Tongues untied: Words on fandoms and foreignness in K-Pop
Why should language matter? Imagine how tired we are….
Context: This post comes approximately one week prior to TWICE’s 14th mini album “Strategy”. Without counting the group’s digital and prerelease singles (“The Feels” and “I Got You”), it is set to be the group’s first fully English title track.
To preface, I’d like to credit u/Placesbetween86 on Reddit, and their comment for inspiring this piece.
I recently found that Twitter isn’t the only prime cesspool of fandom that I’ve found on social media. It turns out that the equally contrarian RateYourMusic may as well give Stan Twitter a run for its money. Here’s a selected comment under the release page of TWICE’s “Strategy” that reeks of the same entitlement and bigotry:
strategy in full english, we’re losing recipes
While this briefly boiled my blood, it ended up prompting me to write this piece in the first place. For many thoughts are simply too much to condense into a single Reddit post.
Being Asian, my return to K-Pop after a decade has confronted me with many fandom behaviors that reveal the most discomforting things about supporting Asian artists as an Asian person. One of these is the constant fetishism of K-Pop’s foreignness, and notions of foreignness that are developed by international fans’ exposure to Korean-language songs.
Sometimes, Western fans like to exoticize the Korean language, rather than actually take the time to understand the musicality of its lyricism. They see English as inferior to any idol group they see fit, regardless of how versatile the group has proven to be across more than one language from a musical standpoint.
TWICE’s music has been more than a testament to this. If anything, songs like “Moonlight” and “Breakthrough” are a continued blueprint of what made “Nobody” by The Wonder Girls a tremendous success in both languages.
This is why we rarely see complaints about Japanese releases among international fans, but endless complaints about the English releases, despite the fact that both kinds of music are doing the exact same thing: Promoting for a specific market.
If this isn’t already common knowledge, Korean artists don’t magically stop being Korean when English comes out of their mouths. And if you have an extreme aversion to hearing a Korean group singing in English because it’s not “foreign” enough for you, then I think that’s something worth examining instead.
Though I do understand if fans don’t like English songs out of personal preference. For example, I personally think the English version of SNSD’s “The Boys” pales in comparison to its original version because its English lyrics lack the declarative revelation of self-empowerment that is anthemically exemplified in Korean.
However, the English lyrics for a lot of Korean K-Pop songs have evolved to be on par with groups’ domestic releases, if not better than they were over a decade prior. Take FIFTY FIFTY’s “Cupid”, which is not only one of the most recognized English K-Pop hits in recent years, but has arguably become one of the best since “Nobody” itself.
Nonetheless, while there are still some songs in Korean whose lyrics sacrifice their cultural nuances and musicality in their English and Japanese language versions, it does teach both non-listeners and seasoned fans that the process of translation is not as simply transferrable as we’d like to think.
That isn’t even including the scarcity of discussions about Japanese lyrics in Japanese releases…and likely because most people who complain about English releases don’t even bother to understand the lyrics in Japanese releases, which carry their own set of nuances and localized adjustments.
All this is to say that I’m exhausted by the complaints regarding English-language releases in K-Pop, the selective nature of which groups get an Anglo-pass, and the obvious fetishizing of Asians that fuels it.
I don’t expect these same people to read a summary on Korea-Japan relations before they write think pieces about how singing in English deters one’s Koreanness. But I still implore them to, because they will soon realize how stupid that sentiment is compared to how Koreans feel about Koreans singing in Japanese, and why Motown is preferrably mentioned in pieces on K-Pop’s history as opposed to acknowledging the Japanese idol industry that is equally part of K-Pop’s foundational blueprint.
As the globalization of K-Pop continues, some of the discourses that K-Pop fans have adopted are about as ignorant and entitled as any subset of sasaengs who claim personal authority over the lives of the idols they support.
It has gone from preferring that idols sing in Korean despite understanding that English is a global and far-reaching language…to the common (and borderline staunch) belief that Korean idols shouldn’t release singles in other languages, because their pronunciation is terrible. That these idols should only stay in Asia, and maintain their place. Or, alternatively, that idols should only market in Korea, even if domestic interest is waning.
It’s even more terrible when we realize that these sentiments are often predominantly uttered by Westerners, when most Asian people — whom international fans assume should be the most angry about this “loss of essence” — are often the most supportive of these decisions, and often don’t care.
The way that many international fans balk at the idea and reality of Asians wanting to conquer space outside of Asia is a terrible problem. Mind you, the problem isn’t even “not prioritizing Korea”, because K-Pop artists have churned out Japanese comebacks for DECADES.
I wonder if these same fans know just how arrogant they sound when they claim that the likes of BTS, BLACKPINK, and TWICE have “sold themselves to the US market”. These acts are not only exceptions to the industry’s rules for materializing their potential for global expansion, but because they all worked ten times as hard to establish their presence in the West, especially when Western artists have reached domestic success by doing only a fraction of what Asian acts have achieved.
