The dark side of K-pop

South Korea's entertainment industry is perhaps the most toxic on the planet, at least among nations under a democratic regime. The statement may sound sweeping, and it's usually wise to be wary of such absolutist tones when analyzing an artistic phenomenon: in this specific case, however, there is so much evidence to support it, as we'll see below, that its use is justified.

South Korea and Japan

Neighboring Japan exerted a strong cultural influence on Korea starting in 1910, when it militarily occupied the country. That domination lasted until 1945; then in 1953, following independence and the definitive split between North and South Korea, the North effectively turned into a bunker nation, expelling any influence deemed out of line with Kim Il Sung's doctrine, while the South became a right-wing dictatorship with strong Western ties and kept its cultural links with Japan.

These ties are evident both in music and in the world of broadcasting. Consider that K-dramas, the Korean series now successfully exported worldwide, originally began as a radio format in 1927, during the Japanese occupation, following models used by the occupying nation; and even when they made the leap to television in 1962, Japanese series remained the benchmark (and, at least in part, still are today).

As for music, trot, the oldest form of Korean popular music still enjoying mainstream exposure today, is in fact a derivative of Japanese ryuukouka, although over time it has developed a strong identity of its own; likewise, the idols who have dominated the South Korean scene since 1992 - the year Seo Taiji debuted and became a commercial sensation - are essentially the local transposition of the idol model that had been in vogue in Japan since the 1970s.

One shouldn't be fooled, then, by the occasional diplomatic skirmishes between the two nations: the two countries are actually aligned on many fronts (just look at their shared allegiance to the United States as a counterweight to China), and their respective entertainment industries keep looking to one another, even if perhaps less one-sidedly than in the past, to the point that today innovation flows from Korea too. The worldwide success of K-pop, starting in the 2010s, is a model of exportability that Japan has never managed to replicate outside East Asia - though, of course, outside of music the picture looks quite different: in video games and animation, Japan remains a dominant force.

This article focuses specifically on K-pop and its idols, since they represent one of the two groups hit hardest by the oppressive mechanisms of the South Korean entertainment industry (the other being actors, to whom an appendix is nonetheless dedicated).

The dehumanization of idols is not actually exclusive to South Korea, but a defining feature of the industry in Japan as well: it was in Japan that the first cases of performance-related stress emerged, along with negative public reactions to news about idols' private lives (consider the career of Akina Nakamori, whose commercial dominance of the local scene was derailed by her suicide attempt in 1989, without public opinion showing any empathy); it was Japan that enabled systems in which figures of power abuse their position (it recently came out that Johnny Kitagawa, founder of the immensely powerful agency Johnny & Associates, sexually abused hundreds of boys under his control over the decades); and it was in Japan that those exploitative contracts for artists were devised, contracts that leave them with no control not only over their own work but even over their own person, forcing them to follow directives on how to dress, what to say publicly and who to associate with, often banning them from having any romantic relationship whatsoever (the latter aims to keep the idol figure chaste and sexually desirable to their audience, in the ultimate triumph of their objectification).

All these strategies were imported into the South Korean market, which then took them to extremes, coming close to actual forms of slavery. It's ironic to think that the world of Korean idols began with the aforementioned Seo Taiji, an artist who always retained full control over his own image and music (writing and playing his records almost entirely on his own), because nearly everyone who followed in his footsteps turned out to be little more than a puppet, thus representing the complete negation of his figure as an artist fully in control of himself.

There was, however, one thing Taiji himself fell victim to: the incredible pressure from his own fans, particularly female ones, who were literally obsessed with him, to the point of stalking, which would soon lead the artist to emigrate to the United States, returning to Korea only for work projects. The excellent K-dramas "Reply 1997" (tvN, 2012) and "Reply 1994" (tvN, 2013) partly depict this phenomenon (the latter even features a Taiji fan among its lead characters).

A vocabulary

Since Taiji's time, the phenomenon of Korean idols has developed and solidified through a series of specific dynamics, several of which are so widespread that they've been given their own names. Below are the most common terms.

Sasaeng

A type of fan – mostly female – who go so far as to invade the privacy of their idols. While the most obvious consequence is physical harassment (often trying to get close to the idol in some secluded spot, through stalking and stakeouts), there are unexpected repercussions that are downright surprising for their level of obsessiveness and sophistication, such as the creation of a genuine black market for information, in which sasaeng trade and sell details about idols' private lives and whereabouts (some have grown rich this way, while others, conversely, have ruined themselves, going as far as dropping out of school to be able to chase their idols, or turning to prostitution to raise the money needed to buy information).

