In 1281, Kublai Khan set his sights on conquering Japan. His Mongol army had already made it to the gates of Vienna, occupying China, Korea and much of central Asia along the way. Mobilising a massive fleet Kublai set sail for Fukuoka, in southern Japan, vowing to defeat the nation. The Japanese, although vastly outnumbered, smashed the Khan’s fleet with a little help from a certain ‘wind’ (the Kamikaze). The defeat remains the greatest naval disaster in history.
On a warm spring evening not so long ago, nine young women from Korea launched their own assault on Fukuoka. The city offered little resistance and politely threw open its gates. After two bars of Motorcycle, their opening song, the surrender was complete. Victory total. Kublai Khan was a pussy!
Wharf-side, Fukuoka: Two hours before the show and the area outside the Marine Messe stadium is packed to the gunnels. People are gathered around the merchandise booths, keen to mark the date with a memento – a T-shirt, poster, even perfume. Groups of young (and not so young) Japanese are sitting down, texting, taking photos, recording movies and updating their Facebook pages.
One spot has drawn a particularly large crowd. In the centre are nine fit and slender Japanese women, dressed and made-up like the artists we’ve come to see. They complete the exact moves of the band’s most popular songs and draw a massive ovation from a fawning crowd. People rush up to have their photos taken with the group and there’s soon a long queue. Another tribute act is working hard to draw an audience; they complete a song and receive a sympathetic clap from a small group of semi-interested watchers, their thunder well and truly stolen by the competition.
Tonight we all have tickets for the hottest band in K-pop: Girls’ Generation. They’ve sold millions of albums and singles, featured in some of the most iconic videos of the K-pop era (Gee, Genie, Mr Taxi), appeared on Letterman and even graced the hallowed pages of The New Yorker. They are as close as you get to K-pop royalty – the Beatles of K-pop – and their Japanese fans, all 20,000 here tonight, just can’t get enough.
Misaki and Yui are at design school. They’ve both seen Girls’ Generation perform before but wouldn’t miss this concert for the world. Yui: “I like Girls’ Generation because they are normal girls. They eat and behave well.” Misaki: “I really want to visit Korea, maybe see our idols.” Seated beside them, Ymi, a Girls’ Generation towel around her neck, shows me some of the merchandise that she has purchased. “I have spent ¥ 40,000 [$400], including the ticket.” Aoi, another friend, confesses she has spent even more.
Further along I spy two young men talking. Kohei, the tallest, attends a local university and is completing a degree in management. He tells me he’s been following Girls’ Generation for four years and also likes the band T-ara and the artist IU. And how do the Korean bands compare to those in Japan? “The dancing level is quite a bit higher,” he confesses. Riko, his classmate, agrees. “Japan bands like AKB 48 are cute, but Korean bands have style and seem sophisticated.” How about their look? “Oh, yes” he laughs. “They are sexier.”
In the Penh, the K-pop brand is everywhere, from music and clothes to social media, so where did all this come from? And what is K-pop? What drives it? And is there really more to it than Psy and ‘that song’? From wharf side Fukuoka to the riverside of Phnom Penh, The Advisor is on the case.
Riverside, Phnom Penh: It’s twilight on a muggy June evening and five rows of young and beyond young Khmers are exercising in the fading light to music thundering out of an antiquated sound system. For now the rain has stayed away and some of the participants look to be building up a sweat. The speakers bellow out a distorted version of 2NE1’s I Am the Best, the band’s most popular song. Arguably the most adventurous of the current crop of K-pop bands (the Rolling Stones of K-pop?) they’ve made a strong push for the US market, performing with the likes of Snoop Dogg. Further east along the river, Koh Pich has played host to several second division K-pop bands over the last few months, including T-ara, Sistar, Tahiti and Miss-A. Four blocks back, on Street 19, the ‘cool young things’ that staff the street’s 8000r hairdressing shops are trying to emulate the styles of their K-pop idols. On the walls are scattered the posters of numerous K-pop boy bands – Super Junior, SHINee, CNBlue. A speaker spurts out Adele’s Heaven, while beside it a hairdresser is carefully running wax through his hair, trying to exact a Jay Park look sans tattoos.
