Mark James Russell

Books, blog and other blather

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Korean Science Growing Up, Going Abroad

November 11, 2012 / / 0 Comments

It’s pretty cool to see Korea pledging $51 million to development in Africa, with a concentration on infrastructure, IT, and science. The announcement — $51 million in aid over the next two years — came just after the Korea-Africa Economic Cooperation Ministerial Conference in Seoul last month. While North Korea, cool cell phones and pop music make the bulk of Korea’s international headlines, it is great to see how science is making such strides.

Korea’s universities have been steadily moving up the world university rankings for some time now. And while they are not exactly vying with the Standford or MIT, they are definitely much better than they were a decade ago. It is also no coincidence that the top-ranking schools are overwhelmingly Korea’s science schools — POHANG at No. 50 and KAIST is No. 68 (Seoul National University was No. 59, but much of that score came from its science programs).

Korea has long put an emphasis on the importance of science. You can get a very good overview of its science policy from Park Chung Hee to the present in this Brookings paper. I quite liked this graph:

The Ministry of Knowledge Economy sketches an amazing high tech future for Korea. Based on a 2009 survey of 3,000 IT industry experts and researchers, they listed such futuristic technologies as home medical checks for common diseases, mobile phones that only need to be recharged once annually, home appliances that respond to brain waves, automatic temperature adjustments for in-door climate control, super high-definition televisions, universal language translators, and efficient solar cells providing most electrical energy. While all this may be remarkable, similarly astounding technologies were predicted in Korean government reports twenty years ago.

Back in 2004, I wrote about the push then-President Roh Moo-hyun was giving science for the AAAS’s Science magazine: “Suddenly, Science Moves to the Top of Government’s Agenda” (I wrote it out because Science has a really stiff paywall). And while there is definitely something of a hamster wheel about the constant re-invention of grandiose science dreams, there is also a driving ambition which is so important to moving forward. It is the sort of vision that I fear way too much of the West has forgotten.

POTUS 2012

November 5, 2012 / / 2 Comments

No one has asked my thoughts on the 2012 US presidential race. And no one has paid me to consult or write about the US presidential race. Nonetheless, I will offer a couple of opinions on what is going on.

  • Barack Obama will win with results very close to Nate Silver’s predictions.
  • Yes, Obama has a pretty mediocre record and the US economy is still pretty weak. In a normal election cycle, he should have been quite beatable.
  • However, one of the biggest reasons he has such a mediocre record has been the historic levels of obstructionism by the Republicans.
  • The strongest candidate the GOP could have offered would have been a conservative who is intellectually honest and competent. But if today’s Republicans were intellectually honest and competent, they would have cooperated with the Obama administration over the past four years, and the United States would be in much better economic shape today. Which would have made Obama much less beatable.
  • This was a deliberate and calculated strategy by the GOP — that party discipline and intransigence was a winning electoral strategy. 2010 seemed to prove that right. Fortunately, in the long run it appears to have been a losing strategy.

And one more big, depressing point:
  • Until the Republican party becomes convinced that their strategy of the past four years (and, really, since Newt Gingrich ran the House 20 years ago) is a losing one, nothing is going to change in US politics.

One of Obama’s biggest failings as president has been his inability to lobby, cajole, and politic Congress effectively. He is way too passive before both his party and the opposition. Four years ago I totally supported Obama’s candidacy. But in retrospect I think the United States would have done better with Hillary Clinton as president (as painful as it is for me at admit that).

Oh, and one last closing thought about politics that I have learned over the past four years, from living in Asia and Europe and following US politics:

  • Any and all nations’ internal politics look just as moronic and painful as the United States’ if looked at with the same level of detail.

The Physics of History

November 3, 2012 / / 0 Comments

I just chanced across the website of Kim Young Suh, a physicist who has been teaching at the University of Maryland for some time. Kim was born in Korea in the 1930s, under the Japanese colonial government. As part of his website, he was quite a long and fascinating section on the music of Korea and Asia when he was growing up. It’s really fascinating, with hundreds of links to singers and music from Shanghai, Korea, and around the region, from the pop standards of the day to his classical favorites. It also talks a lot about Japanese propaganda songs and life in that period before independence. Just great stuff. You could spend hours listening to all his links.

