Routledge Global Popular Music Series. New York; London: Routledge, 2017. xiii, 247 pp. (Illustrations.) US$145.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-138-79303-3.
South Korean (hereafter “Korea”) popular music, a range of genres often stuffed under the rubric of “K-pop,” has been an ubiquitous global presence in the 2010s. Aside from diffusion in established markets for Korean popular culture such as China and Japan, K-pop has increased its reach from Antofagasta in Chile to Zanzibar in Tanzania, and secured its foothold in global cities such as New York, London, and Paris, through dissemination via Youtube, SNS, and precisely choreographed live concerts. Nonetheless, analyses that move beyond clichés and display a solid command of the history and the specifics of the Korean popular music scene have not grown with commensurate rapidity, at least in English.
Made in Korea, part of a Routledge series of edited volumes with similar titles and formats, such as Made in Japan, Made in Brazil, and Made in Italy, addresses this relative lacuna. With contributors from various social sciences and humanities disciplines, the book is an assemblage of seventeen essays organized into four sections: history, genres, artists, and issues. Preceding these are a preface by one of the editors, Hyounjoon Shin, which explains the core questions and the background of the book, and an introduction by both co-editors that provides definitions of key concepts, a brief description of the historical contexts of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Korea, and some anecdotal comments on the state of Korean popular music studies.
The four chapters in the Histories section focus on live performances (Hyounjoon Shin); recorded music (Keewoong Lee); broadcasting of music on radio and television (Jung-Yup Lee); and digital forms of music distribution focused on the ubiquitous 2012 song by Psy, “Gangnam Style” (Sun Jung). The Genres chapters analyze trot and ballad (Yu-Jeong Chang); rock (Pil Ho Kim); folk (Aekyung Park); and soul and hip-hop (Jaeyoung Yang). The Artists section features four studies by Junhee Lee, Dohee Kwon, Okon Hwang, and Eun-Young Jung, each focused on an individual musician/composer: Kim Hae-song (b. 1910); Shin Joong Hyun (b. 1938); Kim Min-ki (b. 1951); and Seo Taiji (b. 1972). These musicians each had major impacts on the evolution of jazz, rock, folk, and rap respectively in Korea. The third section, Issues, is a potpourri, with chapters describing the use of “traditional” Korean musical elements (Hyunseok Kwon); the affective labour of Korean idol groups (Dong-Yeun Lee); government cultural policies towards censoring and supporting music (Soojin Kim); and vocal techniques in trot, ballad, rock, dance, and rap songs (Haekyung Um). A fifth and last section, Coda, features two chapters. The first of these briefly describes the histories of diffusion of Korean popular music in modern China and Japan before the 1980s, then Taiwan of the 1990s and 2000s, and Austria and Europe of the 2010s (Sunhee Koo and Sang-Yeon Loise Sung). The second and last chapter, as is the case with all the titles in the series, is an interview of a prominent musician—in this case a translated and abridged 2013 interview with the late Shin Hae-chul (Sin Hae-ch’ŏl) (1968–2014), who was most prominent during the 1990s as the leader of the rock band N.EX.T. (Hyounjoon Shin and Ch’oe Chi-sŏn).
The lead editor, Hyounjoon Shin, is a pioneering figure in the interdisciplinary study of Korean popular music, having published a variety of articles in English and Korean on various aspects of the music industry. The depth and breadth of his research is reflected not just in his own chapter, but also through compact strokes and deft touches evident in the brief editor’s notes that introduce each of the four sections. Most of the individual chapters make laudably consistent use of the large and diverse body of academic studies of popular music published in Korean, something which bizarrely is rarely found in other English-language academic works on K-pop. In addition, several of the chapters engage with studies published in English and Japanese (plus one in French). The chapters that are more focused on 1910 to 1980, especially for jazz, folksongs, trot, and rock, provide useful empirical details on musicians and institutional structures relatively understudied in English.
Although the book discusses an array of genres, individuals, and issues, it should not come as a surprise given length limits that not all potentially significant points are covered. If detailed analyses of lyrics are evident in Eun-Young Jung’s chapter on Seo Taiji (146–152), mentions of specific songs or their musical, choreographic, or lyrical elements are elided in others. If Yi Mi-cha, a famous trot singer who had her biggest hit banned in the 1960s, turns up in several chapters (even if oddly referenced just once in the index), none of the individual artists who have chapters devoted to them are women, indirectly reflecting the absence of discussion of gender at any depth. If the electronic dance music duo Clon’s success during the 1990s in Taiwan is discussed by Koo and Sung (208–209), examinations of the specific fluctuations and dynamics of K-pop’s recent popularity in major markets such as China and Japan are notable only for their absence. If some key artists such as Cho Yong-p’il make frequent appearances, the roles of diasporic Koreans, for example Korean Americans as producers, sound engineers, songwriters, and performers or as disseminators of music in overseas markets, are either entirely ignored or mentioned only in passing. The conglomerate nature of song production, such as contracting Swedish songwriters or employing Japanese choreographers, and specific mechanisms of government censorship in the 2000s and 2010s, are among other salient points left unaddressed. If the writing is usually clear, the regular appearances of grammatically odd constructions and syntactical malapropisms indicate that the manuscript would have benefitted from another round of copyediting and proofreading prior to publication.
These and other minor issues do not detract from the fact that taken together, the essays in this edited volume provide a very useful introduction for readers unfamiliar with Korean popular music, and also serve as a foundation for academic researchers seeking to strengthen their knowledge across several antecedents, genres, and artists of contemporary Korean popular music.
Hyung-Gu Lynn
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
pp. 174-176