A Korean American Retrospective on Third Generation K-Pop

Thirteen weeks following the release of the most famous music video of the new millennium, South Korean rapper Park Jae-sang (better known as PSY), remarked in an interview with NPR that “the world’s most famous and popular language is music.”

I was only seven years old when PSY’s “Gangnam Style” took over the world, and for half a decade, it reigned as Youtube’s most viewed video ever. As a Korean citizen growing up in the suburbs of Maryland, it had only been a short while since I emigrated from Seoul when the remarkable successes of third generation K-pop opened the door for greater representation of Asian culture into the Western canon.

Hence, the larger legacy of “Gangnam Style” endures to this day in how it initiated the international wave of mass hysteria and interest surrounding the movement we now understand to be “third generation K-pop.”

The first generation of K-Pop set the foundations for what Korean pop music could achieve and defined the contours of late 90s Korean pop culture. The second generation, christened the genre’s golden age, set in motion the ‘Korean Wave’ that made Korean culture, from indelible earworms to tear-jerking soap operas, a staple in the international market. By the start of K-pop’s third generation, the floodgates were open for Korean music to take center stage in the international mainstream.

As I found myself caught up in the meteoric rise of the third-gen artists that populated the airwaves of my adolescence, from EXO to Blackpink, I also found a renewed sense of cultural identity. While my Korean would grow spottier by the day, I would get it back singing along to “Run” by BTS or “Tempo” by Exo at lunch with friends and on walks with my dog. My sister would play the latest Exo song on our car rides back from school, and I would go to class the next day eagerly getting my friends to listen and sing along too. Seeing the people around me caught up in the frenzy that surrounded BTS in particular gave me a sense of cultural pride I’d never experienced before.

And nothing short of international frenzy has followed the artists leading the fledgling movement. In the past decade, artists like Twice and Blackpink, but especially BTS, have dominated the global music industry. In terms of album sales, BTS is the third best selling musical act of the past thirty years and the first to win the IFPI’s Global Recording Artist of the Year award back to back. Like how Elvis Presley reshaped the contours of popular culture for the’50s, third generation K-pop acts such as BTS and Blackpink defined and continue to define this generation’s coming-of-age experience.

But as the titans of the industry go on hiatus or disband altogether, third generation K-pop declines from its cultural apex, and groups that lit the music industry ablaze only a few short years ago now begin to dim into obscurity.

While there’s an endless list of individual reasons for this decline, they really boil down to two main ones: the rise of fourth generation groups and the cyclic nature of the tightly managed K-pop industry. Now, more than ever, Korean entertainment agencies debut new groups on a daily basis, pushing the market towards oversaturation. As these idol companies learned from the successes of third-gen groups, they designed new fourth-gen groups to appeal to broader international audiences while promoting them with greater voracity; building larger — and thus more lucrative — fanbases. At the same time, third-gen groups are growing older, trading in their music careers for more sustainable roles in industries such as acting and modeling. And for male idol groups, looming mandatory military service forces many groups to go on hiatus or disband.

At the same time for many fans, including myself, the shift from third-gen to fourth-gen delineates a significant moment in our lives — a shift from adolescence to young adulthood as we find that what we’ve loved for a long time is finally coming to an end. However, even with its decline, the nostalgia and warmth of our formative years stick like mud on the wall.

Third generation K-pop played a very big part of my childhood and teenage years; it was a time in my life where all I would care about was watching music videos as soon as they came out or learning the choreographies by watching tutorials over and over again on YouTube. Even as I was physically separated from my cultural heartland, third generation K-pop gave me a greater sense of pride in and connection to my own culture that I couldn’t find anywhere else.

As life moves on and even my teenage years begin to bleed into one another as the haze of the past grows ever stronger, the memories of third-generation K-pop stick to me like mud on the wall.

—Staff writer Wonjae Suh can be reached at wonjae.suh@thecrimson.com.