The Birth of Korean Cool (13 page)

President Park Chung-hee’s aforementioned rock ban forced Korea to miss the British invasion, with the exception of the Beatles. In the 1960s, most of the world began to listen to rock
bands that had formed on their own—without the help of a producer or record label Svengali. The British Invasion bands wrote their own songs and played their own instruments without a
separate, anonymous backup band (country and jazz also had self-contained bands, but I’m talking strictly rock music). The Beatles began more or less as childhood friends from
Liverpool—John Lennon met Paul McCartney in 1957 while performing at a dinky local celebration for the crowning of the Rose Queen. Paul then asked his friend George Harrison to join the band.
They were all between fourteen and sixteen years old when they met. The Rolling Stones’ front man, Mick Jagger, and songwriter Keith Richards were childhood friends in Kent.

This was never going to happen in Korea. Kids didn’t have the free time to jam with friends or form bands. They were studying all the time.
All
the time. And if they weren’t
studying, it was likely because they were helping their parents run the family business. If Korea wanted a pop music industry, it was going to have to create it from the ground up. It didn’t
have time to wait around for four random geniuses (okay, three) to meet on their own on the streets of Liverpool or at some pub.

Why does it matter how a band gets formed?

It matters a great deal. The organically formed, self-contained bands had one crucial, history-altering characteristic: because they came from nothing, they had nothing to lose. They could
experiment with new sounds; they could improvise. They could create musical revolutions. Koreans didn’t have that. In the 1960s, Korea was a very poor country. Even a working-class
Liverpudlian had a higher standard of living, and a hell of a lot more free time, than many monied Koreans did at the time.

Furthermore, there is one major difference in western versus Korean culture: western kids can goof off. In the unforgiving Confucian culture of Korea, however, a young person who screws up has a
hard time getting back on track. There aren’t really any second chances. Up until the last ten years or so, when K-pop started to prove hugely profitable, no Koreans would have risked their
future to try to strike out on their own as a musician. If a Korean music industry was to form, it didn’t have time to wait for the Korean John, Paul, George, and Ringo to magically find each
other.

Malcolm Gladwell’s bestselling book
Outliers
cites the Beatles as an example of the “10,000-hour rule,” the theory that the difference between a brilliant achiever and
one who is merely very good is that the former has invested at least 10,000 hours of practice in the craft. The Beatles, argued Gladwell, got in well over 10,000 hours between the McCartney-Lennon
meeting in 1957 and their American debut in 1964, including 1,200 performances together as a band.

If it really takes 10,000 hours to make a great band, then the K-pop convention of the seven-to thirteen-year contract is entirely rational, especially since half that time is spent training the
stars before they make any public appearances.

Shin Hyung-kwan, general manager of MNET, Korea’s version of MTV, explained why the process takes so long. “It takes time to see who has hidden talents. It’s one thing to pick
some person and say you’re going to make them a star, but you have to see if they get along with each other and in society at large. If you are not careful, the whole thing can be spoiled.
Westerners do not understand. The performers could get into an accident, some kind of trouble.”

Yet the K-pop contract remains controversial, not just in its duration but in its inflexibility. This was proven recently by a three-year legal battle between former king of the boy bands TVXQ!
and its label, SM Entertainment; the issue was finally resolved at the end of 2012. The band members wanted out of their contract, citing long hours and rough working conditions. The label agreed
to release TVXQ! from its contracts and in exchange, TVXQ! had to cease to exist. TVXQ! was dissolved in 2009, then the label reinstated it in 2010 with two of the five original members.

