Author | Ding Qianwen Editor | Fan Zhihui
In recent years, classical music seems to have become the sampling library of K-Pop. The phenomenon of
is even more eye-catching with the strong return of BLACKPINK in September. Its title song "Shut Down" sampled the work "Clock" by Hungarian composer Franz Liszt, and became the accompaniment of an hip-hop song. The use of sampling in this song has also attracted mixed reviews, and the criticism mainly revolves around the issue of laziness that is basically a framework of the entire song without main melody and is supported by the sampling part that is extremely existence and throughout the entire song.
This has also become a typical representative of K-Poph's classical music sampling. Looking back at the development of K-Pop, it is actually easy to see that sampling classical music has long been engraved in K-Pop's DNA. However, one is traditional Western music, emphasizing order and hierarchy, and the other is popular music from Korea.
looks like two parallel lines, how do they get entangled together? Why did K-Pop "take action" on classical music?
K-Pop "falls into" classical music
K-Pop is keen on using classical music as a "sampling gift package", which is not surprising. As early as the millennial in the prototype K-Pop period, it was already involved. The most typical example of
is the theme song "Never Say Goodbye" sung by the Chinese and Korean group Y-Star. In 2006, with the Korean drama " My Girl " swept across Asia, and the theme song also became popular in Asia. The most brainwashed part of the song was sampled from "G Minor 40th Symphony " by Mozart .
Entered around the 2010s, as K-Pop began to expand around the world, more and more idol groups began to frequently sample classical music and try the integration. For example, "My Child" launched by Girls Generation in 2009, the climax was sampled from "Radetsky March" by Austrian composer Johann Baptist Strauss; in 2010, the same was true for its release of "Sweet Talking Baby", and the introduction was sampled from "Minstep: String Quintet in E Major" by Italian composer Boccerini.
But overall, sampling classical music has not become the mainstream of K-Pop in the past. Until 2016, classical music sampling has gradually been frequently used in K-Pop songs, and this is somewhat related to K-Pop opening and entering the European and American mode.
For example, BTS , the album "WINGS" released in 2016 all involves classical music elements. Among them, member JIMIN's personal single "LIE" was sampled from the classical opera "La Vida Breve" by the famous composer Manuel de Fallahml5; this single also topped the 55 countries' charts, successfully opening the market door for Central European countries such as Austria and Germany that prefer classical music.
, and K-Pop intermittently intensively sampled classical music, which was mostly influenced by popular songs in the European and American music scene during the period at that time. Many popular lists in the European and American music scene draw inspiration from classical music, which is also their usual usage. Like the hit single "Someone To Call My Lover" released by Janet Jackson in 2001, the masterpiece "Bad Romance" released by Janet Jackson in 2009, and the masterpiece "Secrets" released by OneRepublic in 2010, all of which are sampled from works by famous classical musicians such as Schubert and Bach .
In a sense, sampling classical music is a common routine in the field of pop music. It is not only K-Pop, European and American music scenes, but also in Chinese music scene .
Among them, Jay Chou is the most typical representative of the Chinese music scene. For example, in 2010, Jay Chou used Tchaikovsky's "Four Seasons: The Song of the June Boat" throughout the main melody in " Piano Injury ", and Mozart's " Turkish March " was also used in the interlude part.
In addition, Jay Chou's movie "The Secrets that cannot be told " revolves around classical music elements has a profound impact on China and South Korea. S.H.E, Eason Chan , Mayday, Jolin Tsai , etc., and many of them are sampled from classical music works.
It can be said that classical music is an inexhaustible "source of inspiration" for the pop music scene, which also enables classical music to be active in the present moment in a "rebirth" posture. Why is
K-Pop keen on sampling classical music?
As mentioned above, it is common to sample classical music as a suitable basis in pop music, but K-Pop has experienced a more intense trend of classical music sampling in recent years. In addition to following the world trend, it is also related to K-Pop's eagerness to seek stable music recognition around the world.
With K-Pop's ambition to globalize, its original intention of retaining the "unchanged" sampling is to enable listeners to build "brainwashing" memories on familiar classics, and the sampling paragraphs will also support the entire melody in an extremely prominent and recognizable form. However, this is also a very "lazy" usage. To a certain extent, the magic of K-Pop's "trust" classical music is also due to the serious homogeneity of the pop music field. To put it bluntly, it is the exhaustion of inspiration and innovation.
So, in addition to copying like "Shut Down", there are also "open-book exam" students like Dreamcatcher that popularizes the sampling part. The song "Good Night" released in 2017 is to retain the score of George Frideric Handel's "Seventh Suite in G Minor" and re-arrange it with guitar, and integrate it with rock music .
