“Beyond K-Pop”

Back in my Bollywood blogging days I used to get really frustrated with what I called the “Beyond Bollywood” framing, which was something you’d often see from mainstream English-language media (and a certain type of film writer). Typically, this involved some sort of hyperbolic spin about how cliched and tired and awful “Bollywood” was but how these non-singing-and-dancing movies from Mumbai were different. This strain of thinking led to things like Gangs of Wasseypur (2012), which showed at Cannes to big fanfare. As The Hollywood Reporter coverage trumpeted: Cannes 2012: Indian Cinema Moves Beyond Bollywood.

Traditional Bollywood fare — star-driven song-and-dance melodramas that adhere to formulaic plots and recognizable archetypes — are now being challenged by low-budget indie productions with auteur sensibilities and decidedly edgy subject matter.

The sentence covers it all: 

1) Maps the framing of the American film industry directly onto the Hindi film industry in Mumbai. 

2) Tells the reader that “traditional Bollywood fare” has no artistic value and should be held in disdain.

What “Beyond Bollywood” framing does is set up a false dichotomy where on the one hand you have these allegedly terrible cliche ridden films and on the other are “good” movies that do not contain stars, songs, and dances. I don’t care if some film dork has this opinion on his blog but I do care when an industry outlet is selling this false dichotomy to an audience who doesn’t even know what Bollywood is outside of the cliches it’s being sold.

How can you know what is “beyond” Bollywood, if you don’t know Bollywood??? It’s insulting to a pop culture tradition going back over a hundred years and to the people who love it. You’ve never seen films like Sholay or Rangeela and yet want to claim to need to move “beyond” them to movies without songs and dances? Yeah, that was a no from me.

Although I did end up moving beyond Bollywood… to South Indian films. Because Bollywood—the Hindi language film industry based in Mumbai—[here’s the important part] stopped doing really good star-driven song-and-dance melodramas that adhere to formulaic plots and recognizable archetypes and South Indian films still do. 

You know who else moved beyond Bollywood? The Oscars. 

The full length Indian feature film that eventually won an Oscar wasn’t from Bollywood. RRR was a star driven song-and-dance melodrama from the Telugu film industry out of the south Indian city of Hyderabad. 

I guess that star driven song-and-dance stuff isn’t so worthless after all. 

“Naatu Nattu” became a global trend to the point that you had RRR director S.S. Rajamouli going on American late night shows and idols using the song for #content.

I wrote a little about this Beyond Bollywood validation-seeking in 2022 in a post called “On Western Validation and English”, in which I also talk about the bickering going on in K-Pop fan circles about the validity of “English” songs: 

This new wave of English language material is not “less authentic” because it’s in English. It’s not about the English lyrics. What is different from previous generations of K-Pop is that you have songs now competing against mainstream Top 40 songs that are written by and for American Top 40 pop audiences by the same stable of Top 40 pop songwriters that write everything else on the charts. And you get what you pay for. Even when these songs are in Korean, some (not all!) of these songs still sound like the ending theme to like Trollz 2 or whatever. 

The “Can’t Stop The Feeling”-ization of Brand K-Pop is only part of this wholesale adoption of what is essentially the “Beyond Bollywood” framing for K-Pop acts coming to America.

Call it… “Beyond K-Pop.” You know what I’m talking about and it can take one of two forms.

There’s the “Unlike other K-Pop idols/groups, this idol/group… [something that signals as authentic to Americans].”

E.g. In Variety: 

Unlike other K-pop groups, BTS first gained momentum abroad — and in the U.S. market in particular. 

Or you have the one that positions whatever the act is doing as moving “beyond K-Pop.”

E.g. The LA Times:

“We have always agreed on a vision for Monsta X that certainly includes, but extends beyond their core K-pop Audience,” said Ezekiel Lewis, executive vice president of A&R at Epic Records. “We see them as a potentially enormous boy band that happens to be from Korea as opposed to viewing through the more narrow lens of K-pop.

The goal of this “Beyond” framing seems to be a desire to capture the ordinary American who is assumed to find “K-Pop” too… ethnic? Too extra? Too fake? The problem is—much like the “Beyond Bollywood” framing—that setting up a false dichotomy where this one act is authentic/bigger/more valid than “K-Pop” only reinforces the idea to the reader that “K-Pop” itself fake and worthless as a genre. People aren’t going to remember that there’s one exception, they’re just going to remember that K-Pop is worthless. Or, even worse, they’ll see the one act that has been singled out as exceptional, not be all that impressed with the “Can’t Stop The Feeling” of it all, and conclude that if this is the exception, then the rest of the genre must be truly dire. 

I’ve talked about the K-Pop trend generator before and certainly this “Beyond” framing has become part of the PR trend for approaching the American market, and one that I think was a huge mistake for the industry overall because K-Pop is not mainstream and will never be mainstream. Not because of racism but because K-pop—idol pop—is inherently a niche genre. It’s niche in Korea; it’s niche in China; it’s niche in Japan; it’s niche everywhere. Why wouldn’t you lean into what separates it artistically from everything else on the market? Rather than try to compete to fill the single empty boy band slot in the American market, why not attempt to grow the niche idol pop audience by giving them something they cannot get anywhere else?

In the heyday of the second and early third generation K-Pop in the early 2010s, global K-Pop did seem to be trending that way. Acts were known for their skill, their artistry, and their extremely catchy songs. Was it too much for most normies? Sure, but the target audiences loved it because it offered something different to what was already on the market. It was a larger than life pop culture experience. Why should we move “beyond” something that was already awesome? 

What I’ve watched over the past five or six years is seeing Brand K-Pop making some of the mistakes Brand Bollywood did. There’s been the attempt to give the mainstream American audience localized product which did… fine, but fine isn’t good enough for the American market. This attempt at K-Pop without the K is just pop and there’s a lot of just plain pop out there. And the commitment to localization in America is massive and one that we have yet to see fully realized because, understandably, Korean acts want to live and work in Korea, not Los Angeles or New York. “Cupid” had a potential moment, as did NewJeans, but industry dysfunction claimed both acts before they reached anywhere near their ceilings. 

Meanwhile, Brand Anime from Japan has been slowly and steadily growing its niche audience outside the mainstream, to the point that Universal Studios added One Piece and Jujutsu Kaisen to the slate of fan nights at the parks alongside American brands like Star Trek. 

Trashing the K-Pop brand in an attempt to set a K-Pop act apart from the rest of the pack is a losing strategy and one I think we’re beginning to see the fruits of as revenues decline and fans seem far more interested in the on-going meltdown at Hybe than any of the music coming out of the industry.

What I’d love to see instead is the adoption of the RRR strategy. Double down on what makes K-Pop unique and make the quality of the product the selling point. RRR used a strategy of appealing to the niche audience in America first and growing from there. Anime has done the same thing. K-Pop should be following that trend. The road to the Grammy is not knock-off versions of stuff we already have [i.e. songs that Justin Bieber passed on]; it should come from giving us something we don’t already have. 

Take us to the pleasure shop!