Books, blog and other blather

Category: Korean music (Page 4 of 11)

Morning Links

Since I am apparently dumping a bunch of fun links over on my Twitter feed, I thought I would repeat them here for the (wise) folks who don’t bother with Twitter:

  • 2 million North Koreans have mobile phones these days (Chosun Ilbo). It’s kind of amazing how quickly that is growing:
In 2008, North Korea set up Koryolink with Orascom. The number of subscribers stood at only 1,600 in the first year but rose to 100,000 in 2009, 500,000 in May 2011 and a million a year later.
  • Foreign currency (mostly US dollars and yuan) surges in North Korean economy. Now 10% of NK’s economy (Chosun Ilbo)
  • This story about singer-turned-actress Nam Gyu-ri story was hard to get right. She called herself a 변태, which usually is translated as “pervert.” But that language struck some people in the newsroom as too strong and loaded, so we finally decided to go with “weirdo” (Korea JoongAng Daily)
  • A reminder Aug. 14 is the start of the Jecheon Film & Music Festival. A lot of my friends in the entertainment business think Jecheon’s combination of music and movies make it the best fest in Korea (JIMFF website)
  • I think this is turning into a really interesting year for K-pop. The quality of the music just keeps rising. At the moment, one of my favorite songs is Junsu’s “Incredible” (just a really fun tune):

Early Korean Recordings in the United States

The Korea Herald has an interesting (if factually challenged) story about older Korean music in this recent article about the 1950s singer Moon Kim. I just wish they did a bit more research before going to print.

The KH story claims that a local professor “discovered” Moon Kim’s 1956 record “East of Make Believe,” making the first known recording of a Korean artist in the West earlier than previously known. Worst, the article calls this “hallyu”, which is just silly.

A quick bit of Googling shows that people have known about this record for some time (and it is a record, not an album). Here is an eBay auction of “East of Make Believe” from a couple of months ago, and there are several others out there.

Still, her story is pretty fascinating. Moon Kim was the performance name of Ok Doo-ok, a singer who got her start in the 1940s in Korea. In the late 1940s, she emigrated to America, where she either studied music at Juilliard or journalism (or both … I’ve seen different reports). She released some songs for RCA in 1956 and 1957, but not much came of it and RCA dropped her after a couple of years. Then she worked for Voice of America for a bit, before starting several restaurants around the United States in the 1960s, creating a line of skin creams in the 1980s, and working with Korean orphans. She passed away in 2008.

Here’s a video of Ok/Kim singing on Korean TV in 1990:

And here is a video of her 1957 song “Oriental Hop”:

Feast, Famine, and Korean Music

Econ 101: in a perfectly competitive environment, profits go to zero.

Case in point: Korean music.

After years of people saying Korea could not support summer music festivals, the country now has five major music festivals in a three-week span:

  • Ansan Valley Rock – July 26-28 – Ansan, Gyeonggi Province – 260,000 won (The Cure, Skrillex, NIN)
  • Pentaport – Aug. 2-4 – Songdo,  Incheon – 165,000 won (Fall Out Boy, Suede, Testament)
  • Jisan World Rock – Aug. 2-4 – Jisan – 250,000 (Weezer, Jamiroquai, Nas)
  • Supersonic – Aug 14-15 – Olympic Park, Seoul – 176,000 won (Pet Shop Boys)
  • City Break, Jamsil, Seoul, Aug. 17-18 – W250,000 (Muse, Metallica)

And those are in addition to these July festivals:

  • Asia Metal Festival – July 1-2 – Seoul – 73,000 won/day
  • Rainbow Island – July 7-9 – Nami Island, Gangwon Province – 99,000 won
  • Ultra Korea – July 14-15 – Olympic Stadium, Seoul – 160,000 won (DJs and EDM, but also Japan’s Perfume)

It’s the sort of pattern one sees over and over again in Korea, where everyone tells you something can’t be done, until someone does it, then everyone does the same thing, too, and floods the market, be it microbrew beer, mixed martial arts, or whathaveyou.

But I guess too much music is a problem you want to have. It’s great to see how far the scene has come since the first aborted attempt that was Triport in 1999.

Beauty Myths and Korean Beauty Myth Myths

Zara Stone over in the the Atlantic takes a look at Korea’s plastic surgery “obsession” (HT: Marmot’s Hole), in an article that is at once fascinating and infuriating. Fascinating because Stone has done a fair amount of serious reportage, digging up some really interesting history and details. Infuriating because it is so full of moralism, stereotypes, and poorly thought-out ideas.

Some points on Stone’s article, in no particular order:

1) “Plastic surgery” is presented like a blanket term, with little distinguishing between eyelid surgery and more invasive techniques (although Stone notes that Koreans often make such a distinction). No mention is made of, say, orthodontics, which in America is incredibly common, far beyond any medical need. Are braces and retainers examples of “body objectification”? How about Lasik surgeries? Tanning beds?

