{"id":2498,"date":"2014-11-16T02:20:31","date_gmt":"2014-11-16T10:20:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=2498"},"modified":"2021-05-22T03:49:39","modified_gmt":"2021-05-22T10:49:39","slug":"notebook-on-cities-and-cultures-korea-tour-sonic-bibimbap-with-bernie-cho","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=2498","title":{"rendered":"Notebook on Cities and Culture’s Korea Tour: Sonic Bibimbap with Bernie Cho"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"berniecho\"Notebook on Cities and Culture‘s Korea Tour is brought to you by Daniel Murphy, David Hayes, and <\/em>The Polar Intertia Journal<\/a>, an outlet for artists and researchers documenting the urban condition.<\/em><\/p>\n

In Seoul’s Garosu-gil, Colin Marshall talks with Korean music industry expert Bernie Cho, president of DFSB Kollective, a creative agency that provides digital media, marketing, and distribution services to Korean pop music artists. They discuss why the world now knows what K-pop is; how Korean youth culture, pop culture, and digital culture have become one in the same; Psy as outlier and representative of K-pop, “the bad boy who became the golden boy,” who put a dent in the industry’s pursuit of perfection; how “made in Korea” can work, internationally, as a label; whether the concept of “crazy Korea,” like “weird Japan,” has any traction; the big technological differences between the time of the 1990s J-pop boom and the modern K-pop boom; the musician’s perceived need to break out of Korea for success; how, growing up in the United States, he became aware of Korean popular culture; his disenchantment with the “boo-hoo session” of Asian American studies; the accidental meeting that got him into music television; what he discovered in Seoul’s Hongdae neighborhood; the Korean government’s investment in internet technology, and the digital and cultural revolution that followed; why Korean pop artists have, in the recent past, made so little money; the use of music not as a business, but as a business card; Korea’s other DMZ: the closed-garden “digital media zone” of Korea-only technology; how he first saw the seemingly wholly under-construction Seoul almost twenty years ago; how the vibe of the 2002 World Cup has carried over into the present; what Los Angeles and Seoul have to learn from each other; how his advantage in coming from America has gone away; how K-pop has become “sonic bibimbap,” uniquely Korean in its mixture of various ingredients; what Koreanness internationally-marketed Korean music retains; his “What am I even doing?” moment on a flight from Los Angeles to Seoul; why the origin of the word “piracy” reveals it as a good thing, and how it sparked the British Invasion; what he makes of the return of the 1960s and 70s “golden age” of Korean pop and R&B; and why he tells artists they shouldn’t do everything in English (and why he plays them Sigur R\u00f3s).<\/p>\n