How K-pop became a global

phenomenon
No country takes its fluffy pop music more
seriously than South Korea.
Aja Romano Feb 26, 2018, 1:01am EST

Christina Animashaun/Vox; Getty Images

They call it Hallyu, the Korean wave: the idea that South
Korean pop culture has grown in prominence to become a
major driver of global culture, seen in everything from
Korean dramas on Netflix to Korean skincare regimens
dominating the cosmetics industry to delicious Korean tacos
on your favorite local menu. And at the heart of Hallyu is the
ever-growing popularity of K-pop — short, of course, for
Korean pop music.

K-pop has become a truly global phenomenon thanks to its

distinctive blend of addictive melodies, slick choreography
and production values, and an endless parade of attractive
South Korean performers who spend years in grueling
studio systems learning to sing and dance in synchronized
perfection.
Exo, “Call Me Baby.”
SM/YouTube

Hallyu has been building for two decades, but K-pop in

particular has become increasingly visible to global
audiences in the past five to 10 years. South Korean artists
have hit the Billboard Hot 100 chart at least eight times
since the Wonder Girls first cracked it in 2009 with their
crossover hit “Nobody” — released in four different
languages, including English — and the export of K-pop has
ballooned South Korea’s music industry to an impressive $5
billion industry.

Now, with South Korea hosting the 2018 Winter Olympics in

Pyeongchang at a moment of extremely heightened
geopolitical tensions, K-pop has taken on a whole new kind
of sociopolitical significance, as South Korea proudly
displays its best-known export before the world.

How did K-pop become a $5 billion global industry?

We explore the elaborate music videos, adoring fans, and
killer choreography for Explained, our weekly show on
Netflix.

Watch now on Netflix.

What the Winter Olympics’ opening and

closing ceremonies told us about K-pop (and
vice versa)

During the Olympic opening ceremonies on February 9,

2018, athletes marched in the Parade of Nations to the
accompaniment of a select group of K-pop hits, each
playing into the image South Korea wants to present right
now: one of a country that’s a fully integrated part of the
global culture.

The Parade of Nations songs all have significant

international and digital presences, and each advertises the
cross-cultural fluency of K-pop. Twice’s “Likey” is a huge
recent hit for the group, and recently made it to 100 million
views on YouTube faster than any other song by a K-pop girl
group. (The video prominently features the girls on a fun
field trip to Vancouver, marketing the idea that they’re at
home all over the world.) Big Bang’s “Fantastic Baby” was
one of the first K-pop hits to make inroads in American
culture and was featured on Glee’s K-pop episode along
with “Gangnam Style,” which also played during the Parade
of Nations.

Psy’s ubiquitous 2012 hit is part doofy comedy and part

clear-eyed satire, made by a musician who’s part of a wave
of South Korean musicians who’ve studied at American
music schools. “Gangnam Style” spent five years racking up
more than 3 billion views on YouTube, reigning as the most-
viewed video in the platform’s history before being
dethroned in 2017.

As a whole, these songs and performers show us that K-pop

stars can excel at everything from singing to comedy to rap
to dance to social commentary. And their fun, singable
melodies make it clear that the South Korean music industry
has perfected the pop production machine into an
effervescent assembly line of ridiculously catchy tunes sung
by ridiculously talented people in ridiculously splashy
videos. When Red Velvet sing, “Bet you wanna (bet you
wanna) dance like this” in their single “Red Flavor,” they’re
sending a message to the world that South Korea is modern
but wholesome, colorful, inviting, and fun.

And at the Olympics closing ceremonies, we saw live

performances from two more K-pop icons: solo artist CL,
formerly a member of the powerhouse girl group 2NE1, and
multi-national band Exo. CL’s appearance was a testament
to her success in achieving one of the holy grails for K-Pop
— a crossover into US fame, or at least onto the Billboard
Hot 100. CL has landed on the list twice since 2015.

Exo, meanwhile, is arguably one of the two or three biggest

K-Pop successes going right now. The band was a perfect
fit for the Olympics — they’re multilingual and were formed
with the intention of performing in Mandarin and Japanese
as well as South Korea. And for several years, Exo was split
into two subgroups, one performing mainly in Korea and one
mainly in China. All of this made them a great choice to
serve as a symbolic transition between nations, as Tokyo
gets ready to host the 2020 Summer Olympics, followed by
Beijing hosting the Winter Olympics in 2022.

