Asia Times : Gender and genre < BTS versus Blackpink >

Korean boy band BTS at the 32nd Golden Disc Awards on January 10, 2018. Photo: WikipediaKorean boy bands are subverting gender stereotypes; Korean girl groups are reinforcing them

As any inhabitant of planet earth with access to a computer or TV will have noted, boy band BTS and girl group Blackpink are seismically moving and shaking the global music scene, surfing a tidal wave of K-pop as it crashes upon global shores.

The exposure of the two supergroups recently sky-rocketed to ever greater heights when, one after the other, they smashed YouTube records of “Most Viewed Clips in the first 24 Hours.” Blackpink was first with “Kill This Love” – ringing up 56.7 million views.  Barely 24 hours later, BTS shattered that number, raising it by 20 million views, with “Boys with Luv.”

Both have also performed on massive American stages – Saturday Night Live for BTS and the Coachella music festival for Blackpink.

So has K-pop as a genre truly gone global? Or is it simply that, as the world goes gaga over the Bantang Boys, BTS is dragging Blackpink in its foaming wake?



SORRY BLACKPINK, BUT...

The two groups come from the same place and are often mentioned in the same breath. But when it comes to sales, the chasm between them is glaring.

In 2019, Blackpink’s EP Kill This Love broke the record for the highest first-day sales for a girl group album with 78,275 copies sold, according to Hanteo. Compare that to BTS: The Bantang Boys pre-sold 2.6 million copies of their latest album Map of the Soul : Persona, according to Billboard.

BTS is also a phenomenon in a way that Blackpink just are not.

On Wednesday night, BTS paid homage to pop gods The Beatles – who they’ve been compared to repeatedly in terms of their effect on fans, and in the transformative power of pop culture – when they appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Their performance there deliberately mirrored the Fab Four’s world-shaking appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964.



While Blackpink might be garnering YouTube views by the million and filling concert hall seats by the tens of thousands, they cannot compare with the thunderous buzz that surrounds BTS – who are, arguably the biggest band in the world today and the biggest Asian act of modern times.

Of course, this is nothing new in the music world. Some acts were always more popular than others and this has never stopped a genre from having massive success.

But there is a boy band-girl group undertone to the BTS-Blackpink dynamic, and on the gender-expectation front, Blackpink have limited room for manoeuvre. That is not the case with BTS and other Korean boy bands, who are turning Asian and global norms of “masculinity” on their heads.

K-POP OR GAY-POP?

“How do we blur gender norms?” asked Michael Hurt, a professor of Cultural Studies at the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul. “One way to do that is dressing up women as tomboys – but that’s nothing new. On the contrary, Korea is creating another definition of sexiness – for men.”

In today’s social media era, when gender neutrality and fluidity is very much to the fore, Korean boy bands are redefining maleness with the “flower boy” concept of the pretty, pure, gentle man. K-pop men do things that are have traditionally been associated with, well, women: They wear make-up, dress up, act cute and show that they care.

Among some Western males, this form of masculinity is derided as being “gay.” Millions of Western girls and women, however, have clearly been smitten. And as online pundit Ask a Korean has often noted: Korean boy groups have tens of thousands of women screaming their names during concerts. If that’s not masculinity – what is?

Hurt calls the “flower boy” trend a new form of “hyper-masculinity” and compares it to a fashion show: Models hit catwalks sporting styles that are not designed for everyday wear, but will spark and define trends and conversations in the real world.

This is new. Meanwhile, girl groups like Blackpink are stuck with a sexualised presentation format that dates back to pre-history.

BOYS CHALLENGE NORMS, GIRLS REINFORCE THEM

”Pretty dancing girls is an old formula and Korea does it well,” said Hurt. “They maxed out the way you can harness the female body for economical gain.”

“Maxed out,” indeed. However, the problem for Korean girl groups does not stop at being unable to upgrade an already highly sexualized image. At home, girl bands are subject to societal pressures that their male counterparts have been able to challenge.

“Blackpink is just a harder sell than BTS,” John Lie of UC Berkeley’s Sociology Department told Asia Times. “Boy groups project an image that they’re well-built physically and they’re nice, romantic guys. It’s the contrary of what South Korean society actually is, which is, at the core, very masculinist and misogynistic.”

So, while the boy bands are bringing something new to the table – the “flower boy” look and concept – girl groups are stuck.

“While boy groups reflect a difference with Korean culture itself, girl groups are closer to what Korean society projects,” Lie said. “In K-pop, women are submissive, cute and sexy: their self-presentation is not that much at odds with how South Korean women are expected to act.”

