More about Shin Joong-hyun, the #1 K-Pop Musician of All Time

Blogger Ask A Korean! has finally reached the much-awaited pinnacle of his "Top 50 Most Influential K-pop Artists" list.

I've engaged with this list a few times, recently disputing his definition of K-Pop for (glances around shyly) nearly my only blog post last year. But contrarian as I may be, I love what he's doing with that list, and it's helped me discover a handful of favorite Korean artists.

He has reached #1, and the ultimate Korean musician is a favorite of mine: Shin Joong-hyun (or Shin Jung-hyeon, both transliterations of 신중현). Go read his write-up. Tell him I sent you.

So for readers who are interested in knowing more about the amazing Shin Joong-hyeon, here are some links!

First, to learn more about Shin Joong-hyun's career, particularly the way being blacklisted derailed it, and a bit about his ongoing influence despite that, go read Mark Russell's interview with him.

For an audio documentary about how Shin's reputation was rehabilitated in the 1990s, leading to international recognition in the 2000s (and a bit about the sheer scope of his influence as a musician and producer), listen to this documentary I helped write for TBS Radio.

Speaking of international recognition, here is a playlist compiled by NPR, including songs Shin wrote and produced for a few different artists (an underrated part of his legacy: he sprung a huge number of Korea's major pop stars of the 70s) The playlist includes the Pearl Sisters, the first group he launched to stardom, his live version of "In A Kadda Da Vida" which is simply stunning, and also his version of "Beautiful Rivers and Mountains" -- my favorite song of his.

For readers who would like to listen to more of his music, indie archivist label "Light in the Attic Records" compiled and remastered a great one disc compilation of some of Shin's best music. It includes the best versions of several of his defining songs, though it's short on songs performed by Kim Chuja, one of Shin's most notable collaborators.

Light In The Attic also released perhaps the single best album Shin wrote and produced: "Now" by Kim Jungmi. The story goes that due to being blacklisted, he couldn't find a venue to perform at or musicians to work with him, except Kim Jungmi, and together they cut an album that is fantastic, top to bottom. The opening track, "Haenim" or "The Sun" is one of my favorite recordings, full stop (see below).

For more Shin Joong-hyun goodness, here are a couple of blog posts I wrote about him.

This one is about my favorite song of his: Beautiful Rivers and Mountains.

This one includes a video of Shin performing one of his songs at a more recent concert: even as a senior citizen, the man still rocks.

Favorite blog Gusts of Popular Feeling has also written about Shin Joong-hyun, here on the early parts of his career, when he performed as Hicky Shin.

Here, he talks about the Kim Jungmi connection.

And here he mentions the kind of music Park Chung-hee would have asked Shin to record, in order to show his loyalty to the regime (the incident which led to his being blacklisted)

The Korean's entire list is here, and it's full of great things and worthy luminaries. Of course there are a few singers I think are too high, or too low, and fans could make their cases energetically (though eyes will be rolled at anyone placing a group that debuted since 2010 in the top ten). The list started before Kangnam Style, so Psy doesn't figure. Some might argue to rearrange some of the #4-10 places, and many might switch #1 and #2, but I think The Korean made the right call here in the end.



Finally, if you've read this far, you deserve goodies:

When I was writing that documentary linked above for TBS Radio, I listened to as much Shin Joong-hyun as I could get my hands on (which was quite a bit: he has a couple of anthologies, and scads of stuff on Youtube if you are willing to wade through a few four hour long collection-all-in-one-place videos.

Basically, the Light In The Attic compilation is great, but left me wanting more. A legend of Shin's stature deserves more than one disk! So I combed through all that music I was listening to, and cobbled together a double CD that stretches its legs a bit.

As for goals, I wanted my two disc set to accomplish a few things:

1. Find a good version of each of the songs that comprise the Shin Joong-hyun canon (that is: the tracks that keep showing up on anthology after anthology, many of which have become standards, covered by tons of artists. These are his greatest hits and most recognizable).

2. Feature the variety of singers he worked with (so other than Jang Hyun and Kim Chuja, his most important singers, who had no cap, and Kim Jungmi and Lee Junghwa, who got three, no vocalist got more than two tracks)

3. Show off his skill as a songwriter and producer: his songs are extremely well composed and arranged, tight and concise examples of pop songwriting as a form. For such a brilliantly talented musician, he shows a lot of restraint in only busting out his guitar chops when it makes the song better)

4. Work as a serviceable companion to the Light in the Attic one-disc compilation, (this meant that, for example, where a great version of one of Shin's essential songs existed (often sung by Jang Hyun or one of Shin's top collaborators) on the LITA collection, I'd find a version from a less-often-mentioned singer for my collection, which let me showcase more different artists (see #2) (Park In Soo's version of 봄비 [Spring Rain] is by far the most famous, and it's on LITA, so I got to put my personal favorite version, by 이정화, on my playlist, for example), or songs from the major artists that were a little less famous, because their big ones (이정화's 싫어, and Bunny Girls' 하필 그사람 for example) were already covered on LITA (so I got to put Lee's 꽃잎 and Bunny Girls' 우주여행 on mine)... but my playlist also had to...

5. Stand alone, too. That means where possible, I avoided crossover with the LITA disc, but where LITA had the slam-dunk definitive version of one of Shin's absolutely essential songs (this happened three times), I did double up. There are only a small handful of Shin's essential songs that Shin recorded with many artists, or are frequently anthologized, that I didn't include here. (미련 and 석양 are two that LITA had, while 늦기전에 was the only one I couldn't find space for on my two-disk either, because Kim Chuja only got one torch song, and 님은 먼것에 is more important, in my opinion.)

6. Repeat songs as little as possible (this was a problem with some of the other Shin Joong-hyun box sets and anthologies: he has a group of his best songs, and recorded them each with a number of different artists, which is interesting, but too much for a two disc set.) Only Mi-in, and Beautiful Rivers and Mountains, Shin's two most indelible songs, got more than one version.

And finally

7. Show the scope of his talent as a musician, songwriter, collaborator, producer, and inspiration. Inspiration is why I included a cover of his song by Kopchangjeongol, a tribute band formed by one of the Japanese collectors whose interest revived interest in Shin in the late 1990 (also considered: Jang Gi-ha collaborators The Mimi Sisters, covering one of Shin's strangest songs), and one track from the Shin Joong-hyun tribute album made by Korean musicians (the heavy version of Mi-in).

The first disc is more focused on his ability as a songwriter and producer: these songs are tight, concise, well-arranged and varied. A lot of them are hits, or have lived on as standards. You'll even spot a few of them covered in the soundtrack for the K-drama "Signal"

The second disc is more focused on his versatility and musicianship: some more interesting or unusual arrangements are here (listen especially to 우주여행 - "Space Journey" which sounds cosmic), some funny little songs (나팔바지 - Bell Bottom Pants) as well as some of the longer songs where he really cuts loose as a heavy guitar-rock soloist (the heavy version of In A Kadda Da Vida, Beautiful Rivers and Mountains, and the heavy version of Mi-in (The Beauty) are here).

In my opinion, the measure of a songwriter is that their songs can be covered: new artists bring something new to the song, or reveal interesting facets that hadn't been discovered yet by other performers. Think of the jazz standards, or artists like Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, or Carol King, whose songs have done very well for other artists. The Beatles are covered a ton, because the songs are well built and have good bones. On the other hand, the measure of a musician is that there is something inimitable in their performance of a song: nobody sings "Respect" because it's impossible to live up to Aretha Franklin's version. Every version of "All Along the Watchtower" is measured against Jimi Hendrix (and comes up short). You don't come across many Guns'n'Roses covers, because who can sing like Axl? It is amazing to me that Shin Joong-hyun has delivered both types of songs in his career: as a songwriter, 봄비, 나는 너를, 미련, 님은 먼곳에, 명동 거리/검은 머리, 비속에 여인 and even 아름다운 강산 (copy/paste and look up the different versions on Youtube) are all standard repertoire songs covered by a bunch of different artists, but then, nobody even comes close to his versions of 미인, and his version of In-A-Kadda-Da-Vida is unbelievable. Even a song of his that has been covered time and time again, the version where Shin opens it with a solo is (in my opinion) the definitive version of 떠나야할 그 사람.


