Popular Korean music is very strange. It is very different from the music in other Asian countries, giving Chinese and Japanese ample reason to make fun of Koreans.
What is so weird about it? It is difficult to describe... Groups like UP, HOT (High Five of Teenagers (that makes sense... actually it DOESN'T!)) and Young Turks sing extremely happy, geeky songs. There are, incidently, more normal singers like Kang Suji who do not wear nursery-type scuba-gear clothing and sing normal-ish songs, but this type of singer is generally less popular in Korea.
One trend in Korea seems to be that there are a lot of singers who have come from America.
Kang Suji, Solid, and others all came from America (some of them can not speak Korean very well yet)... Another weirdness of Korean groups/singers is their attire. It is indescribably weird, so I won't describe it here, but maybe I'll find a picture... Korea doesn't have the above-mentioned problem with Japanese singles and album CDs... Korean groups typically will have one (or maybe even two) popular songs at a time (if at all) and will therefore make sure that their one good song is on their album.
Not only that, they will often make three or four versions of that song... This is one of the weirdnesses of Asia: it's love of making lots of versions of the same, albeit good song.
Versions often have funny names to them, too...

  The Korean popular music industry, whilst dominated by forgetable dance music aimed at a teenage market has some very creative and noteworthy elements derived from a rich heritage of musical and creative expression.

 While the term underground in English brings to mind images of avant-guard acts that may shun wide popular acceptance, in Korea the term is applied to musical acts that do not appear on the regular popular music television shows.
The musicians banded together under the Korean label of underground do not necessarily aim at producing music for the arcane tastes of an intellectual clique. It may simply be that they have a sincere commitment to the producing quality music. They may also hold contempt for the popular music industry and prefer to avoid it's dubious values.
For many years live music in bars was banned by paranoid military regimes as a potential source of subversive activity as well as decadent morality.
It was probably during this period that the interpretation of underground began as a result of the distinction between sanctioned artists promoted through mass media and those involved with music on a more clandestine basis.
As the political climate loosened up and market forces gained greater influence over the media, the nature of the acts operating in the different arenas changed.
Obviously any categorisation applied to human activity will be fairly arbitrary.
I am not attempting to define the nature of the artists described but merely using the label of Underground to indicate a general theme or direction for this page.

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