Tuesday, July 19, 2016

Breaking: Professor Hodges to go K-Pop (trigger warning: cuddly American ex-pat culture and literature maven prepares to jump the shark)

Today I was going to write something profoundly insightful about fine contradistinctions among sundry American and European theories of nationalism, when I ran into Professor Hodges' recent Gypsy Scholar post describing his EWIS course, which he just finished teaching for the summer at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, South Korea.  Well, as you can tell from the pictures, the aesthetic whirlwind I found myself caught up in switched me over to a consideration of K-pop.  Allow me to explain...

The Wikipedia article describes K-pop as an exciting mix of popular musical genres:
K-pop (an abbreviation of Korean pop; Hangul: 케이팝) is a musical genre originating in South Korea that is characterized by a wide variety of audiovisual elements. Although it comprises all genres of "popular music" within South Korea, the term is more often used in a narrower sense to describe a modern form of South Korean pop music covering a range of styles including dance-pop, pop ballad, electropop, R&B, and hip-hop music.
The genre emerged with one of the earliest K-pop groups, Seo Taiji and Boys, forming in 1992. Their experimentation with different music styles "reshaped Korea's music scene". As a result, the integration of foreign musical elements has now become common practice in the K-pop industry.

K-pop entered the Japanese market at the turn of the 21st century and rapidly grew into a subculture among teenagers and young adults of East and Southeast Asia. Currently, the global spread of K-pop and Korean culture known as the Korean Wave is seen in Latin America, India, North Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere in the Western world.
K-pop represents a style of music that is not afraid of experimentation. As Highbrow readers especially know, years of developing new ideas can get a little tiresome. Moreover, there is ever the  problem of exhausting the possibilities, of "drying up" and discovering that the next "new" idea has already been done.  Bold new intellectual sensations don't grow on trees. Coming up with a "zilch" is always the specter lurking behind the next corner in the world of avant-garde "wow" engineering. One wonders, could even K-pop run out of steam?

Short answer: NO!

K-pop is getting smart again once more with a really new idea. How about a girl band featuring a forty-five (ahem) year-old American professor as the lead singer and dancer!?  Now, my Korean pop culture IQ prohibits me from venturing to guess what the new band might be called, but I have a feeling my suggestion is for sure going to match the trendy excitement of the concept itself!

 Dr. Daddy-O a-Go-Go!







4 comments:

Horace Jeffery Hodges said...

So . . . how high is your "Koran pop culture IQ"? Be careful how you answer - you don't want to lose your head over this!

Jeffery Hodges

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Carter Kaplan said...

Not very high at all, alas. Everything I know of K-culture is from the Wikipedia article on K-pop, your blog, and reading your fiction. If I sound like I know a lot about the subject, it is because you have given me the cultural data points I've used to fake it. As for actual knowledge of the subject, I respectfully submit myself to your instruction.

Horace Jeffery Hodges said...

Actually, I was referring to your typo "Koran" and reminding you to be careful when speaking of things Islamic.

Jeffery Hodges

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Carter Kaplan said...

Ah! I caught the typo same time you posted your comment, simultaneously. It was late, and I wasn't paying much attention. I imagine the post itself was written while I was in a state of Hypnagogia, a land to which, as you know, I harbor strong nationalistic feelings.