Ah, Korean pop music. I just read an article on Jodi's Pages that I got hooked into via Lost Nomad. It reminded me instantly of just how much I used to like Korean pop music – and how little interest I have in it now.
And no, I don't think it's just because I'm old and jaded. I'm the biggest baby of them all – my wrapping's just 34 years-of-age. Now, with a real income, I've just moved up to bigger toys: I got a 100" image beaming out from a killer projector, an Xbox through which I've become not only a highly-trained WWII-era, OSS-trained elite sniper, but have also piloted UFO's to lay waste to farmers and townspeople alike in the 1950's, kidnapping them for my experimenting and gene-splicing pleasure. Of course, sometimes I touchdown to reality enough to be near my Ph.D, I've done some decent artistic work, and am fairly responsible and self-motivated. I have grown up in certain ways, of course, yet I am still a kid at heard. For one thing, I've got more in sheer amount and types of music on my iPod now than I ever hoped to carry around in my Sony Sports CD Walkman from back in the day.
So I'll start everything off with the big admission – I liked Britney Spears (first two albums, only!) But my ear gets piqued by a lot of different things: heartfelt ballads with edge, good guitar hooks, rap lyrics that truly flow, and catchy pop tunes. The RIAA can kiss my fat ass because it's not MP3's that made me stop buying CD's, it's what I call the "20-percent rule" – only 2-3 songs out of 10-12 tunes on a CD are any good, whereas the rest are filler crap designed to hide the fact that you're paying $3-5 per song. If you actually have any talent, which I judge in terms of consistency and not raw singing skills, your entire CD is going to be good. That doesn't happen often in recent years, but when it does, I am more than happy to plunk down my money. It's also a reason many of my old CD's from my collection were carefully-selected "best of" and "greatest hits" compilations of singers and groups I already knew.
Back in the 50's, every good song was available as single 45's, which was generally true until laser pickups unceremoniously replaced phonograph needles in the late 1980's. In fact, I was a good customer, with crates of records bulging at their seams. And for some reason, albums seemed more well-rounded overall, so I bought a lot more of them and listened to more of them the whole way through. Most of my "illegal downloading" since the advent of the MP3 has actually been reacquiring the music I refuse to buy again, since I spent all my allowances and part-time Church's Fried Chicken money buying records that are now collecting dust and mold in a cold, dark storage room somewhere in Oakland.
But now, most of the groups are primped, managed, and modded out to fit a marketing model. If you're in your late 20's and up, try to think back to Exposé – if you can, you probably also remember how much they generally sucked. Still, they sang catchy tunes and if you liked one of their songs, you pretty much liked them all. Same was true with The Jets, Taylor Dane, and Lisa Lisa – all of their songs I'm embarrassed yet happy to have riding around in my iPod, despite the fact that Lisa Lisa was always flat (obviously I'm talking about her lack of intonation), 
Taylor Dane couldn't hold a tune to save her life, and the Jets were just plain corny, what Koreans rightly call "느끼해". And those were the bad ones – the good ones were even more reliable to put out something worth keeping: Madonna, Duran Duran, EPMD, Eric B. and Rakim. Even in the field of rap, there were many strong contenders out there making good stuff worth buying a whole album of.
Perhaps back then, groups had a bit more pressure to be better, since there was no easy way to skip to the next tune, besides actually standing next to the record player and eyeballing the little space between songs, into where you had to lightly drop the needle without getting that scratch sound that could blow out speaker components or damage your
precious piece of vinyl. So you were often stuck just letting the record play or making a mix tape that took lots of time. Now you can make an iTunes playlist and burn a CD in the time it takes to make a trip to the bathroom to drop the kids off at the pool.
And I will return to Korea in a moment. I just need to make a quick point along the way.
