Corporate logic says you can solve racism with a flawless dance routine. After American Eagle had a cheerless Sydney Sweeney say bad puns about “genes” and “jeans”, Gap launched its counter-attack: six very cheerful and multiracial young women dancing in tight denim outfits.
The Gap video went viral, albeit not quite to the extent that Sweeney’s did. “This is actually a cultural takeover,” said Gap’s CEO, claiming that it had garnered 400 million views across its various social media platforms. “Now This Is A Great Denim Ad,” read a Glamour magazine headline. Indian-American influencer Megha Rao took a photo of the campaign, posted it to Instagram, and recited the same self-aggrandising phrases about corporate “representation” that we have heard for the past ten years: “that little girl who always wondered why a face like hers was never in magazines gets to raise a daughter who takes it for granted.”
Together, the women in the video are called Katseye. Steadily becoming the world’s biggest girl group, they’re backed by two music industry giants: Geffen Records (owned by Universal Music Group) and Hybe, who are responsible for some of the biggest K-pop artists in the world. The women in Katseye are between 17 and 23, and come from the US (via China, Cuba, and India), Switzerland (via Ghana), the Phillipines, and South Korea. Their hits are typically sung in English: there’s the TikTok-primed “Touch” and the controversial, acerbic “Gnarly” which has lyrics like “Oh my God, this song’s so lit, congratulations”. They are the product of a music business more cynical and exploitative than most Western listeners could ever imagine.
Emerging in 2024, Katseye were the first successful “international” girl group to come out of South Korea’s now $10-billion pop industry, otherwise known as K-pop. The industry’s characteristic all-singing, all-dancing “idol” groups first became a thing in the mid-Nineties and had accrued a large, global audience by 2012, when PSY’s “Gangnam Style” became a global hit. Now, K-pop’s fanbase is global and Gen-Z: last month, gargantuan girl group Blackpink managed to gather 70,000 fans in Wembley Stadium, while America’s three-day fan convention, KCON, welcomed 125,000 people.
K-pop has no “signature sound”. A random sample of EPs will expose you to a dizzying range of electronic tics and textures, most of which have been collaged together from 50 years of extant pop history in the West and Japan. Sometimes this factory-made oeuvre ends up looking and sounding more experimental and interesting than its Western counterpart. While Anglosphere pop artists are allowed long hiatuses, most working K-pop artists are expected to release at least an EP every six months. The resultant oversaturation puts pressure on producers and video directors to stay ahead of the curve. So old genres come together with surprising originality.
The industry is exiting a love affair with Nineties-style drum-’n’-bass; it has also seen periods of Tokyo “city pop”, Ibizan house, and Eighties synthwave, all produced and mastered with a precision and cleanliness scarcely seen in the original source material. It is not unusual to hear several of these flashback genres on a single EP, and a seasoned listener may not be surprised to encounter them all on one track. This level of supercharged pastiche is K-pop’s real trademark. It applies to its visual side too: music videos tend to be expensive affairs, cutting quickly between synchronised choreography and glossy, highly-conceived sets.
Corporate strategists conspire to shape the perfect image for future acts. A tiny minority of working idols have any involvement in their own lyrics, choreography or visual identity. “Trainee” pop idols are taught singing, dancing and deportment in-house, often incurring sizeable debts they’ll have to deduct from their later wages. The wealthiest K-pop companies edge towards the peak period of Metro Goldwyn-Mayer, with creative directors, stylists and choreographers on permanent payroll.
Corporate prestige is a big thing in K-pop. Even casual fans know who funds and produces their favourite act; labelmates are meant to act like members of a real-life family. Under the name Bighit Entertainment, Hybe was responsible for the massive success of the notionally intellectual seven-piece boy group BTS, an endeavour that shot them to the top tier of K-pop’s corporate world. For a long time the company only dealt in male artists. As if to prove the naysayers wrong, Hybe has spent the past three years building up a slate of female acts. Katseye, who live in Los Angeles, are their first “international” one.
Many acts come through “survival shows”, and Katseye was no exception. Hybe and Geffen started out with a pool of 20 young women and let external voters cull it during a webseries they called Dream Academy. This came closer to a South Korean sifting-and-sorting exercise than a typical Western singing show; contestants wore truncated schoolgirl uniforms, went through tightly choreographed “challenges,” and sat through routine rankings and eliminations, this time conducted by an AI-generated robot voice. Personal narratives, “sob stories,” and celebrations of individuality had no part in the contest; all fans had to rely on were photos, short introductory videos, and footage of the contestants singing and dancing, generally to a comparable standard. Voters at home went off a mixture of looks and nationality. A Filipina contestant shot to first place with the help of her country’s enormous K-pop fanbase; a girl from indifferent Slovakia was promptly voted off.
“America’s post-BLM racial politics found a bedfellow in South Korea’s corporate cynicism.”
