How K-Pop Relies On Fandom

 

    K-pop does feel like it exploded in the past couple of years, but I won't chalk up my own awareness of the genre as definitive proof of its popularity. It's popular because it deserves to be popular. What I will say is, just a person who casually scrolls through social media and never had any intention of following K-pop stan accounts, I've encountered enough phrases to recognize some aspects of the fandom. I had seen the first tweet that incited the anti-Trump rally move, when it was fully involved in the antics of virality, and had been delighted when it worked out. I recognized Jimin's face, usually captioned alongside a string of keyboard smashes. I knew BLACKPINK and Red Velvet existed the standard of badassery, where all the women excelled with precision and talent. I figured it was only a matter of time before my knowledge of the fandom and genre expanded, whether the Internet's power was voluntarily luring it or it if just fully would become mainstream. After reading this week's articles by Kyong Yoon and now considering the cultural and global implications of the genre, my opinion of the genre hasn't changed: K-pop, an innovative form of entertainment, emerging from a vertical integration system of industry, nets a host of the baffling and exciting phenomenon of fandom and reception.    

    While reading Yoon's article on K-pop's effect on Korean-Canadians, I was especially interested in how fan reception and consumption of the genre change the industry's position as a transnational product. Yoon likens it to an appropriative manner, where overseas fans impart meanings that transcend the genre's appeal as something that fulfills more than just a need for entertainment. Still, the link between a traditional understanding of transnationalism — as an agent of Western capitalism and ideology— has rejected the claim that K-pop can be a "homogenizing force" that influences through its cultural products because it is perceived as a commodified genre of "recombinant" integrated styles. However, the sheer popularity of the industry poses a challenge to one of globalism's biggest implication, where innovative modernity has to be explicitly aligned with Western aesthetics. There is an inherent aspect of hybridity that streamlines K-pop's appeal and entertainment factor — incorporating English, stunning and lively visuals, an emphasis on attractive idols in music groups with marketable personalities K-pop projects innovativeness absent in Western media. Videos from American artists praised for their upbeat, complicated choreography or visual narratives have genuine competition from the orchestrated products that the K-pop industry puts out. It's a much needed shift that reconfigures Western ethnocentrism and undermines perceptions of dominance. It's about time that cultural value is no longer fixed to recognizable Western textual characteristics.

    Depending on the positionality of the person who culturally appreciates K-pop, there are feelings of ethnic belonging and identity negotiation that even further undermines the overwhelming, imposing feeling of mainstream American culture. There is a sense of radicalness in appreciating K-pop, forgoing the idea that foreign music must be categorized as strangely exotic and without substance other than its difference. Included in both articles are fan testimonials that illustrate this most clearly, where the fans articulate the complicated feeling of discovering themselves and information beyond the simple allure of K-pop. Yoon's article doesn't detail fan interactions from fans without diasporic or ethnic connections to Korea— something I found particularly telling of when they were both written. The most popular fan accounts I've encountered have always been Black content creators who acknowledge anti-Black behavior that many performers are guilty of perpetuating. Some dismiss this as a "cultural misappropriation," where the performers don't understand the connotations of the fashion, behavior, or Black forms of music they incorporate but refuse to acknowledge the discrimination Black K-pop stans face. It's an observable, active source of tension in the fandom that further complicates the dichotomy between overseas fans and national fans of Korea. The accusation that fans appropriate Korean cultural details because of linguistic or cultural barriers, voiding their specific meanings through a "de-ethnicization" process that reconfigures textual characteristics into an abstracted artistic form of "global youth," must also make room for that reality. There does, however, seem to be a genuine risk of misconstruing the cultural value of visual or lyrical details. That doesn't negate the level of cultural authenticity that can be gleaned from them, making entry into the K-pop fandom almost didactic. 

    It's the fan participation creates multiple entry points to appreciate K-pop's dizzying blend of hybridity and specificity. Obvious linguistic and cultural barriers can be overcome through zealous dedication, where fans analyze lyrics and publish translations for others, slowed-down videos of routines to learn the choreography, edit fancams to praise their favorite idols, pour-over music videos to understand the implications of the visuals. K-pop, empowered by the world's interconnectivity and its effortless transcendence overseas becomes an object that the fan essentially leaves their mark upon the cultural product in a strange twist of re-appropriation influenced by K-pop's own tendency to do so. 

    So, on the one hand, K-pop should be understood as a formulaic capitalistic structure primed for global overseas outreach. The groups of attractive groups with songs and dance resembles a vertical integration system of production and management. Still, it's no coincidence that further appreciation of the genre requires self-agency. Regardless of being informed by intergenerational or diasporic tensions, but the fandom indoctrinates a newfound fan into the industry's specifics. The inherent appeal of the collective personalities within an idol group and the appeal of dance performance draws a fan in, but the comparative romanticization also allows a fan re-appropriation to occur. The K-pop group's appreciation seems to categorize the genres as an alternative to the over-sexualization found in America. The site of discourse where fans specifically defend their idols' masculinity seems especially important. A part of the enthusiasm seems to boil down to fans asserting that their favorite male idols are exceptional models of softened, respectable masculinity— wherein reality and American media, there is a shortage of praiseworthy men. Coupled with the fact that groups like BTS blow so many male artists out of the water with their choreography and performance technique, it's no surprise that when fans defend their favorite artists, they vehemently mean it.