Anti-fan

At the opposite end of the spectrum from sasaeng are anti-fan (this time distributed more evenly between the sexes), who do exist in the West too, but only as a niche phenomenon, whereas in Korea they take on major proportions and are the subject of public debate. While sasaeng start out from an appreciation of the idol, even if it spills over into aggressive, pathological behaviour, anti-fan start out from hatred of them. Convinced that the idol in question has no talent and doesn't deserve the success they're enjoying, anti-fan often operate online, through forums and chats where they organise defamatory campaigns against their targets, sometimes managing to whip up storms that make national headlines and have a strongly negative impact on the idols' mental health. In essence, this amounts to genuine, organised cyberbullying, which can occasionally escalate into physical assault (in 2006 Yunho of Tvxq survived an attempted poisoning). It can happen that a disillusioned sasaeng turns into an anti-fan.

Trainee and Noye gyeyag

In the systematisation of the apparatus governing the lives of Korean idols, the turning point came in the late 1990s, when Sm Entertainment (one of the most powerful agencies in the local entertainment industry) devised the noye gyeyag, often referred to by its English translation: slave contract. This is a type of contract whereby anyone aiming to become an idol commits to following their agency's or record label's directives for a very long period (once as long as thirteen years, though since 2010 the legal maximum has been seven). During this period, aspiring idols are known as trainee and are forced to live in dormitories with their fellow trainees, following exhausting singing and dancing regimes, strict diets aimed at keeping a slender figure, and wearing only clothes supplied by the agency.

For the most part, this extremely long apprenticeship is not covered by the agency: the trainee is in fact required to pay back all the costs, which usually leaves them with two options. The first is working part-time during the day and then attending training in the evening, a punishing lifestyle that effectively wipes out any free time and even sleep (working trainee end up sleeping just a few hours a night, with serious repercussions for their physical and mental health). The other option is to go into debt with the agency, running up liabilities so heavy that, once they are finally selected as an idol at the end of the process, they're forced to spend their first years in the entertainment industry paying off their debts.

It should be noted, however, that being hired as an idol at the end of the process is by no means guaranteed: the agency may well decide to drop the trainee, deeming them not up to standard, in which case that person would be left empty-handed.

Physical health

Videos showing cases of fainting right after a performance, involving both trainee and already established idols, are not uncommon. These videos are often filmed without the artists' consent and effectively amount to a violation of privacy, but at least they have one positive side effect, namely helping raise public awareness of the workloads these young people are subjected to in that world.

Mental health

Beyond all the issues listed above, mental health is a very underrated aspect. Idols suffering from internal pressures (agency control) and external ones (stalking, cyberbullying, etc.) are offered very little support, and public debate shows that part of the population is deeply hostile to discussing the subject (partly because addressing it would mean admitting shared responsibility, as the ones exerting the very pressures that, over time, erode idols' health). The relentless, insistent demand for flawless performances and the sense of isolation stemming from having no one to talk to about it are often enough on their own to make things spiral out of control.

Many idols develop serious forms of depression even without ever having been the target of specific attacks: simply being immersed in that constant climate of negativity, forced to live on high alert for years, is enough.

The element of sexual repression probably also plays a role, with these people not only required to remain chaste but also to lie about their sexual orientation: the high percentage of gay idols is well known, terrified as they are by the prospect of being outed, to the point that not a single openly gay name can be found among the scene's biggest stars (South Korea is a strongly homophobic country, and in this respect is in a far worse state than Japan).

The suicides

Following long periods of depression endured without adequate support, or as direct victims of vicious attacks from public opinion, often carried out through cyberbullying, many idols have taken their own lives, at a frequency that has become alarming since the mid-2010s. Below are the best-known cases.

U;Nee (2007)

Born Lee Hye-ryeon in 1981. She began as an actress in the second half of the Nineties, mainly playing villainous characters. This provoked hostile reactions from the public, who after a while began to identify her with the characters she played, eventually pushing her to end her acting career. In the early 2000s she tried to reinvent herself as a singer, but things didn't go any better: online, she was hit with criticism for every possible reason, from wearing overly sexy clothes to plastic surgery to allegedly poor singing ability. The biggest blow, however, came from another celebrity, TV personality Lee Kyung-kyu, who cited her as an example of what he wouldn't want his daughter to become.

