![\"Jisoo,](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/80b591e2-501c-42ea-ac21-9ee766d52d37.jpg\")
Jisoo, Lisa, Jennie, and Ros\u00e9 of the K-pop group Blackpink Getty IMAGES<\/p>\n
The Korean wave, or hallyu, has been washing over the world for 30 years, encompassing TV series such as Squid Game<\/a>, Netflix\u2019s most-watched show; Oscar-winning films ranging from Parasite<\/a> to KPop Demon Hunters<\/a>; and above all K-pop, which the Bank of Korea in 2021 calculated had added almost \u00a34 billion a year to the South Korean economy. On the crest of the wave are BTS, who are the first group since the Beatles to have three Billboard No 1 albums in a year and in 2020 became the first non-western and non-English-speaking act to be named global recording artist of the year by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.\u00a0<\/p>\n So how did this happen, and why did it happen in South Korea? The answer involves a financial crisis, Jurassic Park and a political system that, though democratic, retains vestiges of the dictatorship it was until 1987.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cK-pop is a very centralised project organised by the government in the late Nineties,\u201d says Euny Hong, the Korean-American author of The Birth of Korean Cool: How One Nation Is Conquering the World Through Pop Culture. \u201cKorea is one of the few capitalist countries that can act as a command economy and tell a private company what to do. They told Hyundai to stop making microchips, which they did, and they told Samsung to stop making cars, which is why you\u2019ve never seen a Samsung car.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n After the 1997 Asian financial crisis South Korea realised it was overly dependent on heavy industry. It looked to America, to which it is more closely tied\u00a0than any other east Asian country. \u201cPart of that is because the United States liberated them from communism,\u201d Hong says, referring to the Korean War. America still has a strong military presence in South Korea. <\/p>\n America\u2019s entertainment industries suggested a way out of the economic quicksand. A few years before the financial crisis a team of Korean economists had pointed out that one movie, Jurassic Park, had generated the same profit as selling millions of cars. Koreans were also aware, Hong says, \u201cof the halo effect that made everything American automatically cool. Levi jeans or the Cadillac, which was a crap car \u2014 these are all cool by association and not by their essence. So South Korea said, \u2018OK, we have a branding problem.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Hallyu phase one was regional and dominated by K-dramas \u2014 telenovela-style series such as Star in My Heart (1997), which projected an image of glamour and became popular across east Asia. It helped that South Korea did not have a dark imperial past, as China and Japan do. \u201cWe are the country that never invaded anybody else, so our Asian neighbours have more respect towards us,\u201d says Jieun Kiaer, Young Bin Min-KF professor of Korean linguistics at the University of Oxford, who is South Korean and has written extensively on hallyu.<\/p>\n K-pop came later, piggybacking on the streaming revolution, where South Korea, with one of the fastest online networks in the world, was a leader. \u201cThe really smart thing that the South Korean record industry did was focusing on music videos with crazy choreography that looked like they were designed by a brutalist architect,\u201d Hong says. It was YouTube where Psy became the first K-pop artist to break through in the West with Gangnam Style in 2012, and the super-stylised video for BTS\u2019s Butter (2021) had the most views, 108.2 million, of any music video on the platform in the first 24 hours of release.\u00a0<\/p>\n A less discussed factor in hallyu, Kiaer says, \u201cis how Koreans value education\u201d. All seven members of BTS went to university \u2014 not something you can say of Take That \u2014 and RM has a reported IQ of 148. \u201cWe don\u2019t have many mineral resources so we realised we had to invest in people. It\u2019s very much at the foundation of K-culture, a basis for you to be more creative.\u201d Educational freedom is still a relatively new thing \u2014 under the dictatorship in South Korea censorship was rife. \u201cWhen I was in primary school we were even taught that North Koreans looked different. Now that we have this freedom, we know how precious it is,\u201d says Kiaer, who has written a novel about Korean education called Seoul Mothers.\u00a0<\/p>\n What surprised Hong about K-pop was its staying power. \u201cK-pop now doesn\u2019t have anything to do with the sound. It doesn\u2019t even have to do with the members being Korean,\u201d she says, referring to the all-white British K-pop group DearAlice. Nor do the lyrics have to be in Korean: the new BTS album features more English than ever before. \u201cIf it\u2019s not about music, race or language, what is it about?