紐育の韓流 - Living, Loving, Thinking, Again

JON CARAMANICA “Korean Pop Machine, Running on Innocence and Hair Gel” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/25/arts/music/shinee-and-south-korean-k-pop-groups-at-madison-square-garden-review.html

K-Pop米国進出の話。SM Entertaiment*1所属の韓流アイドルたちがマディソン・スクエア・ガーデンで行ったSM Town Liveを巡って。

American teen-pop at its peak has never been this productive. K-pop ― short for Korean pop ― is an environment of relentless newness, both in participants and in style; even its veteran acts are still relatively young, and they make young music. Still, there were subtle differences among the veterans, like BoA and TVXQ, and the newer-minted acts like Super Junior, Girls’ Generation and SHINee.
Members of the younger set are less concerned with boundaries, drawing from the spectrum of pop of the last decade in their music: post-Timbaland hip-hop rumbles, trance-influenced thump, dance music driven by arena-rock guitars, straightforward balladry.

Of these groups, the relative newcomer SHINee was the most ambitious. From the looks of it, the group’s men are powered by brightly colored leather, Dr. Martens boots and hair mousse. Their music, especially “Replay,” “Ring Ding Dong” and “Juliette,” felt the riskiest, even if it only slightly tweaked that polyglot K-pop formula; these vocalists were among the night’s strongest.
But SHINee came in a recognizable format, the same size as American groups like ’N Sync and the Backstreet Boys. But what K-pop has excelled at in recent years are large groups that seem to defy logic and order. Super Junior, which at its maximum has 13 members, was one of this show’s highlights, appearing several times throughout the night in different color outfits, shining on “Mr. Simple” and the intense industrial dance-pop of “Bonamana.” (K.R.Y., a sub-group of Super Junior, delivered what may have been the night’s best performance on “Sorry Sorry Answer,” a muscular R&B ballad.)
Super Junior was complemented by the nine-woman Girls’ Generation, which offered a more polite take on K-pop, including on “The Boys,” which is its debut American single. Girls’ Generation gave perhaps the best representation of K-pop’s coy, shiny values in keeping with a chaste night that satisfied demand, but not desire. (It was an inversion on the traditional American formula; in this country young female singers are often more sexualized than their male counterparts.)

In the past few years K-pop has shown a creeping global influence. Many acts release albums in Korean and Japanese, a nod to the increasing fungibility of Asian pop. And inroads, however slight, are being made into the American marketplace. The acts here sang and lip synced in both Korean and English. Girls’ Generation recently signed with Interscope to release music in the United States. And in August Billboard inaugurated a K-Pop Hot 100 chart. But none of the acts on the SM Town Live bill are in the Top 20 of the current edition of the fast-moving chart. This is a scene that breeds quickly.

*1:http://www.smtown.com/