(dramatic music) Interviewer So, and what is K-Pop? (upbeat pop music) Amber Liu: It's bright lights, vibrant colours, crazy concepts. Everybody has to dance.

(upbeat pop music) Joon Park: It's about the fans. Fans are everything. (upbeat pop music) (upbeat pop music) (slate clacking) What is K-Pop?

K-Pop is huge. (crowd cheers) (upbeat pop music) (crowd cheers) (lively pop music) Korean pop culture is the third largest export industry for Korea. News Reporter: K-Pop super group Super M gets Billboard's Grammy nod.

(lively pop music) James Cordon: I'm joined by K-Pop sensations Black Pink! (crowd cheers) A global phenomenon, BTS is here! Bernie Cho: It's become the new normal for Korean music acts to have a billion YouTube views, so the next question probably should be, how did we get from the traditional Korean popular music.

(soft singing in Korean) To this phenomena? (upbeat pop music) Bernie Cho: Itaewon is the Harlem of Seoul. The Haight-Ashbury, the Sunset Strip, all rolled into one.

In a sense, you can say that Itaewon is the birthplace of modern K-Pop. (lively groovy music) ♪ (lively groovy music) (lively groovy music) (groovy guitar music) ♪ (sombre singing in Korean) ♪ (soft rock music) JinJoo Lee: I'm JinJoo. I play guitar in a band called DNCE.

I'm in America. Originally from Korea. That's me.

I grew up listening to all this amazing blues, funk rock guitarist. I'm a big fan of Shin Joong Hyun and Kim Hong Tak from Key Boys. He's one of the amazing guitarists that came out of that generation, like 60s when it was like a lot of struggle because in that era, Korea went through so much.

(frenzied rock music) (bullets booming) (frenzied yelling) (rock music) (bullets blasting) (rock music) (frenzied yelling) (rock music) (bullets blasting) (upbeat rock music) JinJoo Lee: As a musician, it's really heartbreaking. Like all these artists and players that I look up to, they went through that struggle. I look up to them even more.

They had to go through a lot of stuff and, you know, I'm thankful that they didn't give up and they just keep on going. (groovy rock music) (groovy rock music) (rock music) Bernie Cho: This was a golden age, a golden era of Korean rock music. What might have been was crushed by the military dictatorship.

The government dictated what was going to be played on radio and more importantly, what couldn't be played. Musically, it was very much the dark ages. But then something happened.

(uptempo music) Reporter: Election fever has produced a remarkable demonstration of democracy for a nation with virtually no experience at the ballot box. We must get, uh, real democracy. Bernie Cho: And then in 1988, the Seoul Olympics came to Korea.

A spark was lit and the torch was passed to the younger generation. Reporter: The Olympic flame which burns in South Korea's capital city, signifies the emergence of a country which has become the new economic miracle of the 20th century. The opening of the 24th Olympic Games is expected to attract a quarter of a million visitors to Seoul.

(gong) (upbeat dance music) And the movement was in Itaewon. In Itaewon, a lot of clubs were like hotel clubs in the basement of the hotel. I would come to, come to Korea during the summertime and, yeah, I was a minor, but like if you're from the States they kind of let you in to see what it's like and that's how I was first introduced to like the Korean dance culture.

I was like, wow, the night life is really, really awesome. It was very European so it was like Euro disco. Jae Chong: Moon Night, that was like where all the hip-hop dancers, rappers, anybody who was aspiring to be into the hip-hop culture was hanging out.

There was a lot of hip-hop going on there because of the whole military base there. There was dance battles going on there. It's like one of those things where you take us to a club in the middle of the night in Itaewon, open the door and you were like sort of like kind of zapped into this new world.

There was like a whole new side of Korea that I didn't know existed at the time. (frenetic rock music) My name is Jae Chong and I'm a member of the group Solid. I was born in Seoul, Korea.

I moved here to L. A. when I was, uh, in third grade, not knowing a word of English.