\u201d <\/p>\n The answer is the active involvement of fans. Koreans have even invented an anglicised word for it: \u201cfandustry\u201d. The closest western equivalent to this business model would be Taylor Swift\u2019s, \u201cbut the K-pop industry has perfected it and made it into a science\u201d, Hong says. \u201cBTS, for example, will have a poll: \u2018Which of these songs do you think we should lead with in our next concert?\u2019 And then they\u2019ll actually do what the poll says.\u201d A reality show, Boys Planet, also allowed viewers to vote on who they wanted to be in a new group, Zerobaseone. <\/p>\n Fandom \u2014 BTS\u2019s are known as ARMY, Adorable Representative MC for Youth \u2014 is \u201cthe language that binds people together of different ages and status. Through it they find a safe space to be themselves,\u201d Kiaer says. That K-pop is dominated by bands such as BTS, Blackpink<\/a> and Stray Kids<\/a> when western music moves towards solo artists, she adds, \u201cshows how Koreans value community\u201d.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a far more wholesome side of Korea than the brutality of Squid Game or the poverty of Parasite. The government was \u201choping Parasite would not be noticed\u201d, Hong says. \u201cWhen it became a global sensation, suddenly they acted like they were always behind it.\u201d Yet these two faces of the country \u201cby duelling, rise together\u201d. <\/p>\n BTS could have tarnished their image as golden boys had they dodged their military service. \u201cThere was literally a national debate in the Korean senate,\u201d Hong says. \u201cDo we make an exception for BTS?\u201d It was estimated that if they completed their military service, the loss to the South Korean economy would be almost \u00a330 billion. The government decided against exempting them, but if it had done so, Hong thinks the band would have volunteered anyway, \u201cbecause in Korea people really don\u2019t like it if somebody thinks they\u2019re special. People were just so in love with that decision they made.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n What about North Korea, the ostensible reason for training young South Koreans to fire guns? K-drama and K-pop have certainly found their way into Kim Jong-un\u2019s hermit state \u2014 according to reports, a man who supplied North Korean students with a black-market copy of Squid Game was sentenced to death. Kiaer, who has interviewed several North Korean defectors, says, \u201cThe key reason they knew what was going on in South Korea was because of K-drama and K-pop. Sometimes they have to risk their own lives to watch it but it\u2019s still hugely popular.\u201d\u00a0In April 2018 the K-pop girl band Red Velvet even performed at the Spring Is Coming concert in Pyongyang.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople much smarter than myself have speculated that if there is a reunification between North and South, it will have been because of North Koreans discovering South Korean culture,\u201d Hong says. \u201c\u2018Wait a minute, they have electricity in South Korea!\u2019\u201d It wouldn\u2019t be the first time: the Cold War thawed a degree or two when people in Warsaw Pact countries gained access to western TV and music. Could peace with the North be BTS\u2019s biggest prize?\u00a0![\"Illustration](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/af061c4a-1df9-433f-a040-424153286491.jpg\")
The film KPop Demon Hunters was a hit for NetflixAP<\/p>\n![\"BTS](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/b2f85529-9ad5-4269-8ce3-de48836ad7ec.jpg\")
The BTS singer Jin on his final day of military serviceJUNG YEON-JE\/AFP<\/p>\n
BTS The Comeback Live | Arirang and BTS: The Return are on Netflix. BTS play Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, London, Jul 6-7, ibighit.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cAnnyeonghaseyo [hello], Seoul! We\u2019re back!\u201d yelled RM, the leader of BTS, as 104,000 fans screamed their lungs out.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":389603,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[146,85,46,409],"class_list":["post-389602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389602","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=389602"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389602\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/389603"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=389602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=389602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=389602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}