E.via (artist of the year, 2010)
For the many people* who ask me "Why Korea?" my answer is love. Yes, and there are plenty of other answers too, one being that people who know more than I do come to my lj and talk to me about K-pop, providing sociability and mindwork, and another being that K-pop is creating a hip-hop, r&b, dance-pop amalgam far better than the Billboard Hot 100's
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This entry really resonated with me, and I like the simple way you describe the appeal of K-pop. It's very similar to how I feel about K-pop, and since discovering it a few months ago, it's all I've been listening to. There have not been a lot of musical discoveries as monumental for me as K-pop, and I've been enjoying going through your writing on it (and look forward to following your writing on it in the future).
I've tried to write about it's appeal for me, as well, including making a mix that I've been sharing with people:
http://occupiedterritories.tumblr.com/post/16010722069/pop-utopianism-a-manifesto-we-need-to-talk-about
The thing I've noticed, and that I feel, about K-pop is precisely this love that you describe, which makes people want so badly for others to share their enjoyment or for the artists to succeed and get their music heard. I think that's rare in pop music today (at least, at such a high level), but it's really heartening and special.
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I am puzzled as to why you think I describe the appeal of K-pop in a simple way:
she's gonna out-cute the pop cutie-pies while still doing speed-rap and sex; meanwhile, my eyes or ears or my imagination tell me that her attitude towards cute is like Ray Davies' towards sunny afternoons or Mick Jagger's towards hearts of stone: she doesn't believe in it but she'll do it better than you or anybody else, just to show you.
That seems pretty nonsimple me, esp. given that I'm comparing her to Mick Jagger, a complex, self-reflexive, and contrary star who terrorized my adolescence. (And loving stars who potentially terrorize you isn't simple either.)
Here are several links you might be interested in:
Rolling K-pop (though this seems to have hit a dead spot since November)
http://arbitrary-greay.livejournal.com (this person posts here a lot)
http://snsd-ffa.livejournal.com (a livejournal community, stands for snsd free for all)
Thanks again for showing up.
Oh, by the way, I did a brief search on you a couple days ago and discovered that the trailer that accompanies your review of Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is the wrong one (is for the Swedish flick, not the Fincher).
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Perhaps "simple" is the wrong choice of words. I liked your description because it articulates the sense I feel that pop music is largely about a leap of faith, so to speak. You're on the outside and you don't understand or see an artist's appeal, and then suddenly, something clicks and you're on the inside. It's about love, as you say, and it works in the same interpersonal way as falling in love with a person.
And it works in another way that's interpersonal too: sometimes just by knowing someone and getting a good sense of their aesthetics, they rub off on you. I know that's happened with me, for instance, with my girlfriend of five years. She got me into The Carpenters before I had ever really thought about them, but now I see, through her and somewhat on my own now too, that they were a lot darker and more melancholy than I had thought. (Todd Haynes' Karen Carpenter biopic helped with that too.) I feel like I haven't just started liking them because of greater exposure; it's more like I'm hearing them with someone else's ears. (I think the same thing happens with movies sometimes too, which is why seeing a movie in a group can affect the way you see it.)
I think my girlfriend also primed me to appreciate K-pop because I grew to appreciate aegyo through her before I even knew the word or concept (she is Asian, but Cambodian, not Korean). And it seems that, for many, being nauseated by K-pop's potential cuteness is a big stumbling block. But I see it not just as a mere trait ("cute" versus not "cute"); it's really like a whole world in which what is for Americans a rather trite and shallow concept ("cuteness") takes on a whole new dimension. But it also doesn't just seem a translation of this concept (aegyo) into pop music; there's something more going on, it seems. (And I'll add, I appreciate your writing on K-pop because you take these things "seriously" when many reflexively dismiss these kinds of things.)
So maybe what I'm trying to say is that there's a simplicity to your first sentence in the entry above, but maybe the better word would be "elegance," in that "love" comprises so much in a single word. But yes, I agree that once you get beyond that initial sparking of one's love, it opens up a whole field of complex questions. For instance, I've enjoyed your thoughts on HyunA, especially when you discuss her screaming at the chicken (great clip). I like the idea of HyunA as this extremely adept performer of "sexiness," and there's nothing like a clip of her acting resolutely "non-sexy" to show so well the way these personas are all very "fake" (in the sense that they are performances) and yet equally "real" (because they work). For me, I think that's a good part of pop's essence, that kind of "both/and" transcendence and gleeful smearing of contradictions.
But I agree that there is a rich complexity to K-pop of which I am, months later, still only scratching the surface. I don't think I've yet quite explained why it works for me so well when other similar forms of pop music (while still very good) have not gotten me this interested in exploring all these questions. I mean, I can't remember the last time I was so interested in the extra-musical life of pop idols, including watching their TV shows.
Anyways, thanks for the links. I'll definitely check them out, and I'll be reading your blog here as well.
(Re: Dragon Tattoo, I'm not sure why that is. I'm not in charge of putting up the videos, so I'll check with my editor. Thanks for pointing it out.)