It’s also worth noting that Korea’s obesity rates are so much lower than America’s. So, while too many women in Korea have an unhealthy fascination with thinness, the problems with weight are a much smaller part of Korea’s body image problems.

The point being, if you broaden your definitions of body image beyond “plastic surgery,” suddenly Korea looks a lot less of an outlier.

(All that said, the V-line jaw surgery is pretty terrible stuff … although Stone gives us no sense of how common or uncommon the procedure is.)

2) The K-pop link. Like a lot of writers on this subject, Stone looks at K-pop’s beauty standards (although, thankfully, she notes that this is an issue that pre-dates K-pop). And like others, she blames K-pop for much of Korean women’s beauty myth problems (and the article focuses 99% on women). Which is pretty daft, in my opinion. There are huge amounts of plastic surgery in Hollywood and Western pop music, but people usually are more cautious about linking them to mainstream plastic surgery culture/trends. What makes K-pop so much more influential and problematic than Western pop culture? If there is a difference, Stone doesn’t describe it.

It’s also worth nothing that K-pop fans tend to be more interested in the male idols than the female, but once again the author glosses over male images in her analysis.

Oh, and then there are those K-pop talent shows on TV, which has produced acts like Busker Busker, Lee Hi, and Akdong Musicians — all pretty different faces and bodies than typical K-pop. If this was all about prefab appearances being pushed by the music companies, why does the Korean public vote for all sorts of different looks?

(Btw, I quite like this brief interview with Park Ji-min, winner of the “K-Pop Star” program, talking about why she likes working at JYP Entertainment).

3) Work and beauty. Stone talks a lot about how beauty is a part of work-related competition, trotting out the canard that the economic crisis of the late 1990s somehow pushed people toward more procedures. She also points out how Korea job applications include head shots — although I would point out that plenty other parts of the world tend to require photos, too, and Korea was requiring photos long before women were participating much in the workforce.

Do beautiful people have an unfair advantage when it comes to getting hired in Korea? Sure … just like everywhere. But is it significantly different in Korea? Not from the many, many offices I have been to in Korea over the years. Ninety-eight percent of the time, the university name and record matters far more than appearance (plus most of the high-prestige jobs in Korea require an application test, which double-fold eyelids don’t help you with at all).

* * *

Anyhow, I’m no fan of most cosmetic surgery, and like many people harbor an instinctive dislike for it. My wife has never had any work done and I’m quite happy with her (quite Korean) appearance. But making sweeping generalizations about a country based on my personal tastes (and a country that the author doesn’t particularly know)? That I’m much less confident about.

Certainly women in Korea, like women everywhere, are under way too much pressure to look certain ways. And the deep types of anti-women prejudice still lingering in Korea make it worse. As Sharon Heijin Lee (not “Hejiin”) says in the article:

There’s a real problem when you make generalizations about a whole country full of women, that they’re all culturally duped. There are certain economic situations happening in Korea and America that might impel different choices. We — Americans — might not see plastic surgery on the same level here that we see in Korea.

And:

When we think of it as just the desire to look white, we’re not really giving credit to the surgery industry that flourishes by reprinting people’s features.

Body image and the pressures women are under to look a certain way are important subjects worth exploring. But blaming Korea’s version of these subjects on K-pop and economics is dubious to the extreme. If only Stone had listened more to her own expert.

It’s Not (and Never Was) a Korean Wave — It’s a Globalization Wave

One of my bigger arguments in Pop Goes Korea was that the Korean Wave was not really about Korea at all; it was actually about globalization. The amazing success Korea has had in media and entertainment over the past 10-15 years was not because Korea was unique and different as much as it was because Korea has ahead of the curve.

Korea was at the forefront of the Internet revolution, and many of the changes that online has wrought came to Korea first (or at least quicker and more dramatically). Music, for example — online/digital sales in Korea have surpassed physical sales (CDs, etc.) since at least 2004.

But, the thing is, those changes are increasingly affecting the rest of the world now. With music now, $5.6 billion is spent globally on digital music (that’s about 34% of all music revenue), with digital exceeding physical sales in Sweden, Norway, India, and the United States, and much of the rest of the world is catching up.

Which brings me to Turkey and Turkish television. I wrote about Turkish soaps in 2010, but they have just continued to grow in popularity since then, earning $90 million in exports last year, up from just $1 million in 2007. They have found big fans throughout Central Asia, the Balkans, the Arab World and even Latin America. And what’s driving that success? Good production values and stories, as well as the need for more content — cable/satellite TV means more channels, and those channels need something to fill the void. Turkish producers have done their best to fill it.

One of Turkey’s most popular TV shows, Magnificent Century (or “Muhteşem Yüzyıl”).

