Episode 2.5: Divesting From K-Pop
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“As a gay, Black, gender fluid, queer traffic cone, y’all truly have me fucked up sometimes. And I have no say in the matter.
Which is fine. It’s not really my job to speak out about racism in Korea. [mumbles] I’ve already got my hands full here in the states.”
[Planet Grove: a Black + Queer curation theme song plays.]
“Welcome to my planet.
Welcome to my planet.
Welcome to my planet.
Welcome to my planet.
P-L-A
N-E-T
G-R-O-O
V-E
P-L-A (UH HUH)
N-E-T (WHAT?)
G-R-O-O
V-E
P-L-A
N-E-T
G-R-O-O
V-E”
Host: Hello everybody, welcome back to Planet Groove: a Black and queer curation. My name is Mars and today’s episode is different. I had a completely different episode planned but I’m not done with it yet so here’s a mini episode or a .5 episode. I don’t even know what started this conversation but I’ve never got to fully explain my life as a Black K-Pop fan in detail. While this may be titled “Divesting From K-Pop” I still enjoy aspects of K-Pop but navigating it as a Black person has been nothing but violent.
[SHINee “Replay” plays]
Host: I got into K-Pop at almost the end of its second generation. For those who don’t know, K-Pop is still a relatively new market. It’s Korean pop music but it’s also a Idol system inspired by the workings of Berry Gordy’s Motown. Started in the 1990s inspired by most Black music and Black aesthetics. That’s not an exaggeration. A lot of popular music is derived from Black music. Specifically popular Black American music. Before my exposure to K-Pop my knowledge of Asian pop music was mostly J-Pop as it was strangely accessible to me in my early childhood. My first experience being Crystal Kay, a Japanese pop artist with Black and Korean ancestry.
J-Pop and K-Pop are two different worlds. Anyway when it comes to K-Pop there are different generations. Kind of like how music has eras. It is to be believed that the second gen of Kpop started around 2002 or 2003. I came in towards the end in 2008. A lot of fans can’t really agree on where these generations start or end.
What attracted me to K-Pop was that it initially reminded me of a lot of the Black music I was listening to at the time but the packaging reminded me of all the hyper commercial pop groups I grew up with and loved. Like Backstreet Boys, N’Sync, O’Town and etc. A piece of my childhood lost in the culture of what was popular at the time in American pop music. Here it was in K-Pop. 5 men singing dramatically about a girl and chasing her through the streets only to perform a choreographed dance for their personal audience of one. The girl. It was nostalgic and fun.
I was apprehensive because I thought this was some nerd shit. I saw the pictures in the binders of the girls I went to school with and was confused as to why they cared so much? But then I started to care. My engagement with K-Pop for a longtime was mostly singles and the occasional performance stage. It wouldn’t be until 2012 0r 2013 when I started downloading albums from the various K-Pop sites where I started diving any deeper. My music taste is incredibly varied but for a long time I’d have 2NE1, Hyuna, SHINee and Miss A on repeat.The music was so infectious. Occasionally I see some cultural appropriation and be like “oh okay, I’m just going to ignore this.” My engagement with K-Pop online was mostly involuntary on Tumblr. When people could post songs I’d hear songs and be like “hmm that sounds good maybe I’ll check this out later.” For the most part K-Pop for me was a solo experience up until 2018.
[Kim Lip singing “Eclipse”]
Host: Me and my best friend discovered we both fancied K-pop and did so from a distance. Not really engaging with fandom culture. Just music video and some show performances. When I’d discover a new group I’d send music videos constantly to the group chat. Everyone was often dismissive until Loona happened. And from there we spiraled into Kpop. Around 2018 towards the end we discovered that we liked BTS and so we decided to get K-Pop Twitter accounts. What a fucking mistake that was. Criticisms that would usually be things people agreed upon over on the Black side of Twitter were things that caused war zones on K-Pop twitter. I remember discussing my experience with racism in the fandom of BTS’ and was met with nothing but racial violence from the fandom. So much that I had to go private on that account. It was so weird to me because while I had experienced anti-blackness online, I had never experienced in a way that was so constant. So vile and so vicious. There was no voice to have among a violent majority. The oddest thing to me was that a lot of Black K-Pop fans were also incredibly anti-Black in defense of idols they loved. Blackness discarded for non-Black pop singers making bastardized versions of Black music and while some of it hit, it could never come close to the inspiration. Even then I knew my time with K-Pop was up because I knew that if this is the “community” that I’m meant to enjoy these things with then fuck K-Pop and fuck the community of it all but I didn’t listen to myself. I’d been a fan since I was in high school and thought maybe I could give it another try. The cultural appropriation and the racism from K-pop idols and their fans was not going to deter me from a bop. Because in all honesty no matter where I could turn for entertainment I’d get that everywhere. So I tried to rationalize. Maybe it’ll get better.
[BTS’ “Dionysus” Live plays in background.]
Host: In 2019 a friend invited me to BTS’ Speak Yourself tour. While there was not much fan experience as I expected from a fandom that appears to be united online I had a fun time. It was my first K-Pop concert and it was an entertaining experience. Great choreography, lights and all that. But something about that experience left me a bit empty. Me and my friend did not listen to BTS for a long time afterward because there’s nothing like experiencing music in a stadium. After that we just kind of started going to concerts back to back. Hi touch events, merch on top of merch. I currently have a closet full of K-Pop albums. Some signed. Some limited editions. K-Pop was bright, colorful and fun. It was a package of escapism. Not that I looked to K-Pop for escapism but as a Black queer fat disabled person living in America, you have a lot of shit to deal with and K-Pop is a great distraction when you need it. The expensive videos. The idol personas. A lot of K-Pop is product first like it was in my childhood for teen pop and the music last being an afterthought.
