“The K-pop fan community keeps up to speed with the touring or promotion visits, so even before these groups become familiar to a wider audience, there have been in-market trips,” says Yvonne Yuen, senior vice president of international marketing at Universal Music Southeast Asia. Though established Korean pop acts visited the United States as early as the 1980s, when the “godfather of Korean pop,” Cho Yong Pil, performed at Carnegie Hall, there has been a dissonance between attendance numbers and mainstream awareness. The march continues, and much of the force behind K-pop’s aggressive outward expansion is that Korea’s own market is, at this point, too small to contain it. It not only transcended the language barrier but also upended thousands of hours and millions of dollars worth of market research in South Korea, where the word “invasion” had become used more and more frequently to describe and package the impending arrival of highly trained, highly disciplined pop brands who were already uniformly famous across the Asian continent. He is not a conventionally pretty face and “Gangnam Style” is comprised of very specific cultural signifiers, written in largely untranslatable Korean. Which is why Psy is such an extraordinary case.
The result is a listening (and viewing) experience that is both bewildering and thrilling, one wherein recognizable pop moments from the past (or present) are copied, tweaked, and improved upon before being fused together, side-by-side, in the space of the same, aggressively polished product. Sounds, textures and visuals are often sourced from various Western hits. (Both of those examples, EXO and Girls’ Generation, call Seoul’s first powerhouse agency, SM Entertainment, home.) The songs, like the groups themselves, are constructed for maximum reach: Choruses are built from catchphrase English, verses are in Korean or custom-tailored to target markets. This debut is usually a heavily considered concept, be it a 12-member, half-Chinese, half-South Korean boy band that can split up to tour separately but simultaneously or a sprawling, nine-member girl group with members come from as far away as Southern California. They live together in housing arrangements made by their record label, learn foreign languages, song composition, rapping and dance choreography before finally debuting. As early as their teens, prospective performers are recruited and sent through a specially designed, deeply competitive training program meant to prepare them for careers as global pop exports. It is an artform - closer to a science - that in recent years has made cultural inroads outside of Asia. Since the late 1990s, Korea has been producing some of the most exhilarating pop music in the world. “Gentleman” has, if the numbers are to be trusted, been an overwhelming success - proof, the narrative would suggest, that Psy wasn’t just a one-hit wonder and that “Gangnam Style” wasn’t just the 2012 equivalent of the “ Macarena.” But like the Latin pop surge of the mid-1990s, Psy’s unexpected breakthrough came at a pivotal moment for Korean pop, or K-pop as it’s also called. But have you actually heard “Gentleman” recently? An unabashedly strategic copy of its predecessor, the song is armed with a similarly propulsive, high-wattage electro hook and an equally relentless barrage of outlandish visual punchlines. How could he possibly follow that?Īs of this past week, “Gentleman” is the year’s most-viewed video on YouTube with 573 million hits and counting. And all of it stemmed from the sometimes maddening appeal of one very viral music video. He was a part of pop’s most inner circle. He’d gained entrée to the largest music market in the world. After a decade spent touring almost exclusively for Korean audiences, he was teaching Britney Spears the “ horse dance” on “Ellen,” counting down the New Year for us in Times Square, shilling pistachios during the Super Bowl, and, perhaps most impressively, performing for the Obamas at the annual “ Christmas in Washington” special. That song vaulted Psy - a doughy, good humored outlier in his native country’s carefully moussed, vaguely militaristic music industry - to pop cultural heights no one in Seoul could have ever anticipated. That post came nearly a month after the release of “ Gentleman,” the 35-year-old Korean pop phenomenon’s follow-up to his first smash hit, a song whose video, with 1.8 billion total views, is - by almost a factor of two - the most watched visual in the history of YouTube.įor much of the past year “Gangnam Style” was inescapable on TV, at weddings, at sporting events, everywhere.
“Once you think it’s gone, it comes back.” “This dude is the herpes of music,” the caption read, alongside the hash tags #flareup and #pleasegoaway. In early May, Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong posted a photo to his Instagram account of “ Gangnam Style” sensation Psy.
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