A Smug Sense of Self-Satisfaction – ‘hallyu’ through the Lens of the West

It’s been a few days since I’ve published, I’ve got a couple of half-finished blog posts but I’m finding it hard to keep coming up with new things to write about. It’s nice to finally finish something. Last week you asked for an angry rant, Matt; here goes.

Last night I came across a BBC news story about 한류 (hallyu), or the Korean Wave. Hallyu was originally coined in 1999 by Chinese journalists to describe the sudden surge in popularity of Korean culture all across Asia. This level of cultural exposure is very new in a country which, because of its isolation from the rest of the world, used to be known as The Hermit Kingdom. In the last few years, this movement has gained even more momentum with the explosion of K-pop on the Asian music scene. For those of you who don’t know, K-pop is by far the most popular type of music in Korea these days. Performed almost exclusively by boy bands or girl bands, many of which were formed in pop idol like TV shows, K-pop combines the catchy melodies and choreography of Western pop, ‘synthy’ backing tracks reminiscent of disco, and often a singing style based on rap and R’n'B. I suppose the closest we have in the West is ‘the Backstreet Boys’. For any one back home reading this blog, if you want to get a taste of what K-pop is you should check out these music videos from T-ara, Big Bang and Girls’ Generation.

‘A Contradiction’ – the Trouble with Travel Writing

One of the biggest challenges in talking about a culture – especially a culture which you’re not part of – is to avoid over-generalizing. If you want to write anything at all you need to make certain sweeping statements, but at the end of the day, everybody’s different, and nothing you could say about a culture applies to absolutely everybody. The travel guide publisher Lonely Planet has really grasped this, and they manage to appeal to our desire to categorize everything we see on the one hand, and our desire to think of ourselves as open-minded, non-judgmental individuals by describing every country the world over as a ‘contradiction’. Some Irish people are chatty and friendly, some are quiet and introverted; so Ireland itself is ‘a contradiction’. A bit of an empty statement, but it keeps us happy. Instead of simply describing Korea, or ‘the West’ as a contradiction, and leaving it at that, I’m going to try to describe some of the larger cultural currents, but obviously I’m not trying to suggest that all Koreans or all Westerners are the same.

One of the most common mistakes in talking about a foreign culture is to pass judgment without understanding why it is the way it is. If enough people disagree with you about something, they probably have a point. If you can’t see what that is; if you can’t put yourself in the mind-set of those who you disagree with, and can’t see why they believe what they do, then you probably don’t understand the problem well enough to pass judgment either way.

One of the most unforgivable blunders in talking about a foreign culture is to fundamentally misunderstand your own culture, levelling criticisms that can so easily be thrown right back at you that you come off sounding ignorant and hypocritical. This is exactly what Rajan Datar, Daniel Tudor, and the BBC as a whole have done in their special report. They stop just short of outright mocking hallyu for its supposed commercialism and conformism; describing it, as Westerners tend to do, as superficial, vacuous or hollow. Unlike Western popular culture, they say, Korean pop culture is state and corporately sponsored. Unlike in Western Pop Culture, popularity is garnered through hype rather than content, and unlike our timeless classics, such as Corrie, East-Enders and Emmerdale, Korean dramas lack artistic merit. Is anybody else reminded of pots and kettles?

Many of the problems with hallyu according to this report can be boiled down to one general complaint; it’s not based on a counter-cultural movement. How is it that a large Korean company can sponsor music festivals? How can music be seen to be cool when it’s endorsed by the government? How can a whole country, a whole continent even, embrace a culture which is so blatantly pre-packaged and marketed? K-Pop is all of these things, but I don’t think it’s as different from Western culture as people like Daniel Tudor would like to think.

‘We’re All Individuals’ – The Emergence of Western Youth Culture

I remember being quite taken aback in 6^th year history when reading about 60′s popular culture and the emergence of the ‘teenager’. Up until that point, I had always thought that ‘being a teenager’ was just part and parcel of being human, that teenagers have been the same for the last however many millennia mankind has been around, and that all of the music I found myself listening to, all of the political ideologies I followed, and even the way I dressed were down to my own innate, natural search for an identity. Reading about the beginning of ‘youth culture’ I realized that this search for an identity – all the clothes, the albums, the time spent watching MTV – was just another way to put money in the pockets of the ‘suits’, as I would have called them. People in general, and teenagers in particular, have such a strong desire to belong to a group, any group, that it was only a matter of time before membership had a price tag attached to it. But the way this has happened in the West, seems, at first glance anyway, to be very different to how it’s happened in Korea; and I think this is why.

