Mark James Russell

Books, blog and other blather

Category: Korean music (Page 1 of 11)

My Top-3 K-pop Songs of 2017

December 19, 2017 / / 0 Comments

A completely biased and arbitrary list, but here’s my selection of the top three K-pop songs for the year.

And what a year it was. K-pop definitely reached new heights in North America and there was no shortage of solid songwriting with great hooks. Much like the Korean movie industry, K-pop has lost some of the rough and unpredictable elements that once made it so charming; but, instead, now it boasts better than ever quality. Maybe the most dynamic and interesting musically since 2012? Ever?

It’s also a time of big changes for K-pop, as much of the last generation of superstars is fading away, whether because of breaking up or military service or just getting older. But while losing so many big names hurts, I think the new talent rising up more than makes up for it. Because pop music always needs new faces, new ideas and new sounds to stay fresh.

Anyhow, as for my top-3 list for 2017:

1. BTS “DNA”

I’m not a huge BTS fan, but there’s no denying that they’ve had one of the biggest years for any K-pop act ever. And “DNA” was a serious earworm. It sounds all right on headphones, but I think it’s qualities really shine in a club or other big, banging soundsystem.

2. Uhm Jung-hwa “Ending Credit”

Uhm Jung-hwa goes synthwave! Hard to believe Uhm Jung-hwa has been cranking out pop hits for 20 years now. And while I haven’t really listened to her much in a few years, this song was just amazing. Like something Giorgio Moroder might have cooked up.

3. Hyolyn “Blue Moon”

Okay, this is a bit of a random choice, but screw it, it’s my list and I really liked this song.

At last — Pop Goes Korea is back!

July 13, 2017 / / 0 Comments

PGK2

Okay, so this took a few months longer than I expected last fall. But at least, Pop Goes Korea (2nd Edition) is out and for sale.

The new version is 10,000 or so words longer than the old one, with all sorts of updates throughout. In addition to updates to each chapter, I’ve also added essays about Korean indie music, another about classic rock, a followup Q&A with Sean Yang (founder of Soribada) and a new Q&A with Dami Lee, the web cartoonist.

Best of all, the 2nd edition is also a lot cheaper, for $4.99 on the US Amazon site.

Oh, but all the photos are gone. Sorry, but I didn’t want the hassle of dealing with all those photo rights all over again. And, besides, this is the internet age, so I assumed people could just search and find all the photos they wanted for any subject.

For now, it is only available as an ebook at Amazon, but I am planning to upload it to all the major ebook sites soon enough.

Okay, it is a bit of an old book for such a high-turnover, constantly changing topic. But I think it holds up fairly well (and there really is nothing else that covers the same territory in English). And for the occasional student of pop culture, hallyu or modern Korea, I thought it would be useful to have my book easily available.

Thanks to all who read the original edition, and to those who are interested in the new one. I really appreciate your time, and I hope you find the new version interesting and useful.

 

 

Pedro Pelo Marco (Me!) — Brazil Comes to Seoul

May 31, 2017 / / 0 Comments

Here is a fun project I participated in last year, but it only recently hit the airwaves—one of Brazil’s most popular travel programs, Pedro Pelo Mundo (Pedro Around the World).

Pedro Korea

Host Pedro Andrade and his wonderful team came to Korea last summer, where they met with a whole bunch of experts in food, fashion, tattoos, and more, to talk about what makes Korea so fascinating. And they were nice enough to ask me to be one of their guests, too.

Pedro Mark Hongdae

So we walked around Hongdae and talked about music (K-pop and other genres), and plenty of other things about Korea. It was a lot of fun.

Mark Pedro 2

Unfortunately, the full show is not online, so you can’t enjoy it all. But you can get a taste of it here, with a segment on the Cheonggyecheon.

Talking music on the radio

September 13, 2016 / / 0 Comments

My good friend Shawn left Korea last year after seven years there, most of that spent immersed in the local indie music scene. Since moving to Hamilton, Ontario (that would be Canada), he’s had a weekly radio show about Korean indie music on McMaster University radio, CFMU.

As I am currently visiting family nearby, Shawn invited me to join him on last week’s show. It was good fun. For an hour, I shared some of my favorite Korean music, and we chatted a bit about music things. You can listen to the results on Mixcloud. (I also briefly wrote about it over on the Korea Gig Guide).

 

Music history keeps moving on

March 10, 2016 / / 1 Comment

A couple of events recently have made me all too aware of how everything is constantly changing in Korea, including the music scene. The biggest news of late (imho) is that the best music store in Korea, Hyang Music, is finally shutting down, closing its doors on March 12.

The cosy interior of Hyang Music (this photo blatantly taken from the Time Out article... Happy to take it down if anyone is upset).

The cosy interior of Hyang Music (this photo blatantly taken from the Time Out article… Happy to take it down if anyone is upset).

Hyang opened in 1991 and was going strong when I first arrived in Seoul back in the late 1990s. Back then, Korea was full of music stores (around 5,000 is the most common number I’ve seen), with several huge Tower Records around Seoul, a huge Hot Trax at Kyobo Books, and countless small shops seemingly on every corner. But most of them died out when the music market collapsed in Korea more than a decade ago. Even Hongdae’s great Purple Records closed last year, and now Hyang has fallen, too.

Even in the heyday of the music industry, Hyang was still the shop to go to, especially for local indie music. Back then, it felt like you could keep up with most of the CDs being released by the local indie scene, and if I could find a release, I usually bought a copy. Hyang was a tiny store, but it was in such a convenient location for me, on the road connecting the Shinchon Subway Station and the Yonsei main gate (being around the corner from Voodoo Bar, my favorite hangout way back then, helped, too). I couldn’t begin to guess all the CDs I bought there.

