Here come the girls! All-female K-pop groups conquer Britain
When girl group Blackpink took to the stage in Hyde Park in London last month, they made history as the first ever Korean pop (or K-pop) group to headline a UK festival. Yet, despite the quartet clinching eight official Top 40 UK hits, their appearance at such a big UK event was still viewed with surprise by some. British music snobbery is not short of jibes towards the K-pop industry’s overtly manufactured nature.
Now doubters will have to concede that the juggernaut of K-pop music is not showing any signs of slowing. And this year it’s all about the girls.
Four all-female K-pop bands – Twice, Aespa, Itzy and (G)I-dle – are all set to perform in London arenas next month. And another girl band, Mamamoo, have just had their concert screened across UK cinemas earlier this month. This year also saw two all-girl groups – Fifty Fifty and New Jeans – both enter the UK charts. They may not be familiar yet, but in the world of Kpop they are big business.
This hive of activity from the girls is a refreshing change. K-pop has been growing in popularity for some time – who can forget 2012’s Gangnam Style by Psy, or Ed Balls’ even more memorable interpretation of it on Strictly Come Dancingin 2016? But until now, K-pop’s popularity in the UK has largely been dominated by boy bands. However, they have been tainted by the jailing of various boy band members for rape and sexual assault over the past few years, while the pressures of fame have seen a number of K-pop suicides.
So what’s currently whetting our national appetite for deliciously polished South Korean pop princesses? Part of the answer lies in the demise of the British girl group. No more Girls Aloud, Spice Girls, Saturdays. For more than a decade, Little Mix had a serious following but, now the group has gone on hiatus, the UK is once again lacking a powerful female pop group, albeit with the exception of Flo and a Sugababes reunion. It’s clear that there’s room for more.
Filling this space, K-pop girl groups have benefited from their videos going viral on social media, which has enabled their finely tuned winning formula – catchy tunes, energetic dance routines and, for some, an inspiration in how they act and dress – to reach British shores.
“The music is catchy, the fashion styling is on point, the choreography is brilliant and the stage production is meticulously thought out,” says Claire Rodrigues Lee, the songwriter behind hits for groups such as Girls’ Generation and Red Velvet. “The girl group songs have a real female-empowered energy to them. It’s like ‘come and be in our gang’.”
It’s this sense of camaraderie that has likely attracted the core fan group, the majority of whom are young women. Many of the unapologetic lyrics and vivacious sounds are an antidote to the “sad girl” era of music that’s currently trending with Billie Eilish, Tate McRae and Mimi Webb.
Yet, Rodrigues Lee makes a vital point – it’s not just about the music. The attraction of K-pop girl groups is multifaceted.
“Fashion is a big part of it,” says Chelsea Cheetham, fan and founder of Kpop magazine Cherry Chu. She points to the futuristic metaverse style of Aespa as one that inspires her the most.
Some of the groups’ outfits have been notable enough to be put on display in the V&A museum as part of the Hallyu! The Korean Wave exhibition.
The constant makeover that accompanies every new music release serves the audience’s addiction for continuous reinvention – a pressure that’s particularly heavy on female artists.
Yet the uniformity of girl group members does not stand in the way of individualism – a fundamental trait behind any successful group. Personalities are often perpetuated online through copious amounts of social media.
So while you may not resonate with all nine members of Twice, you may feel a kindred spirit to Dahyun’s humour or perhaps Mina’s introverted nature. Either way, it’s enough to garner a following.
“K-pop has always thrived off a big social media following and plenty of engagement with fans,” says longtime fan Ketan M. “Personal connection and innovative trends are the two biggest marketing sellers right now. K-pop groups are manufactured to have both from the start.”
We are already beginning to see these trends play out positively with a wider audience in the UK. For instance, Fifty Fifty’s song Cupid went viral on TikTok, proliferating its cutesy choreography and catchy chorus on to unassuming Brits, clinching it a history-making spot in the UK Top 10.
“No one even knew that was from a K-pop girl group,” says fan Gloria Pinamang. The industry is increasingly releasing English versions of K-pop songs to tap into British reluctance to accept foreign language pop. In turn, Pinamang believes this is creating more visibility for K-pop girl groups to come to the UK.
Connecting to British listeners outside of the dedicated fans groups is a goal that K-pop agencies already seem to be actively working towards. For instance, earlier this year Hybe (the company home to K-pop boy band BTS) and US label Geffen Records auditioned teenage girls from the UK as part of a plan to build a global K-pop girl group.
From an industry perspective, this makes commercial sense. Overseas audiences now make up a very lucrative 90% of K-pop consumers, with only 10% of fans actually residing in South Korea.
Yet, while this globalisation has clearly promoted Korean girl groups to UK chart success, it’s not without criticism from long-term fans. Some feel the industry’s desire for commercial success has gotten in the way of innovating new sounds. “K-pop is still using the same recipe it always has, and while it’s successful, the sound of new K-pop, especially girl groups, can often be repetitive and generic,” says Ketan M.
Meanwhile, others feel the worldconquering aspirations of record labels has pushed girl groups away from the genre’s original style. “I have friends that used to be K-pop superfans but they’ve become more casual listeners because they just don’t feel it’s the same any more,” says Pinamang.
The global dominance of Korean girl groups may feel like an untimely collision with the west that impedes the genre’s progress, but the reality is that the British and Korean pop industries have never been worlds apart.
For the past decade, the exuberant pop hits, empowering harmonies and “he’s not good enough” lyrics have drawn parallels with Britain’s Little Mix.
