Songs Implicated In Bullying Scandal (Top Singles, Five-Sixths Through 2016)

[koganbot]

I feel emotionally battered by the election, feeling simultaneously vulnerable and malicious, as if I'll be attacked for anything and nothing and I run constant fantasies of going back and settling old scores

Comments

[belecrivain]

Apologies for responding to only part of your entry and not the whole (will be digesting the whole for a bit longer), but: I get the sense that K-pop mostly comes from the mainstream and is geared towards cheerleader types and jocks more than to the freaks and the greasers (to use ancient terminology from a different part of the world). To unpack the sentence "K-pop mostly comes from the mainstream" a bit: I think the whole apparatus that gives us K-pop is definitely "mainstream" and "geared towards cheerleader types and jocks" given its heavy government involvement (and to get more details I'd have to reread The Birth of Korean Cool, but I don't think "heavy government involvement" is a controversial statement at this point). Given the whole idea of "soft power" and the Hallyu Wave as top-down marketing (propaganda) enterprise, one could even go so far as to classify K-pop promotion as a sort of expansion of the growth machine, and the growth machine from Molotch's first definition of it was cheerleader- and jock-based, in a way. (I'm cheating here, because Molotch specifically said "urban growth machine," and set his definition in a particular spatial setting that was sub-national, and I'm tossing that setting in urban politics out the window to make it fit K-pop.)

However I get the impression that a lot of the performers are/were closer to what Penny Eckert would have described as "freak" or "greaser" status, if only because by definition they've eschewed the conventional route to achievement / adulthood / Making Something of Themselves. Not to mention that idoldom is such a risky business that it makes sense that it would appeal more to preteens / teens (and their families) who are already pessimistic about their chances to get into one of the SKY universities and land a decent white-collar job thereafter. This is in part based on what I know about Infinite, in which I can point specifically to four of the seven being alienated from the traditional intense study -> exam -> university track, so I can't say I've done any specific surveying on idols' family backgrounds and potential alternate career paths. But my impression is that most of them will close out their careers without any sort of college degree, much less a prestigious one.

Idols whose politics seem to hew closer to what we define as "left": SHINee's Jonghyun (not so much in his songwriting that I know of, but he publicized and expressed support for the protest messages of an out trans college student last year, IIRC) and BTS's songwriting rapper line ("Am I Wrong" directly and critically quoting sitting government officials). That's just off the top of my head; there are probably others.

I may have read you too fast -- I'm on my tablet and can't go back to your actual entry without losing what I've written so far -- but I think there's a conflation here between freak/greaser status (outside the jock/cheerleader conventional norm) and political rebellion / "leftwards" thinking ("left" in 1973 != "left" in US now != "left" in Korea now). If I'm right, in myself conflating freak/greaser status with economic insecurity, then the freaks and greasers who enter K-pop aren't necessarily more likely to express challenging political opinions, at least not anywhere where they can be quoted; because to do so would risk biting the hand that feeds them, and their family might well need that hand. Whereas I would guess that the freak/greaser turned musician of the early 1970s was under less pressure to secure the family economic future. (Of course it immediately comes to mind that none of, say, the Ramones came from families with hefty financial security, and Joey's and Dee Dee's families in particular may have been in particularly precarious situations; whether or not that translated into a sense that the kid had to go out and secure a better future, I'm less sure.)

[koganbot]

In my high school the greasers and freaks didn't conflate, in fact hated each other, even if they had a lot in common. To be oversimplistic about class, the freaks were the sideways middle-class and vaguely leftish while the greasers were working class and pro-the-war and racist at that. But this was, like, in 1970, and the situation was not nearly so simple, of course: the numbers were probably more like 70%-30% as to the working-class and middle-class origins of the greasers, and probably the reverse for freaks and jocks. And the more impact the freaks had the more the greasers and the jocks-cheerleaders took on freak characteristics, while the freaks' successors tended to veer glam or punk. And the greasers were succeeded by grits and then burnouts, and many of them switched on the war and some probably sincerely tried to switch regarding race; and the original "burnouts" had been freaks. Or something. I hardly know how it all played out once I graduated. Did you ever see Dazed And Confused? The dope-smoking quarterback in that movie (set in 1976) wasn't so far from the senior class president/soccer goalie in my high school (1972). As for K-pop, I don't know the society, of course, and the economy was transforming so rapidly for so many years anyway. It makes sense that there'd be a tension within many of the performers as to whether they were in it for the art of it or for the money (not that the two motives need to cancel each other out). To switch to 1950s/early '60s Britain, Art Into Pop by Simon Frith and Howard Horne describes how a lot of the Brit art school kids (many working-class) were fed art values* which they took with them into the jazz, blues, and rock 'n' roll bands they were forming. Don't know if there was/is an equivalent in Korea. I've barely one-zillionth skimmed Korean indie. The little I've heard seems pretty boring.

The only thing I know about the Ramones' social background (other than what the words and music told me, which is that the band were in it for the art, and the Jewish gallows humor), is that Joey's dad was Lester Bangs' psychotherapist, which puts the dad in the middle class culturally no matter where he was financially.

*The Who Sell Out is a great example of '50s visual-art ferment finding musical expression in the '60s.

Fact checking

[koganbot]

Er, it was Joey's stepfather who was Lester's psychotherapist.

[koganbot]

Glad to see you made a playlist of your top singles, which I'm linking here for the benefit of people who don't see your lj.