48 songs released that year. And the legacy of Girl’s Generation’s leg-tastic choreography continues to loom large in Japanese pop culture. In fact, hugely popular music show Music Station just included Girls Generation’s “Genie” in a quiz on popular debut songs alongside domestic acts like Morning Musume. 

It’s true that this 2010s boom of Korean idols in Japan did have the gloss and branding of the K-Pop wave in a way that BOA, a decade earlier, did not but even today there are groups like Twice or NiziU are part of the domestic Japanese idol landscape as well as existing in a separate global “K-Pop” sphere. Not all K-Pop groups manage this but they all aim to, which is why they continue to release Japanese language material.

As the nature of idol group audiences has become more and more insular (and check out my previous guest Patrick St. Michel on this), K-Pop acts have increasingly targeted their releases to that demographic in Japan, Korea, to the global “K-Pop” market, and, increasingly to the American pop fan. 

So let’s move to America.

H.O.T. reached primarily (though not exclusively) Korean diaspora audiences in America. As K-Pop spread through Southeast Asia, we began to see K-Pop spreading through the broader Asian diaspora in the West. This era reached its pinnacle with Rain performing to a very excited and primarily Asian-American crowd at Madison Square Garden in New York City in 2006 as part of his Rainy Day Tour. But what makes this concert special is that you saw, really for the first time, tendrils of cross-promotion into mainstream American entertainment news. Rain wasn’t performing under the radar, he became the Biggest Star of the Rest of The World to the American entertainment media, putting K-Pop and Hallyu on the radar of the normies and locals who watched shows like The Colbert Report. 

Anybody paying attention to American pop culture in the mid-late 2000s would have seen coverage of Rain in mainstream, normie entertainment outlets like Entertainment Weekly as well as mainstream news media like The New York Times.  

Rain spoke English to better reach a broad American audience.

While K-Pop companies were breaking through into Japan with localized material, they were also trying the same thing in America. JYP brought Wonder Girls over with an English language, localized song aimed at a broad American pop audience. Se7en feat. Lil Kim was also targeting a broad American urban radio audience with his English-language “Girls”. 

But unlike in Japan, these acts failed to break through to the mainstream domestic American pop market. I think there are a few reasons for that. 

1. In the mid-late 2000s into the early 2010s, the competition in the domestic American pop market was simply too strong. This is an era of massive, nationwide pop hits that I think most people today would still be able to sing the choruses of: Black Eyed Peas, Lady Gaga, Flo Rida, Beyonce, the second era of Britney Spears, and so on. 

2. The American localization just didn’t hit right. The mismatch between what JYP thought of as “American music” for the Wonder Girls didn’t quite fit with what was actually happening in American music and the result was a somewhat fusty, retro sound.

3. The economic timing was just bad for K-Pop companies and it wasn’t worth sinking resources into the mainstream American market.

But here’s the thing--the American mainstream pop marketplace was far too crowded but the American K-Pop market, which had been growing outside of the traditional diaspora spaces thanks in large part to artists like Rain, was ripe for the plucking. 

The year after the Wonder Girls opened for the Jonas Brothers on the American leg of their tour, SM Entertainment hosted a massive concert bringing together all their big acts… SM Town in Los Angeles. The artists spoke English to the crowd but the songs were the same Korean language ones they sang to other global K-Pop audiences. If you look at the footage of the crowd at that first 2010 SM Town concert in Los Angeles, for the first time you really start to see a significant number of non-Asian faces and that number would only increase.

The key here is that these American K-Pop fans were now part of the global K-Pop fandom and (at least for time) had similar tastes and behaviors to other K-Pop fans in places in Malaysia or Brazil or China than they did to their individual domestic markets. They liked K-Pop because it was K-Pop and were willing to put in some extra effort to learn how to sing along in Korean because that’s the language their favorite music was in. 

But, again, because awareness of K-Pop had spread outside of traditional Korean diaspora spaces, it allowed these new “K-Pop spaces” in America to function more or less like anime fandom. There would be the occasional crossover with savvy pop culture vultures but it more or less operated independently of what was happening in American pop music. And this served “K-Pop,” as an art, very well. It’s during this era that you get Missy Elliot performing with G-Dragon in a Korean-English mashup, Lady Gaga picking up Crayon Pop to open for her on her ArtRave tour, and English-language music news outlets dedicating major space to Korean language K-Pop songs. 

K-Pop was cool and K-Pop was trendy. Two things that are no longer true.

Chart performance, sales, these things were (and I would argue that they remain) irrelevant to the actual influence that K-Pop had and the awareness of it among people whose tastes matter.

There would be one last ride: SuperM.

In 2019, with “Jopping,” SuperM closed the book on the era of fantastic “K-Pop” unleashed by SM Town a full decade earlier. The nonsense phrase signifying a combination of jumping and popping was a fitting swan song to an era of colorful, forward-looking, super catchy, Korean-language “K-Pop” in America. 

What happened over the last few years--at least as I see it--is that as American pop music itself has become more and more of a niche music, K-Pop companies realized they were now on an increasingly equal playing field. Unlike 2009, when K-Pop acts were attempting to compete with Beyonce’s “Single Ladies,” a song that you couldn’t avoid hearing even if you lived like on top of a mountain with no electricity, the competition was now like… Harry Styles “Watermelon Sugar” which you would physically have to like tune into a Top 40 radio station to hear. 

The bar to entry is just far, far lower for K-Pop companies to compete in the American charts. But what’s interesting is that only some of the acts have tried their hand at localization. So while on the one hand you have K-Pop acts putting out more or less traditional K-Pop music, other acts have localized to American tastes giving us songs that were successfully localized to sound just like the rest of the truly mediocre American Top 40 pop hits of today. 

This new wave of English language material is not “less authentic” because it’s in English. It’s not about the English lyrics. What is different from previous generations of K-Pop is that you have songs now competing against mainstream Top 40 songs that are written by and for American Top 40 pop audiences by the same stable of Top 40 pop songwriters that write everything else on the charts. And you get what you pay for. Even when these songs are in Korean, some (not all!) of these songs still sound like the ending theme to like Trollz 2 or whatever. 

For the groups that haven’t gone the American Top 40 Trollz 2 route, what you hear is a mixture of some domestic Korean pop elements with a heavy dose of contemporary, global “urban.” I happen to really enjoy the pots and pans genre like NCT 127 “Sticker” and Stray Kids “Maniac”. It’s certainly not mainstream in America and yet these pots and pans K-Pop sit side-by-side the Trollz 2 American pop songs on the charts. Both equally as valid as the other… at least in terms of chart positions. What we see now is K-Pop companies motivating fans to compete in American charts for seemingly the prize of… media attention as an end to itself. Chart positions, awards, none of that means anything on its own. The point should be--as Aamir Khan wisely said--to leverage these things, that media attention, to get your art in front of people who might not have otherwise seen it. Because otherwise what is the point? And if what you are putting in front of people who may not have otherwise seen it is mediocre, then is it really a win?

Again, it’s not about English. At the end of the day, K-Pop has already had Western validation--a decade ago when CL was getting featured on best of lists in normie outlets like Spin magazine and Missy Elliot was working with G-Dragon… in Korean. That’s Western validation. All that English language is doing is to put a cherry on the localization of the music that’s happened as K-Pop companies move to compete against domestic American fandoms in the American charts.