Still, even “flower boys” can be very, very bad boys.

Lie noted that the ongoing Burning Sun scandal – in which multiple A-list K-pop male celebrities have been named and shamed in a sex trafficking, drugs and bribery ring centred on the Burning Sun night club in Seoul’s funky Gangnam district – exposes the hypocrisy of at least some male bands’ idealistic images.

The scandal, though, probably won’t affect K-pop as a whole: After all, the genre’s top names, BTS and Blackpink, are not implicated. The question now is what will drive the genre forward.

BEING REAL IS THE NEW DEAL

According to Bernie Cho, a Seoul-based industry player with DFSB Kollective, the future of K-pop is not about gender, it is about how truly global they the genre can go. In that sense, both BTS and Blackpink point to a new future.

“BTS can sing, rap, or chat comfortably in Korean, English or Japanese,”  Cho said. “Blackpink goes even further as they have members who can also communicate in Chinese and Thai.” Moreover, unlike most Asian music, K-Pop artist names and song titles are often provided in a bilingual Korean-English format, Cho noted.

For the music industry executive, BTS and Blackpink represent a new kind of act in K-pop where being highly trained singers or dancers is not enough.

BTS are “actual authentic artists who play key roles in producing, composing, and writing lyrics to their own hits,” he said. “Even Blackpink can’t be placed in the ‘just cute’ category. If they ever wanted to be a live band, they could pull it off.”

Rather than being carefully curated products manufactured on factory-line production process – the previous formula for K-pop acts – BTS and Blackpink indicate that it is now about being artists, rather than simply performers.

“The ‘fake it ’till you make it’ days are over,”said Cho. “Being real is the deal now…authenticity has displaced automation as the new normal.”

https://asiatimes.com
By Ophelie Surcouf

Featured Commentator : Bernie Cho [DFSB Kollective]

Asia Times : BTS ‘ARMY’ spurs K-pop mania in distant lands

Korean boy band BTS at the 32nd Golden Disc Awards on January 10, 2018. Photo: WikipediaBTS’ fans are using their promotional nous to help the band conquer ears, eyes and hearts worldwide

On the poster stuck up in the subway station, he is smiling, raising his left hand in the air, clenching a microphone and obviously happy.

And why shouldn’t he be? He is “V” and is a member of K-pop supergroup BTS. The poster is a birthday tribute to him.

It is a classic fan salute, of a kind that can be found plastered all over Korea. But this is not Korea – this is Copenhagen, Denmark.

It is a sign of the power of fandom and informal international marketing, which has been an immense help to BTS in its world-conquering surge.

VIKING ARMY

“In December we put up the first banner in Denmark,” Camilla Hansen, 35, said in a phone interview. For her daily grind she works in an office,  but during her off-hours she runs the “BTS Danish ARMY,” the Danish fan club for the band’s mighty fan base.

“It was great, we got so much feedback afterwards, people were so excited,” she said of her postering activity. “The fan culture is slowly starting to spread here, I’ve seen posters so many times in South Korea, so to be part of it here [in Denmark] is amazing.”

In fact, her dedication to BTS – also known as “The Bangtan Boys” – is having real-life implications for the spread of the group’s music.

Every year, Danish music magazine GAFFA holds an award show, and this March BTS took home the gold in two categories: International Band of the Year and International Release of the Year – thanks to a little help from the ARMY.

“It was a fan vote and all our fans voted, [and] when the host said the name of BTS we all went crazy,” Hansen recalled. She traveled halfway across Denmark to attend the event, which she had tweeted about in advance in order to ensure the international ARMY would help BTS.

The Dane stumbled upon BTS and K-pop by accident. Back in May 2016 YouTube’s algorithm suggested a video showing the boys practicing a dance. She watched, and her life changed.

“I didn’t understand a word they said, I knew nothing about South Korea or K-pop, but I was completely hooked on their music,” she recalled. “My life took a 180-degree turn and I’ve been lost ever since.”

Hansen has immersed herself to the max, teaching herself Korean, travelling all over Europe to see BTS perform, and even naming her cat ‘TaeTae’ after one of the band members.

SUPERFANS = SUPER PROMOTION

The success of BTS – the first K-pop act to truly hit it big in Western markets – can be attributed to fans like Hansen. In the US, the ARMY made sure that local radio stations gave air time to the Bangtan Boys by calling DJs directly. It worked.

