[Culture Op-Ed] Why the “Public Good” Should Leave BTS Alone

As mentioned in previous Op-Eds, the original secret behind the success of BTS, K-pop, and the broader Korean Wave industry has had little to do with support at the level of the state or other public institutions. Even so, unnecessary intervention by public authorities, supposedly intended to help an industry that is already thriving, never seems to stop. Sure enough, not long ago, the same thing happened again. Below is part of a Maeil Business Newspaper article dated September 29, 2020, titled “Will BTS Oldest Member Jin and Youngest Member Jungkook Enlist Together Five Years from Now?”

“As BTS continues to rewrite global pop history, the issue of military service for BTS members has become a hot-button topic. Leader Jin, in particular, must unconditionally enlist by the end of next year under the current Military Service Act. If youngest member Jungkook’s enlistment is taken into account, fans will be unable to see BTS as a full group for five years. The government and political circles are reportedly cautiously reviewing a plan to significantly delay BTS members’ military service. Given that they are playing a greater role than any other field in promoting Korea, active efforts are being made to gather public opinion.

The plan currently under serious consideration is reportedly to postpone enlistment by five years so that oldest member Jin, born in 1992, can enlist together with youngest member Jungkook, born in 1997. Since public opinion is negative toward a military exemption, the idea is to minimize the group’s hiatus by having them enlist together.

Under this plan, Suga, born in 1993, RM and J-Hope, born in 1994, and Jimin and V, born in 1995, would likewise board the train to enlist together when youngest member Jungkook enters the military. This is a more aggressive support measure than the amendment to the Military Service Act proposed on the 3rd by Democratic Party lawmaker Jeonyonggi. Jeon’s amendment centers on allowing outstanding figures in popular culture and the arts, recommended by the Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism, to postpone enlistment until age 30.”

The idea of “special treatment” by public authorities, strongly opposed by the K-pop industry and fans alike

Yet the K-pop industry and fans who actually heard this news reacted negatively. Their view is that this kind of back-and-forth only adds to the confusion. More than that, such “special treatment,” devised by people who do not really understand the realities of the K-pop industry and who simply try to “jump on the bandwagon,” would in practice only make the situation worse.

And once you hear the reasoning, that reaction makes perfect sense. If all BTS members were to enlist in the Army at the same time, their service period would be 18 months. But from the standpoint of how the K-pop industry actually works, is it really wise for “all members to undergo the same 18-month hiatus”? Many argue that this is precisely the kind of “special treatment proposal offered by people who know nothing about the industry.”

It is no exaggeration to say that K-pop idols, including BTS, have grown through continuous bonds with their fans. Analysts have pointed out that BTS’s steady activity on social media played a major role in capturing fans around the world. Above all, unlike many Western artists in places like the United States, who release one album and then spend two or three years with no additional content beyond touring, K-pop returns with new music two or three times a year and constantly reinvents itself, pushing to the extreme the characteristics of what might be called a “trend industry.”

In that context, simply cutting off 18 months as a “military hiatus” is hard to see as advantageous in any way. If anything, it would not be unreasonable to call it practically the worst possible choice.

People in the industry say the better strategy is for a few members to enlist one after another in sequence, while the remaining members continue releasing music through two- or three-member subunits within the group or as solo artists. In fact, many active male idol groups are already dealing with military hiatuses in exactly this way. Under such an approach, the fandom can continue without interruption and remain steadily intact, while the remaining members help maintain the presence of those serving in the military, enabling fans to support and cheer for the enlisted members even more solidly.

In fact, BTS’s agency, Big Hit Entertainment, has already consistently presented measures to address the group’s military hiatus. In the securities registration statement it filed ahead of its stock market listing, Big Hit Entertainment stated: “To minimize the risk of reduced sales resulting from the scheduled absences of major artists due to military service and other factors, we are conducting business reviews in various areas, including pre-producing content such as albums and videos and flexibly operating artists using members who are available for activities,” and also noted that “we are continuously expanding the share of indirect participation-type revenue, such as MD (merchandise), licensing, and mature video content sales, that does not require artists’ direct activities.”

