Beatles vs. Girls’ Generation

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan getting their start in the music business. It was in 1962 that the Beatles signed their first record contract, the Rolling Stones had their first hit single (fun fact: it was written for them by John Lennon and Paul McCarthy), and Bob Dylan legally changed his name from Robert Zimmerman and released his first album.

The breakthrough for all three music legends, however, came after hard struggles toiling in small clubs in Liverpool, London and New York, where they perfected their craft with constant rounds of performing while also devoting time to song writing.

This relentless quest for improvement is captured well in “Shout!,’’ Philip Norman’s classic book on the Beatles that meticulously charts their beginnings. What is interesting is that the group, which began performing professionally in 1960, wasn’t particularly good at first. But a punishing regime of playing over the next two years at the Cavern Club in Liverpool and the dives of Hamburg’s Reeperbahn red light district was instrumental in sharpening their innate talent in terms of musical ability, stage presence and song composition.

It must also be said that the Beatles lived up to the 1960s reputation as the decade of “sex, drugs and rock’n’roll” since all three elements played a crucial role in their creativity. Their sense of cheeky rebelliousness combined with their obvious intelligence and wit soon propelled the Beatles to become the world’s most beloved rock band.

What is striking is the organic nature of their rise from the depths of Liverpool club and to global stardom. The growth of The Beatles relied heavily on a network of friends and contacts in the local Liverpool music scene to help get themselves established before they were discovered by the British media, which made them stars.

I was reminded of all this after reading John Seabrook’s recent article in The New Yorker on Girls’ Generation and other K-pop groups. Its title, “Factory Girls,” sums up the artificial and the manufactured quality of the genre. It illustrates well the top-down approach that Korea takes in many aspects of business, including entertainment.

Of course, K-pop is the antithesis of the development of the Beatles. Performers are selected more for physical appearance than musical skills and are put through years of grueling training in singing, dancing and foreign languages before being assembled in carefully packaged idol bands.

What lies behind the tight management control of K-pop artists is the obsession to remove any hint of rebellious behavior and present a squeaky-clean but sexy image to Asia’s conservative audiences. Lee Soo-man, the founder of SM Entertainment, the biggest K-pop promoter, learned this lesson after he groomed singer and hip-hop dancer Hyun Jin-young for stardom, only to see the performer’s career crash after he was arrested for drugs.

But Seabrook believes the corporate nature of K-pop may ultimately doom it. K-pop’s popularity and profitability in Korea relies on constant TV appearances and product endorsements. But any attempt to break into global markets means extensive touring overseas, threatening the loss of advertising revenue and TV exposure at home. The Wonder Girls, for example, largely faded from the scene after they spent two years in New York in a futile attempt to achieve success in the U.S.

What Korea has been ignoring during the K-pop boom is its own rich heritage of talented performers who inhabit the same type of milieu that once fostered the Beatles. Shin Joong-hyun, Korea’s first rock star, pioneered this path in the 1960s and 1970s, learning his craft by playing for U.S. troops in Korea while absorbing the influences of American rock’n’roll, blues and jazz.

The best Korean rock musicians are found nowadays not on commercial TV or radio, but rather in the underground clubs around Hongdae. As Daniel Tudor, the Korea correspondent for The Economist, notes in his new book, “Korea: The Impossible Country,” their failure to gain much media attention is unfortunate “because several of the best acts would probably attract a big following and become genuine stars if they came from London or New York and sang in English.”

The differences in the Western and Korean pop scenes illustrate the contrasts in their economic systems. The creation of bands in the U.K. and the U.S. have traditionally reflected an entrepreneurial, bottom-up approach as many popular groups first played small clubs before graduating to big stadium tours. The top-down approach of Korean business has resulted in producing engineered K-pop bands, whose success is usually short-lived. The formula may continue to work for a while, but Korea should embrace its grassroots talent in music as well as in other aspects of business and society if it is to achieve a success that has the endurance of the Beatles.

John Burton, a former Korea correspondent for the Financial Times, is now a Seoul-based independent journalist and media consultant. <The Korea Times/John Burton>