While for most, Korean pop star Psy’s 2012 viral hit ‘Gangnam Style’ was simply an annoying one-hit-wonder that wouldn’t go away, for South Korea it was something more. It was a flash point that signified the arrival of South Korean popular culture.
For those unaware, South Korean pop music is a bonafide global force. According to NPR, the annual K-pop convention in Los Angeles draws in more than 40,000 participants, with similar events in other cities drawing in major crowds.
Groups like Crayon Pop and the Wonder Girls opened for artists like Lady Gaga and the Jonas Brothers and Psy even performed at Australia’s own Future Music Festival. Of course, Psy is hardly your typical K-pop star. If anything, he’s the opposite.
As Euny Hong, the author of The Birth Of Korean Cool, tells NPR, while K-pop is populated by statuesque young men with chiseled features and angelic young girls, Psy is short, overweight, and his aesthetic is firmly rooted in irony.
It’s that irony that signaled South Korea’s “final stage in its modern evolution”. With the popularity of ‘Gangnam Style’, K-pop had officially become a schtick. South Korea had been placed firmly on the map and now everybody wants a piece.
Just ask the producers of Nickelodeon’s new show Make It Pop, a musical sitcom that depicts three Asian-American boarding school teens who start a band called XOIQ, who bears all the hallmarks of classic K-pop, including futuristic videos and synchronised dance routines.
But perhaps what’s most interesting about the K-pop explosion is that it didn’t happen by accident. This wasn’t merely a case of a booming economy successfully exporting its brightest stars across the pond. In fact, the opposite is true.
As NPR recounts, in the late ’90s, Asia was going through a major financial crisis and the South Korean government decided to use music to improve its image and build its cultural influence. They used 20th century America as their model – a country so universally cool, you wanted anything made there.
In much the same way that James Dean and Levi’s jeans sold America to the world, South Korea’s government poured millions of dollars into forming a Ministry of Culture with a specific department devoted to K-pop.
“It turns out that the Korean government treats its K-pop industry the way that the American government treats its automobile and banking industry, meaning that these are industries that have to be protected,” Hong says.
It was an elaborate plan and included doing things like building massive, multi-million dollar concert auditoriums, helping regulate noeraebangs — karaoke bars — to protect the interests of K-pop stars, and even refining hologram technology for better live shows.
As Wikipedia notes, the South Korean government has openly acknowledged the boon that K-pop provides to the country’s economy. According to government estimates, a US$100 increase in the export of cultural products results in a US$412 increase in the export of other consumer goods.
Embassies and consulates of South Korea have participated in the planning and organization of K-pop concerts outside the country, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs regularly invites overseas K-pop fans to attend the annual K-Pop World Festival in South Korea.
The country’s investment in its K-pop stars is not unlike the way a country like Russia invests in its Olympic athletes. Korean management agencies offer binding contracts to children starting from age 9 to 10 and begin an intensive, day-to-day training regimen.
Trainees live together in a tightly regulated environment and spend hours a day learning music, choreography, foreign languages, and communication techniques with fans and journalists. In 2012, the cost of training a single member from SM Entertainment’s nine-member band Girls’ Generation averaged US$3 million.
While the robotic system of training has often been criticised, there’s certainly lessons to be learnt in the way South Korea values and invests in its own cultural capital. In fact, one could argue the country has laid a road map for prosperity through music.
