As Jamie Lee argued, until the very early twenty-first century, popular music in Korea with its English mix at least provided the youth of the country an opportunity to construct an identity, connect with each other, represent a discourse of resistance, and reject the norms of the older generation (446). However, as the two exemplary K-Pop songs analyzed in this paper (“Jumping” and “Gee”) and other songs prove, the majority of K-Pop in recent years has not resisted the norms of Western music, portraying both the secularism of modernity (e.g. commercialism and individualism) and a stylistic gesture to resist modern society, because they are busy pursuing primarily commercial successes.
Jin & Ryoo (2014), Critical Interpretation of Hybrid K-Pop:The Global-Local Paradigm of English Mixing in Lyrics