Oppa No More: What Made Me Fall Out Of Love And Interest With K-Pop
The year was 2013 and 16-year-old me decided to peruse YouTube for anything that could cure my boredom.
My sister was getting really into J-pop soundtracks from our favorite anime, one in particular artist she had discovered from the anime “Durarara” was Yuya Matsushita who had sung the ending theme “Trust Me”.
Effectively getting me hooked on a few of his singles, I naturally ventured to some of his music videos yet nothing had quite quenched my musical thirst and I wanted to hear something new.
That’s when I looked at the suggested YouTube video queue. In the corner was a music video by a group named ‘f(x)’ called ‘Electric Shock’. Feeling in need of some listening materials I hadn’t already played to death I clicked the video.
That was the start of my addiction.
While it may seem like a by-the-numbers video now at the time I was infatuated. A modern-day girl group with dance moves coordinated like those I had seen in the western world from the 90’s, cool lyrics, and a hype beat, everything about them and their style was so interesting. From f(x) to male groups like Big Bang and B.A.P, I was thoroughly an established K-pop fan.
for a while.
I cannot remember which band it was that started the long, long line of fuckery I would witness. I just remember how crushed I felt when I heard the news of a member of a group I was following saying racial epithets about black people, my people, particularly the word “nigger”. In my mind at the time it was one thing to say nigga(although still highly ignorant of nonblack people to say and something that made me highly uncomfortable when they did I thought it had already been fabricated into modern-day slang so I just let it be) but the n-word with the hard-er? Even as a star-struck teenager, I could make no excuse for their behavior and while I became disillusioned with that group at the time when it came to the relationship between them and others I was still left thinking “Okay, they’re terrible, but surely it had to be a fluke, right? Surely I can continue listening to other bands I love without this problem, yes?”
No.
One after the other, month after month if not weeks, another person in yet another group was outwardly anti-black in one way or another. Saying the n-word, joking about Black stereotypes, and being alarmingly ignorant yet about people of African descent for a country whose population didn’t even have many non-Asians to have us in their mouth so much and for a genre that was heavily influenced by Black culture.
A jarring example of this would be G-Dragon (a member of K-pop group I formerly was enamored with, Big Bang) and his “tribute” to Trayvon Martin in 2013. Trayvon Martin, a young African American boy who was killed a year earlier was “memorialized” in a selfie on Instagram by the K-pop star. In the photo, G-Dragon dons a t-shirt over his head to mimic Trayvon’s hoodie and a dark substance on his face, to mimic Trayvon’s skin. To put it bluntly, Blackface.
Mocking the death of a dead African-American child, done by a man whose career was built largely off Black culture staples.
A man who regularly donned cornrows and afros, was a rapper, and wore the latest fashions in Black culture as well as even featuring Black children in his videos had absolutely no compassion for Black culture or Black people. After quite a bit of backlash his team, instead of denying the photo was to depict Trayvon(which would be a lie if they had denied it since it was already declared to be), insisted it was not blackface.
Pure bullshit obviously but even more pure bullshit when you consider G-Dragon has glorified minstrel images of Black people (his posting of a cartoon character named Maikol from the show “Doodly” who itself was based on racist cartoons of yesteryear and Michael Jackson, despite having little similarity besides both being Black) and wore Blackface to mock black musicians such as Andre 3000 before.
A more recent example would be the girl group ‘Mamamoo’ and their parody portrayal of the “Uptown Funk” video by Bruno Mars.
During a concert in Seoul, the girls aired a video broadcast of them mimicking the song’s music video while in Blackface. After backlash, they released an apology which in they claimed to be “ignorant of blackface and did not understand the implications of our actions”.
In my opinion, they understood. I think they understood very well that the (obviously) blackface that they had donned was used to portray Black people(as they did). I think it is more believable they didn’t see anything wrong with that blatant anti-Blackness, not that they didn’t know that it was wrong or making a mockery of Black skin.
As it came so went my love of K-pop. I do enjoy a tune every now and then but I don’t think I can ever really call myself a K-pop fan in the sense of being all about it or ‘stanning’ it again. That being said, I do believe it served its purpose; It was the first strike that made me realize how dangerous it can be to make an angel out of your favorite artists, and the first in a long line of lessons that opened my eyes to the anti-Blackness of this world and how deep a pop star in a different country that you admires’ simple nut-assery can cut.