“The question is no longer about how ‘BTS is coming’ or ‘BTS is crossing over’ to the West — the answer is ‘BTS has arrived,’” said Bernie Cho, president of DFSB Kollective, a Korean music artist and label services agency. “They had an insane year last year, emerging as the best-selling band in the world and 2019 is shaping up to be even bigger, as their new album release is already on pace to break sales records they set just a few months ago.”

The success of BTS’s tight fan connection is something other artists can learn from, Cho suggested. “BTS’s special SNS [social networking service] connection with their international army of fans is a fascinating case study on how to successfully be proactive and interactive,” he said.

Hansen has tried to convince Danish radio stations to get aboard the K-pop wave and give BTS a chance on the airwaves, but so far there has been little cooperation from the radio stations in the Scandinavian country.

“We have been told directly that BTS will not be played since no one understands what they’re saying, which is weird since the same radio stations have been playing [Spanish language hit] ‘Descpacito’ almost on repeat,” Hansen said.“But of course, we keep fighting and hope that one day BTS on Danish radio will be a normal thing, like in the USA.”

THE FORCE OF FANDOM

K-pop fan culture is a force. On Korean streets, young kids dance and reenact their favorite artists’ tracks; cafés cater to certain bands and are covered with fan paraphernalia; Seoul’s Sinchon subway station is plastered with “Happy Birthday” posters for K-popsters.

One of them is of Oh Se-hun from Exo. He’s crossing his thumb behind his index finger, a common hand gesture signifying a heart and representing love. Ironically, love is not something most K-pop stars can partake of.

In September, two idols from different groups started dating and were quickly dropped from their record labels for “breaking their trust.” Their crime? They had gone public without the blessings of their label. “No dating” clauses have even been added to contracts, according to The New York Times.

BTS are famed for their Vlog, and K-popsters have to be available to fans – really available. K-pop, like most pop music, is at least partly sold via sex appeal. For this reason, idols must remain asexual publicly, so fans can feel like they’re in a relationship with them.

UGLY AMID THE PRETTY

Yet, although they’re carefully curated by their labels, there is a dark side to some K-poppers.

“I admit to all of my sins,” singer Jung Joon-young said in front of half of the Korean press corps earlier this month. “I filmed women without their consent, shared the videos in a group chat and did such without feeling any sense of guilt.”

Jung is just the latest star to be dragged down in a widening scandal, which has also engulfed Big Bang member Seungri on charges of soliciting prostitutes and possible police corruption.

Still, die-hard fans remain steadfast in their conviction.

“My heart aches for you, I hope you can read all these encouraging words from us so you can also have strength to face all these things,” a fan wrote on an Instagram video showing Jung confessing.

“But I’m so proud of him for being honest and admitting his crimes,” another wrote. “I’ll wait for you…”

BTS has not been implicated in the scandal – and there is no indication that they will be. Even so, some of their fans stand accused of being overly protective of their idols.

Music magazine NME alleged that the ARMY has become “weaponized”, accusing fans of employing bullying tactics on social media against writers who are in any way critical of BTS.

https://asiatimes.com
By Morten Soendergaard Larsen

Featured Commentator : Bernie Cho [DFSB Kollective]

Asia Times : BTS spearheads K-pop’s conquest of the West

Members of South Korean boy band BTS, also known as the Bangtan Boys, perform during the 2018 MBC Plus X Genie Music Awards in Seoul on November 6, 2018. Photo: AFPOnce restricted largely to Asia, K-pop has finally gone West. But BTS is not a typical K-pop act

Asia Times’ Managing Editor Patrick Dunne thought he had escaped the continent when he flew to Calgary, Canada, on a family visit last week – only to find his eight-year-old daughter Amara singing in a language he did not recognize.

“I thought she was speaking in tongues,” Dunne recalled. “Then I realized she was repeating lyrics from the K-pop song ‘Likey’ by Twice.” His daughter told him that at school, she and her friends occupy much of their free time doing K-pop dance moves.

“Yes,” Dunne mused. “K-pop has made it to Canada.”

Indeed. For decades, K-pop and its wider trend, hallyu (“The Korean Wave” –  comprising music, TV dramas and film) flooded across Southeast Asia, East Asia and parts of the Middle East and Latin American.

However, the saccharine charms of perfectly choreographed pretty-boy and pretty-girl bands were largely resisted by Western audiences, even though the phenomenon was widely reported.

Artists with apparent breakthrough potential, such as Rain (“Bi”), Girls Generation and the Wonder Girls never quite made it in London or New York, while quirky ironist Psy – who was, anyway, a virtual anti-K-pop artist – proved to be a one-hit wonder overseas with the now-immortal “Gangnam Style.”

Now, however, the K-wave has – finally – crashed upon Western shores. With a vengeance.

