Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2018, Popular Culture
Since the end of the 1990s, Korean popular culture, known as Hallyu, has spread to the world. As the most significant part of Hallyu, Korean popular music, K-pop, captivates global audiences. From a typical K-pop artist, Psy, to a recent sensation of global popular music, BTS, K-pop enthusiasts all around the world prove that K-pop is an ongoing global cultural flow. Despite the fact that the term K-pop explicitly indicates a certain ethnicity and language, as Kpop expanded and became influential to the world, it developed distinct features that did not exist in it before. This thesis examines these distinct features of K-pop focusing on race, language, and musical genre: it reveals how K-pop groups today consist of non-Korean musicians, what makes K-pop groups consisting of all Korean musicians sing in non-Korean languages, what kind of diverse musical genres exists in the K-pop field with two case studies, and what these features mean in terms of the discourse of K-pop today. By looking at the diversity of K-pop, I emphasize that K-pop is not merely a dance-oriented musical genre sung by Koreans in the Korean language. I argue that K-pop is not confined to a certain region, ethnicity, or language. In the globalization era, it exists as a global cultural flow amalgamating diverse races, languages, and musical genres. My thesis thus demonstrates how diverse races, languages, and musical genres are interwoven in the K-pop field.
Committee: Jeremy Wallach (Advisor); Esther Clinton (Committee Member); Kristen Rudisill (Committee Member)
Subjects: Asian Studies; Cultural Anthropology; Music