Is it K-pop if Koreans aren’t singing it?

Some Koreans have zero tolerance for foreign singers in the musical genre; others say they’re OK

Reading Time:4 minutes

EXP Edition is a K-pop group that includes one European American, one Asian American (half Japanese), one Portuguese and one Croatian. Handout photo

Published: 8:33am, 2 Jul 2017Updated: 8:41am, 2 Jul 2017

In the first season of K-Pop Star, which premiered in South Korea in 2011, an artist named Lee Michelle wowed judges and won third place in the first round. She then rose to second place in the fourth and fifth rounds, but was suddenly eliminated in the sixth.

“Judging from the score and evaluations, as well as the crowd’s response,” wrote E. Kim at Soompi, a website covering K-pop culture, “it almost seemed like a no-brainer for Lee Michelle to advance to the next round.”

But the rankings above were based only on the judges’ scores, and when combined with viewer ratings, Lee was actually bottom-ranked from the start. Here, it’s worth mentioning that Lee is half black, and for many Koreans, she therefore didn’t deserve to win.

Lee Michelle was an aspiring musical talent on the TV show K-Pop Star, but was never among the fan favourites, some say because of her ethnicity. Handout photo

Similarly, when Heart2Heart frontman David Lehre, who is white and known as “Chad Future”, began a solo career, many objected to his ethnicity.

“I find it incredibly insulting for a white man – who again does not speak Korean, was not raised in Korea – to say he is promoting ‘diversity’ in K-pop,” wrote the author of a blog called Because “Oppar Didn’t Mean It”. “From a Korean person, to Korean pop music fans: Do not promote this degenerate scum.”