Читать книгу K-POP Now! - Mark James Russell - Страница 7

The Wonder Girls’ biggest hit, “Nobody,” featured a retro 1960s style.

If Korean music fans’ biggest question was when would K-pop break out in the West, in the West the biggest question has probably been “So what is K-pop anyway?” K-pop literally means “Korean pop,” as in pop music, but of course the term stands for much more than that.

At first glance, the beats and dancing and videos look familiar, much like a variation of American pop music. But the closer you look and the more you listen, the more differences you notice. Like when I heard a K-pop song in a Barcelona café, I could identify something different about it even before I heard the singers’ language. There is something distinct and special about K-pop. It’s like everything is a little bit louder, the images brighter, the style flashier—it’s just more.

Ever since the modern pop music industry began a century ago, it has been international, from the jazz of the 1920s to the rise of rock ’n roll to disco to the hundreds of types of music we have today. Much of the time, that has meant musical ideas arising in the United States and traveling to the world—but not always. The British Invasion, which brought the Beatles and the Rolling Stones to the United States, is probably the most famous example. Bossa nova, Brazil’s samba-influenced jazz that became very popular in the 1950s and 1960s, is a favorite of mine. Scandinavia has its heavy metal. And, today, Korea has K-pop.

So where did K-pop come from? Although the hip, exciting Seoul of today is rather new, it’s worth remembering that Koreans have long been a very musical people. Chinese diplomats returning home hundreds of years ago commented on how much Koreans love to sing. Even Korean traditional music was unique in East Asia for its focus on free-form, almost jazz-like improvisation and reinterpretation. Western music came to Korea in the late nineteenth century, bringing new scales and instruments, and jazz was quite popular in the 1920s.

In the aftermath of the Korean War of 1950–3, both sides of the divided peninsula were devastated, but soon Korea’s strong-willed, dynamic people began rebuilding their country. By the 1960s, South Korea was undergoing an artistic renaissance, and one of the most exciting aspects of that era was its music. Rock, folk and funk all flourished in the late 1960s and early 1970s as young people became caught up in the excitement of an all-new era. Sadly, though, this era would not last. South Korea’s government was quite authoritarian at the time and none too fond of the counter-culture elements of the day, so it cracked down hard in 1975. Many of Korea’s top musicians were sent to jail or drummed out of the music industry, leaving a very different music scene behind. Tastes also changed, and by the 1980s rock was much less popular, leaving ballads and plenty of cheesy synthesizers and syrupy pop music (not to mention oodles of oversized shoulder pads).

CAPTURING THEIR FAVORITE IDOLS

Through all these changes, Korea continued to transform. Its economy surged and expanded at an amazing rate. The military government came to an end in 1987, and the new constitution that came into being allowed greater freedom of expression and restored democracy. The Seoul Olympics of 1988 were a symbol of how much the country had grown and opened up. And thanks to the growth of the economy and freedom, Korean arts and entertainment were soon recovering.

BTOB IS A YOUNG GROUP BUT IT ALREADY HAS MANY FANS

There was popular music before K-pop, of course. Cho Yong-pil was one of the biggest artists of the 1980s, although he faded in the early 1990s before making a spectacular and totally unexpected comeback in 2013 with “Bounce,” a song that dethroned Psy from the top of the charts. Kim Kwang-suk was an important and influential folk singer, closely associated with the democracy movement. Sinawe was probably the biggest heavy metal group ever, peaking in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Kim Gun-mo was huge for much of the 1990s, although his more jazzy, grown-up pop songs never really fitted the K-pop mold. Shin Seung-hoon was the biggest ballad singer of the early 1990s, back when ballads ruled the charts. But none of these acts were K-pop, at least not the K-pop we would recognize.

The rise of modern K-pop couldn’t be clearer. It began on March 23, 1992, the day that Seo Taiji and the Boys released their first album. Seo Taiji (born Jung Hyun-chul) had dropped out of school at seventeen and briefly played with Sinawe before hooking up with b-boy dancers Yang Hyun-suk and Lee Juno. They formed a hip-hop group heavily influenced by New Jack Swing, but also a jumble of musical ideas, and featured plenty of energetic dance moves. Most older Koreans were confused by this new musical concoction, but young people loved it. “Nan Arayo” (“I Know”) spent most of the year on the top of the charts, starting a music revolution.

Seo Taiji was not the only one dreaming of new musical styles, of course. Another producer trying to figure out the new sounds of a new generation was Soo-Man Lee. Lee had been a popular singer, deejay and television host in the 1970s before leaving Korea to study electrical engineering in California. While he was studying engineering, he was also studying MTV and the biggest trends in American music, and working out how to bring these trends to Korea. Soon after returning home, Lee started SM Entertainment. He tried making stars of several promising young talents but was not quite able to find the magic formula.

