K-pop’s Rise: Asia and the Globalised World
Adonis Li is a Lecturer in East Asian History at the School of Humanities and Heritage, University of Lincoln and a recent recipient of an RSAA Travel Award
Korean popular music, often referred to simply as K-pop, is truly a global phenomenon. Earlier this month (August 2025), the song ‘Golden’ from the soundtrack of Netflix series K-pop Demon Hunters (2025) sat at the summit of the Official Singles Chart in the UK, and in second place on the US’s Billboard Hot 100. Quartet Blackpink are due to play Wembley Stadium in London on their ‘Deadline World Tour’. The group sold out California’s SoFi Stadium for two nights in a row with over 100,000 attendees earlier on the tour. Blackpink member Rosé’s hit single with Bruno Mars, ‘Apt.’ (2024), smashed records on music charts worldwide as well as in South Korea. The BBC even provides a ‘What is K-pop music?’ primer for schoolchildren on its Bitesize website.
At face value, it should be fairly simple to define K-pop. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) traces the term’s etymology as an alteration of the adjacent term ‘J-pop’, the definition for which simply reads ‘Japanese pop music’. K-pop’s OED definition is slightly more verbose:
“A genre of popular music originating in Korea, combining elements of traditional Korean music with Western musical influences, characterised by the frequent use of English phrases in Korean song lyrics, and typically performed by young solo acts or groups whose complex dance routines and distinctive, colourful fashions are designed to appeal to an international audience. Also (esp. in early use): Korean pop music more generally.“
However, there is more to K-pop than its country of origin and its genre. Professor Suk-Young Kim of the University of California, Los Angeles provides a non-exhaustive list of the different meanings various groups ascribe to K-pop in her introduction to The Cambridge Companion to K-Pop (2023): a source of ‘ethnocentric pride’, an ‘ailment of the media-saturated youth of today’, a new kind of ‘Asian cool’, an exemplar of Asians being ‘mechanical, machinelike disciplinarians devoid of humanity’, a facilitator of ‘community building’, or a case study in marketing ‘in the age of the metaverse’.
Just how Korean is K-pop? The lyrics to the two songs mentioned in the introductory paragraph are almost completely in English, with a few Korean phrases sprinkled in. The aforementioned Blackpink comprise Korean Kim Ji-soo, Korean-born and New Zealand-raised Jennie Kim, New Zealand-born and Australia-raised Roseanne Park (better known as Rosé), and Thai Lalisa Manobal, who goes by the mononym Lisa. The ‘Western musical influences’ far outweigh the ‘elements of traditional Korean music’; Red Velvet’s ‘Feel My Rhythm’ (2022) samples Johann Sebastian Bach’s ‘Air on the G String’, whilst the first line of labelmates Girls’ Generation’s debut single, ‘Into the New World’ (2007), quotes from Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9, also known as the ‘New World Symphony’. Non-Korean songwriters throng the credits of K-pop chart toppers. Professor Jayson Makoto Chun of the University of Hawai‘i at West O‘ahu refers to a ‘Pop Pacific’, foregrounding K-pop’s transpacific foundations based on Korea’s colonial history under Japanese rule, Japanese pop culture making inroads earlier, and Korea’s sizeable diaspora on the West Coast of the US. Though Korea undoubtedly sits at the centre of K-pop, K-pop is a trend that stems from creative sources beyond Korea.
How was K-pop able to find global success, and why did it happen recently? This success was by no means inevitable. Two of the leading record labels behind K-pop, SM Entertainment (the company behind Girls’ Generation and Red Velvet) and JYP Entertainment (named after their founders Lee Soo-man and Jin-young Park respectively), harboured dreams of global success, with Lee eyeing the Chinese market and Park aiming for the American market respectively. K-pop’s market share in the People’s Republic of China was badly hit when in 2016, Beijing banned K-pop acts from performing in China as a response to South Korea deploying the US’s THAAD missile defence system. JYP’s Wonder Girls debuted in the US with their single ‘Like Money’ (2012) featuring rapper Akon; the music video’s use of ‘techno-orientalism’ did little to ingratiate the group to American audiences.
