We’re going to Hollywood!

One of the things that has become abundantly clear to me, as I continue to pick at the edges of Boy Band Studies in the wake of my blockbuster Episode 36, is that most English language/Western Kpop (and BTS) fans have only the most superficial grasp of pop music and pop music history if they have any knowledge of it at all. I don’t know if this is simply part of being in Current Year in which the boundaries of what can be known stretch only as far back as the last news cycle or if the ignorance goes hand-in-hand with the “otherness” imposed on the Kpop genre outside of Asia. 

Do fans simply not have the depth of knowledge to fully understand what separates a Western act like the Beatles from an equally popular at the time group like the Dave Clark 5? If they even can’t do that, what hope do they have of comprehending the impact of a Korean group like Seo Taiji and Boys? Are fans so blinded by the “exotic” nature of Kpop that otherwise rational media consumers--people who will watch shows like The Real Housewives with a skeptical eye--believe with their whole hearts that the Kpop idol artifice is real? That, duh, obviously the women aren’t really in love with the titular Bachelor on The Bachelor but those two Kpop idols doing fan service are actually fucking each other in private.

What I keep returning to is a knotted tangle of misunderstanding, hubris, vile orientalism, and ignorance. 

In my research into Boy Band Studies I came across (and special ordered) an old out-of-print book on British rock managers called Svengalis and Starmakers (1988), which has in depth profiles of men like the Beatles manager Brian Epstein, Bay City Rollers manager Tam Paton, and Sex Pistols manger Malcolm McLaren. As I read, I couldn’t help but remember my post on Euny Hong’s The Birth of Korean Cool  (2014) and my utter amazement that she would hold up the Beatles as the “organic” antithesis of the manufactured gloss of Kpop. 

The Beatles didn’t just wander out of a basement rehearsal space and into a record contract. In order to even reach a point where they could put pen to paper with a major label, under advisement from Brian Epstein, they 1) fired their original drummer and replaced him with a professional ringer named Richard Starkey 2) adopted a manufactured and polished “look” with matching mod collarless suits and daringly long (for the time) hair 3) worked on curating some affected and distinctive choreographed movements on stage such as the synchronized bow and 4) buried their real private lives (John Lennon was actually married) behind a glossy veneer of wholesome youth. 

The line between the men in the matching mod “Love Me Do” suits and SHINee in their slim cut “Replay” trousers is so thin as to be non-existent. 

When did men like Brian Epstein get erased from popular memory? These pop and rock managers used to be as high profile as men like Lee Soo-Man or Park Jin-Young are in Kpop. Flip on 1960s teen music show Hullabaloo and in between the go-go booted dancers you might well catch Epstein interviewing Andrew Loog Oldham, the dapper manager of the Rolling Stones. 

The “Great Man” theory of history is far from perfect but it’s undeniable that without Lou Pearlman’s lack of understanding of production shortcuts, the Backstreet Boys and NSYNC would have not drilled and drilled and drilled and sweated and danced and trained until they could harmonize and dance at the same time at boy band boot camp in the 1990s. 

Do these men still exist behind the scenes or have they vanished completely from show business? And if they have vanished, who has replaced them as tastemakers and molders of talent? The algorithms of Spotify? Panels of overseers at the major labels? 

Simon Cowell was the only vestige of this strain of show business remaining and he was recently canceled after a poorly received quip about “UK-Pop”. 

I was thinking again about the “UK-Pop” comment after it was announced that SM Entertainment would be partnering with MGM Television to make a reality show about the formation of a new NCT unit composed of Americans. While there have certainly been Korean-American idols pulled from the diaspora as well as idols like Seventeen’s Vernon, whose mother is American and whose father is Korean, the idea of a “Kpop” group composed of well, Americans of all colors, is still a shocking one.

Although it has now been erased from popular memory along with Brian Epstein and the original faces of certain idols, back in 2011 during the last Kpop bubble, former NSYNC’er Lance Bass tried his hand at producing a white American boy group with a (then) contemporary Kpop aesthetic. The result was so ridiculous that most of the discussion around the act was whether or not it was intended as parody. 

For better or worse the dancing-and-singing boy group is no longer a style of performance that we in the West find appealing. Bring up one of the few recentish groups like Mindless Behavior and at best you’ll get a blank look. At best.

I’ve laid this out time and time again but the origins of the singing-and-dancing boy groups in East Asia and the West are very different. It’s one reason that I think we find the “Kpop” aesthetic so jarring when performed by Americans. In Japan, the roots were very much in a Broadway-inspired modern dance style which later blended with and fed back into the Jackson Five R&B dance style that influenced groups like New Edition and the New Kids on the Block, which later in America was blended with a Eurovision pop style brought back from Europe by the Backstreet Boys and NSYNC and then sent back to East Asia. Meanwhile groups like Japan’s Shonentai experimented with acrobatics and an intense angular modern dance choreography which was copied from Seoul to Shanghai to Taipei but Korea also had the influence of the culture of the American military bases in their backyard, something you can see in the moves of Korea’s own early 90s dancing king: Hyun Jin Young… 

What I’m trying to say is that it is a tangled, tangled web of influences in music and dance that it takes to bring you to a domestic Korean boy group like A4 in 1999 let alone one like GreatGuys in 2021. We like it as Kpop but will we like it as “USA-pop”? 

Our own singing-and-dancing boy groups are mocked mercilessly. I said it in Episode 36 but if the early 2000s were a competition between boy group performance like NSYNC’s theatrical, hooded cloak version of “Bye Bye Bye” and Blink182’s mocking pop punk “All the Small Things” video… well, the pop punk mockery won. 1D made it explicit in their video for "Best Song Ever.”

Back in the 1960s Berry Gordy famously developed his factory pop system in Motown in order to sell Black music to “Young America” aka white America. He did this by smoothing out the rough edges of both performers and the music into blander (but still tasty) versions of themselves. I’m not sure what form the USA-pop of NCT Hollywood will take but if Lee Soo-Man can revive our taste for domestic boy groups who can Put On A Show ™ even if that music has the jagged edges sanded down a bit for “Young America” to swallow, then I am all for it. It’s just a shame that we’ve erased our own tradition of boy groups to such an extent that potential members have to fly to Seoul in order to get a shot at stardom.

We used to make some DAMN fine boy groups here at home.