E.via (artist of the year, 2010)
Jun. 12th, 2011 11:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
koganbotFor the many people* who ask me "Why Korea?" my answer is love. Yes, and there are plenty of other answers too, one being that people who know more than I do come to my lj and talk to me about K-pop, providing sociability and mindwork, and another being that K-pop is creating a hip-hop, r&b, dance-pop amalgam far better than the Billboard Hot 100's, and so on and so forth. But there's always got to be love. With rock there was Jagger**, with glitter the Dolls, with punk the Stooges, with disco Donna, with hip-hop Spoonie Gee, with freestyle Debbie Deb (both the real Debbie Deb and the imposter), with hair-metal Axl, with teenpop Ashlee, etc.***
In this instance****, though, especially given the cultural distance, my not knowing Korea or Korean, I really can't say what's going on; this has inspired me to actually read some books about Korea. Not that what I learn will tell me what I want to know here, which is whether the E.via I've fallen in love with, whom I basically constructed in my mind out of scraps and song bits*****, has anything to do with any kind of reality. Did the Jagger? Pretty much everyone on my love list above has got some Jagger in her or him, or has me projecting the Jagger, anyway, Jagger Jagger burning bright, a combination of Jagger and Miss Lonely, my believing that the world is continually picking up the baton that the Stones and Dylan dropped, and dropping and picking up again.
E.via is from outside the idol factories, a rapper w/ supposedly salacious lyrics (though translations seem pretty tame to me) trying to break out of the underground; she's gonna out-cute the pop cutie-pies while still doing speed-rap and sex; meanwhile, my eyes or ears or my imagination tell me that her attitude towards cute is like Ray Davies' towards sunny afternoons or Mick Jagger's towards hearts of stone: she doesn't believe in it but she'll do it better than you or anybody else, just to show you. That's who I want her to be, though Sabina thinks E.via is just another ambitious pop girl who hasn't yet made it big, equivalent to someone like Christina Milian in the U.S.
In the video for "Hey!," E.via's first single, E.via comes on in schoolgirl dress, running parodies of little idol-girl-pop poses in quick succession; then her homies enter, sneering, and she goes into the tough rap proper, none of this pop nonsense.
But then for her next single, "Shake!" (see up top), here she is again, cute as a button, yelling instructions through a megaphone to gyrating women****** while the camera ogles their rear-ends and a disembodied butt logo bounces upscreen and down like the bouncing ball on "Name That Tune." (Korean TV refused to play the video.) I see this as impishly sarcastic, E.via critiquing her sexiness while having it too. But to put this in perspective, idol group Miss A use a pair of disembodied legs (shape of an A) in hose and heels as their logo, straightforward, no sarcasm or scare quotes that I can detect. And HyunA of 4minute recently did a spread-leg to the floor pµssy-pump dance in introducing "Mirror Mirror" to the viewing public, which caused an Internet uproar since after all children watch TV, and the network told the group don't do that on our show anymore or else we won't let you return. So maybe E.via is just another pop girl vying for attention in the game of shock and withdraw and shock again in a country that's gone from rural to urban and from agricultural to high-tech juggernaut in 10 seconds. But in E.via I'm imagining a critical eye, a Jagger mind, a quick hand to yank the rug and make us unsure of our footing.
Don't know the K-pop relation to J-pop; the two don't sound similar, to my uneducated ears. J-pop is fractured power pop rather than K-pop's athletic r&b. But surely "Pick Up! U!" is meant as a Japan reference and is to be heard also as "Pikachu."
*Well, no one's actually asked, but if they had, this'd be how I'd have responded.
**So hatred and fear mixed in with the love.
***The love of course is never limited to the performer. It's also about the world, the reflection, the brawl, people grasping the music with minds and hands. One of my great YouTube moments last year was discovering a Chilean teenager teaching herself to rap fast in Korean to the salsa-inflected "Shake!" and then watching her in her next video get with her girlfriends and dance and shake and rap onstage to it, turbocharging her way through.
****As for the year 2010, up there in parentheses, I meant to finish posting my year-end wrap-ups by mid-January, but you know how that goes. My goal now is to finish them by July 1.
