ABSTRACT
After spending two weeks explaining songs from different genres within Korean popular music, one American student piped up and asked, “So, what is Korean pop music? It sounds like Western music.” Perhaps it all sounded like Western pop music to them. It was a perplexing yet accurate observation. Korean pop music had the familiar twinges of R&B, rock, hip-hop, and soul that is so heavily used in contemporary Western pop music. However, though Western and Korean music share similar sounds, Korean listeners love the distinct sound of Korean popular music which cannot be explained in simple terms. That is why this volume has been put together to delineate some of distinctive features of “Korean popular music” including its development and characteristics. How, then, do we define “Korean popular music”? The answer to this question is an ongoing issue and it is widely debated in both Korean academic circles and the general pop music listeners.
