My last entry was about taste, and how I basically have come to feel that if I like something, it isn’t good. But sometimes this had been taken to a comical degree — where if I like something, it becomes actively bad. In college I had a close friend who would often share things that he liked with me via email. Ocassionally I would do the same. Once, I sent him a link to something that I knew he would really like.[1] No response, but that was fine — we rarely responded to these emails, we just sort of moved on. A long time later, I get an email from this friend: hey, I just found something that I think you’ll like. It was the same link. This could have been a fluke, but it happened multiple times. I would discover something and share it… but it was clear that my taste was suspect, and the links I sent were not worth clicking. This was made triply clear when content I had shared made it’s way back to me, months and months later.
Of course, this was not a healthy friendship, and that’s fine. But historically, I had a pattern of falling into friendships like this. Friendships with people with a very strong sense of aesthetic, people who had the ability to do the one thing that I absolutely cannot do: confidently say “my taste matters.”[2] Many of these friendships were in formative years so I do not think that I was consciously falling choosing their dysfunction, but making friends with people like this made it easy to negate my self, and ever since I’ve always found it much easeir to lose myself in the lives of others than to try and bring them into my own.
I can’t talk about taste without talking about the friend who argued with me that it shouldn’t matter if people like the same things. Who cares if everyone hates everything I like? Who cares if they disregard what I like? As long as there is sincere intimacy between two people, who cares if they don’t share any taste? While of course people can be friends without liking the same things, I wholeheartedly reject the idea that finding commonality isn’t important. First and foremost, if something is important to a person you care about, then it is worth understanding. Even if it’s not your cup of tea, I think you learn so much about people from the art they hold dear. From the music they grew up listening to, the movies they turn on when they are bored, the books that make them laugh or cry, the books they want to read and the books they know they probably never will. The mistake, I think, is assuming that media exists independently from our real selves. Art (which I am defining here loosely as an impelementation of media which achieves something “great”), is not apart from our lives — it springs forth from our lives. Our relationships to media — music, movies, books, whatever — reflect how we relate to ideas, to emotion, to our humanity. And I think for me that is why I have struggled with the rejection of my taste. And why it hurt so much when it was clear that my name was enough to convince someone that a link probably wasn’t worth clicking. Because our taste is us. My tastes, the things that I love, these reflect my past and present. My dreams. My relationship to the sad, the beautiful, the difficult, the exalted. And when you’re told your whole life that the things you love are crap — the things which make your skin dance with joy, which make you weep in awe, which rob you of the ability to speech or reduce you to a stuttering proto-human — you being to feel that you are crap.
As many of you reading this might know, I’ve been very interested as of late in the notion of “taste,” and the way in which we come to form aesthetic judgements of things. I’m interested in this from a more academic perspective, but also a very personal one — I am very used to having my taste made a mockery of. Or at least I was growing up, something which I think I have largely internalized. To this day, I find it very hard to proactively share things about myself. I love to talk, but I know many friends who after hours of conversation will pause for a second only to realize I haven’t shared anything about myself. On certain topics I can speak endlessly, but others will leave me stuttering unless I feel very, very comfortable with the person I am talking to.
I think a lot about how this comes to be. The social dimension of taste is interesting. What does it mean for a person to say that a piece of music is good or bad? There is an academic debate on this that I don’t really care to get into…what I’m interested in here is the fact that we are feigning objectivivity over something which is subjectively experienced. Of course, the factors on which that subjective experience’s formation are contingent are without a doubt social, but that does not change that a person who experiences a euphoric sensation when listening to a “bad song” is still experiencing a euphoric sensation. It’s like eating fast food — we know it’s not good for us, but we cannot change the fact that it pulls our evolutionary levels.
So I think about how some people have a sense of taste well-attuned to some demographic. When we say that someone has “good taste,” what we really mean is that they are reliable predictors of the taste of others. I was always told that I had bad taste. I enjoyed dance pop and techno music and while I did ocassionally meet people who were into these scenes (often obnoxiously so), somehow the damage had sunk in. I think this has contributed to my insatiable need to intellectualize everything. It’s why I take recommendations so seriously. For me, proclaiming that I enjoy something is not a personal endeavour, it’s an intellectual one. I know that my taste in movies, books, or music has no value, so I build an intellectual edifice around media which allows me to at least have reasons around the media I enjoy. You can dismiss my taste — it has been dismissed — but it is harder to dismiss criticism.
Still, that doesn’t change the fact that I like what I like. And when it is good, it’s more than just enjoyment, which is why intellectualizing taste in this way falls so short. Listening to a song I love — especially turned up loud, ideally on an open road going at a high speed — gets under my skin in the best possible way. It sends electricity into my extremities. I feel filled up by it. What I find particularly ironic is that I can be listening to a song and feeling all of these rich, hard-to-explain emotions while another person might be next to me rolling their eyes at 10 minutes of beeps and boops. Good music changes the texture of my life when it is playing, and for them it is just an annoyance. It’s weird to think of that as a metaphor for all of life’s experiences. And it’s so hard for me. It’s so hard to imagine these sounds as being perceived as anything but bliss. What other things that I find beautiful are but an annoyance for others? Probably most everything.
As such, I thought I’d subject you guys to some of my favorite beeps and boops. I find you can learn a lot about a person by their favorite music. What do you think these say about me?
All time favorites — these songs will all completely arrest my being. If you ever want to make my day, make my month, put one of these on a set of good speakers at 2am, drink some tea with me, and tell me it’ll all be ok.
