killing me loudly rather. or slowly.
ok, not at all, actually. But lord does kpop get under the skin. Walk down Daegu downtown, through all the skincare kimbap jewelry clothes cellphone shops and you get a blaring mashup of the top four kpop songs of the moment. KPOP is NOW!!! No, no it's really not. Please, please stop. Or just turn down the volume. Even with headphones in, volume blaring the Fleet Foxes in a force-field of folk goodness, bop-ee-bop-ee-bop-ee invades. kpop invasion in my earlobes, in my brain, jarring my bones...GAH! Paired with the blaring neon, the streets are alive, raging like a coke fiend, or rather more like a kid on a serious sugar rush who just added some pop rocks and orange soda to the mix, the whole thing bubbling over in a noisy vomit of color and fizzle.
Rant aside, let me more rationally devote a bit of time to the abrasive quality of the national music of the plastic-for-the-masses culture in the ROK.
I may be a total music snob, but I am not a discriminant one. If there is talent--even at the production level--I am not too good to admit to enjoying a song. I am not above movin my hips to Lady Gaga just because she is popular or throwing up my arms and shoutin for Shots! However, there is a bit more to talent that being the face in front of--or programming behind--a catchy tune. At some level, I would hope for creativity. But, like many things in mass-produced and fast-tracked manufactured pop-culture, once you find a formula that works you will use it use it use it til its useless. Pair that mentality with a trend-following community culture that drives Korea and bam: Enter KPOP. KPOP is like a drug for the blinking neon masses. Give them beats that are familiar, an addictive and contagious phrase and you've got the next soundtrack for the boys outside of SK(one of the many cellphone stores).
But KPOP definitely doesn't thrive on sound alone--the image is its lifeblood. All young, beautiful, reconstructed teen and twenty-somethings. As plastic as the music they're attached to. The men look like women, the women look like barbies. They all defy the conservative leanings of Korean culture and ooze sex through the hair extensions and very high-reaching fishnets. So what? So what if it's sexy? I don't really care about that as much, except when its the girls who are about 15--but that's really no different than Miley is it?
Well, how about the fact that half of them already have had plastic surgery. How about the fact that they are rail thin, completely made-up, and promoting the standard of beauty that the Korean public can literally only achieve by going under the knife. As if plastic surgery wasn't popular enough in Korean culture, let's have the very pop stars they all adore act as walking adverts for it...
And then there's the dancing. Man, look at them move--boys and girls alike, they are poppin lockin throbbin and doin a kind of rhythm most white boys couldn't acheive even with the tutelage of a master like Mr. Miyagi. But Koreans CAN do it. My highschool students have them memorized--they get up and teach me the moves in class. Perfectly. Maybe I'm just bitter because I can't mirror those stars. No, that's a copout excuse. I think--I know--that I'm bitter because the dances are taking away the freedom of movement. Even dancing has been over-directed, simplified, and produced by the kman.
All these factors culminate in the KPOP performance. The examples I've seen--live at festivals, on stage in the streets, on tv, and in the internet videos my students love to share--are laughable. Big lights, big sound, big color, lots of skin, lots of dancing...lots of lip syncing. KPOP songs couldn't exist without the vocoder, and KPOP performances couldn't exist without the play button. Flash shake smile distract.
I'll admit that American popstars are just as fabricated, just as mass-marketed, just as damaging to the average female's body image, and quite often just as bad, but that brings me to the real issue, the real difference in the KPOP scene--where the money goes. It's no secret that the cast of KPOP allstars are grossly underpaid (in comparison with other celebrities, and in proportion to their monetary worth). These faces, young, often Korean-Americans who are swept back to their Motherland with promises of stardom, gain the immediate screaming loyalty of fans, cha-ching of commercial deals and guaranteed sell-out crowds that keeps the Won signs in their producers eyes blinking neon bright. And they get such little cuts of the enormous amounts of revenue they bring in, that there are even lawsuits and group breakups over the control held over the group members. The beloved 2PM boy group is no more because of such a breakup, news given to me through the tears of one of my high school students.
So it's disgusting to me, the control that the men with money hold over Korean pop culture while keeping so much of that profit for themselves-- they get cheap hot labor to sing and dance for them, screaming young fans to crowd dance buy move wear whatever they are told, they get cellphones skincare clotheslines chicken shops--you name it to--begging to be allowed to purchase those faces to sell their products, and they get the perpetual anxiety of an entire nation of people who feel they will never be pretty skinny western white enough. Won Won Won for the money, two for the show, three to get ready (you know the rest) The big Kman won.
So, in honor of my rant, here are some catchy links to kpop videos for your viewing pleasure:
soon to come: a post devoted to musical experiences in Korea I actually enjoy...
No comments:
Post a Comment