Here is my two disc compilation. I don't know how many people will download this, but if I hit my daily google drive maximum, come back and try again another day.
If this gets enough positive feedback, I might expand on why I included the songs I did. If not, well, enjoy it, whoever is inclined.

Also, seriously, readers: if you like this stuff, go find a place where you can spend some money on Shin Joong-hyun's music. Buy the Light In The Attic set, or Now, or one of his other albums. He has some box sets, too, if you have his main stuff and want deep cuts. It's good stuff, and he deserves your royalties.

****

Thinking about the things I learned about Shin Joong-hyun, who had globe-spanning talent, but never became a global star, it simply strikes me how many different things have to go right for someone to become a global star.

If US hadn't had military bases in Korea, providing income and inspiration for Shin to explore rock and soul music, he might never have developed as a musician.

According to one story I heard, Shin was actually invited to the US by an American record company interested in his talent... but his manager hid the invitation from him for a year, lest his cash-cow leave the country. That could have been his "Jimi Hendrix goes to England" moment... but it wasn't.

Also, if timing had worked out a little differently, he wouldn't have become the Korea legend he is at all: he'd signed a contract and taken the payment to travel to Vietnam and perform for American troops there, when word came to his manager that The Pearl Sisters' song "Nima" was his first real hit, and he decided to wiggle out of his contract and stay in Korea to keep trying as a producer and songwriter. A few days one way or the other and he would not have been in Korea at all to become what he became for Korean music.

Shin's singers kept leaving him as soon as they got famous. He simply never found the right muse or collaborator, the way Keith Richards found Mick Jagger and Jimmy Page found Robert Plant, or U2 got together thanks to an ad on a high school bulletin board. We could speculate on reasons why his groups never stayed together, but the fact is he never had a band lineup together for longer than a few years, and every new vocalist meant the old songs and arrangements might not fit.

Maybe if he'd been a bit better of a vocalist himself, he wouldn't have needed that, or if he'd done things a little differently whilst collaborating, or found a vocalist with the right temperament, one of his singers would have stuck around to be his Mick Jagger... who knows? But the fact is, he had to keep starting from scratch.

If he'd just recorded a song kissing President Park Chung-hee's ass that one time, the entire narrative of Korean rock music could have been completely different, and the (great though they were) Korean singers of the early 80s could have been starting from a much more interesting place than from scratch. I mean... (looks around nervously) say what you want about artistic integrity (looks around nervously again) ...given the situation at the time, he had to know what the fallout of that choice would be, right?

I mean, he got cut off just as he was peaking as a recording artist and producer, truncating his "Mega Producer, Taste-Maker" phase (imagine JYP or Lee Soo-man if they like, rocked, or ... a hard rock Quincy Jones, or Phil Spector with more guitar and without criminal charges), where he could have steered the course of Korean music for decades. We got a shadow his knack for starmaking in the '80s, boosting In Sooni and Kim WanSeon, but way less than we would have if he hadn't been banished to the doghouse for half a decade, while pop music moved on without him. He might now be doing his "Sir Paul McCartney tour" instead of being the "Hey why doesn't everybody know about this Korean guy? He's really good!" guy.

Of all the artists on my playlists, Shin Joong-hyun stands as the most tantalizing, both for the amazing stuff he created, and for the sheer scope of the woulda-coulda-shouldas of his career. Imagine if Brian Wilson were a little more mentally stable. And could rip a guitar riff like Keith Richards. Imagine if Jimi Hendrix were also a producer and starmaker on par with Berry Gordy Jr.. Imagine if Neil Young could also lay down a solo with the power of Jimmy Page, and also spring a dozen other popstars as a producer. What he did was enough to peg him as the #1 most influential K-pop musician in Korean music history. Who knows what Shin Joong-hyun could have been if things had broken right for him instead of always going sideways! 

K-Pop Can Be a Genre If You Want, and some Other Stuff Too: Equivocations on Ask A Korean!

UPDATED: Now with headings and more links!


At long last, something has prompted me once again to set finger to keyboard (doesn't have the ring of set pen to paper, does it?) and, naturally, it is the wonderful old blog friend Ask A Korean! with whom I have disagreed before. Let's party like it's 2009!

This week on his blog, The Korean! (whose series on the recent Korean presidential election are excellent guides) is back talking about K-pop, one of my favorite topics for pontification. He is well-versed in the field: his series of "The Top 50 Most Influential K-pop Artists" is well-researched, interesting, and frankly up there with culturalism as one of the best things he has written on his blog.

But The Korean has, in my opinion, bitten off a little more than he can chew in attempting a be-all and end-all definition of K-pop. We'll get to why in a minute, but first, let's summarize his original argument, as found in his blog post. We'll try to be concise, and if you prefer the real McCoy, go read the original here and its follow-up here, instead of my distillation.


Summary of AAK!

The Korean appears to take issue with those who define K-pop specifically as what others would call "Idol K-pop" -- the image that comes to many peoples' minds (especially if you're on Tumblr or Instagram) of leggy young women and be-sixpack'd young men making cute faces and dancing in sync to highly produced music tracks in elaborately crafted, probably colorful videos. The Korean's definition is clearly in contrast with this, and some of the evidence he uses is solid on first pass:

He uses the examples of three artists who have almost nothing in common musically, but who are all grouped under "K-pop" to broaden the definition from that narrow "Idol Kpop" definition. IU (video here), BTS (video here - recent winners of a social media award at the Billboard Music Awards) and FT Island (video here - whose youtube channel, FTISLAND makes me want to read 'FISTland' which sounds more Chuck Tingle than JYP) are all called "K-pop"; he also points out the lineups of the "K-pop Stage" at the SXSW music festival, where groups ranging from idol pop to indie punk to hip-hop all appear on the same concert stage, under the K-pop banner. Most damning of all for "small wagon" K-pop definers, when Psy's "Gangnam Style" became a smash hit, those who were talking about K-pop in 2012 were, for the most part, perfectly happy to hitch their wagon to his comet, rather than making a stronger effort to clarify that Psy does not fit the mold of "Idol K-pop" in a number of ways.


Genres need boundaries but we're bad at describing them

When glimpsed through a closing elevator door whilst pelvis-thrusting, the Korean language lyrics, colorful video, electric, synth-heavy arrangement and rap sections were similar enough to what we'd seen on the latest Hyun-a single (not to mention her appearance in the video) that anybody anxious to boast that K-pop was taking over the world would gladly paper over the differences between Psy and those handsome, be-sixpack'd boy bands that fit the K-pop mold more accurately. More about Psy later. This is definitely the strongest part of The Korean's argument: that little or no effort has been made to draw boundaries for what is K-pop and what isn't, and genres need boundaries, even fuzzy ones.

Think about other music and this is intuitively true: there are songs that straddle the line between soul and R'n'B, or soul and hip-hop, or folk and twee pop, or grunge and punk, but there are also songs that are definitely one or the other, even if the genres are not clearly defined and people couldn't explain why they think one is and one isn't part of their genre. People argue about whether this song or that song is this genre or that, and when Taylor Swift stopped being country and whether Justin Bieber qualifies as R&B, but don't dispute that genres exist, and are different from each other. However, The Korean does his argument a disservice in his rejoinder post when he puts up pictures of white cats and brown dogs: music genres do not delineate as starkly as cats and dogs, which cannot mate and create viable offspring. Music genres are constantly mating and creating viable offspring in shocking combinations. The Korean is a smart guy and knows what false equivalence is, and he is guilty of it here. Sandwiches are a much better comparison because different people will pitch their "This is NOT a sandwich" flag on different squares of the chart, and be able to defend their choice.

This chart is culturally biased.

Words get more than one meaning all the time

The Korean's argument derails when he starts insisting that words -- the term K-pop in particular -- be defined and used more narrowly than what is actually done in practice. While it's one of the best-written paragraphs in the original article, it is also where his argument is weakest:

In our current, "post-truth" world, it is more important than ever to insist that words must mean what they say. "K-pop" plainly means "pop music of Korea," because "K" obviously stands for "Korea," and "pop" obviously stands for "pop music." Q.E.D. And in fact, that is exactly how the term was used when it first entered the English language. Most English speakers--i.e., non-Koreans--encountered pop music from Korea for the first time in the early 2000s, and called such music "K-pop." The term was essentially the equivalent of gayo [가요], the word Koreans use to denote popular music generally, without reference to any genre, style or era.

