Sunmi as “Heroine, Gashina, and Siren”: How a Former Member of the K-Pop Group The Wonder Girls Developed Sunmi-Pop
Presenter: Grace Kao (Yale U.)
Moderator: Seok-Kyeong Hong (Seoul National U.)
Abstract:
Korean Pop Music or K-Pop that is most familiar to non-Korean audiences is primarily comprised of idol groups. The individuality of members is subsumed under the group’s identity, and it can be a challenge for members to emerge and build their own brand. In this article, I focus on Sunmi (선미), a member of the second-generation girl group Wonder Girls. After the group’s debut in 2007, she later learned how to play an instrument, became a songwriter and producer, and developed her own subgenre (endearingly known as ‘Sunmi-Pop’). Not only that, her discography actively confronts the multiplicity of personas that is required of the life of an idol. I argue that Sunmi has no parallel among female K-Pop idols, and her biography informs previous work about the potential feminist possibilities that girl groups (from the Motown Era, for instance) can bring. Western scholarship has largely ignored K-Pop in its theorizing of popular music more generally. When researchers focus on K-Pop, they largely do so in isolation rather than as an example of popular music more broadly.