Asian Indie – It’s a Big Place

November 3, 2012 / / 0 Comments

As much as I love Korea’s indie music scene, it is always good to be reminded just how much other great music is being made all over Asia. And I don’t just mean Japan and China. Southeast Asia seems to be flourishing culturally these days, thanks in part to its continued economic growth.

If you are interested in Southeast Asia’s rock music, there is a great blog called Sea Indie (SEA Indie?), which features music from Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, etc. Along with news and reviews, Sea Indie puts out Soundcloud compilations, year-end best-ofs and other good packages for finding the best music of the region. For example, here is their article about the best songs of 2011. Did you know Indonesia had a great folk-rock band called Bangkutaman? Well they do, and the band is quite good.

Here is Sea Indie’s first compilation, featuring rock from Indonesia:

You can download their Filipino collection here and their Malaysian compilation here. But I quite like this regional collection.

The website kind of gets at one of my points in POP GOES KOREA — that Korea’s great musical accomplishments aren’t just because Korea is so special, but they are in part a sign of how the world is changing thanks to the continued effects of globalization. Korea did it first in Asia, but young people around the region are traveling more and growing more wealthy, and as they do, they want to participate in modern pop culture. Sometimes that will be very mainstream culture, but other times it will be more indie and ground-up. And that is a very good thing.

Oh, it is worth noting that this is not just a new thing either. Here is a fun blog post at Tofu Magazine with plenty of music links featuring some great Hong Kong and Singapore rock-pop from the 1960s. I quite liked this album by Teddy Robin & the Playboys:

Here is their version of “A Little Bit of Me, A Little Bit of You“.

Pop Goes Korea Comes to E-Book

October 23, 2012 / / 2 Comments

Fun news — Pop Goes Korea is at last available as an e-book. You don’t have to track down a physical copy, wait for an order, or kill any trees anymore.

You can get Pop Goes Korea for your Kindle here, or your Nook here.

Best of all, my publisher allowed me to make one small but important change to the e-book edition. At last we have the dollar-won exchange rate specified in the text. When I wrote the book, it was at the unusually strong 800 won/dollar level, which made some of the numbers seem a bit odd (soon after, it fell to 1,200 won/dollar, and today is still less than 1,100 won/dollar).

Big thanks to everyone who has already bought a copy. And thanks to all who read my articles and blogs — I really appreciate the support and I hope to keep you interested.

Pop Goes Korea Goes E-Book

October 23, 2012 / / 1 Comment
Fun news — Pop Goes Korea is at last available as an e-book. You don’t have to track down a physical copy, wait for an order, or kill any trees anymore.

You can get Pop Goes Korea for your Kindle here, or your Nook here.

Best of all, my publisher allowed me to make one small but important change to the e-book edition. At last we have the dollar-won exchange rate specified in the text. When I wrote the book, it was at the unusually strong 800 won/dollar level, which made some of the numbers seem a bit odd (soon after, it fell to 1,200 won/dollar, and today is still less than 1,100 won/dollar).

Big thanks to everyone who has already bought a copy. And thanks to all who read my articles and blogs — I really appreciate the support and I hope to keep you interested.

From Ikea to Korea: Writing for K-pop

October 9, 2012 / / 0 Comments

My new article about K-pop songwriting is up not at the Wall Street Journal (or, if you prefer, in Korean at the Korean Wall Street Journal).

With all this talk about K-pop recently, I tried asking about what musically makes K-pop. It’s a pretty ephemeral subject, very hard to nail down. Plenty of people say there is nothing unique about it. Others say it is just a rip-off of J-pop. One former Korean music exec had a theory that it was a technical issue, regarding the equipment that Korean studios use. So I thought talking to someone who actually finds songwriters and sells songs around the world — Pelle Lidell — could provide some good insights into the question.

Sadly, some of my favorite subjects did not make the final cut. He talked a fair bit about how you have to write always keeping in mind the accompanying dance performances. And we discussed what kind of feedback Korean labels provide as a song is developed. I was expecting a lot of technical detail, but instead instructions tend to be quite cinematic and abstract. “Sassy cheery attitude + fire explosive beat,” for example. Or “deliverance of deep emotions and force.”

But the best quote to get axed was his answer to whether K-pop was just a copy of J-pop: “Bullshit,” he said.

Anyhow, thanks much to everyone who let me pick their brains for this story. It is definitely a subject I plan on coming back to in the future.