Most of what we know about the world comes from the mass media. Many of our conversations revolve around recent headlines, storylines, or Will Ferrell lines. People who watch the same T.V., read the same books, and get the same news tend to share a similar worldview, similar ideas; a similar culture. Before we had the mass media, this shared culture was generally confined to a single country. Once you crossed state borders people spoke a different language, and so did not communicate as often or come in contact with the same media. Because of this, your nationality was what defined your cultural group, and this gave rise to early 20^th Century nationalism. Philosophers talked about a ‘national character’ common to all fellow countrymen and the idea of the volk or ‘the people’ became popular. World War II showed us how destructive that can be if pushed too far, and nationalism went quickly out of fashion and played a much smaller part of someone’s identity, than it did before. Because of this, young people growing up in the period immediately after the war would have struggled to find a group identity. The 50′s and 60′s marked the beginning of a boom in mass-media; these ‘culture-carriers’ now crossed national borders more than ever, bringing more and more people together under the same shared culture in what is known today as globalism.

Between working part-time jobs and getting pocket money, without having to worry about paying bills or putting food on the table, teenagers had quite a large disposable income, and became quite an attractive marketing target. The result was that group identity was no longer based on nationality but on generation. Now every 10 years we have a new cultural movement, (60′s, 70′s, 80′s etc.) as one generation of teenagers tries to define itself against the group that has gone before; but more importantly against the older generation which is currently in charge. For something to belong to a teenage cultural movement it usually has to exclude the mainstream adults; and so we had the rise of face-piercings and the ‘parental advisory explicit lyrics’ sticker being used as an advertisement in itself. Impressively, it is the very generation against which teenagers define themselves which stands to benefit most (economically) from youth culture itself. Over the years, marketers have perfected this great vanishing act, and though you’re less likely to see big companies attach their names to music festivals, you can be certain that a lot of corporate money goes into these events. Take Oxegen for example, one of the biggest Irish festivals of the year. One of the first large-scale rock festivals in Ireland, Oxegen originally went by the name Witnness, but changed in 2004; a look at the logos might help give an idea why.

Witnness (note th extra ‘n’) was originally sponsored by Guinness, but in 2004 Guinness pulled out and Heineken stepped in to sponsor the event. This is part of the reason Oxegen is spelt with an ‘e’ instead of a ‘y’ (to resemble Heineken) and why they use the distinctive Heineken font for the two final letters. Heineken are careful not to feature too prominently in case the blatant commercialism detracts from the cool image on which these festivals thrive. However, if you go there, you can be guaranteed that there’ll be only one brand of beer available; most likely one brand of cigarettes as well. On top of this, the recent explosion of O₂ arenas and the popularity of events like the ‘V’ festival show that perhaps commercialism is beginning to work its way into youth culture to the point where it’s no longer seen as uncool.

The BBC’s final complaint about hallyu is that it’s pre-packaged, superficial, vacuous, or otherwise speaking that it lacks the depth and personality that we in the West have come to expect of any ‘merchants of culture’. Because most of the songs are written on very generic subjects, and most of the singers are ‘attractive’ in a very standard, pin-up kind of way, we assume that hallyu promotes a level of conformism scorned in the West. On this assumption, we’re half right. Anybody who’s had the pleasure of watching Monty Python’s Life of Brian (or the displeasure of hearing Axa insurance rip it off in a horrendous radio-commercial) will be familiar with the famous balcony scene. The motto, ‘we’re all individuals’, is a helpful one to bear in mind when thinking about the youth culture of today. In order to feel like part of the group, we need to assert our individuality. Most teenagers will have one pet band or interest, unique to them (or almost anyway). This sets them apart, marks them off as ‘just as individual as their peers’, and gives them a little niche of their own.

I was struck, while reading about Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail, which describes the economic trend towards niche marketing and how it has been made possible by globalization, by the similarities between the culture and the economics. Creating niches is a way to maximise revenue as you can create a much stronger, more personal attachment to your niche. Combine this with the added pressure of having to have some niche to fit in in the first place and you’ve got some serious potential for profit. In the West, we expect song lyrics to resonate with our own personal thoughts and feelings, we like to feel like we have some sort of a personal connection with our favourite bands, as if we are on the ‘same wavelength’. We rely on the 6 or 7 tracks of album filler common in today’s releases to mark us off as genuine fans as opposed to those who are only into the popular stuff. On the whole, though, Western Culture is like a catalogue, geared towards allowing us to mix and match and craft our own (pre-packaged and marketed) identity, though the years of practice and level of expertise in marketing culture can often obscure that. Hallyu is superficial, it is conformist, and it is little more than a corporate money-maker, much like its western counterpart.

