The Rise and Rise of K-Pop

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Howard
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Cultural Development ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Cultural Economy ◽  
Central Component ◽  
History Of ◽  
International Success

K-pop, Korean popular music, is a central component in Korea’s cultural exports. It helps brand Korea, and through sponsorships and tie-ups, generates attention for Korea that goes well beyond the music and media industries. This essay traces the history of Korean popular music, from its emergence in the early decades of the twentieth century, through the influence of America on South Korea’s cultural development and the assimilation of genres such as rap, reggae, punk, and hip hop, to the international success of Psy’s ‘Gangnam Style’ and the idol group BTS. It explores the rise of entertainment companies, how they overcame the digital challenge, and how their use of restrictive contracts created today’s cultural economy. It introduces issues of gender and sexuality, and outlines how music videos and social media have been used to leverage fandom.

scholarly journals Alternative Conceptions of Modernity in the History of Iban Popular Music

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 55
Author(s):  
Connie Lim Keh Nie
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Music Industry ◽  
Cultural Development ◽  
Alternative Conceptions ◽  
Physical Environments ◽  
Indigenous Ethnic Group ◽  
Historical Processes ◽  
The Social ◽  
Agents Of Change ◽  
History Of

This paper examines how modernity has historically shaped developments in the industry of Iban popular music. The Iban make up one third of the Sarawakian population and are the largest indigenous ethnic group in Sarawak, Malaysia. As with other ethnicities in the nationstate, modernity has presented challenges for socio-cultural development and lifestyle of Iban people. Historically, the Iban are a cultural group located geographically and politically on the periphery of the multi-cultural nation of Malaysia. Throughout much of the 20th century, the music industry has experienced a rapid embrace of modernity through the nation to the detriment of traditional practices in culture in order to adapt themselves in the era of modernization. Iban society had gone through a state of flux where people have gone through the process of readapting themselves in meeting the demanding challenges of Malaysian nationalism. Drawing upon Barendregt’s (2014) ‘alternative conceptions of modernity’ this paper examines how the Iban reference both a national as well as a local music industry particularly through their use of language as an expression of Iban. First the paper will examine changes in Iban society through political and economic modernization. Then I look at differential transformation within Iban music industry because of relative exposure to agents of change such as the influence through Christian missionary and education. This reflects how the Iban react and reflect in adaptation of modern demands of change as a result of the effects of historical processes on the social, cultural and physical environments.

Turkish popular music videos as a multimodal site of resistance

2012 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lyndon C.S. Way
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Music Industry ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Religious Values ◽  
Multimodal Analysis ◽  
Indigenous Music ◽  
History Of ◽  
Dominant Discourses ◽  
Western Democracies

AbstractCountercultural, alternative and subversive values share a history with some popular music, it being subjected to political scrutiny in both western democracies and less tolerant states. In Turkey, despite a thriving indigenous music industry, there has been a long history of censorship, arrests and even exiles due to popular music and its politics. Since 2002, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) has governed Turkey, embracing free market policies, privatisation of state services and monopolies alongside conservative Islamic social and religious values. Many of AKP’s dominant discourses are articulated in Turkey’s media, due to intertwined relations. This paper asks how popular music videos can express subversion to AKP’s dominant discourses. A sample of Turkish videos is examined using a multimodal analysis of images, lyrics and music to reveal how these three modes and relations between them shape discourses of subversion. This is contextualised by examining AKP policies and a history of Turkish popular music. This study demonstrates how popular music videos can articulate discourses of subversion to dominant conservative ideologies that benefit those with power to the detriment of those without.

Remembering the Griot

2018 ◽  
pp. 61-88
Author(s):  
Catherine M. Appert
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Religious Conversion ◽  
Local History ◽  
Vocal Performance ◽  
Performance Practices ◽  
Pan African ◽  
Musical History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Strategic Project

This chapter locates Senegalese hip hop at the intersection of local musical history, transatlantic Afrocentric dialogue, and the accelerated globalization of the 1980s. It traces the historical invention of the griot through colonialism, religious conversion, and postcolonial nationalist projects, while showing how griot instrumental and vocal performance practices provided a foundation for Senegal’s preeminent popular music, mbalax. It details how early international rappers, including Positive Black Soul (PBS) and Daara J, in line with a history of Afrocentric and pan-African projects in which they were well versed, traced an alternative history that routed the griot through diaspora and “back” to Africa, bypassing contemporary griot performance and mbalax in the process. It argues that this was not a literal claim to hip hop origins, but a strategic project of remembering that claimed diaspora as an alternative local history.