*****Counting "Hey!" and "Oppa, Can I Do It" as the same song, she's basically got three significant songs, though with scads of remixes, alternate versions, guest artist A here, B and C there, D, E, F, G etc., instrumental versions, great dreamy little filler bits (like the one at the start of the "Hey!" vid), skits, and the usual second-rate ballad, plus a couple other actual pretty good songs buried in there, 36 tracks in all on four EPs.
******Who seem to have been filmed dancing to a different song altogether.
In this instance****, though, especially given the cultural distance, my not knowing Korea or Korean, I really can't say what's going on; this has inspired me to actually read some books about Korea. Not that what I learn will tell me what I want to know here, which is whether the E.via I've fallen in love with, whom I basically constructed in my mind out of scraps and song bits*****, has anything to do with any kind of reality. Did the Jagger? Pretty much everyone on my love list above has got some Jagger in her or him, or has me projecting the Jagger, anyway, Jagger Jagger burning bright, a combination of Jagger and Miss Lonely, my believing that the world is continually picking up the baton that the Stones and Dylan dropped, and dropping and picking up again.
E.via is from outside the idol factories, a rapper w/ supposedly salacious lyrics (though translations seem pretty tame to me) trying to break out of the underground; she's gonna out-cute the pop cutie-pies while still doing speed-rap and sex; meanwhile, my eyes or ears or my imagination tell me that her attitude towards cute is like Ray Davies' towards sunny afternoons or Mick Jagger's towards hearts of stone: she doesn't believe in it but she'll do it better than you or anybody else, just to show you. That's who I want her to be, though Sabina thinks E.via is just another ambitious pop girl who hasn't yet made it big, equivalent to someone like Christina Milian in the U.S.
In the video for "Hey!," E.via's first single, E.via comes on in schoolgirl dress, running parodies of little idol-girl-pop poses in quick succession; then her homies enter, sneering, and she goes into the tough rap proper, none of this pop nonsense.
But then for her next single, "Shake!" (see up top), here she is again, cute as a button, yelling instructions through a megaphone to gyrating women****** while the camera ogles their rear-ends and a disembodied butt logo bounces upscreen and down like the bouncing ball on "Name That Tune." (Korean TV refused to play the video.) I see this as impishly sarcastic, E.via critiquing her sexiness while having it too. But to put this in perspective, idol group Miss A use a pair of disembodied legs (shape of an A) in hose and heels as their logo, straightforward, no sarcasm or scare quotes that I can detect. And HyunA of 4minute recently did a spread-leg to the floor pµssy-pump dance in introducing "Mirror Mirror" to the viewing public, which caused an Internet uproar since after all children watch TV, and the network told the group don't do that on our show anymore or else we won't let you return. So maybe E.via is just another pop girl vying for attention in the game of shock and withdraw and shock again in a country that's gone from rural to urban and from agricultural to high-tech juggernaut in 10 seconds. But in E.via I'm imagining a critical eye, a Jagger mind, a quick hand to yank the rug and make us unsure of our footing.
Don't know the K-pop relation to J-pop; the two don't sound similar, to my uneducated ears. J-pop is fractured power pop rather than K-pop's athletic r&b. But surely "Pick Up! U!" is meant as a Japan reference and is to be heard also as "Pikachu."
*Well, no one's actually asked, but if they had, this'd be how I'd have responded.
**So hatred and fear mixed in with the love.
***The love of course is never limited to the performer. It's also about the world, the reflection, the brawl, people grasping the music with minds and hands. One of my great YouTube moments last year was discovering a Chilean teenager teaching herself to rap fast in Korean to the salsa-inflected "Shake!" and then watching her in her next video get with her girlfriends and dance and shake and rap onstage to it, turbocharging her way through.
****As for the year 2010, up there in parentheses, I meant to finish posting my year-end wrap-ups by mid-January, but you know how that goes. My goal now is to finish them by July 1.
*****Counting "Hey!" and "Oppa, Can I Do It" as the same song, she's basically got three significant songs, though with scads of remixes, alternate versions, guest artist A here, B and C there, D, E, F, G etc., instrumental versions, great dreamy little filler bits (like the one at the start of the "Hey!" vid), skits, and the usual second-rate ballad, plus a couple other actual pretty good songs buried in there, 36 tracks in all on four EPs.
