Back in June, KCON LA — the world’s largest annual Korean pop culture festival — announced that the first-generation K-pop group g.o.d would be performing at its event in July. When KCON USA’s official Instagram account posted the group’s name without any periods, some commenters cracked religious jokes. “Is he bringing the 12 disciples?” read one comment. “The rapture is at KCON” read another.
But for fans who’ve been listening to K-pop for many years and had long heard about these living icons, it really did feel like the rapture was here. One of South Korea’s bestselling artists throughout the early and mid-2000s, g.o.d (short for “Groove Over Dose”) debuted in 1999 with members Joon Park, Danny Ahn, Son Ho-young, Kim Tae-woo and Yoon Kye-sang. While many of their peer groups gravitated toward bubblegum pop, EDM, or even rock-infused music, g.o.d brought a refreshingly unique mix of smooth R&B, rap, hip-hop, funk, and Korean-style ballads and infused them with a certain Korean sensibility. Moreover, at a time when English lyrics were already making their way into K-pop songs, g.o.d almost always opted to sing and rap entirely in Korean, and quickly became known for their raw narrative storytelling.
Their third and fourth albums each sold more than a million copies, with the latter selling more than 1.4 million copies within just a month of its November 2001 release. (In the years that followed, no other K-pop idol group saw comparable album sales in a single month until 2017, when BTS sold more than 1.2 million copies of their Love Yourself: Her album in just 13 days.) G.o.d swept the major music awards shows in 2001, winning the grand prize from all three of South Korea’s top broadcasters (KBS, MBC and SBS) and at the Golden Disc Awards and Mnet Music Video Festival (now called the MAMA Awards). Between 2002 and 2003, they played 100 concerts in South Korea — and sold out every single one.
They were the first K-pop group to have their own reality show: g.o.d’s Babysitting Diaries, in which the members were tasked with looking after an adorable 11-month-old boy. Beloved by South Koreans of all ages for their down-to-earth demeanor, powerful vocals, and heartfelt, relatable lyrics, g.o.d became the first K-pop act to earn the nickname “the nation’s group.”
Performing at KCON L.A. this summer
CJ ENM*
The quintet, who are playing three highly anticipated shows in Seoul this weekend, helped prove that K-pop could indeed be commercially successful, giving music executives a glimpse into the nascent industry’s promising future. In fact, it wouldn’t be an overstatement to say that had it not been for g.o.d and their early successes, many of today’s most popular K-pop groups might not even exist. Countless K-pop stars — including ATEEZ, TWICE, IU, ITZY, Le Sserafim, NCT Dream, NMIXX, Kwon Eun-bi, and many others — have cited them as a role model or inspiration.
I GET TO SPEAK with the group just before their performance at KCON LA’s “M Countdown,” the festival’s main concert at Crypto.com Arena. I’m a bit nervous as I watch the members file into the interview room, but that feeling quickly dissipates when we start the interview. True to their public personas, g.o.d really do come across as a humble yet outspoken bunch of middle-aged men. They also exude a confident, easy charisma that comes from 25 years of working in the industry — a factor that made for a hilarious, fun, and unrestrained conversation.
“We really have no filter,” says Joon Park, the group’s founder and leader. An outgoing and energetic Korean American who grew up surfing and skating in California, Park was discovered in the late 1990s by a K-pop agency executive who happened to see a picture of him that his sister had. The label invited him to Korea to audition.
“They wanted to make a duo with me and another guy, like Daryl Hall and John Oates. And I go, ‘No, I don’t wanna do that. I wanna make a boy group like New Edition or ‘NSync,’” Park says.
So he recruited his cousin Danny Ahn, who in turn introduced him to his friend Son Ho-young. “Then Kye-sang came into the group, and Tae-woo came in at the end, and we became g.o.d,” Park says.
“Destiny!” Kim Tae-woo chimes in with a laugh.
Next came the difficult task of choosing a name for the group. “We said, ‘Let’s do ‘god,’ but we don’t wanna do ‘god’ with capital letters because we’re not claiming to be a deity,” says Park. “So let’s do small-case letters and say we all have god in our hearts. But we weren’t referring to any particular religion.”
However, there was one small problem. “People in Korea can’t pronounce ‘god,’” Park notes. “They say ‘gaht’ or ‘goht’ or — if they read it wrong — it could be ‘joht’ [Korean slang for “penis”]. It could look weird, right?”
And so the group decided to turn “god” into an acronym. “We made it ‘Groove Over Dose’ because we all like groove and funky music. But our real name is just ‘god’—no periods,” notes Park.
