On May 21, 2014, Illionaire Records released [11:11]. Its title track, “Yeonjulgori (The Link),” entered the Gaon Chart at number 96 in its release week. Given that legacy media still held strong sway at the time, this was a curious phenomenon—because when [11:11] came out, Illionaire Records had no history of TV appearances. Before the label was even founded, the whole of their TV résumé amounted to Dok2 appearing on Mnet’s <M! PICK> in 2006 as its youngest-ever beatmaker.
And so Illionaire—on the charisma of its three members, The Quiett, Dok2, and Beenzino, and the sheer force of trap alone—climbed the charts and became the opening shot of a cultural shift. Trap music’s unfiltered bravado, vivid self-assurance, and flashy fashion instantly became icons of the era. Over the roughly ten years that followed, hip-hop edged toward the center of Korean pop culture through audition programs.
There are many explanations for why hip-hop caught fire in 2010s Korea. But to borrow The Quiett’s words, hip-hop was a genre the era itself summoned. Let’s look back at Korean society in the 2010s. Smartphone penetration surpassed 30 million people from November 2013, and around this time a new thing called Facebook spread rapidly. Facebook toppled the strongholds of NateOn and Cyworld—the so-called national SNS platforms—until it became a service where it was harder to find someone not using it. At the same time, with slurs like jinjichung (try-hard bug), gamseongchung (sentimentality bug), and seolmyeongchung (over-explainer bug), it thoroughly demolished the content once called “Cyworld sensibility.”
If we note that Cyworld’s “ilchon”—its word for a friend connection—came from chonsu, the concept of measuring distance between family members, we can see the zeitgeist of the 2010s in finer detail. Etymologically, “ilchon” carries the nuance that you and I are as close as family, whereas “follower” is flattened into the nuance that I am merely watching someone’s moves. The brutal shattering of Cyworld’s content on Facebook is precisely the point where the gap becomes stark—between the “ilchon,” to whom one could pour out even the deepest feelings, and the “follower,” to whom one cannot. And so followers dismantled all their ilchon and embalmed them as cringe history, opening the age of self-PR in Korea.
In Facebook’s early days, people realized just how sweet attention could be. That’s because the “Like”—far more immediate and quick to compare popularity than the “Today” counter people fussed over in the Cyworld days—had appeared. Of course, Korean internet users had already experienced online communities with upvote systems, like Nate Pann, Naver Boom, and DC Inside. But Facebook’s Likes operated at a different scale of exposure, because you could receive nationwide attention, freed from the spatial constraints of the computer. So people studied and refined their SNS content for more attention. And soon, the answer narrowed to two: give people what they want, or be envied.
In that sense, the image of the trapper broadcast through the media was the very incarnation of the self-PR era. They won envy by spelling out, in blunt language, that they were this accomplished and had piled up enormous effort for this life, and at the same time delivered fresh auditory pleasure by chopping hi-hats to the extreme. And so simulacra of the trapper flooded Facebook, and the original narrative of self-made success was diluted. People borrowed only the trapper’s dazzling surface and made it their own persona. The “car poor” phenomenon is a prime example.
From the late 2010s, the self-development keyword—that you must strive to live such a life—came into vogue, and this became a wellspring of ever more striving. Thanks to it, the self-made narrative that formed one axis of the trapper remained valid. And as people’s efforts toward success continued for years, fatigue steadily piled up in society. Then Korea entered the 2020s.
We in the 2020s cannot secure even a single house to lay our bodies down, no matter how much we work. Some have nowhere to work at all. At the end of effort without reward came burnout, and the perception that nothing works no matter what took root in the minds of the young. According to the National Health Insurance Service, the number of depression patients in Korea in 2022 rose 33% from 2018, four years earlier. In particular, people in their 20s and 30s made up 34.4% of all depression patients, and 40.96% including teenagers. Given Korea’s population pyramid, where the young are fewer than the middle-aged and elderly, this means the younger generation is more exposed to mental threats than their elders. Reflecting this, the number of people in their 20s receiving psychiatric care rises by the day. Young people’s hearts have fallen ill.
We can infer that this phenomenon stems from the competitive pressure and comparison culture of Korean society. In the three Gangnam districts, where competitive pressure is fiercest, the number of adolescents visiting psychiatrists rose 65% over four years, and Korea’s youth suicide rate is the highest in the OECD. It means that more and more people, from the intense competitive pressure endured since childhood, are giving up on life or checking out. And since it’s hard enough to keep oneself afloat, they don’t have children. In 2021, as this lethargy and resignation began to deepen, Parannoul’s [To See the Next Part of the Dream] was released.
[To See the Next Part of the Dream] is fundamentally an album that follows the genre grammar of shoegaze. Critics often describe shoegaze as a genre that stacks effects on the guitar layer upon layer to build a wall of sound; in it, the vocals, rather than leaping forward, convey the feeling of sinking into that wall of noise. The countless bits of information the world pours out, the wall of sound placed before them, and the young generation quietly adrift inside that wall—Parannoul gathered them all up and painted a self-portrait of the young generation in sound. And so [To See the Next Part of the Dream] became an emblem of the young music aficionado.
On top of this, through an interview from around the album’s release posted on Parannoul’s own blog, we can confirm that they listened to a great deal of Japanese independent music. And at the time of the album’s release, Japan was still mired in low growth. In other words, Japanese independent music was music made by people who had stood at the very center of the problems Korean youth were expected to face.
Yet even in such conditions, it was only two or three years after release that [To See the Next Part of the Dream] began to draw notice from domestic aficionados outside the Post-Rock Gallery. The reason is that 2021 sat in a transitional interim of mood. Meansteer had not yet appeared, and <Show Me the Money 9>, fronted by the outstanding rookie Mushvenom and Lil Boi, was still influencing the public. Moreover, <Show Me the Money 10>, which aired after Parannoul’s album, unearthed BE’O and set the charts ablaze with songs like “Rest” and “Limousine.” There was Lee Chan-hyuk’s remark that “somewhere along the way hip-hop stopped being cool,” but that remark predated Parannoul’s album.
The sentiment of the time can also be seen in the sharp clash of opinions in the Post-Rock Gallery, the hub of Parannoul’s buzz. Back then, in the camp that disliked it, evaluations like “loser sensibility,” “nerd sensibility,” and “cringe” were mainstream—the very elements that were thoroughly trampled, lumped in with Cyworld sensibility, as the self-PR era opened. As time passed, countless youth problems kept surfacing, resignation and lethargy became the mainstream sentiment, and a young aficionado class familiar with TikTok-borne Japanese culture gradually flowed in—which we can read as a reverse importation.
Based on the Korean social picture we’ve examined so far, the young generation are people who, exposed since childhood to intensified competitive pressure, no longer have the energy to express anything outward. To make matters worse, the entire country has entered a phase of low growth, so they conclude that their salaries are unlikely to rise going forward anyway.
So they seek work-life balance, secure enough money to survive, and then immerse themselves in their interests in the time that remains. And so the various subcultures that were once underground grow in size and rise into the open, while interest in mainstream culture falls compared to before. In other words, we have passed the trap of expansion and met the shoegaze of contraction.
For however many years lie ahead, we will fragment further and sink further inward. But just as Unified Silla splintered and then merged again into Goryeo, someday we will once again yearn for a grand discourse. And on the day of that yearning, the wave that rises highest will become the name of the next era.