“…Park Jimin, Kim Taehyung, Jung Jungkook, BTS!”
Imagine you are in my shoes, or really, my seat. It is 2017 and the BTS WINGS concert in Anaheim, California has just commenced. I was in a craze, violently whipping back and forth my glowing Bangtan Bomb lightstick, which I had valiantly fought for in merchandise lines outside. The members appeared in front of me as if by magic, their bright smiles greeting the crowd as smoke machines followed their figures. When they performed their hit song “Blood, Sweat & Tears,” it was nothing short of an out-of-body experience. I still remember the WINGS album release date, how I stayed awake into the early morning just to be the first to watch the new music video, fingers shaky as I tried to control my fangirl squeals.
While I still hold a deep affection for BTS, my lightstick now collects a thick layer of dust as it settles atop my desk. In retrospect, all these physical products fulfilled the wants of my 15-year-old self, adapting a sense of consciousness in their plastic, induced by my memories of BTS and my emotions associated with them. On a larger scale, I cannot deny that everything within K-pop follows this same pattern; the love for an artist manifesting itself in some sort of monetary exchange, a dance between production and consumption on industry streets.
Interestingly, in taking a class on Marxism and reading Das Kapital, I found great overlap between Marx’s critique of capitalism and the K-pop industry.
- Commodity Fetishism
Even today, I sleep with my BTS plushie and use my BTS-themed sticky notes in class. These uses are what Marx calls the “use-values” of a commodity, essentially the purpose a commodity was made to fulfill. Not as intuitive, however, is “value,” which Marx says can only be created by humans. Value equates to the amount of human labor power embedded in the production of a commodity from its base of raw materials. Value does “not have its description branded on its forehead…in so far as they are values, [they] are merely the material expressions of the human labor expended to produce them” (Das Kapital 167). Although labor power is required for commodity creation, when we buy a photocard or lightstick of our favorite idol group, the labor used to manufacture such a commodity is not visibly manifested in the item. The same goes for all of K-pop and its productions; the audience is oblivious to the total amount of practice hours, recording sessions, dance lessons, or even the various people within the artistic process, such as the cameraman.
When idols make a “comeback” (even if their last release was only three months prior), it is typical to expect teaser videos, music videos, concept photos, and performances all in addition to the actual album release itself. In this rapid release pace, value as the collection of human labor vanishes from the eye. Additionally, everything produced to have even the slightest connection to the idol immediately gives the product a grander emotional and social relationship with the consumer, alienating the production and actual labor-power behind the commodity even further. This gap between labor and use-value is further reinstated in the market exchange-value, when an item is put in relation to money and therefore other commodities. This exchange illustrates how much someone is willing to pay for an item, as well as how people treat a commodity as having a life and therefore a price of its own.
In a sense, the idol also becomes a commodity in themselves. For example, plastic surgery is huge in Korea, and the number of my own relatives who have had procedures done is sky high, yet a complete normality. Young teens receive double-eyelid surgery as graduation gifts and many idols go under the knife before and after debut. Plastic surgery becomes a way for the human labor power used in the procedure to be instilled within the idol’s face, in turn making their image “into a thing which transcends sensuousness,” (Das Kapital 163) – a commodity used to gain audience adoration.
In addition to plastic surgery, I can see how K-pop is obsessed with the creation of the “perfect” idol. Companies further complete the commodification process by training their idols with outside human labor such as teachers and mentors. Idols have even reported receiving lessons on how to properly take selfies (not to mention these lessons further putting idols in debt) and this group image is key for marketing: idol group IVE is associated with royalty, and New Jeans with the Y2K aesthetic. By regulating each piece of media idols produce, idols are used “as both instruments of labor and raw material in the same process” (Das Kapital 288). The body and face of the idol evolve into a commodity further alienated from the human being, and the company (the capitalist) feels like they own the idol because of the labor put in to create them.
- Social Reproductive Time
In the middle of finals season, sleeping soundly through the night or catching food with friends seems like paradise on earth. The moments to (hopefully) relax and refuel for the next long workday are what Marx calls “social reproductive time.” Just like us, the idol must also recharge, yet it is no secret that social reproductive time is hardly maintained in K-pop, even at a bare minimum. This results in idols fainting on stage or needing to be put on hiatus for medical treatment. At the same time, an alarming lack of privacy for idols means that exploitation becomes a nearly 24-hour system, where the already minimal social reproductive time is transformed into a further commodity.
I recall logging into Vlive to watch my favorite BTS members stream for fans. It always stuck out to me how members would have these super shocked faces, hands covering their open mouths as they looked around in worry, like some invisible force was going to come out of the shadows at them. The crime against their company? They had accidentally uttered a curse word. Even these seemingly casual moments cannot escape the constraints of around-the-clock company regulations. This commodification occurs to the point that viewers are left unaware of what is being staged. Even at the height of my “delulu-sions,” the idol is simply someone I will never know.
- Mechanization: Industry & Adorno
Returning to the main purpose of the K-pop idol: to create music and to entertain. In his book “On Popular Music,” philosopher Theodor W. Adorno adopts a Marxist lens when highlighting how standardization within music “extends from the most general features to the most specific ones. Best known is the rule that the chorus consists of thirty-two bars… hits are also standardized… back to the same familiar experience [where] nothing fundamentally novel will be introduced.” The idol group, Blackpink, is an excellent case study for both standardization and industrialization. Most of their music is created by producer Teddy Park, whose discography contains the same over-utilized drumbeats. Once-charming high-hats feel like a preset slapped over the track, with sharp, unsalvageable staccatos. One-dimensional vocals tend to reiterate single phrases, and this format is abused in the sparkly track “DDU-DU DDU-DU.” This repetitive (but rapid and profitable) production process is part of the exact reason some of my friends hate K-pop, stating that it lacks the life of the artist. Now as soloists, we can see Blackpink stretch into their own paths, each taking on a different persona and style that adds more flair to their composition, coming with the fact that they now have more control over their sound.
As industrialization increases exponentially, K-pop music is being broken down into smaller and smaller elements. Each task operated by a different worker: the music by a producer, utilizing the production software of machines, and lyrics by songwriters on recording applications, including pre-recorded demos telling the idols exactly how to recreate the vocals. It becomes typical to isolate “these operations and [develop] their mutual independence to the point where each becomes the exclusive function of a particular worker” (Das Kapital 457). Even idols themselves have little power on the musical direction of their career, with artists such as Rosé expressing how stifled they felt within Blackpink.
The industrialization of K-pop is exactly what Marx outlines in Das Kapital, that laborers are cogs in a machine, performing small tasks separately in order to create a collective final product: an amalgamation of their individual labor powers. A hyper-skilled worker, conducting each step of the process on their own, is no longer a necessity. Instead, emphasis is placed on how to streamline the production in order to release commodities at a rapid rate. This system is also what allows increasingly young idols to debut, such as minors in Illit that lack proper vocal training. Like the way a machine makes a laborious task operable by a child, even an unskilled idol can have their vocals disguised by machine software like autotune or by preparing a pre-recorded audio track for lip syncing.
I still love K-pop, but I cannot ignore how the goal was never solely to create music and to entertain, but to turn music and idols into commodities that a company can keep spitting out, reaping profit in every new, unoriginal beat.
Written by Jenai Johns-Peterson
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