KPOP: Karl Marx and Simulacrum (I was drunk)

Well, if you read the summary and read the title, you can understand what this will be about. If you did not, I had come up with a framework that analyzes and connects K-pop with Commodity Fetishism (a concept developed by Karl Marx) and something called Baudrillard Simulacrum/Simulacra (a philosophical essay made by philosopher Jean Baudrillard).

For a self introduction (?) I have been kind of roaming around communities like this for a while, and have been reading and roaming around. I go here semi-regularly and have been following some authors from Tumblr. Maybe I plan on writing in the future or do something similar to this, who knows. Anyways why am I writing this and what compelled me to write this? Well, I wanted your guy’s opinion on this matter. Amongst my irl friend group, I am the only one who is this involved in the community, and considering you guys write and read fanfiction of idols, I think you guys are as involved as well. The motivation? I think it was disappointment that drove me to analyze K-pop in a drunken state. That disappointment came from LESSERAFIM’s Celebrate and ILLIT’s It’s Me, which in my opinion (you guys have your own), was pretty bad musically. Then (basing this off my drunken notes) I was also disappointed over AESPA’s Dirty Work (even if its been a while, I think I credit it towards a downwards hill for AESPA’s music considering I was also kind of disappointed with Rich Man). Also, if you notice a lack of boy group representation, that’s because I only listen to girl groups.

Anyways, to start this spiel so to say, It is important to understand the roots of K-pop. Western influence came to Korea around the time the land of Korea was split to North and South, and troops stationed there post-Korean war brought western culture and influence to Korea. American soldiers brought jazz, rock, and R&B to the country, and Koreans were exposed to these genres through military broadcasting stations and clubs near U.S. bases. Through the following decades, as South Korea's economy grew and globalization accelerated, the country had gained increasing access to American pop culture through television, cassettes, and later the internet, absorbing everything from dance-driven pop to hip-hop. Then, around the 1990s, these influences were ready to be mixed and morphed into something different and distinctively Korean. The late 1990s saw entertainment agencies like SM Entertainment formalize the "idol system" and establish the corporate blueprint that would define today’s K-pop. This paragraph more so shows the historical definition of K-pop.

The thing is, I think K-pop’s definition and structure has more or less changed over the decades. Now, It’s evolved past a genre into a vertically integrated music industry. The big companies have created a system which blends itself with the dreams and craft of an idol, and is vertically integrated meaning they are largely in control of what comes in and what comes out (trainee systems, a group’s music, an idols image, etc etc). What my drunk self wrote on a notebook one night was that this system is exploitive. You see, most industries are exploitive, that’s kind of a given. However, for KPOP, the industry here specifically requires the genuine parts of a person (their actual longing, their real tears at a debut stage, their true affection for the fans) and then sells those genuine parts back as a product feature. The dream is not incidental to the machine. The dream is the fuel. The system selects for sincerity, cultivates it, and then monetizes it without ever acknowledging that it belongs to the person it came from. The idol's authenticity is not incidental to the product. It is the product. The system works because the dreams are genuine.

You see, exploitation is quite difficult in this context to properly identify, but that’s because it doesn’t look like exploitation. I mean, the trainee/idol chose this and did everything for the spot. They audition, went through the training, signed contracts, and practiced for half their life because they genuinely wanted to be a KPOP Idol and live the dream. The industry and system identifies this, and works around it. So it doesn't manufacture the dream. It finds people who already have it, and then builds a structure around that dream that converts it into revenue, with some cases showing that they leave the dreamer/idol with a fraction of what they produce (Everglow not being paid for ~6 Years, NJZ). I will go back on this concept again later on.

Anyways, before we get into the Marxist analysis, it’s important to understand Cultural Appropriation. I would define this as when members/the people of a majority group adopt the cultural elements of a minority group in an exploitive or disrespectful way that doesn’t pay respect to its origin, meaning, and history. Appreciation and appropriation are not the same thing. The difference lives in whether the source is acknowledged, whether the originators benefit, and whether the culture is engaged with as something alive and meaningful or simply mined for aesthetic value.

Why is this important? Well, hip-hop, R&B, dancehall, are historically African American sound. There is an argument (that I believe in) that the sonic foundation of K-pop is overwhelmingly Black American in origin. If you listen to a lot of the aforementioned genres, then you also know that they are the products of specific communities, specific histories, specific experiences of navigating race in America. Hip-hop in particular did not emerge from nowhere. It emerged from the South Bronx in the 1970s, from Black and Latino communities with no institutional resources, as a response to economic abandonment and systemic neglect. The genre carries that history in its DNA.