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"The Boney Joan Rule"
As for the "real"-versus-"fake" thing: real versus fake, just like real versus imaginary, and true versus false, is a crucial judgment that we make every day, and if we make it poorly we end up dead or homeless or in the congress a mental institution, whatever our philosophical questions are about those terms. You're right that we need to unpack "authenticity," wrong that we can possibly shelve it. If you're interested, and have the time (it's thousands of words), here's what I consider my best take on the subject of authenticity, though the word "authenticity" doesn't appear even once. ("Real," meaning "authentic," shows up twice, once in the statement, which I absolutely mean, "if you're a real punk like the Stooges and the Sex Pistols, you want fans to resist, to hit back," and once in scare quotes where I say - incorrectly, by the way, my flimsy excuse being that I was going only on the basis of "My Name Is" - that Eminem's voice is "a slow talk, unlike 'real' rap not heavily into rhythm and rhyme.")
"Death Rock 2000"
My Cliff Notes summary would be that what we do doesn't count as authentic unless it costs us something, so authenticity is tied to defiance of authority. This feeling saturates the culture, and it's not going to go away. It saturates "pop" as much as it saturates "rock" (not to mention "jazz," "hip-hop," and so forth). I don't buy into the pop versus rockism thing (if you're game for one more link, here's a much shorter version of my not buying into the pop versus rockism thing: "it makes a lot of sense that someone who likes Dylan and Tori would like Ashlee"). Basically, I think antirockism has been thirty years of posturing bullshit, which doesn't mean I'm a "rockist" but that I think the whole discussion has gone wrong. Well, it's not bullshit if by "antirockism" one means "not being an asshole when writing about Paris Hilton or Ashlee Simpson," but as social analysis and as an attempt to understand human beings it's bullshit. (Caveat: I've never seen the 1981 NME interview with Pete Wylie where Wylie coined the phrase "the race against rockism"; from what I've heard, I'd probably be pretty sympathetic with what Wylie was getting at, which was that rock had become routine and needed to either shake itself up or die. But this is - legitimately - criticizing rock from a rock point of view, since rock's own ideals oppose being routine. And Wylie, if I've got him right, wasn't opposing "authenticity" but rather making the argument that rock was no longer authentic; you could say rock was no longer really rock. Wylie, by the way, wasn't the first to make that point by a long shot. But the people who were making it in the late '60s and early '70s weren't called "antirockists" or "poptimists," they were called punks. OK, I'm banging on a pet peeve now, so I'll let you go.)
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One thing that the authenticity question reminded me of... When I was doing my undergrad work, my focus was on indigenous religions and culture, and this has really shaped how I think about everything now. One anecdote I remember hearing about had to do with a Native American practice of imitating animals as a kind of performance piece to be judged by audiences. For example, a man would imitate a horse, and although we outsiders probably wouldn't be able to get a grip on the criteria for judging the success of any single imitation, the people who watched and did judge these performances certainly had a working understanding of what a really "authentic" imitation of a horse looked like.
A lot of these questions have been in my mind recently, as I've been thinking of writing a quick piece about some of my thoughts on charisma, which is think is a hugely related issue, and how charisma is so interpersonal that it's hard to say much of anything "objectively" about it (which I think is what I'm getting at here).
In the meantime, have you had a chance to listen to the new single from K-pop group Sunny Hill "The Grasshopper Song"? Here's a version with an English translation of the lyrics (which seem relatively crucial here):
Also, in case you haven't seen it yet, SNSD appeared on the Letterman show and then on the Live with Kelly show. Here are the clips:
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I have a sense, not based on any research but just on the sound and presentation, that Sunny Hill didn't come up through the usual idol process. Checking Wikip, I see that they were sponsored or something by Narsha of Brown Eyed Girls. I don't know much about LOEN Entertainment either; I gather that so far it's fundamentally a distributor, not a talent agency; I'm not sure what the story is with an act signing directly with LOEN rather than coming through a label/agency. Wikip only lists five, with IU the massive success.
Fascinated by the fact that Tiffany seemed to be exaggerating a Korean accent at the start of the interview with Kelly - though maybe I'm wrong about that. From the little I've heard her speaking English on YouTube, her regular accent in English does seem a bit Asian. I hadn't thought of Asian Americans born and raised in North America as likely to have any Asian in their English, any more than my Dad had any Yiddish or Russian in his; but looking up Diamond Bar, California in Wikip, I see that its demographics are 50 percent Asian and 20 percent Hispanic. Maybe there's a Diamond Bar accent, just as there probably used to be a West Chicago accent. So maybe it's just that Tiffany's American accent differs from my American accent more than, say, Jesssica's does. Cheech Marin was born in Los Angeles but he nonetheless has a Mexican American accent (which he plays up as part of his act). Of course, "accent" is a loaded term.
Tiffany's vastly more comfortable talking to the camera than Jessica is.
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And it works in another way that's interpersonal too:
iacus at snsd_ffa linked me to this.
