What Rosé’s rise means for Ok-pop’s (English-speaking) future : NPR

Years earlier than BTS broke the seal on Ok-pop in America, Teddy Riley noticed the imaginative and prescient. The R&B trailblazer, whose manufacturing and songwriting pioneered new jack swing within the Eighties and ’90s, turned an ear to Seoul within the late 2000s, producing for Ok-pop teams like f(x), EXO and Ladies’ Technology. The wedding was arguably overdue: A technology earlier, Riley’s signature sounds had been everywhere in the single most vital breakthrough in Ok-pop historical past, the 1992 smash “Nan Arayo (I Know)” by Search engine optimisation Taiji and the Boys, the primary crew to not solely experiment with Western affect however mimic its artistry and style wholesale. And so, when Riley arrived to service the now totally constructed pop trade that had taken form in South Korea due to the “Nan Arayo” revolution, the producer was properly conscious of his function within the course of. “They did not don’t have any disgrace of their sport. ‘We would like the American tradition,’ ” he instructed The Boombox in 2017, laying naked the supply of the youthful tradition’s hip-hop, R&B and post-Michael Jackson disco-pop swagger. However Riley additionally acknowledged one thing distinctly Korean concerning the synthesized closing product. “The one factor that evokes them is American tradition and our fashion,” he mentioned, “however their music is their music and it is actually territorial.”

On the shut of 2024, Ok-pop is turning into territorial in a distinct sense. Earlier this month, the BLACKPINK member Rosé and the lady group TWICE, two of the style’s towering figures, launched new English-language music on the identical day — the previous dropping her solo debut, rosie, and the latter releasing a mini-album led by the Megan Thee Stallion-featuring title monitor, “Technique.” Each have launched music in English earlier than. What’s notable this time is the seamlessness of the imitation, with many tracks feeling as if they might slide undetected into the American High 40. The music is totally advantageous — and but, there’s a sedate, by-the-numbers earnestness to even the perfect songs, one at odds with Ok-pop’s traditional excesses. The efficiency of style is toned right down to the purpose of feeling nearly standard. To a lover of the shape, the impact is each spectacular and a bit of unsettling. And it’s consultant of a motion constructing momentum, evident within the work of many artists capitalizing on an American breakthrough this yr.

For a lot of its historical past, Ok-pop has been at the least one step faraway from the tradition it predominantly echoes, owing to what the social idea scholar John Lie known as the “temporal hole” — the dissonance created by the bodily, social and anthropological distance between cultures — in his 2014 ebook Ok-pop: Well-liked Music, Cultural Amnesia, and Financial Innovation in South Korea. Lots of the songs and types draw from a recognizable wellspring; some are nostalgic, others flat-out spinoff. All are in dialog with a worldwide pop diaspora that has been dominated by the U.S. (even when Ok-pop is partaking with Afrobeats or urbano, it’s doing so as a result of the Sizzling 100 says so). Ok-pop songs have been riddled with English hooks for the reason that daybreak of the style, however the closing product is usually barely askew — not often becoming into conventional molds or scanning as American pop to any ear skilled on High 40 radio. For its devotees, numerous what has labored about Ok-pop thus far is distinctly the byproduct of that mash-up nature, the slight discord of our sounds pushed by means of their system. Even for producers like Riley, who might hint the road of affect to his personal doorstep, there gave the impression to be an understanding that assembly within the center was not simply mutually helpful however crucial for the cultural alchemy at play.

Nonetheless, the very issues that make Ok-pop thrilling to its followers additionally mark its otherness, at the least from a sure business-minded perspective. The trade was constructed within the shadow of South Korea’s “huge three” expertise businesses — JYP Leisure, SM Leisure and YG Leisure — which within the mid-Nineties established the blueprints for a extremely systematized, deeply allusive, kaleidoscopic group equipment. In tweaking that mannequin, BTS’ label, the HYBE Company, has since supplanted all three, turning into its personal consortium of imprints producing crossover triumphs like NewJeans, Le Sserafim, Enhyphen and Tomorrow X Collectively, all of which have debuted within the High 10 of the Billboard 200. Between this transition of outdated and new powers, we now have seen the goalposts for achievement transfer from certainly one of sustained profitability to unfettered development. If one’s objective isn’t merely business success, however an entire and whole integration into the worldwide pop market, then there’s a strategic drawback in sounding merely shut to what’s hottest. For a South Korean music govt attempting to beat that remaining friction, it could appear the only path ahead is to take away the obvious differentiator — language — completely, and strip these songs of a few of their tangled eccentricities in order that they mix in. There have been loads of English songs made by Ok-pop teams, however most are merely the English-language variations of current Korean singles, or afterthought deep cuts buried on releases. Solely now’s a persistent and widespread effort rising to have Ok-pop idols create music that does not simply search American ears, however prioritizes them.

