Category: Discussions

What complications would ensue if pop stars were granted exemption from mandatory military service? Should they be exempted? On what grounds? 

In order to maintain the national defense army in South Korea, as we know, there is a male conscription since around 70 years ago. Male at ages of 18-35 is expected to serve the military force or other supplemental services mandatorily, from at least 21 months to 55 months. However, there is always people trying to “shirk” from this crucial legal liability, which causes a social criticism that is magnified on the male Korean celebrities. In severe situations that “can easily end even the most prominent celebrity career overnight”, just like Psy did before (Yeo 2017, p.294). Standing in front of mass media and social norms, I personally think that mandatory military service should not be exempted for pop stars.

Nowadays, mass media is a powerful instrument that regulates pop stars’ behaviors. Although, only a few Korean stars were criticized for the mandatory military service in history, people still take it very seriously. In the case of Psy, mass media like newspaper and online articles, was repeatedly using his example to encourage and promote celebrity conscription, which also “function as a watchdog” to “keep the citizenry informed of abuses and misconduct” (Yeo 2017, p.298). Therefore, it would not be hard to image that if one pop star is exempted from mandatory military service for any kind of excuses, would start an enormous debate on mass media and mainly contains criticism.

In addition, social norms would not allow the exemption for pop star, as if equality and democracy is the goal which Korean citizen pursue in their society. The mandatory conscription has been developed into a form of social norms and considered as a “normal” process in a young male adult’s life. The consequences for populations that exposure to inequality, these pop stars could “create a distorted focus for public attention” (Yeo 2017, p.299). In another words, the attitudes of pop stars towards conscription can reflect the social norms that held by themselves, which will be criticized if it against the social values held by the majority who are seeking equality.

In conclusion, I think in order to maintaining the equality between pop stars and rest of Korean citizen, and also to avoid the undutiful behaviour of pop stars exposure to the public through mass media, mandatory military service should not be exempted for pop stars.

 

Reference

Yeo, Yezi. “The good, the bad, and the forgiven: The media, spectacle of South Korean male celebrities’ compulsory military service.” Media, War & Conflict, 10, no.3, (2017): 293-313.doi: 10.1177/1750635217694122

Question D: After the class on sexual objectification, explain what you think about sexual objectification in K-pop

The success behind K-pop hides behind the extravagance of revealing outfits, cheesy smiles, catchy melodies, and seductive dances. In the K-pop industry, sexual objectification is very prominent within female artists by the way they are dressed and perceived within the lyrics of their songs. Therefore, the success of a K-pop idol completely relies on their image. Unfortunately, within K-pop, it purely embodies the idea of how “sex sells.” Today, women are commonly being sexualized and objectified in K-pop where societal pressure exists for these idols to be flawless. Thus, sexual objectification in K-pop illustrates disempowerment in women by exercising the pressure for them to conform to set beauty standards and traditional gender roles.

There is no doubt that in every K-pop music video there are certain images that female K-pop idols need to conform to. In the normative male gaze perception, there are strong desires for a woman’s long, smooth legs. Thus, many K-pop idols are to assimilate to this kind of perfect body perceived by the audience. In addition, plastic surgery is very common for female idols to attain that perfection. As Saeji argues in her article, many idols are chosen to be within a certain group and are controlled “with a carefully pre-prepared image under the tutelage of K-pop’s major entertainment companies” (Saeji 2013, 330). Ultimately, the entertainment companies are the powerhouse that determines how they should be in their everyday lives. Hence, this forces female K-pops artist to simply comply in order to enhance their career. As a result, sexual objectification within K-pop further disempowers women through the importance of conformity within set beauty standards.

On the other hand, Korea is still embodied as a very male-dominated society today. As K-pop being the cultural ambassador of Korea, they are forced to follow the ideals of traditional gender roles. This is shown in many music videos like “Dream Girls” from class which has exemplified gendered ideas that “manipulates young female idol’s femininity in order to meet socially prescribe role expectations in a male-dominated society” (Lin & Rudolf 2017, 28). By sexually objectifying women as “exotic sexual objects” this further results in women to be portrayed as “submissive, fragile, and innocent maidens” (Lin & Rudolf 2017, 28).  Therefore, the practices of K-pop reinforces women to continue to execute these traditional gender roles.

The idea of “sex sells” is embedded within the practices of K-pop culture. It is shown in the evidence above that female artist groups are still consistently being sexually objectified in their music videos.  As a result, sexual objectification is a technique that is not only used to achieve success and fame but to also realign the standards of beauty and traditional gender roles of women within the Korean culture.

Reference

Lin, Xi, and Robert Rudolf. “Does K-pop Reinforce Gender Inequalities? Empirical Evidence from a New Data Set.” Asian Women 33, no. 4 (2017): 27-54. doi:10.14431/aw.2017.12.33.4.27.

Saeji, Cedarbough T. “Juvenile Protection and Sexual Objectification: Analysis of the Performance Frame in Korean Music Television Broadcasts.” Acta Koreana 16, no. 2 (December 2013): 329-65. doi:10.18399/acta.2013.16.2.003.