On top of pent-up anger and frustration at being overcharged for music, a consumer's only got so much cash to spend. Back in the day, the VHS market was rental-oriented, with new videos priced at $119 to prevent consumers from buying them until the video stores were finished sucking them bone-dry of rental fees. Even when a certain video was set for major release, it still seemed like consumers were buying less videotapes, especially since home theater was not something everyday people could afford. Those nuts were out buying laserdiscs anyway, along with BMW's and country club memberships. I was stuck watching T2 on a 19" screen. To me, taping it from HBO was nearly as good as buying it. Back then, I indeed spent most of my cash on music.
Now that we've got DVD's as a major source of competition – for its a market designed to be collected and replayed from initial release, just like CD's, with the added value designed for increasingly larger numbers of people with home theaters and bigger TV screens – the consumers treat DVD's as high-fidelity products made for collection and continued consumption, also just like CD's. Me, Jane Doe, and Joe Schmoe all have finite amounts of cash, and since people like me have not only bad blood with the present crappy state of music, combined with options to bypass buying songs legally, I gleefully Limewire down the 4 or 5 Britney Spears songs I like (spread over like 4 albums) and don't feel guilty one damn bit. I save my money and buy myself the 4-disc special edition of Hellboy, with dozens of hours of content for the price of a CD-and-a-half. Screw the record industry, their transparent marketing of bionically-constructed bands, and the way they try to pass off what is mostly loads of crap.
It's not that bands suck any more these days – I just feel it's marketed a lot more aggressively and sneakily – it feels like they're trying to pass off less for more money. Now, there are still people out there who are just plain good – remember, defined as putting out a consistently decent set of songs on an album – so I happily bought albums from 50 Cent, N.E.R.D., and one specially-ordered compilation of 40's German and French cabaret songs by Liane that is sweet as hell. Money well spent, I say.
Not only that, with the free, law-bucking, swashbuckling Napster from a few years back, I downloaded stuff totally unfamiliar to me that I would never have plunked down hard money to buy, untested, songs unheard. Here, I am indeed talking about country music. And not the "country" that-is-not-really-country like Clint Black or Shania Twain poser country-for-suburban-cowboys, but guitar-twanging, fist-swinging, hard-drinking, crying on the muthafucking record country. George Jones. Willie Nelson. Wayland Jennings. Back when country was big hair, trailer park, white-ass, one-black-guy-in-the-audience, Hee Haw kind of shit. Living in Ohio as a kid, I heard a lot of it wafting around the airwaves in the diner and outta people's pickups occasionally, and some of it was quite good, actually. So I dowloaded all the names of country "sangers" I could remember, got familiar with whom I liked and whom I didn't, and eventually bought a George Jones and Willie Nelson DVD's. Again, screw the RIAA.
But what does this have to do with Korean music, ask ye?
Well, I think the same thing has happened to Korean music, except – like many things in Korea – at a much more compressed, accelerated rate. Everything is a boy band or pre-marketed ballad singer in the real K-Pop end of things, while Korean producers seem to have gotten much better at imitating American styles. Seo Taiji, one of the king imitators, yet who had some skills, seemed to have sort of lost it – when I left them for good was when I bought a poorly-produced "ultimate" DVD of them that had shaky-cam footage of some random concert in which their old classics were all redone as fad-of-the-moment punk songs. Yes, even come back home got the Limp Bizkit "Faith" treatment: Rrrrrawwr, rrrrrawwrrr, roarrrr! Umm, no thanks. And no more Seo Taiji and the Boys. Find your style again, guys. And how about throwing some music videos while you're at it?
And then, from the Lost Nomad's page, I saw news and a couple of pictures of boy and girl bands that looked more like small armies than singing groups.
What are you gonna do with like 14 people on a stage? That's too much action even for the aerobics/taebo style dancing that never seems to die in K-Pop – unless some of the people do pantomime, a few express themselves through interpretive dance, some of them hip-hoppity around, while a trio emotively sings overwrought ballad hooks as interludes to the aerobicizing action. Now that's a complete experience. With 14 fools on a stage, I want dances, drama, spoken word poetry, laser shows, and even a couple ninjas featured in a rap/dance/martial arts final showdown. And if the final moment is punctuated with a pyrotechnics-laden series of explosions and smoke bombs, I'll be part of the standing ovation.
