Frank Kogan

Jessica, sorry it's taken me so long to respond, and these first responses of mine probably aren't going to address the meat of what you said, just that little bit that Subdee quoted, the paragraph beginning "I have this theory..." Where you seem to be going with it is that, say, a decision whether or not to boycott 6ix9ine and Rich The Kid, or how to evaluate them if one does write about them, has more to do with how I see myself or you see yourself and how others around us might see us — how we be ourselves — than it has to do with "supporting" or not "supporting" the artist. TSJ's taking their boycott of XXXTentacion into the grave is a tacit acknowledgement of this.

But the notoriety of an R. Kelly or a Seungri distorts the discussion somewhat, in effect puts what they now represent in place of what the music had previously represented and what the social styles surrounding the music represent. That is, in the normal course, people almost never base their liking of a song, or whether they think the song is good or not,* on "What sort of person does this make me, that I like this song?" They might ask that question of themselves once they've figured out that they do like the song, but the liking itself is already in place, comes prior to the question, not after it.** But nonetheless, the songs they like and dislike form the kind of personal and social footprint that would have arisen if they had based their likes and dislikes on "What tastes would be appropriate to the sort of person I am?" And this becomes even more pronounced once we start adding up the various tastes of the people and social groupings an individual hangs out with or near.

It's as if our ideas and perceptions and feelings regarding music do a kind of psychosocial sorting for us (and against us, too, if it keeps sticking us in the same old milieus and reinforces the same old class hierarchies), despite this sorting having nothing to do one way or another with our intentions. And believe me I'm not being crude here. "The sort of person I am," or you are, or anyone is, has a lot of facets: temperament, personality, style, and where one locates oneself — or gets located — on various social maps. Social location is underrated as a factor precisely because, while we may notice when our tastes match or put us at odds with the people around us, we're not liking or disliking something in order to match or oppose them, nor to make sure we identify with one group of them and not another. And anyway it's not as if what you praise and deride in music ever exactly matches what your buddies praise and deride. What a group of people argue about is as defining as what they think they hold in common: one thing they hold in common is what they think is worth arguing about, as opposed to what they let slide or ignore; another is that, in Western culture, anyway, we wouldn't trust anyone who lacked idiosyncrasies.

Even in the case of a Seungri*** — and let's say he weren't a musician, that you're talking about a neighbor or something — your opinion of who he is and what he did isn't based on how that opinion will rearrange your sense of self (which it won't) or your sense of how others will see you (which it also probably won't, but you never know). Not that you can't or shouldn't rethink your opinions and change how you hear the music in response to blowback from others or your own self-questioning. That's what a lot of thinking is: responding to dissonance. But what's changed here isn't you, it's just your perception of Seungri and ilk, and with it your perception of K-pop. And maybe that'll change how you hear K-pop, even down to the level of beats and melodies.

*These are two different things, how much you like something and how good you think it is, though they often run close to one another and I'm not bothering to separate them out in this comment.

**The public display of the liking can be a different story, but let's put that aside for the time being. And once you learn what others think, how you hear the music can change, but again the change won't be in order to align yourselves with others — but that's often the result.

***As you say, it's not just Seungri; but I'm using him as a metonym or synecdoche (not sure of the right term) for all the related and similar scandals.