Since K-pop was just beginning to emerge at the time, the members gave thought only to the local market when crafting their group moniker. “We were just active in Korea. And to Koreans, the word ‘god’ doesn’t have as much impact as it might for foreigners, who might feel like we’re really talking about ‘God’,” Ahn explains.
“Now that K-pop is globally popular, we’ve been able to go overseas,” Ahn adds, laughing. “But back then, we had no idea any of this would ever happen. We named our group ‘g.o.d,’ but I guess foreigners might be surprised when they see our name. Extremely surprised, I’d bet!”
Today, many experts say that one of the reasons for K-pop’s global popularity is its seamless blending of Eastern and Western music. But K-pop wasn’t always like that. It took pioneering artists like g.o.d to help raise the bar for the industry. “I saw Korean artists doing hip-hop or pop music, but it looked like they were just emulating other songs,” Park says. “I didn’t wanna emulate — I wanted to bridge that gap and make it kind of like a fusion [between] Korean music and American music. Have the feel, but send a message that’s positive. I didn’t think it’d be easy, but that’s what I really wanted to do, and I thought I could do it. And I met the perfect guys.”
The “perfect guys” were K-pop moguls and powerhouse producers Park Jin-young (a.k.a. J.Y. Park, or JYP) — he founded JYP Entertainment, one of the “Big Four” K-pop agencies — and Bang Si-hyuk, founder and chair of HYBE, another Big Four agency and the label behind BTS. Both cut their teeth working on music for g.o.d in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Between the two of them, they produced, composed, and arranged hits like “To My Mother,” “Lies,” “One Candle,” “Road,” “Friday Night,” and “Sky Blue Balloon” (an ode to g.o.d’s loyal fan base and a reference to the group’s official color, sky blue) that have since become K-pop classics.
G.o.d were the first K-pop group that JYP produced; they were also the first group that Bang composed songs for. By churning out hit after hit for g.o.d, JYP and Bang built a name for themselves as star producers, and it was during this time that Bang adopted his famous nickname “Hitman” Bang.
One of the keys to g.o.d’s success lay in simple yet profound lyrics that often center on shared human experiences like love, life, and loss. For example, the group’s debut track, “To My Mother,” recounts the story of a son who regrets not appreciating his mother’s love and the sacrifices she made for him until it was too late. “To My Mother” became the most-requested song on South Korean radio, and even convinced runaway teens to return to their homes, crying.
“Road,” which topped domestic music charts and won multiple awards after its 2001 release, grapples with questions that we all ask ourselves about our dreams and goals in life, the path we choose to take in hopes of achieving them, and the uncertainty we face along the way.
I ask the members if they would ever consider incorporating more English lyrics into their songs in the future, especially considering the fact that many K-pop songs nowadays are sung partially or even fully in English. “Music is something that has to move you when you don’t even listen to the lyrics,” says Park. “So it doesn’t matter if there’s English or Korean lyrics — I think music in itself is universal. If there’s something that sounds good and it clicks, we can [include English lyrics], but we pretty much do all Korean lyrics.”
At KCON L.A. this summer
CJ ENM*
“The great thing about it is, nowadays, many international K-pop fans are learning Korean, so they find it fun to decipher [Korean lyrics],” he continues. “We get a lot of DMs from people saying that when they listened to our songs again after learning some Korean, they were extremely touched by the lyrics.”
Ahn mentions seeing a reaction video posted by a Black YouTuber who cried after listening to “To My Mother.”
“Since ‘To My Mother’ is a song about one’s mother, I think not only Koreans but everyone around the world would feel the same emotions once they’ve understood the lyrics,” he says. “And because, as Joon said, a lot of folks are learning Korean, if our songs could help them learn Korean, wouldn’t that be even better?” he adds with a grin.
Given g.o.d’s early formation and outsize impact on K-pop (as well as K-R&B and K-hip-hop), it would be hard to describe the group to newer international K-pop fans who may not be familiar with their music and legacy. But Kim decided to give it a shot.
“We’re a first-generation K-pop group, so we came out when the K-pop idol culture started taking shape,” Kim says. “At the time, there wasn’t global interest in K-pop, so we were super active in Korea. We took R&B and hip-hop from the U.S. and reinterpreted it in a Korean way. I think this is one of the reasons why when global fans hear our music today, they don’t find it to be strange or unfamiliar, but rather very enjoyable.”
