While the growth in the popularity of Korean music in various corners of the world has spawned an increasing number of academic studies of its texts and contexts, most these have often focused on specific questions and approaches, such as the role of social networking technologies in distribution, applying gender theory to the study of specific musicians, or undertaking reception studies in overseas markets. In contrast, this book aims wide, and its answers are deliberately syncretic. It begins with three questions: Where did K-pop come from? What does K-pop say about South Korea? How did K-pop become popular? The answers draw on personal observations, a range of secondary sources in Japanese, English, and Korean, and engagement with elements of larger popular culture and music theories.
Ostensibly composed of six cleverly titled sections—”Prelude”; chapter 1, “How Did We Get Here?”; “Interlude”; chapter 2, “Seoul Calling”; “Postlude”; and “Coda”—the book is essentially the two chapters and some notes, as the “Interlude” appears to repeat historical context provided in other chapters rather than the analysis of cultural amnesia that it promises, the “Postlude” is composed of riffs on ideas of the “popular” that are familiar to researchers in popular culture studies and ethnomusicology, and the “Coda” is used as a synonym for acknowledgments. But the two core chapters, in addition to their titular homages to the Talking Heads and the Clash, are emphatically substantive yet consistently accessible. The colonial-era star Yun Sim-Dŏk; 1960s singer Yun Pok-Hŭi; 1970s male stars such as Nam Chin, Na Hu-Na (Na Hun-A), and Cho Yong-P'il; pioneers of 1980s pop such as the singer Kim Wan-Sun and the acrobatic if occasionally imprecise group Sobangch'a; 1980s J-pop stalwarts such as Anzen Chitai and Shōnentai; the 1990s Korean American group Solid; and contemporary stars such as After School, 2PM, Beast, and Sistar all make appearances along with hundreds of other names from Korea's history of popular music. Accessible personal anecdotes are interwoven with more orthodox descriptions of the political and economic contexts, interspersed at points by unexpected cadenzas of intertextual readings. Readers exasperated by the ubiquitous focus on Psy's “Gangnam Style” will appreciate the discussions of other artists, genres, and scenes, such as indie or underground music in the area around Hongik University in Seoul, the historical evolution of trot, or the diffusion of jazz in South Korea. If readers trained in management or organizational studies might gravitate towards the passage discussing benchmarking practices and marketing innovations by Korean entertainment production companies such as SM and JYP, those who hew closer to the auteur theory would find comfort in the singular impact attributed to the group Sŏ T'ae-ji wa Aidŭl in revolutionizing the landscape of Korean popular music upon their debut in 1992.
For all its strengths, there are some elements that are discordant. The emphasis on linkages between a larger historical context and individual artists and their music results in a noticeable underplay of some key factors. The government, for example, appears entirely as a source of indifference or oppression. State censorship undoubtedly combined with anti-government sentiments to fuel South Korean popular music of the 1970s; nonetheless, discussion of cultural policies promoting the export and the diffusion of K-pop in more contemporary contexts, regardless of how misguided or reductionist the rhetoric of national branding or soft power might be, would have been useful. Leaving aside whether individual artists in fact spark entire systems of musical production, distribution, reception, and reproduction, key musicians who predated Sŏ T'ae-ji in their introduction of Western popular musical genres into South Korea, such as the singer Nami (who recorded one of the earliest Korean disco songs in 1979), singer-songwriter Yun Sang (whose 1990 debut album is seen as the first synth-pop work in Korea), or the band N.EX.T (whose 1992 album Home is considered by many music critics in Korea to contain the earliest domestic examples of techno) are missing. Analysis of fans, fandom, and variations among individual overseas markets is sparse. Discussions of social networking technologies and digital music files as routes and platforms of distribution and reproduction, especially the conscious use of YouTube by entertainment companies, are sporadic. Significant academic work in Korean, and to a lesser extent English, on trot, the imagery of “Asia” in Korean songs of the 1950s, specific forms of resistance and their links to folk rock of the 1970s, or sources of K-pop's overseas popularity in the 2000s are uncited, while points of interpretation and fact are repeated across several of the sections. Also, how exactly the “cultural amnesia” of the subtitle informs current K-pop never fully emerges, rendering it a nearly forgotten leitmotif.
Overall, the book does succeed in its aim of providing an overview of the historical evolution of South Korean popular music, and in doing so, addressing to varying degrees the three questions with which it began. Combining a solid command of empirical facts with dexterous explorations of genres, contexts, and concepts, this is an engaging, stylish work that will be useful for both academic researchers and general readers alike.
