Frank Kogan

How did you find out and learn about kpop?

Anywhere I start would be the middle, but let's begin our story with James Brown. The funk he and his band creates in the mid '60s expands on a tendency in black American music — to be an interplay of parts, voices in conversation, rather than dividing into a lead voice (or melody or thematic progression) with the rest as accompaniment — takes it to an extreme, so that what the drums and bass and guitar are doing rhythmically are as defining of the song as what the singer is doing. And what the singer is doing is correspondingly rhythmic and has to take its cue from the rest of the instruments as much as they have to take their cue from him. "Give It Up Or Turn It A Loose" is a great example, in that changing the "arrangement," especially the rhythms laid down by the bass and the guitar, wouldn't just change the accompaniment, it would change the song, in effect replace it with something else, a different one.

The massive popularity of this funk, from the mid '60s through the '70s, created an ineradicable tension between foreground and background, one that permeates any modern popular music that's substantially related to soul and R&B. This is because the funk runs up against another feature of black American music, the tendency to be (in dubdobdee's words) "casually magpie-ish," to lift and absorb whatever isn't nailed down, including melodies from anywhere in the culture, many of which seem to require the accompaniment to be subordinate to a main melody. So there's a push and a pull here, never to be decided one way or another. (I talked about this a bit with arbitrary_greay on the first Dead Lester thread, and I made the argument in much greater detail in "Death Rock 2000.")

There's an equivalent foreground-background tension in life as everyone lives it, between your life as your own story, you the lead character, on the one hand, and the events and social context and everything else around you, your context, your accompaniment, on the other.

So... one day in late spring 2009 I saw a piece on the UPI wire about a Korean pop group that was playing support on the Jonas Brothers' latest U.S. tour, so I searched 'em on Google and found a nice song that didn't knock me out but had a truly clever video about a James Brown star-of-the-show type character creating a song (albeit in Brown's pre-funk mode) but then his background singers come along and take over the performance. I embedded the vid under the title "Background Becomes Foreground," and lo! — here comes anhh, a Spaniard (I think) who's visited this lj in the past to talk about social theory, and turns out to be a fan of K-pop, who embeds SNSD's "Gee." And petronia drops by, a Canadian of Chinese descent, embeds Shinhwa and BoA and informs us that "K-pop has the most insane and deeply frightening fanclub culture ever" (speaking of background becoming foreground), which of course draws me in; she also tells me that "toilet paper dude" in the vid for Wonder Girls' "Nobody," the one I'd embedded to start us off, "is a famous K-pop singer turned songwriter-producer for other acts."

I'd say the rest is history, but history took a while to rev up. [To be continued.]