Here, America’s post-BLM racial politics found a bedfellow in South Korea’s corporate cynicism. All conventional K-pop idols are of East Asian extraction; while historical atrocities have marred the relationship between the two countries, market logic dictates that a limited number of singers are allowed to be from Japan. Japan’s music fans are big spenders, and are more likely to drop the cash on a given K-pop act if they can relate to one of the singers. A token Japanese national only benefits the group as a whole.
Katseye replicates this shallow effect on a massive scale. The ideology behind the group is about as progressive as a Miss World final; you’ll max out your earnings if you can attract fans from every music market on Earth. Dream Academy’s end goal of catch-all racial representation meant that, if women were both black, or both Indian, they would find themselves competing against each other.
An in-depth Netflix documentary, Popstar Academy: Katseye, told something closer to the real story. The contestants thought they had simply joined a training bootcamp for a K-pop-style girl group, and had no idea they would ever be subject to public voting. As with every other “survival show”, the point of Dream Academy was twofold: it stressed the power and totality of the K-pop training system, and it lied about the meritocracy involved. There’s space for everyone in the idol machine, the message went. We can train you to be a star. But only if you devote your entire life to it.
An earlier cautionary tale came from JYP Entertainment, an enormous institution founded by the veteran singer and producer Jin-young Park. Park had always wanted his groups to take off in the West. This generally meant rewriting their songs in English and taking them onto American morning talk shows. But mainstream fame in the Anglosphere never followed.
In a 2023 webseries, America 2 Korea, Park patrolled the US to find a pool of girls who could sing and dance to acceptable idol standards. After a rigorous bootcamp and a few eliminations they became LA-based six-piece girl group VCHA, aged from 13 to 19. Their debut EP in early 2024 failed to land with the English-speaking market. The group disappeared from the public eye.
Then one of their mothers filed a lawsuit. During her time in VCHA, Tracey Madder’s 15-year-old daughter Kiera had allegedly amassed a debt of over $500,000, most of which went towards a $2.5 million group home chosen by the company and fitted out with secret surveillance cameras. Kiera, Madder claimed, was pressured into working 11-hour days, made below the California minimum wage, received inadequate treatment for performance-induced injuries, and faced verbal and emotional abuse from JYP staff.
“I feel like I don’t even hv a personality anymore,” the teenager wrote in a text message to another member of VCHA. One girl, Madder testified, developed an eating disorder and later attempted suicide during her time in the group. The introduction to the lawsuit quoted a passage from Nicholas Nickelby about “traders in… the helplessness of children”; some of the anecdotes sound as if they came straight out of Judy Garland’s life as a child star at Metro Goldwyn-Mayer, where she was abused, manipulated and overworked.
The case ended in a private settlement. There has been no industry reckoning. Kiera and another girl have left VCHA; last week, the remaining four released their first single under a new name. “Thank you for staying focused, hungry, resilient and most of all TOGETHER!” wrote Park in a celebratory Instagram post.
A recent spate of positive news coverage about Katseye looks only dodgier in light of this controversy. Interviewers often fail to acknowledge that they are an idol group at all, tailor-made for their market and operating under the auspices and whims of the K-pop system. A recent fawning profile in Flaunt magazine talked about “artistry”, with Katseye comparing themselves to Lady Gaga and Madonna, singers with near-total creative control.
“I see a lot of evolution… we’re gonna try a lot of different things,” said member Lara to NME in June, with no further clarification about who would make them. Teen Vogue says Katseye’s critics simply bear “typical qualms about women with success”, and that the group “knows their magic lies in their authenticity”. A short Rolling Stone article — perhaps the worst offender yet — contains no less than seven further glowing references to the girls’ “authenticity” and “individuality.” It all falls apart at the end, when the writer finally touches on the “creative” process. The latest EP, it turns out, “started with the girls being played songs and offered pre-selected verses and parts to try out”.
Katseye’s fans want the group to be successful at all costs. Western listeners, primed by headlines about industry predators, may switch off if they think the singers are being exploited. So their fans remind us repeatedly that Katseye are allowed privileges their Korean label-mates do not share. K-pop diets are often extreme, with solo singer IU famously subsisting on an apple for breakfast, a sweet potato for lunch, and a protein shake for dinner; but Katseye can eat properly. They have enough time off to rest between performances. They are unusually candid during regular public livestreams. As the Rolling Stone journalist takes pains to remind us, they have a “group therapist, who offers them a ‘safe space’ to work through any issues”. They are allowed boyfriends; this would cause tabloid alarm in South Korea, where idols are expected to refrain from relationships out of dedication to their fans. Two Katseye members have even come out as bisexual, a declaration that wouldn’t make a ripple in the Western pop scene but is unheard of in K-pop.
But this new emphasis on diversity and authenticity is just another part of Hybe’s corporate strategy. Journalists are falling for it when they should really be concerned. Katseye, whose personal narratives are now tied up in the K-pop model, make convenient “kind faces” for the industry behind them. The industry proper is built around the premise that its stars must have as little power as possible; once cash-strapped companies manage to muscle in on the American scene, it will flip back to its logical extreme. We can learn from K-pop’s visual brilliance and its postmodern musical risks. We must leave the idol model on another continent.
