Dream Machine (Yet another article on K-Pop by western media)
In the early hours of the morning when Beatrice Phan finally shuts down her computer, she goes to bed with a handful of soft toys and her idols: boys with chiselled jaw-lines, straight noses, full lips, lustrous hair and most likely a bit of eyeliner. Perfect boys, pretty boys, boys who look like girls, the boy next door, the foppish, the sultry, the wholesome.
"Like, even when I go to sleep I do dream about them sometimes," says Phan, a 17-year-old with long bleached hair who lives with her Vietnamese-Australian parents and sister in a neat house in an affluent inner-west Sydney neighbourhood. The walls of the teenager's upstairs bedroom are wallpapered with posters of her boys - boys from her favourite Korean pop music groups with names like TVXQ and 2PM and SHINee. "I fantasise a lot of, like, stories in my head where we magically meet and then we start dating or something.”
There are no pictures of Psy on Beatrice Phan's bedroom wall. Beatrice Phan has never fantasised about Psy. Like most Korean pop (K-pop) fans, Beatrice Phan likes her K-pop "idols" pretty. It's a quirk of history that Psy, the creator of last year's global hit Gangnam Style ("Eh, sexy lady"), was the one to swing a global spotlight on K-pop, that such a roly-poly individual of the formulaic K-pop industry should be the one to get kids singing along to Korean lyrics and doing the "horsey dance" in lounge rooms and kindergartens across the Western world.
This month, the star will be in Australia for the travelling Future Music Festival, starting in Brisbane today - fittingly, at Doomben Racecourse. It's a visit that's likely to be accompanied by widespread horsey-dancing and general hysteria, and one that may lift anxiety levels among Australian parents. "When my children started to call me 'sexy lady', I realised it had to stop," says one Sydney mother. Says another of her daughter's affection for the song, "She recognises the opening bars more readily than the Play School theme.”
Some pundits tip that Psy's next release, expected any day, will sink without a trace and the star will quietly fade into pop-culture oblivion. But the massive dream machine that is the K-pop industry, estimated to be worth billions annually and manufacturing dozens of pretty new idol groups every year, has ambitions. K-pop, part of the country's government-sponsored hallyu or Korean wave - which encompasses Korean soap operas, film and food - wants to ride on the coat-tails of Psy's success and conquer the world. "In this age of globalisation, Korea is being understood through its pop culture," head of the government's Export-Import Bank, Kim Yong-hwan, said in early February when he announced a loan package of a trifling $900 million or so for hallyu-related businesses wanting to play in overseas markets.
In a residential neighbourhood of Seoul, I climb six flights of stairs, remove my boots and put on a pair of slippers in an attempt to understand the very, very strange world that is Korean pop music. I've come to a humble apartment that's the office of the K-pop magazine Boda to meet Jung Dong Soo, founder, publisher and editor-in-chief. In our slippers we sit at a glass-topped table with a bowl of snacks in the middle while two staff giggle and work at computers in the next room.
"At the top of my mind every day is what can I do to make the fans happy," the earnest young man in spectacles tells me through an interpreter. "I think this day and night because these fans are so knowledgeable.”
Jung takes his responsibilities to the predominantly female K-pop fan base seriously: a K-pop idol shuffles along a red-carpet and Boda might feature a dozen or more nearly identical pictures of the moment. "Let's say we are describing five minutes of red-carpet walk of a celebrity - we will spend about six pages to cover that from every aspect possible ... like how many times he shook hands versus the average number of hand-shakes by stars," says Jung.
In Korea's internet-saturated, non-reading culture, Jung's sales are modest (in Japan, where he licences it to a Japanese partner, the magazine sells six times as many copies) but he has noticed an increasing audience among wealthier, middle-aged women. "These Korean women really don't have much going on in their lives; I think it's such a good sign that they've found an interest," he says unflinchingly.
And, as Jung's Japanese sales would suggest, K-pop's popularity in Japan is surging. Tomoko Hiraoka, a 37-year-old mother of two from Nara in Japan, tells me why: "Korean men are better looking than Japanese ones." Her friend, Setsuko Hemmi, who discovered K-pop through watching hallyu television dramas, adds that watching them helped her diet. She was so excited about them that she couldn't eat. "It felt like falling in love.”
I bump into Hiraoka, Hemmi and their friend, Yoko Ikunari, at Seoul's Everysing, a merchandise outlet for the powerhouse SM Entertainment group's stable of K-pop idols, including Beatrice Phan's favourites, TVXQ and SHINee, boy group Super Junior and nine-member blockbuster outfit Girls' Generation. At Everysing, in the trendy Rodeo Street area of Seoul, fans can record themselves in the karaoke studio, pick up a special- edition Girls' Generation chocolate box or invest in a pillow case featuring the angelic face of SHINee member Taemin.