The Music Factory:
“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.” – Mark Russell, author of K-Pop Now!
K-pop is pop music produced in South Korea, but it’s more than the music we know and consume in the West. It’s a neon-lit, ultra-modern, sophisticated and stylish interpretation of what pop music can be; a mash-up, borne from the collision of corporate Korea and the broadband consumer culture of East Asian youth. Welcome to the ‘music factory’.
At the centre of K-pop lies a group of independent music agencies modeled on the family corporate structure that fueled Korea’s post-war recovery. The companies control every aspect of the performer’s professional life and a good deal of their private. Artists are typically recruited in their young teens, through talent competitions or auditions, and then inserted into the company’s K-pop machine. What follows are years spent at school, learning English, Japanese and Chinese and then reporting after class for training – modelling, acting, dancing, singing, media coaching – before returning to company accommodation to complete homework. Fourteen-hour days are not uncommon and the process is demanding; some of Girls’ Generation trained for seven years before they finally took to the stage with the band. Others fall and fail and are spat out by the music machine.
The notion of music as a corporate product is not unique to Korea. The Beatles, for a time, were part of a production factory held together by Brian Epstein and dubbed ‘Mersey Beat’. Detroit’s Motown and Memphis’ Stax were all companies that applied a factory concept to music production, creating a distinct sound and then milking it for what it was worth. Also the phenomenon of music waves emerging from different countries of East Asia is hardly new either. In the 1990s J-pop, from Japan, was the rage while further back, in the early 1970s, artists such as Teresa Teng surfaced from Taiwan and became fashionable across the eastern Pacific. But what has distinguished K-pop from these movements has been the effort to go beyond the ‘song’.
Beyond the song:
Past the language, few who listen to K-pop would notice anything different from a conventional American or European song. Hip-hop, Euro-pop choruses, dub-breaks and some rudimentary rapping are all represented, but in K-pop the song is only the beginning. Around the tune are built elaborate choreographed performances, some now as iconic as the songs themselves. The Girls’ Generation ‘kick flick’ is synonymous with their tune Genie, while the body flips that feature in Got 7’s recent hit Girls, Girls, Girls have gained celebrity status.
Then there are the videos. For many westerners this has become the gateway to K-pop and it was Psy’s Gangnam Style that sent K-pop viral. Here, music collides with the production values and techniques of the nation’s burgeoning film industry. The result: videos that may not make much sense, sometimes verging on the bizarre, but are always enticing.
In Cambodia, K-pop has been especially well served by the internet and the nation’s netizens are renowned for the amount they ‘share’ about their K-pop idols, giving agencies an enormous opportunity to expand the commercial reach of their performers. In reality this translates into a cycle of commercials, endorsements, acting roles and weekly appearances on talent and game shows. The members of Girls’ Generation have endorsed everything from Domino’s pizza and rechargeable batteries to banana milk.
Going global?
Visibility is crucial to success: the Achilles Heel of K-pop as it seeks to expand into Europe and the US. Spend too long overseas trying to ‘break through’ and run the risk of losing your audience back in South Korea: one of the reasons Japan, China and wider East Asia, including Cambodia, are so attractive. Bands such as Girls Generation and Super Junior can easily pack-out a 30,000 venue in Tokyo or Hong Kong one evening and be live on a domestic game show the next afternoon.
Many bands like Girls Generation and Sistar feature sub-groups (Twinkle and Sistar 19 respectively). Artists perform English, Chinese and Japanese versions of their songs to make them marketable in other countries. The boy band EXO takes things one step further and has two versions of itself: Chinese (EXO-M) and Korean (EXO-K). They perform the same set, but in two different languages.