Fucking hell, do you think K-Pop became worldwide out of nowhere?
Do you think that BTS’s first Billboard Music Award was well received by the American public? Do you think SNSD’s YouTube Award for Video of the Year was met with Western praise?
It has taken years for Korean acts to gain even the slightest amount of space in this industry, let alone become the global standard for boy groups and girl groups. And yet, people still have the absolute gall to say that they just “sold out to the West”.
Not everyone has to like an English-language release, but I cannot stress enough for anyone to be careful with the way they choose to talk about it. For more than ever, I’ve noticed that covert xenophobia in international K-Pop spaces is a very real thing, and has provided more than enough statements synonymous with “go back to your country and stay trapped in the box we established for you.”
Then again, this stems from plenty of international fans who pride themselves in being “different” by liking non-mainstream, specifically East Asian, entertainment. K-Pop going global has crushed their self-imposed persona that fantasizes and projects ideals of Asianness that are neither true to idols’ personal lives, nor their places of origin.
This is just as applicable to a subset of international J-Pop fans who feel the need to let the world know how different they are by no longer liking K-Pop and switching to a music industry that has now become slightly less insular — and more popular in Korea — than before (even if not from a retrospective standpoint, and much to the frustration of many who are interested, myself included).
Being Filipino, it’s already discouraging to hear my friends being met with these same words by their own relatives when trying to relearn their mother tongue. English is an international language. Of course its spoken variations will contain many different accents, insofar as adapting itself into English-based creoles respective of the country in which it is spoken (Franglais, Taglish, Singlish).
Having lived in Canada for 14 years, I’ve been well-adjusted to naturally speak with a Western accent, but my retention of Tagalog will always cause the emergence of my native accent in between tongues, simply because I continue to speak and think in both languages. And because I call Toronto my second home, I have also had the geographical advantage to do so.
Perhaps the Philippines’ own history as a Spanish colony and US neocolony — and the ways in which Filipinos reclaim their identities through arts and culture — is why Filipinos are known to be very receptive to Korean culture more than most countries in the world. We are often still seen as Filipino before receiving praise for the careers we are known to establish ourselves in, and even the careers that go against preconceived notions of working Filipinos. In many ways, we resonate with Korea’s own history all too well.
Regardless of this, it remains patronizing that international fans feel entitled to gauge one’s Koreanness based on the market that a group will choose to prioritize at any given time. It is just as disturbing when idols’ roots are so often quantified by those who have no say in them, not least because one’s heritage is simply who they are.
K-Pop, and Korean culture as a whole, has only gained independence and creative strength as a result of the nation’s last 15 years of upward growth. Though having been subject to Japanese and US imperialism and colonialism, there is still a reality in which Koreans are revisiting their historical and cultural origins as if they were tourists of their own heritage.
If international fans today are of the belief that their idols are too Americanized in style and sound, it’s because all idols in this industry are much more victims of this process than anything else. Thus bringing about the immediate assumption that all K-Pop becomes a shell of itself once it enters the Anglosphere.
Just look at how massive Rose’s “APT.” is right now. It may be steeped in Korean culture by name alone, but “Dynamite” by BTS wasn’t. Yet both ruled airwaves and charts, and didn’t make either act more or less Korean.
One’s idea of a K-Pop group of their stature pandering too hard to the West doesn’t even matter in the long run, simply because Koreans, ethnic or diasporic, will either appreciate that it’s coming from one of their own artists, or simply look elsewhere to those who primarily sing in their mother tongue. After all, ballads in this country still reign supreme.
Another assumption is that of K-Pop’s biggest acts always riding the tail of Western artists for acclaim, as if the likes of TWICE don’t come from a generation of idols who have openly voiced wanting to work with Western artists — and far more than the first two generations who were primarily made to focus on domestic success. If anything, “Strategy” seems like a genuine collaborative effort as opposed to BTS’s “Permission To Dance” or BLACKPINK’s “Ice Cream”, with both songs more visibly compromising to a palatable side of Western acclimatization.
It’s also important to note that while TWICE are well into their second career in the US market, there has suddenly been an onslaught of international fans who think that wanting to work with Megan Thee Stallion is taking the “K” away from K-Pop. As if a style as inherently Black as hip-hop will put a dent in, rather than a seed, for TWICE’s sound to blossom even further than before. Mind you, there are whole groups and companies in this industry that have tastelessly adapted the styles, sounds, and sensibilities of that genre and culture.
Frankly, if you as a fan are so disillusioned by the barriers that are being lowered from the globalization of K-Pop, be it for marketability or one’s own love for their craft, then go support groups from smaller companies — whose music hasn’t scraped the Anglosphere, and whose domestic success isn’t always guaranteed — rather than projecting your expectations onto groups who are continuing to be exceptions to the industry’s rules, for the sake of themselves and smaller acts trying to sustain themselves at home.
With this in mind, it is equally important to consider the importance of Korean popular music in relation to Shin Joong-hyun, who is still widely regarded as the Godfather of Korean Pop.