******Who seem to have been filmed dancing to a different song altogether.
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no subject
Date: 2011-06-15 04:20 am (UTC)Anyway, I'm still parsing some K-pop recently delivered unto me and have thoughts about it, especially now that I've been thinking a bit about how late 90's/early 00's teenpop was very much in conversation with hip-hop in rhythm and dare I say swagger in ways I feel like I once knew and then forgot, then remembered then forgot again and now re-remembered (or something).
But listening to some of the K-pop stuff, I'm struck by how it feels very much of this time, but as though it followed through a parallel history from the late-90's, where the promise that you could have your swagger and your sweetness and that these two things were not only incompatible but actively warped together in strange and beautiful ways...that seemed very much alive in 90's/early-00's pop and was (maybe?) cut down a bit by sober futurism with a different sense of humor (but a sense of humor nonetheless). I find much recent hip-hop to be oddly humorless given how fucking stupid (not a criticism per se) it is.
Anyway, the connotations I get biggest are something like: "what if Celine Dion and crunk had the same level of respect to a musician trying to make it in 2011?" But I haven't listened enough yet to articulate why this little idea keeps popping in my head.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-15 04:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-15 04:49 am (UTC)Btw, the performer I'm definitely getting a Cassie feeling from these days is Dev; she's bringing a Cassie feel to Ke$ha party skank vibe. (I could imagine Lex blowing a gasket if he were to read that sentence. But my guess is that Lex'll be down with Dev, and get what I mean by the Cassie comparison: a massively sexy and slightly imperious sense of absence in both of them, despite Dev's club-urchin aura.)
no subject
Date: 2011-06-16 11:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-16 12:59 pm (UTC)She tends to get classified as "rap," and I'm assuming (perhaps incorrectly) that commercial success as a rap solo artist doesn't follow the trainee route. (As opposed to being a rapper in a girl group or boyband.)
Btw, to switch the subject to IU, my impression of IU - and this is an impression I've gotten from you - is that though she's on a major she's also taken her fate into her own hands, maybe even with the encouragement of her label. That is, she's such a broad talent that the label isn't set on locking her into a particular image or style, since they're getting a better payoff by trying a whole lot of the things she wants to try. I'm saying all this in ignorance of the actual situation: I'm just assuming that her live-girl-with-guitar efforts a couple of years ago superseded her actual record releases and videos at that time in establishing who she is and what she's capable of.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-16 01:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-16 02:21 pm (UTC)I don't know that trainee-ing for a studio is the only route to non-balladry stardom*, but it's close. This is one of the things I've bemoaned about k-pop - the lack of different artist types among the real big commercial stars. Not about the sounds and the music and the ideas, but where they come from.
I've brought up some k-pop songwriter types lately and my excitement for their rise is not so much a longing for acoustic jamming as seeing different narratives leading to stardom. Many of them are a lot more popular than e.via. http://www.gaonchart.co.kr/main/section/search/list.gaon?Search_str=%EC%9D%B4%EB%B9%84%EC%95%84&x=0&y=0
* Indie band 10cm's "Americano" is one of the bigger hits of 2011, so other kinds of success stories exist, but I'm talking pop STAR, doing the pop tv shows, getting that fan base.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-16 04:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-16 05:24 pm (UTC)I don't know much about the labels and organization of the hip-hop scene. I just listen to the things that show up on my subscriptions, mainly. Many female mcs who never get on music shows like e.via does.
Supreme Team are pretty huge, regular supply of hits. MC Mong has some of the biggest #1 streaks of the past few years, his is more novelty, fun time rap (see "Circus").
There's LeeSSang, whose member Gary featured on Lee Hyori's 'Swing'.