On the one hand, the stringent contracts are indeed part of Hallyu’s success—the performers dance and sing well because they’re recruited young and trained for years. On the
other hand, the TVXQ! contract reveals that the band is paid shockingly poorly compared to top American bands. The artists don’t get a guaranteed percentage of album sales until fifty
thousand units have sold.
¹

If these K-pop aspirants had taken a traditional path, though, overwork would have been their fate anyway. “Of course we don’t want people to be stuck in contracts, but these kids
are so passionate,” says Martina Stawski, a Canadian expat in Seoul who cohosts the popular video blog Eat Your Kimchi. “This is a big chance for them. They might work ridiculously hard
at [becoming a pop star], but even if they join a chaebol they’ll work ridiculously hard anyway. It’s up to them to decide, ‘Do I want to go to a
hakwon
every night till
1 am to slave away for a university entrance exam? Or, do I want to be a pop star?’ ”

“That’s how the west sees all of Asia, not just K-pop,” says culture critic Lee Moon-won. “They think we’re all robots. We can’t do anything about the fact
that the west sees us that way. Koreans spend the same effort on everything, whether it’s college entrance exams or an office job. Korea stands for hard work.”

Lee offered additional insight as to why the K-pop star factory system is a necessity. “The U.S. population is 300 million, and Korea only has 50 million. Yet Korea has the same number of
pop artists as the United States.” In the United States, explained Lee, the pool of hopefuls wanting to be stars is big enough that natural triage occurs for stars to rise to the top.

Korean record labels don’t have this luxury of waiting for stars to come to them. “The human resource pool in Korea is small,” says Lee. “They have to take measures to be
competitive internationally.”

I interviewed Lee in his cramped Seoul office in the Yoido commercial district, out of which he runs a weekly watchdog magazine called
Media Watch
. He had a shaved head and facial
stubble, and wore a white T-shirt. On the table before him, he had lined up a pack of cigarettes, his phone, and an ashtray neatly in a row and futzed with them as he spoke, periodically making
slight adjustments in their placement. He reminded me of the old-school
Rolling Stone
journalists from the 1970s, back in the day when music writers thought of themselves as having a real
social responsibility.

Lee observed that the job of critic is a very recent one in Korea. “When I was a kid, there was no [culture] criticism, but now that has changed. Korea has only been a democracy since
1987. Since then we have made significant advances. Korean politics is very fast.”

According to Lee, his mighty pen has no influence on sales. “Fans don’t care about reviews; they just buy music. MP3s are so cheap that it doesn’t matter. [My reviews]
don’t have a huge effect from a business point of view. But if a musician has a bad reputation as an artist, it does affect whether they can get television appearances or radio
play.”

This points to a crucial difference between Korean and western culture. As Lee succinctly puts it: “There is no ‘bad boy’ model in Korea. Everyone is a
chak han
kid.” A
chak han
kid is a good kid, with the implication of innocence. It’s different from simply being “good.” A philanthropist giving millions of dollars to a
charity is performing a good deed, but it is not a
chak han
deed. A kid who helps his grandmother with the washing up is doing a
chak han
deed. It is on a smaller scale than
goodness, and it refers more to conforming with traditional social values rather than spiritual or metaphysical goodness.

“Koreans position themselves as a good boy or good girl,” he elaborated. “So if an artist is using drugs, then people get upset, so there is a big problem. [Something like
this] can ruin a career, especially a sex scandal.” Note, however, that on stage there is a lot of “sexiness” going around, like the female pop star Hyuna—but in her
interviews and the way she conducts herself in the public eye, she is all sweetness and light.
²

While the outright bans of the Park Chung-hee dictatorship exist no more, record labels and artists still have to reckon with the youth protection laws, which Korea instituted in the 1990s
partly to clamp down on sexual exploitation of children and partly to protect children from material that might corrupt them. The latter category is open to interpretation.

In response to the laws, record labels assign strict age limits on albums, sometimes for odd reasons. “Mirotic,” a song by boy band TVXQ!, could originally only be purchased by those
over eighteen because of the lyrics “I’ve got you under my skin” (in English), which had to be changed to “I’ve got you under my sky” in order to be legally sold
to a younger audience.

The penalties for being consigned to the nineteen+ age rating are high; it means the song in question gets no radio or TV play. When Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way Ball” toured in
Seoul, her concert was limited to the nineteen+ crowd with another turn of the screw: anyone eighteen and under was barred from entry
even if accompanied by an adult.