But we all know that ain't gonna happen. We're gonna get the same few people singing and just tons more synchronized dancing. I fear that the incredible one-upsmanship that goes on here in Korea might escalate to the level of having Bali-wood-level shows with 150 backup dancers, but who knows? The point is, even in the space of 10 years, the amount of over-produced pap has simply washed over everyone else in the K-pop scene, talented or not, such that there are only a few really good people or groups out there that make it. I don't even know any names anymore, since, in the space of the several years that separated this Korea stay from my last one in 1994-1996, the physical appearance of these stars has become so homogenized through anorexic/bulimic dieting, plastic surgery, and the incredible payoffs many singers, especially the untalented ones, have to make to break into the business, that I can't even tell them apart anymore.
So I feel ya, Jodi's boyfriend. Where's the old school talent? I had a chance to see DJ DOC in concert – amazing, by the way – it was one of the best concert experiences I'd ever seen anywhere – and they still got it, even though they're older than my ass. Where's blow-your-ears-off, slapping heads, taking names Pak Mi Kyeong? (Sadly, I know – with bad nosejob, performing in ajussi nightclubs and whatnot.) What about syrupy 슬퍼 Shin Hyo Beom? King Kim Geon Mo? (Also now sadly irrelevant but doesn't seem to realize it.) But he still had dibs on claiming his song as the "Korean national anthem" back in 1994 ("잘 못 된 만남").
Back when K-Pop was good – not meaning more talented, but just more honest and earnest-sounding and deliciously goooood – it was really a joy to listen to. And even before that, the 'bbong-jjak" songs and ballads from the 70's and 80's, albeit derivative of a lot of Japanese stuff, was also solid. Now, like a lot of the "Korean Wave" – the products just seem to be slicker, higher-production value version of formulas that are imported and tweaked from elsewhere: the boy bands, the bad ballad singers, sexy girls who can't sing swinging non-existent hips onstage.
Still, I like a few from the now, but only a few. When I catch someone on TV or hear a song worth noting on the radio, I make a note to catch the title and singer. Who am I bumping now on the iPod from the present-day Korean scene? I can only pick a few, since I don't really keep up anymore. YG Family's "멋쟁이 신사" strikes me as original Korean rap, sung with Korean humor, verve, and flava. DJ DOC still has more bounce to the ounce than any of these youngstas out there.
In a completely different genre, Jang Yoon Jeong's "어머나" and her performance style has a kind of honest-yet-playful, winking-atcha, more refined kind of charm than the any of the pesudo-sexy mimicking of Beyoncé and J-Lo videos presently all the rage. I bought her CD. 
They call Lee Hyo Ri the "Jennifer Lopez" of Korea; frankly, the dance style doesn't seem to work for me, since such sultry dance moves were made to accentuate parts of the body that a lot of these would-be "Jennifer Lopez-of-Koreas" just don't seem to be able to pull off without push-up bras, padding, or fetish accessories. I pose the question: why do you have to be a "Jennifer Lopez" clone to come off as sexy in your own country and culture, one that is completely different from the one "Bennifer" comes from? Can't you just be the Lee Hyo Ri of Korea™ and still charm people that way? Or do we totally have to reproduce the cultural forms and modes of the West in order to drive this wave?
Like the "Korean Wave" in general, I think it will plateau but generally continue to do well in the Asian cultural marketplace. Hey, that's a great thing for Korea. But also like many other Korean Wave products – the movies from Shiri to Taegukki come to mind – instead of overtly trying to be Hollywood-style Korean cultural products, how about being confident enough to espouse a real kind of "Korean Pride" and and make Korean-style Korean products? Riding the wave of making movies as "the Steven Spielbergs" or the "Jennifer Lopezes of Korea" is going to get old. In the end, I hope this bubble bursts soon so we can get back to seeing more real Korean movies, listening to some decent K-Pop again, and enjoying the real fruits of Korea's political, economic, and cultural growth over the last couple decades, such that a real – not derivative – "Korean Pride" and "Korean Wave" can truly gain their bearings.