Tiger JK's African American/Korean wife Tasha is one of the bigger female names http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgK9TzVq7b4#t=06m12s
I guess this does show that as hip-hop artist you have other ways to the top. Don't think any of these started out as idol trainees, but I don't know for sure. But JYP's got san-E and YG's got PSY, both hip-hop and not idols. PSY started out elsewhere but found a home and a huge hit with YG
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We've talked about DJ DOC. They created a bit of a row in the midst of the "I'm this kind of person" promotion for attacking the tv shows only showcasing pop idols.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-16 05:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-16 06:50 pm (UTC)Physical album sales from LOEN Entertainment, SM Entertainment, Sony Music Korea, Warner Music Korea, Universal Music, and Mnet Media are synthesized in the album chart. All music sales except physical sales is estimated by digital chart. The digital chart is the combination of the mobile chart and the online chart. The mobile chart estimates the best selling ringtones, while the online chart calculates downloads and bgm sales as well as streaming services. All charts are offered monthly and weekly. [emphasis added]
It's that first sentence that jumped out at me as making the chart particularly untrustworthy. I can't tell if the companies are doing the sales reporting themselves; but otherwise, why list them like that? Not that physical sales are dominant anymore, or albums, but how can you be trustworthy if you're getting your figures from the labels, not the retailers. Or course, retailers can accept payola and lie too, which is why Billboard started using Soundscan in the U.S. And any system can be gamed, and it's the big guys who are likely to win the gaming. My guess is that in several years Gaon will be closer to genuinely reliable. Of course illegal downloads totally skew the picture anyway, and that's not going to change; though maybe there's a reasonable way to estimate which genres get illegally downloaded more than others, and which sales patterns have stronger correlations to illegal downloads than others do. But it'll never really be scientifically possible to gauge a song's popularity with complete numerical accuracy.
Chuck Eddy
Date: 2011-06-17 05:17 pm (UTC)From global pieces that I edited when I worked at Billboard, I got the idea that that's how music sales are tallied in many, many countries around the world -- So, where physical product is concerned, what you're really seeing are shipments, not actual sales, and you're trusting that the shipment numbers record companies give you are reliable, when obviously the labels would have good reasons to artificially boost them. I don't know off hand whether Korea, specifically, adds up numbers that way, but I wouldn't be surprised. And if they do, they are hardly alone -- SoundScan's use in the U.S. is actually the exception to the rule.
Re: Chuck Eddy
Date: 2011-06-17 05:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-21 10:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-19 04:46 pm (UTC)This entry really resonated with me, and I like the simple way you describe the appeal of K-pop. It's very similar to how I feel about K-pop, and since discovering it a few months ago, it's all I've been listening to. There have not been a lot of musical discoveries as monumental for me as K-pop, and I've been enjoying going through your writing on it (and look forward to following your writing on it in the future).
I've tried to write about it's appeal for me, as well, including making a mix that I've been sharing with people:
http://occupiedterritories.tumblr.com/post/16010722069/pop-utopianism-a-manifesto-we-need-to-talk-about
The thing I've noticed, and that I feel, about K-pop is precisely this love that you describe, which makes people want so badly for others to share their enjoyment or for the artists to succeed and get their music heard. I think that's rare in pop music today (at least, at such a high level), but it's really heartening and special.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-23 12:54 am (UTC)I am puzzled as to why you think I describe the appeal of K-pop in a simple way:
she's gonna out-cute the pop cutie-pies while still doing speed-rap and sex; meanwhile, my eyes or ears or my imagination tell me that her attitude towards cute is like Ray Davies' towards sunny afternoons or Mick Jagger's towards hearts of stone: she doesn't believe in it but she'll do it better than you or anybody else, just to show you.
That seems pretty nonsimple me, esp. given that I'm comparing her to Mick Jagger, a complex, self-reflexive, and contrary star who terrorized my adolescence. (And loving stars who potentially terrorize you isn't simple either.)
Here are several links you might be interested in:
Rolling K-pop (though this seems to have hit a dead spot since November)
http://arbitrary-greay.livejournal.com (this person posts here a lot)
http://snsd-ffa.livejournal.com (a livejournal community, stands for snsd free for all)
Thanks again for showing up.
Oh, by the way, I did a brief search on you a couple days ago and discovered that the trailer that accompanies your review of Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is the wrong one (is for the Swedish flick, not the Fincher).
no subject
Date: 2012-01-23 10:00 pm (UTC)Perhaps "simple" is the wrong choice of words. I liked your description because it articulates the sense I feel that pop music is largely about a leap of faith, so to speak. You're on the outside and you don't understand or see an artist's appeal, and then suddenly, something clicks and you're on the inside. It's about love, as you say, and it works in the same interpersonal way as falling in love with a person.
And it works in another way that's interpersonal too: sometimes just by knowing someone and getting a good sense of their aesthetics, they rub off on you. I know that's happened with me, for instance, with my girlfriend of five years. She got me into The Carpenters before I had ever really thought about them, but now I see, through her and somewhat on my own now too, that they were a lot darker and more melancholy than I had thought. (Todd Haynes' Karen Carpenter biopic helped with that too.) I feel like I haven't just started liking them because of greater exposure; it's more like I'm hearing them with someone else's ears. (I think the same thing happens with movies sometimes too, which is why seeing a movie in a group can affect the way you see it.)