In 2004, Yoon Kye-sang left the group, a move he later revealed was because he’d wanted to quit the entertainment industry. He fell into acting, however, and subsequently appeared in a number of South Korean films and TV series, including Netflix’s recent hit The Frog. Soon after Yoon’s departure, g.o.d went on an indefinite hiatus around 2005, before reuniting as the original five-piece group in 2014 — a momentous event that sparked frenzy among the South Korean media and public. As for why the members ultimately decided to come back together, Kim chalks it up to “destiny,” a word that cropped up multiple times during our interview.
“I think it just happened naturally,” Kim says. “We’d been performing as g.o.d for a long time, and there were also other things that each of us wanted to do, so the time came for us to go our separate ways. We just casually tossed around the idea of a possible reunion, but some of us had other things going on at the time, so we’d be like, ‘OK, let’s just revisit this next year,’ and that’s why our eventual reunion kept getting delayed. We just thought if the conditions were right for a g.o.d reunion to happen naturally, we would do it then, and that happened to be in 2014.
“The way I see it, the biggest reason why we’ve been together for so long as a group is that we never force anything on our members,” Kim continues. “We never told each other that a reunion was absolutely necessary — rather, it was something that our fans wanted, and we have so much fun when we’re performing together onstage, so I think those are the reasons why we’ve been able to share our music with audiences for so long.”
“So, if I were to sum it all up in one word, it’d be ‘destiny’,” he adds.
The group’s 2014 comeback album, Chapter 8, immediately topped the charts in South Korea and took home the Album of the Year award at the Melon Music Awards later that year. Three of the album’s tracks — “The Lone Duckling,” “Sky Blue Promise,” and “The Story of Our Lives” — all reached Number One on multiple domestic music charts, with “The Lone Duckling” also topping the Billboard K-pop Hot 100. After completing their 15th-anniversary reunion tour throughout South Korea, g.o.d even ventured to the States to perform at the Staples Center in Los Angeles (now known as Crypto.com Arena) and the Prudential Center in Newark, New Jersey.
The fact that a first-generation K-pop group formed in the 1990s continues to be hugely popular among South Koreans and the Korean diaspora today — even after an eight-year hiatus — is impressive. But at a time when K-Pop seems to be constantly evolving, g.o.d’s sound hasn’t really changed much over the years. Their music still feels very much old-school, yet there’s also a certain universal and timeless quality to it.
Park explains that the group doesn’t chase after trends. “We don’t change our style; there’s no real trend in our music. The stories that we’re telling in our songs — anyone can relate to [them]. There is no trend in a relationship between a mother and a son or daughter. There is no trend in ‘Road’ — everyone walks that road. I think that’s why our songs last a long time.”
“Really anyone can relate to our lyrics because everyone has gone through those experiences, and our melodies are easy to sing along to,” Ahn says. “And when Koreans see g.o.d, they might think back to their hometowns, since many of our songs have a [nostalgic] vibe to them. So, I think this could be why we continue to receive a lot of love [among Koreans] to this day.”
For g.o.d, this year’s KCON LA must seem like a full-circle moment. “It’s g.o.d’s first time attending KCON. Frankly we haven’t done a lot of overseas activities, so to directly witness the K-pop craze on site [at KCON LA] makes us feel really happy,” says Ahn.
“We’re truly thankful to the K-pop artists that came after us. I never imagined that K-pop would become so popular — it’s really encouraging to see this happening right now,” says Kim. “We’ve just been doing the same things we’ve always done for the past 25 years, but since so many people around the world are into K-pop now, I think we’re at a time when a lot of people are watching us as well.”
When g.o.d first takes to the stage at KCON LA’s main concert, the crowd — the vast majority of whom were non-Korean and skewed toward a younger demographic — remain relatively subdued. With each song they perform, however, the audience grows progressively louder, enthralled by the members’ vocal performances and onstage charisma. Halfway through g.o.d’s set, nearly everyone in the arena is up out of their seats, swaying, clapping and cheering along, and waving their phone flashlights in time to the music. And just like that, the nonbelievers have been converted.
Before g.o.d’s performance, I ask the guys how long they planned on performing and making music together as a group.
“We don’t have the answer to that question — the answer lies with our fans,” says Park, who’s 55 years old. “It doesn’t matter if I want to keep doing this until I’m 100 if no one [wants to come to our shows]. But we’ll keep doing this as long as our fans want us to.”
Kim adds that they’ll just let things happen “naturally.”
Park agrees. “Yeah, destiny.”
