The Grand Narrative

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Apologies for the slow posting and unanswered emails everyone, but as this post goes up I’ll be en route to the Korean Pop Culture Conference 2011 at the University of California, and preparing for the trip has taken a lot more work than I expected. But I’ll be back and blogging by Wednesday next week, and so until then I thought you might be interested in the abstract of co-author Stephen Epstein’s and my presentation topic, which – assuming no disasters – is likely to become a chapter in the forthcoming book The Korean Popular Culture Reader by Duke University Press:

Girls’ Generation? Gender, (Dis)Empowerment and K-pop

“The hottest phrase in Korea nowadays is undeniably ‘girl group.’ But girl group fever is more than just a trend: it’s symbolic of a cultural era that is embracing the expulsion of authoritarian ideology.” So reads the content blurb for a story on the rise of girl groups in the March 2010 issue of Korea, a public relations magazine published under the auspices of the Korean Culture and Information Service. Nonetheless, despite official, top-down promotion and cheerful assertions that this phenomenon is a liberating pop movement, a reading of the lyrics and visual codes of the music videos of popular contemporary Korea girl groups raises serious questions about the empowering nature of “Girl Group Fever.” In this paper, we will engage in a close analysis of the music and videos of groups such as the Wonder Girls, Girls’ Generation, KARA, T-ara and the discourse that has surrounded their rise to popularity in South Korea in order to deconstruct the notion that contemporary consumer society is making a radical break from more traditional, deeply embedded power structures.

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We will argue that a set of recurrent tropes in the studied media and marketing presentation of Korean girl groups undercuts claims to a progressive ethos. In particular, as we hope to demonstrate, girl group videos and lyrics often fall into one of three categories: first of all, while girl group singers can express desire in potentially empowering fashion, the viewer is generally constructed as male, and expression of desire is accompanied by a coyness and feigned innocence that returns power to men (Girls’ Generation’s “Gee” and “Oh”; T-ara’s “Like the First Time”; KARA’s “Mister”). A second set of songs and videos suggests exertion of female power, but influence is wielded through recourse to the overwhelming force of feminine sexuality that either embarrasses (After School’s “AH!”, which adds the tease of a forbidden relationship between teacher and student) or renders males helpless in its midst (The Wonder Girls “So Hot”) and thus projects the message that narcissistic desirability is the route to redress power imbalance. Finally, a number of songs have lyrical and video narratives that depict female solidarity in wreaking revenge on callous boyfriends or threatening men (2NE1′s “I Don’t Care”, The Wonder Girls’ “Irony and “Tell Me”, the latter of which has lyrics that are at odds with its visual narrative), but in doing so continue to foster the discourse of a battle between the sexes. As we will show, in noteworthy contrast to J-pop girl group videos from the dominant entertainment group Hello! Project, which emphasize the expression of youthful energy without reference to a validating or polarizing male presence, Korean popular music’s engagement with larger discursive structures has yet to break free of ideologies that pit male and female against one another (end).

(Source: Screen Capture, “Magic Station”, Asahi-TV, 15 October 2010)

Update: Very much the lens through which I’ve been writing about Korean music for the last few months, nevertheless I should really have stressed that the abstract was written almost a year ago, and indeed developments in K-pop and J-pop since then have rendered much of it out of date, let alone the opinions of my co-author and myself growing and changing as we deepened the extent of our research. Also, word limits for the paper precluded necessary related discussions of boy-bands and J-pop, with 8000 words unfortunately barely being enough to even begin to scratch the surface of the subject.

Unfortunately then, in hindsight the abstract isn’t actually a very good guide to our current opinions on the subject and/or what we’ll be presenting on Friday(!), so please understand why it’s necessary to close this post to further comments. Instead, for now at least please accept the abstract simply as something to hopefully get you thinking about possible common themes in K-pop and why they exist, and if it becomes possible then I will definitely (re)open the discussion at a later date.

Finally, my special apologies to those who already commented, and frankly I didn’t expect such a wealth of expertise to be brought to bear on the abstract so quickly!