William Orbit – Wate from a Vine Leaf
Agnelli & Nelson – Everyday
Banco de Gaia – Celestine
Banco de Gaia – Igizeh
Orbital – Halcyon and On and On
Future Sound of London – Papua New Guinea
Boards of Canada – Dayvan Cowboy
Brian Eno – An Ending (Ascent) (Leama & Moore Remix)
Andrew Bayer – Distractions (Movement 1-4)
Hybrid – Choke
Ridgewalkers Featuring El – Find (Andy Moor Remix)
Vinayak A – Sometimes It Just Turns Into Reality (Michael Cassette Remix)[2]
Massive Attack – Man Next Door
Songs I currently really like — many of these are a bit poppier and while they definitely induce euphoria, it’s hard to tell if they always will. There’s some element that doesn’t quite make my soul jump out of my body…
Solarstone & Clare Stagg – Jewel (Pure Radio Edit)
Der dritte raum – Hale bopp (Raumgleiter version)
Matt Darey Urban Astronauts – See The Sun (Aurosonic remix)
Topher Jones – Lost it All (Arty Remix)
Arty, Nadia Ali, BT – Must Be The Love[3]
Art of Trance – Blue Owl
C2C – Le banquet[4]
So what’s the point of all this? One, I suppose, is to drive home the distance I feel with other people on these matters. If you click on any of these songs, you’ll probably feel a strange audial assualt and then…boredom. Indifference. And yet there is a person to whom that cacophany is dear. But my desire goes beyond merely cementing the wedge which music has driven between me and other people, but it’s an attempt to recognize and own that difference. I struggle with my taste, because I struggle with my sense of self. In a very serious way. I intellectualize things to try and control them. Objectivity, to my mind, means that something can exist outside of me, outside of my self, my existing — and only by being apart from me can anything be good. This is not healthy, but it’s deeply rooted in my way of being. And music is the clearest place where this tension cannot be avoided. I cannot pretend that these songs do not affect me. I can only acknowledge it. This is me.
[1] I can’t resist also linking to a vocal version that is such a goddamn guilty pleasure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-QKslIMiFo. High school, man…
[2] I have no idea where this song came from but it is so good. Total dark horse.
[3] God dance acts can’t make a music video to save their lives. Monster track though.
[4] These songs have heavily skewed to trance, house, ambient… but this is a deep, marvelous track.
The other day I stared at myself in the mirror. I mean really stared. I realized how long it had been since I had done so. I take my own appearance so for granted. Of course I see myself all the time, in mirrors, in reflections… but I have this idea of what I look like in my head, of the form that is me, so as I move quickly in and out of my own view I feel like I don’t actually even bother to pay attention to myself. I just see what my brain fills in as “me.” So I stared at myself and I felt foreign to myself.
We all take for granted what we look like, but really, I don’t even know. I can describe some features, but I find that the more I become acquainted with a face, the more the cohesive whole becomes overwhlmed by disjoint individual features. And that’s how I felt. I felt like I was looking at the forest again after a tree-drawing expedition. I am so used to seeing the world from inside my own vantage point that I forget that I am the only one who sees the world like this. To literally every other person I have met and ever will meet, I am a foreign object floating through space, coming through doors, making noises. And so I sat in my bathroom, staring into the mirror, trying to take myself in as an alien entity. A creature that moves through space. A creature that, to most people, is as mysterious to them as they are to me.
I can’t say I really learned anything except the knowledge that I do not know what I am to others nearly to the agree that I assumed I did at one point. I still don’t know what I look like, really. As I stared at myself, I was struck by my own ability to construct a cohesive whole around who I am. Around my physical reality. And this makes sense. I never have been able to do that. I have always identified with my mind — with the brain peering out into the world, the eyes that are staring at the computer screen as I write this — and not with that weird, hairy body that stared back at me through my bathroom mirror. It was like meeting an inquisitive child who was unafraid to avert his gaze. I was challening myself. “Who is this creature?” I don’t know. That’s what I know now. I do not know.
I went through a phase in college where I read a ton about behavioral economics, game theory, generally through a poppier type of lens. By far, the best book that I read during this period is Influence by Cialdini.
I remember telling a fellow intern the summer after my junior year about my interest in understanding why people make the decisions that they make, and he emphatically insisted that I read this book. He said that I would love it — and I did. This book is all about how people’s sense of reality and self-awareness falls apart — and can be manipulated. This sounds pretty evil, but the book is about understanding these patterns of exploitability in order to defend ourselves and others. Still, that doesn’t mean that we aren’t surrounded by people who have a deep understanding — whether trained or intuitive — who will use this understanding in order to gain from our ignorance.
I work for Twitter, and Twitter went public. I won’t be making any fuck you money, but I stand to make a little cash (of course assuming that the stock continues to perform, which is always an assumption). Regardless, when a liquidity event happens there is a constellation of financial planners that come out of the woodwork. The key factor which determines how much a financial planner makes is how much in assets they manage…and finding new clients is tough. When a company goes public — especially a tech company — this means that there is a known group of people who are going to have a windfall, and often won’t know what to do with it.
I ended up meeting with some financial planners who some other people at Twitter had mentioned. I was mainly interested to see if they could help me out with tax complications from the Sweden move (they couldn’t), and more generally I was very interested to see how they would pitch themselves to me. How would they sell their services? Of course, I’m sure that the high net worth guys get an entirely different type of treatment from an entirely different type of salesman, but that’s what this was: sales.
While I was talking to them, I was reminded of an interaction that had happened on the street the other day. I was with a couple of friends in the Mission and we had just left a restaurant or a bar or something. We were figuring out where to go next and a homeless man came up. He sort of stood there, staring at us, then looked at my friend and threw up a fist to make a “pound.” We stared awkwardly. My friend said “nah man, I don’t want to do that.” We walked away. My friend said, “you know, if you engage, they know that you’re going to feel mentally connected.” It’s true, and it’s 100% Cialdini. And I was reminded this when, on the second meeting, the advisors asked me if I thought they had been useful. Sure, I responded (eh, not really, I was thinking inside, but no reason to be mean)… and then one of them immediately pulled out a notebook. “Great! Well, would you mind brainstorming with us some friends of yours who might benefit from our services?” Fuck! They almost had me trapped. In my desire not to be an asshole, I had said that I appreciated their services (and to be fair, even if I felt they hadn’t been super useful, I did appreciate their time and patience… I grilled them like only I can, while recommending that they watch and read a number of finance related classics), and now they were putting my goodwill to the test: if I thought that they were useful, why wouldn’t I want them to help out my friends? They even suggested that I invited them to drinks at Twitter! Masterful (especially given that the rest of their pitch was, honestly, pretty flat). In this case, I legitimately had somewhere I needed to be so I excused myself, but it was a tense moment. And it goes to show how easy it is for us to be manipulated, even in situations where we are completely aware of not only the incentives to manipulate, but also the means.
These days I think a lot about the end of the world. The end of humanity. I think less about what it looks like, honestly, and more about the process of getting there. That’s what really scares me. It’s like death… I’m not afraid of death, I’m afraid of dying. I’m not afraid of the end of the humanity, but I’m afraid of being a part of that process. These days, it’s global warming… and this is sort of the perfect source of fear. It’s very, very easy (and even scientifically plausible!) to imagine very rapid catastrophic changes to the earth. We’re seeing the precursors, and it will probably get much worse. I don’t want to live through mass extinction. I don’t want to live through a literal purging of the 99% as the 1% invest in the meager technologies that might preserve at least a little life on this planet.
As such, one of the questions that I ask people that I respect these days is for their thoughts on this issue. Are they afraid? Do they think there is hope? How do they deal with it? The homogeneity in response has been almost shocking. Everyone is afraid, almost nobody has hope, and most people deal with it the same way: they just don’t think about it. Sure, some people feel a bit more fatalistic than others, but I was shocked by how little hope there was…just different levels of effective coping. Some people have a deep (often unquestioned) trust in technology’s ability to dig us out of this. Many people think that there will be broad suffering for a while, but that governments will wake up and that broad action mixed with technological progress will mitigate the possibility of extinction. And some people, my brothers and sisters in angst, just wait.
But one person highlighted something that I hadn’t thought about…I had asked them how they could justify the idea of having children, knowing that the possibility for such extreme mass suffering was out there. When I asked most people this, they basically responded with an extension of the above. But this person said this: the only people who will REALLY suffer are the ones who live through the transition…if our life becomes some sort of horrible dystopia, the children who grow up in that world won’t know any better. That’ll just be life. Basically, while the objective quality of life may go down significantly, there will still be happiness. And sadness. And joy. And tears. The drama of human existence will go on.
There are a numbed of things that you wouldn’t know about me just by looking at me. One of the most obvious of them is one of the most directly to, well, looking at me. I actually have a pretty deep fondness for fashion. I think it is easy to dismiss fashion: it’s pointless! Why bother dressing yourself up like this or like that instead of just going for utilitiarian things that don’t cost a lot, last a while, and do their job — namely, clothing you. This entry, however, is not a defense of fashion (suffice it to say that we are visual creatures and there is no way to get around that). What this IS about is my relationship to fashion.
I’ve always struggled with fashion, and recently I realized that this is part of a larger set of issues that I struggle with: any time there is a large search space, and the quantity to be maximized is abstract.[1] Put more plainly, in the world of fashion there are no right answers, just tenuous notions of what do and do not work. Of course, one can go for “classic” looks that are safe, but that’s not the sort of fashion I admire. The sort of fashion that I really admire reflects a confident sense of self, a bold projection out into the world.
And so I struggle with fashion for many reasons, but I think that might be the most fundamental: I have no sense of self that I want to project. I have no sense of self that feels worth projecting. I think that might be what I find so tantalizing about people who have developed sense of fashion: it feels like they also must then have a developed sense of self. When I walk into a department store (or even a small boutique!) I feel utterly overwhelmed.[2] When I go shopping with my friends, they seem to just sort of magically be able to connect articles of clothing to themselves. And it’s odd: I can make judgements of other people’s taste, but have none of my own. I think it’s becasue what I’m judging is a projection into reality. It’s like the difference between the outcome of some large number of dice that have been rolled, and predicting the outcome. “1 2 3 4 5? That’s amazing!” But if you had tried to predict it beforehand, the odds would have been miniscule. That’s what fashion feels like. Somehow, other people have “the eye.” They know how to take the vast number of choices and condense then into a personal sense of style. The know how to choose the things that do and do not fit in. And I admire them for it.
And as I have never had this ability, my life has basically become an affront to fashion. For a long time I couched this in irony, as many people do. Heck, right now I am wearing a 3 wolf moon t-shirt. I wear sneakers (with the defense that my chiropractor says it’s good for me, but that’s just a convenient excuse). And I avoid shopping like the plague. My friends know this. I am more than happy to go shopping with someone else, but the second that you suggest that we look for things for me I concoct a hundred plausible reasons that all boil down to: “please, no, I’m scared.” I think this fear defines my relationship to many things, but recently fashion stuck out as a clear example of one of them, especially because it IS tied up with our sense of self. That isn’t to say that someone who dresses poorly is worth less as a person, but as I am someone who cares about the world, and about aesthetics, it seems like such an apt metaphor for broader issues that I have with personal identity. Not only do I have difficulty defining myself in intellectual terms, I fall apart when I have to even present myself visually.
People often have the feeling that they are being watched by those around them. Insecurity can make us feel like everyone can see our worst flaws, as if they can see into the rough edges of our soul. But with fashion they CAN see our failings. And just as I’ve given up in fashion, I think as of late I’ve given up the fight on identity — and not necessarily for the better. I’ve just decided not to play. I put on my sneakers, but I also recede into my room. I retreat into the familiar. Shirts that I’ve had since college, music that I love, a good book. None of the pain of trying to reconcile myself with the eyes ears and minds of the people around me.