The comparison is not unfounded. In fact, Little Mix’s Jade Thirlwall has written music for K-pop girl group Twice.
British pop songwriters are also increasingly gravitating towards South Korean artists. “A lot of K-pop songs are written in Europe, and there are numerous K-pop songwriting camps held in Europe, some of which I’ve personally attended,” says Rodrigues Lee. Plus, British garage and bubblegum pop are influences in K-pop, so there is a musical crossover in terms of sound.
But there are also distinctive differences, and British music moguls have tried (and failed) to replicate these to gain a slice of the K-pop pie. Simon Cowell’s The X Factor: The Band was a short-lived attempt to forge a “UKpop” band to rival Korean groups. FrontRow Records also launched the UK’s first self-proclaimed K-pop girl group Kaachi in 2020, which lasted two years before disbanding.
The prefabricated element of K-pop girl groups may have seen them dismissed as artists. But the UK’s failure to replicate their style and success show they clearly have something that we, as listeners, find special. And K-pop entertainment agencies are ready and willing to propel their female talent into the full view of the British music market, amid our own pop girl group scarcity.
“I think they really are filling a gap,” says Cheetham. “And I’m not sure the UK is going to be able to fill it itself for quite a long time.”
are novels made. More and more the whole practice wearied her, even to the point of disgust.” Years later, Eliza goes on to write a novel of her own – the theme is noticeably more contemporary than her cousin’s compulsive efforts.
Fans of Smith will pick up on the familiar laundry of her sensibility within the first few pages of The Fraud: the boisterous narrative intelligence; the ear for dialogue; the chronic absence of boring sentences. I’d wager that this is her funniest novel yet and the best lines are all at Ainsworth’s expense: “Even as an adolescent, William fatally overestimated the literary significance of weather.” Or this one, about his onanistic writing process: “He always appeared entirely satisfied with every line.”
In reality, Ainsworth was once hailed as “the English Victor Hugo”, and one of his novels even outsold Dickens’s Oliver Twist. Smith captures him in his dotage, after the money has dried up, forcing his family to change houses every few years. His novels, more than two dozen of them, have fallen out of print, and publishers aren’t too keen to “look over” his new manuscript. He has recently knocked up a maidservant from Stepney, Sarah – who happens to be a decade younger than Ainsworth’s three daughters from his first marriage – and it falls on Mrs Touchet to make arrangements for a hasty wedding at the local Anglican church. Ainsworth did indeed have a housekeeper named Eliza Touchet, who died around the time The Fraud begins, in 1869. Smith reimagines her as a late-in-life novelist, a Catholic, an abolitionist, an observer of the London literary scene in the 1830s, a chronicler of the discernible changes in English society through the 1870s – someone who both belongs and doesn’t belong to the establishment.
At the centre of the novel, however, is another bit of “stolen truth”: the Tichborne case, still among the longest trials in English legal history. Sometime in 1866, a cockney-speaking butcher in Australia claimed he was Sir Roger Tichborne, heir to the Tichborne baronetcy, presumed to be lost at sea years ago. The Claimant, as he came to be known, was 200 pounds heavier than Sir Roger, couldn’t speak a word of French (Tichborne’s first language as a child), and yet the fact that he became an icon for the working classes was a testament to not just the capitalistic turn of 19th-century Britain, but also its venal dependence on slavery, indentured labour and other forms of colonial exploitation. In the novel, Sarah, the new Mrs Ainsworth, is fervid in her belief in the Claimant’s upper-class antecedents. Accompanying her to the trial, Eliza is amused by her uncouth comments and begins to understand that the masses don’t see the butcher from Wagga Wagga as an impostor, but as someone deserving of a fair day in court. The Claimant’s staunchest witness is one Andrew Bogle, a servant of the Tichbornes, formerly enslaved in a Jamaican plantation. His family story – how the Bogles went from being “highborn men” in an African village to captive overseers in a sugar estate – unfolds over 100 pages midway through the novel.
Smith presents a coruscating picture of twin societies in flux, the ways in which 19th-century England and Jamaica were “two sides of
Every few pages I was struck by how light the novel feels, despite its length and epic themes
the same problem, profoundly intertwined”, joined at the hip by Andrew Bogle’s “secret word”: slavery. But she is also devastatingly good on the lesser delusions, the ways in which we are consistently blind to our own privileges. We see Ainsworth raucously debate the abolition of slavery with Charles Dickens, William Thackeray and other prominent literary men in his Kensal Lodge drawing room, while Mrs Touchet quietly refills their glasses with port. For years, the young Ainsworth disappears abroad, apparently to do “research” in Rome, leaving the women – his first wife, Anne Frances, and Eliza – to take care of the household. Decades later, he can’t understand why Eliza likes Middlemarch: “No adventure, no drama, no murder… Is this all that these modern ladies’ novels are to be about? People?” How could he? He has spent much of his life avoiding people, passing off almost all his responsibilities to women.
The late Martin Amis once wrote about Middlemarch that it is a “novel without weaknesses”. You might say something similar about The Fraud, except perhaps Andrew Bogle occasionally feels a bit two-dimensional, too benevolent. The first time Eliza sees him in court, she thinks he has an “honest” face, and the reader has no subsequent reason to disagree with her assessment. He is the one simple soul in a story otherwise littered with complicated portraits. Every few pages I was struck by how light the novel feels, despite its length and epic themes. The short chapters glide tellingly between decades and scenes.
• The Fraud by Zadie Smith is published by Hamish Hamilton (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply