I don’t know how people enjoy pop music while acknowledging that people commit suicide over the stress and harassment and pressure, and the auditions are grueling and dehumanizing and grooms children
I think the main difference between K-pop idols and Western pop stars is that K-pop idols need to be genuine pentuple threats. They need to be able to rap, sing, dance, rap and sing while dancing, have the ability to cultivate and commodify parasocial relationships that could make them the big bucks on twitch all the while maintaining model level good looks.
Euro/US/UK pop is a lot less demanding, you can usually make do with two of those.
I don't think it's so much that k-pop is uniquely exploitative as it is that K-Pop Idols are athletes, models, parasocial relationship commodifiers and musicians all at the same time so the k-pop industry is a combination of all of those industry's exploitative behaviours and pressures, with the caveat that as people who are capable of doing all those things at once are super rare, performers, and even promising trainees, have more power than anyone with only one of those skills in their respective industry.
I think the trainee system is what makes K pop more exploitive than the American system.
As far as I know, aspiring pop stars in America don’t have to sign 12 year deals with a company when they’re teenagers and move away from their parents to train and do school all the time with 1 day off every 2 weeks and no contact with their family.
They’re also competing with everyone else and getting ranked all the time, forced into starvation diets, training for like 10 hours a day. If they can’t handle the lifestyle and want to quit they have to pay back to company for their training and housing. They also are frequently groomed and encouraged to be escorts to wealthy creeps.
Most don’t ever debut and even the ones that do still don’t make any money until they pay back the company for their training.
There are a few aspects here that I think do happen in the American music industry, like unfair contracts, artists not getting paid, grooming/exploitation, being overworked and underfed, but I think it’s worse how it’s an official component baked into the industry in K-pop.
The only music I listen to is Phil Ochs and the Red Army Choir. Anything else is counter-revolutionary bourgeois decadence.
I don't know how people enjoy posting while acknowledging that children die in cobalt mines to make the microchips for their devices, imperialist wars are fought to keep the labour to make posting devices cheap and the electricity to run the devices and transmit the posts is killing the planet.
😢
Sorry fam. Been there. Depression fucking sucks. Thinking of you and I hope you get through it.
I wasn't so much trying to pull a gotcha as point out that most fun things produced under capitalism suck because capitalism sucks, it's good to acknowledge that but counterproductive to let it dominate your thinking and stop you enjoying anything ever.
"once your brain goes to shit it's just shit" something like that :/
I think the genre itself requires too many cultural signifiers the North Koreans aren't familiar with to even make sense of the spectacle - it's not just pop music, it's a whole extended universe of signs.
North Koreans don't have some kinda commie sixth sense lmao, how would they somehow recognize just from watching a concert how exploitative and shitty K-Pop is
That's fair. I tend to be wary about any kind of aesthetic judgement like that, though. It seems waaaay too common for internet leftists these days to basically just go 'everything I don't like is exploitative and won't exist under communism' which is like goldfish-tier ideology, I see no reason that music videos (and specifically pop-aesthetic music videos, to remain somewhat on-topic) are inherently exploitative and will cease to exist under communism or something. These kinds of aesthetic judgements can lead to asshole behavior towards allies or at least well-meaning people, too. Pertinent example given relatively recent threads would be people making fun of Nathan J Robinson for how he dresses because it strikes them as somehow inherently bourgeoisie.
I might have digressed entirely from the topic there and started rambling, but fuck it, still gonna post
too many cultural signifiers the North Koreans aren’t familiar with to even make sense of the spectacle
the virgin Schizoprhrenic late capitalist sujbject vs the Chad neurotypical human
That's my favourite kpop performance of all time, everything is just so fucking funny
people commit suicide over the stress and harassment and pressure
*workers
Someone has to mine through these layers of missing context/ meaning for me so I can understand
Kpop stan accounts arguing about Marx, one of them roasting the other for calling Marx ugly when they stan a Kpop star they also consider ugly.
