KPop Demon Hunters

What K-pop’s visibility is actually made of

Today’s drama

KPop Demon Hunters (케이팝 데몬 헌터스) — a girl-group act folded into a monster-hunting premise.

K-pop is the most globally visible part of contemporary Korean culture. This week asks what that visibility is made of.

Three questions

  1. Why has K-pop become globally influential, when so much national pop music doesn’t travel?
  2. How does Korean popular culture combine local identity with globally engineered production?
  3. What does K-pop reveal about contemporary Korean identity, as opposed to what it’s marketed as revealing?

What is K-pop’s visibility actually made of? A production system, a fandom, and a set of choices about what gets exported.

Take from this week

  • K-pop as an industrial system, not a genre of song
  • fandom as an organised, often transnational, labour of its own
  • Hallyu / the Korean Wave, and what “wave” implies about direction and export
  • cultural export as policy as much as taste