K-Pop without the ‘K’ just won’t pop

By Bobby Ghosh

K-Pop is betting that it can reverse its slowing global growth by becoming less Korean. This is a mistake: Without the “K”, the music is plain pop, undistinguishable from — and unable to compete with — the dominant American kind.

There is no question the K-Pop wave is waning. Bang Si-hyuk, whose Hybe Co. is behind such acts as BTS and NewJeans, believes the industry is in crisis. South Korean customs data shows that K-pop album exports in 2022 grew just 4.8 per cent to exceeded USD 230 million, compared with 62.1 per cent in 2021 and 82.6 per cent in 2020.

This is in no small part because of BTS, far and away the industry’s biggest act, went into hiatus at the end of 2022, to allow the seven band members to fulfil their mandatory military service and pursue solo projects.

At the time, there were fears of a decline in the US market, where BTS accounted for a third of all K-Pop sales and streams. The US is K-Pop’s second-biggest export market, behind Japan.

But overall album exports in the first half of last year were up a respectable 17 per cent. Jungkook, a BTS member, scored a huge hit with his solo album Golden, and the single Seven garnered a billion streams on Spotify — faster than any song previously.

So Bang’s warnings about a K-Pop crisis seem a little premature.

But even if he’s right about the industry’s prospects, I am skeptical about his prescription for how to return to the go-go growth of a few years ago. At a rare press conference last spring, he suggested that “the letter K needs to be diluted”.

Now the industry is taking him at his word — and following his suggestion to the letter. Several K-Pop management companies are backing bands that have few Korean members, or even none.

KatsEye, a new girl group has only one Korean among its six members, all chosen from the audition show The Debut: Dream Academy, a collaboration between Hybe and the American label Geffen Records. NiziU is an all-Japanese girl group, and Hori7on’s seven members are all Filipinos.

Coming up next from JYP Entertainment, another major K-Pop management firm, is VCHA, which is made up of five Americans and a Canadian, all of them picked from another TV program, America 2 Korea, known as A2K.

These bands will be put through “training” to try to replicate the K-Pop look and vibe, but they will sing mainly in English.

But can they really be K-Pop bands? Fans of the genre are skeptical. Purists complain when older bands produce songs in English, and even the more tolerant draw the line at non-Korean singers.

They point out that the first serious attempt at creating a “multinational” K-Pop band, the all-girl Blackswan, has never shaken off the suspicion of inauthenticity — and, despite several changes in its lineup, failed to break big.

The skepticism of fans is well merited. K-Pop has never been a distinct genre of music, with its own sounds and rhythms.

Strip away the Koreanness of its performers, and you’re left with synth-heavy pop without a unique cultural marker. If anything, given the heavy influence of disco and hip-hop, it sounds vaguely American.

That’s the strength of American popular music: Disco, like rock, rap or hip-hop, can be (and have) reproduced anywhere and in any language. K-Pop is a derivative, albeit a very compelling one.

But what the industry is attempting with the new bands is, at best, a derivative of a derivative. Lacking Koreanness, these acts will have to compete in the crowded American pop scene, where the success rate is infinitesimal.

This is not to say that all the new bands are doomed to fail. The parallels that come to my mind are the non-Black acts that the great Detroit impresario Berry Gordy signed up to his Motown label in the 1960s and early 70s.

Some of them, like the all-white Rare Earth, enjoyed some chart success, but not even Gordy’s legendary marketing machine could pass them off as authentically Motown.

K-Pop’s impresarios, who profess a deep admiration of Gordy and Motown, should heed that lesson.