I got to see just one more K-Pop concert just before America pretended to close down due to the ongoing pandemic we’re dealing with. It was one of the best nights ever. K-Pop was still very much enjoyable despite the daily racial violence I’d deal with online from K-Pop fandoms.
Then sometime, over a 3 month span in my time on the K-Pop side of Twitter things got very sinister. Suddenly people were getting doxxed left and right. Some get mere threats of being doxxed. I got threatend with it. And the reason it happened was simply because those fans that were getting doxxed were Black and said something unfavorable about someone’s favorite K-Pop idol. That was when I knew this K-Pop thing wasn’t for me anymore. Because you had people online pretending it wasn’t happening or trying to rationalize why it was happening. It didn’t make any sense to me that K-Pop could be held so close that people forget their humanity to inflict violence on behalf of personas they only knew at face value. You had non-Black fans and Black fans losing their minds over idols to commit essentially crimes online for the sake of scaring Black fans they didn’t like. All while this was happening K-Pop groups were releasing their PR Black Lives Matter statements and journalists who specialized in writing K-Pop articles were out here doing just as much damage as the fans. Suddenly K-Pop fans were lauded as activists when in reality they were contributing to the racial violence Black people face. But I guess anything is great PR when it’s a reflection of an idol group. These journalists knew what was happening and a lot of them frankly didn’t care. Nor did their publishers because who’s going to click on an article about the irony of K-Pop fandoms tweeting hashtag BLM while in the same breath tweeting lynching jokes and calling me a nigger? The BLM movement was bastardized and colonized by so many people but that’s a conversation for another day.
K-Pop to me has lost it’s shiny gloss of magic. It’s no longer something that is fun. Do I enjoy K-Pop from time to time? Yes. But dealing with the anti-Blackness from Idols, labels and fandoms peels away and tarnishes any light it once had for me. It’s simply just another genre of music that I sometimes agree with but mostly not.
[Stay C’s “So Bad plays.]
Host: However, before I end this episode I want to briefly touch on some topics dealing with K-Pop and K-Pop fandoms when it comes to anti-Blackness.
Often when an idol does something racist, it is yelled about for two minutes and people move on which is understandable. You can’t be mad all the time. But there’s no expiration date on people’s misfortunes in racism. No matter if there’s an apology or not. It’s up to the individual how they navigate this. For example, I was once in a space with a lot of people and we were talking about K-Pop. Mind you everyone in this space was Black. And we were talking about a certain group and one of the speakers brings up why they don’t listen to them and their points were valid. It’s because they can’t tolerate the cultural appropriation and racism said group had done and everyone in that space jumped down this person’s throat because they simply couldn’t handle someone being critical of an idol they love. It was a very weird experience. That opened my eyes that no matter whoever you got close to in a community of Black K-Pop fans you can’t really trust anyone in these spaces because while Blackness is a common denominator it is not something that unifies everyone. In the coming months I’d later see these same people rejoice in the bullying of this person on the platform.
Now this isn’t a call out but it was eye-opening and it turned me a little sour from creating spaces to enjoy K-Pop with fellow Black K-Pop fans. Discourse isn’t welcomed unless it’s discourse people want to talk about and often people screaming into echo chambers that create toxic spaces. I’ll admit to being one of those people who have created toxic spaces for conversations that didn’t need to happen. It’s the reason why I no longer engage with these spaces.
I’d like to also break the public myth that there is such thing as a good K-Pop fandom. That doesn’t exist. All of them are racist. All of them. The biggest ones to the smallest ones because anti-Blackness doesn’t exist in a vacuum. No amount of quote on quote “K-Pop activism” can change that.
Trigger Warning before I go into this rant. So if you’d like to skip a little ahead I wouldn’t be offended. I’ll give you a few seconds.
Fans will excuse sexual abuse, racism, cultural appropriation, racial violence, skrrt skrrt on niggas, use a non apology as an apology while pretending to care about these issues. And this isn’t limited to K-Pop. To be quite honest this is standom in general. I believe that no one should stan anyone. You’re dedicating your life to buying and streaming all for the success of someone else and what does it get you in the end?
A new picture?
I could go into the parasocial relationships people have with celebrity but this episode isn’t meant to be a long one. Just a short one to hold you all over until my most important episode.
Now while I’ve said a lot of negative things about being a Black K-Pop fan, I would never discourage someone from looking into it and seeing what sticks for them. K-Pop can be catchy. There are a lot of bops. Some of them are problematic but there are a lot of great pop tunes. I’d just caution people about the online aspect of. Also all K-Pop idols are anti-Black until proven otherwise.
[more from Miles Jai’s 5 Stages of Being A K-Pop Fan}
Host: If you would like to add to the conversation you can reach me @planetgroovepod on Twitter and Instagram. In the podcast description I’ll also have the transcript for this episode. Thank you for listening to Planet Groove and hopefully you’ve enjoyed the time you’ve spent with me. I’ll see you next time for yet another episode of Planet Grove: a Black and Queer curation. Be blessed.