I wonder if the crowdsourcing trend that the Rock Critic Roundtable talked about is more effective in terms of numbers (more people have listened to/recommended this) or from that interpersonal angle.(this person I trust has recommended this) Because I do have friends where I know that we have different tastes, so that when they like something it may sometimes have the opposite effect on my anticipation. Then again, just recommendations are different from exposure.
Regarding aegyo: there is indeed something more going on. Perhaps it's just my love of semantics, but I associate "aegyo" with the Japanese term "burikko", that is, unnatural cutesiness. I also find a difference between cuteness and cutesiness, in that the former is not necessarily intentional and the latter is.
Whenever someone is asked to do aegyo on TV shows, the majority of the scenarios performed involve the girl attempting to get the guy to do/buy something for her by acting more cutesy than normal.
I was only able to enjoy the overwhelming because 1) enough genuine cuteness was mixed in to endear me to them,(like Hyuna screaming at chickens) and 2) because I became a smark, and some girls play up to that. I love the aegyo when it's clear that the girl doing it herself is kind of treating it like a satire on aegyo. SNSD's Sooyoung was notorious for this, and Sunny went from doing regular aegyo displays(but still always always the manipulation of guys) to "aegyo that calls for a punch", taking the gimmick from Sooyoung's example. No coincidence that these two are my favorites.
But yes, in general cuteness is seen as something to be outgrown in America. However, artists like Nicki and Katy, who have acknowldged the asian influence, are starting to phase cuteness back in as a source of quirky humor, and is it any wonder that my generation, bombarded with anime during our childhood years, has also been the one to embrace the newest "My Little Pony" series and shake off that "cute is childish!" stigma?
Authenticity with regards to Jpop, although I feel like cuteness culture does apply to the whole of contemporary urban East Asia.
In some ways this article is the ideal answer to those complaints about pop manufacturing, and somewhat goes back to that matter of being a smark: we can have our "fake" and eat "real" too, because in Apop they're all just facets in the Apop idol's image, and not really in conflict.
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This article also works well with the pleasure portions.
Would you mind expanding on your definition of "admittedly despicable “famous for being famous” types?" It seems odd that America's celebrity culture has more of these compared to the celebrity-based television of old, still largely in place in Asia, where there is a "geinou"(talent) celebrity description wherein their job is to appear on talk shows and such and be amusing, not technically being a singer or actor or even comedian in official capacity, although with enough popularity they may branch out into those areas of pop culture.(Japanese game shows are often crazy not for the sake of being crazy, but because said geinou know how to make the best reactions to such craziness, which is what the audience is really looking for. Prizes are inconsequential in such game shows, and are more like over-the-top improvised comedy skits.) Those people are technically "famous for being famous" as well. Or did you more mean "famous for being infamous?"
Current Kpop is musically based on European music trends, although "black forms of music and rhythms" are usually found in the album tracks and are making their way into the promoted singles of some groups with that image. askbask and I have this running joke that the Kpop revolution is actually a Norwegian one, given that many companies buy their songs from Norweigan songwriters. I don't know if that has any influence on your rhythm theories.
One note about the praise of fandom you have in your manifesto: the threat fandom does pose to pop music is in that fandom for much of Apop is not tied to the music, but the idol, which has allowed music quality to become a lower priority for those with enough popularity.(Especially when music pays the least dividends compared to, say, endorsements) The same can be said for production quality in general, as fanclubs will do everything to keep their biases on top, regardless of the products being pushed on them by the management. Thus some lament the state of their music markets as being idol saturated, without variety, and other artists not having a chance at the spotlight because the idols so expertly feed our pleasure drives. There is that element of "Sure, [[artist]] has better music, but I gotta support [[idol]] so I'll buy [[idol]]'s CD instead!" Luckily, the competition between pop music and itself is usually enough to produce great music on its own.
How would you compare Gaga, Bieber, and tween market(Disney and Nickelodeon stars) fandoms to Apop fandom. Or when you speak of the American mocking of fandom, do you refer to how the aforementioned Little Monsters/Beliebers/tweens are looked down on as mindless fangirls?
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So far I don't get J-pop much at all; but I'm presuming that it's not able to avoid the necessity of keeping it real - a precondition of keeping it real is that you're not born into a role but have to find one, i.e., that you are born into the modern world, a world of choices - but that where it chases real may be somewhat different from where gangsta does.
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Can you please elaborate? Are they settling for too lax an adherence/rejection of their standards?
There's also, of course, the nit-picky response about the difference between "real" authenticity and "the cult" of it, and possibly Ray only criticizing the latter, but splitting hairs about what's "real" and what's not usually goes wrong, as the line between two such abstract things isn't usually so much a line as a gradient, as the debate about pop music itself goes.
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Yeah, either that or they're making lazy or bad choices as to what standards to adhere to in the first place.
As for what Ray's criticizing, you're not making a nitpicky response, that's exactly the distinction Ray is trying to draw. He's not opposed to authenticity per se. But he actually doesn't know what he means by "cult," or "authenticity," really. Whether or not I thought the hardcore punks were real punks (I didn't, and don't) had to do with my standards for punk, not my standards for "authenticity."
[More anon.]
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