EASTERN BEATLES HEAD WEST

Spearheading the tsunami is BTS – the boy band whose collective faces are almost as globally recognizable as Kim Jong Un’s. According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, the organization which represents the recording sector worldwide, BTS was the number-two global artist in 2018 behind Drake.

Ticketmaster voted their four-continent world tour – which sold out both London’s Wembley and California’s Rose Ball – the hottest concert ticket of the year, while Spotify named them 2018’s second-most streamed artists.  They even addressed the United Nations.

“2018 was the breakout year that BTS became the Asian-version of Beatlemania,” said Bernie Cho, president of Korean music artist and label services agency DFSB Kollective. “It’s been a bit surreal to see a K-Pop band like BTS neck-and-neck on international music charts with the likes of Drake, Lady Gaga and Queen. It’s hard to believe that BTS concert tickets are now more expensive than Elton John, Taylor Swift, and The Eagles.”

How did BTS do it? Everyone has an opinion.

Mark Russell, the author of “K-Pop Now,” suggests BTS arrived in a market that was just maturing. “Any time a new genre is rising, it is a series of steps to grow the fanbase and develop the connections,’ he said. “A lot of people nibbled at it – you had the Wonder Girls and Girls Generation – it is a whole process of growing any market.”

Others cite musicality and the heartfelt messaging behind BTS’s songs.

“I am 63 and I am a fan – I am going to their concert because I really sympathize with what they are saying when they are singing,” gushed Choi Jungwha, head of the Corea Image Communication Institute, or CICI. “Their songs are what I feel – their sincerity!”

While all K-pop acts have leveraged social media – most notably by using YouTube as a distribution mechanism to cross borders while building a visual as well as aural brand – BTS have deployed weapons-grade social media skills to connect with their millions of fans, the BTS “Army.”

“They show their daily lives on vlog so there is no barrier – it is as if we are friends or family,” Choi said. “BTS have all these ‘Army’ members who translate into many languages every aspect of their daily lives, which is shared on social media. Other bands did not do that.”

Production values are stratospheric. “When you see their vlog – aesthetically it is so well done, so beautiful, it is almost perfection,” Choi said.

WHERE K-POP FAILED

But why did other K-idol bands not break through before? After all, multiple BTS selling points – pinpoint dance choreography, hyper stylish threads, flawless complexions and cutesy good looks – were typical of their predecessors.

One commentator, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of his comments, suggested that the K-poppers who came prior were too carefully curated by the Seoul-based entertainment agencies that incubate talent using a factory-style training process, and usually supply groups with songs and music.

“The Wonder Girls and Rain did not write their own music and their life experiences were all about being trainees [in the hands of the management companies which mold the stars], so though they made great music, when they were thrust into an interview situation, they had nothing to talk about,” the source said.

“Fans actually want humans: K-pop acts came across as too robotic and over rehearsed … they are so trained, it is hard for them to be natural and normal.”

BTS, however, are actual singer-songwriters. “Maybe people were waiting for someone like The Beatles who wrote their own songs and built their own brand,” said Park Ye-seul, who operated Seoul’s K-Pop Academy, an experience center, in 2018.

“The runaway success of BTS is in many ways, a rebellious proof of concept that K-Pop needs to evolve beyond the ‘pretty boy-band’ stereotype,” said Cho. “BTS Army fans around the world are very loud and very proud of the fact the band members are not management manufactured idols but actually socially aware, outspoken artists.”

That presents a challenge to other K-popsters. “Just looking good is not good enough, fans and critics want more,” Cho added. “Idols, for better and not for worse, now have to be ‘artists.’”

K-pop, with its multiple cultural influences and high-tech distribution and marketing, may be poised as a global cultural norm for the 21^st century.

“K-pop is a global cultural appropriation machine that takes in other cultures’ systems and turns them into new things, with no allegiance to the original,” said Michael Hurt, a visual sociologist and research professor at the University of Seoul. “It if sounds good, who the hell cares where it came from? If you want to mix rap, jazz, RnB and rock it does not matter – it is a hyper-modernity kind of thing.”

BANDS AND BRANDS

The combination of BTS’ staggering success and the maturing market for K-pop means that other Korean acts are also capturing bridgeheads in Western markets. Just days after BTS announced their sell-out world tour, the debut mini-album by fellow label members TXT (“Tomorrow by Together”) topped the iTunes Top Album charts in 49 countries, including Australia, Norway, Russia, Spain, Sweden and the US.