The company has already been steadily preparing countermeasures, and it has never asked public authorities for anything. Yet people “among themselves,” without properly understanding the industry, are offering ideas out of their own supposed goodwill that would actually harm the continued popularity of K-pop. The private sector is not foolish. If anything, it studies the situations it faces far more intensely and swiftly than public authorities do.

Fans, meanwhile, object to this political “goodwill” from another angle. To be more precise, on every news page and community site carrying reports about “special treatment for BTS,” one can find comment sections filled with furious criticism from K-pop fans. It is hard to find anyone welcoming the idea.

They have their own reasoning. K-pop, they argue, has won favor both in Korea and abroad as a subgenre associated with a proper, healthy, and wholesome image. Since the 2000s, as hip-hop has come to dominate the global pop market, its signature explicit expressions, performances, and private lives have steadily grown more extreme. Amid a flood of provocative and sometimes illegal issues involving drugs, violence, and sex, K-pop artists have consistently emphasized hope in life and healthy attitudes, while also projecting such images in their private lives. In doing so, they have attracted global music fans who had grown uncomfortable with and fatigued by the hip-hop-centered pop market.

So would it really help that image if they were suddenly to receive some kind of “special treatment” from public authorities that sets them apart from the overwhelming majority of ordinary people? This is especially true in Korea. Even if such special treatment were granted, it is unclear what standard could possibly be used. Unlike competition prizes or Olympic medals, achievements such as reaching No. 1 on the Billboard chart are thoroughly commercial in nature, so it is entirely natural that people would question whether such metrics can serve as a basis. By that logic, some ask, should startup CEOs who have exported a great deal not also qualify for special treatment?

In the end, all the various claims from public authorities about giving BTS special treatment with regard to military service amount to nothing more than simplistic, performative benevolence conceived by people who are completely ignorant not only of the industry’s actual circumstances but even of the very reasons K-pop grew in the first place. It would not be too much to call it a “road to hell paved with good intentions” that would only make the real situation worse.

Have people already forgotten the backlash caused by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism’s “SM Paris Concert”?

In truth, this kind of public-sector intervention in the K-pop industry, causing problems rather than solving them, is nothing new. In one sense, these situations have arisen steadily since the very early stages of K-pop’s globalization. A representative example is the “SM Paris Concert,” held on June 10 and 11, 2011, at Le Zénith, a large concert venue in Paris.

SM Entertainment, a private company, originally had no plans for a European concert. It was aware that its own artists, as well as K-pop artists more broadly, were receiving some response in Europe mainly through YouTube videos, but its judgment was that “the time was not yet ripe.” If it went then, only a very small niche fan base would likely gather, and there was little reason to expect meaningful expansion from that.

Then suddenly, on April 11, 2011, the Paris branch of the International Cultural Affairs Division under the Culture and Arts Bureau of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism drew up a “Plan to Promote a K-pop Concert in Paris.” It was a plan intentionally aligned with the 2010–2012 “Visit Korea Year” period and one clearly shaped by the public sector’s own characteristic interests and judgments. A budget of 340 million won was provided, and even before the plan was officially announced, around November 2010, a venue rental contract in Paris had already been signed in advance. SM Entertainment was then persuaded to go through with the project. The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism boasted that it did not pay appearance fees to participating SM artists such as Girls’ Generation and TVXQ, and covered only actual expenses such as airfare and lodging. But no K-pop company is going to refuse when someone offers to fly its artists to Paris for free, boost morale, and effectively give them a free trip.

That is how SM Entertainment came to sign an “overseas concert sponsorship agreement” on May 30, 2011, with the “Visit Korea Year Committee Foundation.” In other words, the concert had effectively been slotted in as part of another event called “Visit Korea Year.” But strictly speaking, the concert left behind only a strange stigma for the K-pop industry as a whole.

For one thing, there is no data of any kind showing that this event doubled K-pop’s popularity in Europe. If anything, assessments say interest slowed over the next two to three years. Common sense also suggests as much. The idea that holding two concerts overseas for a small number of fans would inspire those concertgoers to become one-person armies promoting K-pop is little more than a fantasy. More fundamentally, that is not how “culture” generates momentum and spreads in the first place.

