For all the talk of Taiwan as the great factory of Chinese pop, Taiwan’s music industry looks like a bunch of clowns banging each other on the head with rubber hammers compared to what’s happening in South Korea. The thing that’s gobsmacking about K-Pop is not the 2 billion YouTube views for Gangnam Style, nor that its artists are trained from birth in corporate breakdancing camps like Russian weightlifters were once bred in athletic gulags, it is that K-pop is a product propelled forth not by genius producers and hardworking musicians, but by the entire weight of the Korean nation. Imagine a world in which Apple does not only sell you music and movies from the iTunes store through your iPhone and iMac, but it also owns Lady Gaga, Brad Pitt and Maroon 5. Total vertical integration. That is basically Korea today.
Tomorrow night, Taiwan will be humbled first-hand by Korea’s national-entertainment complex with the the YG Family 2014 Galaxy Tour: Taiwan Power at Taoyuan County Stadium. The concert will feature Mr. Gangnam Style himself, Psy, as well as boy bands Big Bang, Winner and Epik High and the girl group 2NE1.
If you have not been following K-Pop and need some decoding of all this, the YG Family refers to YG Entertainment, a Seoul-based record label and actor agency worth US$675 million and listed on the Korean stock exchange. It is headed by entertainment kingpin Yang Hyun-suk, aka Yang Goon, or YG. When YG Entertainment calls itself “YG Family,” it just means that all the performers are under contract with YG Entertainment. “Galaxy” refers to none other than the Korean-made Samsung Galaxy smart phone. Samsung is in fact underwriting this entire K-Pop tour, which has already hit Shanghai, Singapore and just last weekend Beijing, where it drew 35,000 to the Workers Stadium. As I said, this is not just a tour, it’s a national effort.
Photo: Reuters/Kim Hong-ji
Could Taiwan ever imagine a HTC-sponsored mega-tour of Taiwanese stars through Korea and Japan? I’m not holding my breath.
So what is Korea doing right, that they have generated so much international fascination? Psy is basically just a comic musician who did Gangnam Style as a spoof, and he’s more or less admitted the whole fame thing was a huge surprise, if not an accident. Most K-Pop tunes are just crappy knock-offs of mainstream R&B or EDM performed by carefully groomed singer-actors. There is even Korean twerking, and not that I’m really against it or anything, but conceptually speaking, Korean twerking just kind of weirds me out.
Maybe the answer to this question of success is that K-Pop is just a better product. At a time when the world’s music industry is falling apart, Korea, through the strength of its ironclad national will, is able to deliver some of the world’s slickest, most pre-packaged pop music that doesn’t sound like it’s intended for a Japanese-only audience. Maybe that’s the secret.
Photo: Reuters/Kim Hong-ji
A couple other items of note here. In August, the high-end fashion brand Louis Vuitton bought about nine percent of YG Entertainment, and was negotiating to buy another three percent. So fashion is not just an intense K-Pop fetish, it is also now officially part of the business model.
The newest group performing at this weekend’s concert is called Winner. The R&B quintet got its name just last year after winning a South Korean reality TV show featuring two boy bands — both signed to YG Entertainment — in direct competition. The band that received the most fan votes got to be called “Winner,” along with a ticket down YG’s formulaic path to fame and fortune. The band that lost now goes by the name Team B, which admittedly sounds better than “Loser”.
The other groups performing tomorrow night are quite famous, at least in K-Pop terms. Big Bang is one of Korea’s top boy bands, and 2NE1 (pronounced “twenty-one”) is a top girl group that rides the fine line between angelic and slutty. Epik High is a new-ish hip hop group. If the stage performances of the “YG Family” even compares to their music videos, this concert should be a high-flash spectacle.
■ YG Family 2014 Galaxy Tour: Taiwan Power, tomorrow at 6pm at Taoyuan County Stadium (桃園縣立體育場), 1, Sanming Rd Sec 1, Taoyuan City (桃園市三民路一段1號). Performers include: Big Bang, Psy, 2NE1, Winner and Epik High. Tickets are NT$1,200 to NT$8,800 through tixcraft.com.
AMIS MUSIC FESTIVAL
Taiwan’s Aboriginal folk tends to lose a lot of its energy when it’s performed in Taipei live houses or stages of government-sponsored fairs. But this weekend there is a rare chance to see this marvelous music performed on its home turf and in a tribal setting.
The Amis Music Festival in Dulan, the small arty hamlet on the coast in Taidong County, is organized by the well known aboriginal pop singer Suming (舒米恩). It will feature local Amis singing groups of children, men, women and tribal elders, as well as a few surprise guests. I have no inside info on this, but given the musicians that call that area home — including stars like pop diva Chang Hui-mei (張惠妹), also known as A-mei (阿妹), and Matzka (瑪斯卡), as well as incredibly talented folk singers like Panai, Takanow, Long-ge (龍哥) and many others — one can expect something special.
■ The Amis Music Festival (阿米斯音樂節), tomorrow from 2pm to 10pm at the Dulan Middle School Gymnasium (都蘭國中體育館), 398 Dulan Township, Taidong County (台東縣東河鄉都蘭村398號). Tickets are NT$800 through www.indievox.com or 7-11ibon.
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