Factory Girls Part Two: Electric Boogaloo

I’ve been thinking a bit more on the recent piece in the New Yorker on Bang Shi-Hyuk. When the New Yorker published Tammy Kim’s awful article on K-Pop and BTS (“How BTS Became the Most Popular Band in the World”) in June 2022, the fan response was quick and it was massive. At least three sizable fandoms, along with K-Pop fans more generally, joined together to express their dissatisfaction with the piece—not all for the same reasons—and the tweets (since deleted, as was Tammy Kim’s account) were ratioed into the thousands.

That wasn’t the first time the New Yorker, of course. Amanda Petrusich wrote an equally tone deaf piece in 2018 titled, “Two Theories on How K-Pop Made It to No. 1 in America,” in which the theories are 1) BTS being “safe” for teen girls and 2) China. 

And, of course, there’s the original and much loathed John Seabrook piece, published almost 12 years ago to the day, “Factory Girls.”

What I find so striking at the response to Barasch’s “The K-Pop King” has been its absence. Barasch made his X account private but, to be honest, he probably didn’t need to bother. The New Yorker social media team posted the article at least four times with diminishing engagement. America’s premier access journalist for K-Pop, Jeff Benjamin, managed to do a solid few thousand likes on a tweet which pulled a single factoid from the piece—that BTS’s Jungkook had been invited to the Super Bowl with Usher but turned it down—and that factoid is what has made it to the English language K-Pop news content mill sites like Koreaboo, as well as on the desi circuit like Pinkvilla.

“The K-Pop King” generated some pushback from annoyed K-Pop fans like myself who are tired of seeing Bang rewriting K-Pop history to make himself look good. (e.g. Trotting out the myth of BTS being unusual in having their names on song credits, etc.) As well as some mild pushback from BTS fans (and Jungkook fans) who didn’t like seeing kayfabe broken and seeing Bang (and Scooter Braun) take credit for things they’d been assured were the work of their “boys.” But the pushback happened only at the edges. The main fandom amplifier accounts haven’t really touched it—again, outside of dedicated Access Journalist Jeff. 

Are Hybe fandoms simply fatigued from the unending cluster fuck that is the Min Hee-Jin/Ador situation? (In the latest update, Hanni, from NewJeans, is testifying in front of a National Assembly committee about workplace bullying she experienced.) That’s certainly possible but there’s a 13-part megathread on the Hybe situation on r/K-Pop that seems to contradict that.

Or are Hybe fandoms—specifically the notoriously volatile BTS fandom—just not as powerful or organized as they were in 2022? After all, K-Pop companies across the board have seen declining profits which speaks to some decrease in engaged fans since the heady heights of the pandemic. BTS members have been churning out pre-recorded content and been active on social media during the military hiatus but peak popularity--something that comes for every boy group--has passed and fans who joined for the bubble have gone with it.

Along that same line, K-Pop just isn’t something most locals are interested in, especially in America. One of my most popular posts (from May 2022) says exactly that. If the article isn’t getting fed through stan amplification accounts, then who exactly is reading it? Grammy voters, whom a Hybe-facilitated backdoor brag about Jungkook turning down the Super Bowl seems targeted at?

The article is ostensibly promo for Hybe’s documentary series on Netflix, Pop Star Academy: KATSEYE, which follows the creation of Bang’s ideal K-Pop without the K girl group in the style of CJ ENM’s Produce series. 

I’ll preface this by saying I haven’t seen Pop Star Academy--although I may end up watching it for some #podcast #content--but a pop culture vulture acquaintance who caught it on Netflix recently asked me if all K-Pop training was this dystopian. (If I could have projected the Homer backing into a hedge gif in real life…) 

What Barasch provides in “The K-Pop King” is essentially “Factory Girls Part 2: Electric Boogaloo.” He’s less candid than Seabrook but that only makes his prose feel emptier.

Seabrook in 2012: 

The two “subgroups” release songs at the same time in their respective countries and languages, and promote them simultaneously, thereby achieving “perfect localization,” as Lee [Soo-Man] calls it. “It may be a Chinese artist or a Chinese company, but what matters in the end is the fact that it was made by our cultural technology,” he has said. “We are preparing for the next biggest market in the world, and the goal is to produce the biggest stars in the world.” But, while S.M. gets credit for inventing the factory system, its idol groups are seen by some as being too robotic to make it in the West. Y.G. is significantly smaller than S.M. in terms of revenue, but it has a reputation as an agency that allows artists like PSY a kind of creative freedom they would not enjoy at S.M.

Barasch in 2024: 

Katseye, the English-language girl group that Bang has developed with his American partners, reflects his international ambitions. “I feel lucky I’ve had the opportunity, since I was very young, to work in a lot of cross-cultural environments,” Bang told me. The knowledge he’d gained would help drive hybe’s worldwide expansion. He compared his process, without irony, to A.I.: “You know how machine learning happens?” he asked. He studied local music industries and fan behavior across the globe in an attempt to target listeners in various countries more precisely. “We don’t apply our methodologies uniformly in each region, but we don’t follow the practices of each region blindly, either,” he said. “We take what works.”

Almost like… cultural technology?

In the 12 years since “Factory Girls,” the New Yorker has seemingly lost whatever K-Pop history knowledge Seabrook had acquired and happily provided a blank template to be filled in by Hybe… and despite all of that, the narrative remains exactly the same. Barasch tries to cloak his Seabrookian observations with hedge words like this: “Hybe has figured out how to stoke genuine camaraderie through artificial means.” That sentence follows a section where Barasch describes a Hybe handler dictating answers to the Katseye girls. 

How genuine is the camaraderie, he’s almost begging you to ask. 

And maybe that’s the difference between Seabrook’s “Girls” and Barasch’s “King.” Seabrook, at least, seemed honest in his pervy uncle response to Girls Generation. Barasch does not seem to have been afforded the same freedom with Katseye. Twelve years on, what’s changed is the New Yorker needs the Hybe engagement farming. The opinion of K-Pop in the eyes of the cultural elite remains exactly the same as was.

And “The K-Pop King” seems to have gotten exactly the amount of attention it deserves—minimal.

(Besides, we all know who the true K-Pop King is and it’s not “Hitman” Bang PD.)