A few thoughts on K-Pop

The “Westernization” discourse is making the rounds again. I’ve talked about this before and will likely talk about it again since it refuses to die. (I may also add it to my K-Pop Vocabulary post because why not.)

There’s a strain of thinking that has emerged in English speaking fandom that goes like this:

1. K-Pop has always been “Western” because the music has always been taken from Western sources.

2. Therefore, it cannot be made more Western.

3. If it cannot be made more Western—because it’s already Western—then any complaint of “Westernization” is either:

A. An ad hominem attack from an anti-fan.

B. Actually expressing the orientalist desire of the person making the critique.

While the fans making this argument are seemingly trying to bolster the claims to authenticity of their favorite acts, I find this way of thinking both facile and kind of insulting. When you boil it down, the argument hinges on the idea that K-Pop is nothing more than a simulacrum of whatever is on the Western pop charts plus added parasocial elements and in the Korean language. (Although that last one is not strictly necessary these days.)

Isn’t that exactly what fans have been complaining about uninformed Western critics saying, dating back to the infamous John Seabrook “Factory Girls” era?

K-pop is an East-West mash-up. The performers are mostly Korean, and their mesmerizing synchronized dance moves, accompanied by a complex telegraphy of winks and hand gestures, have an Asian flavor, but the music sounds Western: hip-hop verses, Euro-pop choruses, rapping, and dubstep breaks. (2012)

Where to even begin?

How about here—what does “K-Pop” even mean?

Generally, when you encounter this “Westernization” argument you’ll hear that it’s “pop music in Korean.”

When the term “K-Pop” first started to appear in English in the early to mid-2000s, that was more or less true. It was music for teenagers made in Korea for a primarily Korean and a global Asian diaspora audience. Here we see it used in 2006 talking about Korean-American performers and fans:

Micky Yuchun grew up in Seoul, South Korea, where he was known as Yuchun Park. He immigrated with his parents, middle-class small-business owners, in the sixth grade. He watched Korean dramas on satellite TV and listened to the CDs of K-pop bands. At school and among friends, he soaked up the Backstreet Boys, Eric Clapton and MTV.

“K-Pop bands” at that point was not synonymous with idols but was essentially the equivalent of “gayo” (가요, popular music) and included acts as diverse as anything on TRL in America at the time—from R&B duo Fly to the Sky to legendary rockers Crying Nut.

So how did we get from K-Pop meaning PiPi Band to K-Pop meaning Hearts2Hearts (note: different from Heart2Heart)?

Let me rewind just a bit. You can listen to a more in depth discussion on this in Episode 27 on the Taiwanese Wave but Korea was very similar to Taiwan in the growth of its pop music scene in the 1980s. The scene was essentially created out of nothing by existing record companies in response to loosening economic and cultural restrictions. In both countries, you had these veteran songwriters who’d been working with domestic acts doing the equivalent of enka/trot/schlager/country music suddenly tasked with sounding hip and trendy. Sometimes that involved directly biting popular Japanese acts like Shonentai (see: Sobangcha and the Little Tigers, Japan’s pop music landscape was miles ahead of other countries in the region) but there’s a lot of extremely interesting music from both countries that emerges in this era as they just threw everything at the wall trying to find something that worked. This era was very much a real time experiment in musical hybridization, in domestic songwriters trying to unlock the trendy foreign genres that were attracting young people but with a mix of elements that were palatable to domestic ears.

But at what point can we say an art form has been domesticated? At what point can ownership be claimed? Does every artist using a string section on a ballad have to give props to Mozart? Do we all need to credit the British Empire for the use of English in lyrics? Does it take fifty years? Twenty-five? A hundred? Does it make a difference if the music was brought to a population by an occupying military force, as in Korea? Is it empowering to claim the music of an occupying military force for yourself, like Shin Jung-hyeon did, or do the current rules of discourse mean that we have to say he copied everything from Americans and made American music because he played rock music on a guitar?

Seo Taiji, who serves as something of a sacred totem in these stan arguments today, is given as the ur-figure of K-Pop and these fans will claim he copied Western/Black music. Therefore, everything he made was Western and all that follows is also Western.

Let’s leave aside the fact that a popular music scene, aka “gayo,” had already put down roots by the time Seo Taiji came along. Here’s something that has been conveniently forgotten: Seo Taiji was not a regular at Club Moonlight, which was the club where Black American soldiers would hang out, but rather was inspired by seeing Park Nam Jung—one of the stars of that 1980s/early 1990s hybrid era that—perform. Can we really say Seo Taiji was merely “copying” American music or did he use then-brand new equipment and then-brand new techniques from the hip hop scene in America—like sampling—to create songs that hit with Korean musical sensibilities? In other words, can we say that he was engaging in a new hybrid form of pop music? Inspired by hip hop and using those techniques, sure, but the songs were his own.

