Girls’ Generation Featured in New Yorker Magazine

FACTORY GIRLS

Cultural technology and the making of K-pop.

BY JOHN SEABROOK

ABSTRACT: ANNALS OF MUSIC about K-pop, the musical phenomenon which is sweeping Asia and may yet come to the West. Over the last two decades, South Korea, a country of around fifty million, has somehow figured out how to make pop hits for more than a billion and a half other Asians in countries like Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, and Thailand, contributing two billion dollars a year to Korea’s economy. K-pop’s success is based on a template created in the nineties by Lee Soo-man; Lee devised a system in which musicians are recruited as young teenagers, rigorously trained as singers and dancers, sometimes taught acting and even foreign languages, and often put together in groups which are unusually large by Western standards. (Girls’ Generation, one of the most popular bands, has nine members.) Musically, the songs tend to sound like typical global pop hits, but K-pop is distinguished by its attitude; where Western pop stars sing about sex, drinking, and clubbing, K-pop stars steer away from those topics. At this point, the creation of K-pop bands is almost an assembly-line process: Lee talks about South Korea’s ability to use “cultural technology” to create hit music. For today’s K-pop producers, the goal is expansion abroad. One band, EXO, records songs in both Korean and Mandarin. Writer talks with an executive at the American record label Interscope about his efforts to popularize K-pop in the U.S., and joins him at a performance in Anaheim, California.