The complication with K-pop is that by the time these sounds reach Seoul, they have usually already passed through one appropriation. I am not saying that K-pop doesn’t have a distinct sonic-identity or that they willingly exploit black communities, but that its important to acknowledge that their distinct and unique sound came from other origins. Often times, it feels like the industry, corporation, and sometimes producers have appropriated a genre by washing down and removing the roots of a culture they appropriate, in this case the sound. By the time it reaches the idol, it is already a washed product. An example of this, would be how artists use Hip-Hop. Sure, rappers use Hip-Hop to show how much money, hoes, and drugs they have, but a lot of them also use it to show the struggles of a community, battling inner demons, etc (just listen to TPAB). K-pop Idols on the other hand, kind of use it more like an aesthetic (darker styling, oversized clothing, chains, grills, AAVE).

To be fair on the idol, this is a problem of the structure. The blame of indirect or not realizing cultural appropriation is distributed and partially displaced. In most cases, I think the Idol is one of the last people in the production chain. By the time a song reaches them, the sonic and cultural decisions have already been made. Holding the idol responsible for the appropriation is like blaming the actor for the script. Furthermore, fans idols genuinely love the culture despite its imperfections. Loving something imperfectly, through a distorted lens, from a distance, is not the same as contempt. The issue is structural ignorance, not malice.

Now, for Karl Marx’s inclusion in this topic. Commodity Fetishism is a concept developed by Karl Marx which is described as when social relations between people appear as relations between things. The immense human labor involved is almost entirely invisible to the consumer. You see a phone and think of its features and brand, but ignore/don’t acknowledge the worker who made it. Commodities seem to possess value inherently, as if their worth is a natural, inevitable attribute rather than the result of human work.

I think you can kinda connect some dots now. For K-pop songs, we as the consumer receive a product that appears to have generated itself. The sound seems to simply exist, to belong naturally to the genre, to be just what K-pop sounds like now. The Black American communities who built that sound over decades, through specific historical conditions of racism and economic exclusion, are as invisible in the final product as the factory worker is invisible in the finished phone. The culture has been converted into a commodity, and the commodity has severed its relationship with the people who made it. This is cultural appropriation and commodity fetishism operating as the same mechanism.

Despite this, I think there are existing exceptions to this analysis. The clearest example (in my opinion) is NMIXX. NMIXX’s sound is something they call MIXXPOP, and instead of choosing what to perform when, they use genres as ingredients to create a distinct experimental sound that does well in differentiating themselves in an otherwise saturated ecosystem. It is a sustained, identifiable artistic approach that fuses boom bap, pop-rock, musical theater, and electronic music not as a concept switch between eras but as a consistent philosophy across their entire discography. I am not saying NMIXX is the only good sounding group also, if that’s somehow a conclusion you arrived at, I love a lot of K-pop even through these cultural flaws, and a lot of songs are sonically great despite everything.

Now, this is where it gets a bit tricky, and its something I agree with and disagree with simultaneously. Most commodities hide their labor. K-pop hides its labor while simultaneously selling the illusion of no labor at all. The entire apparatus exists to manufacture this feeling: the reality shows that appear unscripted, the Weverse posts at midnight that feel like a private message, the vlogs that look like the idol just picked up a camera, the fan cafe entries written in an intimate register that suggests confession rather than content production. There is an argument to say that all of it is designed to make the fan feel they are bypassing the industry and accessing the real person behind the idol. I am not saying we are getting a fake personality or version of the idol, but the industry has blurred the lines between the idol and the person.

This is commodity fetishism at its most refined, because the commodity being sold is authenticity itself. Not music, not performance, not even the idol's image. The product is the sensation of realness. And the labor being concealed is not just the trainee years and the debt contracts and the dating bans, but it is the emotional labor of performing genuine spontaneity, day after day, for millions of people simultaneously, within a system and culture that owns the performance and monetizes every instance of it. The idol appears to simply be themselves. The apparatus that produces that appearance is almost entirely invisible.

See, what makes K-pop interesting under Marxist lens is that fans like us are often aware of it all. We know the idol is managed (I mean, there’s so much fics where the reader is the Manager), we know the content is produced (producer-nim!), and we know the scarcity is engineered (photocard distribution, limited fan-meet slots). I don’t think we are a fandom of naive consumers, but despite all of this, the fetish holds anyway.