It tracks that members of BTS and BLACKPINK, the primary teams to essentially break the stateside dam for Ok-pop, have been among the many first to aggressively goal the language barrier. This yr, after fastidiously teasing the transfer since 2020’s The Album, BLACKPINK members Jennie and Lisa launched “Mantra” and “Rockstar,” respectively, each by means of American labels. “Mantra” faucets into Miami bass however evokes Los Angeles; “Rockstar,” which Lisa carried out on the Victoria Secret Style Present in Brooklyn in October, dials up hyperpop for a equally cosmopolitan sentiment: “Each metropolis that I’m going’s my metropolis,” she sings. Since pausing their group actions in 2022, the Bangtan Boys have continued off in numerous instructions towards the American horizon. The vast majority of the music they’ve launched as soloists this yr has been blatantly crossover-minded: j-hope teaming with Nile Rodgers and Benny Blanco, Jungkook buying and selling intercourse bars with Latto. However the pattern goes properly past these marquee stars. The music by the lady group Kiss of Life that went semi-viral in 2024 was not their EP’s designated Korean single, however the English B-side, “Igloo.” Ditto for Le Sserrafim and its half-rapped “1-800-hot-n-fun.” The newly debuted group MEOVV launched the English single “TOXIC,” and BOYNEXTDOOR launched an English cowl of “It is Starting to Look a Lot Like Christmas.” NCT Dream’s “Rains in Heaven” even made it onto the Pop Airplay chart, which ranks songs being performed on High 40 radio. The entire Ok-pop songs to affix NCT on the airwaves in 2024 — “Mantra,” Lisa’s “Moonlit Ground,” Rosé’s “APT.,” Jimin’s “Who,” and “Feeling Fortunate,” a collaboration between the R&B singer BIBI and Jackson Wang, the Hong Konger of the group Got7 — are in English.

We’re seeing this uptick as a result of Ok-pop is extra seen, accessible and approachable for Western audiences than ever earlier than, and our ears have by no means been extra receptive. Tik-Tok is, as a lot as anything, a Ok-pop app: algorithmically fed, prioritizing clipped sound and glossy objects, geared toward dwindling consideration spans, designed particularly for fancams and thirst-trap edits and choreographed dance challenges. If it is not a gateway drug to Ok-pop, it is at the least a pipeline. However past short-term gratification, this second has been years within the making. Since 2016, Ok-pop has been steadily on the rise, beating lengthy odds — most notably, a pervasive bias towards foreign-language music — by circumventing conventional avenues to listenership, due to YouTube and streaming. Spanish-language pop has made comparable inroads in America throughout that point, and has benefited from the web in the identical methods, however did not face as steep a climb. For one, there’s a built-in viewers for that music within the greater than 40 million individuals who communicate Spanish within the U.S. Latin pop additionally comes from a wide selection of areas, and is produced throughout numerous inventive circumstances. (The Puerto Rican star Unhealthy Bunny, as an example, bought his begin on SoundCloud.) In Ok-pop, the small oligarchy of leisure businesses that every one however management the music and its manufacturing churn out glowing new collectible figurines at breakneck pace like a workshop. In a way, you can say the mannequin’s incessantness wore down the defenses of American cynicism. Now, we stand at a crossroads the place the endgame of Ok-pop’s export initiative could lead away from its creative development.

