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Discussion#5(regrade#2)

  1. What is your answer to criticisms of K-pop masculinity?

  As Korean K-pop music becomes more famous all around world, people are going to have a new concept of aesthetic: What is the real masculinity? In normal Korean males, they have grantee to serve the military, then they became real men. In K-pop industry, males are not necessarily stronger or dressing formal to follow in the traditional style. They can make up, act like a spoiled child or even dressing bonzer and become “Pretty boys”(Colette 2017). In my opinion, I think whatever the male’s style in K-pop right now, as long as they can contribute in K-pop and their fans, then they have masculinity

Male’s style in K-pop industry influences their fans as squeals of delight and excitement(Colette 2017). It means male idol’s style can let their fans become excited, then it is the masculinity and it is also their contribution for K-pop. For example, Colette Bennett said in his article “How male K-Pop idols are redefining masculinity”: “While K-pop may not suit the taste of many, its continued popularity in the U.S. means that hundreds of thousands of people are falling in love with a new kind of man, one we’re meeting for the first time through the music. It’s refreshing and exciting” (Colette 2017). So after K-pop explored in U.S, more fans get interested in the new kind of male. They actually changed their aesthetic and they even fall in love with the male who actually doing make up. And those male idols just did what they desire to do as: “It’s OK for me to dance, to sing, to enjoy who and what I am”(Colette 2017). Their realistic is a responsibility to K-pop industry and their fans. Whatever they look like, they are themselves and they can perform themselves in good attitude. It is the real concept of masculinity.

In 2009, the music video called Abracadabra by 2 pm had a total hit count of 1,150,000 on YouTube. It became the queen of the girls group mimickers(Jung 2010 p.164). It also proved people accepted 2pm’s performance as girls mimickers. However it did not mean they wanted become girls or they are gay. They just opened a new path of male’s aesthetic and a new style of K-pop music video. Those are all their achievement and I think their achievement let them become masculinity.

In conclusion, we should change our mind about how a male should be look like in K-pop industry. There’s no exactly rule that a male couldn’t make up or dressing in female style. Those are all their styles even features. We cannot say if a male who wear ear ring is not masculinity. We should focus on what they did for their fans and how they work hard for K-pop, this is their identification of masculinity.

References:

Jung, Sun. Korean Masculinities and Transcultural Consumption: Yonsama, Rain, Oldboy, K-Pop Idols. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011.

Colette,Bennett. “How Male K-Pop Idols Are Redefining Masculinity.” The Daily Dot. February 24, 2017. Accessed November 22, 2018. https://www.dailydot.com/upstream/k-pop-boy-bands-masculinity/.

 

 

 

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Discussion 5 (regrade)

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

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Discussion #5

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

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Cover Video Reflection

In the course of making this cover video, we as a group planned accordingly to distribute work equally by realizing everyone’s strengths and weaknesses in the first meeting. Part of the group was more opened to work behind the scenes on the editing and filming side of the production, whereas group members like me who recognized editing as a flaw and decided to be in front of the camera more frequently. Apart from that, group members who weren’t involved in the editing process made other contributions to the group such as organizing meeting times, purchasing items for the shoot, and planning the overall storyline of the cover video (how to make it authentic while remaining Korean feel).

I learned a lot throughout the process of making the Hangover cover video. Because Psy’s collaboration with Snoop Dogg was not their best vocal performance in the realm of K-pop, we were drawn by the visual aspect of the music video and its creativity with cartoons. With limited filming resource and knowledge, the group had to replace the graphic scenes of the music video with authentic clips of ourselves performing and singing to the song. For my part, I had to cover Psy’s first two minutes of the video. As the person who was being filmed, I never knew the importance of lighting and audio perception for the camera. Picking a setting with adequate lighting and the low surrounding noise was the best combination for the filming process.