 

Emily Chow

2) Consider the role of television (as compared to other media devices) in your daily consumption and perception of popular culture, in comparison to that of the presence of television and its implications on the direction of contemporary popular culture in South Korea as suggested by Kim Suk-young in chapter 2.

 

In chapter two of her book, Kim Suk-young writes about the role that TV has played in the presentation of media. Initially, TV was envisioned as a media platform which could deliver a theatre like performance in the comfort of one’s home. As one might expect, cable TV at the time it was introduced was extremely popular, and continued to grow during the late 80’s into the 90’s with the introduction of colored broadcasts.

At the time of their inception, there were three major broadcasting companies in Korea which each had their own tv music chart programs. These programs focused not only on the music, but the visuals as well, allowing for fans to put both the image and voices of their favorite artists together. In Western culture, this can be likened to MTV, and the music billboard. A stark difference however, is that in Korea these TV broadcasters today, still retain some control over the music industry despite the vast new ways to consume media.

That is to say, we no longer need to watch TV to get the experience of watching our favorite music videos, or figure out who the most popular artists currently are. Instead, we have the availability of programs such as Vevo, Youtube or any other website online that allows us to stream uploaded content. Instead of listening to music that is “popular”, clever software built into applications such as Apple Music and Spotify look at our preferences and personalize a list of recommendations. Such advances in the distribution of music media would lead one to question how the same TV producers in Korea still retain a lot of power.

As explained in Kim’s book, music producers still try and kowtow to the individuals in charge of the selection of which artists will be put on TV broadcasts. Despite all the other media outlets available today, these TV broadcasts still remain essential to the k-pop industry. This is explained by circumstances within the k-pop industry; the star system used by entertainment companies, and the “manufactured nature of popularity by various media forces”. A balance exists now, where entertainment companies allow their biggest starts to perform on TV shows, in exchange for the same TV broadcaster to present some of their lesser known performers.

Even though these shows do not draw in massive audiences, the time and effort (usually 24 hours goes into putting together a 5 minute video) is worthwhile because this content is usually pushed to other online platforms which would generate more views.

It is interesting to imagine that TV broadcasts would remain important in Korea, but have for the most part gone extinct in Western entertainment culture. I can’t remember the last time I saw a music video on the TV. It seems to me that in the k-pop industry, most of the control over the production of music remains in the hands of the media and production companies, and less so that of the artists, especially when compared to the Western frame work.

 

Kim, Suk-Young. K-pop Live: Fans, Idols, and Multimedia Performance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018. Kindle.

 

 

 

We all understand that without fans, there would be no stars, but how much power do fans really have? Discuss the power of a fan/consumer and what this could entail (how much impact do we have)?

Obviously, there would be no stars if they don’t have fans. Fans are groups of people from worldwide, gathering together with same interests, goals and having the same particular idol they follow. There is no doubt that fans would always support and protect their idols from many dimensions, such as buying CDs, photo albums and do things they believe are supportive to their idols, etc. As the fan groups becoming bigger and bigger, their influences widen globally. In my opinion, power of fans is unaccountable, which can be both positive in transnational cultural and negative in the producing of anti-fans.

Positively speaking, it is a good thing that fans from worldwide are producing transnational culture fandom while sharing their culture with fans from different countries. The influence of fans is creating this transnational cultural fandom which becomes a product of Korean fans and non-Korean fans consist different culture and media (Thussu 2007). It allows fans interacting their socio-cultural background with other fans, which studies have found that “fans are enjoying textual and intertextual play with cultural products” (Lee 2016). In addition, fans can be valuable in creating their own fan culture, which also is the product of transnational cultural fandom. In the fan culture, there are norms are created, such as fans have to buying certain supporting items to identify themselves from the rest of non-fan group, especially in young teenage girl and it is defaulting to purchase the unique light stick to hold in their idol’s concert.

However, the dark side of the fan culture which is the product of the anti-fans. Anti-fan is originated in Korea, which form by a group of people who dislike a particular artist and making threat to the artist directly or indirectly. They could do things that are totally unethical, emotionally and sometimes physically harmful to the artists and to their real fans. The reason why people turn into some anti-fans can be as simple as the little unsatisfactory of the performance by the artists. In 2006, Jung Yunho from super junior drunk a drink contains super glue which send by anti-fans, and was send to the emergence room for surgery and got safe eventually; in the same year, because the performance by SJ in Korea MCB was not gone well as expected, anti-fan smashed their car window of on their way out while SJ members, Kim Ki-bum and Lee Dong-hae, were sitting in the car and they got injured by the broken glasses. However, SJ still apologize for their performance after this incident, anti-fans were not showing any sympathy and even become more malicious. This damage of anti-fans is tragical to every artist and unforgettable to every fan who deeply love their idols.

 

References

Lee, Hye Kyung. 2016. Ashgate research companion to Fan Cultures: Transnational Cultural Fandom, 2016.