I think my girlfriend also primed me to appreciate K-pop because I grew to appreciate aegyo through her before I even knew the word or concept (she is Asian, but Cambodian, not Korean). And it seems that, for many, being nauseated by K-pop's potential cuteness is a big stumbling block. But I see it not just as a mere trait ("cute" versus not "cute"); it's really like a whole world in which what is for Americans a rather trite and shallow concept ("cuteness") takes on a whole new dimension. But it also doesn't just seem a translation of this concept (aegyo) into pop music; there's something more going on, it seems. (And I'll add, I appreciate your writing on K-pop because you take these things "seriously" when many reflexively dismiss these kinds of things.)
So maybe what I'm trying to say is that there's a simplicity to your first sentence in the entry above, but maybe the better word would be "elegance," in that "love" comprises so much in a single word. But yes, I agree that once you get beyond that initial sparking of one's love, it opens up a whole field of complex questions. For instance, I've enjoyed your thoughts on HyunA, especially when you discuss her screaming at the chicken (great clip). I like the idea of HyunA as this extremely adept performer of "sexiness," and there's nothing like a clip of her acting resolutely "non-sexy" to show so well the way these personas are all very "fake" (in the sense that they are performances) and yet equally "real" (because they work). For me, I think that's a good part of pop's essence, that kind of "both/and" transcendence and gleeful smearing of contradictions.
But I agree that there is a rich complexity to K-pop of which I am, months later, still only scratching the surface. I don't think I've yet quite explained why it works for me so well when other similar forms of pop music (while still very good) have not gotten me this interested in exploring all these questions. I mean, I can't remember the last time I was so interested in the extra-musical life of pop idols, including watching their TV shows.
Anyways, thanks for the links. I'll definitely check them out, and I'll be reading your blog here as well.
(Re: Dragon Tattoo, I'm not sure why that is. I'm not in charge of putting up the videos, so I'll check with my editor. Thanks for pointing it out.)
Banging on a peeve
Date: 2012-01-26 07:27 pm (UTC)"The Boney Joan Rule"
As for the "real"-versus-"fake" thing: real versus fake, just like real versus imaginary, and true versus false, is a crucial judgment that we make every day, and if we make it poorly we end up dead or homeless or in
the congressa mental institution, whatever our philosophical questions are about those terms. You're right that we need to unpack "authenticity," wrong that we can possibly shelve it. If you're interested, and have the time (it's thousands of words), here's what I consider my best take on the subject of authenticity, though the word "authenticity" doesn't appear even once. ("Real," meaning "authentic," shows up twice, once in the statement, which I absolutely mean, "if you're a real punk like the Stooges and the Sex Pistols, you want fans to resist, to hit back," and once in scare quotes where I say — incorrectly, by the way, my flimsy excuse being that I was going only on the basis of "My Name Is" — that Eminem's voice is "a slow talk, unlike 'real' rap not heavily into rhythm and rhyme.")"Death Rock 2000"
My Cliff Notes summary would be that what we do doesn't count as authentic unless it costs us something, so authenticity is tied to defiance of authority. This feeling saturates the culture, and it's not going to go away. It saturates "pop" as much as it saturates "rock" (not to mention "jazz," "hip-hop," and so forth). I don't buy into the pop versus rockism thing (if you're game for one more link, here's a much shorter version of my not buying into the pop versus rockism thing: "it makes a lot of sense that someone who likes Dylan and Tori would like Ashlee"). Basically, I think antirockism has been thirty years of posturing bullshit, which doesn't mean I'm a "rockist" but that I think the whole discussion has gone wrong. Well, it's not bullshit if by "antirockism" one means "not being an asshole when writing about Paris Hilton or Ashlee Simpson," but as social analysis and as an attempt to understand human beings it's bullshit. (Caveat: I've never seen the 1981 NME interview with Pete Wylie where Wylie coined the phrase "the race against rockism"; from what I've heard, I'd probably be pretty sympathetic with what Wylie was getting at, which was that rock had become routine and needed to either shake itself up or die. But this is — legitimately — criticizing rock from a rock point of view, since rock's own ideals oppose being routine. And Wylie, if I've got him right, wasn't opposing "authenticity" but rather making the argument that rock was no longer authentic; you could say rock was no longer really rock. Wylie, by the way, wasn't the first to make that point by a long shot. But the people who were making it in the late '60s and early '70s weren't called "antirockists" or "poptimists," they were called punks. OK, I'm banging on a pet peeve now, so I'll let you go.)