It is possible to assume a fan of k-pop like us would undergo a similar process to produce a cover video for their favorite idol, they would have to have to organize personnel similar to us for maximum productivity and efficiency. I’m glad to say we’ve managed to do that!

  • Wesley Wong
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Cover Video Reflection

In the processing of making this cover video, I found that there is much more work than I thought. First, if we want to construct a narrative music video, we have to build a story line and create a basic frame of this video, and connecting footages with the key scenes during editing. Then, I believe the communication between the camera operator and actors is important, since we do not have a director, and that requires the imagination of the camera operator who decides the shooting angles, length of each scenes and the expectation of the performance of actors. After finish shooing footages, editing is an essential step, which is the spirt of the video making process. Those discontinued, meaningless footages would be transformed into a completely different shape in a video.

When I was editing, I learned that storyline must be well-established, and then focused on details. At first, I missed picking footages that should be in the video, which made my partial video nonsense and confused. Then I tried different footages combinations, played them over and over again, and choosing the most appropriate and making-sense ones to put in my video. Because we are doing the music cover video, the switches between sense to sense and music beats have to be matched in some extent, which makes audience more comfortable to watch it. This beat matching cost me lots of time to make adjustments.

Those are the most difficult situations I have encountered when I was editing, but luckily, I resolved these problems eventually, and I had a very great experience with my group of doing this cover video.

 

Shiruo zhang

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Cover Video Reflection

In the course of creating our cover video, I have learned that it is crucial to embody creativity and a strong vision in order to make it a success. Hence, this consists of a huge production that takes a great effort from different roles of expertise to re-create the music video well. These roles include performers, choreographers, videographers, producers, and editors.

By being the main videographer for the cover video, it made me realize how important it was to get the right shot. In particular, it is significant to have a clear vision of how you are going to capture the performers in a particular scene. Through using specific camera angles, it further helps shape the meaning of the lyrics and the song. There were many particular instances where I had to be creative with camera positions to perform different camera angles to further dramatize the scenes. Therefore, as an individual videographer,  I had to be innovative to adopt different angles in order to imitate Hangover’s scenes.

However, without having a clear vision and creative idea in mind, it is really hard for the group to start the project. There were many instances where we had to use one of our film days to figure out the props, the scenes, and the roles for our cover video. There is no doubt that K-pop stars like G-Dragon, who have the capability of not only performing, but also choreographing, composing, and producing their own songs are truly labelled as a K-pop idol. Overall, I adore and applaud fans who have created cover videos on Youtube because this kind of task surely takes lots of time and energy to assemble.

Emily Chow

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Cover Video Reflection

After making the cover video of PSY’s “Hangover”, I have a better understanding about K-pop and fandom. Being a K-pop idol is harder than you think, because they have to practice singing and dancing for a long time until actually debut. They will not know when they can debut and they just keep practicing every day since their company will not tell them. Even after they can debut, they still need to keep practicing and show their perfect side in front of their fans.

We usually focus on the idols on stage; however, we should also pay more attention to the people who work so hard behind stage such as producers, songwriters and composers. Making a 3 to 4 minutes long music video is definitely not an easy task, and I can imagine that how much time and efforts they need to put in. Starting from writing songs and lyrics, then need to decided different locations and prepare different materials for filming. The editors need to combine everything at last to produce a final version of music video. Each step is very important and cannot be skipped.

On the other hand, I really admire the fans who do the dance or song cover. I never did any cover videos before and this is my first time. I found that it is really challenging. Before filming, we needed to get a rough idea about the music video. At the time of shooting, we needed to act in front of the camera with different facial expressions or movement. The lighting and shooting angles are also very important. I definitely know more about the process of K-pop covering.

Cherry Cheng

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Cover video reflection – Joel Yap

The process by which we created our cover video project provided an experience that I thought allowed us to envision what it would be like to actually create a k-pop music video. At the beginning of this class, I had very little knowledge about k-pop, let alone the huge production behind the music videos that this industry produces. As such, the only few k-pop artists I had been exposed to were those who had made an impact overseas, like Psy.

