K-Pop on the Road

I was browsing a list of books to understand Korea that was recommended by the Economist. And of course there was a K-Pop book included. And after reading a sample, I have to ask: did the Economist actually read it? I can’t decide which is worse—that they recommended it based on a back of the book skim or that they read it and thought it said something valuable. 

One of my favorite axes to grind on here has been the incredibly poor quality of academic research into both K-Pop and idols more generally. For every Patrick Galbraith doing on the ground field work in Tokyo, there are… well, there are a lot of academics writing things like this: 

“The Japanese Idol system was a direct influence for establishing K-Pop as it communicated worldwide. Starting at the end of the 1960s, Japan’s Johnny’s Entertainment developed a system for raising teenage trainees into entertainers, calling them Idols and creating a new type of entertainment laborer that didn’t exist in the West in this form. In the 1990s, Korea took up this system but added much harder training to create entertainers who were better skilled. Compared to Japanese Idols, who give off the impression of teens next door, Korean male and female Idols are trained in music, dance, foreign languages and media contact. Inevitably, their performances are superior in dance, song, and elaborateness.”

That is from BTS on the Road (2023) and no source is given by the author, Hong Seok-Kyeong, a professor whose primary area of research appears to be the influence of the Korean dramas overseas. And if this was a small passage from a book about Korean drama fans, we could maybe give Professor Hong a pass. But it’s not. It’s from a book about a K-Pop group. 

The question is then raised: How can we trust what an academic has to say about a K-Pop group and its fans when her understanding of the genre is so shallow?

I’ve spent years trying to untangle the roots of K-Pop because nobody has written a coherent and comprehensive narrative of the industry. First of all, “Johnny Kitagawa invented idols” is a huge reach. Did Johnny Kitagawa pioneer a style of boy group performance that hadn’t been seen before? Yes, absolutely. But he didn’t invent the concept of the idol nor did he invent idol training. The conflation of boy group performance and “idol” here is really sloppy.

Japan has retroactively canonized the “original idol” as Ashita Matsuko, a pre-World War 2 actress who worked at the Moulin Rouge theater in Shinjuku. Think of her as something of a proto-AKB48 idol. She got her start at the tender age of 13, trained, and became something of an… idol. She was cute and the face of consumer goods in advertisements. Obviously she wasn’t an “idol” like we know them today but I think we can safely say that this concept of a young, attractive person who has a special connection with their audience and also performs and is also the face of brands has deep roots in Japanese popular culture.

The Johnny’s & Associates (now STARTO) idols were not a new type of entertainment laborer. What was new was this group style of performance. The Johnnys and then the Four Leaves sang and danced in a way that hadn’t been seen before. There were plenty of other young, attractive “idols” who were active in the entertainment industry at that time, not to mention The Tigers—Japan’s first idol group and a product of Watanabe Productions. The 1970s and 80s brought the massive idol stars of スター誕生, a few of which I discussed with Zach over at I’m So Popular. It’s in the 1980s that we start to see the development of the modern idol group system that is more or less what we’re living with today. Shonentai, Onyanko Club, SMAP, Morning Musume, Arashi, AKB48, and so on.

And not only did Johnny Kitagawa not invent idols but this idol training that is credited by Professor Hong to Johnny Kitagawa is also something that can be seen widely across Japanese entertainment. Just look at the Takarazuka Theater Troupe which began in 1914! Girls train for two years in specialized skills before graduating to the stage. Then there’s a rigid hierarchy as you move up from background performer to—if she’s very lucky—a leading role. Women in the company can’t marry or get pregnant. They must be “on” even off stage. And they develop large, devoted fandoms, on par with anything a popular idol might command. Top Star Yuzuki Reon sold out the Budokan for a solo show. They have light sticks. The retirement celebrations for the top actresses are enough to make any idol green with jealousy.

[L: Yuzuki Reon on stage at the Budokan; R: Farewell parade for Kurenai Yuzuru]

So if we’ve established that this type of celebrity existed in some form or other for decades both before and after Johnny Kitagawa debuted the Johnnys, let’s look at the next sentence. “In the 1990s, Korea took up this system” collapses the entirety of the first generations of K-Pop acts into a depersonalized collective verb action. No mention of the economic, political, and cultural reasons why Korea had a much, much different popular music scene than existed across the East Sea/Sea of Japan. Nothing to explain why there was a push to develop a domestic, trendy teen pop music in Seoul in the 1980s. No mention of the impact of the R&B scene at Club Moonlight on that burgeoning 1980s pop music. And then let’s be real here: “Korea” didn’t take up this idea of the “idol,” Lee Soo-Man did with H.O.T. in 1996 and there was no guarantee that it was going to be a lasting idea.

Not only were there a lot of factors that went into importing the idol to Korea that get handwaved here but I don’t think it's at all fair to say that “[i]nevitably, their performances are superior in dance, song, and elaborateness.” Sounds like Professor Hong has never seen an actual STARTO concert because they are the epitome of elaborate. 

As far as skill in singing and dancing, there may have been a point in the 2000s into the 2010s that Korean idols had the upper hand—thanks in no small part to the reputations of 2nd generation acts like TVXQ and BigBang for performing live—but today I think we can call it even. I’d say the recently debuted Kid Phenomenon (Japan) are not particularly more or less skilled, musically, than the recently debuted Riize (Korea).

The book spins off into deeper and deeper into kayfabe which should be familiar to anybody who has been following the BTS Exceptionalism Narrative over the past decade or so. (And, of course, considering this book was done with the backing of Hybe, BTS’s agency, one does have to question whether the constant denigration of K-Pop from that corner in order to separate BTS out as exceptional has done more harm than good—especially since Hybe is still in the K-Pop business.)

But the bigger point is this: If this book was consumed only by BTS fans in their fan spaces, I wouldn’t care. BTS fans should be able to have their BTS-only fan publications just like any other fan group. What I find objectionable is the attempt to push this as objective and authoritative truth to an outside audience who knows nothing about the subject. This hagiography and sloppy research from BTS-fan academics feels a lot more like proselytizing than social science.