Re: Banging on a peeve
Date: 2012-02-01 07:45 pm (UTC)One thing that the authenticity question reminded me of... When I was doing my undergrad work, my focus was on indigenous religions and culture, and this has really shaped how I think about everything now. One anecdote I remember hearing about had to do with a Native American practice of imitating animals as a kind of performance piece to be judged by audiences. For example, a man would imitate a horse, and although we outsiders probably wouldn't be able to get a grip on the criteria for judging the success of any single imitation, the people who watched and did judge these performances certainly had a working understanding of what a really "authentic" imitation of a horse looked like.
A lot of these questions have been in my mind recently, as I've been thinking of writing a quick piece about some of my thoughts on charisma, which is think is a hugely related issue, and how charisma is so interpersonal that it's hard to say much of anything "objectively" about it (which I think is what I'm getting at here).
In the meantime, have you had a chance to listen to the new single from K-pop group Sunny Hill "The Grasshopper Song"? Here's a version with an English translation of the lyrics (which seem relatively crucial here):
Also, in case you haven't seen it yet, SNSD appeared on the Letterman show and then on the Live with Kelly show. Here are the clips:
Re: Banging on a peeve
Date: 2012-02-01 10:29 pm (UTC)I have a sense, not based on any research but just on the sound and presentation, that Sunny Hill didn't come up through the usual idol process. Checking Wikip, I see that they were sponsored or something by Narsha of Brown Eyed Girls. I don't know much about LOEN Entertainment either; I gather that so far it's fundamentally a distributor, not a talent agency; I'm not sure what the story is with an act signing directly with LOEN rather than coming through a label/agency. Wikip only lists five, with IU the massive success.
Fascinated by the fact that Tiffany seemed to be exaggerating a Korean accent at the start of the interview with Kelly — though maybe I'm wrong about that. From the little I've heard her speaking English on YouTube, her regular accent in English does seem a bit Asian. I hadn't thought of Asian Americans born and raised in North America as likely to have any Asian in their English, any more than my Dad had any Yiddish or Russian in his; but looking up Diamond Bar, California in Wikip, I see that its demographics are 50 percent Asian and 20 percent Hispanic. Maybe there's a Diamond Bar accent, just as there probably used to be a West Chicago accent. So maybe it's just that Tiffany's American accent differs from my American accent more than, say, Jesssica's does. Cheech Marin was born in Los Angeles but he nonetheless has a Mexican American accent (which he plays up as part of his act). Of course, "accent" is a loaded term.
Tiffany's vastly more comfortable talking to the camera than Jessica is.
Re: Banging on a peeve
Date: 2012-02-02 04:23 pm (UTC)And it works in another way that's interpersonal too:
iacus at snsd_ffa linked me to this.
I wonder if the crowdsourcing trend that the Rock Critic Roundtable talked about is more effective in terms of numbers (more people have listened to/recommended this) or from that interpersonal angle.(this person I trust has recommended this) Because I do have friends where I know that we have different tastes, so that when they like something it may sometimes have the opposite effect on my anticipation. Then again, just recommendations are different from exposure.
Regarding aegyo: there is indeed something more going on. Perhaps it's just my love of semantics, but I associate "aegyo" with the Japanese term "burikko", that is, unnatural cutesiness. I also find a difference between cuteness and cutesiness, in that the former is not necessarily intentional and the latter is.
Whenever someone is asked to do aegyo on TV shows, the majority of the scenarios performed involve the girl attempting to get the guy to do/buy something for her by acting more cutesy than normal.
I was only able to enjoy the overwhelming because 1) enough genuine cuteness was mixed in to endear me to them,(like Hyuna screaming at chickens) and 2) because I became a smark, and some girls play up to that. I love the aegyo when it's clear that the girl doing it herself is kind of treating it like a satire on aegyo. SNSD's Sooyoung was notorious for this, and Sunny went from doing regular aegyo displays(but still always always the manipulation of guys) to "aegyo that calls for a punch", taking the gimmick from Sooyoung's example. No coincidence that these two are my favorites.