[1] There are a whole class of problems in life that fit this pattern and I’ve found that I’m pretty bad at all of them.
[2] I should also mention that as of late I’ve realized how many things give me a sense of hopelessless and anxiety…I’ve just gotten very good at avoiding them, or transforming my life so I don’t have to face them.
Howdy y’all. I have a big backlog of things I want to write about and I think I’m back on the horse now…I got a little bit discourage, both by writing and by life. I don’t know if the latter has really crossed the line yet, but I find writing pretty cathartic so here I am.
I’m sure you’re very excited about the prospect of ANOTHER entry on kpop, but that’s the whole point: the REAL reason I enjoy kpop has nothing to do with kpop per se. I talked a bit in my essay on kpop about kpop’s pop music origins — but what about my own?
When I was in elementary school, I remember distinctly my first experience with euro style dance pop. I even looked up the CD:
LOOK AT THOSE SONGS. Holy shit! It’s like a who’s who of 90’s classics. And this was one of the first CD’s I REALLY listened to. That I utterly devoured. I remember going to Venezuela and being able to sing every word to every song (and at one point my family there made fun of me, calling me fagito — little faggot — which made my 10 year old self extremely upset…we put the kabosh on that, but you can see how my identity was rocked by my interests from the very beginning…but this isn’t an entry about that).
As I got older I took a detour through the stuff that TRL (remember that?!) peddled on us. I listened to Eminem and Blink 182, but there was a part of me that never forgot the words to Another Night. And then I found DDR. I of course loved playing the game itself, but I also loved the saccharine, high bpm songs. I wanted more but didn’t know where to find it… and the truth is, I never really found it. Of course there was American pop music, but that took a different turn — more rap influence, more seriousness, more guitars — and left behind the euro influence. At the same time I discovered trance music and clubbier electronic music dominated my life for a long time. But there was a part deep down inside that was waiting… and with kpop, that part found what it had always wanted. Complete earnestness. Fast beats, catchy rhythms, meaningless lyrics (in this case literally meaningless — I can’t understand them). Kpop is the fruit of a tree planted by Le Click 20 years ago.
I’ve always enjoyed reading, though for the last couple of years I’ve read mainly fiction. I love fiction, but in 2014 I’m hoping to spend some seroius time digging into a number of subjects which have gone neglected for too long. In the interest of shaming myself if I don’t get through them, here are a number of books I’m hoping to read in 2014, with annotations where relevant. If you have any suggestions, please send them along! And if you want to read along, just let me know and we can make it happen.
Critical theory/cultural criticism/genres are hard: I’ve long wanted to have a stronger understanding of the contemporary philosophical works which have so thoroughy influenced the academic humanities. I think that this is going to be pretty difficult reading at times, but I’m hoping that by reading a number of works I can begin to form an ability to understand a field not known for accessibility.
I need to throw some Foucault in here. Perhaps will start with Discipline & Punish, as I’m very curious to see a treatment of prisons, a subject which I find rather harrowing; I’ll probably also read History of Sexuality.
Prince of Networks: a lot of people have been touting Latour and this book, and this seems to be the place to start.
Feminism: I want this to be a year where I have a much more solid understanding of feminism. I have a decent sense from blogs and talking to people, but I for me, 2014 is about fluency in the building blocks for all this stuff.
Whipping Girl: a friend of mine I’ve reconnected with is trans and while I’ve always been aware of trans issues, I didn’t realize how much tension there was in contemporary feminism around trans issues. I’m told this is a great book, and has a good defense of femininity, which is interesting given how easy it is, in my opinion, to go the route of identity anarchy.
The following are from a radical feminist blog. I don’t necessary always agree with the blog, but these books include a lot I’ve been meaning to read and I think will form a strong base for understanding contemporary feminism.
Literature: 2013 saw a lot of literature, so I’m going to skew towards the above for the time being. That said, I want to finish the incredible In Search of Lost Time, and I’d like to read some Hemingway. This is entirely contingent on making headway in the above though.
Note: this is a rough draft that some people have seen, but I thought it was silly to keep hiding it. As I get more feedback, I will hopefully refine it and repost it. Until then, at least enjoy some of my favorite music videos. And please please give me comments!!
A mythology of kpop music videos
I recently read Roland Barthe’s Mythologies and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I found the analysis whimsical and engaging, and it touches on a personal goal of mine: to be able to turn a critical eye on the myriad symbols which saturate our existence. It’s also well-known that I’m a kpop fan,[1] so I was inspired to share some thoughts about kpop music videos in the vein of Barthe’s analysis.
Kpop is a growing, now-global phenomenon. Gangnam Style has almost 2 billion views on youtube. And people are taking note. The question has been: will Kpop go mainstream? The answer is: by any measure that matters, it already has… but what people in the US really wonder is: will it become popular with mainstream America? This isn’t a question I’m as interested in (prediction: it’ll continue to be huge), though I am interested in where kpop will go. For now, what fascinates me most about kpop are the formal visual elements deployed broadly across kpop music videos.[2][3][4]
I believe that kpop’s success is based directly on distilling the success of America’s turn of the millenium boy bands; to understand what makes kpop so distinct from American pop music, it is key to see how it ran with pop-music tropes developed in this time period. Kpop is the Ivan Drago of boy band music, scientifically crafted by foreign scientists to heighten the saccharine qualities and production value of early millenial pop music, while simultaneously removing any subversiveness or connection to reality.
This is the music video to Bye Bye Bye. This song came out when the radio still played a huge role in the dissemination of pop music and I can tell you that I probably heard this song over a thousand times. It was huge. It also represents, to me, the zenith of the boy band craze and the video has all of the trappings of a classic boy band video. It has pretty men dancing together, and portrays simplified, usually undefined but vaguely antagonistic realtionships between the sexes (often with little actual interaction between the two). Further, in boy bands there were generally roles parsed out to the various members (who doesn’t remember “the slightly creepy older one”?) and we can see these roles here.