MISS A MEETS WITH FANS

CUBE STUDIO

Not until he created H.O.T, that is. With H.O.T—short for “Hi-five Of Teenagers”—Lee combined the energy of new American pop music with a rigorous training system designed to create young stars. Lee realized that stars needed to learn more than just singing and dancing. They needed a whole range of skills, such as humility, attitude, language and the ability to deal with the media. H.O.T exploded on the scene in 1996, selling in huge numbers and whipping young fans into a passionate frenzy. Soon came more bands, such as the girl group S.E.S., Shinhwa and Fly to the Sky.

Lee was not alone. Yang Hyun-suk, one of the members of Seo Taiji and the Boys, started YG Entertainment in 1996. Daesung Enterprise (today’s DSP) had groups like FinKL and Sechs Kies. Park Jin-young launched his solo career in 1994, then started his own music label, JYP Entertainment, in 1997. With each new group, each new producer, K-pop was growing, becoming brighter and better.

It is important to remember that these trends and successes in music were not happening in a bubble. Korean movies, too, were ever more creative and celebrated, setting box office records and winning awards around the world. Musical theater boomed also, and today the live options are almost endless. In the arts, design, fashion and more, young talented Koreans were rewriting the notions of what Korea is and what it could do. And as each field grew, it would influence and fertilize the others, transforming the whole of Korean society.

G.NA

With the turn of the new millennium, K-pop continued to grow. Korea quickly installed one of the world’s best broadband Internet networks, which, while amazing for gaming and transforming day-to-day life in Korea, also meant that the Korean music industry bottomed out. Young people simply stopped buying music. Music stores disappeared. If they were to survive, Korea’s music labels would have to look at other ways of making money. Some pushed their artists into commercials and acting. Others focused more on international sales. Japan, being the world’s second biggest music market, was the obvious target, and SM Entertainment’s BoA was a prime example of doing great there. But many singers increasingly found fame around Asia, thanks in no small part to acting in popular TV dramas. Rain, who starred in the very popular Full House, is a great example of this trend. And China, although still a tiny music market, was growing rapidly, and Korea’s music leaders had their eye on it. This is where the term hallyu came from, coined by Chinese journalists to describe the popularity of Korean artists there. Called hanliu in Chinese and hanryu in Japanese (it’s all the same character, 韓流), hallyu literally means “Korean wave” or “flow,” and soon Korean music was washing over all of Asia.

But the wave didn’t stop there. As with Korean movies and TV shows, its music kept finding new fans. In the old days, you had to convince radio programmers or music television executives to play your music if you wanted people to discover your group. Not in the Internet age. Thanks to YouTube and other online services, fans were able to find anything they wanted and could spread the word. And the word kept spreading. If you are reading this book now, it’s probably because the word spread to you as well.

Today, SM Entertainment, YG Entertainment and JYP Entertainment are commonly called the “big three” music labels (with Cube, which was founded by a former JYP president, often considered a strong fourth). Each has a pretty distinct style of music and way of doing business. SM is easily the biggest company and concentrates on more bubbly, younger pop. Having consistently produced many of the biggest groups in K-pop for nearly two decades, it can be argued that SM is the industry leader and most aware of what the fans want. Except that SM might argue it doesn’t produce K-pop. It produces SM-pop—a style of its very own.

FANS HANGING OUT AT CUBE STUDIO

JYP ENTERTAINMENT

2PM

YG ENTERTAINMENT

JYP Entertainment has a more R&B flavor and is strongly influenced by its founder, JY Park (Park Jin-young). Park is the main songwriter for his company’s groups and the creative force. His mottos of leadership, humility and responsibility hang prominently on the walls of the JYP headquarters. He also has a long history of success, having been a big solo artist himself for many years and having worked with many of Korea’s top stars. JYP used to be home to Rain, one of the biggest K-pop stars of the last decade, and his group Wonder Girls were the first K-pop group to land on the Billboard charts.

YG Entertainment was founded by Yang Hyun-suk after Seo Taiji and the Boys broke up. From the beginning, YG featured hip-hop and favored attitude over the usual K-pop cuteness. But since YG struck gold with the idol groups Big Bang and 2NE1, it has pushed swag and flair to ever greater heights. YG is also home to a little solo artist by the name of Psy; maybe you’ve heard of him.

But there are dozens of smaller labels, too, all following roughly the same formula: recruit potential stars young, then train, train, train them incredibly hard, and put together the most promising recruits in a multi-member (and nearly always unisex) band. Almost everything is done in-house, from production to publicity.

