Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018. ix, 275 pp. (B&W photos) US$29.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-5036-0599-2.
Over the last two decades, the K-pop (Korean popular) music scene, including its industry, markets, stars, and fans, has grown into a contemporary global phenomenon. Echoing this, and given the volume of recent scholarship on the subject, the study of K-pop is undoubtedly a burgeoning academic field. However, still in its nascent stage, K-pop scholarship has been primarily based on a few limited premises: it is discussed in celebratory terms that explain how it has become popular in relation to international fandom, the Internet, social-media-led distribution, business strategies, or the Korean government’s policies; or it is discussed critically in terms of its nationalist, neoliberalist, or capitalistic embeddedness. In so doing, the quintessential qualities of K-pop as a cultural practice are often conjured through binary prisms, such as West and non-West, center and periphery, global and local, and cultural hybridity and imperial hegemony. Yet, K-pop scholarship has potential for further development and maturation beyond these limiting and limited binary theses. K-pop Live: Fans, Idols, and Multimedia Performance signals such a transition and opens a new arena in which K-pop and its multifaceted and multilayered presences can be critically explored, articulated, and reimagined.
The book navigates key multimedia and live scenes of K-pop in the form of an ethnography while questioning the idea and experience of “liveness” in the age of digital media. It principally engages K-pop as “kaleidoscopic” pop that combines “multiple forms of performance” and “a transmedia phenomenon” due to “the kaleidoscopic convergence of various media platforms” and as “keyboard/keypad” pop…which consumers can access digitally rather than through live performance” but still “adheres to the idea of live music” (9). Chapter 1 launches this journey of exploration by recounting the emergence of K-pop and its close ties with the development of media technology. Such development “enable[d] the mobile and facile consumption of multimedia K-pop” as nationally branded music (43). Further, the chapter establishes “the complexities of digital Imagineering” (“the marriage between imagination and engineering”) regarding “live” K-pop, which is further explored in subsequent chapters. It connotes that K-pop benefits from technological development, which plays an integral part in its glamorous façade.
Chapter 2 takes readers to a live recording of a TV music chart show, which is broadcast by one of the major Korean television channels. The author notes that a large portion of the show was not performed on live TV; rather it was a pre-recorded or lip-synced dance-only performance. While “the authenticity of performance” is still prioritized, these Korean live TV music shows concoct “a uniquely hybrid performance” that neatly bridges liveness and mediation before an audience (72). Next, readers are taken to the scene of a global TV live chat show with K-pop stars, one that used Google Hangouts and was produced and broadcast by Arirang TV, a Korean English-language radio and cable television station. The risks of live broadcasting were, however, prevented and tamed in preparation for the show.
While K-pop’s main parlor is video-streaming sites such as YouTube, music videos globally convey the multimedia performance of K-pop and its liveness as a digital artefact. Chapter 3 takes readers to the scenes of two music videos: TaeTiSeo’s Twinkle (SM Entertainment) and G-Dragon’s Who You (YG Entertainment). According to the author, K-pop music videos denote the “kaleidoscopic” aspect of K-pop that is notable for its “flamboyant mixing of classical and kitschy, old and new, foreign and local elements” (96), while also gaining “a semblance of ‘live’ performance that exudes the freshness of here and now” (97). The author accentuates that Twinkle draws upon Broadway-style musicals to endow K-pop with “digital media’s nostalgic nod to the live stage performance” and thus “an invented historical authority” (101). The analysis of Who You’s production highlights how the shooting of the video deployed the interactivity and integrated “an unrehearsed authentic view of fans as a way of creating an impression of liveness” (124), while simultaneously drawing upon “the cold-hearted marketing and promotion strategy of a profit-driven corporation” (125).
This “korporate” aspect of K-pop—“a highly polished commercial product whose sole aim is to generate profit in global marketplaces” (9)—becomes more palpable in chapter 4. This chapter visits two hologram theaters: Klive, an exhibition theater that displays stars of YG Entertainment in hologram images, and SMTOWN, which hosts the world’s first hologram musical featuring stars of SM Entertainment. As the interests of the K-pop industry and South Korean government intersect in the realms of technological development and profit-making (e.g., “corporate nationalism” [195]), “idols make their bodies a vacuous playing field where technology of all sorts can be tested out” (142) and “the spirit of live performance can be commodified in the service of the neoliberal state” (147).
In chapter 5, readers are brought to two live scenes—BIGBANG’s Made Tour in Seoul in 2015 and KCON LA 2015. The author observes that K-pop live performance “reinforces the notion of music as a synesthetic total performance that stimulates all five senses” (176) with the aid of multimedia technology and the construction of performance that stresses liveness and intimacy with fans, while the audience is “feeling alive” with the “sensorial stimuli” created by being there with other fans (175–176). With a vivid and sober portrayal of the KCON LA 2015, the author suggests that “KCON might be seen as an event where liveness as an expression of the human desire for intimacy masks the neoliberal commodification of affect” (183). Equally, the author does not cease her intellectual exploration of the chimera-like qualities of K-pop to the very end: “It feels strange to witness fiery love born out of the icy machinery to spin profit, but in K-pop parlance, striking sincerity and calculating profitability might have no trouble being synonyms” (197).
This study is informative, insightful, thought-provoking, and entertaining. It mediates the key scenes of K-pop with a sense of liveness for the reader; as if we were there with the author. The analytical frameworks suggested in chapter 1, such as The Teletubbies Generation, Generation Like, Media Tribalism and heung (“spontaneous energy stemming from excitation, inspiration, play, and frolicking” [17]), could have been further articulated throughout the book. And yet, I believe that they can be taken up by other inspired scholars for further development. The stage is now open to all.
Nikki J.Y. Lee
Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, United Kingdom