YouTube has clearly played such a huge part in the growth of Hallyu since the inception of second-generation idols such as Girl’s Generation and BIGBANG. The release of music videos on these platforms creates more opportunities for foreigners to stumble upon their music, and clearly K-pop as a genre is taking over this platform by storm.

What I’ve found interesting in the past few months of K-pop’s overtaking of YouTube is the deeper integration and interaction of “behind-the-scenes” content. A recent shift I’ve noticed in the YouTube space is that many popular music broadcasting stations are releasing “individual fancams” in which you get continuous uncut shots of idols dancing to their songs. As Kent A. Ono and Jungmin Kwon state in their piece “Re-worlding culture?,” it is this type of content that helps “shorten the emotional distance between singers and fans,” which can especially help fans develop further “interactions” with their favorite members as they get to see more of their professional mannerisms in a more intimate way, and the vertical video format itself makes it feel almost as if you’re looking at them through the lens of recording from your own phone. If anything, it can also even serve as a way for fans to focus on certain members, as there can be many cases in which certain members of larger groups get lesser lines than other members, and thus not get a lot of screentime.

 

 

Furthermore, it is through this that even idols themselves can further promote themselves in rather inventive ways unseen in the music industries of other countries. Of course, there are the individual projects that members pursue, such as self-choreography videos or covers of English songs, but one particular video that caught my attention was the [Dance the X] video for Chungha’s “Gotta Go,” which featured not only Chungha herself dancing to the song, but also other famous K-Pop cover groups, such as Ellen and Brian and ARTBEAT.

 

What I found rather interesting with this video was not only its inclusion of cover groups but the fact that fans were just as happy to see their favorite cover groups as much as they were happy to see Chungha. If anything, fans of the cover groups were praising Chungha for dressing very casually while the guest dancers got to be more glamorous with more coordinated outfits, giving these guests to live out their fantasies of putting on the K-pop star facade. As Eun-Young Jung states in her piece “New Wave Formations,” it is because of K-pop’s “participatory culture” that enables “both the industry and the consumers to conveniently promote, circulate, appropriate, re-create, and recirculate media contents” (Jung 84) and the fact that these media conglomerates are taking advantage of the rise of cover groups and the sort of content they produce makes it evident that this sort of fan-made content is only going to become more popular, and, in turn, help popularize K-pop even further.

Clearly, YouTube has played such an important role in the way K-Pop has grown to reach international audiences, and now with the rise of new types of fan-serviced media, it’s bound to get even bigger and more popular with each passing second.

Cultural appropriation is unfortunately nothing new to the K-pop industry. From traces of Black hairstyles found in K-pop acts here and there to the superficial wearing of traditional garments, K-pop’s globalized nature makes it prone to more and more instances in which cultural aesthetics are utilized for profitable purposes, making idols prone to more and more criticisms by international fans.

Unfortunately, cultural appropriation itself has been around since even earlier, as exemplified in “yayaya” by T-ARA (released in 2013), which features the members partaking in stereotypical portrayals of Native American culture and practices such as war cries.

The comments below the YouTube video unsurprisingly have people (Native American and otherwise) taking sides as to how they feel about the portrayal of the Native American caricature in the video.

Certain viewers mention how the accuracy of these portrayals are painted in broad strokes (one commentator mentions that T-ARA are taking feather headbands from Woodland tribes but also incorporating teepees/tipis from Plains tribes) while other expressed a level of gratitude for the video showcasing the continuing existence of Native American culture, with one viewer suggesting, “maybe we could have a [Native-American] kpop [sic] star.”

This is the issue with the cultural appropriation vs. cultural appreciation debate that Pham points out: the term “cultural appreciation” itself prioritizes the “feelings” or “good intentions”. It is because there is so much emphasis placed on how viewers “feel” about these certain portrayals — whether they find it either amusing or offensive — that these debates often fizzle out into nothingness as nothing more than a “let’s agree to disagree” situation, which is why Pham asserts that we move on to calling this sort of practice “racial plagiarism.”

What Pham interestingly points out is that “racial plagiarism” involves the process in which “racialized groups’ resources of knowledge, labor, and cultural heritage are exploited for the benefit of dominant groups and in ways that maintain dominant socioeconomic relationships,” with “dominant groups” primarily related to White people. I wonder where Koreans fit into this equation: are they still considered to be part of the dominant groups which render these actions as “racial plagiarism” or does their status of being an ethnic minority give them some degree of leniency? Where does South Korea, a country so often situated outside of these conversations on racial inequality in America, fit into with these power dynamics that are also apparent in Western civilization in its entirety as well?