Partnership Gwinnett is the presenting sponsor of Global Atlanta's Korea Channel. Subscribe here for monthly Korea newsletters.
K-pop groups are now firmly entrenched in the global zeitgeist and accustomed to amassing huge numbers of views on YouTube and selling out concert venues on extensive worldwide tours.
But it wasn’t always this way, and it took a blend of government backing, creative serendipity and a well-placed diaspora over the decades to turn this trickle of cultural exports into what has become a bona fide “Korean wave” — Hallyu in Korean — spilling over into other sectors where firms from the dynamic market economy have become global leaders.
That’s the assessment of an expert panel convened in Atlanta by the Consulate General of Korea and organized by Global Atlanta in December.
If there was any doubt of Korea’s global street cred on the cultural front, it was allayed last year when Bong Joon-ho’s “Parasite” became the first non-English film to take home the Oscar for best picture. Soon after, mega K-pop group BTS became the first all-Korean band to top the Billboard Hot 100 chart with its English-language hit “Dynamite.” Twenty-six weeks later, it’s still in the top 50.
For Korean Consul General Young-jun Kim, the prominence of Korea’s cultural sector, starting with TV dramas in the 1990s and extending to today’s video games, cartoons and pop music groups, has lent recognition that has aided the country’s integration with global markets.
“The success of Korean Wave also boosted South Korea’s cultural diplomacy significantly by the winning the hearts and minds of people across the world and the enhancing the national image of South Korea,” he said in introductory remarks.
That means that more cachet accompanies brands like Samsung, LG and Kia Motors, and it has translated into an influx of tourists and much more uptake on the study of Korean language.
Suk-young Kim, professor at the UCLA School of Theater and author of K-pop Live: Fans, Idols, and Multimedia Performance, thinks of K-pop not only as Korean but also as “kaleidoscopic” pop that embraces flashy, colorful visuals, and “keyboard” pop that is built for the digital age.
Ultimately, it’s a teenage idol music that weaves in elements of pop, electronica, hiphop and dance to create a genre that consistently engages a younger audience but somehow has maintained a broad fan base globally, she said.
“There are many different ways to articulate K-pop. But for me personally, it is really creating a new type of cultural movement for the Millennial generation, and younger people like Generation Z, who have known digital culture as their primary sources of exchanging ideas and information and also existing in this world,” Dr. Kim said.
In a way, it emerged as a Korean answer to J-Pop, the Japanese musical wave that preceded it, but K-pop went after the world market at the right time for the industry.
“In a way, the industry was really optimally adaptable to this digital consumption of music. And because the K-pop industry really requires massive scale of investment in grooming its idols even before they debut, they really had to look beyond the Korean domestic music market,” Dr. Kim said.
Using English hooks and focusing on videos and intra-band dynamics that appealed to fans, K-pop somehow broke through the language barrier and embraced a “hybridity” that makes it stand out against a monolithic global cultural backdrop. In that way, it has created a new kind of Korean culture.
“It wasn’t really the industry’s intention to be the flag carrier of Korea. But it happened with the global spread and the digital platforms being introduced in our daily lives.
Now, Korea accounts for just 6 percent of the world’s music industry, but it’s sixth in the world in terms of profitability, Dr. Kim said.
One example of its power: Big Hit Entertainment, the management company behind boy band BTS raised $822 million in an initial public offering last year, valuing it at $4.1 billion, even as many of the band’s concerts (including in Atlanta) were canceled due to COVID-19.
“K-pop as an industry is hurting, in part because its business model has shifted towards live tours, especially for big bands,” Dr. Kim added, noting that about half of their income comes from live shows. “But because K-pop’s natural habitat is online space, it has weathered the storm better than other comparable industries.”
Was K-pop’s success due to government foresight and support?
Somewhat, according to the panelists, but it’s not as simple as saying that the cultural exports were a needed salve for an ailing economy after the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s.
Jenny Wang Medina, an assistant professor at Emory University’s Department of Russian and East Asian Languages and Cultures, said K-pop was certainly a beneficiary of government efforts to push more Korean creative content into the world — supporting the translation of Korean literature for instance. But the genre also became a force for ushering in a larger, more diverse media landscape.
“While there is an economic incentive behind this, and a very strong one, I think there is also a real desire on the part of the Korean government as well as Korean people to have their culture recognized,” said Dr. Wang Medina, who is working on a book manuscript titled K-World: Cultural Capital and the Ethno-Nation in Global South Korea.
Korean diasporas in culturally significant cities around the world, including a more recently placed enclave in Atlanta, have provided a receptive “landing platform” for Korean food and culture, she said, interacting with other ethnic and racial communities in new ways.
That played out on a global stage in 2020, as K-pop fans (Stans, as they are known online) took over anti-Black hashtags on Twitter with memes in support of their favorite bands, rallying in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.
For Dr. Wang Medina, whose parents owned a beauty supply shop in New York patronized primarily by Black customers, this is an example of how Black and Korean communities are already mixing in realms beyond the obvious hiphop influence on K-pop. Atlanta, a center for the Black hair industry where Koreans are primary actors, has become a venue for such cross-pollination.
“There are already these kinds of integrations happening, but I think to bring it to a socio-political level and bring awareness to the fact that this is happening would be very helpful,” Dr. Wang Medina said.
Georgia State University film major Dhaylin Lee joined the panel to talk about her experience as the founder of Lunar Krew, a local K-pop performance group that narrowly missed the opportunity to travel to Korea to compete in the K-pop World Festival.
Her group finished second in a regional competition sponsored by the consulate in 2019, but the group had its own rewards: knitting her group of friends together, boosting their self-confidence and providing a creative outlet.
“It feels like we’re actually performing these songs. We see the idols on stage giving their all, and we wanted to try to mimic that,” she said.
Has the Korean wave that has immersed people like Ms. Lee crested, or will it continue to sweep the world? That remains to be seen, says Dr. Kim.
“I’ve gone through many skeptical moments. But having seen the kind of evolution of K-pop, over many generations, I can say that it’s likely to stay here longer than we might anticipate. Of course, in the world of pop culture, nothing is permanent. And even the term Hallyu, or Korean Wave, is a stream that flows and cannot be contained. So it will eventually phase out, but not anytime soon.”
Watch the webinar in the embedded video above or find more information about the event here.
Atlanta Ballet is the presenting sponsor of Global Atlanta's Culture Channel. Subscribe here for monthly Culture newsletters.