K-Pop: Devoid of Art?

A friend passed along an op-ed from the Korea Times titled, “K-pop: Full of aesthetic but devoid of art.” The author, a Dr. David A. Tizzard who is billed as a “social/cultural commentator and musician” wants to make the case that a) K-Pop is garbage and not “real art” and b) K-Pop consumers are nothing but hogs at the trough. 

He starts off his essay with a tired and reactionary claim: traditional religion has been replaced by the religion of the marketplace. Says Tizzard, “We become masterless dogs. Desperate to chase a ball but no one to throw it for us.” But he gives it a twist--actually this is good. “Supreme art,” says Tizzard, can give life meaning. Okay, sure. Art can be extremely moving but he never actually defines what he means by that. He says, “Aesthetics and an appreciation for beauty take us beyond rationality and science and towards something more profound and moving.” Okay so beauty can be moving? An appreciation of aesthetics is a replacement for religion? Yeah, okay buddy. But then we have another twist: “Yet at the same time, art can be futile. Meaningless.”

And here is where we begin to see his argument really take shape because his examples of “meaningless” and “futile” are some of the pillars of contemporary art. 

1. “Marcel Duchamp showed long ago that art can be a fountain of urine,”

This is an extremely disingenuous reading of Duchamp’s work which was quite meaningful and groundbreaking as a piece of performance art. You can say the urinal itself was meaningless, which is true, but in that case if you’re limiting the definition of “art” to the object itself then quite a bit of contemporary art is by definition “meaningless.” 

2. “Warhol evidenced it can be a can of soup.” 

Again, a very disingenuous reading of Warhol’s soup cans which found… what was the phrase “an appreciation for beauty” amidst the industrial design of the mid-20th century. It’s like Robert Crumb’s power lines--pulling beauty out of the industrial landscape.

3. “John Cage demonstrated the opposite: that music can be made of nothing.”

For a musician, this is an extremely bad take on Cage’s famous “4:33” which is not nothing but rather the opposite of nothing. I’ve actually been in the audience of a performance of “4:33” by the Magnetic Fields and what you hear is not nothing--you hear the absence of music. In other words, you hear the sounds of the audience around you. The ambience of the music hall itself. It can be a transcendent experience.

Is K-Pop truly on the level of Duchamp, Warhol, and Cage?

Appreciation of beauty can replace religion but art that he finds ugly is a false god.

Tizzard continues, laying out the meat of his reactionary argument that essentially just as the old, good art (which he thinks could replace religion) has been replaced by new, bad art so too have the old, good artists have been replaced with these no-good, talentless idols. 

“Current pop culture in Korea feels this burden. The musicians who get the most coverage and have their names plastered all over our media are not the most talented. They are those most capable of listening to what others tell them to do. They are malleable commodities, asked to sing what others write, dance to what others teach, and wear what others say. Their names, clothes, images, and personality are constructed in such a way so as to be as appealing as possible to the desires, often sexual, of the least discerning audience.”

There is some truth to this statement. However, it’s a lot more complicated than he makes it out to be. First, I’d like some proof that idols are receiving more publicity than literally any other musician in Korea because it seems to me that most idols are barely known outside of a few big names. And media coverage is something that has always been pushed by who can pay for it or by who the current trend setter is. Are those people the most talented musicians as determined by some sort of metric? No, but they’re usually stars for a reason. Idols may begin life shaped and sculpted to fit an image but once they’ve been around for a while, almost all K-Pop idols take control of their work. Tizzard may not value the aesthetics of a good visual concept like those from SHINee’s Key but Key is nobody’s puppet.

And the “least discerning audience” is who pop music has always aimed at. It’s lowest common denominator music, not high art. You can’t judge “Ring Ding Dong” by the same standards that you would for a Steve Reich piece. I mean, you can but it’s not “Ring Ding Dong” that’s going to look like a ding dong for doing it.

Now, I will say that this point becomes muddled when K-Pop stans put forward their favorite idols’ new song as a masterpiece to end all masterpieces performed by the greatest musicians of their generation and when the educated listener tunes in and they hear this, they’re likely to give  a very unimpressed reaction. 

Tizzard goes on to make some good points regarding media coverage of K-Pop, which is--to be fair--abysmal. He complains that critics and journalists never actually talk about the music but prefer to focus on numbers. (True.) He dismisses the similarities between sports fans and idol fans outright saying that sports fans allow critique of their teams while idol fans do not. All fair points. I’ve made the following point myself, numerous times: “K-pop however is largely fans talking to fans about things of which they are fans. Genuine analysis simply becomes spitting in the wind and shouting at the clouds.”

But again it breaks down, when he complains: “Despite my cynicism, there has been a load of great music created recently. Humans certainly haven't gotten worse. It's just our systems of information and control won't let it access the mainstream. We'll get the tiresome noise of corporate products devoid of emotion thrust in our faces while artists who challenge ideas of taste and form will be deemed beyond the algorithm.”

Spoken like a man with no understanding of pop music or the music industry. Here’s the deal: the industry/capitalism has always pushed the “tiresome noise of corporate products” at us, it’s just that selective memory erases the truly awful contemporary detritus and replaces it and/or the fog of nostalgia (or better appreciation) makes us rate things higher than critics did at the time. 

To give my favorite example, in 1975, the biggest band in the world was the Bay City Rollers, a hacky bubblegum act who neither wrote nor played their own songs. That’s also the year Lou Reed’s difficult but important Metal Machine Music came out. Guess which one got more positive press in 1975? 

Pop music is not the place to go to look for meaning beyond an appreciation of aesthetics. Like Warhol’s soup cans, there is beauty to be found in the industrial design but you can’t judge an act like BigBang or Girls Generation by the same standards you would a free jazz riff from Ornette Coleman. They’re doing completely different things. 

I’ve written thousands of words--hundreds of thousands of words--on idols and at the end of the day their skill sets may overlap with musicians but the successful ones are doing music and something else. Sort of a large scale performance art piece with themselves as the subject. Idols are entertainers, yes, but they are also partly one of Duchamp’s ready-mades (the setting creates the “idol” from a mundane human) and partly Cage’s “4:33” where the audience themselves creates the performance they’re listening to. And that’s what makes the K-Pop idol so fascinating when it’s done right.

There are the duds, sure, and we can name and shame--Tizzard does an admirable job in his essay taking down one of the lamest acts ever to grace the stage--but there’s also interesting work being done by idols. Just look at Taemin’s entire solo career.

And, perhaps most importantly, there’s also competent pop music that just sounds nice when you listen to it. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with just bopping along to a fun song. Pop music has never been at the vanguard of cultural change and we shouldn’t expect it to be. What we should expect is good tunes you can hum along to. Now, if you want to talk about the lack of bangers recently…