Category: Literature Analysis

This article pointedout the phenomenon that Korean commercials are highly dominated by celebrity endorsementsand presents less creativitycompared to western advertising cultures. (Turnbull 2017,128) However, in my perspective, this is an inevitable advertising trend developed under Korean instinctive television celebrity culture and idol system.

As the author suggested, in Korean television celebrity culture, idols or other artists are usually the main characters on infotainments(Turnbull 2017,130). Similarly, for commercials, celebrity endorsements are good strategies to attract audiences with celebrity’s popularity. For fans, advertisement is another opportunity to ‘reach’ their idols andsee their idols’ human side(Turnbull 2017,130). The author also indicates that the K-pop idol system has high investment for trainees before debuting but low payback from musical productions, this encourage entertainment companies to chase for profits from commercials endorsements and sexualized performances(Turnbull 2017,132). Therefore, as long as the 15-second advertising slots can successfully catch consumer’s eye and achieve the same or better advertising effect, the merchant will be happy to save the budget for a creative commercial.

However, accompanied by the fast development of media and commercial mode, celebrity endorsement can be no longer at the expense of creativity. For example, Girls’ Generation, as one of the most influential Korean girl groups, has played an important role in leading K-pop and Hallyu through recordings, concerts, and TV shows in the past decade. In 2014, Innisfree, invited one of the group member, Lim YoonA, to be their global brand ambassador. YoonA’s fresh and pure image is highly in line with the brand concept about beauty and has made great contributions to the promotion of the Innisfree brand. Although a large proportion of the endorsement commercials are still in the model of “Just beautiful people holding a bottle”, long and creative advertising videos telling stories between ambassador and brand are also produced to fulfill the interest of customers who are expecting another chance to see their idols in longer vedios.

Bibliography:

Turnbull, James. “Just Beautiful People Holding a Bottle: The Driving Forces behind South Korea’s Love of Celebrity Endorsement.” Celebrity Studies8, no. 1 (2017): 128-35.

The appropriation of English language in Korean popular music has been present since as early as the 1990s, adaptive to an increasingly international market. By examining how degrees and forms of appropriation developed and changed throughout album concepts and lyrics by Girl’s Generation from debut to present, we uncover an emerging pattern of hybridization representing an acculturation process for Western acceptance in need of change. The group has transitioned through distinctive stages in which the appropriation of English has been manifested differently, mirroring greater phenomenon in the K-pop industry overtime. At first, there was minimal English mixing besides using English as song titles, with the debut single not including English at all from title to lyrics. Girl’s Generation transitioned to the next stage with their 2009 hit song “Gee” in which English lyric mixing began to serve important purpose of creating catchy hooks. The releases of hit songs following “Gee” such as “Run Devil Run”, “Oh!”, and “The Boys” perpetuated such use of lyric mixing in all the repetitive hook lines, and mixing reached its prime from brief, common words like baby to full sentences like Girl’s Generation make you feel the heat. Girl’s Generation has gained substantial international popularity from then to present, with abundant appropriation of English as well as mixing Western genres, for example hip-hop in “I Got A Boy” and lay back, semi-organic music styles of the 90s in “Lion Heart”, yet most of their songs have deficit in Korean cultural identities. Such lack of “Korean sentiments and social milieu” is rather representative of the greater K-pop industry’s effort to self-re-acculturate for foreign popularity (Jin&Ryoo 2014:128). It is eventually diminishing for future international strivings if success is built off self-acculturation, and the industry should begin considering culturally sensitive hybridization as a future direction.

Bibliography

Jin, Dal Yong and Woongjae Ryoo. (2014) “Critical Interpretation of Hybrid K-Pop: The Global-Local Paradigm of English Mixing in Lyrics.” Popular Music and Society, no.2 (2014): 113-131

Concerning whether sexual elements in music contexture will affect sexual attitudes, empirical experiments have been conducted by sociologies Kistler and Lee to find the correlations. Experimental evidences showed support for hypothesis that highly sexual content had effects on reinforcing gender stereotype. When relates to SNSD, I am in conformity how the influence is formed but in contradictory questioning the direction of influence in the article.

