Three terrible articles; one response
Even though I know better, I wanted to give a brief response to a few recent articles on the Korean Wave that I’ve seen circulating recently. The first two are by (I believe) an expat in Seoul. “The Door Opened by Gangnam Style” in the New Yorker and “South Korea is Stealing From the West” in Unherd.
In the first, he posits that it was Americans’ delight at seeing Asian parody of the folly of the wealthy in “Gangnam Style” that eventually led (somehow, this part is unclear in his retelling) to Parasite and Squid Game almost a decade later. And that the current American interest in Korean media is because after years of hearing about how terrible it is there, “if they’ve been primed to see it as a dystopia, they’ll respond favorably to even its most grotesquely heightened dystopian portrayals.”
Then the same author in Unherd says that, actually, it’s that we westerners are just seeing ourselves reflected back in Korean media which is why it’s popular here now. “To Westerners, South Korea now exudes more vitality — in music, film, television, and also fields like fashion and graphic design — than most countries. But much of its output also feels curiously un-foreign, as if imported forms had merely been outfitted with a Korean veneer.”
The author manages to completely miss the main point: these products he’s talking about were meant for export. Of course they seem familiar to Westerners because they were made with an eye to the Western (or global) markets. There are plenty of very popular things in Korea that are not made for export and those things are made with a Korean audience in mind. A prime example is the drama Sky Castle and also rapper Be’0.
Neither of these posts seems based in any kind of reality and are likely just #content meant to get clicks because, you know, Squid Game and Parasite are hot now and anything that will trigger a keyword search for… “that” K-Pop group will also do numbers. We’ve seen it with brain dead pieces from all sorts of outlets and they shouldn’t really be taken seriously.
The third one is from Hybe’s in-house publication Weverse Magazine and it’s called “K-Pop in America After BTS.” Ostensibly about BTS’s impact and importance on the American music marketplace, it’s main thesis seems to be that BTS are more popular than K-Pop in America but also K-Pop is hugely popular now thanks to BTS and also that the demographics of K-Pop listeners in America do not track with the demographics of America which seems to be confirming that K-Pop listeners represent only a small minority of people in America which is the opposite of what he said at the top of the piece.
So, where am I going with this? Well, I think what it comes down to is that journalists and critics were caught off guard with the small Korean boom in America over the past couple of years and are scrambling to provide takes.
Why did BTS, Parasite, and Squid Game all become a fad in America at the same time? Coincidence. Well, coincidence and the pandemic.
Parasite’s win at the Oscars is the product of decades of lobbying from CJ ENM and a Korean film industry that figured out the types of films that played well in global art house cinemas and then made some good ones. I remember when Oldboy came out in the early 2000s and was considered the coolest movie ever by my film buff friends. The movie was so globally popular there was even a Bollywood remake. Parasite is firmly in this tradition and its Oscar win is thanks to all of the good work and good will built up by these Korean filmmakers and producers over years.
Squid Game’s Netflix success is partially due to the pandemic lockdown that had us all streaming but it’s also thanks to (again) years of slowly building an audience for Korean dramas in the West. It started with the spread of the Hallyu dramas that became popular in Asia--Winter Sonata, Full House--and these were spread online via the English-speaking fans in places like the Philippines or from Asian-Americans in the diaspora. First in closed communities and forums and then later on streaming sites. There was also a big crossover with the existing communities of anime fans thanks to adaptations of popular properties like Boys Over Flowers. My theory is the popularity and growth of sites like Viki led to mainstream streaming companies like Netflix picking up K-dramas. They need popular content and dramas do big numbers. Squid Game may have popped off harder than something like Kingdom or Crash Landing On You but it’s not the only drama that’s done very well in the American marketplace and it wouldn’t have been seen if it hadn’t been for the groundwork laid by sites like Viki.
And then there’s K-Pop and BTS. I would argue it’s too early to really judge what (if any) BTS’s legacy in American media will be. Right now it seems like the group is quickly on their way to being forgotten. There is more mainstream awareness of “K-Pop” as something that exists in the world but the reputation among locals is not positive and I would say is actually worse than before BTS “paved the way.” K-Pop remains a siloed subculture with only the occasional reach into mainstream music. I think things could have gone differently after “Gangnam Style” and the small boom among pop connoisseurs around the “Fantastic Baby” era but the K-Pop industry focused on growing their siloed audience of captured K-Pop subculture consumers rather than the path taken by the film industry (product aimed at tastemakers) or the drama industry (product intended for wide audiences).
I do think, however, that the K-Pop subculture right now is undoubtedly bigger than it was a few years ago pre-BTS. And it is cool that you can get your Black Pink album on the next aisle over from your copy of the latest volume of the My Hero Academia manga… just make sure nobody has stolen the photo cards before you go to pay for it.
In short, these were three separate waves and it really is only coincidence and the media’s love of a “rule of three” that surfaced these takes on some kind of unified Korean culture boom.