Thussu, D.K. (ed.) 2007. Media on the Move: Global Flow and Contra-Flow. London: Routledge. Tsai, E. 2007. Caught in the terrains: An inter-referential inquiry of trans-border stardom and fandom. Inter-Asian Cultural Studies, 8(1), 135–54.

Do you think a solo/group artists’ career is financially sustainable in this digital era (of streaming and social media)? Has technology improved or made the conditions more difficult for artists to sustain their careers? What compromises may artists be forced to make in order to be financially sustainable? Consider how few groups are as successful as BTS, Big Bang, or Twice and how many groups and solo artists “never become sophomores” (in the words of Macklemore). 

In the K-pop industry, artists under major entertainment companies such as SM, YG, and JYP often struggle from earning extremely low paycheques day by day as a group member or as a solo performer. In order to comply with the global demand, managers in charge of identifying talent would frequently introduce fresh solo artist or groups to attract new fans to K-pop or lure supporters from other idols. Apart from performing in live shows, recording music videos for an album, or promoting merchandise at events, K-pop artists also rely on product advertisements and television appearances to generate more supporters and income.

With the emergence of online streaming and social media, K-pop artists are able to reveal their unfiltered side to the public, and fans from around the world would have the access to any recent performances or interviews as long as it’s available on social media. Although the digital era created opportunities for more idol exposure and product placement in advertisements, artists in this industry do not have a financially sustainable career and I would argue the utilization of social media strengthens an artist’s chance of succeeding in the business by staying relative with the fans and generating discussion among club members. 

One of the social media platform that stores and shares K-pop music content is Youtube. This platform not only offers an acoustic aspect of music, Youtube additionally provides the visuality of music to the fans and replaces MTV as the provider for music video consumerism (Ono and Kwon 2013, 207-210). In YouTube, views on a video can translate into money compensation for artists to potentially earn. Furthermore, they have an opportunity of earning additional money by appearing on YouTube advertisements for a product or the group.  As K-pop continued to grow with YouTube, major entertainment companies such as YG and SM began to join YouTube in 2006 and created YouTube channels for fans to browse their idols (Ono and Kwon 2013, 208).

Technology connects fans with artists through social media, anyone can browse the latest post from their idol with just a press of a button, artists can release unedited videos on social media to trigger discussion ahead of the release date, fans in facebook groups can arrange meetings after school or work to practice their Ttechang. Technology offers alternative ways to earn money and it improved the conditions for an artist to remain relevant in the business, solo or group artists can financially sustain their career without physically participating in any events or shows. 

Reference:

Ono, Kent A. and Kwon, Jungmin. 2013. “YouTube as a K-pop Interlocuter.” In The Korean Wave: Korean Media Go Global, edited by Youna Kim, 199-214. New York: Routledge.

How did American music influence Korean music of the past and of the present? Are the influences of the past still prominent in Kpop today?

Korean music of the past and the present have been deeply influenced by American music, and the influences of the past are still very important in Kpop nowadays. The American culture was widely spread to Korea in the Korean War era. The radio programs which brought by the American armies were the major media in Korea at that time, and this made the Korean people listen to American pop music very often. Television broadcasts and American movies were also passed to Korea.

At the end of the war, many American soldiers stayed in South Korea and did not move out. They also set up camp towns across the entire country, and many military shows had been established for American soldiers’ entertainment (Shin 2009: 92). The Korean people were able to earn money by performing in front of the American soldiers. In order to participate in the show, the Korean people had to learn how to sing English songs and play different Western instruments. The performers were graded regularly by the American. If they got high scores, then they were sent to perform in front of the officers which were the highest class and obtained a higher pay. Otherwise, they had to stay in the camp towns. On the other hand, some Korean agencies were developed to train the Korean musicians based on the standard of the American. The music styles, song themes and fashion were greatly influenced by the American too.

Comparing to the present, there are some popular Korean TV audition music shows recently which are also influenced by the American. The most well-known audition show in Korea would be Produce 101in 2016. It was a series of TV program about 101 female trainees fight for victory through various missions. The ideas of these Korean audition shows were very similar to those in America such as American Idol. Both Korean and American audition shows are competitions that are used to discover some potential talented people.

In addition, the American influences of the past are still remarkable in today’s Kpop. Some American style music are combined with Korean culture these days. Trots which were also influenced by American music are still being used nowadays. Some young singers like Hong Jin-young are still singing trots in this Kpop world. Also, the songs in Korea are regulated through censorship system which were inspired by the American during the war. The songs are required to be checked before releasing to the audiences. As we can see, the past is still influencing the Korean music today.

 

Citation:

Shin, Hyunjoon, and Ho, Tung-hung. “Translation of ‘America’ during the Early Cold War Period: A Comparative Study on the History of Popular Music in South Korea and Taiwan.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies10, no. 1 (2009): 83-102.

“How K-pop became a global phenomenon” Vox. https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/2/16/16915672/what-is-kpop-history-explained (accessed 10/1/2018).