The Japanese friends, visiting Seoul for a long weekend, all fancy the members of TVXQ. "They're tall and their faces are small and they're good at singing and dancing - everything," says Hiraoka over coffee at Kona Beans, a cafe owned by the mothers of Super Junior members. Kona Beans is listed in the magazine that Hiraoka is carrying - a guide to Seoul for the Japanese K-pop fan, with page after page of restaurant and food photographs and headshots of the idols who frequent them. For lunch, the women will take another tip from the magazine and dine at a restaurant that specialises in barbecued beef intestines and idol sightings.
Korean K-pop fans, who usually focus their obsession on one idol group or idol, sneer at overseas fans, who tend to divide their attention and follow a number of stars. Although it is acceptable, apparently, to like both a girl group and a boy group - for female fans, the girl group members are appropriated as older-sister figures, while the boy group members are the focus of their wistful romantic attentions. And sometimes not so wistful: sasaeng (literally, "private life") fans are the stalking bunny-boilers of the K-pop world. "Sasaeng fans ... They'd probably literally murder a girl if they found out they were dating their idol," notes one commenter on the Facebook page of SBS's PopAsia.
"They're an emotive audience; they're really, really engaged and they want to be married to these pop stars," says Sydney-based PopAsia radio host Jamaica dela Cruz of her listeners, who request K-pop above all other Asian pop genres. They include Beatrice Phan, who describes herself on her Tumblr web page as "married to Lee Chang Sun". The first-year pharmacy student at the University of Sydney has a religious devotion to Lee, a member of the boy group MBLAQ, and to K-pop generally: she spends up to $500 a month on music and merchandise, attends auditions held by visiting Korean companies scouting for talent, tweets prolifically, constantly updates her Tumblr and uploads to YouTube videos of herself singing K-pop songs. And, despite her shy, innocent demeanour, Phan dabbles in writing steamy fan fiction, or "fanfics" - stories posted online in which she immerses her K-pop idols in boy-on-boy love.
This weird world has its own language: "OTP", or "one true pairing", and "shipping", in which a fan's work of fiction brings together favourite idols in relationships. I sit on the edge of her bed as Phan explains: "As K-pop fans we 'ship' people; the way I think about it is if they can't be with me then they can be with someone in their band ... we role play a lot of that." When she's not studying, Phan immerses herself in the online world of K-pop fandom for up to 20 hours a day. "I think sometimes maybe I should give it a break a little bit but, like, I just don't want to at the same time; I don't want to let go.”
Rachael White and Carolees Jacobs want to be K-pop stars - a towering ambition given that Asian faces are the only ones to have made it in the industry so far. I meet the 16-year-olds, friends from Mosman High School, at K-Pop Star Australia, a vocal and dance academy on Sydney's busy Pacific Highway in Chatswood - the only one of its kind in the country. White takes dancing classes while Jacobs focuses on vocals at the academy, where about 70 per cent of the 100 or so students have Asian backgrounds.
"It's all her fault," says Jacobs of her K-pop dreams, pointing to White. "She put photos of these bands and stuff on her [school] books and I looked at them one day and I said, 'Oh, that guy is really cute'."
White had stumbled upon a SHINee video, been hooked by the boy group's schmicko dance moves, and determined K-pop would become her new creative focus. A small role in last year's Puberty Blues, the possibility of a career in Australian film and television - for White, they seem nothing beside the glittering world of K-pop. Dance is her primary passion - she danced last year on stage with Korean idol Jay Park during his Sydney concert - and she knows that the training needed to become a K-pop star will be mighty.
But still, White is seduced by the idea of the idol lifestyle. "Who doesn't think it's going to be glamorous?" she says.
In Seoul's Gangnam district, K-pop's ground zero, there's little glamour, at least on the face of things, and more than a hint of the dystopian. Stand on a traffic-jammed street in the shadow of shimmering office towers and bleak multi-storey apartment blocks and watch the idols roll by, chauffeured to hairdressers, dermatologists, language tutors, personal trainers, costumiers and music studios in sinister black Hyundai Starex people-movers with tinted windows.
"One of the concepts for these idol groups, especially those with the big companies, is mystery," Boda magazine editor Jung Dong Soo tells me. "It's part of their strategy." The big three - SM Entertainment, YG Entertainment (Psy's agency) and JYP Entertainment - are impenetrable: requests for interviews are either ignored or hand-balled from one low-level functionary to another. Keep the shutters down, the formulas to their idols' chemistry under lock and key.