Avant-Gardists and the Lure of Pop Music

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol Vernallis
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Sound Image ◽  
Derek Jarman ◽  
History Of ◽  
Joseph Cornell ◽  
Cultural Constraints ◽  
Experimental Films

This chapter provides methods and models for thinking about avant-garde and experimental films and videos that incorporate popular music. It sketches the history of intersections between avant-gardists and popular music. It also provides close readings of works by Kenneth Anger, Bruce Connor, Joseph Cornell, Derek Jarman, Tony Oursler, Pipilotti Rist, Andy Warhol and others. It claims that institutional, formal and cultural constraints not only limit the frequency with which avant-gardists participate with pop musicians and pop music, they also colour the audiovisual relations within the works themselves. Avant-garde films and videos with pop soundtracks emphasise particular kinds of audiovisual relation—relations that differ from sound-image connections in narrative films, YouTube clips, commercials and music videos. It is demonstrated that this experimental subgenre embodies a unique sort of sound-image relation and suggests, finally, that these videos can expand our knowledge of audiovisual relations more broadly.

scholarly journals "Rapper on a Rampage": Theorising the Political Significance of Aboriginal Australian Hip Hop and Reggae

2009 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Cameron White
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Hegemony ◽  
Aboriginal Australians ◽  
Political Expression ◽  
History Of

Hip hop is a powerful vehicle for the expression of identity and resistance in contemporary Aboriginal popular music. This paper examines the origins of Aboriginal hip hop and explains the reasons for its cultural and political significance. By looking at the influence of reggae in Aboriginal hip hop, especially in the work of CuzCo (Wire MC and Choo Choo), it locates hip hop’s history in terms of the reggae tradition in Aboriginal popular music, represented here by the work of No Fixed Address in the early 1980s. In this way hip hop is understood as part of a longer history of Aboriginal transnationalism. The paper seeks to understand how and why transnationalism is such an important element of Aboriginal political expression. It concludes by arguing that transnationalism represents a speaking position from which Aboriginal Australians can negotiate the cultural hegemony of the state.

scholarly journals Metanarratives and Storytelling in Contemporary Mainstream Popular Music: Romeo and Juliet in the Making of the Star Persona

Text Matters ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 209-222
Author(s):  
Eduardo Viñuela
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Significant Source ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Romeo And Juliet ◽  
Media Audiences ◽  
Transmedia Storytelling ◽  
Fan Communities ◽  
Concept Album

This article analyzes how mainstream artists respond to the dynamics of online fan communities, developing complex metanarratives that interrelate their songs and music videos with their “personal” activity on social media. Audiences analyze in depth and discuss each release, contributing to its viralization on the internet. However, these strategies need strong narratives that allow convincing developments and transmedia storytelling, and this is where literature becomes a significant source of inspiration. I argue that the assumption (or subversion) of popular literary characters and narratives contributes to a positioning of artists in the music scene and facilitates their “reading” by the audience. To illustrate this process, I analyze the references to Romeo and Juliet by mainstream pop artists in the last decade, paying special attention to Troye Sivan’s debut album Blue Neighborhood (2015), considered a homosexual version of Shakespeare’s drama, and to Halsey’s concept album Hopeless Fountain Kingdom (2017), understood as a queer version of the play. Both artists explained their personal reading of Shakespeare’s drama as a way of expressing their own feelings and experiences. These examples of metanarrative storytelling achieved their aim, and millions of fans engaged with both artists, discussing lyrics, photos and music videos related to Romeo and Juliet on social media.

scholarly journals ‘Dear Future Husband’: young people’s critical exploration of gender and sexuality in pop music videos

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 6-26
Author(s):  
Elly Scrine
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Qualitative Data ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Critical Exploration ◽  
Primary Consumers ◽  
Insightful Analysis

