mattlakeman.org
Submission statement: Eternally interesting blogger Matt Lakeman goes on a (very) deep dive into K-pop. He covers the history of Korean pop music, obsessive fans, gruelling popstar cram schools and the corporate machine behind it all.
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Notes -
Left unexplored is the question why? Why do they do it? Why do parents send their kids to idol auditions and camps? Why do producers do all this complicated logistical managerial work for slim profit margins with high risk? Why do so many young Koreans sell their body and soul to this machine?
Everyone involved knows the game. They know it's so insanely cutthroat that you'll never get rich out of it. So the motivator must be something other than money.
I suggest you put yourself in the shoes of a lower-class or middle-class member of the Korean precariat who leads a usual crummy existence as a parent. Not even trying to send your child to an idol audition is, I suppose, similar to not even sending him/her to cram school i.e. not even bothering to give him/her that very marginal shot of enrolling to one of the top national universities. It means that you’ve already internalized that your child will inevitably grow up to be another lousily paid miserable wagecuck in the hellworld of late-stage capitalism, just another nameless prole. You’ve already accepted this reality, even though your child is not even an adolescent. And if you happen to have two children, you and everybody around you already knows that you won’t be able to afford all the cram school curses, summer camps, private tutors etc. for both of them, which means you’ve condemned one or maybe two more children in the country to the prole life.
This is not a decision that is easy to live with.
This strikes me as unnecessarily pessimistic, though I myself do not live in Korea and have only passed through there and therefore I cannot with complete confidence say that you are far from the mark. I do, however, live in Japan, which has--to some degree--similar cultural mores.
In Japan (and be warned: Incoming personal viewpoint not based on hard data and dancing perilously close to the most shameful generalizations of nihonjinron), as perhaps everywhere, it takes all types. You do have what used to be called kyoiku mama who were obsessive about education for their children and putting them through the grinder of cram schools to get into "top schools" (scare quotes because such schools are only "top" due to their bafflingly rigorous entrance examinations--once students are enrolled, the so-called 人生の夏休み or "summer vacation of life" begins, when the pressures and strictures surrounding high school and prepping for the Big Exam are behind them, and they are essentially guaranteed to both graduate and receive a job of similar clout as their school, regardless of academic performance.)
But not all mothers are kyoiku mama and not all students are obsessive about the status of their universities. The ruling class and future bureaucrats all have a school they typically attend (a public university, in particular Tokyo University), but your average joe (or joanne) who wants to work at a car dealership or electronics store needn't worry about shooting for that goal. From not quite birth, but probably from at least high school onward, the trajectory is set--and it's not all the doom and gloom of what you are characterizing as a "miserable wagecuck." Nor is "the prole life" seen as such a horrible fate.
I do not suggest here that everyone is happy--no more than they are perhaps in Hungary, or Australia, or the United States. But I would suggest that to the degree people outside Japan wring their hands or shake their heads about karoshi (death from overwork) or the punishing workweek of the salaryman, they probably make the mistake of imposing their own cultural norms and expectations on a context where they probably should not.
To get back to Korea, I imagine, as in Japan (and more and more in the US), fame is the magic fairy dust that creates an aura of wonder around even the most humble and banal personality. To be famous is to be notable (regardless of why), and in a society that to some degree perhaps values conformity (as in Japan and Korea) ironically this is an acceptable way to be a nail that sticks up. Thus: A certain percentage of families will shepherd their children toward this (for that vicarious fame-by-proxy) and a certain number of teens with any sort of performing talent will naturally be drawn to this particular candle flame simply because of the promise of glamour.
In other words, the pull needn't be a draw away from the workaday of the office society (which not everyone is a part of anyway) or some horrible anonymity in a suburb (in fact this is to some degree a goal to shoot for--a similarity to everyone else, a "joining society" [shakai sanka is the term in Japan]). The draw is that youthful aspiration, Fame, I'm gonna live foreevah, I'm gonna learn how to fly, etc. Not everyone has it; but a lot do.
Finally, the cutthroat aspect: Everything seems cutthroat. In Japan even getting a driver's license is an unimaginable hassle of paying thousands of dollars to go to driving school then take a test where the most infinitesimal missteps will cost you enough points that you fail--and are not told why. The typical Japanese professor at my university will administer an exam, mark it, release the scores, but not tell students which questions they missed. This is for you to go sort out in fear and trembling. Being on a cheerleading squad is cutthroat. Being in any sort of anything is cutthroat. It makes sense then that being in an idol group (which will have a cultural capital regardless of the fame of the group) is also going to be cutthroat. And all the other contestants are also vying not just against you but with you, you're all in the same boat, etc. etc. This imbues a great sense of group and belonging, to, at least Japanese, and I imagine to Koreans as well. I noted that in that blogpost many, if not all, of the informants of the author were not themselves Asian. They happened to "make it" in the groups for whatever reason, but the cultural expectations and norms of the process were not part of their own emotional disposition, for lack of a better term, and in the end they balked at experiences that someone more imbued in the culture would not.
For perspective, though, at least some top British universities do this as well.
Things being cutthroat in domains other than signalling knowledge of trends and class belonging presumably feels unusually unusual from a US perspective.
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I'll not dispute this detailed writeup, I'll just add that yes, what I wrote is pessimistic in the sense that, based on what I've read and seen, the current reality for the middle-class and lower-class in developed economies is that it's increasingly difficult to avoid sliding down to the ranks of the precariat, and also to leave it. Basically one needs to master marketable and specialized skills in order to reliably secure a middle-class lifestyle.
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Why do people gamble?
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Between the whole post and the SSC Redditpost about the Korean education system, I can't help but suspect the real reason is "the philosophical foundations of Korean culture allow Moloch to flourish."
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