This is where Marx’s original framework fails. Transparency would be and should be the cure and antidote towards commodity fetishism, K-pop suggests it isn't. The fan who knows exactly how the photocard scarcity was engineered still wants the photocard. The fan who understands that the parasocial intimacy is a product feature still feels it as intimacy. The knowledge and the feeling exist simultaneously without canceling each other out, because the industry understands that the illusion doesn’t need to hide anymore, but it just needs to be better than the alternative.

To defend the idol, under Marxist lens, they would be the labor, not the capitalist. Their image, time, relationships, and identity are packaged and sold. They are subject to commodity fetishism themselves, turned into a product for consumption. When they try to break free from this system, they become victims of it. For example: NewJeans (MINJIII 😭😭😭).

Anyways, now to the other topic, Simulacrum. Philosopher Jean Baudrillard described a concept within his essay Simulacra and Simulation (1981) where the fourth and final stage of an image/content, is where representation has completely detached from reality to become “pure simulacrum”. In this stage, images, signs, models don’t just hide reality itself, but construct a new reality known as Hyperreality.

Hot take, maybe not so hot, but a lot of K-pop is stuck in a loop which references itself. HEAR ME OUT. I think a large chunk of fans, due to the cultural appropriation and commodity fetishism, are subject to this simulacrum concept because we misinterpret the songs of a group as an Original sound. Due to a song’s success, the industry also turns it into a framework for a group’s future song or even as a framework for other groups and companies to follow. Slowly, it evolves into copies copying copies, thus fulfilling Baudrillard’s final stage of the image.

One big example of this would be Blackpink and BTS being the framework for future girl groups and boy groups due to their rampant success. Crucially, the groups that followed this framework looked past the original music traditions that influenced their sound, but looked towards Blackpink and BTS themselves. I think an example of this, is how MEOVV and Babymonster sounds like a more polished version of Blackpink (which kinda explains why Babymonster or Meovv has never been big in my personal list of groups, because I feel like they sound like Blackpink and I only like one Blackpink song).

Now here is where I tie it back to ILLIT’s It’s Me. A lot of the defense I see for the song is “They’re doing something new!”, and frankly it’s also one of the default defenses for defending a new album release or a comeback. However, in the global scope of music, this statement is kind of invalid. It’s technically only new or unheard of in K-pop.

I found ILLIT’s It’s Me to be disappointing because I’ve listened to Charli XCX, and I think CharliXCX was what Illit was trying to replicate or reference but failed at doing (this is a personal opinion, you can disagree). To someone who has listened to the source itself, the copy becomes hollow. This is why, as one of the only K-pop fans in my existing irl friend group, its pretty difficult to introduce my friends to K-pop. My friend group are all music nerds, and if I introduce them to a song, they’ll just say “isn’t this just a Korean version of {insert artist/song here}?”. Often times, since K-pop doesn’t understand the roots, origin, and soul/meaning of what they’re trying to copy, its more hollow than the original.

Well, that brings us to the end. My notes actually have more stuff to talk about, such as K-pop and Freud’s concept of the “Madonna-Whore Complex”, but I don’t know if I’ll publish it online anytime soon. To defend the idol, remember the dream is genuine, its just that an exploitive system is built around it which blends itself with the culture. Underneath every idol is a person who wanted something genuinely, before any label told them what to want. Commodity fetishism makes that invisible. Our job is to listen critically. Even within a song that is industry slop, an idol can deliver a performance with genuine feeling. Even within a sound that falls victim to the simulacrum, a performer can find something true to express. The vehicle being compromised does not mean the driver has no soul. We, as good fans and listeners, need to acknowledge that cultural appropriation and commodity fetishism in the system is as true as the dreams of the idol. Both things are true. Both things have always been true. Refusing to flatten either one into the other is maybe the most honest thing a fan can do.

Ok now that everything is out of the way. I want to know if you guys agree or disagree, or if you have additional points you want to talk about or think can add to this argument. You could also think I’m completely bonkers and that “its not that deep”.

For a small note, I want to do a bit of market research here. I want to write something that people can find joy in also. I have two ideas I might write:
1. A fluff series where the reader is a tired fashion professor who happens to be Tsuki’s neighbor and maybe slowly becomes more integrated as a stylist (Main idol being, you know, Fukutomi Tsuki from BILLLIE)
2. A more action based concept where Assassins are integrated into the K-pop world (like Sakamoto Days x K-pop) where experienced assassins become bodyguards.

Anyways in the meantime, I’ll be out and about reading. Ciao