서강대학교

Abstract

Music is one of the main sources of leisure people rely on nowadays. Given recent trends made available mainly as a result of technological developments, music has achieved a level where cultural barriers are continuously being overcome, making music performances of any kind available anywhere in the world. With time, music has become more and more important in individuals’ social realities. Thus, while gaining significant importance in people’s lives, music performances are ‘granted’ the ability to manifest strong effects on audience members, either temporarily, on long-term or even permanently; with this, such performances become powerful enough to influence and alter individuals’ opinions, providing an aid to their everyday struggles, but also making them more open and vulnerable to possible manipulative factors, depending on how such elements could be hidden in performances’ messages. Following the recent expansion of South Korean culture to other parts of the world with the obvious goal of penetrating not only Asian, but Western markets too, the current dissertation seeks to observe and understand South Korean music performances, analyze their general format in comparison to Western pop music, and establish an analytical frame to explain the formation of the Korean Pop genre along with its possible effects on audiences; simply put, this paper’s goal is to observe restored behavior in K-pop performances and analyzing the narrative model of current K-pop performances. The conclusions are dedicated to proposing a narrative model for K-pop performances, following PSY’s model of performance (which appears as appealing to publics all around the world). This being said, while attempting to offer K-pop performances – which are native to Asian cultural influences (South Korea) – to Western audiences, analyzing similar acts from such areas, adopting the right elements, and properly adapting them to the K-pop genre can prove to be a good method of raising their success. On the other hand, if the genre comes to be well received by audiences of other cultures as a result of its uniqueness, this also implies an indirect promotion of local cultural traits, contributing, thus, to the cultural diversity development and understanding, a trend which is spreading more and more as a result of the globalization process societies are currently going through.