[Culture Op-Ed] BTS Has the World in a Frenzy—So Why Aren’t Their Songs National Favorites?

This is a question that pours forth endlessly, especially from middle-aged people and older. A boy group called BTS is now topping the U.S. Billboard Hot 100, and the whole world is supposedly going wild over them—so why is it that I have barely had the chance to properly listen to their songs? It seems I’m not alone; people my age around me are mostly in the same situation. And not just with BTS, but with K-pop as a whole—the very K-pop the world is said to be raving about these days—the same thought comes to mind.

And the answer to that question already seems predetermined. That kind of trendy culture is something only the young 10s and 20s enjoy, while people like us are simply too old to keep up with such trends, so it can’t be helped. But that is half right and half wrong. Let’s begin with the “right half.”

It is true that all forms of popular culture are originally led by younger generations. This is even more so in societies wealthy enough for what might be called a “pocket-money market” to function. Young people who have not yet fully entered the struggle of everyday life do in fact have more psychological room to immerse themselves in cultural leisure. And from the outset, the teens-and-20s generation is the most emotionally sensitive of all age groups, and the one with the strongest desire to have that sensibility rewarded on a cultural level.

And those newer generations always want to support and enjoy new cultural forms that distinguish them from the older generation. In some sense, there is even a tendency to pursue cultural styles that the older generation “deliberately” cannot adapt to. All younger generations share this tendency to prove themselves as a generation in that way.

In that sense, even the notion of so-called “mainstream culture” enjoyed by the older generation needs to be reconsidered. The point is that those too initially began as provocative anti-culture or counterculture led by young people in their teens and 20s. Only after that generation acquires social influence and itself becomes the established generation do those forms finally enter the mainstream.

Indeed, even Japanese enka, which runs parallel to Korean trot, followed that trajectory. Strictly speaking, in its early phase it was a new culture liked mainly by young people, while the older generation could hardly adapt to it and scarcely enjoyed it.

Even the scale that forms the basis of enka—the yonanuki minor scale—illustrates the point. It was a pentatonic structure characteristic of East Asia, but also a Western-style scale localized to some extent, an attempt to create a minor scale corresponding to Western minor-key music. That is why, at the time of its birth, the yonanuki minor scale was also called the miyakobushi scale, literally the “urban scale.” It meant a scale liked only by trendy urban youth. By contrast, the older yonanuki major scale was called the inakabushi scale, or the “rural scale.” And a similar pattern was repeated in Korea during the Japanese colonial period through the relationship between shinminyo and enka.

Even the genre of trot, now regarded as almost the exclusive preserve of the older or middle-aged generation, began as a cultural form that was in part rejected by the established generation, a form they turned away from and even attacked as vulgar. So there is really nothing surprising about today’s middle-aged establishment not knowing a single BTS song, or not especially wanting to. Cultural trends have always flowed in roughly that way.

“National singers” and “national hit songs” were only possible when the three terrestrial broadcasters could “create” popular taste

Yet this view, in fact, cannot fully answer the question posed in the title. Strictly speaking, a “national hit song” does not mean a song literally enjoyed by everyone. Unless we have all been subjected to some kind of totalitarian brainwashing, there is no reason everyone would have exactly the same taste in music.

A “national hit song,” in practical terms, refers to a song that everyone in the same country at least knows. Songs like Cho Yong-pil’s “Come Back to Busan Port,” for example. Whether people liked them or not, they were songs everyone at least knew. There are countless similar examples. Na Hoon-a, Nam Jin, Deulgukhwa, Sanulrim—even Seo Taiji and Boys, who are often said to have created the widest-ever gap in musical taste between the older and younger generations. Whether one liked them or not, people of almost any generation would at least know one or two of their representative songs.

Then why is it that BTS, BLACKPINK, Seventeen, or IZ*ONE—acts that are far more globally prominent and presumably have been mentioned in the media on a vastly greater scale—have failed to become even “national hit songs”? Why is it that some people have never even heard their songs, and may even find the group names unfamiliar?

There is a cause on a different level here. It is not simply a matter of “generation gap” and the like. More precisely, it is rooted in something that had never occurred before the arrival of the 2000s. And for that very reason, it may be a much more important point for understanding changes in cultural currents “today” than the formulaic explanation of a generation gap. Let us look at it one by one.

