A New K-Pop Era

South Korea's most well known music genre is K-pop. This music is a huge hit not only in South Korea, but around the world. K-pop's sound waves wind through Asia, Europe and recently throughout North America. Gangnam Style is, perhaps, the most well known K-pop song at the moment. The music video, with Psy as the singer, recently went viral. Now people all over the world are doing the Gangnam Style dance, singing the song, and mentioning it in everyday conversations. Even elders, people of a generation that would normally not become interested in a viral video, are able to recognize the tune. How could they not when everyone is talking about it? Psy has been able to follow the strict formula of K-pop, while making it his own, so much so, that he is now a huge sensation.

This formula is the same that allows girl bands in Korea to be more popular in Japan, than in their home country. One of the most key pieces to the recipe is the education of the musicians. In many countries anyone can become a famous singer by making it onto one of the many competition shows. However, in South Korea the aspiring singer must first take professional singing, and dancing, lessons before they can even make it onto the radar. This helps to insure that the musician actually has some form of talent.

As I mentioned before, dancing lessons are essential. The language barrier, perhaps, creates the most need for a superb dance. If there can be a simple - yet catchy - dance that people can imitate, who needs to know what the songs about? This is one of the reasons why Gangnam Style became the most viewed video on Youtube. With the simple lasso swing above the head and the strange appearance of riding a horse, the dance became a joke. And it was meant to be! It was meant to be something so unique and bazaar that people would want to watch the video over and over again. Moreover, they then would show their friends, and by the end of the day they would know the dance and the song by heart, or at least parts of it, the English parts.

Most K-pop songs will have a word or phrase in English that is repeated often. The reason for this is because English is the most spoken language in the world. By having a tiny bit of the song in a form that most people could sing to widens the audience immensely. One popular Korean song is titled "Twinkle." Everything in the song is in Korean, except the frequent use of the word "Twinkle." This may seem awkward at first, however with the blending of the music and the lyrics it seems quite natural when you are listening to it. Sometimes, when listening to k-pop you have to rewind the song because it seems as if something is in English, but you aren't really sure. Gangnam Style also used this wonderful tool of English. Throughout the song the phrase "Hey, sexy lady" is sung. Psy, also, used a different approach by blending the title with Korean and English. Gangnam is Korean (although simple enough for English speaking people to catch onto) and Style is English. This allows many people of various backgrounds to sing to two frequent phrases in the song.

One of the most important factors of k-pop being so wide spread is the music videos. They use extremely bazaar graphics. The colors are either extremely bright, or they just seem off, maybe dull with splashes of red, or everything so mute that the slightest color variation seems bright. Also, the uniqueness that makes up these videos is the strange objects and settings that appear. Even when one knows what the song means, the objects sometimes don't seem to fit. It's often like someone were to step into an abstract painting and get lost. While Psy did use some of these techniques, the bright colors and the strange settings it wasn't too over the top to disturb people. It was just enough for someone to yell to his friend "Hey, look at this crazy video!!" But, not enough for people to be ashamed they were watching something so extremely strange.

Psy's Gangnam Style is an amazing example of the use of the K-pop formula. However, the reason why Psy made k-pop so much more widely listened to, isn't because he followed all the rules exactly. He learned the rules and then bent them into his own style. Perhaps, this is the dawn of a new k-pop era: the development from musicians being creative, as long as they followed the rules. To musicians being creative in any way that they wish, while still remembering how to make their music have the most impact.