Prominently missing from the live performance roster at the

Olympics was the most popular K-pop band in the universe
at the moment: BTS. BTS became an uncontested US
phenomenon in 2017, with two songs hitting the Billboard
Hot 100, a huge performance at the American Music
Awards, a New Year’s Eve performance in Times Square,
and a remix of their latest single, “Mic Drop,” done by Steve
Aoki. If it’s possible to ascribe a tipping point to a “wave”
that seems to be endless, BTS might be it; it certainly
seems that the all-boy group has gone as far as a South
Korean band can go in terms of making inroads into
American culture — they recently graced the cover of
American Billboard magazine. But while the band was
missing from the Olympics, their song “DNA” — the other of
their pair of 2017 hits — did at least play during the opening
ceremonies, much to the delight of fans.

None of this is accidental. K-pop has become the

international face of South Korea thanks to an extremely
regimented, coordinated production system. More than any
other international music industry, K-pop has been
strategically designed to earworm its way into your brain —
and to elevate South Korea and its culture onto the world
stage.

How did we get here? Through a combination of global

political changes, savvy corporatization and media
management, and a heck of a lot of raw talent being ground
through a very powerful stardom mill.

K-pop began in 1992 with one electric hip-

hop performance

K-pop as we know it wouldn’t exist without democracy and

television — specifically, South Korea’s reformation of its
democratic government in 1987, with its accompanying
modernization and lightening of censorship, and the effect
this change had on television.

Prior to the establishment of the nation’s Sixth Republic,

there were only two broadcast networks in the country, and
they largely controlled what music South Koreans listened
to; singers and musicians weren’t much more than tools of
the networks. Networks introduced the public to musical
stars primarily through weekend music talent shows. Radio
existed but, like the TV networks, was under tight state
control. Independent music production didn’t really exist,
and rock music was controversial and subject to banning;
musicians and songs were primarily introduced to the public
through the medium of the televised talent show, and radio
served as little more than a subsidiary platform for
entertainers who succeeded on those weekend TV
competitions.

Before the liberalization of South Korean media in the late

‘80s, the music produced by broadcast networks was
primarily either slow ballads or “trot,” a Lawrence Welk-ish
fusion of traditional music with old pop standards. After
1987, though, the country’s radio broadcasting expanded
rapidly, and South Koreans became more regularly exposed
to more varieties of music from outside the country,
including contemporary American music.

But TV was still the country’s dominant, centralized form of

media: As of 1992, national TV networks had penetrated
above 99 percent of South Korean homes, and viewership
was highest on the weekends, when the talent shows took
place. These televised talent shows were crucial in
introducing music groups to South Korean audiences; they
still have an enormous cultural impact and remain the single
biggest factor in a South Korean band’s success.

As Moonrok editor Hannah Waitt points out in her excellent

series on the history of K-pop, K-pop is unusual as a genre
because it has a definitive start date, thanks to a band
called Seo Taiji and Boys. Seo Taiji had previously been a
member of the South Korean heavy metal band Sinawe,
which was itself a brief but hugely influential part of the
development of Korean rock music in the late ‘80s. After the
band broke up, he turned to hip-hop and recruited two
stellar South Korean dancers, Yang Hyun-suk and Lee Juno,
to join him as backups in a group dubbed Seo Taiji and
Boys. On April 11, 1992, they performed their single “Nan
Arayo (I Know)” on a talent show:

Not only did the Boys not win the talent show, but the
judges gave the band the lowest score of the evening. But
immediately after the song debuted, “I Know” went on to
top South Korea’s singles charts for a record-smashing 17
weeks, which would stand for more than 15 years as the
longest No. 1 streak in the country’s history.

“I Know” represented the first time modern American-style

pop music had been fused with South Korean culture. Seo
Taiji and Boys were innovators who challenged norms
around musical styles, song topics, fashion, and censorship.
They sang about teen angst and the social pressure to
succeed within a grueling education system, and insisted on
creating their own music and writing their own songs
outside of the manufactured network environment.