Kistler and Lee explained the formation of influence referring to concepts of “social cognitive theory” and “parasocial interaction” (Kistler and Lee 2009: 69). The social cognition theory indicates “human have the capacity to learn through symbolic environments, such as through media portrayals” (Ibid.). After learning, attitudes is enhanced by involvement of viewers to the protagonist of media script (Ibid.). I believe the processes revealed in the article are verified by the process of how fandoms are affected or even the formation of the fandoms. Refer to the idea that Korean fandoms are encouraged to show activeness by mimicking idols talked in the class, there are numerous SNSD’s fans passionate about learning the dance and making cover videos. These behaviours are the combination of learning and evolvement, resulting fandoms’ affection and absorption of  the attitudes conveyed by MV or any forms of content. The second part stated the direction of the sexual attitudes. Although the experiment targeted both men and women, the results for men were significant while were ambiguous for women. Considering there is a large proportion of SNSD’s fans is women, I cannot agree with the findings. For example, “Geniesns” is categorized as sexy MV because of waving hips, bare legs and uniform fantasies. But the theme of “fulfilling the wishes” made the overall impression becomes the encouragement of women’s assertive self-disclosure, and leads a positive direction of sexual attitudes.

In conclusion, the article preciously analyzed the formation of influence. While since SNSD never published any highly sexual videos, considering current level of sexual elements and gender of their fandom, I believe idols positively undermine the sexual stereotypes in contradictory to authors’ opinion.

Wenhui Fu

 

Bibliography:

Michelle, E. Kistler and Moon J. Lee. “Does Exposure to Sexual Hip-Hop Music Videos Influence the Sexual Attitudes of College Students?” Mass Communication and Society 13, no. 1 (2009): 67-86.

Girls’ generation group is a perfect representation of Korean-ness in K-pop, they had introduced people to Hallyu and explore more about Korean culture. They had involved brand new elements that are unique and transnational into their songs and videos to create a new trend of Korean-ness. They were accepted from broad extensions and successfully reached out and connected to international fans with balancing from the distinct cultures.

Lee has indicated that Korean music is a presentation of globalization and localization, which become the important feature of Korean conscious. (Lee 2006:143) Korean-ness has related to four major aspects: hybridity, nostalgia, mobility and othering referring music that is from abroad in 1990s (Lee 2006:138). Girls’ Generation is a typical group that makes a good connect of original K-pop and culture from other countries. They have debuted for many years and they changed their style for attracting audiences from all over the world. For example, they form the figure of cute Korean girls in “Gee” in 2009, but they form a figure of mature and independent ladies image in “Lion Heart”, which illustrate the Western culture. As time passed, they incorporate various culture in their music and add new elements to K-pop, then making K-pop been more acceptable to observers all over the world. When audiences recognize their own culture in the music or videos, they may have a sense of identity, which helps K-pop reaching out to the world.

To conclude, Girls’ Generation does not just form the Korean style and focus on only the Korean culture; by contrast, they globalize K-pop and put it in an acceptable way to both the Korean and audiences from abroad.

 

 

 

 

Bibliography

 

Lee, Hee-Eun. “Seeking the ‘others’ within us”. In mediasia: Global mediation in and out of context, edited by Todd Joseph, Miles Holden and Timothy J. Scrase. London: Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, 2006.

 

Girls’ generation’s accomplishment and achievement are closely related to social media’s development, they had well used the promotion of media to gain reputation not only in Korea but more importantly internationally.

Jung is focusing on media studies, it emphasizes on the underlying reason of having the opportunity to communicate and marketing K-pop culture internationally is due to the presence of new media technology (Jung 2015:76). Girls’ generation had an outstanding performance on connecting and reaching out to international fans. They had offered diversity and all-embracing concepts and elements in different forms such as songs, dances, and music videos. In their music videos, “I got a boy” displays a hip-hop style, “Party” shows a sweet holiday style; “Genie” with a mature image wearing a uniform and “Lion Heart” was emphasizing on retro style. They had so many views on YouTube, which is a powerful type of social media platforms, and they are very active in different platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. They had well-used style conversion and fascinating content to show their charm and charisma through media. On the other side, they are appearing not only in the music field but also TV dramas, advertisements, films, music, and fashion fields. They are building their power and influence from the expansion of fans, for instance, there are cover videos of their dances on YouTube, and they are also impacting the fashion trends and cosmetic consumption.

