A huge part of the success of NewJeans — the most creatively promising new K-pop act of the past two years — has been its music videos: stylistically sophisticated, vividly colorful, palpably joyful. Starting with music that deploys top-shelf songwriting buoyed by production savvy about global microtrends, the group developed a singular aesthetic to go with it, drawing equally from high fashion, lived-in nostalgia and contemporary cuteness.
So it was striking when, a couple of weeks ago, the group released a video performance unlike any that preceded it. In a live broadcast on a burner YouTube account, the group’s five members — Danielle, Haerin, Hanni, Hyein and Minji — spoke for almost 30 minutes about their dissatisfaction with their parent company, Hybe. They particularly focused on how it had de-emphasized the role of the group’s executive producer, Min Hee-jin, in their work.
Here was a group putting its external image and its internal leverage at risk to argue for their creative lives. It is an infrequent scenario at this level in K-pop, a genre and business in which careful choreography — of music, visuals and star behavior — is crucial to the power of the art.
This livestream, of course, was as art directed as any of the group’s technicolor music videos. The members dressed largely in black, speaking softly in an anonymous office. Out in the world, NewJeans is vibrant, dynamic and approachably fun; in this clip, which some fans speculated was secretly orchestrated by Min, the members were reduced to spiritless cogs, as if trapped and suffocated by the corporation itself.
For almost as long as K-pop has been a global force, it has been an exemplar of the controversial virtues of top-down control. American pop labels essentially abandoned this mode more than a decade ago, following the boy band and Britney-Christina era. The influence of social media in creating bottom-up hits and stars has all but invalidated the label-knows-best mode of creation. But K-pop’s commitment to that ethic persists, and has made exactitude into an artistic virtue.
Nevertheless, human beings pulse beneath these constraints, and the NewJeans rebellion — one of the highest-profile K-pop labor disputes in recent years — feels like a true rupture. It turned a behind-the-scenes executive tug of war into a game of chicken. Hybe can effectively derail NewJeans’s career for stepping out of line, or the members of the group can effectively sacrifice themselves. In the video, NewJeans demanded that Min be reinstated — their mien is somber, but it’s not quite a plea. There is authority and resilience in their presentation, with its frequent mentions of their fans, known as Bunnies — a group that’s loyal to the stars, not the label.
K-pop idols rarely break character, even in unpolished settings. To the extent that Hybe (formerly Big Hit) is interested in transparency, it is only to showcase the intensity of the work its stars put in to appear perfect.
But the NewJeans conundrum makes this a curious and perhaps not totally fortuitous time for Hybe to loudly demonstrate its micromanaging methods. That’s the intent of “Pop Star Academy: Katseye,” a Netflix series about the making of an English-language global girl group that’s part behind-the-scenes documentary, part elimination competition. (The show, and the group, are part of a joint venture between Hybe and the American label Geffen.)
Directed with nervy patience by Nadia Hallgren, “Pop Star Academy” is far more in thrall to the labor being learned and performed than about the art it will be put in service of making.
The first batch of trainee competitors practice for over a year: dance classes, vocal lessons, style makeovers, media training. What the show renders explicit is the extent to which a pop star can be constructed from almost whole cloth — the star is the training regimen. Even the contestants with ample social media following and defined personalities before joining the competition are slowly broken and tamed.
At one point the Hybe chairman, Bang Si-hyuk — one of the most powerful figures in K-pop — decides to accelerate the group’s rollout, combining strategy and mischief: “When they wait too long to debut, they get frustrated and lose their spark, which shows in their eyes,” he says, speaking Korean, with a glint in his eye.
Critique is offered up like air — cheap and ubiquitous. “I didn’t believe it at all. It felt like nothing, honestly,” says one dance instructor; “Are you aware that you’re singing out of tune?” asks a mentor with clear exasperation. Competitors are derided for flat facial expressions, for failing to live up to K-pop beauty standards, for having private Instagram accounts. Those who chomp at the bit, or otherwise push back, are largely dismissed (except TikTok-popular Manon, whom the label contrives to make a part of the group despite her seeming lack of vigor for the idea). One of the more emotionally sophisticated contestants leaves the show once it shifts from training to competition, which the participants hadn’t been fully informed would happen.
On the one hand, it is bracing and refreshing to hear such plain appraisal. Pop stardom is astonishingly hard work, and the difference between the raw clay on display in the first episode and the polished final product at the show’s conclusion is more than striking, it’s valorizing.
The final group is scrupulously diverse, apart from height — those who were comparably short get cast aside. Last month, Katseye released its sturdy debut EP, “SIS (Soft Is Strong),” and unsurprisingly, the best and most popular song from it, “Touch,” is the most NewJeans-ish. The group is hawking it relentlessly on TikTok, where they perform its hand-gesture choreography with a variety of K-pop stars, and even Usher.
There is a glimpse of where all of this relentless work might lead in “Jung Kook: I Am Still,” a new documentary/performance supercut focusing on the youngest member of BTS, who last year became, in disorientingly short order, the most commercially successful K-pop solo star in American pop.
BTS is the ne plus ultra of Hybe plan — this film is one of several that has focused on the group or its members. It captures, sometimes just barely, the frantic eight-month stretch in which Jung Kook was thrust into solo stardom before enlisting in South Korea’s mandatory military service.
This is what all the hard work of being in BTS was for, ostensibly — a shot at extending his career beyond the very wide boundaries of the group’s accomplishments. Or put more plainly: more hard work.
To the extent that “Jung Kook: I Am Still” is a film at all — as opposed to a slapdash collection of casual moments, behind-the-scenes fan service clips and music and concert videos — it is a film about labor. Or more precisely, the inextricable relationship between labor and glamour.
Like “Pop Star Academy,” it is decidedly unromantic. Jung Kook is alternately enthused and depleted. Even his purported private moments are commoditized: At one point, he’s shown sleeping on a plane. He has a strikingly lithe and sweet voice that’s well-captured on his album “Golden,” a frothy debut that smoothly yanked Justin Timberlake’s comeback lane away from him.
But if Jung Kook is thrilled to be at the top of the charts, he does not show it. Instead, he doubts his vocal range and his natural dance instincts. If he celebrated his ample successes — including a No. 1 single and No. 2 album on U.S. charts — the cameras were not there. If he acted out or pushed back, we’ll never know.
Like many K-pop entertainment companies, Hybe is vertically integrated, and exerts a significant degree of control over its artists’ public presentation. It also builds the metanarratives that become fan manna.
But with success comes courage, or something like it. Not long after NewJeans posted the video about their label concerns, Jung Kook appeared to offer them a measure of support with a pair of cryptic koans: “Artists are not guilty” and “Don’t use them.” Sure, the words appeared on an Instagram account for his dog, but it was revealing — and perhaps indicative of table-turning to come — that they appeared anywhere at all.
The post NewJeans’ Ultimatum Casts K-Pop’s Displays of Labor in a New Light appeared first on New York Times.