"The scene is so protected and management has such control over these artists," says Sam Hammington, a Melbourne-born Seoul resident. Hammington, dubbed "the first foreign comedian in Korea" for his television and radio work in Korean, has been on the inside of the Korean entertainment industry for a decade. "It's an investment - we're talking large amounts of money that go into this. Some of these kids will sign with a management company and may not perform professionally for seven years. They're in there training; learning how to dance, how to sing.”
If K-pop artists are commodities, their work is formulaic. "It's manufactured pop music," says Hammington. "You could get a five-girl group but they've never met each other before they've had an audition and then they're put on stage together.”
In the main, K-pop songs are written by independent songwriters, including many from the West. "K-pop is never artist-generated; it's dreamed up in boardrooms full of dudes in suits who reek of garlic and soju," is how Seoul-based, American-born writer Chris Tharp puts it on his Homely Planet blog. "The songwriting is farmed out to people whose job it is to shit sugary gold." (Perhaps Tharp is thinking of a Girls' Generation release called Chocolate Love, created in 2009 to sell an LG mobile phone called the Chocolate, and which features dreamy sequences of the girls, dressed in white, caressing mobile phones.)
There are formulas, too, for K-pop's presence in foreign markets such as China, Taiwan and Japan, where there are huge K-pop fan bases. Sub-groups might be formed to target a particular foreign market - SM Entertainment's Super Junior, for example, has several such offshoots - or group members might be recruited from those countries. And training usually includes foreign-language studies.
Established idol Brian Joo, of the duo Fly to the Sky, spent a stressful month resisting SM Entertainment's attempts to send him to China to learn Mandarin and get a foot in the door of Korea's massive neighbour, before ultimately convincing his managers he should stay in Seoul. In 1998, Joo was 17, a Korean-American living in Absecon, New Jersey, and dreaming of stardom when he was identified by an SM Entertainment scout, transported to Seoul and sent down the K-pop assembly line with another aspirant, Hwanhee, to create Fly to the Sky. "I was so excited, ecstatic, young, nervous, all at the same time," says Joo, now 32, over lunch at a Seoul salad chain.
"We lived on the 14th floor of this apartment building; I remember looking out the window - we were living together at the time with two managers - and there's at least 150 girls sleeping outside. I was telling my parents, 'Mum, I'm like an Asian Michael Jackson; this is what it feels like to be Michael Jackson'; it was so overwhelming.”
The "boot-camp type" training program - the vocal training, the dance practice, learning how to be a celebrity and how to be interviewed by the media - was overwhelming, too. SM Entertainment wanted Fly to the Sky's image to be reserved, serious. "Especially for me - they didn't want me to talk much, so in public, I'd have to go like this." Joo, a small, buff man in gym gear and a baseball cap, demonstrates: an erect pose, a stern expression, an almost imperceptible nod to answer a question. If he slipped up, they'd say, "No, wrong Brian, that's not the image."
"You kind of brainwash yourself," says Joo. " 'Okay, all righty'."
Joo played his part and Fly to the Sky had a string of successful album releases. But the strong-silent type wasn't him. "I'm just a goofball, you know," says Joo, who is now pursuing a solo career while Hwanhee does military service. The duo parted company with SM in 2004. "The labels here in Korea, what they'll do is, they'll see a face and then say, 'This guy and this guy will probably match up really well.'"
But if K-pop is highly contrived, it's also catchy. Listen to girl group GLAM's new I Like That, about a girl eating alone at a Korean barbecue restaurant after a breakup, and you might agree. I meet GLAM's four members - Miso, 17, Dahee, 18, Zinni, 26, and Park Jiyeon, 21 - at a Gangnam cafe, each sitting crowbar straight and declining coffee or food ("We're on a diet"). Their dream, says Miso, a bubbly redhead with black nail polish, is to be as popular as Girls' Generation.
GLAM's minders sit in on the interview: a manager/chaperone who lives with the girls in their apartment glass bubble, a public relations woman, plus two other unidentified staff from their entertainment group, a JYP subsidiary called Big Hit Entertainment. The size of the entourage seems to suggest that GLAM are serious stars but, in fact, they're little known and have only had two song releases in their year together.
The girls were brought together after a series of auditions. In the way of the K-pop world, it seems management puppeteers mapped out a blueprint for the new group: GLAM would eschew the sexbomb girl-group prototype and instead develop a feisty, casual, sporty and friendly image. "We're not afraid of being sweaty, it's cool," says Miso, who brings her hands elegantly to her mouth each time she giggles as though to conceal such an indiscretion.
American-born Nathan McMurray, 37, a long-term Seoul resident and lawyer who has a Korean wife and who blogs about Korean culture, remembers a time when things were different. "What we have today is not what existed 10 years ago in Korea," he says. "When I first came to Korea, we had independent acts that worked their way up ... just like any other music scene. Older Korean music was subversive, it had challenging messages ... and it was moving." Does K-pop last? No, says McMurray. "It's confectionery. It's candy. It's something that tastes good for two seconds, then you're sorry you ate it.”
SBS PopAsia host Jamaica dela Cruz might choose to pick a fight with naysayers like McMurray. For her, there's nothing wrong with the manufactured nature of K-pop. "It's showbiz, babe," says dela Cruz. "Dress up for me, give me costumes and she-bam! It's entertainment, so entertain!"
There's mayhem on the streets of Seoul. At ground level outside a corporate tower in the Mapo District, security guards are attempting to maintain order as a rabble of screaming teenage girls pushes towards a wall of glass separating them from boy band B1A4. In a television studio behind the glass, a leggy hostess in a strapless white dress is interviewing the rookie group for the music channel Mnet.
No one's held back on the pink: it's in the studio's set decoration, the hostess's high-rise heels, on the fans' pink-cased phones held high in an attempt to capture the action behind the glass, in their placards with fluoro-pink Korean script saying "Marry me", and "OMG" in English. One of the B1A4 idols has pink hair. From time to time, one of them shifts positions in the studio. It's then that the girls go nuts, wailing and moving as one in a surge towards the window.
In another studio deep inside the building, a warm-up woman is encouraging an audience for the hit show M! Countdown to wave their glow-sticks in the air. The host, some dude from a boy band, reads his notes and adjusts his costume, a weird, multi-coloured affair that makes him look like he should be playing the fool in a Tudor court. He announces the acts in today's show; they include C-Clown - its leader, Rome, is a 23-year-old former Sydneysider who, according to a fan page, likes boxing and the colour blue; HyunA, who achieved eternal global fame as Psy's love interest and dancing sidekick in Gangnam Style; and the group Miss A, whose members are said to have spurned plastic surgery.
They'd be some of the few in the industry to have done so. "These Korean stars are all about beauty and looking beautiful," says Nathan McMurray, chatting to me in the lobby of my Gangnam hotel. "Every single block of this neighbourhood is covered in plastic surgery clinics." They have names like Miracle in Seven Days and Wannabe Plastic Surgery and, in a country with a higher rate of plastic surgery than anywhere else in the world, are adept at imposing desirable Western features on Korean faces. The ideal is the small face: small cheekbones, a jaw that's a neat "V-line" rather than the more typical squareish Korean shape, raised noses with a bridge.
The matter of plastic surgery wasn't on my list of questions I was asked to submit to GLAM's management ahead of our interview but, ever so sweetly, I ask the girls if any of them have gone under the knife. Miso raises a hand and wiggles it, smiling broadly. My question, and Miso's frank answer, apparently causes a kerfuffle; my interpreter later relays to me that if I choose to mention Miso's new nose in my article the group's management will refuse to help me with further interviews I've requested.
I get more insights into this world of beautiful people at the outdoors "Walk with the Stars" K-pop concert at Seoul Olympic Park one wintry morning. It's the legs of girl group Nine Muses that emerge first from a black Hyundai people-mover. Legs elongated by infinitesimal black shorts and black thigh-high boots. "They're very famous for their physiques, their beautiful figures," the MC tells the audience.
Nathan McMurray believes the objectification of women in Korean pop music has got worse, much worse. "The dance moves that girls are doing now would have been totally unacceptable in Korea 10 years ago.
"They've taken stripper moves, cute-ified them, then polished them to the maximum degree." It is, he says, a continuation of what happens in Korean bar culture, where hostesses stroke men's egos and encourage them to buy expensive liquor. "They're all, like, cute and nice and everything your wife is not." McMurray knows 70-year-old businessmen who have pictures of Girls' Generation on their office walls. He has memorised group members' names so he can answer politely when he's asked which one is his favourite.
And while McMurray is anxious not to be seen as only negative about the industry - "The good side of it is, these kids are master dancers, master performers" - he doubts that, Psy aside, K-pop will ever sell into overseas markets like Australia as the Korean government might hope. "Frankly, the guys [are] just too effeminate. It may sell in South-East Asia, but it's never going to sell in the West. Because they don't even look as masculine as Justin Bieber. They're so glammed up, it's almost awkward to look at it at times.”
Returning to my hotel room after my interview with McMurray, I flick through the pages of Boda magazine, trying to see past the glitter, the perfectly planed faces, the glossy hair, the poses, the vacant smiles. The Korean script and the images on the page start to blur and the young men and women turn into anime puppets moving through some dreamy landscape.
I remember then something that GLAM'S irrepressible Miso had said during our interview, when she described the filming for the group's first video, Party (XXO), in which she was lifted aloft by wires so it would seem she was floating in a cloud of cappuccino steam: "I thought maybe I was born to fly.”
Source: smh lifestyle
Really long and we've heard it all before, but there's some interesting interviews with Brian Joo and GLAM in there. Still surprised that someone from my city actually bothered to make an article about K-Pop.
"Like, even when I go to sleep I do dream about them sometimes," says Phan, a 17-year-old with long bleached hair who lives with her Vietnamese-Australian parents and sister in a neat house in an affluent inner-west Sydney neighbourhood. The walls of the teenager's upstairs bedroom are wallpapered with posters of her boys - boys from her favourite Korean pop music groups with names like TVXQ and 2PM and SHINee. "I fantasise a lot of, like, stories in my head where we magically meet and then we start dating or something.”
There are no pictures of Psy on Beatrice Phan's bedroom wall. Beatrice Phan has never fantasised about Psy. Like most Korean pop (K-pop) fans, Beatrice Phan likes her K-pop "idols" pretty. It's a quirk of history that Psy, the creator of last year's global hit Gangnam Style ("Eh, sexy lady"), was the one to swing a global spotlight on K-pop, that such a roly-poly individual of the formulaic K-pop industry should be the one to get kids singing along to Korean lyrics and doing the "horsey dance" in lounge rooms and kindergartens across the Western world.
This month, the star will be in Australia for the travelling Future Music Festival, starting in Brisbane today - fittingly, at Doomben Racecourse. It's a visit that's likely to be accompanied by widespread horsey-dancing and general hysteria, and one that may lift anxiety levels among Australian parents. "When my children started to call me 'sexy lady', I realised it had to stop," says one Sydney mother. Says another of her daughter's affection for the song, "She recognises the opening bars more readily than the Play School theme.”
Some pundits tip that Psy's next release, expected any day, will sink without a trace and the star will quietly fade into pop-culture oblivion. But the massive dream machine that is the K-pop industry, estimated to be worth billions annually and manufacturing dozens of pretty new idol groups every year, has ambitions. K-pop, part of the country's government-sponsored hallyu or Korean wave - which encompasses Korean soap operas, film and food - wants to ride on the coat-tails of Psy's success and conquer the world. "In this age of globalisation, Korea is being understood through its pop culture," head of the government's Export-Import Bank, Kim Yong-hwan, said in early February when he announced a loan package of a trifling $900 million or so for hallyu-related businesses wanting to play in overseas markets.
In a residential neighbourhood of Seoul, I climb six flights of stairs, remove my boots and put on a pair of slippers in an attempt to understand the very, very strange world that is Korean pop music. I've come to a humble apartment that's the office of the K-pop magazine Boda to meet Jung Dong Soo, founder, publisher and editor-in-chief. In our slippers we sit at a glass-topped table with a bowl of snacks in the middle while two staff giggle and work at computers in the next room.
"At the top of my mind every day is what can I do to make the fans happy," the earnest young man in spectacles tells me through an interpreter. "I think this day and night because these fans are so knowledgeable.”
Jung takes his responsibilities to the predominantly female K-pop fan base seriously: a K-pop idol shuffles along a red-carpet and Boda might feature a dozen or more nearly identical pictures of the moment. "Let's say we are describing five minutes of red-carpet walk of a celebrity - we will spend about six pages to cover that from every aspect possible ... like how many times he shook hands versus the average number of hand-shakes by stars," says Jung.
In Korea's internet-saturated, non-reading culture, Jung's sales are modest (in Japan, where he licences it to a Japanese partner, the magazine sells six times as many copies) but he has noticed an increasing audience among wealthier, middle-aged women. "These Korean women really don't have much going on in their lives; I think it's such a good sign that they've found an interest," he says unflinchingly.
And, as Jung's Japanese sales would suggest, K-pop's popularity in Japan is surging. Tomoko Hiraoka, a 37-year-old mother of two from Nara in Japan, tells me why: "Korean men are better looking than Japanese ones." Her friend, Setsuko Hemmi, who discovered K-pop through watching hallyu television dramas, adds that watching them helped her diet. She was so excited about them that she couldn't eat. "It felt like falling in love.”
I bump into Hiraoka, Hemmi and their friend, Yoko Ikunari, at Seoul's Everysing, a merchandise outlet for the powerhouse SM Entertainment group's stable of K-pop idols, including Beatrice Phan's favourites, TVXQ and SHINee, boy group Super Junior and nine-member blockbuster outfit Girls' Generation. At Everysing, in the trendy Rodeo Street area of Seoul, fans can record themselves in the karaoke studio, pick up a special- edition Girls' Generation chocolate box or invest in a pillow case featuring the angelic face of SHINee member Taemin.
The Japanese friends, visiting Seoul for a long weekend, all fancy the members of TVXQ. "They're tall and their faces are small and they're good at singing and dancing - everything," says Hiraoka over coffee at Kona Beans, a cafe owned by the mothers of Super Junior members. Kona Beans is listed in the magazine that Hiraoka is carrying - a guide to Seoul for the Japanese K-pop fan, with page after page of restaurant and food photographs and headshots of the idols who frequent them. For lunch, the women will take another tip from the magazine and dine at a restaurant that specialises in barbecued beef intestines and idol sightings.
Korean K-pop fans, who usually focus their obsession on one idol group or idol, sneer at overseas fans, who tend to divide their attention and follow a number of stars. Although it is acceptable, apparently, to like both a girl group and a boy group - for female fans, the girl group members are appropriated as older-sister figures, while the boy group members are the focus of their wistful romantic attentions. And sometimes not so wistful: sasaeng (literally, "private life") fans are the stalking bunny-boilers of the K-pop world. "Sasaeng fans ... They'd probably literally murder a girl if they found out they were dating their idol," notes one commenter on the Facebook page of SBS's PopAsia.
"They're an emotive audience; they're really, really engaged and they want to be married to these pop stars," says Sydney-based PopAsia radio host Jamaica dela Cruz of her listeners, who request K-pop above all other Asian pop genres. They include Beatrice Phan, who describes herself on her Tumblr web page as "married to Lee Chang Sun". The first-year pharmacy student at the University of Sydney has a religious devotion to Lee, a member of the boy group MBLAQ, and to K-pop generally: she spends up to $500 a month on music and merchandise, attends auditions held by visiting Korean companies scouting for talent, tweets prolifically, constantly updates her Tumblr and uploads to YouTube videos of herself singing K-pop songs. And, despite her shy, innocent demeanour, Phan dabbles in writing steamy fan fiction, or "fanfics" - stories posted online in which she immerses her K-pop idols in boy-on-boy love.
This weird world has its own language: "OTP", or "one true pairing", and "shipping", in which a fan's work of fiction brings together favourite idols in relationships. I sit on the edge of her bed as Phan explains: "As K-pop fans we 'ship' people; the way I think about it is if they can't be with me then they can be with someone in their band ... we role play a lot of that." When she's not studying, Phan immerses herself in the online world of K-pop fandom for up to 20 hours a day. "I think sometimes maybe I should give it a break a little bit but, like, I just don't want to at the same time; I don't want to let go.”
Rachael White and Carolees Jacobs want to be K-pop stars - a towering ambition given that Asian faces are the only ones to have made it in the industry so far. I meet the 16-year-olds, friends from Mosman High School, at K-Pop Star Australia, a vocal and dance academy on Sydney's busy Pacific Highway in Chatswood - the only one of its kind in the country. White takes dancing classes while Jacobs focuses on vocals at the academy, where about 70 per cent of the 100 or so students have Asian backgrounds.
"It's all her fault," says Jacobs of her K-pop dreams, pointing to White. "She put photos of these bands and stuff on her [school] books and I looked at them one day and I said, 'Oh, that guy is really cute'."
White had stumbled upon a SHINee video, been hooked by the boy group's schmicko dance moves, and determined K-pop would become her new creative focus. A small role in last year's Puberty Blues, the possibility of a career in Australian film and television - for White, they seem nothing beside the glittering world of K-pop. Dance is her primary passion - she danced last year on stage with Korean idol Jay Park during his Sydney concert - and she knows that the training needed to become a K-pop star will be mighty.
But still, White is seduced by the idea of the idol lifestyle. "Who doesn't think it's going to be glamorous?" she says.
In Seoul's Gangnam district, K-pop's ground zero, there's little glamour, at least on the face of things, and more than a hint of the dystopian. Stand on a traffic-jammed street in the shadow of shimmering office towers and bleak multi-storey apartment blocks and watch the idols roll by, chauffeured to hairdressers, dermatologists, language tutors, personal trainers, costumiers and music studios in sinister black Hyundai Starex people-movers with tinted windows.
"One of the concepts for these idol groups, especially those with the big companies, is mystery," Boda magazine editor Jung Dong Soo tells me. "It's part of their strategy." The big three - SM Entertainment, YG Entertainment (Psy's agency) and JYP Entertainment - are impenetrable: requests for interviews are either ignored or hand-balled from one low-level functionary to another. Keep the shutters down, the formulas to their idols' chemistry under lock and key.
"The scene is so protected and management has such control over these artists," says Sam Hammington, a Melbourne-born Seoul resident. Hammington, dubbed "the first foreign comedian in Korea" for his television and radio work in Korean, has been on the inside of the Korean entertainment industry for a decade. "It's an investment - we're talking large amounts of money that go into this. Some of these kids will sign with a management company and may not perform professionally for seven years. They're in there training; learning how to dance, how to sing.”
If K-pop artists are commodities, their work is formulaic. "It's manufactured pop music," says Hammington. "You could get a five-girl group but they've never met each other before they've had an audition and then they're put on stage together.”
In the main, K-pop songs are written by independent songwriters, including many from the West. "K-pop is never artist-generated; it's dreamed up in boardrooms full of dudes in suits who reek of garlic and soju," is how Seoul-based, American-born writer Chris Tharp puts it on his Homely Planet blog. "The songwriting is farmed out to people whose job it is to shit sugary gold." (Perhaps Tharp is thinking of a Girls' Generation release called Chocolate Love, created in 2009 to sell an LG mobile phone called the Chocolate, and which features dreamy sequences of the girls, dressed in white, caressing mobile phones.)
There are formulas, too, for K-pop's presence in foreign markets such as China, Taiwan and Japan, where there are huge K-pop fan bases. Sub-groups might be formed to target a particular foreign market - SM Entertainment's Super Junior, for example, has several such offshoots - or group members might be recruited from those countries. And training usually includes foreign-language studies.
Established idol Brian Joo, of the duo Fly to the Sky, spent a stressful month resisting SM Entertainment's attempts to send him to China to learn Mandarin and get a foot in the door of Korea's massive neighbour, before ultimately convincing his managers he should stay in Seoul. In 1998, Joo was 17, a Korean-American living in Absecon, New Jersey, and dreaming of stardom when he was identified by an SM Entertainment scout, transported to Seoul and sent down the K-pop assembly line with another aspirant, Hwanhee, to create Fly to the Sky. "I was so excited, ecstatic, young, nervous, all at the same time," says Joo, now 32, over lunch at a Seoul salad chain.
"We lived on the 14th floor of this apartment building; I remember looking out the window - we were living together at the time with two managers - and there's at least 150 girls sleeping outside. I was telling my parents, 'Mum, I'm like an Asian Michael Jackson; this is what it feels like to be Michael Jackson'; it was so overwhelming.”
The "boot-camp type" training program - the vocal training, the dance practice, learning how to be a celebrity and how to be interviewed by the media - was overwhelming, too. SM Entertainment wanted Fly to the Sky's image to be reserved, serious. "Especially for me - they didn't want me to talk much, so in public, I'd have to go like this." Joo, a small, buff man in gym gear and a baseball cap, demonstrates: an erect pose, a stern expression, an almost imperceptible nod to answer a question. If he slipped up, they'd say, "No, wrong Brian, that's not the image."
"You kind of brainwash yourself," says Joo. " 'Okay, all righty'."
Joo played his part and Fly to the Sky had a string of successful album releases. But the strong-silent type wasn't him. "I'm just a goofball, you know," says Joo, who is now pursuing a solo career while Hwanhee does military service. The duo parted company with SM in 2004. "The labels here in Korea, what they'll do is, they'll see a face and then say, 'This guy and this guy will probably match up really well.'"
But if K-pop is highly contrived, it's also catchy. Listen to girl group GLAM's new I Like That, about a girl eating alone at a Korean barbecue restaurant after a breakup, and you might agree. I meet GLAM's four members - Miso, 17, Dahee, 18, Zinni, 26, and Park Jiyeon, 21 - at a Gangnam cafe, each sitting crowbar straight and declining coffee or food ("We're on a diet"). Their dream, says Miso, a bubbly redhead with black nail polish, is to be as popular as Girls' Generation.
GLAM's minders sit in on the interview: a manager/chaperone who lives with the girls in their apartment glass bubble, a public relations woman, plus two other unidentified staff from their entertainment group, a JYP subsidiary called Big Hit Entertainment. The size of the entourage seems to suggest that GLAM are serious stars but, in fact, they're little known and have only had two song releases in their year together.
The girls were brought together after a series of auditions. In the way of the K-pop world, it seems management puppeteers mapped out a blueprint for the new group: GLAM would eschew the sexbomb girl-group prototype and instead develop a feisty, casual, sporty and friendly image. "We're not afraid of being sweaty, it's cool," says Miso, who brings her hands elegantly to her mouth each time she giggles as though to conceal such an indiscretion.
American-born Nathan McMurray, 37, a long-term Seoul resident and lawyer who has a Korean wife and who blogs about Korean culture, remembers a time when things were different. "What we have today is not what existed 10 years ago in Korea," he says. "When I first came to Korea, we had independent acts that worked their way up ... just like any other music scene. Older Korean music was subversive, it had challenging messages ... and it was moving." Does K-pop last? No, says McMurray. "It's confectionery. It's candy. It's something that tastes good for two seconds, then you're sorry you ate it.”
SBS PopAsia host Jamaica dela Cruz might choose to pick a fight with naysayers like McMurray. For her, there's nothing wrong with the manufactured nature of K-pop. "It's showbiz, babe," says dela Cruz. "Dress up for me, give me costumes and she-bam! It's entertainment, so entertain!"
There's mayhem on the streets of Seoul. At ground level outside a corporate tower in the Mapo District, security guards are attempting to maintain order as a rabble of screaming teenage girls pushes towards a wall of glass separating them from boy band B1A4. In a television studio behind the glass, a leggy hostess in a strapless white dress is interviewing the rookie group for the music channel Mnet.
No one's held back on the pink: it's in the studio's set decoration, the hostess's high-rise heels, on the fans' pink-cased phones held high in an attempt to capture the action behind the glass, in their placards with fluoro-pink Korean script saying "Marry me", and "OMG" in English. One of the B1A4 idols has pink hair. From time to time, one of them shifts positions in the studio. It's then that the girls go nuts, wailing and moving as one in a surge towards the window.
In another studio deep inside the building, a warm-up woman is encouraging an audience for the hit show M! Countdown to wave their glow-sticks in the air. The host, some dude from a boy band, reads his notes and adjusts his costume, a weird, multi-coloured affair that makes him look like he should be playing the fool in a Tudor court. He announces the acts in today's show; they include C-Clown - its leader, Rome, is a 23-year-old former Sydneysider who, according to a fan page, likes boxing and the colour blue; HyunA, who achieved eternal global fame as Psy's love interest and dancing sidekick in Gangnam Style; and the group Miss A, whose members are said to have spurned plastic surgery.
They'd be some of the few in the industry to have done so. "These Korean stars are all about beauty and looking beautiful," says Nathan McMurray, chatting to me in the lobby of my Gangnam hotel. "Every single block of this neighbourhood is covered in plastic surgery clinics." They have names like Miracle in Seven Days and Wannabe Plastic Surgery and, in a country with a higher rate of plastic surgery than anywhere else in the world, are adept at imposing desirable Western features on Korean faces. The ideal is the small face: small cheekbones, a jaw that's a neat "V-line" rather than the more typical squareish Korean shape, raised noses with a bridge.
The matter of plastic surgery wasn't on my list of questions I was asked to submit to GLAM's management ahead of our interview but, ever so sweetly, I ask the girls if any of them have gone under the knife. Miso raises a hand and wiggles it, smiling broadly. My question, and Miso's frank answer, apparently causes a kerfuffle; my interpreter later relays to me that if I choose to mention Miso's new nose in my article the group's management will refuse to help me with further interviews I've requested.
I get more insights into this world of beautiful people at the outdoors "Walk with the Stars" K-pop concert at Seoul Olympic Park one wintry morning. It's the legs of girl group Nine Muses that emerge first from a black Hyundai people-mover. Legs elongated by infinitesimal black shorts and black thigh-high boots. "They're very famous for their physiques, their beautiful figures," the MC tells the audience.
Nathan McMurray believes the objectification of women in Korean pop music has got worse, much worse. "The dance moves that girls are doing now would have been totally unacceptable in Korea 10 years ago.
"They've taken stripper moves, cute-ified them, then polished them to the maximum degree." It is, he says, a continuation of what happens in Korean bar culture, where hostesses stroke men's egos and encourage them to buy expensive liquor. "They're all, like, cute and nice and everything your wife is not." McMurray knows 70-year-old businessmen who have pictures of Girls' Generation on their office walls. He has memorised group members' names so he can answer politely when he's asked which one is his favourite.
And while McMurray is anxious not to be seen as only negative about the industry - "The good side of it is, these kids are master dancers, master performers" - he doubts that, Psy aside, K-pop will ever sell into overseas markets like Australia as the Korean government might hope. "Frankly, the guys [are] just too effeminate. It may sell in South-East Asia, but it's never going to sell in the West. Because they don't even look as masculine as Justin Bieber. They're so glammed up, it's almost awkward to look at it at times.”
Returning to my hotel room after my interview with McMurray, I flick through the pages of Boda magazine, trying to see past the glitter, the perfectly planed faces, the glossy hair, the poses, the vacant smiles. The Korean script and the images on the page start to blur and the young men and women turn into anime puppets moving through some dreamy landscape.
I remember then something that GLAM'S irrepressible Miso had said during our interview, when she described the filming for the group's first video, Party (XXO), in which she was lifted aloft by wires so it would seem she was floating in a cloud of cappuccino steam: "I thought maybe I was born to fly.”
Source: smh lifestyle
Really long and we've heard it all before, but there's some interesting interviews with Brian Joo and GLAM in there. Still surprised that someone from my city actually bothered to make an article about K-Pop.