We can accept that the Beatles took in the sounds of American rock and R&B and created something inspired by it but still very much their own. Why can’t we give Seo Taiji the same agency?

It’s no coincidence that the Beatles’ home city of Liverpool was a city that had a lot of sailors bringing in new sounds from America, just the soldiers posted in Seoul did. In the 1960s in Liverpool, those sounds were reprocessed and then sent back to America in the form of the British Invasion. The sound of the British Invasion was reprocessed in America and sent back out again and so on and so on. Some music isn’t always appreciated on both sides of the pond and that’s okay. E.g. Pulp were never near as big outside of the UK as they were in it but Oasis crossed over just fine and both acts are excellent.

Okay, so, even if we can get to a point where, okay, maybe the West doesn’t have proprietary ownership of the concept of rock music or pop or hip hop and, yes, other cultures can produce their own versions of popular genres, we still return to the confusion of what “K-Pop” actually is.

It may help to think of “K-Pop” not as a genre of music but rather as a format. What do I mean by that? I recommend Eric Weisbard’s Top 40 Democracy for an in-depth exploration of “format” but the tl;dr is essentially this: while a genre aims to describe a style of music, a format is music aimed at a specific demographic. This is why “classic rock” keeps creeping up through the decades, because “classic rock” doesn’t mean Lynyrd Skynyrd, it means the music serviced to men who are between the ages of 45 to 54.

Like I said above, when the term was first being used in English-language publications, it did literally mean Korean pop music for Korean (and other Asian and diaspora) teenagers. It’s not until later that the term “K-Pop” was disconnected from the music of Korean teenagers and became the music of a global idol market (something I’m slowly exploring in my BigBang MADE series of episodes).

Looking at Japan may also be helpful to fully understand what we’re seeing as “K-Pop” today. What we initially took in as “K-Pop” was received as “Hallyu” (韓流) in Japan and rather than being music for teenagers like 1TYM, it was first dramas and then music for middle aged women. Bae Yong Joon hit Japanese shores like all four Beatles rolled into one and his audience was also rolled up by the dashing young men of DBSK/TVXQ/東方神起 when they hit Japan soon after. 東方神起 would move away from this initial Bae Yong Joon image towards a more domestic-Japan facing image that worked really well for them. (The group—now a duo—still has a massive fanbase in Japan.) But the point is that this audience was the Hallyu audience and they moved en masse onto Jang Geun Seuk when he hit their shores as the 2010s were dawning.

Jang Geun Seuk was a one-man content wave, just like Bae Yong Joon had been and his audience was powerful. He wasn’t an idol--though he was known as the Prince of Asia--and his music wasn’t aimed at trend-forward teenagers. It was more… mom music, which is a totally respectable genre, and he even hit number one on the Oricon Chart, not an easy task back in 2011 during the Everything is AKB48 era.

What’s important to note here is that Jang Geun-Suk was concurrent with a wave of Korean girl groups, idol groups, starting with Girls Generation and KARA, two girl groups still fondly remembered in Japan for their massive debuts. And the conversation in the Japanese press noted that these groups did not have the Hallyu audience, their audience was… teen girls! Much, much closer to their Korean teen counterparts across the East Sea/Sea of Japan. This “Girls Pop” sound of KARA and Girls Generation was heavily influenced by the sound of J-Pop and would also filter back into the sound of Korean pop music more generally.

These are basically the two parallel tracks of the “K-Pop” format as I see it. You have the mom music and you have the trend-forward stuff for teen girls. And while it wasn’t always the case, these days, it’s all idol group-coded, even in Japan.

When “Gangnam Style” hit our shores in America, he was slotted into the trend-forward category, helped along by then-teen star Justin Bieber (and Justin’s association with Scooter Braun, who soon also signed Psy). And the stuff that crossed over in that that first major post-Rain crossover in 2011-2012 was the trend-forward teen music. And the English language press coverage at the time was a potent mixture of awe and giddiness, as if the music writers at the time just couldn’t believe pop music could be this fun.

Here’s David Bevan from Spin on f(x)’s “Nu Abo” in a list of the “best” K-Pop songs ever:

The mark of a particularly potent K-pop song is one that can make you feel like you’re hearing 80 songs fit neatly into one — sometimes you recognize a hook with every passing measure, sometimes you hear them all at once. Written and produced by a team of Danish popsmiths that includes Cutfather and Thomas Troelsen (one of the minds that brought you Junior Senior’s forgotten 2003 smash, “Move Your Feet”), “Nu Abo” is a schoolyard-taunting, Britney-esque monster that sounds like dueling iPods and still allows for a thick layer of crowd noise. D.B. (2012)

Note the reference to Danish popsmiths.

