Once the preserve of hot young pop stars in cosy jumpers gesturing dramatically to virginal snowy landscapes with a suggestive twinkle in their eye, British Christmas music at some point had a bucket of freezing water poured all over its mojo.
A preponderance in today’s year-end charts of charity choirs, novelty YouTubers and miscellaneous has-beens hawking crappy swing records proves that, much as their hormones might still be raging harder than a shoeless John McClane up Nakatomi Plaza, the nation’s youth have long since abandoned the hitherto hallowed festive tradition of screaming at native seasonal dreamboats such as East 17 or Shakin’ Stevens in favour perhaps of gazing longingly beyond our borders.
To South Korea, for instance. Because in the land of K-Pop Christmas is – and I cannot emphasise this enough – big.
Support The Big Issue and our vendors by signing up for a subscriptionClick a K-Pop Christmas playlist on your favoured streaming service and you will quickly find yourself lost in a labyrinth of soundalike smouldering R&B tracks, merry janglin’ festive covers and painfully overearnest icy ballads sung by an endless procession of clean-cut, good-looking boys and girls resplendent in Santa hats and cosy-fashionable winterwear.
What’s interesting is when you consider it all in the context of South Korea’s paradoxical attitude to Christmas in general.While half of the country’s 52 million citizens may be non-believers, Christianity has grown to become the country’s majority religion post-WWII – around 20 per cent of South Koreans are Protestant and 10 per cent Catholic, relative to around 15 per cent Korean Buddhists – and as such December 25 is a national holiday, unlike in many neighbouring countries including China and Japan.
Yet, religion actually has very little to do with it – South Korea’s appreciation of Christmas having arrived via America’s considerable influence in the country since 1945, and thus in all of its Coca-Cola sippin’ consumerist glory. Since South Korea’s miraculous economic explosion in the late 20th century, South Korean Christmas has grown into a bonanza of buying beholden only to the religion of capitalism, fit to make our Black Friday look like a sparsely attended car boot sale in Frome.