For Ejae, the last 10 months have felt like a lifetime’s worth of success — and sickness.
Since the animated film “KPop Demon Hunters” became a global sensation last June, its hit song “Golden,” — which Ejae co-wrote and sang — has won a Golden Globe, a Grammy and an Oscar. Throughout it all, she had gotten sick eight times, including with Covid, the flu and bronchitis, twice. At some of the live performances of the track she had barely been holding it together with a fever and rattling lungs.
“Maybe it’s muscle memory,” she said. “Once the lights shine I just lock in.”
She was recently back in Seoul — where those instincts had been honed over the decade she had spent training to be a K-pop star — musing about what the future after her unexpected and precipitous rise might look like. The streets along her mother’s neighborhood, where she was staying, were awash with cherry blossoms, announcing the arrival of spring. Visible at a distance was N Seoul Tower, the landmark featured prominently in the film.
In South Korea, “Demon Hunters” has been celebrated as a lesson in how to market “Koreanness” to a Western audience without compromising on authenticity. Critics admired its deep cultural references and granular attention to details like the texture of the pavement on the streets of Seoul. At a news conference earlier that April afternoon, reporters confessed feeling a swell of national pride watching Ejae and the two other singers on “Golden” — Audrey Nuna and Rei Ami — perform at the Oscars, in a show that featured elements of traditional Korean music.
Yet these accolades have also revealed tensions. That the film — the deliverer of K-pop’s first Grammy — was ultimately an American production, created by Sony and Netflix, has prompted concerns that cultural exports like K-pop might no longer belong to South Korea in the way that Champagne does to France or bourbon to the United States.
Ejae, 34, whose birth name is Kim Eun-jae, was familiar with these debates. She recalled with exasperation how, growing up in South Korea, she was sometimes called “black hair,” a pejorative term for diaspora Koreans deemed to be Korean in race only, as Ejae, a U.S. citizen, spent some of her childhood in the United States. Now, some had questioned whether the song “Golden” — despite having been written by a team of K-pop songwriters — was even real K-pop at all.
“Isn’t it cooler that Korean Americans utilize that system to share that culture?” she said. “I hate that it’s a versus thing.”
But the impermanence of such labels now appealed to her.
“I still don’t know who I am as an artist,” she said. “What will I do with that freedom? I’m still trying to figure that out.”
Learning Korean
Ejae was born in Seoul but spent her early childhood in Fort Lee, N.J., at a time when K-pop was still seen as weird and foreign, an obstacle to assimilation, even among many other Korean Americans. Showing her classmates her favorite artists, she recalled, would draw “ews.”
She moved back to Seoul with her mother in the late ’90s, when she was in the second grade, after her parents divorced. She asked her mother to teach her the Korean alphabet just so she could understand the lyrics of her favorite song by the K-pop boy band g.o.d.
She likes to note that learning Korean from K-pop and her mother left her with an odd, anachronistic idiom — a hodgepodge that includes both early 2000s colloquialisms and expressions that fell out of fashion in the 1970s.
When Ejae became serious about her singing ambitions at the age of 10, she and her mother frequented noraebang, or karaoke, so Ejae could practice. After auditioning for all the major K-pop companies in South Korea, Ejae joined SM Entertainment — the only one that accepted her — as a trainee at the age of 11.
K-pop as an object of childhood yearning and as a business, Ejae would discover, were very different things.
Trainees at SM, competing for spots on future debut slates, were constantly assessed and graded on their singing, dancing and weight, for which they were given weekly targets. Ejae, who is about 5 feet 9 inches tall, recalled towering over the boys and stressing out about upcoming weigh-ins, the results of which were shouted aloud in front of everyone else. Once, a female handler cornered her and said: “Your dancing feels very heavy and I’ll tell you why — it’s your thighs.”
“So I would start criticizing the way I look,” Ejae said. Her voice was also frequently judged to be too dark and husky — “too old.”
Ejae stayed on as a trainee even while she was attending New York University’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music. She had hung on hoping to debut as a solo artist, but by the time she graduated in 2014, the business model had shifted to groups. For this, Ejae was told she was too old.
She now speaks about this period with a distant appreciation. At the same time, she is still in therapy.
“To be really honest, if I continued on to become a K-pop idol, I don’t know if I’d be here,” she said. “Yeah, it was that bad.”
