A backdrop with K-pop group BTS in Seoul, South Korea on October 29.
Ed Jones / Getty Images
Last week, fans of Korean pop music groups made the headlines after organizing a campaign to sign up for more than hundreds of thousands of free tickets to the Donald Trump rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which helped raise the expectations of an event that turned out to be a fake poor attendance. This followed another effective piece of digital activism in early June, when K-pop fans flooded an app launched by the Dallas Police Department to collect “illegal protest activity” videos with content from their favorite artists, making the application unusable. These fans also did something similar with the Twitter hashtag #whitelivesmatter. And fans of the BTS band raised $ 1 million for various Black Lives Matter organizations, matching a donation from the band.
All of this may seem unexpected in a genre better known for monster hooks, tight choreography, and airbrushed faces than political activism. But while this particular form of activism is new, K-pop has been a deeply political genre for years.
For starters, the state of South Korea has always played an important role in the country’s pop music industry, positive and negative. During the 1970s, Western-style rock music by both foreign and Korean artists was heavily censored by the government of dictator Park Chung-hee. Censorship was lifted after the country’s transition to democracy in the late 1980s, but the real turning point came after the 1997 Asian financial crisis, which devastated the country’s economy, forced it to ask for what It was considered a humiliating loan from the International Monetary Fund, and it exposed the vulnerabilities of its export-dependent growth model. In an attempt to rehabilitate the country’s image, as well as focus on an industry that could develop rapidly with little investment in infrastructure, then-President Kim Dae-jung decided to invest heavily in the country’s pop culture, increasing the budget of the culture ministry and creation of agencies to invest and promote cultural products.
The result, known as the Korean Wave or HallyuIt has been amazingly successful. Today, South Korea is a pop culture superpower, from the popularity of its television dramas across Asia, to ParasiteThe historic Oscar victory, to the worldwide success of K-pop. When Psy’s “Gangnam Style”, technically a K-pop song, albeit unusually ironic, became a viral hit in 2012, many dismissed its success in the United States as a fluke. However, BTS’s recent career on the Billboard charts seems to have shown otherwise.
Hallyu’s content may be produced by private companies, but as Euny Hong writes in her book The birth of Korean cool, the state still plays a guiding role in promoting cultural products abroad, advising producers on the “socio-economic, political and cultural factors that could generate [a foreign region] a good market for Hallyu. “These include manuals with suggestions on how to take Muslim prayer times into account when programming Korean television dramas in Arab countries.
For South Korea, Hallyu is a form of soft power: global influence based on having an attractive national culture and ideology rather than a military force. Along with the technological influence of companies like Samsung, Korean pop culture has helped develop the country’s image as a dynamic and futuristic society. And that pop culture has penetrated the markets of countries like China and Japan, where the state of South Korea is not exactly popular.
Sometimes this form of power projection is quite literal. During times of inter-Korean tension, the South Korean government has set up loudspeakers to play K-pop songs in the demilitarized zone.
K-pop’s association with South Korea’s national image also makes it a target. When Seoul reached an agreement with Washington to build an anti-missile defense system known as THAAD in 2017, angering the Chinese government, which saw the system as a threat, Beijing responded, among other measures, by blocking Korean music videos and TV shows. The Chinese market was once so important to K-pop that the popular EXO band included a subgroup, EXO-M, which was performed exclusively in Mandarin, and the industry has yet to fully recover. Indeed, critics point to the THAAD affair as one of the reasons for the recent rise of K-pop in the United States: With the Chinese market off limits, sellers of the genre were forced to focus their attention on the Pacific.
But while K-pop is often seen as an unofficial branch of the Korean state, it is sometimes used by non-state actors for more anti-establishment purposes. Boy band god’s song “One Candle,” for example, became an unofficial anthem for the 2016-17 “Candlelight Revolution” protests that brought down President Park Geun-hye.
Even given this story, K-pop’s new role in the George Floyd protests may seem particularly unexpected. While online K-pop watchers dovetail well with the decentralized, non-hierarchical nature of this protest movement, their recent activism is somewhat ironic given that K-pop is one of the most centralized hierarchical music genres on the planet. , one in which the bands are assembled and trained by labels that strictly control public images and appearance. It’s a model that K-pop entrepreneur Lee Soo-man, whose company created acts like Girls’ Generation and Red Velvet, refers to as “cultural tech.” K-pop idols are still considered ambassadors of the state and are subject to implicit censorship.
But as John Lie, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, who wrote in K-pop, noted in an email to Slate, “one of the main marketing strategies for K-pop: creating a participatory culture of Fans “has been successful beyond the wildest dreams of K-pop producers and BTS fans, for example, take considerable pride in its size and influence.”
That size and influence is most often used by K-pop characters to power the latest releases from their favorite artists. But there are also numerous cases of them organizing to raise money for charity. In a Frankenstein-like twist, fans have often turned against the industry itself, acting as corporate watchdogs at times, including lobbying campaigns to force the agencies behind their favorite acts to treat beloved artists in ways more humane and review the infamous “slave contracts” they have kept idols locked up in exclusive deals for years.
It should also be noted that artists of the genre, who play music strongly influenced by African-American artists, have not always distinguished themselves in their treatment of race.
However, despite the mistakes of some of its artists, it’s hard to think of a more cosmopolitan genre than K-pop, which first became popular in the US primarily among young Asian Americans, but now It has a broader and more multicultural fan base.
In his book The new kings of the worldPakistani journalist Fatima Bhutto describes the growing popularity of K-pop, along with Bollywood films from India and Turkish soap operas “Dizi,” as an emblem of global change far from the previous dominance of American pop culture. She writes: “As the world struggles with the stresses of globalization (the shock waves of neoliberal economic adjustments, the fierce speed at which information travels, and the turbulence caused by urbanization and mass migration of peoples to cities), American pop culture seems less and less reflective of this new and uncertain present. ”
Over the past century, American and American-influenced rock and pop music, with its themes of freedom, individuality, and modernity, has often been embraced by progressive young people in autocratic countries, including Korea. Perhaps not surprisingly, American fans of a genre known for its relentless positivity, intense levels of collaboration, and a participatory, Internet-native fan culture come from a country where everyone willingly wears a mask without being forced into do what. they turned their attention to addressing racism and structural inequality in their own society.