To be honest, the concept of a globalized Ok-pop trade was all the time the objective, and cracks at a brand new revolution aren’t wholly novel. From the multinational girl-group mission Rania in 2011 to the NCT experiment that culled 25 members from eight international locations into sub-units (together with NCT Dream) with the express objective of area of interest advertising and marketing, there have been a number of makes an attempt at franchising, notably right here in America, the massive leagues of cultural consumerism. However we’re reaching a tipping level — not only for musicians on the prime of the Ok-pop heap again residence seeking to totally transition, however for executives, each inside and out of doors the Ok-pop trade, rubbing their fingers collectively on the prospect of enhanced attain, even when it means a dilution of the cultural signifiers in motion. You possibly can see it in XG, a Japanese lady group based mostly in South Korea that sings and raps completely in English. I’ve loved a few of XG’s songs, which function machine-gun flows and entice drums. However not solely is the group taking part in into the facsimile of rap tradition now handled broadly as web tradition, it doesn’t appear to be talking to or for anybody particularly. Ok-pop is not precisely constructed for individuality, however that is music so all-encompassing as to turn out to be flat. The mission assertion for the group’s label, XGALX, feels like start-up jargon: “By way of XGALX’s distinctive creativity in music and content material, we intention to interrupt down the partitions of widespread sense and stuck concepts, create new values by means of creativity, and talk to younger individuals world wide.”

Take, as one other instance, KATSEYE, a brand new lady group shaped on the 2023 actuality present Dream Academy in collaboration between the HYBE Company and Geffen Information. The sextet was launched with a lofty goal: a “world lady group” that will “transcend nationwide, cultural, and creative boundaries.” It has since turn out to be evident that “world” truly simply meant “Western,” and that the group’s backers weren’t seeking to transcend cultural boundaries a lot as create one thing cultureless. KATSEYE sings completely in English. Its music is produced by ASCAP mainstays like Ryan Tedder and Cashmere Cat. Solely certainly one of its six members is Korean. (Ok-pop trainee applications are recognized for plucking would-be members from throughout the Korean diaspora — Rosé, for one, is a baby of Korean immigrants raised in Australia — however these strikes have typically served the efficiency of Ok-pop’s comfortable energy, fairly than feeling like believable deniability by means of tokenism.) Although the group is clearly cosplaying Ok-pop, in apply, it’s something however. In an interview with Korea JoongAng Day by day, HYBE founder and chairman Bang Si-hyuk admitted as a lot earlier than betraying his true intentions: “It is time to use the Ok-pop manufacturing system abroad to seek out new skills throughout the globe,” he mentioned, producing a product “focused to the American market.” Ok-pop, he appeared to say, was not a style however a workflow.

Ok-pop businesses construct their teams by means of a rigorous course of that begins with a trainee program, auditioning teenage girls and boys to suit a specific group aesthetic. The “idols,” as they’re known as, signal contracts that permit the label to manage each side of their profession and public life. Members are organized by operate (e.g., a principal rapper or dancer), and every new launch brings a brand new idea, whose extremely choreographed routines are carried out on numerous Korean music exhibits for months earlier than the cycle repeats. The revelation that the identical components may be relevant within the American market — the auditions for KATSEYE drew 120,000 candidates — has discovered some U.S. stakeholders keen to help the assimilation. “It has been nice to have the ability to educate them about our market and the way they’ll carry out higher in it,” Allison Kaye of HYBE America instructed instructed Billboard. “I feel it is the primary true East-West partnership because it pertains to expertise.” In March, HYBE struck a 10-year deal with UMG, linking the most important video games of their respective cities, and by August the label had doubled down on its “multi-home, multi-genre” plan to deliver “the Ok-pop methodology to the American pop scene,” underneath the stewardship of polarizing expertise supervisor Scooter Braun. To date, that methodology has been a chart gold mine. Final month, three Ok-pop albums had been within the High 10 of the Billboard 200 for the primary time ever — this after Rosé lately turned the primary feminine Ok-pop act to succeed in the High 10 on the Sizzling 100. Final week, rosie debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard 200, the best ever for a Korean lady.

The timing of this export operation feels a contact ironic. For one factor, as concern about A.I. slop intensifies, it is weird to think about deliberately treating Ok-pop — as uncommon a phenomenon as we have seen in music this century — as merely an outlet for generically engineered musical copypasta. However this increasing strategy to the music’s enterprise mannequin additionally comes at a second the place the equipment itself is underneath scrutiny. Latest scandals have resurrected longstanding considerations concerning the ethics of commodifying idol worship: In April, NewJeans, maybe essentially the most critically revered Ok-pop act of all time, discovered itself on the heart of a labor controversy that led certainly one of its members to offer tearful testimony for a broader investigation into office tradition within the South Korean leisure trade. In July, Brian Kim, founding father of Kakao Corp. (who gained a controlling stake in SM Leisure after a battle with HYBE), was arrested for allegedly manipulating the inventory worth throughout his tried acquisition. In November, NewJeans introduced the termination of its contract with HYBE on the grounds that the corporate had breached the settlement. The trade at massive rallied towards the transfer: “If we permit such a way of contract termination to happen, who might ever spend money on the Korean Ok-pop market?” the Korean Leisure Producers Affiliation mentioned in a press release.