Lee said of Korea’s censorship laws, “The standards are very vague and inconsistently applied.” One of the most puzzling bans—well, puzzling to an outsider but obvious to
a Korean—was the ban on Japanese music, films, manga, and movies. Japanese bands were not permitted to do live concerts in Korea. The laws did not start to ease up until 1997—and even
now, it has not been lifted entirely.

The loosening of the rules is shockingly slow and shockingly recent. In 1999, Korea started permitting Japanese films to be shown in theaters if, and only if, they had won prizes at
international film festivals.

Lee’s explanation for the Japanese ban was somewhat cynical, or pragmatic: despite the pretext that the ban was a response to Japan’s erstwhile colonization of Korea, the real reason
was pure business: the Korean government and culture industries were worried about the Japanese taking over the local market. Now, the quality of Korean cultural goods has improved, so Korea feels
“less threatened,” said Lee.

THE CONGLOMERATE CASH COW

A staggering 4 percent of the population of South Korea auditioned in 2012 for
Superstar K
, Korea’s biggest televised singing competition. That’s 2.08
million would-be K-pop stars competing in a single year in a country with a population of 50 million. By contrast, even the behemoth
American Idol
only has about 80,000 contestants in a
given year, amounting to a minuscule 0.03 percent of the U.S. population.

What this attests to is that the Hallyu Wave, and the Korean government’s strategy to capitalize on it, has caused a tectonic shift in how young Koreans are viewing their future.

“Until about ten to fifteen years ago, [Koreans] didn’t think of music and film as a legitimate business,” said Shin Hyung-kwan, whose network, MNET, airs the
Superstar
K
reality show. “Overseas, performers are called ‘performing artists.’ But here, we thought of them as
ddan ddara
”—meaning “hustler,” a slang
word possibly of Japanese origin. “We associated them with performers at gentleman’s clubs. But now, as of two or three years ago, the most desired job is to be a singer.” Shin is
an emblem of the new respectable face of Korean entertainment: calm and educated, corporate with a bit of hip tweaking: high-fashion glasses and a well-pressed black Nehru-style jacket.

MNET, South Korea’s most important music video channel, is owned by CJ E&M, Korea’s largest entertainment group, a subsidiary of the CJ Group—an independent spin-off of
Samsung. (Large Korean companies with an ounce of sense have their finger in the K-pop pie. As does the Korean government, which has invested heavily in K-pop.) CJ has an established
fifteen-year-old brand for its music television network MNET, and its movie division is one of the most successful movie producers and distributors in Asia.

CJ and Samsung no longer have any ties, even though they are owned by members of the same family. But CJ E&M certainly has astounding business acumen reminiscent of its former parent
company.

Speaking of the company, Shin said, “There is no equivalent in other countries.” He’s not kidding. CJ E&M is the quintessential Korean pop culture company in that it is
made up of completely integrated units that all feed off each other in a highly efficient, highly profitable ecosystem. Its divisions include music television (such as MNET), film distribution,
live entertainment (they staged
Mamma Mia
in China), video games, and “smart media,” which is basically a social media web 2.0 platform for marketing all of the above. When CJ
E&M puts on a concert, it also simultaneously releases a music video game and a dance video game related to the concert’s theme. This sort of “one hand washes the other” model
is what Korea has become known for.

The company was founded in 1995, but in 2011 it was spurred on to become the brand it is today by a desire to keep the competition from other Asian nations at bay. It is hard to imagine too many
companies outside Korea that could pull off this kind of pan-entertainment model so rapidly. And if they did, it would take years for them to catch up.

How has success been achieved so quickly?

The CJ E&M ecosystem business model is a good example of Korea’s general export strategy: it depends on a unanimous understanding that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
The Korean government, its entertainment companies, IT companies, and even corporations that have nothing to do with entertainment know that they have to work together in order to pull off Hallyu
world domination.

There is another, bleaker reason why Korea has little reason to fear that other countries will try to emulate the K-pop export model: the star-making process is so unpleasant that there are not
many countries whose aspiring stars would put up with it. Korean youth, meanwhile, are used to intense sadomasochistic academic pressure, extreme discipline, constant criticism, and zero sleep.