How K-pop’s most ancient ingredient, gugak, became its passport to the world
How K-pop’s most ancient ingredient, gugak, became its passport to the world
Here’s the thing nobody expects when they fall for K-pop from the outside: the sound that hits hardest is not always the newest thing in the track. Sometimes it is the oldest.
A percussion break that sounds like a village suddenly remembering its own pulse. A reed tone that cuts through the gloss of trap drums. A folk phrase, half-chant and half-laughter, rising out of a pop hook like it has been waiting there for centuries. The surprise is not that K-pop learned how to travel. The surprise is what traveled with it.
We are often taught to imagine “going global” as a kind of sanding-down. The local edges get softened. The old language gets thinned out. The inconveniently specific thing is left at home so the product can move more easily through the world. But some of K-pop’s most thrilling moments have proved the opposite: the most rooted sound can be the thing that carries a song the farthest.
That sound is gugak, Korea’s traditional music, but this is not only a piece about instruments. It is about two Korean feelings that keep slipping through translation: 멋 and 흥.
멋, romanized as meot, is not quite style. It is not simply coolness, and definitely not the flattened English “swag.” 멋 is flair with a spine. It is the way someone carries themselves when confidence has ripened into ease. It is not expensive. It is not loud by default. It cannot be bought off a rack, although many have tried. Real 멋 has a moral temperature to it: dignity, play, self-knowledge, a refusal to beg for approval.
흥, romanized as heung, is even harder to pin down. It is not just fun. Fun can be scheduled, sold, and photographed. 흥 is what happens when joy becomes kinetic. It is the thing that makes your shoulder move before your mind has granted permission. It is the bright twin of 한, han, that famously heavy Korean word for grief, resentment, endurance, and sorrow that does not pass cleanly through the body. If 한 is the ache that lingers, 흥 is the joy that bursts out anyway.
That is why gugak in K-pop rarely feels like decoration when it works. The instruments matter, yes. The gong matters. The drum matters. The folk song matters. But what really travels is the emotional engine underneath them: the 멋 of standing in your own shape, and the 흥 of turning history into motion.
Before we walk through the songs, it helps to know what your ear is catching.
Samul nori is a percussion quartet made from four traditional Korean instruments: the small gong kkwaenggwari, the larger gong jing, the hourglass drum janggu, and the barrel drum buk. The kkwaenggwari is the sharp one, the metallic crack that can slice through a whole arrangement like lightning finding metal. Pansori is Korea’s epic vocal storytelling form, traditionally performed by a singer and a drummer, built from singing, speech, gesture, and narrative stamina. Taepyeongso is a piercing double-reed wind instrument, historically at home in farmers’ music and royal procession music such as daechwita. Piri is another Korean double-reed instrument, made from bamboo, less trumpet-blare and more human cry.
Keep those colors in your ear. Now listen to what K-pop did with them.
B.A.P, “No Mercy” (2012): the early crack in the wall
B.A.P’s “No Mercy” is not the most polished example of gugak fusion in K-pop. That is part of its charm. It arrives like an experiment that did not ask permission first.
The track is mostly hip-hop muscle and rock-riff bravado, but then the dance break hits and the floor changes. At around 2:36 in the music video, “No Mercy” brings in samul nori, using Korean folk percussion as the rhythmic engine of the break. Soompi identifies the section as samul nori and notes the two-drums, two-gongs structure of the percussion style. Even the official 1theK/LOEN description says the song crossovers with samul nori sounds added through Himchan’s idea, and points to the dialect rap at the opening.
That second detail matters. “No Mercy” does not only use traditional percussion. It also pulls in Gyeongsang-do satoori, a regional dialect from southeastern Korea. So the Korean-ness is layered: not just national tradition, but regional texture. Not just the museum sound, but the hometown mouth.
This is why the song still shows up in “K-pop meets tradition” conversations long after B.A.P’s original run ended. It was not seamless. It was not subtle. It was a door kicked open by a gong.
And maybe that roughness was the point. The samul nori break does not politely blend into the song. It announces itself. It says: here is an older rhythm, and it can still start a fight.
