Frank Kogan

Well, without knowing the particulars of T-ara and IU, I'll say nonetheless that "the real" is an issue that's simply never going to go away, at least not in my lifetime and probably not in the next several centuries. There are a whole bunch of reasons for this persistence, among them being that in the modern economic world that was invented in the "West" over the last 500 years, people - as economic individuals with their labor to sell - have become increasingly mobile both physically and socially ("socially" includes being mobile across classes and cultures), which means that roles and behavior have to keep shifting. The thing is, you can't be everything to everybody; you have to have at least some reliability and consistency or else no one's going to do business with you. Yet you have to remain flexible, not just in regard to what role to play but also in regard to which rules to adopt and which to set aside.

It's precisely because the real keeps shifting that it's an issue that no one can duck. Not to make choices as to what's real is simply not to live your life. Not to have an opinion on which music is real is simply not to care about music. You don't have the option not to choose. Someone can pretend to know better than to care about authenticity, but such indifference is a shuck.

But what's real today can be fake tomorrow. For example, if you locate the real in your willingness to take risks, to stand for something before you know that you'll be rewarded for doing so, then once you've been rewarded, the move can't be repeated. But just finding new risks and opposing authority for the sake of doing so ends up as a shtick, if you've got no good reason for doing something other than that the crowd and the authorities don't like it. And anyway, opposition to authority can be routinized and marketed too.

Back in my fanzine in 1988 Steven Sherman wrote that Springsteen changed his image as much as David Bowie did. But I'd say the difference is that Springsteen always chose plausible images, what he or you could look like in day-to-day life, or could if he'd never been a star. Whereas Bowie always goes for implausible images - not that he won't dress like that offstage, but that there's something about the image that says "This isn't me, it's something I'm putting on to symbolize my desire and my possibilities, even if I'm not really a spaceman or Greta Garbo." But he's not being inauthentic; what he's doing is to claim control over the imagery, to take responsibility for it, to place honesty in the gap between his reach and his grasp and to place reality in the future. I'm assuming, without knowing anything about it, that IU is more or less in the Springsteen role and e.g. Orange Caramel are in the Bowie position (though E.via may be more to the point here, since she simultaneously mocks the cuteness while outcuting all the other cutiepies). Everybody gets to play dressup in videos, but IU is plausibly girlie (whether she wants to be or not) while Orange Caramel are playing little girlie dolls, signaling to us that they're something else. Neither strategy is honest or dishonest in itself, real or fake in itself. You have to judge how well and truly they comport themselves from song to song, from video to video. And I assume that underlying this is a quite fraught relationship with "girliness" and "femininity," and whether or how much those roles are corrupted by the oppression of women or validated by viable gender roles - just as it's fraught in the U.S., though I assume (again without knowing) that in Korea the issues may be intensified by having to have made the shift from a traditionalist bureaucratic culture to a "modern" one in little more than a century and for having been an occupied country for a big hunk of that time.