By the time Seo Taiji and Boys officially disbanded in 1996,

they had changed South Korea’s musical and performance
landscape, paving the way for other artists to be even more
experimental and break even more boundaries — and for
music studios to quickly step in and take over, forming an
entire new studio system from the remnants of the
broadcast-centered system.

Between 1995 and 1998, three powerhouse music studios

appeared: SM Entertainment (often referred to as SM Town)
in 1995; JYP Entertainment in 1997; and YG Entertainment
in 1998, created by one of the members of Seo Taiji and
Boys, Yang Hyun-suk. Together, these studios began
deliberately cultivating what would become known as idol
groups.

The first idol group in South Korea appeared on the scene in

1996, when SM founder Lee Soo-man created a group
called H.O.T. by assembling five singers and dancers who
represented what he believed teens wanted to see from a
modern pop group.
H.O.T. shared traits with today’s idol groups: a combination
of singing, dancing, and rapping, and disparate personalities
united through music. In 1999, the band was chosen to
perform in a major benefit concert with Michael Jackson, in
part because of their potential to become international pop
stars — an indication that even in the ’90s, the industry was
attuned to K-pop’s potential for global success.

That potential can be seen in the studios’ eager promotion

of multilingual artists like BoA, who made her public debut
at the age of 13 in 2000 and in the ensuing years has
become one of South Korea’s best-known exports thanks to
a brand built on raw talent and multicultural positivity.
All the while, K-pop as a whole was building its own brand,
one based on flash, style, and a whole lot of quality.

Don’t ask what makes a K-pop song. Ask what

makes a K-pop performer.

There are three things that make K-pop such a visible and
unique contributor to the realm of pop music: exceptionally
high-quality performance (especially dancing), an extremely
polished aesthetic, and an “in-house” method of studio
production that churns out musical hits the way assembly
lines churn out cars.

No song more perfectly embodies these characteristics

than Girls’ Generation’s 2009 hit “Gee,” a breakout success
that came at a moment when K-pop was starting to turn
heads internationally due to a number of recent milestone
hits — notably Big Bang’s “Haru, Haru,” Wonder Girls’
“Nobody,” and Brown Eyed Girls’ “Abracadabra.” “Gee” was
a viral internet earworm, breaking out of typical K-pop fan
spaces and putting Girls’ Generation within striking distance
of US fame.

The combination of cheeky, colorful concept, clever

choreography, cute girls, and catchy songwriting makes
“Gee” the quintessential K-pop song: It’s fun, infectious,
and memorable — and it was all but algorithmically
produced by a studio machine responsible for delivering
perfect singing, perfect dancing, perfect videos, and
perfect entertainment. The then-nine members of Girls’
Generation were factory-assembled into the picture-
perfect, male-gaze-ready dolls you see in the song’s music
video via extreme studio oversight and years of hard work
from each woman — a combined 52 years of training in
total, beginning in their childhoods.

Through highly competitive auditions, starting around ages

10 to 12, music studios induct talented children into the K-
pop regimen. The children attend special schools where
they take specialized singing and dancing lessons; they
learn how to moderate their public behavior and prepare for
life as a pop star; they spend hours in daily rehearsals and
perform in weekend music shows as well as special group
performances. Through these performances, lucky kids can
gain fan followings before they even officially “debut.” And
when they’re old enough, if they’re really one of the lucky
few, the studios will place them into an idol group or even,
occasionally, launch them as a solo artist.

Once an idol group has been trained to perfection, the

studios generate pop songs for them, market them, put
them on TV, send them on tour, and determine when they’ll
next make their “comeback” — a term that usually signals a
band’s latest album release, generally accompanied by huge
fanfare, special TV appearances, and a totally new thematic
concept.

Because of the control they exert over their artists, South

Korean music studios are directly responsible for shaping
the global image of K-pop as a genre. But the industry is
notoriously exploitative, and studio life is grueling to the
point that it can easily cross over to abusive; performers are
regularly signed to long-term contracts, known as “slave
contracts,” when they are still children, which closely dictate
their private behavior, dating life, and public conduct.

The studios are also a breeding ground for predatory

behavior and harassment from studio executives. In recent
years, increasing public attention to these problems has
given rise to change; in 2017, multiple studios agreed to
significant contract reform. Still, as the recent suicide of
Shinee artist Kim Jong-hyun revealed, the pressures of
studio culture are rarely made public and can take a serious
toll on those who grow up within the system.