Youth Culture in Asia

Asian youth culture does not share the same history as ours in the west. In Korea, mass-marketed youth culture is a relatively recent phenomenon. South Korea has been a very poor country up until the 1990′s, and consumable identities are a luxury after all. Korea has always been quietly nationalist, and has never had to deal with the cataclysmic events of World War II. Nationalist sentiment is incredibly strong, as Koreans see themselves as a race apart. This is why the girls being interviewed couldn’t understand foreign interest in K-pop, “It reflects our images of relationships and our thoughts and beliefs”, she observes; how could this be of interest to a foreigner? This attitude is sometimes taken to extremes. A friend of mine recently asked a co-teacher for a recipe to make kim-bap (a kind of Korean wrap, using rice and seaweed), but the teacher replied, with no malice intended, that it would be too difficult. The idea that a non-Korean would be able to get their head around wrapping rice in a roll of seaweed is alien to them! Even the word for the Korean people, the 한(Han), is the same word they use meaning ‘one’. Korea is known as ‘han country’, and the language is known as ‘han country language’. Now, Korean would be a fantastic language for anybody who enjoyed puns, as each word seems like it can have about 8 different meanings, but when I was in my orientation one of the lecturers pointed out this similarity between Korea and ‘one’. He believed that it implied ‘the’, Korean’s are ‘the people’, Korea is ‘the country’; whether or not it’s true I don’t know, but if it is it would certainly explain this fierce loyalty and natural affinity to and with each other, which seems to me to be one of the defining characteristics of Korea.

Because of this, young Korean’s are free to find their identity as one of the Han. Nationalism is a perfectly legitimate cultural badge and one which is embraced. For youth culture to be legitimate it does not necessarily have to offend or not appeal to the older generation. It doesn’t have to pit itself against the government as the government is part of the Han people. It doesn’t need to pit itself against materialism (except as manifested in the West) because materialism is part and parcel of the culture (as it is in pretty much every culture around the world). Finally, it doesn’t need to cultivate this image of individuality, because individualism is not a condition for membership of the group. Korean music should express the ‘images of relationships… thoughts and beliefs’ of Korean people as a whole. Going into too much detail, or singing a song with a slightly unexpected message would mean speaking for fewer people, and becoming less representative of the han as a whole. Daniel Tudor quips that if he were Korean he ‘might question the value of… [being known around the world for K-pop]. The point is that if he were Korean, he wouldn’t, and nor should he. I think what makes Western commentators so quick to dismiss K-pop is how similar it is to our popular culture. For years, now, Asia has been bombarded with Western cultural propaganda, to the point where China, a communist country, whose ideology is completely at odds with that of the West, recently opened a theme park called ‘American Dream’. Korea has its own take on Western culture, and K-pop, (just like Korean ‘Italian restaurants), is a kind of a fusion of different types of Western cool, with a particularly Korean flavour to it.

Through the Looking Glass

I could go on at length about everything that is wrong with this seven-minute clip, and I’m surprised at how much ignorance, bigotry and arrogance can be squeezed into such a small space of time, but I think I’ve already probably gone on a little too long. Very quickly though, I would like to answer two of the other accusations levelled at K-pop:

1. K-Pop is superficial: This is definitely true, but I have never seen a culture so obsessed with outward appearance that when Susan Boyle, a famously unattractive singer, finally does well, the photo on her Christmas ghost-written biography is actually airbrushed to make her look worse!
2. Single Dimensional Culture: K-pop is the only aspect of Korean culture to make it over to the West; however, it’s not like we look very hard. Korean cinema is world-famous, and quirky comedies like I’m a Cyborg, but that’s OK provide a contrast to the ‘superficiality’ of K-pop. Daniel Tudor may not like the idea of being remembered as the country which gave the world spice girls, but if he’d ever asked a Korean student, he’d know that England will not be remembered in Asia as the country which gave us The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Radiohead, Pink Floyd, etc., but the country which gave the world David Beckham.

On top of all this, the unwillingness to engage properly with Korean culture is quite clear. Look at this exchange between an anonymous reporter and Hyo-min, a K-pop singer and actress

BBC: “Some people say that the music that you do, and the drama that you do is manufactured, it’s not real, it’s not genuine, it’s not artistic, what would you say to that?”

Hyo-Min: “I can’t say that I totally disagree with them…”

She was probably going to say something to the effect of what I have just ranted about up here, or at least given some kind of a justification, but of course, the BBC’s not interested in actually finding out anything about Korean Culture. We’ve already got it nicely boxed up as superficial and all-round generally inferior to our own, and we wouldn’t want anything upsetting that beautiful smug sense of self-satisfaction that such an observation brings. Watching this has taught me a lot more about my own culture than it has about Korea’s. I think that part of the reason we get so worried about the superficiality of Asian culture is because of how it imitates ours. Because the more subtle theoretical justifications of our own hypocrisy are lost on a foreign culture, they see our culture bare, stripped of all the marketing, all the smoke-and-mirrors. They absorb that culture, assimilate it and imitate it. What irks us about Asian culture is how uncannily it mirrors are own and how unflattering we find the reflection.