This year, one of the biggest music festivals in the world, California’s Coachella, will be headlined by Korean girl group Blackpink. And K-music extends beyond idols; Blackpink will be joined at Coachella by two other Korean acts. One is Jamba Nai – an experimental, punky-looking alternative rock band that wields Korean traditional instruments. The other is Hyukoh – an indie rock band that sings in Korean, English and Chinese.

According to Cho, Korea is the world’s biggest market for “indie music” – not a genre, but a descriptor of artists not represented by the big three global labels, Sony, Universal and Warner. The market is pioneering creative new sales concepts. For example, Korea, once known as a market where digital music had killed physical sales, has now reverted.

In 2018, BTS were the first Korean act ever nominated for a Grammy in the “Best Recording Package” category. Their fanatical Army don’t just buy digital music, but CDs too – which are so well designed, they become collectors’ items.

“Although the CD packaging design was impressive, CD sales were even more impressive,” said Cho. “Last year, BTS collectively sold over 600,000 CDs in the US – second only to Eminem, who amassed over 750,000 CD sales. What’s more impressive is that BTS sold over 1.4 million CDs in Korea in just one week – nearly the same amount the best-selling CD in the USA sold in an entire year.”

And there are other revenue streams. For decades Korean products, from smartphones to cosmetics, have been promoted across Asia by K-pop idols in commercial endorsements. The emergence of K-pop stars in Western markets suggests lucrative new brand-to-band commercial ties. Kia Motors is sponsoring Blackpink, Hyundai Motor are in bed with BTS.

And of course, Brand Korea scores collateral benefits. “K-pop is a gateway drug to Koreana in general,” said Hurt. K-drama and K-pop music videos “are very influential in introducing people to other layers of the K-cake,” he added. Thanks to K-pop, the K-fashion, K-cosmetics, K-cuisine and K-tourism sectors have all benefited.

But not every fan is ultra-engaged. Back in snowy Calgary, Amara Dunne has not analyzed K-pop too heavily. ”I saw some friends working on dance moves and wanted to try it too,” the eight-year-old said of the lure of K-pop. “It’s cool!”

https://asiatimes.com
By Andrew Salmon

Featured Commentator : Bernie Cho [DFSB Kollective]

Music Press Asia : Inconsistency In Korea’s Music Chart Systems

What is Korea’s current issues in the music industry affecting artists?

Music Press Asia interviews Bernie Cho, Presideent of DFSB Kollective at Music MattersPart 2.

What happens when there’s 3 separate music charts nationwide?

Korea has seen some of Asia’s largest musical export in 2018 and it doesn’t seem to be showing and signs of slowing down. With Blackpink signed to Interscope Records in a deal to promote the K-pop girl group outside of Asia, it also marks the beginning of, a shift, for potential possibilities for other artists to follow suit. Korea, like many leading markets in the music industry, are suddenly seeing a surge of artists’ music exports due to a demand never seen before in music history in the region. And music charts naturally became a nationwide concern stipulated heavily especially from the indie artists and labels.

In a brief chat with DFSB Kollective – a Seoul-based artist and label services agency that specializes in providing international digital media, marketing, and distribution solutions to over 480 Korean pop music artists – President, Bernie Cho expresses the inconsistency of Korea’s music chart systems and calling for a more unified chart systems equivalent to Album Equivalent Unit (AEU), a system established in the United States.

Featured Commentator : Bernie Cho [DFSB Kollective]

Music Press Asia : How Is Korea’s Music Export Going To Look Like in 2019

The surge in export of K-pop music is dominating the music market worldwide. What are the effects of this popularity for the last decade?

Korean music is just about to see the fruit of a government funded entertainment initiative to launch the Korean music pop culture out of Korea.Part 1.

Perhaps, one of the latest news surrounding the K-pop world is YG Entertainment’s deal with Interscope Records. The deal is some of the most telling of what’s happening to the demand for Asian artists, K-pop artists in particular – YG has signed a deal with Interscope to cover promotion and distribution outside of Asia. This marked a significant power shift in what Korean artist can now demand and YG is keeping the most exciting pie to itself, if not, for just a little longer.

Catch our interview with Bernie Cho, founder of DFSB Kollective on his opinion for streaming, K-pop’s demand and the confusingly outstanding demand for girl and boy groups more instantly famous for their fashion and dance rather than its music. While we at Music Press Asia are still confused that how artists on our music charts no longer play an instrument or write their music, but rather, still  demand such worldly idolization.  We salute to their youth and vitality for some of the largest population – youth –  crazy for Asia’s “pop culture” in today’s entertainment world.

Featured Commentator : Bernie Cho [DFSB Kollective]