Envisaging the Sociocultural Dynamics of K-pop: Time/Space Hybridity, Red Queen's Race, and Cosmopolitan Striving

The success of K-pop’s global drive has provoked scholarly interests from various perspectives and disciplines. The multidisciplinary interest in K-pop reflects the wealth of K-pop success factors that are either exogenous (i.e., emphasizing global factors) or endogenous (i.e., highlighting Korean factors). This article focuses on the endogenous factors of K-pop’s success, given the fact that the majority of the extant studies on K-pop analyze the impact of global factors on K-pop’s popularity in different regions of the world. Thus, this study seeks to find if non-stereotypical Korean particularities that cannot be accounted for by exogenous explanations exist within the K-pop industry. We posit that the Korean peculiarities in the K-pop industry can be traced back to time/space hybridity, the “red queen’s race,” and cosmopolitan striving. This article finds that these three specific features within modern Korean culture explain why K-pop songs are still different from American or European pop music, despite their similarities due to the globalization of pop music. The differences between K-pop music and their counterparts in America and Europe are: the con temporaneity of the uncontemporary, the synchronized dancing to melodic music (vis-a-vis beat music), and the multi-top dancing formation. We conclude that the aforementioned Korean factors are responsible for these musical variations in K-pop.