Rather, we can look at both the longer history of transnational popular culture in East Asia and the unique circumstances of certain actors in South Korea which came together to popularise K-pop beyond its East Asian origins. On the supply side, the Korean entertainment industry had long looked towards other countries for growth. In 1992, the Republic of Korea elected Kim Young-sam as its first civilian president. According to one anecdote, Kim increased state support for media and cultural outputs upon hearing that the film Jurassic Park (1993) earnt a profit equal to the export of 1.5 million Hyundai cars. Successive South Korean governments have kept up their subsidies for cultural exports. Professors Patrick Messerlin and Wonkyu Shin have found that by the 2010s, Korea had relative advantages compared to competitors: lively street dance, traditional dance, and classical dance scenes; a timely pivot towards boy bands and girl groups when these were declining elsewhere; and record labels’ effective choices in selecting the right products (idols, songs, videos, merchandise) for global export.
On the demand side, South Korean pop culture such as television dramas and pop music had made inroads across East Asia and the whole continent at large by the 2000s. Professor Youna Kim of the American University of Paris has found that fans across Asia are ‘yearning for something other than overly Western or Japanese’ pop culture. Long before films like Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite (2019) and streaming programmes like Squid Game (2021) gained prominence in the English-speaking world, Korean pop culture had already gripped Asia; Winter Sonata (2002) tugged on the heartstrings of Japanese middle-aged women, complicating the image of younger fans comprising the main demographic for foreign pop content. Beyond Asia, Korean pop culture, including K-pop, followed in the footsteps of its Japanese counterpart. Jungbong Choi refers to this as a sort of ‘cultural glide’:
“global Japanophiles [in the 2000s] began scrambling to Korean popular cultures, as they would align themselves with whatever Japanese media would turn to. […] This pattern of what I would like to call cultural glide (or cultural transfer) is commonly found in Europe, Latin America, the US, and Southeast Asia. Having started out from early childhood absorbed with Japanese popular cultures – including video games, trading card games, manga, and anime – the global youth’s cultural appetite for exotic yet high-quality culture beyond the shrub border of Japan has grown correspondingly. That is, as these youths mature into their twenties or thirties, their interests also segue into music, dance, fashion, drama, and beauty products suited to their rising consumption power as well as physical/psychological conditions.“
Indeed, for non-Asian fans, K-pop can be seen as part of a broader trend of East Asian pop culture taking hold amongst young people who are growing up in a globalised world.
The creativity and the idol-fan relations of certain acts also plays a large role. Rapper Psy’s ‘Gangnam Style’ (2012) was undoubtedly the first Korean ‘pop’ song to have broke through to English-speaking audiences and was even the most viewed video on YouTube at one stage, though the song’s satire of Korea’s neoliberal society was unfortunately missed by much of the global audience, who were more entertained by the spectacle of an Asian man dancing a silly dance.
By contrast, rap-focused septet BTS’s sincerity gradually earned the respect of foreign fans first, and domestic fans second. For Professor Michelle Cho of the University of Toronto, BTS’s ‘sonic, visual, and kinaesthetic vocabularies have always been hybrid and transnational in nature, and BTS’s oeuvre reflects the influence of American pop aesthetics and youth cultural ethos across the Asia Pacific’. ‘Of the multitude of elements that drive BTS’s phenomenal success’, according to Suk-Young Kim and Youngdae Kim, ‘authentic storytelling may be the most crucial’. Thus, in June 2020 when BTS’s record label Big Hit Entertainment donated US$1 million to the Black Lives Matter movement, international fans organised to match the company’s donation. Again, though K-pop is centred on Korea, its transnational nature cannot be ignored.
Though the music and the dance moves may not be to everyone’s tastes, K-pop is undoubtedly a key part of how many think of Korea, and East Asia in general. In the 2020s, popular culture products such as K-pop and adjacent phenomena like K-dramas (Korean television/streaming series) are how British youths learn about Asia. Whereas in the previous two decades, Japan-centred visual arts (anime and manga) garnered a small but vociferous fanbase, in the 2020s K-pop has helped propel East Asia’s popular cultures into the global limelight. This, coupled with the increased ubiquity of other East Asian content in European lives (most pertinently through the use of Chinese social media app TikTok and cross-cultural Internet memes), mean that children growing up in the UK now have much more varied access to this part of the world, compared to their parents and grandparents, who may only have had a Chinese takeaway menu to hand. K-pop constitutes new opportunities for young people to hear, and to see, Asia.
The opinions expressed are those of the contributor, not necessarily of the RSAA.