But yes, in general cuteness is seen as something to be outgrown in America. However, artists like Nicki and Katy, who have acknowldged the asian influence, are starting to phase cuteness back in as a source of quirky humor, and is it any wonder that my generation, bombarded with anime during our childhood years, has also been the one to embrace the newest "My Little Pony" series and shake off that "cute is childish!" stigma?
Authenticity with regards to Jpop, although I feel like cuteness culture does apply to the whole of contemporary urban East Asia.
In some ways this article is the ideal answer to those complaints about pop manufacturing, and somewhat goes back to that matter of being a smark: we can have our "fake" and eat "real" too, because in Apop they're all just facets in the Apop idol's image, and not really in conflict.
Re: Banging on a peeve
Date: 2012-02-02 05:51 pm (UTC)This article also works well with the pleasure portions.
Would you mind expanding on your definition of "admittedly despicable “famous for being famous” types?" It seems odd that America's celebrity culture has more of these compared to the celebrity-based television of old, still largely in place in Asia, where there is a "geinou"(talent) celebrity description wherein their job is to appear on talk shows and such and be amusing, not technically being a singer or actor or even comedian in official capacity, although with enough popularity they may branch out into those areas of pop culture.(Japanese game shows are often crazy not for the sake of being crazy, but because said geinou know how to make the best reactions to such craziness, which is what the audience is really looking for. Prizes are inconsequential in such game shows, and are more like over-the-top improvised comedy skits.) Those people are technically "famous for being famous" as well. Or did you more mean "famous for being infamous?"
Current Kpop is musically based on European music trends, although "black forms of music and rhythms" are usually found in the album tracks and are making their way into the promoted singles of some groups with that image.
One note about the praise of fandom you have in your manifesto: the threat fandom does pose to pop music is in that fandom for much of Apop is not tied to the music, but the idol, which has allowed music quality to become a lower priority for those with enough popularity.(Especially when music pays the least dividends compared to, say, endorsements) The same can be said for production quality in general, as fanclubs will do everything to keep their biases on top, regardless of the products being pushed on them by the management. Thus some lament the state of their music markets as being idol saturated, without variety, and other artists not having a chance at the spotlight because the idols so expertly feed our pleasure drives. There is that element of "Sure, [[artist]] has better music, but I gotta support [[idol]] so I'll buy [[idol]]'s CD instead!" Luckily, the competition between pop music and itself is usually enough to produce great music on its own.
How would you compare Gaga, Bieber, and tween market(Disney and Nickelodeon stars) fandoms to Apop fandom. Or when you speak of the American mocking of fandom, do you refer to how the aforementioned Little Monsters/Beliebers/tweens are looked down on as mindless fangirls?
Re: Banging on a peeve
Date: 2012-02-09 08:08 pm (UTC)Re: Banging on a peeve
Date: 2012-02-09 11:16 pm (UTC)So far I don't get J-pop much at all; but I'm presuming that it's not able to avoid the necessity of keeping it real — a precondition of keeping it real is that you're not born into a role but have to find one, i.e., that you are born into the modern world, a world of choices — but that where it chases real may be somewhat different from where gangsta does.
Re: Banging on a peeve
Date: 2012-02-11 02:27 pm (UTC)Can you please elaborate? Are they settling for too lax an adherence/rejection of their standards?
There's also, of course, the nit-picky response about the difference between "real" authenticity and "the cult" of it, and possibly Ray only criticizing the latter, but splitting hairs about what's "real" and what's not usually goes wrong, as the line between two such abstract things isn't usually so much a line as a gradient, as the debate about pop music itself goes.
Re: Banging on a peeve
Date: 2012-02-11 02:54 pm (UTC)Yeah, either that or they're making lazy or bad choices as to what standards to adhere to in the first place.
As for what Ray's criticizing, you're not making a nitpicky response, that's exactly the distinction Ray is trying to draw. He's not opposed to authenticity per se. But he actually doesn't know what he means by "cult," or "authenticity," really. Whether or not I thought the hardcore punks were real punks (I didn't, and don't) had to do with my standards for punk, not my standards for "authenticity."
[More anon.]
no subject
Date: 2012-04-02 11:33 pm (UTC)