Besides the fact he never defines what "pop music" is, which is a baffling and difficult conversation of its own beyond the scope of this response (given that AAK did not address it either), The Korean slips here and gives up the fatal flaw in his discussion, mentioning that it was in the early 2000s that most English speakers first encountered pop music from Korea, and described it as K-pop.

Because the problem with using the term K-pop to describe "pop music of Korea" is simply that Koreans generally don't use it to describe Korean music, and certainly didn't before the early 2000s. I teach at a Korean university and sometimes ask my students what music they like, and they name genres like "ballad" or "dance" or "hip-hop" and even if they name a group known as "K-pop" to the world, they might describe it as K-pop, or they might describe it as girl-group or boy-band. The Korean cops to the fact the term K-pop is used differently in Korea than outside of Korea in his rejoinder post, written after reading some comments disagreeing with his original post.

...when one observes the actual usage of the term "K-pop" by non-Koreans, it is abundantly clear that the term is not the same thing as "idol pop." When the international fans encountered Korean popular music that was clearly not idol pop--such as Gangnam Style--there was no effort to enforce the conceptual boundaries of "K-pop" to exclude Korean popular music that was not idol pop. When the international fans recount the history of "K-pop," there is no effort to trace the development of idol pop as a distinct strand of style that exists within the broader universe of Korean popular music.

The term K-pop is used differently by Koreans than by non-Koreans. We can drill down into even more detail if we want. When we poke around the term K-pop, and learn about its origins, and look at how it's used in different places, the inescapable truth is this: the term is used differently by different people, for perfectly good reasons that are easy enough to grok. The only confusion comes when people start cross-talking, failing to pause and take seven seconds to clarify "Hey, random stranger on the internet, do you mean K-pop as in popular music in Korea, or K-pop as in manufactured Idol Pop from Korea?"

The Korean wants to insist that every word or term have one meaning, and one meaning only, across all contexts, regardless of who is saying it, but language doesn't work that way. The word "set" has different meanings, depending on whether you are a performer getting ready for a concert (a set list), lining up to begin a footrace (ready, set, go), a sailor (set sail), a tennis player (won in straight sets), making jello (put it in the fridge to set), programming your digital alarm clock (can you set my alarm for me?), collecting pokemon cards (two cards short of the whole set), work for a theater company (set design is fun but hard), or preparing for a corner kick (our team is good at set plays). Some of those meanings resemble each other, and so do the different meanings of K-pop, but the context and the speaker changes the meaning.

"Set" is not the best example because it's such a simple, flexible word that it's easily co-opted into new contexts, but there are other words we know have hugely different meanings in different contexts. Buffer means different things if you're talking about financial planning, diplomacy, car care, or Youtube videos. Suite means something different if you're a composer or a hotel manager or MS Office user. Pitch can be a baseball move, a tar-like substance, an attempt to sell something, a degree of darkness, a musical note, or the ability to sing the correct musical note. Words like insulate, program, developing, overture, advance, target, and on and on. Even within art circles, indie can mean a distribution model or musical aesthetic, dubstep refers to a completely different musical sound if you are from America or the UK. Meanwhile, wherever someone draws a line between genres, artists specifically flock to that boundary to defile it, just for the sake of argument, or out of sheer playfulness, or because they don't give a shit who says what is which genre: they're just making art they like. Ask Banksy or Marcel Duchamp, or Prince, or John Cage, or Lin-Manuel Miranda.

Avicii's country techno song.

How are people using the term?

K-pop also has different meanings depending on who's using it, and where. That's normal. The meanings are conceptually coherent within those contexts, to those using it, so... what's the problem?

Website developers want it to have as broad a meaning as possible, in order to use it for search engine optimization. If the tag "K-pop" gets more hits for their band EXP edition, then EXP edition is K-pop by gum! (Warning: this article might make you angry)! But lots of people say a group of North American boys making (mostly) polished pop and goofing off in a video like the "Orange Mocha Frappuccinos!" boys in Zoolander (spot Eric from True Blood) while singing Korean they are reciting phonetically isn't K-pop, even if they sing in Korean.

If you are trying to promote Korean cultural products, then anything that you think will generate interest (and then tourist dollars or cultural export dollars) for Korea gets a K- in front of its name. Anything popular (or profitable) is K-pop, and anything that garners international success or accolades becomes retroactively tagged "Korea's Representative X" (this explains Psy suddenly becoming the flag carrier for K-pop when, by the strict definition of Idol K-pop, Psy doesn't fit the mold).

If you are stocking shelves at an American record store in 2003, or making music more searchable in the iTunes library by categorizing Asian popular music by country, and you want to differentiate music from Korea and music from Japan (and this is my guess as to the reason it is specifically called K-pop rather than some other name), or you need a shorthand tag to let people know where all the Korea-originating acts will be performing at your music festival, then K-pop means any music from Korea other than traditional stuff... or from the other end, if you have so much Korean music in stock now that the "World Music" shelf is overflowing and Korean music needs its own shelf, K-pop is a nice catch-all for anything that comes from Korea.

If you are a PR or an economics lover looking at the infrastructure of music content distribution or promotion in Asia, K-pop is a business model, a content development model and/or a distribution model.

On the other hand, if you like looking at GIFs of sexy Korean boys with sixpacks, or leggy Korean women making aegyo poses, and you have a Tumblr account and use the word "oppa" a lot but don't know any other Korean, then K-pop means a specific type of look, a specific type of music, and a specific type of sexy people.

If you are looking for other people to join you in celebrating a set of shows, bands and whatnot you like, or that has a connection with something in your heritage, K-pop is a good term to use to find other people who want to celebrate it with you.


On Orwell's on language and retroactive naming of things

It is not Orwellian that different people have found different definitions of K-pop serviceable labels, in the different contexts where they use it: though Korea promotions has been involved, it has not been a sinister top-down attempt to manipulate or control people, or to make Korean culture or art into something it is not, just a bit of fuzzy-minded opportunism on the part of K-pop power players and Korean promotions folk hoping for a windfall. This has happened before: on his Hot Fives and Sevens albums, Louis Armstrong had a bunch of tracks with "Blues" in the title (14 by my count in the 4 disk set), even though he was making one of the foundational jazz recordings, because blues was selling at the time. Look at the number of songs with "Soul" in the title in the 70s, be they soul or not. K-pop's popularity abroad would have continued at, or nearly at pace without the Korean government's intervention, and K-pop would still exist if it weren't being marketed abroad, though it would look different and act a bit less grandiose. Not all meaning-slippage is Orwellian manipulation of meanings and reality, aimed at creating confused passivity in a populace. Sometimes they're just trying to sell units, or people are grabbing onto the nearest searchable tag to increase their platform's reach, or looking for others who also like their favorite genre, in order to celebrate it together, and engaged fans will figure out where they stand soon enough.



If you define K-pop as "popular music of Korea" like The Korean, then Shin Joong-hyun and Kim Wan-seon are K-pop, because their music was popular, and it was Korean. But here is the catch: Koreans never called those artists' music K-pop, and probably won't start. Sometimes retroactive naming can work -- for example, when the terms "Mansplaining" "Slacktivism" and "Vaguebooking" were invented, something clicked and people could relate the new term to things they'd been observing/practicing for years, but had no name for it until those terms were coined. How handy to have a word for it now!

In most cases, though, retroactive naming that goes back too far makes me uncomfortable, because it can bulldoze more nuanced stuff that was going on at a time in the past. The term K-pop appeared around 2001-2003, and going back a few years to call SES or Seo TaeJi K-pop isn't too much of a stretch, because early K-pop groups were intentionally, specifically trying to duplicate their success. But going back decades gets more and more spurious, because Koreans did have names for the music genres that The Korean is retroactively erasing under the K-pop banner.

