The global traction of K-pop is often assigned to supportive export policy and digital
ingenuity. Only recently have scholars started to relate it to K-pop’s capacity for persuasive
storytelling and world building. One of the important narrative devices used to that end is
“concepts”: the thematic organization of songs around certain literary or cinematic tropes,
whereby the musical track, its music videos, and its promotional visuals are bound together in
an aesthetically and affectively cohesive way. Among the concepts that have lent K-pop
productions their distinctive scenography, the concept of Korean heritage has rightfully
attracted the most scholarly attention. Expressed through historical costume, décor, and
traditional instruments, the representation of Korean traditional arts has been considered a
means to assert a sense of locality and national identity (Saeji 2020), (Lee 2023).
This paper aims to map the different ways in which K-pop approaches tangible and
intangible cultural heritage as part of its construction of both “imaginaries of heritage” and
“heritage imaginaries” (Astudillo and Salazar 2024). It argues, firstly, that K-pop uses
artefacts, instrumental timbres, musical motifs, and even regional dialects to generate specific
notions of what cultural heritage inheres in, at the same time as it constructs representations of
specific groups of people as subjects of heritage. Secondly, it argues for a distinction between
K-pop’s representation of heritage as a topic of discourse—the stereotypical allusion to a
characteristic musical style in a theatrical, indexical way—in contrast to the appropriation of
heritage as an idiolect, in an attempt to create a new, distinctive musical language. Through
analysis of musical examples, the paper proposes ways to decipher cases of the invocation of
cultural heritage as topic versus idiolect, for example by considering its co-occurrence with
other topics, as well as its relation to certain lyrical themes.