G-Dragon, “Niliria” (2013): the folk song in designer armor
If B.A.P cracked the door open, G-Dragon walked through it wearing sunglasses.
“Niliria” takes its name and vocal sample from the Korean traditional folk song of the same title. YG Life described the track as using a vocal sample from a Korean traditional folk song, combined with hip-hop, and Pitchfork later called it a high-velocity flip of a traditional Korean folk song.
That fusion was not accidental decoration. It was almost autobiographical.
A 2002 Korea Times profile places the young Kwon Ji-yong at Korean Traditional Arts Middle School, in the music-theater department, while also tracing the spark of his rap obsession to Wu-Tang Clan. The detail is small, but it is electric: Black American hip-hop and Korean traditional arts sitting inside the same teenager before either had fully learned what the other would become.
That tension is the song.
“Niliria” does not treat the folk source as something fragile that must be protected under glass. It flips it into swagger. The old refrain becomes hook, taunt, runway, dare. Where an older version of the melody might carry a folk sadness, G-Dragon lets it grin.
The Missy Elliott version makes the whole thing stranger and richer. This is not Korean tradition sealed inside Korean borders. It is a Korean folk phrase pushed through global hip-hop language, with one of American rap’s great futurists in the room. The result is not preservation in the museum sense. It is preservation by combustion.
There is 멋 in that. Not politeness. Not heritage-pageant reverence. The kind of 멋 that says: I know exactly where this came from, and I also know it can still outrun you.
BTS, “IDOL” (2018): the grandest platform
By the time BTS released “IDOL,” K-pop was no longer simply trying to enter the global conversation. It was helping set the terms of it. That makes “IDOL” fascinating: at one of the highest-pressure moments of K-pop’s global expansion, BTS did not hide the Korean. They turned it up.
The Korea Times describes “IDOL” as drawing punch from jangdan, the rhythmic backbone of traditional Korean music, and pansori, Korea’s storytelling vocal form, inside a track that also uses South African dance beats, trap grooves, and EDM drops. Soompi also notes Korean instruments and references in the song and video, including kkwaenggwari, janggu, the pansori-associated exclamation “eolssu,” folk-pungmul movement, hanbok-inspired clothes, and traditional architecture.
That is the architecture of “IDOL”: global beat language underneath, Korean rhythmic and vocal memory cutting through the middle, visual tradition staged not as nostalgia but as velocity.
The song’s thesis is right there in the posture. You cannot shame me out of myself. You cannot make me smaller by naming me. You cannot turn “idol” into an insult because I already know who I am.
The traditional elements work because they are not there to prove authenticity to an imaginary judge. They are there because the song is about self-possession. “IDOL” is not a polite cultural showcase. It is a refusal to be translated into something more comfortable.
This is where 흥 becomes political without becoming grim. The song is jubilant, but not naïve. It knows it is being watched. It knows it is being categorized. It knows a global audience is trying to pronounce the shape of it. And still it moves.
The world did not need to understand every reference to feel the point. The body got there first.
Stray Kids, “Thunderous” (소리꾼) (2021): noise becomes ancestry
Stray Kids built “Thunderous” out of an insult and turned it into a drumline.
The Korean title, 소리꾼 (sorikkun), can refer to a pansori singer. The song also plays against 잔소리꾼 (jansorikkun), a nagger, someone who keeps scolding from the sidelines. That pun is the whole engine of the track: you call us noisy, we call ourselves singers.
Musically and visually, “Thunderous” leans hard into Korean traditional elements. Rolling Stone India asked about the cultural elements in the music video and sound, and Changbin answered that the group wanted to express “how grand our traditional musical sounds can be,” as well as the possibilities of combining those sounds with K-pop. Bang Chan connected the title itself to pansori singers and said traditional instruments were added to emphasize the concept. The Korea Times specifically identifies the kkwaenggwari, the metallic gong of Korean folk bands, as the cutting sound and pulse of the track.
That kkwaenggwari matters because it does not behave like a polite ornament. It clangs. It interrupts. It refuses to be background.
Which makes it perfect for Stray Kids. “Thunderous” is a song about refusing to lower the volume just because someone else finds your sound inconvenient. The traditional elements do not soften the group’s noise. They legitimize it. They give it ancestry.
