All I’ve got is K-pop and Good Skin, what next?
By Nicholas Hayden
You wanna talk about K-pop?
Let’s talk about K-pop.
We’re starting here because it’s relevant to the rapport we’re going to share about the impact of influencers and celebrities in our lives as we continue to Bird Box our way through 2020.
Personally, I’ve been listening to K-pop since Girls’ Generation brought ‘The Boys’ out (a decade ago). But in the last two years, I’ve really just swan-dived into the industry as a whole, which has been thrilling, gripping, calming, and cathartic all in one. There is nothing like being invested in a group of people who are all triple threats and are working towards a goal of at least two comebacks a year. This has, as a result, thrown into relief the workings of celebrity and influence within western culture.
The K-pop company system is a well-oiled machine ensuring maximum exposure of the idols within the various groups while prohibiting all access to them. You see them on reality shows, variety shows, in dramas, doing solo work - but you will never see or meet them (unless the company wants you to). By contrast, western celebrities almost pointedly attempt to live normal lives and assimilate with whatever environment that they live in. That’s not to say that it’s in any way wrong to want to blend in, to be able to live. If one looks at the timeline of Kim’s husband, Kanye West, and his public outbursts you can see why there is a fine line between what their family will and won’t want to shoot for profit. This is private. There is a vast difference between a semi-constructed storyline about Kourtney always being late for lunch, and the reality of managing someone’s non-neurotypical condition for an audience of millions. Instead, we get to see them do the mundane things that most of us do in our lives; going shopping, dining out, family squabbles, holidays and travel. It’s just interesting that this desire runs parallel to what is becoming a cultural slump of sorts in American-driven pop culture. Our voyeuristic taste for ambition and fantasy has been effectively removed, or diluted, in line with what the modern influencer fills our newsfeed with.
Look at the history of cinema. Once audiences were accustomed to the mystique of the film projector, the ‘movie industry’ began with feature films that saw dramatic over-acting as a means of translating stories on screen. What was being put onto the screen was a translation of what audiences would enjoy in contemporary, live vaudeville performances. Actors were relying solely on their body language and overacted facial expressions to carry their stories in silent films. As the 20th century progressed, and more stories needed to be told (suppressing of minorities in storylines withstanding), the form of acting on stage became more formulaic. Thus ushered in was a high output of content by a select number of companies who had a roster of actors on call to act as glamorous satellites around the industry. They were all trained, and they could act in the most formal sense. If you look at interviews with Bette Davis in the winter of her life, she discusses her unease and discomfort as to where the movie industry is going. She laments that she was trained to act, and felt it was something that you should have to wear a costume for. To Davis, you should be able to dramatically inhabit a role, rather than trying to convince the audience that you already embodied the role outside of filming. She was saying the majority of this in the eighties, when the industry was really starting to give over to more method acting roles and rewarding actors who seemed to have - outside the set - wholly devoted themselves to the craft and the script.
In 2020, after all this evolution, we find ourselves in a place where movie stars have only a fraction of the allure and influence they once had. Do you follow what Brad Pitt is doing? Do you care?
I say all of this because the big three companies that essentially run the K-pop industry have somehow managed to sustain what the Western movie industry was doing 50 years ago. Pros and cons of that system aside, they are keeping their audiences captivated and hungering for more on a diet of danceable music, good skin and nothing more than dating rumours.
There is a reason Simon Cowell is grinding his veneers into a paste over this. As a professional leader and pioneer in manufacturing music and pop, neither he nor his company (Syco) have been able to recreate the grip that K-pop holds over both the east and west. Think about it, One Direction as a group are maybe the biggest boyband of their time. And in all that time, did we see them do a cohesive dance performance, have a polished look or show range? They’re just known for being able to sing and for being, debatably, attractive.
Honestly, “You don’t know you’re beautiful” was supposed to be a real hit; Got7’s “Just Right” is better by a street.
I said what I said.
Be that as it may, I don’t mean to make the two compete. This piece remains a musing on why people tend to be more culturally bored outside of K-pop. Cowell recently tried to launch a K-pop group of his own called Kaatchi, which thus far has struggled. That’s less to do with the level of talent in the group and more with the fact that we haven’t created the musical infrastructure that allows K-pop idols to survive. There is no format or framework that promotes the level of exposure necessary to thrive while keeping them at an absolute distance from their consumer.
In general, there’s a variant that remains constant whenever an industry or cultural focal point attracts a great level of interest and enthusiasm, and it’s the unknown. Kim Kardashian is a good example of this. She was able to flourish as a reality star, being one of the first people to expose themselves so openly, when it was all new and we had no idea how far she and her family would go. Now they’ve shown all they needed to show, so are closing door on that kind of exposure. And no one since has been able to experience the same kind of rise because they weren’t covering any uncharted ground by comparison to Kim and co.
It’s not lost on me that I’m putting these thoughts to paper during an unprecedented pandemic at the beginning of a decade. In the same way that the roaring 20s came out of a war and pandemic, it does leave one thinking about how culture is going to shift this decade and what we will value in our idols, K-pop and otherwise, by the end of it.