Mansplaining, vaguebooking and slacktivism were terms that brought more clarity and understanding (though they are now also suffering meaning creep); calling everything K-pop does not. I would be interested to hear The Korean explain to me why HIS act of lumping groups that aren't K-pop like Jo-yong Pil or Kim Chuja under that banner are OK, but Korea Inc.'s effort and/or lazy-minded non-Koreans' lumping of disparate groups like IU or FT Island under that banner are Orwellian, other than that Ask A Korean is not a government ministry (which, to be fair, is a solid point if we are concerned about mass-manipulation). I would be happier still if he removed overdramatic claims of Orwellian manipulation from his discussion of meaning slippage in music genres as descriptors. (UPDATE: Beyond Hallyu discusses this much more concisely than I do.)


The foreign gaze in Kpop, and definitions that do too much

There is one other important thing The Korean seems to miss in his discussion: the term K-pop was invented to differentiate Korean music from other types of Asian pop music: a differentiation that only needed to be made once Korean music started gaining, or targeting, audiences outside Korea. It became popular at the time of (not necessarily because of) efforts to promote Korean culture abroad. From its very origin, the foreign gaze is baked into the term K-pop. This is why such disparate groups get lumped together. That is how Psy can be the most important K-pop artist, even though he doesn't fit the K-pop mold (foreign gaze don't care), yet also not rate a place on The Korean's "Top 50 Most Influential K-pop Artists" (he hasn't changed Korean music much; he's just made more people outside Korea aware of it, which doesn't affect the music scene in Korea very much at all). Psy's position relative to K-pop changes completely depending on whether you're looking at Korean music from inside Korean culture or outside, and any definition of K-pop that doesn't/can't account for this is suspect. The Korean gets quite close to realizing the importance of the foreign gaze in defining K-pop while addressing Jon Dunbar's objection in his rejoinder post, but stops a couple steps short of it clicking.

I would argue that The Korean's definition of K-pop is unhelpful, because it does too little (it ignores the crucial part the foreign gaze plays in lumping all modern popular Korean music together) and too much (identifies things as K-pop that are not and never have been called K-pop by people in Korea -- the ones who consume and care most about Korean popular music) at the same time. I would have no issue with this if he just said "Here is my working definition of K-pop. Got it? Got it!" But instead, he asserts that his definition of K-pop is the definitive one and others are incorrect. That is why I am writing to re-muddy the waters.

K-pop is a great tag for search-engine optimization and helping readers find his excellent countdown, but by naming it the "Most Influential K-Pop Artists" series, and even worse, insisting his definition is the correct one and others are wrong, he is flattening out the huge diversity of sounds and styles of Korean music that exists, and confusingly hinting at a foreign gaze upon a series in which he has worked very hard to take Korean music on its own terms. I would find it much more accurate if he titled it "The 50 Most Influential Korean Musicians" or "The 50 Most Influential Korean Popular Music Artists" because the term K-pop and the aesthetic Jaden Smith will shoot for when he plans to drop a K-pop single wouldn't exist yet for 30 years when some of The Korean's top-ranked artists made their music.

Let's have more language, not less (speaking of Orwell)

In the end, while I enjoy the discussion of what K-pop is, and really appreciate The Korean's engaging in the discussion, and especially sharing some great music in the video clips, I would advocate spreading and popularizing more names for the different types of Korean music, rather than butting his head against a wall, trying to change the common usages of a term that is already out there, being used by different people in different, understandable ways, for good reasons of their own. Instead of saying all popular music of Korea is K-pop, let's get K-punk, K-indie, K-folk, K-hip-hop, K-dance, hell, K-Britpop and K-Eurotechno out into the ether as well, so that people have more tools to describe the music they like, instead of torturing the one single term we've been working with into froot-loops of twisted and confusing definitions.

Let's get away from too much lumping-together-of-things: clearer, more accurate language is better, the term K-pop has its uses, and it's not that hard to clarify and avoid confusion. It is not necessary to insist words must all have only one, context-free definition when they don't, and trying to do so bulldozes all the other terms that are being used to talk about Korean music. Actual, engaged K-pop fans would happily learn that variety of terms, use and discuss them, while non-engaged observers would never bother to learn any of them no matter how much online huffing and puffing there is for them to ignore, but who cares what they think anyway?

This image is sexist, but you know which one of these people will have more helpful conversations about colors?

Music genres do this. They just do. And outsiders don't care. Deal with it.

Let's play a game...

Let's play a game! (source: pinterest is rubbish for sourcing photos. Sorry.)

UPDATE:
You may notice that I have not offered a definition of K-pop of my own in this whole discussion. Is K-pop a genre? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ sure! I don't really have a horse in this race: on an upcoming episode of the podcast I do with my buddy Eugene, (listen here!) I'll offer something of my own definition, but the point here is, K-pop works better as a term if we don't ask it to work too hard, or do too much. Beyond Hallyu's piece explains this admirably. If your definition of K-pop works for you, and either connects you with like-minded people, helps you find music you like, or gives you a framework for your top 50 Korean musicians countdown, go with it! But don't be too pushy insisting on your definition: language and culture tend to resist becoming overly tidy, and when it doesn't, that is when to bring Orwell back into the discussion.

There will always be big wagon and small wagon K-pop believers: people who think K-pop should be defined as broadly as possible, and those who think it should be more narrow. In that spirit, here's a fun game: let's make a rubric. Run your favorite group through this, and count up their score. Set the bar as high (small wagon K-pop) or as low (catch it all) as you want. Decide for yourself how many points a group needs to earn before they count as K-pop, and we can decide if Psy is or isn't K-pop, whether it's still K-pop when the Wonder Girls start playing their own instruments and singing in English, whether EXPedition is, or No Brain, or Diana Ross and The Supremes for that matter. Here is the checklist, with my own point values. Change the point values to fine-tune your own definition, and then check who clears it and who doesn't.

Group 1: Necessary? Sufficient? Disqualifying?

__ Marketed toward Koreans in Korea (50 points)

__ Sung in Korean (50 points)

__ Marketed toward Korean diaspora (15)

__ Group is signed with either: A Korea-based, Korean-owned label (15) One of the "big three" Kpop labels (YG, SM, JYP) (30)

__ Group promotes itself on Korean shows like Music Bank, Inkigayo and Music Core (40)

__ Group is NOT signed with a Korea-based, Korean-owned label (-60 not completely disqualifying, but close)

__ Group/singer was active before the 1990s (DISQUALIFIED)
__ Group/singer was active since 2007 (3 points)
__ They play their own instruments at live shows (-80: they're not K-pop anymore. They're K-something else.)

Group 2: Makeup and Formation

__ Add 5 points for every member the group has after the first five (so, a six-person group gets 5 points; seven-person = 10 points; a 12-person group = 35 points)

__ Subtract 3 points for every member of the group who was not born and raised in Korea

__ Subtract (__) more points for every member of the group who could not pass for Korean in physical appearance (ethnicity/race is important to some people, who will want to put a point value here. I don't really care as long as the next requirement is satisfied).

__ Subtract 8 points for every member of the group who is not fluent enough in Korean to make appearances on Korean television

__ Group was chosen and trained by the label (15 points)

__ Group members are on restrictive, probably unfair long-term contracts (7 points)
__ Group members are all gorgeous by conventional standards of attractiveness. (18)

Group 3: Aesthetics

__ Creative choices for songs, videos and dances are made by the studio, not the performers (8)

__ Music videos all have a "concept" (5)

__ 3 points for each group member with a designated role ("the visual" "the bad girl" "the vocal")

__ Music is driven by synthesizers and sounds like a mash-up of other popular music genres (4)

__ Features rap solos that add nothing to the songs, or dance breaks that sound like the trendiest EDM styles of the day. (4)

__ Cute poses and extreme close-ups feature prominently in videos (3)

Group 4: Promotion/Differentiation from other Asian pop

__ Subtract 4 points for every single released only in a language other than Korean (lose too many points, and you're not K-pop anymore: you're Asian pop, J-pop or something else)

__ Subtract 2 points for every single released with a Korean version and a version in another language

__ Subtract 5 points if the group has a "sub-group" targeting markets outside Korea

__ The Korean government has actively promoted their music (12)
__ Add 2 points for every advertising campaign they appear in in Korea.
__ Add 1 point for every advertising campaign they appear in in the rest of Asia.
__ Has an online fan club (10 points) with a quirky nickname (3 more points) run or closely managed by the label (8 more) pumping fans for more money through special offers and deals (5 more) whose fans will fucking dox you SWAT you and cut you if you diss their group (12 more)

Group 5: Other

__ White men over thirty living in Asia who don't listen to it sneer at it contemptuously and talk about it as if they were experts on it (7 points)

__ James Turnbull has written 3000 words about them (3 points)

__ One or more performers were discovered on a Korean audition reality TV show (__) add value here: I don't care about this but some might.