The video understands this too: hanok and palace imagery, pungmul dancers, lion-mask references, dokkaebi energy. But the real fusion is not only visual. It is conceptual. Stray Kids take the accusation of being too loud and answer with a traditional sound-world that has always known how to be loud, communal, percussive, public, and alive.
That is 흥 with teeth. Not joy as sweetness. Joy as impact.
ATEEZ, “멋 (The Real) (흥 : 興Ver.)”: the thesis in one title
And then there is ATEEZ, who kindly put the whole essay into one title.
멋 (The Real) (흥 : 興 Ver.) is almost too perfect as an anchor: meot and heung sitting side by side, the two words this piece has been circling from the start. The official music video for the “Heung Ver.” was released by KQ Entertainment in December 2021, and the song later became part of ATEEZ’s live global-facing performance vocabulary, including a GRAMMY.com Global Spin performance of “The Real (Heung Version)” at the GRAMMY Museum in Los Angeles.
For the musical claim, the safest wording is this: the “Heung Ver.” is not merely Korean-coded styling. Gugak musicians were involved in its traditional arrangement and session work. L’ART POUR L’ART Studio, a gugak group, describes participating in the gugak arrangement and session for ATEEZ’s “The Real” Heung version.
That matters because “The Real” is a song about what counts as real coolness. Not domination. Not posing. Not looking down on people from a borrowed throne. The message is closer to: be humble, be kind, know your worth, move with others.
In other words, 멋 is not arrogance. 멋 is calibration. It is confidence that still has manners. It is flair that does not need cruelty to prove itself.
And 흥 is the performance principle that makes that ethic visible. In the “Heung Ver.,” the track keeps kicking upward, communal and bright, as if the song has gathered a courtyard around itself. The traditional sound does not make ATEEZ seem older. It makes them seem more present, more grounded, more themselves.
That is the secret of the best gugak-fusion moments in K-pop. Tradition is not used as a costume for authority. It becomes a way of moving. The old sound is not there to say, “Look how ancient we are.” It says, “Look how alive this still is.”
The bittersweet beat: when the rooted sound travels past home
There is one ache folded into all this joy.
ATEEZ are one of the clearest examples of the modern K-pop paradox: enormous global reach, quieter domestic chart presence. In 2023, ATEEZ topped the Billboard 200 with THE WORLD EP.FIN : WILL, becoming the first K-pop group outside the “big four” agencies to do so. Billboard Korea later wrote that ATEEZ became the first K-pop boy group to perform at Coachella in 2024, earned a second Billboard 200 No. 1 with GOLDEN HOUR : Part.2, yet remained hard to find on major Korean domestic streaming charts.
That is the strange counter-melody: some of the most Korean sounds in K-pop now travel farther than they seem to land at home. Court reeds, folk gongs, pansori echoes, dialect, old refrains, all crossing oceans while the domestic charts look elsewhere.
But even that ache does not cancel the joy. It sharpens it.
Because the lesson of gugak-fusion is not that tradition needs rescuing by pop. It is that tradition was never as still as people imagined. It could become a dance break. It could become a rap boast. It could become a stadium chant. It could become a boy group’s answer to everyone who told them they were too loud.
Maybe that is the real passport: not smoothness, but specificity. Not becoming less Korean in order to travel, but becoming so unmistakably rooted that the world has to meet the sound where it stands.
K-pop did not leave the old instruments behind at the airport. It packed the gong. It packed the reed. It packed the folk song. It packed the words English keeps failing to flatten: 멋 and 흥.
And somewhere along the way, before the world could spell 흥, it learned how to feel it.
-by. Empathetic Cultural Contents Lover, who happened to be Native Korean Speaker, so set out in this journey to translate between the gaps of cultural barriers that might exist in understanding K-contents. I will reveal my secret ability in my next post why I can link all these songs across timeline and across companies. But I really need your support in this lonely pursuit; want some feedback and communication please! I will update the site soon so that it will be easily available. Please reach me out for whatever you want to say or question. We are creating the blog for empathy together, not only me as the sole writer! Let’s flip the script! Thanks for taking the time to read my piece and I send you love and support wherever you are.
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