K-pop was able to move beyond Asia into the United States and Europe only when third-generation idols such as BTS and BLACKPINK emerged—artists well matched to global trends and grounded in the hip-hop genre that currently dominates the pop market. It was possible because the “content” itself was aimed at the global market, not because a few overseas events were held with state money. Culture is, from beginning to end, purely a “content” industry, and for a latecomer like Korea, the tool for spreading that content has always been the Internet. In fact, the entire Korean Wave was only able to globalize through the Internet, something clearly illustrated again by the OTT service Netflix, which has globalized Korean dramas since earlier this year.

Thus, while any measurable achievements were negligible or in any event impossible to verify, the backlash was much clearer. A label was attached to K-pop’s worldwide popularity: that it happened because “the state actively stepped in and fostered it.” No matter how much one tries to emphasize that this is a content industry developed in the private market, once someone brings up the “SM Paris Concert,” there is little left to say.

Some may respond by asking what is so bad about the image that “the state supported it.” But in culture, even if not fatal, that image is certainly not a positive one. Culture is something that arises from the private sphere and carries a distinctive aura of freedom. An image suggesting that the state intervened and fostered it ends up evoking something like a communist society in which the state actually controlled culture. It also makes it difficult to shake the impression that Korea is not much different from places like China, where the state still directly intervenes in such matters.

Moreover, it encourages distorted perspectives among foreign media looking at the success of the Korean Wave as a whole. In media outlets across Japan, the United States, and Europe—especially in Japan, which is quick to point to a particular turning point in the Korean Wave’s success—the logic that “K-pop was raised by the state” never disappears. As a result, instead of trust in and recognition of the capabilities of individual private-sector professionals in the industry, only the state’s supposedly meticulous strategy gets emphasized. This has even contributed to a situation in which the opening of a new market—artists in the United States and Europe asking K-pop staff to produce their music—has progressed somewhat more slowly than K-pop’s global popularity would suggest.

Korean-style Netflix, Korean-style YouTube, Korean-style Nintendo…the unending “vicious cycle”

Naturally, these things do not exist only in relation to K-pop, and this is not even where they are most striking. For years, there have been absurd ideas about creating media platforms tied to culture, and even culture companies themselves. Such notions appear under almost every administration, regardless of the ideology of the ruling party. The following is part of a JoongAng Ilbo article dated June 24, 2020, titled “[From the Scene] Why the Government’s Call for ‘Five Korean-style Netflixes’ Is Being Met with Cynicism.”

“The government’s ‘Digital Media Ecosystem Development Plan,’ which includes measures to foster a ‘Korean-style Netflix,’ is being criticized by the industry as a policy detached from reality. On the 22nd, the government announced that it would spend about 320 billion won by 2022 to create a K-media ecosystem capable of competing with Netflix. But those in the field who are supposed to benefit from this budget point out that ‘both the government’s goals and its detailed implementation measures have remarkably low feasibility.’ … Government-led ‘Korean-style’ projects have often started with a bang and ended in a whimper. Under the Park Geun-hye administration, the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning created a content sales and export platform called K-Content Bank in 2015, saying it would build a ‘Korean-style YouTube.’ The initial budget投入 at launch was 1.6 billion won. Although it was presented as a YouTube-like platform, K-Content Bank sold only 30 million won worth of content in one year. Under the Lee Myung-bak administration, the Ministry of Knowledge Economy spent 31 billion won in 2011 saying it would cultivate software talent that could be called ‘Korean-style Steve Jobs.’ These government-driven projects disappeared without a trace.”

As this shows, even though these efforts have “never once really worked,” public authorities endlessly try to tack themselves onto private industries that are already doing well on their own, and as a result they end up disrupting the ecosystem or leaving behind only a negative image. Then, on October 7, Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism Parkyangwoo stated at a National Assembly audit of the Culture, Sports and Tourism Committee that he would “positively review the matter of postponing military service for BTS, who have enhanced national prestige.” This has now “actually” been set in motion.

This time, at least, for the sake of BTS, K-pop, and indeed the Korean Wave as a whole, one can only hope that the public sector—less a Midas touch than a minus touch—will simply leave them alone.

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Original title: [문화칼럼] 공적개념이 방탄소년단에게서 손 떼야 하는 이유

Author: Mun-won Lee

Date: 2020-10-07

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=column&pn=6&idx=23156