The Dark, Exploitative, and Unsustainable Global Expansion of K-pop
The prominent-looking bar/club on a busy side-street of Bukit Bintang, the premier inner-city shopping district in Kuala Lumpur, has a colorful sign perched on top of it, looming large over the skyline of the narrow street crammed with hawker stands and attracting attention from all passersby. The sign prominently features young East Asian songstresses clad in miniskirt, skimpy tank-top uniforms, making the usual suggestive poses, in a way largely (or perhaps not at all) inappropriate for the conservative culture of this Muslim country.
The sign explains in text below the "graphic" pictures of the singers, in bold, capital-letter English, "ONE NEW KOREAN GIRLS GROUP PERFORMING LIVE EVERY WEEKEND!!!" The girls groups, each numbering 3-5 members and uncannily resembling their more successful counterparts on the big stages in Korea, are identified by rather generic sounding names like New Max and Ruby. The inside of the place, oozing eye-blinding red, blue, and yellow lights from every crack, is thoroughly reminding of drinking areas in the megaclubs of Gangnam in Seoul or Haeundae in Busan.
Such a sight by itself says plenty about just how far the Korean Wave has came here in Southeast Asia. Random unknown groups, simply by the merit of being Korean, receives positive and highly welcoming reception by the local party-going crowd in the most popular party-pads in the most exciting neighborhood in the country. Anyone working for the Korean entertainment industry seeking new sources of revenue, the Korean government pushing for greater national soft power, or simply Korean, would be deeply proud of such development.
However, the sight of Korean cultural power here in the depth of urban Malaysia still raises certain doubts about the methodology with which its international expansion is conducted. For one thing, anyone who knows something about the insular Korean culture has to be pretty sure that for any young female singer signed up with an entertainment company back in Korea would be happy being sent to become an almost full-time bar/club performer in a faraway foreign country whose language they don't speak, people they don't know, and culture they don't understand.
Some perhaps did volunteer, but they mostly have done so because they believed that becoming famous, even in a foreign country with, looking at the big picture of K-pop's world conquest, has little economic value, potential for growth, or little capability to act as a jumping pad for nearby countries due to little cultural resonance or projection power. These girls, with their lofty dreams of joining the ranks of the most popular girls groups back home, have chosen the path to become the foot soldiers of further projecting Korean cultural power abroad.
For the bigwigs in Korean entertainment industry and their powerful backers within the government establishment, the lofty dreams of these girls, then, become the almost endless supply of raw materials that they can use to fuel their continuous ambition to haul in profits and influence from abroad. In essence, the innocent girls have become sacrificial lambs for molding Korea into a global cultural giant, capable of making significant economic gains directly and indirectly from the entertainment industry and then using the revenues for further development of the home country.
On surface, K-pop, just like modern pop-music anywhere else, is an individualistic phenomenon: the individual singers achieve personal fame due to their own talents that are praised and loved by millions of audience. But what one witnesses, here in a party-crazy corner of Malaysia and perhaps many more places around the world, is that the individual has systematically been placed below "Korea" as a national brand, a cultural entity advertised as a birthplace of infinite musical talents with good looks, dance moves, and fashion styles.
The subjugation of individual for the good of the superior collective, instituted through a hierarchic, organizational manner, is just so Asian, so undemocratic, so against human rights, and just so against everything that modern society that value individual choice, equality of opportunity, and liberal social values...especially for those on the political left. Just as one should be worried about the future of these girls burning down their youth performing in the remote corners of the world, one should also remember just how much pain and darkness there are behind glitters and glories of the K-pop world.
The sign explains in text below the "graphic" pictures of the singers, in bold, capital-letter English, "ONE NEW KOREAN GIRLS GROUP PERFORMING LIVE EVERY WEEKEND!!!" The girls groups, each numbering 3-5 members and uncannily resembling their more successful counterparts on the big stages in Korea, are identified by rather generic sounding names like New Max and Ruby. The inside of the place, oozing eye-blinding red, blue, and yellow lights from every crack, is thoroughly reminding of drinking areas in the megaclubs of Gangnam in Seoul or Haeundae in Busan.
Such a sight by itself says plenty about just how far the Korean Wave has came here in Southeast Asia. Random unknown groups, simply by the merit of being Korean, receives positive and highly welcoming reception by the local party-going crowd in the most popular party-pads in the most exciting neighborhood in the country. Anyone working for the Korean entertainment industry seeking new sources of revenue, the Korean government pushing for greater national soft power, or simply Korean, would be deeply proud of such development.
However, the sight of Korean cultural power here in the depth of urban Malaysia still raises certain doubts about the methodology with which its international expansion is conducted. For one thing, anyone who knows something about the insular Korean culture has to be pretty sure that for any young female singer signed up with an entertainment company back in Korea would be happy being sent to become an almost full-time bar/club performer in a faraway foreign country whose language they don't speak, people they don't know, and culture they don't understand.
Some perhaps did volunteer, but they mostly have done so because they believed that becoming famous, even in a foreign country with, looking at the big picture of K-pop's world conquest, has little economic value, potential for growth, or little capability to act as a jumping pad for nearby countries due to little cultural resonance or projection power. These girls, with their lofty dreams of joining the ranks of the most popular girls groups back home, have chosen the path to become the foot soldiers of further projecting Korean cultural power abroad.
For the bigwigs in Korean entertainment industry and their powerful backers within the government establishment, the lofty dreams of these girls, then, become the almost endless supply of raw materials that they can use to fuel their continuous ambition to haul in profits and influence from abroad. In essence, the innocent girls have become sacrificial lambs for molding Korea into a global cultural giant, capable of making significant economic gains directly and indirectly from the entertainment industry and then using the revenues for further development of the home country.
On surface, K-pop, just like modern pop-music anywhere else, is an individualistic phenomenon: the individual singers achieve personal fame due to their own talents that are praised and loved by millions of audience. But what one witnesses, here in a party-crazy corner of Malaysia and perhaps many more places around the world, is that the individual has systematically been placed below "Korea" as a national brand, a cultural entity advertised as a birthplace of infinite musical talents with good looks, dance moves, and fashion styles.
The subjugation of individual for the good of the superior collective, instituted through a hierarchic, organizational manner, is just so Asian, so undemocratic, so against human rights, and just so against everything that modern society that value individual choice, equality of opportunity, and liberal social values...especially for those on the political left. Just as one should be worried about the future of these girls burning down their youth performing in the remote corners of the world, one should also remember just how much pain and darkness there are behind glitters and glories of the K-pop world.
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