A very shy and sensitive person, despite having been in the spotlight since she was young, U;Nee began suffering from depression, and over the years things only got worse, until the young woman decided to hang herself on January 21, 2007. Only a few colleagues attended her funeral: because of the negativity surrounding her, the artist had in fact been isolated by much of the entertainment world. Rapper Kim Jin-Pyo criticized the poor turnout of music industry colleagues at the event, and the public agreed with him, unleashing campaigns of abuse against several singers who had stayed away. Perhaps that much support would have been more useful while the young woman was still alive.

Ahn So-jin (2015)

Born in 1992, she was a trainee at Dsp Media starting in 2009, working part-time by day to support herself and training in the evenings. In 2014 she took part in the reality show "Kara Project", which was meant to select a new member for the girl group Kara, but she failed to win. The girls who were cut were then supposed to have a chance to be recycled into a side project called Baby Kara, but she was the only one denied that opportunity: Dsp terminated her contract in early 2015, likely because of her age (almost twenty-three), by then considered too old to debut in a girl group. The agency's decision, coming after five brutal years of training, pushed her first into depression and then to suicide, which occurred on February 24, 2015, when she jumped from the tenth floor of a building.

Jonghyun (2017)

Born Kim Jong-hyun, he was a member of the hugely popular boy band Shinee. He took his own life on December 18, 2017, at the age of twenty-seven, by carbon monoxide poisoning from charcoal briquettes. There was no single triggering event in his case, but rather years of depression, likely made worse by the general conditions of the South Korean entertainment industry. It's also known that two other Shinee members, Taemin and Onew, suffer or have suffered from mental health issues.

Sulli and Goo Hara (2019)

Choi Jin-ri, known as Sulli, had been an actress since childhood, and in 2009, at the age of fifteen, she joined the girl group f(x), which achieved considerable success over the following five years. In 2015 she left the group to focus on her acting career. From that point on, she became the target of fierce online criticism over her supposed eccentricity, her feminist activism (in particular, having spoken out in favor of abortion, which remains illegal in South Korea), and her rejection of the deeply conservative social conventions of South Korean society. On October 14, 2019, she took her own life by hanging. It later emerged that she had suffered heavily from cyberbullying, and had repeatedly asked her agency, Sm Entertainment, for protection from it, without success.

Her story is closely intertwined with that of one of her closest friends, Goo Hara, also a singer (a member of the girl group Kara) and actress. Her body was found lifeless on November 24, 2019, along with a farewell note. Among the factors that drove her to suicide was a combination of several elements, above all: Sulli's death, which worsened her depression; problems with her ex-boyfriend, hairdresser Choi Jong-Bum, who had assaulted her in the past and, after their breakup, threatened to release a sexually explicit video of her; and the vicious cyberbullying that erupted after news of the video's existence emerged, even though it never actually circulated publicly (merely knowing it existed was enough to make Goo the target of a hate campaign, despite her being the victim of blackmail).

Both suicides had a major public impact and sparked campaigns that eventually led to two proposed laws: the Sulli Act, which aimed to impose harsher penalties for cyberbullying but unfortunately stalled in parliament, and the Goo Hara Act, which did manage to pass, barring negligent parents from inheriting their children's assets. The latter was created in response to the fact that Goo's mother, who had been estranged from her daughter for many years, had demanded half of the family inheritance.

Yohan (2020)

This is the least-known case. He was a member of the modestly successful boy band Tst and was found dead on June 16, 2020, at the age of twenty-eight. His family managed to keep the matter entirely private, and the official cause of death has never been revealed. However, the young man was in perfect physical health and there are no reports of any attacks against him, leaving little else in the way of plausible theories.

Haesoo, Moon Bin and Nahee (2023)

2023 was the annus horribilis of the South Korean entertainment industry, marked by a striking string of suicides. For the music world, however, the dynamics were somewhat different from those mentioned above, with families managing to keep as much as possible out of the public eye. There seems to be an emerging need to reveal as little as possible to the media, which is, after all, an integral part of the pressure system that produces these outcomes.

Trot singer Kim Ara, known by the stage name Haesoo, was found dead in a hotel room on May 12th. All that is known is that she left a farewell note inside the room. She was twenty-nine years old.

Moon Bin, member of the boy band Astro and a well-regarded actor, was found dead at home on April 19th, at the age of twenty-five. He left no note, but according to police it was most likely a suicide (or at least, that was the working theory before the ensuing investigation, after which no further news emerged).