__ Nobody has suggested a different hyphenated K-genre for their music (For example, "She isn't K-pop: she's K-indie!") 5 points
__ Somebody HAS suggested a different hyphenated K-genre for their music (-15 points)
__ Their fans in Korea insist upon this different hyphenated K-genre (-25 points)
__ Their fans abroad insist upon this different hyphenated K-genre (-40 points)
__ The fans abroad insisting on this different hyphenated K-genre name are organized, have a fan club nickname, and will fucking dox you swat you and cut you if you diss their group (cancel all above deductions)
__ When a new video comes out, fans mobilize to try and set Youtube "Fastest to X million views" threshold speed records. 

Add your own criteria in the comments, or change the point value in the comments if you want!

Thank you for reading, dear friends.



UPDATE!

Here are some suggested additions to the checklist from Facebook. Thank you, Jon Dunbar!

__ Band is mixed-gender (-20)
__ Band name could be mistaken for a chemical corporation (good one: wish I'd thought of it... DO THE BUZZFEED QUIZ!) (5)
__ Band wears a uniform or uniforms (5)
__ Minus one point for each year above 25 of the band members' ages

(Rob riffing on those:)
__ Band does a video in thinly veiled fetish gear (3)
__ Plus 3 points for each year below 19 of the band members' ages

Any further additions are gladly welcome!


MORE UPDATES:
Stephen Epstein has written a brilliant comment under AAK's rejoinder post.
Go read it!

Kim Jong-ho: One Perfect Song

I don't know that much about Kim Jong-ho, but in the process of researching all that old Korean music for a shin joong-hyun documentary that I'll feature in an upcoming post... I just happened upon one of those songs that's simply perfect, where it all comes together:



The song is 보고싶은 마음 from the 1974 album 이름 모를 소녀, or "Nameless Girl."  I haven't been able to find an English translation of the lyrics, and have too much pride to put google translate crap on my blog, but not enough time to attempt a translation of my own, so... no lyrics. I know almost nothing about Kim Jong-ho, except that his album pops up on a collection I have, and manages to stay on the right side of all those balances Korean sentimental songs struggle to balance out, and this album has at least two really lovely songs on it. Listen to this perfect song. I hear a bit of downbeat Beck, a bit of Portishead, and other than that... just straight-up musical goodness. Just listen to the interplay between the violin and the bass. That is all.

Enjoy.

Some Old Korean Rock.

Yes, I have heard the complaint that some kinds of Korean music do nothing artistically -- they just take foreign music and put it in the mouth of somebody Korean.

I think the conversation is much more complex than that -- the act of mediation has a lot of different things in play -- why are they choosing this song or this style instead of another, and why does some stuff catch on, and other stuff not? I had a student tell me about her abiding love for U2, which surprised me, because U2 is almost never the foreign band mentioned when you ask your Korean friend who loves foreign music, to name a few bands they like. I've never heard a Korean pick a U2 song in a noraebang. Not to mention, you can just put on a record... so why do we want our singers to bang out live versions of songs, if accuracy is the issue? It's not. There's simply more going on. And even if imitation is the only thing that's going on, well so what? Anybody impressed with the cover is very likely to look up the original, and might even accidentally come across some great music, thanks to a shitty cover.

Those covers don't always work. Some covers do strike me as utterly unnecessary because they've done very little with the original except add a new color scheme, dance moves, or a different vocal style. But then, that doesn't only happen across cultures (original). And when it doesn't work, we can get rude and dismissive.

But then you come across Shin Joong-hyun's cover of In-a Gadda Da Vida (original by Iron Butterfly)... and I'm willing to forgive a lot of derivative works if every once in a while, something this magical comes across.

Play it through. Play it loud. Or don't bother. But... bother. It's worth it.


And ultimately... I have no problem with the idea of adapting things for a target audience. Why the heck wouldn't you? Italian food is so successful worldwide because pasta is easy, and sauces are infinitely flexible, and thus infinitely adaptable to available ingredients and local taste. And yes, there will be someone somewhere sniffing about authenticity, and they should just go to Naples. Ditto for music. You've got to use the available ingredients, and suit things to local taste. As long as royalties are being paid... all the power to ya!

The Pearl Sisters


Their live version of Jefferson Airplane's "Somebody To Love" made them famous.


Another thing I like about Korean music is the way certain songs keep coming up. There's kind of a repertory, and if you listen to enough music, you'll start recognizing them. Not all of them are even Korean songs anymore - somebody always wants to drop Nella Fantasia or "The Susan Boyle song" into the mix.

For example, any female who wants to show off her pipes chooses this one. (Kim Chuja is the original singer.)

It's an emotional rail spike, and it's effective as hell when a woman with a lower range pours her heart into it.

(If she wants to show off her pipes and her English, she picks Mariah Carey's Hero, or Let it Go.)

You can find dozens of versions of it, from darn near everyone. Here. Get started. It's viral video bait in Korea -- right up there with Nella Fantasia (aka Gabriel's Oboe)

I've been listening to more Shin Joong-hyun again lately, and I've heard him revisit songs with different artists and different arrangements a bunch of times, and I love how he brings out a different side each time. Numerous songs appear multiple times in his 8 disk anthology, which was generously shared with me by a reader. (Thanks, Adam.) It manages to highlight both his songwriting (to write a song that glows under so many different lights) and his musicianship (taking a song we know, and still surprising us).

He's done this song (떠나야 할 그사람 - The Man Who Must Leave) a bunch of different times, and each one is interesting. It started with the Pearl Sisters, one of his first proteges, and from there everybody did it, including Shin himself. My favorite might be this version by 김선 (listed as by Kim Chu-Ja by shazam, but that's a boy's voice). And more recently, In-Sooni took it in a totally different direction.



Another one is 봄비 or "Spring Rain" - which has been done by a swack of people, (Park In-Soo, Jang Sa-ik... but there's another song floating around with the same name, by the way) and has a very distinctive "na na" ending that you'll remember if you've heard it. This is another of those songs that makes everybody feel that happy kind of sad.

Shin's own version of this song is the saddest, in my opinion. As he got older, his voice just oozed some kind of disappointment. Fittingly.


Some people might argue that this kind of recurrence of songs is a minus in Korean music, but I have to disagree. First of all, the cult of the singer-songwriter is a culture and even a genre-specific phenomenon coming out of western (mostly white) rock and roll, where Rolling Stone writers got swept up in The Beatles, who made it a selling point on their artistic originality that they wrote their own songs. Now there's something really admirable about a great songwriter -- Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen are two of the artists that find their ways back on my playlist more than almost any other -- but it's also silly to take points away from someone just because the song's not an original. In jazz music, it's fine to sing the standards, and even preferred if the alternative would be a great singer or musician doing crappy songs, because they're limiting themselves to their own bad songwriting. In classical music, you're pretty much required to perform other people's compositions, and nobody rages on Glenn Gould for doing all those Bach cover albums.

If you take points away from Aretha Franklin for not having written "Respect" (she didn't) or Jimi Hendrix for not writing "All Along The Watchtower," then in my opinion, you're kind of missing the point. Learning someone wrote their own songs is great while I'm scanning the bio, and I often do prefer the original version once I find it, but as soon as I press play, it's about the music, not the origin story. In his "50 Greatest K-pop artists" series (which you should be following, by the way), The Korean talks about the role Kim Kwang Seok played in helping to develop the repertory of Korean songs, and that's important work, developing a sense of heritage from which future artists can draw inspiration. While the originality of some artists is great and praiseworthy, it's not the be-all and end-all for a great musical experience, even if your songwriter was some Swedish ringer. Furthermore, sometimes a well-placed cover demonstrates a sense of history, a sense of heritage and respect for the pioneers, that deepens an artist's repertoire, even as it honors what came before.