This study aimed to explore how young people can critically engage with music videos to explore dominant constructions of gender and sexuality. As the primary consumers of popular music and music videos, adolescents are also a group who exist in a unique sociocultural space, where both misogyny and feminism are present in their highly media-driven lives. This study used focus group workshops with young people in high school to generate qualitative data based on the participants’ discussion and interpretations of gender and sexuality in two music videos. Seven groups of young people aged 14 – 16 analysed two popular music videos and reflected particularly upon discourses of expected femininity and female sexuality. Discussion elucidated insightful analysis around gendered subjectivity, and presented three complex and opposing themes, which are explored in detail. A cohesive thread emerged in the data in which young people demonstrated their capacity to identify hegemonic gender constructs, while also relying on these constructs to read and police the women shown in the music videos.

scholarly journals Translating Chicana Rap: Snow Tha Product

2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 132
Author(s):  
Adriana Onita
Keyword(s):  
Hip Hop ◽  
Rap Music ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Cultural Translation ◽  
Cultural Issues ◽  
Academic Fields ◽  
Performative Language ◽  
Definition Of

This project examines rap lyrics, interviews, and music videos by Chicana artist Snow Tha Product to show how rap has been culturally translated, performed, and appropriated by females in order to “flip the script,” or subvert the dichotomous model of female sexuality that has been imposed upon them. Weaving insights from three academic fields (cultural translation, Chican@ studies, and hip-hop feminism), this paper also aims to creatively expand the definition of translation by positioning rap music as a performative language in its own right, capable of encoding and translating complex cultural issues related to race, gender, and sexuality.

(Re)Reading Pop Personae: A Transmedial Approach to Studying the Multiple Construction of Artist Identities

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 501-529 ◽  
Author(s):  
KAI ARNE HANSEN
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Media Studies ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Sound Recordings ◽  
Initial Effort ◽  
Wide Range

AbstractThis article engages with a wide range of existing literature relevant to understanding the artist persona in popular music, and advocates a view of personae as multiply constructed through sound recordings, music videos, live performances, interviews, social media posts, and a variety of other means. In an initial effort to theorize pop personae as transmedial phenomena, I merge a critical musicological understanding of the performative potential of aesthetics with perspectives from celebrity studies and media studies to produce new insights into how personae are articulated across a variety of disparate but intersecting spaces. Through a case study of Sam Smith, I demonstrate how the signs and symbols scattered across numerous platforms are aggregated in the pop persona, and elucidate the interpretive possibilities afforded by different points of contact between artist and audience. I conclude that the task of reading pop personae amounts to an assessment of the conglomerate of texts and contexts that shape both the production and the reception of pop expressions.

scholarly journals Trends in Themes of Popular Music from 1998-2018: A Media Content Analysis (Preprint)

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lois Kwon ◽  
Daniela Medina ◽  
Fady Ghattas ◽  
Lilia Reyes
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Pop Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Media Content Analysis ◽  
Popular Songs ◽  
Potential Impact ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Individual

BACKGROUND The United States have seen an increase in depressive-anxious symptoms and suicidality in the past couple years within the adolescent population. The effects of pop culture, including music, is a factor that is worth exploring to better understand the context in which adolescents view themselves and society. OBJECTIVE This study analyzes the lyrics and music videos of the most popular music of multiple genres to better understand music theme trends. METHODS The frequencies of themes of 1052 total American and Latin songs were collected from the Nielsen Music and Billboard’s top 100 chart performance from 1998-2018 for Hip-Hop/R&B, Pop, Latin, Country, and Rock/Metal genres. Themes from songs were identified, quantified, and categorized using a rubric into negative, neutral, and positive by three different reviewers. Analysis was performed using two-tailed t-tests and a generalized linear model. RESULTS Popular songs were reviewed for positive, negative and neutral themes in three-year intervals for ease of analysis purposes: 1998-2000 (n=148), 2001-2003 (n=150), 2004-2006 (n=148), 2007-2009 (n=156), 2010-2012 (n= 150), 2013-2015 (n=150), and 2016-2018 (n=150). There was a significant increase between all the interval years in the percent of songs with negative themes by 180% across all genres (P=0.01), while there was no significance in the difference of frequency of songs with positive or neutral themes by year respectively (P=0.01). There were significant differences in the number of negative themes found across genres (P=0.01), with Hip-Hop/R&B having the highest frequency (62.5%) of negative themes when compared to each of the individual genres (P=0.01). CONCLUSIONS This study shows there is an increase in the frequency of negative themes over the span of 20 years across all genres, with Hip-Hop/R&B having the highest frequency compared to other genres. These findings point to the potential impact of music in popular culture on society and can help shape discussions between caregivers and their adolescents as well as the primary care provider and the adolescent patient.

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