A big concern of mine before we had even chosen which video we were going to cover was my lack of dancing talent. It was around this time that it became very apparent to me how talented every k-pop performer is; whether that be in singing or in dancing. This lead to our group choosing a less dance-intensive song, which everybody in our group was somewhat familiar with.

In making our video, we analyzed the music video and decided which scenes we could replicate, and others that would be too difficult. In Psy’s Hangover, most of the scenes are not too graphic intensive, and are not reliant on too many props; which we considered to be a good thing. One of the scenes features Psy surrounded by hundreds of soju bombs; while we considered recreating this, we quickly realized that the difficulty of setting it up and getting the perfect take would prove too difficult and time consuming.

Overall, making this cover video brought to light how difficult it actual is to produce a real music video. Working with other group members who had a more consolidated knowledge of k-pop also added to the experience.

Joel Yap

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Cover Video Reflection

As long as we finished our first cover video, the process of making this video let me realize the most important elements in group work and the power of K-pop. Our cover video for PSY’s song is Hangover. The video for hangover is not just dancing or singing, it is more complicated, it likes a drama. As a result, the process of covering this video is not that easy.

First, our group member’s distribution should be clear. Hangover has lots of different plots; our group members need to distribute each part to each person. Then we will choose which part we want to performance individually. It means we should learn how PSY perform in the video and try to become him. This part made me feel that our group like a K-pop group, each member should have a balance time showed in the video and we need to practice together to make the video better.

Second, our performance should be similar. We need to find some places similar with those scenes in the video. And our video has lots of parts were so details. So for our group, we always spend times on finding an empty classroom, designing a classroom and buying some staffs to contribute our cover video. It reflected on that the K-pop idols are so powerful because if they want to make a perfect video, they need to become multitasking, they should handle both dancing and singing even become an actor.

Making a cover video is not easy. I feel so hard when we attempted to perform and I am so admiring those K-pop idols that they can bring such perfect video to us. The process of the cover video let me gained a new understanding of group work and how the K-pop idols do the hard work.

Ziye Pan

 

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Literature Application

Going Viral for Success of Psy

The reading:Cho, Lee, Yoo and Chu, TV Singing Competitions in K-pop, 2018, J of Cultural Economics

Psy became the most popular Korean artist in the world after his song “Gangnam Style.” It became the most viewed video on YouTube after release. The success of Psy shows how going viral on the internet is the best way to become a success artist.

Becoming viral on social media was the most important reason for Psy’s international success. His video was watched billions of times on YouTube (Cho et al. n.p.). This made him popular not just in South Korea but rest of the world. Because of this, the song became number 1 on iTunes and not just in South Korea. It was so popular that students and other young people copied his dance and made their own parody video (Shin n.p.). If Psy’s video was not a viral hit on YouTube, nobody would know about him outside of South Korea.

The importance of viral exposure to musical success in Korea and rest of world is proven by research. For example, a study by Cho et al. showed that Korean artist who competed on television singing competitions sold more songs and made more money than those who did not (n.p.). Competing on TV show is another example of giving yourself ability to go viral. Like Cho et al. say, these shows are very popular. American Idol became one of highest watched and rated show in America, and it is copied in many other countries (Cho et al. n.p.). Psy did not compete in singing competition before his success, but his presence on YouTube is another example of viral exposure that helped make his music successful.

In conclusion, the success of Psy as an international artist is caused mostly by going viral on the internet, especially YouTube and social media. These internet sources give him exposure to all of the world.

Bibliography

Cho, Daegon, et al. “Television singing competitions create stars? Empirical evidence from the digital music chart in South Korea.” Journal of Cultural Economics 1-2, 2018.

Shin, Ryan. “Gangnam style and global visual culture.” Studies in Art Education 57, no.3 (2016): 252-264.

By: Ziye Pan

 

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