And now we have two fairly strandard examples of a kpop boy band music video. The formal similarities between these videos are undeniable, the difference being that the kpop videos have taken all of the familiar boy band elements and ratcheted them up to an almost absurd degree. The cheoreography isn’t just synchronized, it is impeccable. The men aren’t just pretty: they are perfect. Even the ones whose roles are to be “the wild one” are wild in a way that clearly took a couple of hours and a small army of professionals. And while all of the formal visual elements are perfected, kpop videos generally eschew anything truly subversive or antagonistic. The content is just an afterthought to the visuals. In the super junior video there is the hint of a femnine presence, but this serves little more than as a balwark against the otherwise seemingly improbable (and homoerotic?) ocassion that a huge group of dudes would dance together. This is a pretense that the second video does away with entirely.[5] And thus we have the mythology of the kpop music video: a utopian world[6] where beautiful people don’t need a reason to exist — they simply do exist, and they exist for our pleasure. They exist to excite and overload us, and in fact appropriate elements from our everday life in order to sell us on the idea that this ersatz world is our own, but made better in every way through the transformative power of perfect dancing bodies and catchy hooks.
Women in kpop
One big differences between kpop and turn of the millenium pop music has been the fact that success has been shared much more evently between the sexes. While there were of course popular female girl groups (notably the Spice Girls, as well as groups like Destiny’s Child and TLC), in the world of kpop, the women are superstars as much as, if not more so, than the men. Still, by looking at a video made at the Spice Girl’s height we can again find elements which have been drawn from, refined, and turned into pop music heroin a decade later by kpop’s female superstars.
This video is playful, and despite an obviously large budget and a grungy, seemingly dystopian backdrop, the video is really about girls having fun and dancing. Girl power! Spice up your life! This is seen directly in kpop girl group videos, except, once again, without even the hint of what could be construed as actual subversive struggle. Another tool crafted in the Spice Girl’s video that kpop music videos make extensive use of is neutralizing subversive elements (grunge, dystopia) as a medium for cuteness. In the Spice Up Your Life video there are still some creepy men who evoke the western idea of creepy, power-hungry old white guys. This sort of reference is completely absent from kpop music videos.
Compare Spice Up Your Life with the video to Genie. It is clear that Girl’s Generation draws from the history of selling giggling sisterhood to their fans. But it is completely devoid of even the hint of counter-cultural sassiness that was present in the Spice Girl’s video. The boy and girl bands of the early millenium were not counter-cultural, but part of their performance was pretending to be. In kpop music videos this is done away with entirely; instead, we have the vague, apropos-of-nothing hint of the existence of men. The creators of these videos pay lip service to the need for some logic — why are these girls dancing, anyway? — but this is never, ever developed. The masculine hands at the beginning of the video seem to serve as the viewer himself, left gawking at the perfect-beyond-any-reason performance of the girls that seems to exist for no other reason than to please. In the world of kpop, entertainment is it’s own logic.
Beyond the visuals, the viewer cannot help but also notice another element pervasive to kpop music videos: the completely manufactured look of the performers. This isn’t to say that all kpop performers look the same, but they look curated. In the Spice Girls there were definitely roles: the fierce one, the sexy one. The names even reflected this: Scary Spice, Posh Spice, and so on. But if you watch an interview with a kpop group, this is much more transparent. “I’m the sexy one.” “I’m the good dancer.” They often look like they were extruded out of a mould with that title printed on it in big block letters, and it doesn’t help that the videos never offer any real narrative against which to define themselves. They have been crafted to live off of the viewer’s own sense of what a performer can and should be, and they make no attempt to develop or refine this, only to live up to it as perfectly as possible.
We will revisit this video[7], but for now I just want to draw attention to the fact that the women do look different — but in a way that reaffirms the offputting sameness of all of the women in these videos. The differences look clinical. These women look extruded; they don’t look like different people, but rather, as if some platonic ideal of “woman” passed through the dreamscapes of Korea’s best fashion designers and was incarnated. Note, however, that this is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. These women are visually arresting. Gorgeous, athletic, great dancers, and impeccably clad in a world that seems to exist only to heighten their fevered, estatic abuse of our visual cortex. But their existence is also irreconcilable with our experience of the everyday world and it is this tension which is at the heart of my analysis of kpop music videos.
Kpop’s utopian mythology
In kpop music videos, everyone is beautiful. Everyone is a perfect dancer. Strife only exist in a subdued, sexy way, and only when it serves to emphasize the power and virility of the performers, neutralized by their prowess. There are few recognizable backdrops, and in general performances are set against futuristic, flashing sets that make it seems like the performers inhabit another plane entirely. And they do — they inhabit a kpop utopia, a utopia whose formal visual elements are utterly arresting. Thematically, compared to kpop music videos, even the blandest American pop music videos are downright edgy. Themes of drug use, failure, sexuality, and alienation still play a huge symbolic role (even if they are treated without any substance). In kpop, however, any subversive elements are transfigured by the performers into mere pop symbolism — it is this transformative power which is key to understand the power and homogeneity of kpop’s visual presentation.