As a result of his involvement in pretty much every corner of Korean popular music, Shin conceptualized a model of musicianship centered around autonomy. In doing so, he would also separate artistry from novelty through performing original songs that contained a range of American influences, thus cementing him as both the nation’s composer and a regular act in the US military circuit.
Seo Taiji also serves as another bookend in opening the floodgates for the country’s musical diversity. As the embodied genesis of the Korean idol, he would spearhead K-Pop’s mass dissemination of rock and hip-hop, both of which served as the backbone of subsequent idol groups’ exploits into cross-pollinated performances. This includes its most popular examples, as notably trademarked by SM Entertainment’s first wave of flagship acts.
With K-Pop approaching yet another impending sea change, its 4th — and current — Generation is the first in which the global audience has returned most of its “focus” to Korea. Even a music market as seemingly self-sufficient as Japan has joined the race for international dominance.
As Korea the influenced has become the influence, any denial of their efforts is to also deny capitalism’s role in anchoring a horse race for global soft power. By assuming that there is no auxiliary effort or influence at any key moment in Korean history, fan-made notions of revisionism erase any form of cultural cannibalism that still mobilizes a great amount of Korean popular culture. In layman’s terms, this cycle puts the “pop” in Korea’s relentless anthropophagy, all while keeping its prefixed “K” in check.
So I ask this of Western fans who yearn for K-Pop’s need to build its identity: How could South Korea completely free itself from American influence if they have been held hostage to neocolonialism? And how could Korea have a national identity in its purest form, when it has always been stolen by other empires?
Time and again, Koreans of all strides have already been silenced, be it from using their own language or retaining ethnic names. Thus, demanding K-Pop to have a fixed identity is ignoring a process that Koreans themselves are still following through at this moment. It is to force a hegemonic utopia of Korean culture that denies K-Pop’s role as a continuous development of national history.
All things considered, it’s ironic how this behavior is perpetuated in international fandoms across the board, considering how K-Pop others itself as much as it has grown to cater and accommodate itself to Western ears.
To quote journalist Kang Haeryun, K-Pop is a vague musical haze that exists in an industry without a center, and people project what they want onto it. It’s a term that doesn’t say much about — nor dictate — the musical styles of each artist, because the K in front of the pop not only reflects an othering of other cultures by the Western market, but also a self-imposed othering from Koreans because they see themselves as something marginal from pop.
And yet, “Permission To Dance” and “Ice Cream” are as K-Pop as Yves’s “Viola”, as Dreamcatcher’s “Scream”, and as SNSD’s “Gee”. It never loses its essence regardless of how it travels, or however disingenuous it may appear to you. It’s also better not to assume that a smaller or bigger group in this industry intends to make music that is more or less indicative of where they want to be, let alone who they already are.
After all, isn’t it selfish to relegate any group who wishes to sing in English to their mother tongue? Isn’t it stifling to feel selectively entitled over who gets to participate in music’s storied history of cultural exchange?
Say what you want about the quality of an idol group’s music in the Anglosphere, but to whittle all of that down to them wanting to ride off the coattails of Western validation is reductive of the spaces they choose to carve for themselves, and the spaces they’ve worked to maintain for anyone who chooses to follow their path. That to essentialize or codify the notion of Western validation (or an adjacency to Western sounds) as a form of selfishness rather than unity is to limit creative possibilities as many a big suit at the top of the game.
Consider this the next time a K-Pop group prepares for an English-language release:
Do you listen to music for the fetishization of a culture, or do you listen because the music is good?
Whatever “essence of K-Pop” that Western fans tend to speak of is an imagined simulation of culture as any metropolitan city that prides itself on inhabiting a cultural mosaic. So much so, that anything that goes against their ethnic notions of Korean identity is as inhuman as those who reject it.
It only furthers a persistent reading where fans can’t think of those involved in K-Pop as people, let alone acknowledge the validity of their art. Before even considering this, international fans prioritize the stigma of being Asian in their equation. That any idol, past or present, is Asian before being a person in the truest sense.
To thoroughly stigmatize the fabric of K-Pop is to neglect its potential and existing growth. Fans who only focus on what they hope to be will never be able to discover anything new from it. And if there is something new, they will likely reject it as something unwelcome.
In other words, Western fans’ demands for K-Pop to build an identity away from the aftereffects of its colonial history is like asking a newborn taking its first steps to simply run. They ought to let go of their puritanical view of what identity is, because like every genre of music alongside it, a set identity for K-Pop simply doesn’t exist.
Coexistence is a truth for us as fans and human beings, as well as for all cultures — not least those that have been bleeding into each other for some time. For an industry so often perceived as a product of prefabrication, its authenticity has been made possible from stealing things that resonate with the souls of those who build upon it as we speak.
This is what South Korea has been doing as one of the main proponents of global pop culture today. In the words of the late Jean-Luc Godard: It’s not where you get things from, but where you take them to.