Clubs, too, are always opening and closing in Korea. Ruail Rock recently shut its doors, for instance. One of the first clubs in Seoul that I used to go to was Master Plan, which was located in Nogosan-dong, about halfway between Shinchon and Donggyo-dong. I used to go for the indie rock music, but soon after it turned into a hiphop club, and for quite a while it was at the heart of the Korean indie hiphop scene.

Now the fine young music writer Emma Kalka has published a fine history of Master Plan in the latest Groove Magazine. It’s an excellent and informative read, totally worth your time.

I’m old and boring now, so don’t go out very music. But I don’t want to be one of those boring old fossils who complains about how much better things used to be. I’m sad to be losing Hyang Music, just as I’m sad to have lost the other music stores and clubs. But change isn’t all negative, and the music scene today is probably bigger and more interesting than it’s been since I’ve been in Korea. So cheers to Hyang and Master Plan and everyone else who has gone before. And I’m looking forward to hearing all the music that comes next.

(Cross-posted to the Korea Gig Guide).

Summertime (and the bloggin’ ain’t easy)

August 4, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Erg, August already? Apologies for the lack of updates. It’s been a hot, soggy summer in Korea, one that doesn’t really lend itself to blogging.

On the plus side, I’ve been making some decent progress on the writing. Finished one short story (very short) and I’ve been cranking away on the sequel to Young-hee & the Pullocho. Most significantly, I think I finally worked out a few bugs in that story and nearly gotten through a re-write. But still a long way to go.

Back in early July, Bank Street Bookstory in New York City was nice enough to have a reading of The Pullocho. That was a wonderful surprise, but I was even more surprised to discover they filmed the reading, and put some highlights up online.

  • Also, there have been a couple more reviews of The Pullocho, at London Korea Links and ATK Magazine (very positive reviews, too, so big thanks to Philip and Cindy, and huzzah!).
  • Publisher’s Weekly did a very nice writeup of Ed Greenwood’s new publishing ventures … something that should directly relate to my own writing (eventually).
  • Hey, the Wondergirls are back, with a very, very ’80s song:

New Ppi Ppi is just … wha?

May 2, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Ppi Ppi Band was one of the biggest indie acts of Korea in the 1990s, with a very weird sound and Lee Yoonjung’s weirder vocals. The band broke up and went in a bunch of different directions — Park Hyun-joon was in Wonderbirds and other bands (and spent time abroad) and is now in Honey Moss, Dalparan got more into film scores and producing, and Lee Yoonjung is half of the group EE.

But these days, everything ’90s is big again, plenty of older groups are having comebacks, including Ppi Ppi Band. Here’s their first single and video, “ㅈㄱ ㅈㄱ” (or “J G J G”), as strange as always:

New Big Big is just wow

May 1, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Big Bang just released a couple of songs and music videos, “Loser” and “Bae Bae”, which instantly showed the group is still miles ahead of the rest of K-pop. Just wow.

“Loser” is okay, but the real gem to me is “Bae Bae,” with its organic, trippy vibe. Fascinating stuff, totally unlike the rest of pop music in Korea.

Actually, this is almost too interesting. It makes it way too clear how “meh” the rest of K-pop has been for the past year or two.

Here’s the video for “Loser,” too. It’s actually doing better on the Melon song chart, but I don’t think it is as interesting as “Bae Bae”:

Genuine K-pop

April 7, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Hard to believe it’s been a year already since K-Pop Now came out (thanks once again to all to bought it and/or read it). On one hand, it’s amazing how much has changed already in the world of K-pop — new groups, people leaving old groups, etc. But at the same time, I think the last year has been a bit static, without anything transformative really going on.

K-Pop Now wasn’t the most academic book ever, nor was it the most in-depth (it was fairly short with a lot of images). But I tried to give a sense of what K-pop is, why fans love it, and the spirit of the K-pop age.

One line from the book, though, I wish I had been clearer about:

“K-pop is overwhelmingly genuine. When a singer loves, he loves completely.  When he misses his love, it is a deep, soul-crushing ache”

Now, clearly the industrial nature of the K-pop business doesn’t really nurture singer-songwriters, people who spill their souls and reveal their deepest truths. But I wasn’t talking about the industry that makes the music; I was talking about the sentiments expressed by K-pop singers. The industry and the structure of the industry might be cynical and full of artifice, however the emotions and ideas of the songs are not.

Does that make sense? I might compare it to professional wrestling.  Professional wrestling isn’t “real”, but the reason people like it is because of the force of the emotions expressed by the wrestlers. It seems genuine.

It’s kind of an adolescent way of viewing the world and emotion. A grown-up, disillusioned view of love might be more like Nirvana’s “Heart-Shaped Box” or Radiohead’s “Creep” (okay, not really “grown-up”, but certainly more jaded). K-pop is more like an opera aria, and the feelings expressed by most K-pop songs are more straightforward and pure. Personally, I find the artifice of honesty a fascinating subject in all creative areas.

 

Vice takes K-pop seriously

March 7, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Far too many interviews with K-pop groups in the Western media end up being rather infuriating. Sometimes that act like clueless fans, eating up all the marketing b.s. the group’s management throws at them. Or, worse, they ask a lot of insulting, condescending questions that are just as ignorant (usually under the guise of being “probing”, when really it is more about cultural ignorance).

Which is why I was pleasantly surprised by this Vice interview with the group 4Minute. Jakob Dorof asks interesting questions and clearly knows the genre, without falling into the usual traps.

Of course, it helps that 4Minute are a bit more established now, letting them loosen up and be themselves a little. And it helps that their latest single and music video, for “Crazy”, are so good.

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