if i could take you away

For most of my life, I resisted Korean music. I just had a mindset that it was superficial and plainly, just not music. But after trying to avoid it, I failed. It was the entertainment industry that drew me in. If you have to know anything about Korea, you need to know that the Korean music industry is completely redefining celebrity. After just living in Korea for a year or two, I began to notice a few trends.

1) You can’t just sing anymore. Major Korean entertainment companies like YG, SM, JYP may initially seek out singers, but in their books, they’re looking for stars. These companies want individuals that eventually can do everything in addition to singing: dance, act, and model. You might think this is blocking off talent, but it actually is beneficial to auditioning individuals. If you’re an amazing dancer, but a poor singer, they’ll sign you up with a few years of vocal training. If you’re a great singer but a poor dancer, they’ll sign you up with with dance training. Really if you’ve got one of the above, it’s possible to become a singer.

2) Hardcore aggressive marketing. These musicians are like products and these entertainment companies are like corporations. They need to sell their product. So how do they manage to do that? The magical medium of TV. What amazes me is how many live TV performances Korea’s artists showcase themselves in. In the U.S., you might see a TV performance or two by an artist, but never on a weekly basis. It’s not just the performances either. Singers are featured in commercials, talk shows, game shows, reality shows, and TV dramas. If that singer is marketed properly, everywhere you look, you’re going to see, hear, and smell that singer.

The thing is–it doesn’t stop with the television. With the most connected population, Koreans are quick to publicize information on the Internet. People publicize celebrities and celebrity gossip through blogging sites…rapidfire. What what what? Rumors fly, search engines crash, and chaos wins. Perezhilton, you say? Not even close. Korea has some of the harshest and crudest gossipers in the world. It’s really all due to aggressive publicizing.

3) Addictive production. I was actually reading this blog about popular songs that are “brain itches”. If anyone, Music producers in K-POP are masters at producing “brain itches”. Songs that are impossible to drive out of your head. There’s no escape, sometimes. But “production” doesn’t stop at the music. It’s the choreography. This last year 2008 was a year full of addicting…moves. Every hit song had a little dance. This dance was really cute or it was just fun to follow along. If you can choreograph with brain itching melodies and dance moves, everyone…even old ladies…will sing and dance along to your song.

4) Absolutely crazy fans. Fan clubs are immensely popular. Organized official fan clubs are everywhere. They have meetings. They organize events. To put it simply, they coordinate their worship. Where in the world do you find this? The group DBSK has the largest fan club in the world with over 800,000 official members. This just shows how significant this entertainment is in peoples’ lives in Korea.

In a vicious cycle, popularity can be shortlived. If anything, the demands on singers in Korea are HUGE. In America you often hear about these child stars that live stressful lives. But these singers in Korea have passed the stage of merely “stressful”. It’s almost inhumane. But somehow, some of these young singers survive.

But you have to admit, a lot of this madness is pretty interesting. Second to food, Korea’s entertainment industry never ceases to amaze me.

When girls my age are learning how to take care of young kids, I’m doing the exact opposite. All my life, I’ve never felt that connection with the adolescents around me.
I can’t exactly pinpoint my disgust in children.

Rather, I see all our world’s children, not as God’s gifts, but as problems. Imagine. Each child is another one of us. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not a pessimist. I’m just searching for a solution to an ideal world.

If you think about it, every child represents one of us. We are all children, and have not changed much from kindergarten. That Barbie the toddler really wanted is going to become that Gucci purse and mink coat. That fight with the neighbor’s kid develops into that world war. Those little instinctive behaviors that strike world tragedies come from our childhood. All these behaviors I observe in kids, arise in the problems we have in our world.

Don’t you think that we have enough problems already? I don’t really see the benefit in bringing in more lives when it’s getting increasingly difficult to handle the world’s problems. If you think about it, every child brought into this world is taking away something from someone already living–whether it be a meal, a home, or livelihood.

And to invite more people into this world, to take more resources away from the existing global inhabitants would just be selfish. A meal that baby eats would take away from the meal that a sixty year old in China could have eaten. In this overly-populous world, what is the right solution?

It’s not just material goods we’re “taking” from each other. By introducing children to this world, we are further damaging this planet in peril. Every child added means another lifetime of resources taken and carbon emitted. The fact that we can see a lifetime in an individual’s infancy irritates me.

Though family life is valuable, though raising a child probably is enjoyable, I wish the world would take a step back and see the impact of introducing more lives to this world.