Cultural technology and the making of K-pop
I ommited the other information ^^
In 1996, S.M. débuted its first idol group: a five-member boy band
called H.O.T. (short for High-Five of Teenagers). It was followed by
S.M.’s first girl group, S.E.S., after the given names of the three
members (Sea, Eugene, and Shoo). Both groups were enormously popular in
Korea, and inspired other groups. Soon K-pop was pushing both
traditional trot and rock to the commercial margins of the Korean music
scene.
In 1998, Lee began expanding into the rest of Asia. The idols sang in Japanese and Chinese, but the sound and style of the music and the videos adhered to the principles that had made them popular in Korea. Lee and his colleagues produced a manual of cultural technology—it’s known around S.M. as C.T.—that catalogued the steps necessary to popularize K-pop artists in different Asian countries. The manual, which all S.M. employees are instructed to learn, explains when to bring in foreign composers, producers, and choreographers; what chord progressions to use in what country; the precise color of eyeshadow a performer should wear in a particular country; the exact hand gestures he or she should make; and the camera angles to be used in the videos (a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree group shot to open the video, followed by a montage of individual closeups).
C.T. seemed to work. By the late nineties, H.O.T. was topping charts in China and Taiwan. Both H.O.T. and S.E.S. disbanded in the early two-thousands, but Lee’s follow-up acts proved to be even more popular. BoA, a solo female singer who made her début in 2000, became huge in Japan. Super Junior, the boy group, débuted in 2005, and became bigger throughout Asia than H.O.T. had been.
In 1998, Lee began expanding into the rest of Asia. The idols sang in Japanese and Chinese, but the sound and style of the music and the videos adhered to the principles that had made them popular in Korea. Lee and his colleagues produced a manual of cultural technology—it’s known around S.M. as C.T.—that catalogued the steps necessary to popularize K-pop artists in different Asian countries. The manual, which all S.M. employees are instructed to learn, explains when to bring in foreign composers, producers, and choreographers; what chord progressions to use in what country; the precise color of eyeshadow a performer should wear in a particular country; the exact hand gestures he or she should make; and the camera angles to be used in the videos (a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree group shot to open the video, followed by a montage of individual closeups).
C.T. seemed to work. By the late nineties, H.O.T. was topping charts in China and Taiwan. Both H.O.T. and S.E.S. disbanded in the early two-thousands, but Lee’s follow-up acts proved to be even more popular. BoA, a solo female singer who made her début in 2000, became huge in Japan. Super Junior, the boy group, débuted in 2005, and became bigger throughout Asia than H.O.T. had been.
Cr:Source:The New Yoker
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