So, first time I went back to Korea was '92 when we went to do the Solid thing. Initially, we went there as sort of like this, you know, hip-hop, R&B kind of trio. So, like we wanted to sort of bring that to Korea where we incorporate like some rap, R&B, pop, all of it into one package.

Our first album was like literally just nine demos that we had on my four track tape recorder. So, here it goes. (hip-hop R&B music) Ah, this is so embarrassing.

(hip-hop R&B music) Jae Chong: It's a very western type of melody, just kind of, you know, the chords are just kind of like very simple and there's a lot of ad-libbing on it. (soft R&B singing in Korean) Just simple melodies, almost like too simple. So our first album like completely tanked.

So, like the Korean public, they didn't really get it. It was unfamiliar to them. We were almost like, about to pull the plug on the whole thing.

My dad gave me like $4,000 at the time, you know, and it was a big deal. We were just sitting in a hotel room like the three of us all together sort of like trying to figure out what next. (soft singing in Korean) Jae Chong: You know, and we watched these Korean shows, like we had nothing else to do.

(soft singing in Korean) And I used to watch it and go, wow. (soft singing in Korean) Jae Chong: Sort of the common denominator in all the songs in Korea was what they call ppongjjak feel. Comes from like the old trot music.

Bernie Cho: But at the time what was really popular was music that your parents liked. Trot, which is basically like Korean country music. Joon Park: In Korea they would call it teuroteu.

Teuroteu means trot or in another way it's called ppongjjak. So, you have the ppongjjak melody going. That melodical aspect played a big, huge role in the song to make it hit.

Joe Chong: So emphasis of melody was very, very big. Like what I realized was like the melodies, it was moving up and down a lot. (soft melodic singing) So, it's almost like you have to write the melody first before you lay down the beat so when we came back, I just completely had a whole set of like new ideas.

And our second album sold two million records. First album sold like two. (soft melodic singing) ♪ ♪ Jae Chong: The biggest hit on our second album was (in Korean), was our ballad.

When we got introduced to the public, we got introduced singing a ballad, so initially we went there as sort of like hip-hop, R&B trio and then when we-when we debuted we had suits on and we're singing ballads, you know, like-like R&B ballads on stage. (soft melodic singing in Korean) ♪ Interviewer: Was Solid K-Pop? Jae Chong: Yeah, Solid is K-Pop.

That intricate Korean melody mixed with Western beat is sort of like the identity of what K-Pop is. The rhythm is distinctively western and then the melody was very eastern so that's sort of what we introduced in the early 90s. I think we had 10 songs on the album and like eight songs were on the charts in the top 40.

(soft melodic singing in Korean) Jae Chong: I think that was sort of the beginning of what I call like sort of singer/songwriter self-produced bands. So Seo Tajii produced his own music, just like us, samplers and synthesizers and he banged it out in his bedroom and that's his first album. You know, Lee Hyun Do from Deux, same thing.

Everybody was producing their own music. What people know as K-Pop now, what I consider sort of like the modern K-Pop is, I think it started from Seo Tajii and that was sort of like the introduction of hip-hop, rap, rock, you know, all those fused, uh, with-with Korean music. (hip-hop Korean music) ♪ ♪ Korea at that time, '93, '94, obviously it was Seo Tajii and Boys.

It was more than just hearing Seo Tajii and Boys for the first time, it was seeing them for the first time. (hip-hop Korean music) (applause) (rapping in Korean) (hip-hop rock fusion music) (crowd cheers) (melodic pop music) (crowd chanting) (melodic pop music) Danny Im: You know, it's what the youth needed. It wasn't even just about their music, it was their personality and how they dressed.

It was a merging of everything about them and the youth in Korea, most definitely, I think were yearning for that. (rapping in Korean) Danny Im: When you listen to the album, there's so many different styles of music in one album. You know, I mean, there's straight up rock song, hip-hop song, pop song, ballad song.

I think that is what K-Pop is. (rapping in Korean) (rapping in Korean) ♪ Danny Im: When we first saw them on the shows it was like yo, that's what we want to do. Bernie Cho: The first idols provided a preview of what the future of K-Pop was going to look like.

The Birth Of K-Pop