The Origins of K-Pop: Hyangga

The Origins of K-Pop: Hyangga

A now dominant frame with which to view K-Pop is ‘cultural hybridity’. Its explanatory appeal is clear. By describing K-pop’s heavy borrowing of American hip-hop, rap and EDM in terms such as glocalization, cultural reconfiguration and third space transnationalism, it is relieved of the anxiety of provenance. Hybridity theory recontextualizes the ‘local’ into a migratory landscape in which it does not seem to matter whether something is culturally authentic or not since everything is influenced by something else, and borrowing has been a tradition as long as there has been human history. Yet almost as many have called out the hybridity of Western ‘form’ and Korean ‘content’ as a euphemism for cultural hegemony of Western pop. On this view, Korean features in K-pop are but a veneer of local packaging, devoid of any meaningful cultural substance. This paper attempt to move beyond this binary and puts forth an alternative case by situating the language of K-pop in Korean cultural history, tracing back K-pop’s interlingual conviviality back to sixth century hyangga songs.