The New York Times once pointed out that K-Pop is a fantasy like a mixture of classical music, hip-hop, dance music, , etc., which is an absurd and excessive aesthetic, but it has also become the most progressive and popular practice.
On the other hand, classical music spans the dimension of time and has indiscriminate recognition and popularity around the world. According to a research report released by Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in 2020, during the early lockdown period of the outbreak, the 35-year-old who listened to classical music on the Deezer platform grew by 37% worldwide. As Martin Kudela, deputy director of classical music record company SUPRAFON, said, "Classical music has a longer-term value among generations and is not affected by trends and fashions such as pop music."
Most importantly, the classical music market has shown a major growth trend around the world in recent years. According to Martin Kudela, in terms of digital revenue and physical revenue, in addition to European countries with their main audiences, other countries and regions including Africa and India have added new ones.
Last year, the potential of classical music in the global music market was also recognized by top streaming platforms. For example, Apple Music acquired the classical music streaming platform Primephoneic and plans to launch Apple's exclusive classical music app to divide the market with another classical music app Idagio.
It is not difficult to see that classical music that will never lose the market has become a catalyst for pop music to seize the mass market to a certain extent. This also made K-Pop practitioners care about it and began to try to adapt K-Pop songs in the form of classical music. For example, the debut song "Black Mamba" of aespa was released at the end of last month in the form of "SM Classics".
The reason is that it is based on the characteristics of "fast food" in popular culture, which makes K-Pop unable to truly achieve all of them. With the help of classical music, it is also an intention to use classics to consolidate the foundation.
In addition, in terms of cultural output, K-Pop tracks that have both classical and popular also have great communication advantages, especially in sports fields with a wide audience. For projects such as figure skating, flower swimming, and rhythmic gymnastics that require background music, they are generally given priority to repertoire related to classical music elements. In recent years, K-Pop has frequently appeared at events.
For example, at this year's International Skating Union Youth Figure Skating Grand Prix, BTS member JIMIN's "LIE" was performed as a short program by Iceland contestant Julia Sylvia. Previously, short programs and performance competitions have also used K-Pop songs that sample classical music.
It can be said that K-Pop is difficult to abandon classical music, which is caused by the rapid change of star-making industry that wants both classic works to be remembered and fast-fooded star-making. To put it further, it is about the ambivalence caused by the circulation of musical works, and in the end it is only "opportunity" to sample classical music.
Is classical music a universal sampling template?
However, for K-Pop or all pop music, sampling classical music actually faces the same problem, which is the balanced choice between harmony and reduction.
is used to present the sampling parts of classical music as auxiliary compared to the European and American music scenes, and K-Pop shows two more obvious commercial dependence extremes.
One of them is "How to regenerate flowers after taking essence". In this regard, the new song "Feel My Rhythm" released by Red Velvet this year disassembles the part sampled from Bach's famous song "Aria on the strings" and "fill in the blanks" in different intervals of the whole song. On this basis, a new melody was written and integrated with it, making this "week banquet famous song" that is very familiar to the public throughout the whole song, but it is not a straightforward narration, but a song that is acceptable to the public while retaining the complexity of harmonics. However, for the sake of harmony, this song also abandoned the mix, which actually distorted many instruments.
Furthermore, it is "lazy copying intact". This is true for "Shut Down" in BLACKPINK's new album. However, there is another need to copy the sampling situation as an introduction or to add color to MV vision. For example, in 2017, the girl group MOMOLAND chose Czech composer Julius Fucik's "Gladiator Admission March" as the introduction part of the main song "Freeze". Although the sampling has not been changed, it is only used as Intro, and it undertakes the function of leading the audience into the scene atmosphere presented in the MV.
Back to K-Pop, the phenomenon of using classical music as a sampling package is not difficult to understand. In the final analysis, it is based on the fact that the star-making industry also needs "packaging" with connotation. Just as in recent years, more and more popular idols and artists have begun to hope to be called "artists".
It is worth noting that despite being frequently sampled, the environment of classical music in the streaming era is far from good. On the one hand, most streaming media platforms have not yet established a metadata resource library for classical music, which leads to difficulties in retrieval among listeners; on the other hand, there is a payment cost problem between the revenue model of streaming media and the quality of classical music resources and quality, that is, whether revenue can be created to support copyright purchase, recording, etc.
In general, the pop music field is still inseparable from "sampling". In order to be recognized quickly at the moment, pop culture put on the sampling of the "emperor's new clothes", which also aroused the young people's interest in "retro". It may take a long time to go around, and classical music may return to public aesthetics.
