Modern Concepts and Traditional Views - Personal Contemplation

“If the Pop Art period was, to a great extent, a matter of academy-trained artists taking forms of popular iconography into the rarified realm of museum art, high-pop represents the reversal of that flow by transforming Culture into mass entertainment” (Collins, 6).

As I read this statement in Jim Collins’s High-Pop, I immediately thought of G.O.D.’s music video of their song To My Mother. As Im Kwon-Taek used Sopyonje to acknowledge and modernize p’ansori, it seems that G.O.D. is using their music and popularity to keep Korean tradition alive. The song’s undertones of Confucianism, a defining part of Korean culture over the centuries, mixed in with the very urban, hip sounding music results in a unique Korean ‘high-pop’ sensation.

Contrast that with H.O.T.’s Candy. It obviously has no cultural significance, only aesthetic appeal… Right? I may be looking too far into this, or giving the boys more credit than they deserve, but I think that they’re almost a rebellion—straying as far from the cultural norm as acceptably possible (they don’t want to be too extreme, though, that would lose them their audience). First, take a look at the group members. Do any of them look masculine at all? No. One of the most appealing features of H.O.T. is their androgyny. Even the female that appears in the music video for Candy looks somewhat androgynous, with a curve-less body and a masculine jaw structure. Not to mention the western origins of the woman. It seems to me that Candy’s music video is the antithesis of translation tradition, nationalism, etc. in Korean culture.

With that in mind, I find it slightly ironic that H.O.T. and G.O.D. were rival boy bands. It’s almost as if the bands represented different political standings of that decade’s youth. G.O.D., the slightly conservative conformists, and H.O.T., the rebellious counter culture.