1. Chubbily clean-cut Park Jae-Sang, aka PSY, is an all-round entertainer, as much a dancer, comedian and deviser of videos – if not an actual director – as a musician. Educated at Boston’s prestigious Berklee College of Music, where he claims he failed to get out of bed to attend lectures, the 35-year-old has faced public and official censure for his satirical lyrics, and had reconciled himself to not-quite-iconic status before his current hit exploded internationally.
2. PSY belongs simultaneously to the worlds of Korean hip hop and K-pop, the country’s all conquering bubblegum genre, a boy and girl band heaven – or hell depending on your viewpoint – where girlish boys and plastic divas compete in a seamlessly regimented sci-fi, fetish fantasia of spikes, boots and plucked eye brows. Here the boundaries between pop and hip hop have become blurred to the extent that rap tends to often be associated with sugary ballads.
3. Pure rap meanwhile – a genre that has existed in Korea only since 1997 – is the intellectual end of Korean pop. While there’s no shortage of third-hand gangster cliché, the prevailing tone is of existential yearning. Videos are high-spec mini-dramas, with earnest student-types undergoing crises in implausibly well-maintained apartments. It’s all a world away from Gangnam Style’s self-mocking, high gloss foolery.
4. Seo Taiji, androgynous, waif-like godfather of K-pop – the country’s unofficial President of Culture – changed the face of Korean music in the early Nineties, introducing hip hop elements along with everything from swingbeat to heavy-metal. His own excursions into the genre range from bland boy band fare to fierce Linkin Park-style rap-rock.
7. Only a society as preoccupied with order and social harmony as Korea would have come up with the idea of ‘compliment battles’ to avert violence at the end of freestyle rap competitions. Contestants are judged not only on technical skill, but ‘sincerity of respect’, after closing shows by praising their opponents's verbal ingenuity.
8. Yoon Mi Rae. Born Natasha Reid in Texas of Korean and African-American parentage, top female rapper Yoon Mi Rae, aka T (Tasha), is thought of as bringing an appealing earthiness to the brash synthetic world of K-pop. Her music blends anaemic R&B balladry and visceral wordplay in a way that poses no apparent problems either for herself or her audience.
9. G-Dragon & T.O.P. With their big quiffs and oriental bling, pretty boy G-Dragon and his more macho foil T.O.P. emerged from top boy band Bigbang. Representing the acme of a pop-rap mainstream that is remorselessly expanding to dominate the rest of Asia, they’ve even recorded a song in Japanese with Britain’s Pixie Lott.