NewJeans is the Ok-pop excellent: referential however aesthetically targeted, systematic however not mechanically so, broadly interesting however unmistakably Korean, marked by good style and private fashion. Contemplating that, it is jarring to be taught that even the perfect case situation is topic to the whims and evils of trade. It is value noting that many Ok-pop teams do not make it to yr three: Promo cycles are brutal and exhausting, and idols’ lives are fastidiously stage-managed in methods that may’t assist however breed strife. Labor practices within the American document enterprise aren’t generally known as healthful both, however within the NewJeans equation evidently the star-aligned serendipity of the group’s music, by which the configuration of artist, producers, songwriters and choreographers feels completely and harmoniously matched, solely barely balances the burden of an oppressive operational infrastructure. If HYBE’s endgame is a Ok-pop for America, and for the world, there’s a actual risk of sacrificing the perfect elements for the worst elements: Franchise the effectivity, lose the identification.

What’s the sound of Ok-pop, if one exists past language? And if it has a singular sound, why would this push disrupt that? Whereas Ok-pop does borrow far too broadly to have anybody unified sonic idea — in any case, its acts undergo conceptual evolutions each few months, pegged to varied music tendencies — I would argue that the sound’s inherent kitsch owes to its want to barter so many layers of context, and that it’s in that negotiation that one can see and listen to character past the system. At its greatest and most charming, Ok-pop music is about liminal area — the journey between cultural poles, favoring neither the origin nor the vacation spot however the stress of touchdown within the center. Processing all that’s misplaced in translation creates songs which are decidedly not American pop, current in awe of and in opposition to it unexpectedly. Stripping the music of these circumstances can depart it sterile and boring, even when “higher.”

There are numerous explanation why the mannequin works — lovely younger individuals drawing the parasocial needs of even youthful followers; its completely packaged, hypnotizing use of synchronization; its climate-controlled ambiance — and why it could once more elsewhere. However I’ve all the time preferred the concept one thing so blatantly business might produce one thing nearly paradoxically custom-made: as cosmically twee as WJSN’s “Secret,” as reverential as Heize’s “And July” or as bonkers as Ladies’ Technology’s “I Obtained a Boy.” How else can one clarify the “Gangnam Type” phenomenon — by which a firecracker of a music from a personality who seems like something however an idol, written a few very Korean expertise, turned the most important YouTube hit ever on the time — than with a risky cultural chemistry whose imprecision is its biggest asset?

It have to be mentioned that the “outdated Ok-pop” is way from useless. The boy band ATEEZ, who had been on the entrance of the pack the week of Ok-pop’s huge Billboard takeover, embodies the entire chaotic maximalism of the style, and there are lots extra the place they got here from. You will discover the NewJeans excellent in sister group Illit, or in ARTMS’ Dall, the perfect and most intoxicating Ok-pop full-length of 2024. However HYBE’s 10-year UMG deal appears like a harbinger: The shift is coming, and the brink is nearer than ever. I do not wish to be all doom and gloom. I do see the imaginative and prescient. Actually, one might consider Rosé’s chart-storming Bruno Mars collab “APT.” as a logical subsequent step in Ok-pop’s evolution: As a substitute of pairing Korean verses with an English hook, it does the other, and as an alternative of reaching for a sound that’s strikingly up to date to the purpose of setting one’s enamel on edge, or so nostalgic for a bygone period as to really feel alien, it’s deliberately only a bit passé. Together with Mars, the world’s biggest karaoke star, is a intelligent contact. Rosé carried out the music on Fallon and on the MAMA Awards, which is type of just like the Ok-pop Grammys. However it’s telling that the MAMA ceremony was held within the U.S. for the primary time in its historical past this yr. Getting ready to one more Ok-pop revolution, the following battleground is right here.