(Also, I WILL NEVER FORGET “MOVE YOUR FEET”—I owned the CD single at one point.)

What had happened in the sound of K-Pop, specifically with SM Entertainment at this point but moving forward with other companies too, is that they would start dipping into the global pool of songwriters—many of whom were Scandinavian—just like American record companies had been doing. And just like Swedish Max Martin would find a sound that hit with American ears, British duo LDN Noise hit on something that worked in Korea.

If we can call Max Martin’s “...Baby One More Time” an American hit despite being written by a Swede, then I think we can call LDN Noise’s “View” a Korean hit.

“View” was 2015 and by this point a separate global “K-Pop” audience had developed built on the 2011-2012 Western crossover and heavily focused on idol groups thanks to the influence of things like KCON. “K-Pop” at this point up through the media push of BTS in America in 2019, was no longer Korean music for teenagers but a separate demographic made up of idol fans globally and in Korea, along with global trend-forward pop music fans. This takes us through the wave of tropical house to “Boombayah” to the entire MADE song cycle.

Some of these songs were also big hits in Korea—“View,” “Really Really,” “Love Scenario,” “Bang Bang Bang,” “Boombayah”—but some were mega-hits only among the K-Pop demographic.

What’s happened post-the BTS push in the West is that the global “K-Pop” demographic has morphed to roll up more and more of the Bae Yong Joon Hallyu audience demographic. And with it, the sound of K-Pop has tilted more towards the mom music genre and become less and less trend-forward.

Bae Yong Joon lands in Japan in 2004 and causes a riot. Note the lack of teenagers.

K-pop fans waiting outside Hybe HQ in Seoul, 2025.

Going back to “View,” what I find really insulting about the idea that we must call it a “Western” song because it was written by LDN Noise, is that argument takes away all agency from SHINee as artists.

Look at “...Baby One More Time.” The song was written by Max Martin but the decision to wear the iconic school girl outfit was Britney Spears as was the tone of her voice and singing style and dancing. All Britney.

The lyrics to “View” were written by SHINee member Jonghyun, all about the effect of falling in love on the senses. The original demo was called “A Thousand Girls.” “View” was written by LDN Noise but it’s a SHINee song, with SHINee’s distinct vocals, choreography, styling, etc. Written by Brits but for a K-Pop audience.

This wasn’t just a demo with some vocals slapped on top of it.

Global pop music is a hybrid art form, pulling in sources from everywhere, remixing them and sending it back out to be remixed in turn.

What gets lost in the discourse on Westernization are two things—1. The quality of the music and 2. The intended audience.

Stans don’t always have a strong musical literacy and that makes it hard when they are attempting to describe why they do or don’t like something. So they almost always fall back on buzzwords whose meanings they may or may not understand. When I’ve seen complaints about “Too Westernized” what that means is almost always “sounds bad/corny to me” or “is not intended for a K-Pop audience demographic.”

Jennie’s “Mantra” is westernized in that it doesn’t seem intended for the K-Pop audience demographic but it’s catchy and sounds good and fits in a niche that is severely underrepresented in American Top 40 right now: Hot Girl Music.

(Yes, I’ve had this on repeat since it dropped. What? You’ll rip this song from my cold dead hands.)

Similarly, Rose’s “APT” is without a doubt the biggest song to emerge from a K-Pop artist since Psy’s “Gangnam Style.” It’s westernized in that the primary demographic isn’t the K-Pop demographic.

Despite Katseye’s stans claims to the contrary, they very much are K-Pop right now because the Venn Diagram of their audience and the K-Pop demographic is a circle. Nobody is listening to “Gnarly” who isn’t already deeply invested in the K-Pop scene.

That’s why Japanese acts like XG, Jo1, &Team, and NiziU, etc. get lumped in with K-Pop but other Japanese acts like Fruits Zipper, Cutie Street, Naniwa Danshi, etc. don’t. The former share an audience with the global K-Pop demographic but the latter don’t.

(Cutie Street: Not for the K-Pop demographic. Interestingly enough, as I was writing this, complaints from Japanese netizens emerged complaining that Hearts2Hearts were ripping off Cutie Street style kawaii visuals… Japanization? )

It will be interesting to see where acts like Chanmina and Sky-Hi’s Japanese girl group Hana will land; same with Teddy’s new group for the Black Label the Allday Project. Will the Allday Project break global K-Pop containment and hit with normie Korean teenagers?

Anyways, when looking at complaints of “Westernization,” scratch the surface and more often than not the complaint is actually: this song sounds like ass.