All of this makes the 2012 success of Psy (real name Park Jae-san) and ‘that song’ all the more remarkable. Neither young nor beautiful, in a traditional K-pop sense, the man achieved international success with Gangnam Style through the viral, organic power of the internet. Nor did the song’s video feature the sophisticated dance moves that popularise K-pop. Instead, Psy made his mark doing the ‘air horse’. Around all this he wrapped words and images that poked playful fun at elitist attitudes within Korean society. In short, Psy took the piss and in the process the most unK-pop of artists became its poster bloke and figurehead. Ultimately, it’s this spirit of irreverence and fun that makes K-pop palatable to a wider international audience. Depressed by global warming? Watch SHINee’s Replay. Got the post-GFC blues? Take in 3.55 minutes of Sistar’s What Should I Do.
Wharf-side, Fukuoka:
9pm and Girls’ Generation are about to perform Stay Girls, their final number. Seven costume changes, 28 songs, a healthy dose of auto-tune and an impressive array of computer graphics, yet the girls haven’t broken a sweat. One word captures the feeling in the stadium right now: love. You can feel it everywhere: the adulation of the audience, the gratitude from the performers (expressed in perfect Japanese). I want to bottle this spirit up and pour it over some militant Islamic types or pro-gun lobbyists and then ask them to do the line dance from I Got A Boy. Yet in truth the K-pop high-water mark may well have passed and the chances of Girls’ Generation or anyone else emulating Psy’s success are unknown. For many, the legacy of K-pop will remain Gangnam Style and drunken office-party depictions of the ‘air horse’.
But tonight this means nothing. Tonight it is all about ‘now’ and right now we are in love with Girls’ Generation.
Rosette Sok, a Cambodian teenager from Touk Kork, shares her thoughts on the popularity of K-pop in the Kingdom:
K-pop seems to have a strong influence on the music and fashion of young Khmers. Why do you think it’s so popular in Cambodia?
It’s the image, I think. The Korean culture places quite a strong emphasis on beauty and being beautiful and in most K-pop groups there will be at least one or two members who are deemed to be the ‘visuals’ – the face of the group. These idols dress and look the way many ordinary people can only dream of, so while their talent plays a very large part in the rise of their popularity, it is also very much linked to their image.
What do you like about K-pop?
First, the music is unique. With the music comes the presentation of it: K-pop music videos are unlike English music videos. There is a lot more emphasis on dance, more so than depicting a storyline. Secondly, the members: people around the world think they’re good-looking, which is largely the reason it’s so popular. While girl groups are very well known, it’s the boy bands that generally have more fans. A lot of boy bands have many members – with more members comes more fans, because with so many members, there will be at least one who will be closest to a fan’s ideal type. It sounds very shallow to like a band for their looks, but it’s honestly the truth. The music gets you started with K-pop, but what really gets you hooked is the image of the artists.
Who are your favourite K-pop idols?
Exo, who are probably one of the most successful boy bands in South Korea. They were the first K-pop band I listened to. I like them the most because of their sound and their image is very distinctive.
How does K-pop affect how you think about South Korea?
I was in South Korea two weeks ago with my best friend for our graduation trip. I was the one that suggested South Korea back in February, which was around the time that I started to really get into K-pop. I believe that K-pop and the image that people associate with it completely changes one’s perspective about South Korea, especially among youth. I was never interested in visiting South Korea until I got into K-pop. I think if I hadn’t become a fan, I wouldn’t have gone to South Korea last month, nor would I have decided to go anytime soon.
And K-pop’s long-term future?
It’s evident K-pop is rising. On an international level, it has incredible potential. It’s reaching people from all over the world, from different backgrounds and fan bases. It is growing. It’s not just in South Korea anymore; it has impact everywhere!
In Phnom Penh, how do you get to experience K-pop?
When you go to South Korea you experience K-pop in subways, in restaurants, in malls; it’s everywhere you go. It’s not to the same degree here; some of the only ways to experience it are through your group of friends or through social media. There have recently been more channels on TV that play Korean dramas, reality shows and K-pop. The Korean influence is definitely more prominent now, compared to in previous years, and it will continue to grow. With that growth, more ways to experience the Korean entertainment industry will follow.