First of all, media “exploded.” Up until roughly the 1990s, creating a “national singer” or a “national hit song” was not especially difficult. That was because the entire nation watched only three terrestrial broadcasters: KBS, MBC, and SBS. The power of mainstream media platforms was enormous. There were dramas with 60 percent ratings and variety shows with 40 percent ratings, and even entertainment news programs exceeded 30 percent ratings. In that era, if someone appeared continuously on those three terrestrial broadcasters, he immediately became a star “everyone knew.” If he was a singer, the same was true of the songs he sang.

But the situation changed dramatically with the advent of cable TV in the mid-1990s and the rise of the internet as a new medium in the 2000s. The era in which just three terrestrial broadcasters dominated all cultural trends passed, and eventually internet broadcasting emerged, multiplying media outlets to an almost uncountable degree. Cable TV, the intermediate stage in that process, also kept growing day by day.

The public now began moving toward channels that specialized in broadcasting only what they themselves were interested in. In the case of music, which had a particularly large enthusiast base, the center of gravity shifted rapidly to the music-specialty channel M.net. And then the content became more sophisticated. Not just songs by singers, but countless derivative programs—including reality variety shows portraying aspects of those singers’ daily lives—also flowed into M.net.

Naturally, “people who liked music” moved away from terrestrial broadcasting. The conditions there simply did not allow related programs themselves to become diverse or sophisticated. In response, the terrestrial broadcasters reduced their own music programming and increasingly ghettoized it into time slots sought out only by enthusiasts. In this way, it became virtually impossible for ordinary people—those casual members of the general public who might listen to music if they happened to hear it, but otherwise not care—to keep up with current music trends through the “easy old media.”

So how did things change after that? Naturally, “national singers” and “national hit songs” could no longer emerge. Trends in music became something only those with an unusual degree of interest in music could really know, while the rest of the general public could only grasp the situation once Korean Wave success stories and the like were covered by the news media. More importantly, even if they did hear such information, it became difficult to listen to the music itself unless they deliberately went looking for related content on YouTube and elsewhere. Music trends became, in precise terms, a matter for “active consumers.” Much like the Nobel Prize winners announced each year in various fields: unless one has studied the field or is deeply interested in it, one cannot properly understand their achievements.

Even the music industry now wants “singers with passionate fandoms” rather than “national singers”

Let us think a bit further. The media explosion described above was certainly aided by technological development, but fundamentally it is more accurate to say it occurred in response to changing public demand.

That is because the public—especially in advanced countries, where people have the means to consume culture—was becoming increasingly individualistic. People grew dissatisfied with content pushed at them one-way by a handful of monopolistic media outlets, and instead wanted from the outset to seek out and consume content that suited them. Thus, society moved from an age “when everyone enjoyed the same things” to an age “when each group enjoys what suits it in a finely segmented market.”

Accordingly, the music industry too began devising new sales strategies—not simply to adapt to a changed media environment, but to adapt to a changed era. This shift began with the K-pop idol industry, where the greatest amount of capital had long been invested through the distinctive trainee system and the like.

The opening move was made by YG Entertainment, one of the three major K-pop agencies. Once it concluded that its artists were not achieving a genuine win-win relationship with the existing terrestrial broadcasters but were merely being “used” by them, it began refusing appearances on all terrestrial broadcasters except SBS, with which it had been creating content “together.” That was because what mattered in the present era was no longer the recognition or popularity one could gain from appearing on terrestrial TV, but rather how to expose artists exactly in the manner the company wanted and thereby target the intended audience precisely.

After that, the situation intensified further. This came with the rise of the internet, especially YouTube and various social media platforms. Now there was no longer any real need to “bother” negotiating with the giant terrestrial broadcasters. And within just a few years, the center of marketing shifted toward YouTube and social media, platforms familiar to people in their teens, 20s, and 30s—the main consumers of popular music.

This is precisely why, despite BTS becoming such an enormous global sensation, a gap emerged between them and ordinary members of the public who are not especially interested in music trends. From the beginning, there was no intention to become a “national singer” producing “national hit songs.” Above all, a “fan-base strategy” aimed narrowly at the target audience was in fact far more profitable.

