Opulence and excess

Though K-pop draws heavily on the American traditions of hip-hop and R&B for its sound, the flashiness of its visuals is distinctly Korean. The groups have names like a plate of mid-2000’s leftovers—Girls’ Generation, the Wonder Girls, Big Bang, Super Junior—and their members perform elaborately synchronized dance routines onstage and in videos. These are exercises in opulence and excess, full of fancy cars and swagged-out costumes, dizzying jump cuts and gaudy props. In the clip for “Turn it Up,” T.O.P, a member of the iconic boy band Big Bang, drinks coffee out of a tiny coffee mug while lounging in a giant coffee mug, dances with a set of dentures, and poses with a woman wearing a spiked leather gag. In the video for “Crayon,” the solo effort of another Big Bang member, rapper G-Dragon alternately shaves his face in a bathroom decorated with paintings of giant grimacing mouths, dances in a brightly colored athletic getup in front of a pixelated vortex, and drives a toy car in the miniaturized, pastel world of a child’s cartoon, where he is later shown donning lederhosen.

These assemblages of imagery are ridiculous and enthralling, recalling the disorienting alogic of dreams. They speak to a taste for sensory overload, a luxury unfamiliar to a newly-rich nation trying to prove itself as often and ostentatiously as possible. K-pop isn’t subtle, but it’s easy to understand the genre’s widespread appeal: it’s pop in its purest form. Larger-than-life, indulgent as a bowl of buttered popcorn, it’s satisfying in a way that so much Western music, with its pretensions to refined edginess, is not. Unlike the sulky Lana del Rey, who moves in a gauzy miasma of hip mystique, K-pop is highly legible. Idols are beautiful, poised, and successful, it loudly proclaims. By admiring them—and purchasing the associated merchandise—we can share in their aura.

Appropriation nation

Though K-pop encompasses a wide range of sensibilities, its many iterations are uniformly reliant on tropes that convey this common, uncomplicated message. Some artists are clearly trying to parrot American hip-hop artists: CL, of the popular band 2NE1, emulates Nicki Minaj in the video for her single “The Baddest Female,” where she sports grills and a chain—and, later, a flannel buttoned at the collar, a riff on the heyday of West Coast gangsta rap. Other artists, Super Junior, EXO and Beast among them, cultivate a Bieberesque look designed to appeal to teenyboppers who scrawl hearts in their math notebooks. Their videos abound with frosted tips, heartfelt gazes and sentimental gestures. (The music video for Beast’s “No More” explores a quintessentially angsty teen breakup through the filtered lens of Instagram, showcasing the agony each newly-single party experiences upon witnessing the other’s battery of selfies.)

Other artists are up to something different—something with no Western analog. Prime among them is the wildly popular group Girls’ Generation, which was created in the image of the “kawaii” aesthetic originating in Japan. (Interestingly, one former and two current members were actually born in California.) The girls in question are cute, cuddly, and ultra-feminine. In the video for their hit “I Got a Boy,” they cohabitate in a giant pink house where they host a perpetual slumber party, wearing their hair in pigtails and drinking out of dainty teacups. Clad in a baby-doll dress, one of the girls timidly ventures out to meet a male love interest. She is scandalized when her date reaches for her hand, and delighted when he crouches to tie the laces of her gem-encrusted sneakers.