So while I don't like every new cover of an old song, and while I in fact think that "Hallelujah" has been wrecked (but not irreparably) by too many crappy reality talent show audition covers, I think it's great when artists nod to their past, and bring us a new look at a song we already know.

Psy's Hangover Hite Ad, or The Problem With Trying Too Hard

Psy. Yes, that Psy, has a new video out.

And Gangnam Style just passed 2 billion views. Good lord.

I like Psy, don't get me wrong, but I'm not so hot on his new video, Hangover, which you can watch here.



A few weird things happened with the utterly unexpected success of Gangnam Style. We must begin with the fact that Gangnam Style isn't prototypical K-pop. It's not the model the studios tried to promote, or thought would be successful overseas, and that's obvious if you look at which artists got overseas promotion (Wonder Girls, SNSD, Big Bang, Rain) and which didn't (Psy). When Gangnam Style hit the big time, suddenly, the videos of other artists trying to break into the US market also became more brightly colored videos and chock-full of silly non-sequiturs: non-sequiturs that somehow felt like they'd been developed by a marketing team trying to be sure they were random enough. And if there's one thing Katy t3h PeNgU1N oF d00m teaches us, it's that forced randomness is a cringeworthy as a skateboard injury video.

In my opinion, the worst of these "the next Gangnam Style" (there will never be another exactly like it) was Crayon Pop's utterly unnecessary "Global Version" of their catchy song "Bar Bar Bar" (see here) - which I mentioned in a previous blog about Kpop trying to go international (Kim sisters). It's the same as their original, which was great in its own right, except they raised the bass in the mix and added ham-handed references to Gangnam Style in the video: abandoned amusement park, playground, subway station, handheld fans, people doing yoga outdoors, someone lying between another person's feet in an elevator, and ending with a big lineup of people in different uniforms plus, just to make sure everybody knows we're from Korea... a traditional-style pagoda.

The original Crayon Pop video, which I still love:


Psy's video doesn't quite suffer from the same problem of trying too hard to match Gangnam Style - the song's too slow-paced for that, to begin with. This video just seems... lost. You know when you're standing in a supermarket, and take half a step toward the produce department, then half a step towards breads, and half a step towards cereals, before deciding you need to re-check your shopping list, and end up expending a lot of energy to turn in a clumsy, pointless circle? That's what this video is doing for me.

The video looks to be a night on the town with Psy and Snoop Dogg. They tour some common locations for a night of Korean drinking (which is a bit odd when the song's named "Hangover" but whatever). For the record, I think it would have been very fun to go out and drink with Psy and Snoop Dogg for a night, and a night on the town with Psy might be the awesomest introduction to drinking culture in Korea that it is possible to have. Yet I feel really "meh" about the video.


Here are my gut reactions to the video as I watch, augmented by an after-the-fact edit.

0.11 - Snoop's entrance is pretty funny.
I don't like autotune. Never have.

0:30 Taepyongso? Seriously? (This is what a taepyongso sounds like) - it is also the aural equivalent of Hanbok or Kimchi -- the go-to indicator that This Is Uniquely Korean. The reek of Korean cultural promotion is officially on this video. Let's see if it wrecks the thing.

0:38 - Memo to all K-pop choreographers: there are other ways to make female dancers look sexy than making them twerk, or do the Bend and Snap. Learn at least two more each.

Waveya needs to hire a choreographer, and if you're a Kpop choreographer and every single dance move you've put into the routine is in this video, you need to get better at your job.

Oh... and he's holding a saxophone, but that is absolutely a taepyongso. It's like they're embarrassed that they took culture ministry money to make this video. (If they did. I bet they did.)

0:40 - by the way... the Taepyongso (태평소) might be the absolute last sound I want to hear when I'm hung over.

0:43 - Beer shots. A lot of them. An impressive setup, in fact. Product placement perhaps? Eat Your Kimchi says yes. And they're right.

0:59 - Drinking the hangover remedies and eating drunk food. It's fun watching Snopp Dogg eat Korean drunk food, I admit.

1:18 - Soaking in the jimjilbang (or Korean sauna) - also a venerable Korean hangover ritual. I've done it myself, and like that it was included... even though 1. Psy already did the sauna thing in Gangnam Style and 2. The stuff people do for a hangover and for a night of drinking are getting awfully mixed up here.

At least they're introducing an aspect of Korean culture that is actually practiced by many ordinary Koreans. I doubt they'd have gotten Snoop Dogg to wear a hanbok or try playing a janggu, though.

Then again, the video isn't finished yet. There may still be a K-food party in store.

1:24 - motorbike and flying paper. Reference to Gangnam style?

(after what I said earlier, better google "Snoop Dogg in Hanbok" just to be sure...)

Oh shit.

source - from a 2013 store opening - Getty Images. Kill me now.

Better google "Snoop Dogg playing janggu", too, just in case...

Phew! Nothing.

1:29 - Bend and snap.

source

1:40 - Rolling across the face shot. I am jealous of Snoop Dogg for getting to have Psy as his guide and gateway to Korean drinking culture.

1:48 - Ladies joined their table. The kinds of ladies you might bump into at your average purveyor of soju bombs. Fun-looking, not supermodel-y. This "portraying an actual night of drinking in Korea" thing might be going somewhere...

2:05 - but of course there are some supermodel-y dancers there too. Doing the same four dance moves as before. After this video, which is the logical conclusion and apex of Kpop 섹시댄스 choreography, where the world got to watch 400 boys become men at the same time, more of the same just seems so hollow and unnecessary. Bring something new to the table!

2:30 - Drunkovision is making the not-supermodel-looing women look sexy. A beer goggles joke? Shit, I don't think I can like this video anymore. I shouldn't have gotten my hopes up when those women joined the table. How cool would it have been for those two women to become characters in the video, and not just props for a throwaway joke?

2:55 aaaand they're trying to hump them.

Also 2:55 - G-Dragon's random appearance is the best thing about the video so far. I like what he does with the microphone.

3:25 - the spinny-ride, while drunk OR hung over, seems like a really terrible idea.

3:30 - I think it would have been really fun to hang out with Psy. I'm not convinced it's a great topic for a music video though.

3:35 - Pool hall. Complete with washed out, ugly flourescent lights and jajangmyeon.

4:00 - I bet that woman behind Psy in a Bruce Lee outfit (sigh) is famous. Too bad she's so obscured by fur (welcome to 1988) and movie star sunglasses I'm not sure who she is.

4:18 - hite D and chamiseul. Make sure the labels face the camera, boys!

4:20 - they blanked out an "f" word. A song about drinking is worried about an f-bomb. I don't think the moral police are going to give this one a pass, anyway. He didn't even get away with kicking a traffic cone in the last one. Unless the traditional instrument distracts the censors.

4:30 - End. I like the bar fight and mayhem.

For science, or whatever, here is my favorite "street fight mayhem" scene in Korean pop culture so far. If you know a better one, please link it in the comments.



To sum up, then:

Good points: G-Dragon - far and away the high point. The impressive table of soju bombs, the fact this is probably what Psy actually does when he goes out drinking for a night, and if not, what many office workers definitely do.

Bad points: Just not a very good song. Heavy handed traditional instrument that didn't add much to the song... and adds that awkwardness of referencing traditional culture in a song and video about drinking too much, which probably isn't the image of Korea those cultural promotion folks have in mind. Bad bad bad, boring boring boring choreography. The beer goggles thing really bugged me. And, you know, the pervasive Hite and Chamiseul product placements. (Will Psy be passing off ad jingles as singles next?)

All in all, it seems to me like Psy is now trying to please people (cultural export-y people, ad sponsors) in this video, in the songwriting, in the arrangement, and it's hurting him. He isn't a representative K-pop artist, and never will be, and asking him to represent Korea or Kpop to the world will give you a Psy with his hands tied behind his back, which is not Psy at all. The greatest thing about Psy is that he was always fun, mostly because he never took himself too seriously. But now, there are people who do take him seriously, and as long as he's encumbered by that burden, I don't think we're going to see the Psy we love, or the one that both wowed and cracked us up in Gangnam Style, or wore a goofy muscle shirt for most of the "Right Now" video, which might be my favorite Psy moment.

Source. 

Maybe the Psy we have now can get more famous people into his videos, but those videos lack the manic energy, the self-deprecation, and the fun that make everybody love Gangnam Style in the first place.

Come back, silly Psy!

This Reddit comment has a pretty good rundown of the cultural and other references in the video.

Eat Your Kimchi do a good job of explaining how accurately Psy portrays Korean drinking culture (on the nose). And Korea's drinking culture is, depending on who you ask and how bad their last hangover/drunken mistake was, either the greatest thing about living in Korea, or a national embarrassment. I've wavered between those two assessments myself.

And here is "Right Now" - all that is good about Psy, portrayed in the most fun light possible... or put another way, the exact opposite of this video:

Beautiful Rivers and Mountains 아름다운 강산 - Shin Joong Hyun 신중현

A friend on Facebook recently asked a group I belong to for suggestions on niche Korea blog topics that aren't being filled right now, and I suggested he take older Korean music -- rock and pop stuff -- and make a blog dedicated to making the modern history of Korean music more accessible to English readers. Since G'Old Korea Vinyl stopped updating, that seems to be one gap crying to be filled. Matt from Popular Gusts does too, but not nearly often enough. [Update] and we can't forget The Korean's long-running countdown of the fifty most influential Korean music artists.

If I'm wrong, and you know just the website I should be following, please tell me in the comments, of course!

So a few weeks ago, I saw this on TV. (Warning: if you only click on one video in this post, don't let it be this one.)

It's actor and singer Im Chang Jung, whom I first recognized from raunchy sex comedy "Sex Is Zero," the Korean equivalent to "American Pie" where he played Korean iteration of the Jason Biggs character - the one who gets humiliated a lot. He does well enough as a singer that he got the final performance of an episode of 불후의 명곡 ("Immortal Song" is how the show title's translated. Here is the Show's Facebook Page). "Immortal Song" is a show where they call in one of the great artists from Korea's past, and ask young, up-and-coming artists, less-established bands, and sometimes stars or idols singing solo (not with their superstar groups), to do versions of that artist's songs, and the artist gets to give them a score and choose a winner.

Lee Sang Mi was judging this time, and one of her old favorites, it appears, was a cover of Shin Joong Hyun's "Beautiful Rivers and Mountains" (see her do it live, here) Im Chang Jung did a version of that song (아름다운 강산). My wife said "Oh, that's a Shin Joong Hyun song" to me, and the story came back to me from my Korean Pop Culture class.

I've known about Shin Joong Hyun for a while. I even wrote about him a few times on the blog: Here and most recently here. Shin is known as "The Godfather of Korean Rock." He cut his teeth performing as Jackie Shin on US army bases. Read his interview by Mark James Russell here. Popular Gusts talks about him here here and a few other places. His song Mi-in is discussed here. I talked with a few friends about this song on Facebook a while ago, and want to thank Matt and Gregory and everyone whose contributions there led to this post. During the late 60s and 70s, he was like the Prince of the 80s and the Jimi Hendrix of the 60s combined for Korea: he was doing new things with the guitar, and combining genres and sounds from abroad in wildly interesting ways (Hendrix) and meanwhile, when he wasn't recording his own music, he was writing songs and producing music for many of the other best artists of the era (80s Prince). Korean rock music of the time was really, really interesting.

And then Yushin happened. Longtime dictator Park Chung Hee shifted his dictatorship into high gear with the Yushin constitution, where he declared a state of national emergency... because he didn't have total power yet, and needed it, I guess. His moral vision of the country excluded decadent rock and roll, and music got regulated more and more strictly. The very fun movie Go Go 70s explores the police persecution of artists (trailer).  Artists of the time were required to have a "건전가요" - one "wholesome song" on each album, a song that encouraged people to work hard, or save money, or be somehow virtuous, which painted an idyllic postcard image of Korea. Flowers in my basket, going to the market and stuff. The Korean wiki suggests these as representative examples: 아 대한민국 시장에 가면 어허야 둥기둥기. President Park had enough invested in this moral vision of his, he actually even wrote a "wholesome song" himself. Here it is, with a HUGE thanks to The Korean, who slipped me the link on Facebook.


UPDATE: More on this song - including an English translation of another patriotic song also written by Park Chung-Hee is at Popular Gusts now.

There are lyrics under the video box if you can read Korean. I haven't been able to find a translation of them - they're all geographical names (think This Land is Your Land), strength and sweat and pride and ancestors and greatness - but just listen to that military aesthetic.

According to the interview by Mark Russell linked above, in 1972, Shin got the call from the President's office: the president wanted him to write a song in praise of the dictator. He refused.

Instead, he wrote the song "Beautiful Rivers and Mountains" -- or 아름다운 강산. Now, I really want you to listen to the song right above this. Then immediately after, listen to the song right below. The lyrics are in the "about" section under this version of the song.

This is the 1972 version from the Shin Joong-hyun Anthology. The version he wrote and recorded just after being asked to glorify the president in song. (If you only click on one video in this post, let it be this one.)


So... the president asks you to sing a song praising the president. The style he would prefer, if the video above is any indication, would be a terse, military march. President Park was also known to admire sentimental ballads.

Instead, you go into the studio, and write a huge, shambling, sweeping, psychedelic song that builds and builds and builds to a wild cry of passion, with lyrics like this (these aren't all the lyrics - as translated on the youtube link above):
Opening lines: Blue Sky / White clouds / A thread of wind rises / To fill my heart...
In this beautiful place, you're here and I'm here...
Hold my hand, let's go and see, run and see that wilderness...
Into this world, we were born. This beautiful place. This proud place we will live.
Today I'll go to meet you... time will pass, we will live together, then fade and fall.
Spring and summer go, Fall and winter come. (at 3:58:) Beautiful rivers and mountains!
(4:05-4:30) Your heart, my heart, You and me, Us Forever We are all, all in endless harmony.

It is a sweeping, gorgeous tribute to the beauty of Korea, and Shin's pride in his country, it contains time, seasons, mortality, harmony -- this is Shin's love of his land, with a loose, sloppy song structure, no chorus, few repeats, just a love poem sung straight through, all draped in shambling psychedelic, fuzzy, decadent rock sounds, ending with an extended musical washout as "we are all in endless harmony" disappears into the endlessness of great music.

There you go, Mr. President.

So instead of singing a tribute to the President, Shin pointedly, and passionately, sings about the beauty of the land. NOT the beauty of the government, the leader, or a vision of greatness for the people. No exhortations to respect your teacher or work hard. The rivers and mountains. He places all the politics and ambitions and dreams of the people under a giant sky of washing guitar, and sings that they will fade and fall, but the land, the beautiful land, will outlast them all.

To me, knowing the story of it, the song screams, "I love this country, Mr. President. Not you." Not only is it a pitched act of defiance, it also might be the best song he ever made.

Of course, he was on the president's shit list then. His albums and songs started getting banned, and finally in 1975 they pinned marijuana possession on him, and arrested him. His songs were banned from being played until President Park's assassination in 1979.

I just can't get over this song. As I listen to the song again and again, each time it gets more powerful to me. Be careful about listening to it repeatedly on headphones in public spaces, I guess. This Starbucks got really dusty. The section at the end - the "Your heart, my heart, you and me, us forever..." - is a cry of passion. The version with the most beautiful climax might be this, by Kim Jung-mi, who infuses it with so much longing, but the way the original spirals off into the sky at the end has the sweep and scale the others lose when they shorten it. It's a beautiful song that reminds us what is used to mean to say something was "epic" -- before the bros seeped all meaning out of the word by overusing it.

If Park Chung-hee's song got an embed, Kim Jung-Mi's version deserves one, too. If you only click on two videos in this post, let this be the second one:


After the ban on him was lifted, though, music tastes had changed. From Mark Russell's interview:

Shin says, with a soft, matter-of-fact bitterness. “It was completely physical, with no spirit, no mentality, no humanity. That trend has carried over all the way to today, so people are deaf to real music. They don’t know because they are never exposed to it.”

Here's the 1980 version he recorded with "Music Power." The meandering intro is gone. The bass is higher in the mix, the rhythm is more driving. It's a disco song now. A disco song.



I mean... it still kind of rocks, but the synth (rather than rock organ) is a big letdown for me.
The horn section at 3:10 becomes the "hook" in the cover version at the beginning of this post. He's also repeating lines now, rather than letting the song end with a musical meditation.

To me, this sounds like he's trying to make a pop song, rather than trying to make a great song. And it's better than most disco songs you'll ever hear, but it's still a gelded version of that original, which sounds like it's coming down from the top of a mountain. The call at the end after the cry, 아름다운 강산, the climax of the song, where the lyrics come faster, before ending with the musical breakdown - the "Your heart my heart, run together" just after 5:00 here, has none of the emotional impact from the original.

And the sad thing is, the disco version? That's the one that got grabbed, and popularized... as if to prove, to twist the knife on Shin's assessment that "people are deaf to real music." We heard it up above, sung by Im Chang Jung and Lee Seon Hee, whose version is here, and whose version the other singers are referencing. She has a powerhouse of a voice, but the song includes a synthesizer making ocean noises, and '80s power chords. You can almost hear the feathered hair and shoulder pads. And oh. Did I mention? In case you didn't click, the version on Immortal Song at the beginning of the post has a rap solo added. As if the point hadn't already been made. (Apologies to any JYP disciples who think every song is better with a rap solo... I disagree.) And just to make that point really hurt... here is Orange Caramel's version. In case, along with rap solos, you think aegyo is another thing that makes every song better.


Again, I disagree.

And that's the legacy of the song. A defiant cry to heaven, turned into a disco standard. I'm not sure what to make of that, except to just go back and listen to the original again.

In 2006: Shin did a "Last concert" (Covered here by Mark Russell)

That horn "hook" in the 1980 version sounds way better as a power guitar riff, in my opinion. But the song is all the way down to 5 minutes. Now, for a "greatest hits concert," I guess maybe he doesn't have the energy to keep calling out to the skies, especially when the public has chosen the disco version anyway... but I can't help but feel wistful and sad that this is what's come of the song.

I think the gelding of this song is symbolic of what happened to all of Korean music when President Park clamped down on Rock Music. Korea could have been the heartland (or hub, if you will) of an Asian rock scene that might have done all kinds of interesting things we'll never know, because by the time the censors loosened their grip, public tastes were no longer with the innovators. That is a tragedy if you care about Korean music, and I do.

But you know what? You can still listen to the original, so it's not a total loss, I guess.

My man, Shin Joong Hyun

The Kim Sisters and the Ed Sullivan Show

UPDATE: I blanked on the fact Popular Gusts wrote about The Kim Sisters just a few months ago, with some interesting background, including a link to this history of camptown entertainment.


In my Korean Popular Culture class, during our history lecture, the professor mentioned "The Kim Sisters" - a group whose name came up not long ago on tumblr as well. In trying to connect the music being created in Korea during the 1920s 30s and 40s, heavily influenced by Japanese colonialism (Japanese Enka is often mentioned as the musical ancestor to older Korean musical styles like Trot and Bbong-chak) and the US influenced rock and protest songs of the 70s and 80s, the professor draws a line through US military camp entertainment venues, where performers auditioned (echoes of modern Kpop? perhaps, though I think that's a reach), and where performing in the style American soldiers expected, was their meal ticket. A lot of Korea's most memorable performers of the era - including Shin Joong-hyun and Jo Yong-pil, developed their chops on the army bases.

The Kim Sisters came a bit before Shin Joong-hyun and many of the others. They developed an act in the '50s as kids, which became polished enough to garner an invitation to an act in Las Vegas in 1959 (source), and were a big hit in the 1960s, appearing on the Ed Sullivan show 25 times - only 9 acts ever had more. Now Ed Sullivan is kind of a big deal... yet my mother-in-law had never heard of The Kim Sisters.

Their mother was Lee Nan-Young, whose song "Tears of Mokpo" is one of the classic Korean standards: it's like "Someone to Watch Over Me" in that everybody's done this song. You've heard it in a taxi, your mother-in-law sang it in the noraebang, and one of the singers did a version on the latest music audition show.

Source

In the Korea Times interview, former member Mia Kim admits that her group's timing was perfect: "When we started our career in the U.S., there were no Oriental acts as such. We were the first Oriental band that could play Western music and was good at it." They were the right act at the right time.

The early 1960s was also the time when the Japanese song "Sukiyaki" hit number one in the USA (1963)... so maybe there was something in the air... it was well before the Beatles brought Indian culture into hippie culture ('68), and at first google, the early 60s was a relatively quiet time for Asian-Americans, especially compared to the black civil rights movement (Rosa Parks kept her seat in 1955 and MLK met President Kennedy in 1960, around the time The Kim Sisters were putting bums in Vegas seats)... so it's hard to fit their invitation to perform in Vegas into a framework other than putting Orientalism on display -- at least from the demand side. However, getting on Ed Sullivan once ain't chopped liver, and they were invited 25 times - clearly more than a novelty act could ever muster. It would be worth further investigation.

And I really don't mean to take away from what they had going, The Kim Sisters were incredibly talented performers, able to play 20 different instruments between them, and if you watch the videos, able to sing very much in the style of Western pop groups of the time, which is interesting in its own way: the way the sisters balance their Oriental-ness (tossing a few Korean words into a song) with their very Western vocal and performance style, actually reminds me of current Korean acts trying to make it in the US, working to hit that exact balance of being similar to US pop, but not too similar, and different... but not too different. (Do we sing in English? Do we powder our skin paler or apply bronzer? Do we apply eye make-up to look more round, or more slanted? Do we change our dances? Do we harmonize with intervals from Korean music or Western music? Do these people even know what Gangnam is?) The Kim Sisters couldn't completely escape the pressure to put their Asian-ness on display: the b-side of their single "Harbor Lights" was a song titled "Ching Chang," written by E Shuman and M Garson. Sigh. I haven't been able to find the lyrics or a recording of the song online yet.

(image from here)



Watch the sisters. Just watch them. I'm interested in the subtexts of their performances - the fact they were partly chosen, as per the interview, because "there were no Oriental acts as such" ... but also because they 'could play Western music and was good at it" (and they really were). The way The Kim Sisters perform Korean-ness is interesting, and could be contrasted with, the ways The Wonder Girls, Psy, Rain, or Lee Byung-hun choose to emphasize or de-emphasize their Korean-ness, in order, themselves, to hit that right balance of different, but not too different, that is necessary for a pop act to distinguish itself, and the balance between foreign and maybe exotic, but not other, that a foreign act must strike.

Here are some of their performances from Youtube.

With Lee Nan-Young, the mother of the two sisters, and aunt of the third member.
Note the make-up emphasizing their darker skin and eye shape, and that their mother doesn't solo in English, but dresses in American styles.


Contrast that with the way she moves, dresses and stands in a live performance of her most famous song, admittedly downbeat compared to "Michael Row The Boat Ashore" above, but still:


They play instruments in this one, and dance in unison.. but the way they move is pretty clearly modeled on Western pop girl groups.


Goin' Out Of My Head


Starting in Hanbok, with traditional instruments, and then stripping it off to sing in English... interesting images.



And to contrast with more recent efforts to "make it" in America...



A very interesting study would be to compare the versions of Kpop videos for different audiences: what do the changes from The Korean Version of Bring the Boys Out to The American/English version show us about their company's expectations of the American market, or their perception of their members' strengths for the new market.







This is another video where the version marketed to American audiences is different from the one sold to Asians (a version which still features some white actors though).

The difference between the versions of "Bar Bar Bar" by Crayon Pop, meant for the domestic, and then the utterly unnecessary one for "global" audiences is interesting too... and kind of clumsy. I might write that up in more detail later.