In this video we see a clear example of one of the aforementioned trends: kpop music videos’ extensive use of complicated artifical backdrops. Even the boy band videos above — which in comparison were much less visuall saturated than this video — were set outside of any recognizable location. Where the Spice Girls were floating through an expensive CGI future-city, 4 Minute’s video is in an abstract future-scape of flashing digital lights that exist only to overload. Every element of the kpop music video is fine-tuned to overload the senses: catchy beats, beautiful people, hypnotic dancing, and backdrops of pure form and chaos. There is little to remind us of the world in which we actually live, establishing the kpop mythology as a plane of pure performance and entertainment. This isn’t your world,[8] and yet it is made up of elements that are clearly recognizable to us and thus anchor it in our experience; for example, there are human beings performing, and yet their perfection seems to distance them from us more than connect us to them. The beauty of the kpop perfomer is an alienating beauty.[9]
This video is much more clearly rooted in elements of our common experience (cars, waterfronts, hotels, human relations) We even see a city! But our experience of these spaces in the video is a transcendent one. Everyone is always bouncing around at a high bpm. Boys and girls flirt with each other chastely — even grinding, a common element of American pop videos, is reduced to an innocent act. We are presented with an idea of beaches that is infinitely sexier and more impossible than any beach we’ll ever walk on — one with a group of inhumanly pretty people dancing perfectly in tune. Bubble Pop embodies the promise of the kpop music video: things which are recognizable to us will be transformed into pop-objects. The elements of the world which are recognizable to us do not anchor kpop to reality, rather they anchor our reality to kpop’s, giving the the viewer a connection to its simple, irresistable logic: nothing can resist the transformative power of a beautiful dancer and a catchy beat. In the world of kpop, nothing ever has as much utility as when it is used to entertain — because in the kpop music video, there is only entertainment. There isn’t strife. There isn’t even sex!
The transcendence of everyday reality through song and dance is not untread territory for pop music, and there are certainly iconic examples of this — it is easy to draw connections between the bouncy world of Bubble Pop and the sexy hallways of …Baby One More Time.. The key difference is the purity of message found in the mythology of kpop’s visuals.
In the case of Britney Spears, just 2 years later she made the video to I’m a Slave 4 U, a video whose visuals directly challenge the viewer to deal with Britney’s sexuality. This is why I can speak so broadly about a mythology of the genre of kpop music videos, whereas in the case of American pop music there is no sense of a coherent message.[10] Kpop videos are utopian in that they present a simplified world in which every element is perfect, often by being appropriated by kpop a performer. On a formal level, who wouldn’t want to live in a world where everyone is beautiful, where individuality is expressed through bold fashion choices, and everyone can dance in perfect unison? The global success of kpop is the answer: not many people wouldn’t want to live in this world, at least for the 3 or 4 minutes that a video usually lasts.
In this video, we have the first hint that people actually do anything other than dance through beautiful — generally fabricated — places. We have hints of actual human existence: people study; people play instruments. Being set in a school, even, this video even more literally evokes the …Baby One More Time video. We have a school, music starts, and then our performers take the stage. But this video is a perfect example of how spaces which typically are filled with complicated social elements (for a school: teen strife, alienation, sex) are transformed into yet another medium for sexiness and the general chaste perfection of the kpop music video. In …Baby One More Time this tension is dealt with directly, with Britney serving as the physical incarnation of this sexual tension. The fact that the kpop music video does not recognize this reveals the tension between the viewer and kpop’s utopian mythology. By appropriating any and all visual elements as mediums for pop performance and stripping them of their relatable human reality, these items lose their essence and serve to create an alienating tension. Is a school without adolescent tension really a school? The viewer knows the answer: it is not, which leads us to question the critical assumptions of kpop’s visual mythology: is anybody that beauty? Is anyone that perfect? And by allowing us to question, kpop’s simulacra of our actual existence falls apart and we see how it actually alienates us by creating this disconnect between things as we know them and things as they exist in the logic of kpop.[11]
The darker side of utopia
In the vein of Brave New World, the elements which make up kpop’s utopian visuals — a lack of strife, widespread happiness, perfection and transfiguration — are in fact predicated on deeply oppressive notions — erasure of identity and substance in the abstract, and surgery and hyper consumerism in the concrete. So where the visual elements seek to present a utopian reality, the transformation necessary to actually realize this reality makes kpop’s world fundamentally inaccessible to its indended viewers and thus creates a deep tension between the logic of our reality and that of kpop’s. This is what is brilliant about kpop music videos as a genre: it is the very utopian formal elements which addict us that come together in form to create an alien, oppressive view of reality that sucks up subversion and splits out candy and plastic.
I have argued above that in kpop, everyday objects are transformed. This is a lie, however, inasmuch these so-called “everyday objects” are all ALSO perfect. This perfection creates the illusion that kpop’s powers of appropriation are general — ie that they could apply to something as mundane as our everyday existence — but they are actually restricted to the hyperconsumption of the super-rich. The I Am the Best video is just the absurd conclusion of this tendency.[12] We simply accept that all of the cars are always top of the line — remember that Hummer in Bubble Pop that seemed to serve no purpose beyond accentuating that the people dancing in front of it could afford one? In I Am the Best the visuals are almost exclusively made up of these sorts of items. The message of kpop’s seemingly-utopian mythology — anything can be beautiful and amazing as long as we’re dancing perfectly around it — is in fact reversed. The dancing is perfect and beautiful because the backdrop evokes the most extreme perfection that luxury goods can provide.
Kpop relies on the often-innocuous use of these items to sell it’s own message of transformation. The only reason that anything can be “made” glamorous is in kpop is because it already is. The message to the viewer is clear: the only way to enter the world of kpop is to transform your own life to conform to its rules. Make yourself more beautiful. Buy expensive things.[13] Kpop’s visual message pretends to be one of beauty and inclusion, but the real message is one of class-based exclusion, and it has rung clear in South Korean society, where thousands of young people now spend all the time they would have used to spend studying instead practicing to be kpop stars while depleting savings on expensive plastic surgery. Kpop does not transform our world, we disfigure our own to try to fit its own logic.