Despite all this, the cloistered life of a K-pop star is coveted

by thousands of South Korean teens and preteens — so
much so that walk-in auditions to scout kids for the studio
programs are frequently held in South Korea and New York.

In addition to studio auditions, a wave of new TV audition

shows have sprung up in the past few years, giving
unknowns a chance to be discovered and build a fan base.
Often called idol shows or survival shows, these audition
shows are comparable to American Idol and X-Factor.
Competitors on these shows can make it big on their own or
be grouped up — like the recently debuted group JBJ (short
for the fan-dubbed moniker “Just Be Joyful”), consisting of
boys who competed in the talent show Produce 101 Season
2 last year and then got put in a temporary group after fans
started making composite Instagram photos of them all
together. The band only has a seven-month contract; enjoy
it while it lasts!

JBJ
Wikimedia

These TV-sponsored idol shows have caused pushback

from the studios, which see them as producing immature
talent — and, of course, cutting into studio profits. That’s
because a K-pop group’s success is directly tied to its live
TV performances. Today there are numerous talent shows,
along with many more variety shows and well-known chart
TV countdown shows like Inkigayo and M Countdown, which
factor into how successful — and therefore bankable — a K-
pop idol or idol group is seen to be. Winning a weekend
music show or weekly chart countdown remains one of the
highest honors an artist or musical group can attain in the
South Korean music industry.

Because of this dependence on live performance shows, a

song’s performance elements — how easy it is to sing live,
how easy it is for an audience to pick up and sing along
with, the impact of its choreography, its costuming — are all
crucial to its success. Groups routinely go all-out for their
performances: Witness After-School learning to perform an
entire drumline sequence for live performances of their
single “Bang!” as well as pretty much every live
performance mentioned here.

All of this emphasis on live performances make fans an

extremely active part of the experience. K-pop fans have
perfected the art of the fan chant, in which fans in live
studio audiences and live performances will shout alternate
fan chants over the musical intros to songs, and sometimes
as a counterpoint to choruses, as a show of unity and
support.

This collectivity has helped ensure that K-pop fan bases

both at home and abroad are absolutely massive, and
intense to a degree that’s hard to overstate. Fans intensely
support their favorite group members, and many fans go
out of their way to make sure their favorite idols look and
dress the part of world-class performers. K-Con, the largest
US K-pop convention, has grown exponentially over the
years and now includes both Los Angeles and New York.

(There are also anti-fans who target band members — most

notoriously an anti who attempted to poison a member of
DBSK in 2006. But the less said about them, the better.)

You might expect that in the face of all this external

pressure, K-pop groups would be largely dysfunctional
messes. Instead, modern-day K-pop appears to be a
seamless, gorgeous, well-oiled machine — complete with a
few glaring contradictions that make it all the more
fascinating.

Modern K-pop is a bundle of colorful

contradictions

The iconic “arrogant dance” from Brown Eyed Girls’ 2009 “Abracadabra.”

Though government censorship of South Korean music has

relaxed over time, it still exists, as does industry self-
censorship in response to a range of controversial topics.
South Korean social mores stigmatize everything from
sexual references and innuendo to references to drugs and
alcohol — as well as actual illicit behavior by idols — and
addressing any of these subjects can cause a song to be
arbitrarily banned from radio play and broadcast. Songs
dealing with serious themes or thorny issues are largely off
limits, queer identity is generally only addressed as subtext,
and lyrics are usually scrubbed down to fluffy platitudes.
Thematically, it’s often charming and innocent, bordering on
adolescent.

Despite these limitations, K-pop has grown over time in its

nuance and sophistication thanks to artists and studios who
have often either risked censorship or relied on visual cues
and subtext to fill in the gaps.

Case in point: the 2000 hit “Adult Ceremony” from singer

and actor Park Ji-yoon, which marked the first time a K-pop
hit successfully injected adult sexuality into fairly innocuous
lyrics, representing a notable challenge to existing
depictions of femininity in South Korean pop culture.

The women of K-pop are typically depicted as traditional

versions of femininity. This usually manifests in one of
several themes: adorable, shy schoolgirls who sing about
giddy crushes; knowing, empowered women who need an
“oppa” (a strong older male figure) to fulfill their fantasies;
or knowing, empowered women who reject male validation,
even as the studio tailors the group’s members for adult
male consumption.