The era in which one had to create a name everyone knew and songs everyone knew through the power of a few monopolistic media outlets in order to maximize profits belonged to the final period when music itself could still be sold as something highly valuable. In other words, it was the age when, if you wanted to listen to music whenever you pleased, you had to pay money to buy a physical album. But beginning in the 2000s, that era gradually faded.

That was because the internet opened up. At first, the music industry tried to do business in this new media environment in the same way it had in the era of physical albums. It tried to put a high price on digital music files and earn profits comparable to album sales. But the internet was an extraordinarily difficult space in which to control the distribution of illegal files. After trying every possible measure over four or five years and failing, the music industry ultimately changed direction.

The recordings themselves were then released either “for free” or “so close to free as to make little difference.” Music videos were uploaded directly to YouTube and similar platforms so that anyone who wanted to hear them could find them and listen whenever they wished, at no cost. Through contractual arrangements with mobile carriers and others, music streaming became astonishingly cheap via monthly flat-rate subscriptions—cheap and convenient enough that there was little reason to seek out illegal files.

Thus, while effectively giving up profits from the recordings themselves, the music industry focused on building strong “fandoms” around artists and concentrating on revenue from so-called related merchandise. “Free music” became the bait for establishing fandoms, which then bought CDs, photo books, and various fan goods. Efforts also continued to develop the concert market, which had previously not been all that important. And when the numbers were added up, the conclusion was that profits were “far” higher under this fandom-based model built on a tightly knit elite consumer base than under the old model built around “mass popularity” achieved through the power of a few monopolistic media outlets.

In that way, the music industry’s choice was overturned from top to bottom: it abandoned the pursuit of “national singers” and “national hit songs” and switched to a strategy aimed at elite fandoms.

We need to understand that this is now an era in which global stars like Michael Jackson can no longer emerge

Given this situation, no matter how much BTS may be “BTS of the world,” their music was never likely to become familiar to the general public. On the contrary, all strategies are moving in exactly the opposite direction.

Of course, there are also people who have not adapted to this dramatic shift and instead feel weary of it. This is especially true among those in their 30s and older. A representative example is the craze over the event-based coed group SSAK3, which swept through the Korean popular music market this summer. They truly “swept” the music charts and generated numerous other cultural phenomena as well—the central story of Korean popular music in the summer of 2020.

But when one looks back at the secret of their popularity, the interpretation is that the reaction was so strong because SSAK3’s members—MC Yoo Jae-suk, singer Lee Hyori, and Rain—were all “names everyone knew.” All of them were stars who had become “national singers” and spread “national hit songs” widely through the power of terrestrial broadcasting alone, in a time when the structure of the music market was not what it is now and when even internet media like YouTube had not yet been fully activated. It was a cultural phenomenon made possible precisely because of that earlier era.

In the end, this was a reaction generated by the older generation, weary of a time in which the music market has been broken down into tiny segments according to individual taste, where one can stare at today’s music charts and still have no idea who is who, and—more bewildering still—even a singer who ranks No. 1 on the charts can no longer easily be regarded as “a singer everyone knows” or “the most popular singer.” In a collectivist cultural environment like Korea’s, which long enjoyed a mood in which “everyone” rode “the same trend” together, nostalgia and attachment to “those old days” were bound to be all the stronger.

Even so, however, major trends cannot be reversed. SSAK3, and similar surprise success stories, will likely remain only exceptional successes. The world is becoming increasingly individualistic, and it no longer seems possible for a powerful platform to indiscriminately pour the same information onto the entire nation and thereby produce “national singers” and “national hit songs.”

Finally, it is also necessary to understand that even the idea of “BTS, adored by the world” is, in the end, not all that different from the situation within Korea today. Strictly speaking, the phrase “the world is going wild” does not mean that BTS has become a “name everyone knows” in the way Michael Jackson or Madonna was in the 1980s. It means that the “fandom” that buys their products has swelled on a global scale to that extent. Even by global standards, we are now in an era in which stars like Michael Jackson and Madonna from that period can no longer emerge. The mainstream popular music world has moved fully into the next stage.

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Original title: [문화칼럼] BTS에 세계가 난리인데 왜 그들 노래는 국민가요가 아닐까?

Author: Moon-won Lee

Date: 2020-09-03

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=column&pn=7&idx=23047