Furthermore, kpop actively candifies social strife. In this video, we have very dystopian images, somewhat reminiscent of the Spice Up Your Life video. Riot police, a molotov cocktail, strangely dressed pop stars. But instead of a sense of tension or fear, these elements are set below brooding, immaculately clean pop stars in a way that suggests a general triviality. The rhythmic fighting between police clad in riot gear and “pro-music” rioters is much more a dance than an actual critique of modern power dynamics. This video is an example of the alienating kpop-as-utopia mythology. Yet again, the visuals involve something which we are intimately familiar with — political tension, police violence — and reduce it to more pop backdrop. The inconsequentiality of the violence in this video is especially interesting given the constant threat of violence with North Korea that exists in South Korea. Kpop of course can be seen as a form of escapism, but this video is an extreme example of how the kpop mythology once again is built on a complete disregard for it’s viewer actual experience of things.
Another tension intimately belying the kpop mythology is the lack of any development or transformation within the narrative (or lack thereof) of the kpop music video. The performers spring forth from the ether fully formed — in the case of the Gee video, the girls start out literally as dolls which then come to life to entertain through synchronized dance moves and sisterhood (as envinced through laughter and shopping)…before returning again to the static doll state. What an apt metaphor for kpop! Apropos-of-nothing performers spring forth into a world of consumption and performance and then return to the void. There is none of the dynamism or evolution of actual human existence.
The mythology that kpop is a sort of transformative pop force is doubly painful to the mundane, far-from-perfect viewer because it completely ignores the huge amount of works that go into making people look so perfect. Where in the world of Gee the girls of Girl’s Generation spring forth perfect and ready to dance, the unstated reality is once again one of money, consumption, and time. How much time goes into the perfect “just woke up” haircuts of the boy bands? How much time goes into the perfectly natural seeming yet feature enhancing makeup of the girls in Glee?
Kpop is a world without phenomenology. It is a world without change. And it is a world without sex, one of the most interesting tensions present in these videos. You have women and men who are scientifically calibrated to a level of perfection that is generally impossible without 1 in a million generics or 1 in a million income. And yet the allusions to sex are almost non-existent. Of course, I am told this is due to the general conservativism of South Korean society, but it only heightens the deep hypocrisy of having statuesque beauties gyrating perfectly, dolled-up perfectly, and then completely ignoring the inevitable sexual excitement of their perfect hair, makeup, and clothing.
Some videos do at least acknowledge the existence of sex, but they are very rare, and they only reaffirm how sex ruins the static fantasy of kpop. The only emotion allowed in kpop’s mythology are those pre-defined emotions which exist in a proscribed, eternal way in society: women are cute, or sassy, or bitchy, and men are brash, or stoic, or strong. But the real pain and difficulty of relations between the sexes are completely ignored. The Abracadabra video touches on issues of jealousy, but as with the other videos, it transforms it into nothing more than a reason to dance. At the end there is a pregnant, homo-erotic pause between two of the video’s stars and we see the absurd chastity of these videos. Sex is treated clinically, with beautiful women going through chaste, passionless motions. Even if they had kissed, it would be as if Michelangelo’s David kissed the Venus de Milo;[14] we would expect the sound of stones crunching in lieu of any actual excitement.
And yet how cruel this is, given that the content of these videos is so obviously sexual. What is the viewer supposed to do, except to feel a strange sense of contradiction and shame. As with everything else, kpop appropriates elements from our everyday lives — riot police, sexuality — and robs them of their essence. We have sex without the sex. We have violence without the fear. If the American example is valid, this is not a stable situation for kpop. There will always be pressure to push the envelope, and the tension here to actually deal with these issues in more than a superficial way is too obvious and strong.
The fundamental issue at play is that kpop, at its core, is about selling pop music’s transformative ability. Through song and dance all pain disappers and we are entertained. But pop music is not transformative. Pop music generally reaffirms existing social structures, and kpop is a slave to them. While there is definitely pop out there that has challenged the status quo, given that kpop completely fails to do so means that when it potrays its pop utopia, it must inherently be a lie.
This video is a clear example of this. These girls rob a bank, and in the end, all they need to do to get off free is share the wealth with the patrons of the bank and the police. We have been trained to take for granted that a singing group of cute girls can get away with anything, and we gloss over the history of the police as a tool for oppression. In the world of kpop, if you sing well enough, if you’re beautiful enough, nothing can stop you. But the viewer knows that these are not the rules of the real world. It is the people who can already afford the hyperconsumerism of kpop — the Lamborghini’s, the chic haute cotoure — whom the police really serve. And if this seems like a trite point — of course a pop video is ridiculous, right? — then note that this message has been taken to heart by the legions of children who have abandoned their studies and work slavishly for the chance at a chance to be a kpop star. And why? Because they know that the message of this video isn’t a joke. If they’re one of the precious few that can sing well enough and dance well enough, then the police will serve them. Why wouldn’t they work for that instead of resigning themselves to the long hours and daily humiliations of South Korea’s business culture?
So where does that leave us?
Look, I love kpop. I just wrote a huge, ponderous essay on it in my free time! I think that kpop’s achivements are a striking metaphor for much of the modern tendency towards remixing, appropriaion, and reuse. Kpop’s innovation hasn’t been creating some fundamentally new type of pop music, but rather in reorganizing something existing — boy/girl group pop — and perfecting a small set of extremely catchy and visually striking elements. This is what hip hop did with its sampling — and to very powerful effect — and what we are seeing more and more online in projects like Thru You and Pomplamoose. Kpop figured out how to tap itself directly into the part of our brains that is receptive to its synchronized dancing and striking non-sequiturs. And it is amazing. It is a visual drug. But it is still a slave to capitalist, neo-colonial ideas. But it doesn’t have to be! And that’s what could be truly exciting. Instead of just being a zenith of consumer pop-culture, it could use its own engaging visual formula to tear down the structures that it uses to both engage and alienate the viewer.
