Hybridity is a notoriously tricky concept.  It goes beyond the coexistence of races, ethnicities, and cultures, as this simple compartmentalization still implies fairly inflexible borders of difference that impede their integration into a hybrid identity.  Doobo Shim posits that one of globalization’s key effects is the impetus for local communities to sift through the stifling influence of Westernization and rediscover the local of their local culture (2006).  In this new transnational context, these communities appropriate aspects of global (typically understood as Western) culture like music and body practice, but they infuse these aspects with their traditional local meaning (Young 2003).

However, not all forms of transnational flows work to create hybridized cultural products.  Often, talented youth cross borders into new territory, only to operate under an existing umbrella of cultural hegemony rather than bringing in new influences.  Interactions between the Japanese and Korean music industries in the 20^th-century postcolonial period underscore this shortcoming.  Although Korean folk singers did carve out a niche influence among a small number of Japanese musicians, a majority of female Korean pop singers and, most notoriously, male Korean superstar Cho, an artist who was renowned in Korea for his musical versatility, were forced to remarket themselves as artists in the declining market of traditional Japanese enka because there was “no room for them” anywhere else in Japan’s music industry (Shin 2009: 109).  Even the term “K-pop” itself was likely created and spread by Japanese media simply as a way of defining what was not Japanese pop music, the term was made broad enough to also cover Korean singers who recorded albums exclusively of songs with Japanese lyrics (Shin 2009: 106).  Up until the Korean Wave of the mid-2000s, Korean musicians essentially left what made them “Korean” behind as they crossed into Japan, adopting Japanese styles and even language in order to better market themselves in a country outside their own. 

This trend of transnational body exchanges masquerading as musical hybridity continues today.

In February 2015, the female K-pop group 4MINUTE released “Crazy,” the lead single off of their sixth EP.  The group maintains that the track was a return to their niche, “out there” roots and an attempt to “differentiate themselves” from mainstream K-pop.  In truth, both the song and the music video are unabashed billboards of Westernization.  The group members flash across the screen as caricatures of commercialized American hip-hop, complete with oversized gold chains, twerking-based dance moves, and glaring Nike product placement. 

In addition to a verse entirely in English, the song structure is a nearly direct derivation of the song “Boss Mode,” a trap-influenced track produced by the Australian EDM duo Knife Party. 
The song is a contemporary example of foreign bodies implanted into Western culture, much like Korean singers in Japan in the mid-20^th century.  In these cases, national borders are still clear-cut obstructions to transnational flows of culture.  The Korean bodies are confined to cultural imitation, dismissed as empty vessels to be filled with and to spew out whatever culture is necessary to sell records.  The result is not hybridity, but rather a masquerade in which young bodies find themselves mimicking a culture that is not their own in order to satisfy profit-driven needs. 

References

Shim, Doobo. “Hybridity and the Rise of Korean Popular Culture in Asia.” Media, Culture, and Society 28:1 (2006), pp. 25-44.

Young, Robert. Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Shin, Hyunjoon. “Reconsidering Transnational Cultural Flows of Popular Music in East Asia: Transbordering Musicians in Japan and Korea Searching for ‘Asia.’” Korean Studies 33:1 (2009), pp. 101-123.