K-pop Arrives in Korea Precursors t

K-pop Arrives in Korea Precursors to K-pop began surfacing in the mid-1990s, with the advent of a new breed of young singers. These singers succeeded in becoming pop music stars despite their deviation from kayo conventions—singing in a pentatonic scale without much dancing on stage, hailing from poor family backgrounds, and susceptibility to all forms of social, emotional, and economic exploitation. These included the 1980s celebrities Park Nam-Jung, Kim Wan-Sun, and the first Korean boy band, Sobangcha. However, it was not until the 1992 debut of legendary boy band Seo Taiji and Boys that people realized that the kayo world (or kayokei) was going to change permanently due to the hegemony of dance music. Seo Taiji and Boys boldly introduced various new genres, including hip hop, electronic music, and reggae, that had previously been unfamiliar to the Korean audience. What was more shocking to the Korean audience than the group’s radical experimentation with different music genres was their new style of dance and ruffian fashion, which contemporary kayo singers would have never dared to try. It is no coincidence that Korean people labeled Seo Taiji and Boys the “president of [popular] culture” (Lee and Sohn 2003).