BIG BANG

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So that is some history and background about K-pop. But it still leaves the core question unanswered: What is K-pop? There are very few signs of traditional Korean pentatonic music in it, or of Korean traditional instruments. Increasingly, top K-pop labels buy music from international producers (and some K-pop songwriters write for Western acts, too). Detractors, even Korean ones, often accuse K-pop of not being Korean at all. But if you listen to it seriously, there is definitely something different about K-pop that stands out.

It has certainly changed a great deal from the days of Seo Taiji and H.O.T. Tinny New Jack Swing is long gone, replaced with much more of an electronic dance sound, even dub step on some songs these days, most notably on CL’s “The Baddest Female.” There are still a few tinges of trot here and there, but much less than there once was. A popular trend at the moment is to create songs that almost sound like mash-ups of three or four different songs stuck together at random. Although this mishmash sounds weird to many ears, it’s a hyperactive style that has long been popular in Korean discos, where you often get just minute segments of a song before the deejay quickly moves on to something else. Apparently, even pop songs are not fast enough for the high-speed pace of young Korean people today.

FANS GATHER TO GLIMPSE THEIR IDOLS

Perhaps one of the most defining parts of K-pop is simply the language. Korean is a snappy, popping language, full of densely packed, tight syllables. In many ways, it is already halfway to hip-hop. Writing melodies for the Korean language forces the songs to reflect the language, often with more syllables in a line than you’d hear in other languages. And since dance and live performances are such an important part of K-pop, songs are also written with their choreography in mind. The things K-pop sings about are different, too. There is much less storytelling than in Western music and more of a focus on describing a feeling or metaphor. While there is plenty of longing and suggestion, K-pop is usually much less graphic and sexual than Western pop (well, except for JY Park).

Perhaps most importantly, K-pop is overwhelmingly genuine. It is not a music of cynicism. When a singer loves, he loves completely. When he misses his love, it is a deep, soul-crushing ache. And most of the time, it’s just fun. Sure, it can seem a little silly, even childish, but plenty of people appreciate the opportunity to forget about being cool and have a little fun.

If you have dreams of becoming a star yourself, there is good news as K-pop has gone global, and so has the search for new talent. And with new stars like 2PM’s Thai-American Nichkhun, Miss A’s Fei and Jia and SM Entertainment’s large and growing line-up of ethnic Chinese stars, K-pop is more open to the world than ever. Even non-Asians are increasingly getting chances at stardom now, with girl group The Gloss featuring Olivia, a French woman, and Nicole Curry appearing on the audition program Kpop Stars 2.

2PM

However, it’s still an incredibly tough slog. There are untold thousands, even tens of thousands, of young people fighting with all they’ve got to secure one of the few precious slots that open each year in Korea’s leading music labels to become a young trainee. Of the few that make it, fewer will actually get a shot, and fewer still will make it to the big time. Between that audition and becoming a star, a trainee is in for years of brutally tough training. Not to mention that they had better learn Korean fast and well.

Step one, of course, is the audition. These days, all the big music labels in K-pop recognize the importance of finding stars, so there are more opportunities than ever to try out for a precious slot. Many, like YG Entertainment, accept online applications any time, inviting the most promising young people to live auditions several times a year. The big labels typically have one or two auditions in the United States each year, and another in Japan, and auditions in Canada, Australia, China and other parts of the world are growing more common, but of course there are more chances in Korea.

What are the music producers and labels looking for? It’s more than just a great voice. It’s more than just dance moves. It’s more than just a pretty face. Everyone is hungry to find stars—that magical but oh so elusive charisma that inspires fans. And you had better be pretty young. It takes years to create a K-pop star, more than four on average, so the window of opportunity is fairly small.

BROWN EYED GIRLS

Once you pass the audition, now the hard work really starts—the training. Expect to face years of arduous work, improving your singing, dancing, languages and, most importantly, how to be a star. Expect long, long days, often going well into the night. Expect to sweat. Often labels expect you to live on-site, at small dormitories close to the main studio with many other aspiring young talents. It can be a fiercely competitive environment. “Cut-throat,” said Jay Park in Spin magazine.

School, however, is usually optional. Some labels, like JYP, insist their stars do well in school and encourage their talents to get into university. Others, however, leave such decisions up to the individual.

As for dating, don’t expect much. Both during training and after making their debut, artists are usually too busy to have much time to date. And, generally, music labels don’t want their stars to be tied down. Idols are presented to fans as a kind of virtual boyfriend and girlfriend, so relationships ruin the illusion, not to mention that overly enthusiastic fans have been known to go crazy on girls seen dating their favorite male stars.