Our final Saturday night Creator First Pilot (or Sunday night in Seoul) takes us from Japan to Korea.
South Korea’s music industry is a massive force around the world, especially K-Pop. Around 37.5 percent of global respondents to a Statista survey said K-Pop was “very popular” in their country.
Creator First pilot season finalist Danny Chung is exploring the genre through his show “Inside K-Pop.” Chung is a Korean American songwriter and A&R who’s worked with artists like BLACKPINK and Zion.T.
In his pilot show, he brings Art of Movement (AOM) member and AOMG/H1ghr Music CEO Jay Park, along with multi-platinum producer Cha Cha Malone. They’ll be breaking down the journey of writing, recording, releasing, and performing their 2016 hit “All I Wanna Do,” which has over 30 million views on YouTube alone.
Park gained mainstream success as the front man for K-Pop boy band 2PM. At the age of 34, he’s an experienced music mogul and the pioneer of Korean R&B as a subset of its hip-hop scene.
He also recruited co-mod help from Davonna Gilpin (who acted as co-host), Isabel Chi (who provided a Korean translation) and multimedia journalist Azadeh Valanejad.
Diving into the intricacies of this piece of musical art and history is sure to be an Almost Famous moment. Let’s dive into how the conversation was orchestrated to see if it hit all the right notes. https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/kqckfuUnC1U?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0
K-Popping the Glass Ceiling
It’s always interesting hearing music industry veterans on Clubhouse. American rappers like Lupe Fiasco, Royce Da 5’9, The Game, Snoop, and 21 Savage play a big part in the platform’s early growth. These inside-baseball conversations can go any number of directions based on the crowd, goals of the artist, and their individual personality.
This weekend alone, both Nicki Minaj and Outkast’s Big Boi created waves across social media for showing up on the platform. They continue a month that also included the debuts of Justin Bieber and Eminem. What they all have in common is their savvy in digital marketing and willingness to take risks to be on the cutting edge of technology.
American rapper Wiz Khalifa is reportedly collaborating with Park on an upcoming song, although that’s not the focus of this discussion.
K-Pop stars have just as much star power as their American counterparts though. Everywhere these superstars go online or in-person, they’re flocked by fans and paparazzi like modern-day Beatles.
Recruiting these musical heavy hitters is Chung’s way of reminding the world that Korean music dominates charts around the world. That’s because K-Pop artists are insanely talented, relatable to wide audiences, and come with such a great marketing force and catchy sound that it’s impossible to ignore.
It goes back to Seo Taiji and Boys, who transformed a heavily controlled music industry that largely relied on classical music until then. Their mainstream success paved the path for boy bands like 2PM, which took the world by storm in 2008.
Like their American boy band counterparts, many of these boy bands rely on smoothly choreographed performances. They also blend elements of pop, hip-hop, and R&B to create a sound that’s palatable across generations and geographies.
This Clubhouse Behind-the-Music gave a strong performance that attracted nearly 1,000 concurrent users throughout its hour-long broadcast. It also included a stream of the song, so we have the background necessary to understand what they’re breaking down.
Malone, for example, explains his “Cha Cha” tag, which Park helped him create. It took multiple recordings and mixes to get exactly right – he’s an artist just like DJ Khalid. Those tags are an essential musical ingredient that you don’t think much about but are integral in your enjoyment of the song.
It’s always the simple things that hit hardest.
All I Want to Do
I love hearing artists break down their creative process, and this conversation played out like a fireside chat about the modern music business. Both Park and Malone have deep experience in the music industry, and they had some great stories to share about the backgrounds of how their paths crossed and they ended up working together.
Globetrotting and working with different people in different studios and clubs can be common in the music industry. The life of a rolling stone isn’t easy, but they still managed to create serendipity with “All I Wanna Do.”
Malone wasn’t sure if the beat was Park’s style, and neither fully expected the reception as it blew up across the world in multiple languages. Representing Korean culture down to the language is clearly important to Chung.
Korean culture is criminally underrepresented in American culture. The best version on television, in my humble opinion, is CBC’s Kim’s Convenience, which is one of the best-written TV comedies of the past decade, even if it’s Canadian.
Seeing how much pride Chung has and the attention to detail of presenting his love of music, technology, and his heritage is great.
He’s weaving a lot of elements to tell a painfully undertold story – Psy’s “Gangnam Style” alone is still in the top 10 most-watched videos of all time on YouTube. BTS already sold over 20 million physical albums worldwide. But they’re only two acts in a sea of talented and accomplished musicians.
Hearing Malone and Park discuss how their collaboration happened solidifies the history and does for K-Pop what VH1, MTV, SiriusXM, terrestrial radio, and others have been doing for American music for a long time.
Like the British invasion of the 20th Century, the K-Pop wave is just getting started, as North American audiences continue discovering what some have known for over 30 years.
Final Thoughts on Inside K-Pop
Inside K-Pop dives deep behind the music made by some of the biggest modern K-Pop stars. Professional musicians, mostly rappers, have long made Clubhouse their home. It’s good to see Danny Chung represent Korea within the culture.
He clearly has a passion for the topic and culture, and he’s making his mark in the Creator First pilot season.
Talking about music is just one aspect of the full Clubhouse capabilities for these artists though. The show missed out on an opportunity to do a live performance, something that could have truly brought the house down. Clubhouse is a stage like any other, and so many talented musicians like John Mayer created magical moments with surprise performances.
And while the Korean translation is appreciated, it wasn’t blended into the conversation as seamlessly as The Global Lowdown. If anything, it hurt the conversational flow more than it helped, and the way everyone stepped over Chi, it felt like a last-minute, unrehearsed addition for optics.
The show easily stands next to Career Crush though for focusing a serious lens on a seemingly soft topic.