From Psy to Sigh

October 6, 2012 / / 0 Comments

A few random notes for this Saturday…

  • Of course, now that a spate of K-pop stories in the Western press has my tiny blog getting an uptick in visitors, my website goes down. It seems to be up and running again. Sadly, I cannot blame my ISP or anyone else for being incompetent, as the incompetence seems to be all mine. That’s what I get for trying to make changes a few hours before getting on an airplane.
  • There is yet another story out there with my gabbing, Don Kirk’s latest in the Christian Science Monitor. It’s about Psy, of course, but focuses on his free concert to 80,000 people from City Hall. I wonder if Don’s reportage came from the Seoul Foreign Correspondence Club last Friday — it’s in the 18th floor of the Press Building, which is right behind City Hall … great views there for downtown street protests.
  • Just a reminder that, if you are in Washington DC on Oct. 16, you can catch me, along with Marja Vongerichten (Host of PBS’s “Kimchi Chronicles”) and Grady Hendrix, talking about Korean culture. Grady, of course, will be talking movies. And I am told there might be one more “special” guest, but I’ll let you wonder who that might be. I will be talking K-pop and the Korean Wave. RIDING THE KOREAN WAVE takes place at 6:30 pm at George Washington University.

Citations and Celebrations

October 1, 2012 / / 2 Comments

It’s been a good couple of days for people who like to read my ramblings about Korea (admittedly a rather small sub-section of humanity). First, I was quoted a fair bit in an article in the Scotland Sunday Herald about K-pop. And now the latest New Yorker, as John Seabrook’s feature article about K-pop, “Factory Girls,” references Pop Goes Korea a whole bunch — sadly, though, Seabrook’s story is behind a pay wall. (UPDATE: I nearly forgot, I also was quoted in an Ad Age article about the marketability of Psy and “Gangnam Style”*).

“Factory Girls” was interesting, as I got to experience the famed New Yorker fact-checking regime. Plenty of calls and emails asking about all sorts of K-pop details, sometimes basic facts, but other times more interpretive. They were nice enough to have uncovered a couple of errors from my chapter on Lee Sooman … in part because there is so much more information from the 1980s and 1990s online now than when I wrote the book. Luckily, none of the errors were crucial to my book — mostly they were details (like the number of times one K-pop star was arrested for drug use), the kind of things I hope to clean up should the book ever get another edition.

Anyhow, if you are interested the New Yorker’s fact checking culture, John McPhee’s article “Checkpoints” is also paywalled, but you can read it for free here.

* (How scary is it that when Anita Chang Beattie filed her story late last week, “Gangnam Style” had 283 million Youtube hits, and already it is at 335 million?)

* * *

In other news, Park Jihyun and Gord Sellar’s short film, “The Music of Jo Hyeja,” just won the Audience Pick Award at the HP Lovecraft Film Festival in Los Angeles. “The Music of Jo Hyeja” is a spooky, atmospheric short film that re-tells Lovecraft’s story “The Music of Erich Zann.” It looks great and features music by Jambinai, so how can you go wrong? Hopefully it will come to a film festival near you before too long.

 

300 Million?

September 27, 2012 / / 0 Comments

UPDATE: My article about Kpop and Korean exports to emerging markets is up on Foreign Policy now. Please check it out.

ORIGINAL: Hard to believe that it was just three weeks ago I was amazed by Psy’s “Gangnam Style” hitting 100 million Youtube views. Because checking out Youtube today, it has now topped 290 million, and I guess will be hitting 300 million soon.

Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” (which most of us assumed would be the big summer hit) is at 270 million.

 

But more important than just Youtube views (after all, “Charlie Bit My Finger” has 483 million views) is that Psy is now getting sales and radio airplay. The song is now at No. 11 No. 2 on Billboard’s Hot 100 and No. 1 on Apple’s iTunes singles chart — well, it is down to No. 2 in the US after spending a few days at No. 1, but it is still No. 1 in Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, and Portugal.

Thanks to that surprise success, there is going to be a host of articles on Psy and K-pop coming out very soon, including a couple by myself. I’ll link to them as they appear. As someone who has been writing professionally about Korean pop music since around 2000, it’s all a bit overwhelming. But it is also fascinating to see who much our world is changing, and how Korea is changing with it.

More to come soon…

Btw, if you are looking for a great new Korean tune to dance to, I highly recommend the retro-disco of Glen Check’s “84”:

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