In summary, K-pop is able to share and attract people by making improvement and advancing their technology to provide a better media space and platform. Using this low costing method, Girls Generation had expanded their influence with high returning effect.

 

 

 

Bibliography

Jung, Eun-Young. “New Wave Formations: K-Pop Idols, Social Media, and the      Remaking of the Korean Wave”. In Hallyu 2.0: The Korean Wave in the Age of Social Media, edited by Lee, Sangjoon, Nornes, Abé Markus. 73-89. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2015.

Aijing

Nowadays, as we all know, Girl’s Generation is a well-known girl group and has significant influence in the world. They have also won the first place in South Korea in the Forbes rankings for two consecutive years. I argue that their success cannot separate from the help of the Cultural Economics of Fandom.

As Cho, Lee, Yoo and Chu mentioned in their article, TV singing competition can be a useful marketing tool which can explore the potential of players (Cho, Lee, Yoo and Chu 2018, 17). Since the productivity of fans directly determines whether these players can be competitive in the market and bring profits to the entertainment companies, the amount of new fans which each player can obtain through the competition can be a valid indicator of the entertainment companies’ marketability, which determines the future fate of the players to a large extent. They also used a series of credible data to confirm the importance of the Cultural Economics of Fandom.

I agree with their opinion. Fans’ fanaticism about idols often accompanies with a series of equally extreme consumer behaviors. Just like a series of music television program broadcasts attended by Girl’s Generation, a large percentage of the scoring rule is based on the sales of records to stimulate their fans to purchase. Therefore, fans can have the opportunity to get involved in and purchase albums, videotapes, TV series VCD, etc.to help Girl’s Generation to get good rankings in the competition. This sense of participation and the ability to support their beloved idols can significantly increase the enthusiasm of the fans.

In general, I believe the success of Girl’s Generation is mostly due to the success of the Cultural Economics of Fandom. Their excellent marketability helps them achieve amazing results on the record sales rankings.

 

 

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Bibliography

 

Cho, Daegon, Seok Ho Lee, Yeawon Yoo, and Hyo-Youn Chu. “Television Singing Competitions Create Stars? Empirical Evidence from the Digital Music Chart in South Korea.” Journal of Cultural Economics, no.3(2018):1-20.

 

Literature Analysis:

Puzar states that performing “Aegyo” does not detriment both the performer and the receiver in terms of the “vertical mobility” and the power in their professional career and private life (Puzar and Hong 2018, 7). I agree with Puzar about his statement that the capability of performing “Aegyo” is a “soft power” of females in South Korea, and I believe it has been used by the SNSD group to successfully attract their intended audiences.

According to Puzar, performing “Aegyo” refers to a widely accepted practice of East Asian culture, specifically South Korean females, to pretend and imitate the behavior, facial expression, linguistic and the voices of young children or pet animals to give the receiver an impression of cute, vulnerability and lovability (Puzar and Hong 2018, 1).  As a Ph.D. in Culture Study, Puzar has done a thorough and professional research to study the “Aegyo” in the Korean social context by distributing questionnaires and interviewing with the interlocutors. The result shows that the “ideal female” in Korea usually can perform “Aegyo” in a situational intelligent way, and it is a “tactical tool” that has been used by the female to serve a various purpose such as negotiating, softening the conversation, entertaining the superior and ultimately achieving their goal (Puzar and Hong 2018, 13). Since the SNSD group’s major targeted audiences are the mid-age males in a patriarchal society, many of the choreographic videos have demonstrated the characteristics of “Aegyo” either performed by the girls or in the setting and the lyrics of the songs, such as gee, oh!, I got a boy and much more.

Moreover, in the traditional East-Asian context, feminity has always been associated with “water”, although the water is soft, it still has the capability of shaping rocks. Although being “soft” or act “Aegyo” may look like it is disempowering women, but it may turn out to be a more adapted and suitable tool to empower female in a patriarchal society where social hierarchy has been strictly enforced.

 

Bibliography:

• Puzar, Aljosa, and Yuwon Hong. “Korean Cuties: Understanding Performed Winsomeness (Aegyo) in South Korea.” The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology (2018): 1-17. doi:10.1080/14442213.2018.1477826.