And it is not just Turkey. In Eastern Europe, the growth of pay-TV (now an $8.3 billion market) has also created more demand, leading producers to emulate Russian, Scandinavian, and other content.

With the success of Turkish soft power, predictably, has come a backlash, with many countries banning Turkish soaps. While cultural protectionism is a common issue all over the world (at least when a country is importing culture … exporters tend to be much more open-minded), I do think a lot of journalists oversell the issue. As one wrote:

Remember, the Turks did not feel they should be a satellite state of Brazil just because they so dearly loved Brazilian soap operas in the 1980s and 1990s. Nor did the Arabs begin to love the Americans/America because they had a habit of watching more Hollywood films (than Turkish soaps).

On the other hand (if I may undercut my own argument), when you look at the IFPI’s international music numbers, local sales are still overwhelmingly important in most markets. But I don’t think that is terribly surprising. Exports are more of an issue in capital-intensive forms of media, like TV or movies. When you go to the big international content markets (film, TV, music, or whatever), you are increasingly seeing an international presence selling content, not just buying. It’s still the early phases of the new media world we are growing into, but I’m still encouraged by what I am seeing.

 

 

Seoul Music

A few days ago, Annie Ko of the band Love X Stereo, wrote a column in the Guardian about her favorite Seoul-related songs. It’s a pretty good list, too, and includes Cho Yong-pil’s “Seoul Seoul Seoul,” He6’s “Come On Baby,” and Lee Sangeun’s “Secret Garden” (not to mention smartly adding her own “Soul City”).

So that got me thinking about other Seoul-related songs. Of course, Byul.org put together a CD last year featuring indie bands singing about Seoul, called Seoul Seoul Seoul (I assume in reference to the Cho Yong-pil song).

But, to be honest, most of those songs did not excite me terribly much. I guess it is hard to write songs about a city (even if Jay-Z makes it look easy). What other Seoul-related songs are there?

There’s Yang Hee-eun’s “Road to Seoul”:

And Yang Byung-jib’s “Seoul Sky 1” (a cover of Woody Guthrie’s “New York Town” that starts this video) and “Seoul Sky 2” (a cover of Phil Ochs’ “Lou Marsh”, at 21:17):

Add4’s “Seoul Square” (starting at 05:00):

And I supposed you could include Neon Bunny’s entire album Seoulight, if only because of its name (and because it is so catchy). Here’s “Falling” from that album:

I’m sure there’s plenty more that I’m missing, but those are some pretty good ones.

UPDATE: Okay, I suck — I totally forgot about Hyeuni’s “Third Han River Bridge.” One of the most iconic Seoul songs of all time. HA!

Musical Notes

A couple of interesting music-related items that I have recently run across. First, there is this amazing essay on songs about Seoul. Apparently there was a special exhibition at the Chunggyecheon Museum (just ending today, terrible timing by me) about some 1,400 pop songs about Seoul that have been recorded over the years. Some interesting tidbits about Patti Kim, Lee Mija and a lot of great singers from the past.

And then there is this interesting video about the Korean singer Hwang Boryung (who also performs as Smacksoft). Bo is a very cool woman and well worth a listen. I do not know Stuart Reece, the video creator, at all (although some Googling reveals that he is a deejay at TBS-eFM), but it seems that he is intending on starting a series about underground music in Seoul. A very promising start. I hope to see more soon.

Seoul Underground: SMACKSOFT from Stuart Reece on Vimeo.

Epik High No. 1 on iTunes

Well, I never would have imagined it, but Korean hiphop group Epik High is currently sitting on top of the iTunes US hiphop chart.


Also currently are No. 1 in New Zealand, No. 2 in Australia and No. 3 in Canada. Pretty wild.

Epik High’s new album, Epilogue, was just released on iTunes on Monday (March 8). I am told that it has bounced around on the charts for Japan (as high as #9), France, Germany and the UK. Good for EH.

Very encouraging for a more “real” group to make some noise outside of Korea, as opposed to a more manufactured teen-pop group. But, as I have argued many times over the years (along with many other folks, of course), real music is much more likely to get noticed around the world. Hiphop and indie rock are the real futures of K-Pop around the world.

(Again, there is room in the world for teen-pop, too, just as there is a place for the Jonas Brothers, Miley Cyrus and the like. But that sort of music is not majority of the music industry. Artists who write their own songs have a lot more “weight” with critics).

If you are interested, here is the music video for Epik High’s lead-off single Run. I have never been a huge fan of the group, but this song is rather catchy.

Don’t forget, Epik High will be on CNN’s Talk Asia on April 21.

(UPDATE: I added a link to the iTunes chart, that I forgot to add when I originally posted. Although I am not sure how long Epik High will be on top, which is why I posted a screen capture).

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