K-Pop Comes To Cayman For A Korea-bbean Music Confab

You land on a strip by a strand of sand called Seven Mile Beach in a junket-jet carrying a party of Korean and Western music pros to a conference on an island known less for fun in the sun than funds in shell structures.

You travel from the airport of this tranquil and safe British territory on roads as flat, well-paved and safe as Cape Cod’s. But you’re on an island a hop away from pot-holed streets to the son montuno clubs of Santiago de Cuba or the lush Blue Mountain switchbacks down to funky Kingston’s sound systems.

Cayman has plenty of money but hungers for more music tourism. So Cool Out, a music-meets-money conference and fest launched recently as an annual event, may be the ticket.

Sure, in February of 2019 KAABOO Cayman came to the island, as an offshoot of the upscale SoCal fest and partnering Richard Branson’s Virgin Fest with Cayman mogul Ken Dart to bring mainland headliners Flo Rida, The Chainsmokers, Blondie, Duran Duran, David Spade and others to the island.

But it was a one-and-done wonder, because KAABOO got Kiboshed by legal woes (unrelated to Cayman) and shut down shortly after the island event. Happily, issues reportedly resolved and KAABOO is coming back this year, but to Del Mar, California, not to Cayman.

So let’s get back to Cool Out.

“The mission of Cool Out is to position the Cayman Islands as a creative and financial hub for the global music and entertainment industry within the Caribbean,” says a representative (who asks to remain anonymous) of Deep Roots Entertainment, the organizer of the event. “After COVID shut down the island for almost two years, our local artists and hospitality sector suffered greatly and so Cool Out was created to help support our local artists and hospitality sectors recover, drawing upon the strengths of our financial sector.”

You make your way to the Ritz Carlton, the locus of the event, where panels discuss the business of K-pop, and later you wander to a stage where K-pop singer AleXa sings “Juliet,” a jubilant SoCol OMO!-meets-Oklahoma kinda country K-pop smash. AleXa is followed by Steve Aoki delivering highly danceable high decibels. The superstar DJ hails from Japan but is one of the most active non-Korean collaborators with K-pop artists, including with BTS.

You wander down the road to a hall where you take in traditional tunes from a young Korean ensemble wearing pirate hats, playing a bounty of folk tunes having little to do with K-pop but a lot to do with Korea’s musical elegance. They’re followed by a fish tea of local island funk bands Red Boat Experience and Swanky Kitchen Band. Musical mash-ups between locals and visiting Koreans is one of the event’s treasures.

Next day, AleXa’s manager, Eshy Gazit, former manager of BTS and currently handling Monsta X, speaks on a panel (moderated by the author) about what the West can learn from Korea about exporting music, and what K-pop can learn from Western music biz models about taking over the world.

“K-pop is an extension of the Motown model,” says panelist Andrae Alexander, a Grammy-winning composer and music business professor at the University of Southern California. “And of course the Motown model is an extension of the Detroit car boom based on factory manufacturing. During the height of Motown’s success in the 1960s, Berry Gordy owned multiple houses on both sides of the street of the Motown studio; each house served a different purpose in training or servicing the needs of Motown’s signed artists. For example, one house was for practicing performances, one house was for learning etiquette and media training, another house was for dance rehearsals, one house was for eating, and one house was for finance.”

And just as Motown moved its operations out of Detroit to Los Angeles in the late ‘60s, so too are Seoul’s K-pop factories like Hybe, the company behind BTS, trying to transport their assembly lines to Hollywood.

If the Motown Sound of Detroit was part of the essence of Soul Music – even after Berry Gordy and Smokey Robinson moved out of Motor City – just where is K-pop’s essence located? What does Seoul’s soul music sound like?

Not necessarily like K-pop, says Jangwon Lee, who spoke at the conference. He’s the founder of Beyond Music, known as Korea’s largest independent music catalog investment and management company.

“We see the K-pop companies that are making BTS, Blackpink, Red Velvet, or whatever, these companies are much more accentuated in the West,” says Lee. “They seem to take up all of the oxygen of Korean music. But actually, all of these four or five major K-pop companies combined, they take up less than 50 percent of the Korean recorded music market, which leaves the 50 plus percent of the market wide open for what you would call more indigenous or more artistic Korean music.”

K-pop is a commercial format that, aside from the Korean look and language, is much like Western pop music. That is, it’s voraciously eating up modes, memes and manias of the moment to make money and maybe project soft power of a culture. But what culture? Is K-pop projecting largely Korean soft power, American soft power, or something else?

“No conversation about K-pop can happen without first talking about the seeds of K-pop,” says Alexander. “The Korean War in the early 1950s brought the American military and, subsequently, American culture to the country. What most people don’t realize is that it is impossible to remove Black or African American culture from American culture, meaning, wherever American culture goes, so does Black and African American culture.”

No question about that. Pop music around the world projects African-American soft power. Just take “Seven” by Jung Kook of BTS fame, featuring Latto, a Grammy-nominated R&B Rapper from Atlanta on the bridge. Currently sitting at Number 5 on Spotify’s Global Top 50, with 1.25 billion plays on Spotify in less than six months. It starts off with a guitar vamp much like the Fender Rhodes progression on Bill Withers’ “Just the Two of Us,” a 1981 that reached No. 2 on the Billboard 100. Like the Withers’ hit, Jung Kook’s verse hangs heavily on a “blue note,” the gold standard of African American Blues and Jazz. No one’s screaming “copyright infringement” here, and even if the uplifting vamp seems a bit lifted, it’s common musical vocabulary worldwide nowadays.

One of the more original aspects of K-pop is not so much about the music as about the squeaky clean, drug-free code of conduct of the culture. Korea has strict restrictions around any kind of drug use, an infraction that carries jail time and societal backlash in Seoul, even for cannabis. So it’s a scandal when super idol G-Dragon of BigBang is busted for drug use, or when his bandmate T.O.P. is convicted for smoking marijuana four times with a 21-year-old female K-pop trainee singer at his swank Seoul home, receiving a 10 month prison sentence (later suspended). Drug use by K-pop celebrities, even marijuana, is considered a big disgrace in the home country.

On the other hand, if a Reggae or Reggaeton star admitted to not smoking Ganja, that might be a scandal. Drug use by Western pop stars is neither surprising nor career train-wrecking.

K-pop is still largely made and marketed (some say manufactured) by Korean concerns like JYP, SM, YG and HYBE, often recruiting idol candidates as young as 10 years old, and then priming and primping them for profitability over a long term.

But will K-pop’s disciplinarian lifestyle requirement relax as K-pop corporate titans open foreign offices in the US?

Judging from Cayman’s Cool-Out K-pop party, all is Haengsyo. So don’t worry ‘bout a ‘ting.

“Cool Out brings together the finance, legal and artistic communities in a way that has never happened before in the region,” says Jeff Liebenson, president of the International Association of Entertainment Attorneys, a partner in the event. “It’s a unique opportunity for us to integrate Cayman and the Caribbean more into the global music industry.”

The 2024 Cool Out “come back” is set for November 14-17, with a focus on Mexico.