MUSIC

THE STRANGE EVOLUTION OF K-POP

or what the 1 Million Means

By Julian Kim

The One Million and more

Can you think of living in a society without music? Music makes us happy, sad, elated, brings us together, and can sometimes even heal us. Most of us could never live without music. And the music I can’t live without is K-pop, aka Korean pop. K-pop is traditional pop music, but it has its own style, unique qualities, and quite a strange evolution, starting with its roots in American R&B—we can thank the mid-century war between North and South Korea and the American intervention for that.

For many years K-pop was just a Korean cultural thing, but over the last couple of years it has exploded and is now considered one of the hottest musical genres in the world. From PSY’s “Gangnam Style” to the current popular idol groups (BTS, Black Pink, Wanna One) K-pop has become a force in the music industry. Strangely, the reason for its success has little to do with music and everything to do with dance. K-pop has morphed from singing to dancing, and has, because of it, changed a great deal of what we consider the purpose of popular music. To understand K-Pop’s movement into dance we’re going to have to take a bit of a detour and a history lesson on generations of K-Pop innovators.

BTS is at the latest evolution of K-Pop

As mentioned earlier, American R&B inspired K-Pop due to the presence of American soldiers in Korea. The war lasted 3 years (1950-53) but the United States army stayed and America’s cultural influence was strong and consistently present throughout the fifties, sixties, and seventies. Even though there were a lot of popular Korean singers before the Americans arrived, their presence is at the root of K-Pop.

The first K-pop singer is Seo Taeji and Boys. After watching Seo Taeji and Boys’s act, people started to focus on the performance more than their singing. They were good singers, but they were also talented dancers. It’s impossible to underestimate the influence that had on K-Pop. The groups that followed, such as H.O.T, Sechs Kies, Big Bang, Super Junior, Wonder Girls, SNSD, and KARA all balance the singing dancing combination the Boys pioneered.

At that point K-pop seemed to be flourishing, but it did not last long. People gradually got bored with listening and watching K-pop and it started to wane in popularity. Audiences needed something new and fresh, which is always the time when innovation strikes. A lot of huge promoters were looking for inspiration and they decided to push dancing further than it had ever gone in K-Pop. This is when the movement called the 1 Million happened and shook the genre of K-Pop it ways its originators could never have imagined.

Wanna What?

1Million is the biggest dance studio in South Korea. 1Million has more than 8,700,000 subscribers on Youtube with fans not only in Seoul, but also all around the world. So, what does this studio actually do and how has this community become so famous? 1Million dance studio is not a simple dance club, but more of a business organization. From that perspective, 1 Million is really an offshoot of K-pop and one might say a new or different take on the marketing of pop music.

So, let’s take a look at how 1 million operates as a business and we can begin to see why it’s changing the dynamic in pop music from singing to dancing. 1 Million works through a mentorship community. This means that to join the 1 Million you have to first become part of a system. If you happen to be a good dancer, forget becoming a leader. You have to be a great dancer to work you way to that type of position and then you are plugged into a vast system of dancing teams, training, and leadership positions. When you watch 1 Million videos they are led by key members of the community, they teach others to follow and, most importantly, spread the news of their dancing and choreography.

K-Pop comes in all the colors of the world

This explains how K-pop dancing and 1 Million dancing have become so popular and have been able to promote different dance styles—poppin’, krump, B-boying—to world-wide interest. This doesn’t just happen in a vacuum, but is part of a consciousness business plan that has pushed dancing to the forefront of pop. This has not always been the case. For many years dancing was just an adjunct to the song.

In today’s pop music, dancing is almost the entire game. In other words, dancing has a huge impact by itself. This development not only affected K-pop, but also other genres. And, it is easy to find the result and development through the present K-pop groups, such as BTS and Black Pink. Then, what is the difference between the past and present? Unlike old K-pop singers keeping pace with the rhythm during their performance, BTS and Black Pink actually play with the rhythm. This is a huge difference and is the most startling innovation of K-Pop from its R&B roots.

©Julian Kim and the CCA Arts Review