It is possible for a video to be both beautiful and still acknowledge humanity, though it isn’t easy to achieve. In Six Days people are beautiful and powerful, but they also exude personality. Dynamism. Jealousy. Rage. Love. Pain. Sex. There is no simulacra here. This is human relations, as distilled by one director’s vision.[15] Wouldn’t it be incredible if kpop could evolve into a critique of the tensions between the world its reality and our own?
I think that it will have to. The current situation isn’t stable. That isn’t to say that the vast majority of kpop won’t be majoritarian audio visual heroin — and I’m ok with that, I want my hit — but if the American pop experience is any example, when there is such a strong and obvious tension, someone will lampoon it. Gangnam Style was a very limp warning shot, but a warning shot nonetheless. Distribution is cheaper than it ever was, as is making a high-quality music video, and there are soon to be thousands of disillusioned South Koreans who trained to be a kpop star and won’t make the cut. It’s hard to imagine that at least a few of them, having stewed in kpop all their lives, literally having dedicated their life to it, won’t make something critical and beautiful out of their intimate experience of kpop’s profound lie.
[1] Though not a creepy one :< [2] If you aren’t familiar with kpop, I highly recommend actually watching all of the videos I link to. Formally, the quality of these videos is unmatched to 99% of what the American pop industry is putting out, and at an amazing pace and consistency. [3] It’s also important here to note that I don’t speak Korean. This is about the way that visual elements are deployed, not the lyrics they’re deployed against. Having talked to my Korean speaking friends, however, they go to great lengths to assure me how little the lyrics are really about and I think that emphasizing the visual is actual important in a world where our visual load is constantly being increased. [4] I’m definitely as fun at parties as I’m sure this essay will make me seem. [5] It’s easy for western viewers to read a homoeroticism into this, but I do not think it is present. Kpop doesn’t have the preoccupation for having clear causal relationships in the way that american pop videos do. If a group of men want to dance, they dance. While these men might exude some symbols that to an American might evoke the image of a gay male, these videos definitely reaffirm patriarchal realtionships between the sexes, especially given that they eschew subversion so extremely. [6] I think one of the key difference in the nature of the dancing between kpop and the boy bands is that the highly synchornized dancing of the kpop music video creates a homogeneity between the performers that might be unsettling to American audiences that still, for historical reasons, see “rock and roll” (which is still associated with pop) as an expressive, individualistic endeavor. Having 9 people dancing perfectly in line negates the need for a lead singer, for a Justin Timberlake to go solo afterwards. [7] I have to admit that I unabashedly love this video, and anyone who knew me years ago knew that I loved this dance. When Psy’s Gentleman came out and lampooned the dance, I felt at once vindicated and betrayed. [8] This is not always true, of course, though given that kpop is produced in one of the world’s exploding metropolises it is very telling that Seoul is rarely the center of these videos…compare that to the role of New York in American popular music culture [9] Which makes sense given that it is most often achieved through surgery [10] Well, excluding the usual suspects like reaffirming gender roles, patrarchal power dynamics, etc. [11] Another interesting example of this which didn’t quite make the cut for more discussion but is interesting nonetheless is T-Ara’s Lovey Dovey video.
This is a clear homage to the music video to Thriller[a], except completely stripped of any tension or drama. In the Thriller video, people are afraid. People think they might die! In Lovey Dovey, the girls blankly stare expectantly as they are overtaken by zombies. At the beginning a girl is even killed with a little chirp and a cartoonish blood-splat. This is a far cry from the werewolf horror at the beginning of Thriller! More fundamentally, Thriller presents us with a plot. People interact, and the video exists with respect to their relationship. Kpop generally eschews any such narrative or character development. [a] If you haven’t seen this video, watch it now. Even if you have seen it, it is worth rewatching.
[12] Though this is also kind of their shtick and is a common element in their videos, it’s important to note that while they are an extreme example, it’s pervasive [13] This is even more explicit when there is clear product placement, as in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISEoXdHb4W4 [14] Before it lost its limbs [15] That director is Wong Kar Wai, and I recommend you go watch everything he has ever directed. Start with Chungking Express.
A friend made the comment that I often talk about happiness, and specifically, that I often say that I am or am not happy, as if I were trying to convince someone. Myself? My readers? She made the astute point that it is ok to be unhappy too. Sometimes we are unhappy.
This made me pause. I mean, my twitter profile says “beauty and happiness before all else,” right? Happiness is, for me, the means and the end. So why do I seem like I need to keep reminding myself that I am happy?
What I feel is that there is a natural tension between discontent and happiness. I think we associate happiness with contentment. We accumulate all of the things we want and need — a family? a nice car? a good job? — and then: bam. Happiness. But I don’t think it works like that. I think happiness is something we have to cultivate every day of our lives, despite discontent. Hell, happiness should even be fueled by discontent, as it fosters a deeper, richer understanding of how we relate to ourselves and our surroundings.
I guess my point is that I try to emphasize that I am happy because usually when people make deep criticisms or complaints about things, it implies unhappiness. But I don’t think that is the case for me. I’m not saying I’ve always been happy in the last few years, but I’ve certainly tried to be. I’ve tried to decouple happiness from the events in my life — this is very difficult to do. But as long as I have good people in my life, I have a fighting chance.
There are a LOT of things in my life that are difficult for me right now. I have been writing about many of them. On the dating front, I’m still figuring out how to understand dating, what to do about crushes (I am and have always been bad at acting on crushes, and I basically feel like a rapist if I even vaguely entertain “making a move”), how to understand the boundaries of crushes and friendships, what it means to be bisexual. On a broader front, I’m still working through what I want my life to be about. But my desire is to not make my happiness contingent on the answers. For a long time, it was… and I think I still have a tendency to strive for clean solutions to broadly stated questions. To try and find the perfect, mathematically rigorous and elegant solution to tough problems. But if I can’t be happy in the meanwhile, I’ll never be happy. I don’t think I’ll ever get the answers that I want. I just have the process.
Here I am 