Independent r&b singer Im Na-hee, known simply as Nahee, was found dead on November 8th, at the age of twenty-four. No further details are known, but her producer and partner Kim Youngwoong (known as Lazy) confirmed that she had long suffered from depression.

Choi Sung-bong (2023)

A different case involved Choi Sung-bong, a tenor devoted to crossing over between pop and classical music, who found fame in 2011 after finishing second in the first season of "Korea's Got Talent". From that point on he published a successful autobiography, in which he described a childhood spent in extreme poverty, and, most importantly, managed—at least for a while—to make a living from music. Attention faded within a few years, however, and this drove him to devise a scam against the public: in January 2021 he claimed to be suffering from cancer, with the aim of raising funds for one last album.

The deception was exposed within a short time, prompting him to make a public confession that same October, effectively putting a tombstone on his career. On June 20th, 2023, the artist was found dead in his home in Seoul, at the age of thirty-three: shortly before taking his own life, he posted a note on YouTube informing the public that he had spent the past couple of years repaying everyone he had managed to track down, and apologizing for his mistakes.

Opinion on him remains divided: some are unwilling to forgive what he did, while others take a softer stance, pointing out that he may have felt like a boy who had lived in poverty (at times even homeless) for the first twenty-one years of his life, watching the little he had managed to gain slip through his fingers. The act certainly deserves condemnation, but the person who committed it perhaps had some mitigating circumstances—and even if one believes otherwise, he certainly didn't deserve the end he met.

His story is also emblematic of a largely overlooked segment of South Korean society, at least within the glittery world of K-pop: those living below the poverty line, surviving on odd jobs, working well into the age when people in other countries start thinking about retirement homes, sometimes relying on organized crime just to get by, and so on. It's striking to think how quickly he managed to climb out of such a nightmare, only to end up in the meat grinder of the entertainment industry—situated at the exact opposite end of the social spectrum from where he came, yet no less merciless.

Actors

This article obviously doesn't aim to demonize K-pop, which musically may or may not be interesting (the best material, in any case, tends to come from the rare cases in which artists have control over their own work), but rather to point the finger at its hierarchical structure and at the system that produced it—a system that is in fact widespread and affects other fields as well.

South Korea is a country that is highly advanced technologically, but also very backward when it comes to social mores, and the combination of these two factors often proves explosive. As mentioned in the introduction, another category that pays a particularly harsh price for this condition is that of actors.

In their case, sexual chastity isn't expected (unless they're also idols, which happens increasingly often), but they're still expected to be beyond reproach. If it comes out that an actor has cheated on their partner, the backlash on their career is inevitable. This does happen in Japan too, to be fair, but in South Korea the phenomenon goes even further, touching every single aspect of an actor's life: an innocent statement taken out of context, one reference too many to the culture of a country deemed hostile (perhaps a symbol printed on an outfit that the artist wasn't even aware of), too eccentric an appearance—any of these is enough to land someone in the eye of the storm. The discovery of drug use essentially spells the end of a career (as happened to Yoo Ah-in, incidentally one of the country's finest actors, who found himself out of work and also had to serve a year in prison).

Below is a sadly long list of all the best-known actors who have taken their own lives over the past twenty years: Lee Eun-ju (2005, twenty-four years old), Jeong Da-bin (2007, twenty-six years old), Choi Jin-sil (2008, forty years old), Jang Ja-yeon (2009, 29 years old, died in 2009), Park Yong-ha (2010, thirty-two years old, also a singer), Jeon Tae-su (2018, thirty-four years old), Jo Min-ki (2018, fifty-two years old), Jeon Mi-seon (2019, forty-nine years old), Cha In-na (2019, twenty-seven years old), Oh In-hye (2020, thirty-six years old), Park Ji-sun (2020, thirty-five years old), Song Yoo-jung (2021, twenty-six years old), Jo Hana (2021, twenty-three years old), Yoo Ju-eun (2022, twenty-seven years old), Kim Mi-soo (2022, twenty-nine years old, cause officially unknown, though suicide is strongly suspected), Jung Chae-yull (2023, twenty-six years old), Lee Ji-soo (2023, thirty years old) and Lee Sun-kyun (2023, forty-eight years old). The latter was one of the stars of "Parasite": not even international fame could shield him from the scandal that engulfed him, through no particular fault of his own.

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