Top: K-pop group Blackpink performing at the 31st Golden Disc Awards. Bottom: Miss A
onstage during the 2011 Hallyu Dream Concert.
Wikimedia; Getty Images

An idol group’s image often changes from one album to the

next, undergoing a total visual and tonal overhaul to
introduce a new concept. However, there are a few girl
groups — 2NE1 and f(x) spring most readily to mind — that
have been marketed as breaking away from this gender-
centric mode of performance; they’re packaged as rebels
and mavericks regardless of what their album is about, even
while they operate within the studio culture.

Yet the women of K-pop are also increasingly producing

self-aware videos that navigate their own relationships to
these rigid impositions. Witness Sunmi, a former member of
Wonder Girls, tearing down her own carefully cultivated
public image in her recent single “Heroine,” a song about a
woman surviving a failed relationship. In the video, Sunmi
transforms physically, growing more empowered and
defiant as she faces the camera and finally confronts a
billboard of herself.

If songs for women in K-pop break down along the

“virgin/mature woman” divide, songs for men tend to break
down along a “bad boy/sophisticated man” line.
Occasionally they even break down in the same song — like
Block B’s “Jackpot,” the video for which sees the band
posing as wildly varied members of a renegade circus,
uniting to kidnap actress Kim Sae-ron into a life of cheerful
hedonism.

Male performance groups are generally permitted a broader

range of topics than K-pop’s women: BTS notably sings
about serious issues like teen social pressures, while many
other boy bands feature a wide range of narrative concepts.
But male entertainers get held to arguably even more
exacting physical and technical standards than their female
counterparts, with precision choreography — like Speed’s
all-Heely dance routine below — being a huge part of the
draw for male idol groups:

If you’re wondering whether co-ed bands coexist in these

studio cultures, the answer is, not really. Most of the time,
co-ed groups tend to be one-off pairings of members from
different bands for one or two singles, or novelty acts that
are quickly split into gendered subgroups. The most famous
actual co-ed band is probably the brother-sister duo
Akdong Musician, a pair of cute kids who made it big on an
audition show; and even they get split up a lot to pair with
other singers. (See the “Hi Suhyun” clip above, which
features Lee Hi and the sisterly half of AM, Lee Su-hyun.)

It probably goes without saying that this traditional gender

divide isn’t exactly fertile ground for queer idols to thrive.
Despite a number of K-pop stars openly supporting LGBTQ
rights, the industry aggressively markets homoeroticism in
its videos but remains generally homophobic. But progress
is happening here, too: South Korea’s first openly gay idol
just appeared on the scene in early 2018. His name is
Holland, and his first single debuted to a respectable 6.5
million views.

Holland, “Neverland.”
YouTube

Hip-hop tends to be a dominant part of the K-pop sound,

particularly among male groups, a trend that has opened up
the genre to criticism for appropriation. South Korea
grapples with a high degree of cultural racism, and recent
popular groups have come under fire for donning blackface,
appropriating Native American iconography, and much
more. Still, K-pop has increasingly embraced diversity in
recent years, with black members joining K-pop groups and
duo Coco Avenue putting out a bilingual single in 2017.

Last but not least, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention South

Korea’s emergent indie music scene, which includes a
thriving crop of independent rap, hip-hop, and, increasingly,
R&B artists, as well as a host of grassroots artists who’ve
made waves on SoundCloud.

Taking stock of all these changes and paradoxes, we might

be able to extrapolate a bit about what the future of K-pop
looks like: even more diverse, with an ever-increasing
number of independent artists shaking up the studio scene,
even though most of them will still have to play within the
system’s rigid standards.

This gradual evolution suggests that part of the reason K-

pop has been able to make international inroads in recent
years is that it’s been able to push against its own rigid
norms, through the use of modern themes and
sophisticated subtexts, without sacrificing the incredibly
polished packaging that makes it so innately compelling.
That would seem to be a formula for continued global
success — especially now that South Korea and its culture
has the world’s attention. Hallyu may swell or subside, but
the K-pop production machine goes ever on. And from here,
the future looks fantastic, baby.

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