Drop the K in K-pop?
But a decade’s worth of training to be in the spotlight was proving useful in the current moment, which now consisted of swiveling heads and star-struck looks as Ejae meandered through Hannam, a neighborhood filled with gelato shops and high-end boutiques.
Being approached by strangers still felt a little weird, she said. But to every photograph request and greeting, she responded with a seemingly endless well of exuberance, one that somehow revealed as well as concealed the distance between star and fan.
“The fans brought me out,” she said. “They believed in my voice.”
Like many countries’ soft power campaigns, the global export of Korean content has played on nationalist sentiment, playfully known as gukbbong — or “nationalism meth” — a term for the thrill felt upon seeing one’s culture reap international praise, occasionally in ways that some have called chauvinistic.
The Oscar-winning film “Parasite,” the group BTS, and South Korea’s growing footprint in global arms sales have all been the stuff of gukbbong. So, too, has the success of “Demon Hunters” and “Golden,” which was apparent at the cafe where Ejae ordered an iced Americano. Out of earshot, the employee who took her order admitted he hadn’t seen the film. Still, he gushed: “I feel such pride as a Korean.”
In South Korean media appearances, Ejae has emphasized how much it meant to her to represent Korean culture on stages like the Oscars. But at the same time, she now said, she worried about being “pigeonholed.”
“Yes, I did ‘KPop Demon Hunters’ but it doesn’t mean I’m a K-pop artist,” she said. “I’m just an artist who’s Korean American.”
The genre has indelibly shaped her career. After letting go of her solo aspirations, Ejae turned to songwriting as a way to make music without having to sing in public. As a trainee, she had been discouraged from getting involved in production and was told to focus on performing. But studying at N.Y.U. — where she said she failed music theory three times — had awakened her to other possibilities.
In Seoul, she spent hours in coffee shops learning how to make beats, inspired by the lo-fi instrumental tracks she would find on SoundCloud. That path, ironically, led her back to SM, where she co-wrote hits like “Psycho” and “Armageddon” for the K-pop acts Red Velvet and aespa.
But as K-pop has continued its global ascent, questions of authenticity have surfaced in its production spaces, too. Groups have become increasingly international in makeup. One notable example is Katseye, a multiracial, Los Angeles-based girl group jointly formed by Geffen Records and Hybe, the Korean agency that manages BTS. Bang Si-hyuk, the chairman of Hybe, has argued that K-pop should drop the “K” for it to go truly global.
“Absolutely not,” Ejae said, looking chagrined. “K-pop is a genre in itself, why would you drop the ‘K’? Does Bad Bunny drop any Spanish?”
‘Asian Women Belting’
This idea of dialing back Koreanness in pursuit of greater global appeal has vexed not just fans but also artists, including BTS, whose members pushed back against efforts from producers to include more English lyrics in their latest album.
Ejae, too, said she is worried that K-pop companies have increasingly been leaning on non-Korean writers to pen English-heavy hits. (“Golden,” which is primarily in English with only bits of Korean, she explained, was an exception — the song had to be written in service to the overall story line, which unfolded in English.)
She searched for the words to explain why this rubbed her the wrong way. K-pop has always been a brew of borrowed influences, from Japanese pop to Black music, which itself had evolved through tensions between pressures to de-racialize and a refusal to do so. But to her, it still felt like K-pop companies were ceding too easily something that many Korean artists had fought so hard to claim — the sense that Koreanness could finally be cool on its own terms. It was like watching K-pop companies trade in their own cultural appropriation, she said — and it was bad business.
“American audiences want something novel,” she said. “They don’t want to hear the same thing.”
It is the same dilemma that Ejae is perceiving as an artist, now more starkly than ever — how to assert Koreanness in the American music industry, while also somehow transcending it.
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“They’re not used to seeing Asian women singing, like Asian women belting,” Ejae said.
She now wonders whether mainstream America might finally be ready for a Korean American artist who isn’t just a K-pop crossover. Part of her wants to find out. Since “Golden,” she has released two new singles — songs she had originally written for someone else.
For now, she still wants to focus on songwriting — K-pop too, but also everything else. She rattled off her wish list of artists she’d like to write for: Dua Lipa, Ariana Grande, Beyoncé, maybe Harry Styles.
And of course the sequel to “KPop Demon Hunters” — if they would have her.
