Introduction: K-pop and the asian abbreviation
Has Korean pop, a.k.a. K-pop, established itself as one of the popular genres in the global music
industry? For those who say yes, there exists a clear piece of evidence: “The Korea K-Pop Hot
100,” launched in August 2011, is second in Asia only after “Japan Hot 100,” which was started
in February 2008. Popular hits in Korea are displayed with romanized titles and artists’ names,
but that is not the whole story. Around the same time as the K-pop chart started its business, two
important events heralded K-pop’s “triumph” in the global market. One was the SM Town Live
2010 World Tour held in Le Zenith de Paris on June 10 and 11 that drew big crowds from all
over Europe, followed by another live show in Madison Square Garden, New York on October
- The other was the global craze of “Gangnam Style” that began in July 2012—it topped the
music charts of more than thirty countries by the end of the year, reaching number 2 in the U.S.
Hot 100 Billboard chart and left a record of more than 2 billion hits on YouTube.
It would be safe to say that K-pop has become a “dominant particular” (Negus 1996, 180,
185–186) at least in East and Southeast Asia, if not around the globe. It could even be said
that K-pop has become a template for Asian pop in the twenty-first century, as seen in many
national variants such as V-pop (Vietnamese pop), T-pop (Thai pop), I-pop (Indo pop), and
L-pop (Lao pop). Thus, the inquiry on K-pop includes questioning the abbreviation of Asian
pop music in the twenty-first century.
The etymology of K-pop traces back to Japanese media and industry, with the international
media adopting the term uncritically. It is easy to imagine that the terminology comes from
J-pop, which K-pop has emulated for a long time, but there is a significant difference between
the two. Whereas J-pop denotes all the genres and styles of contemporary Japanese popular
music, K-pop is exclusively reserved for Korean popular music worthy of international export.
Thus, the latter abbreviation is closely tied to exportability, or in other words, the border-
crossing quality of certain types of music. Who or what can cross the border? Idols can.
Making idols: K-pop as more than (or less than) music
The face of K-pop is undoubtedly that of an idol. An idol does not refer to an individual per-
son or group, but an institution, as in (idol) “system,” “factory” (Bevan 2012), or “machine”