Structure!
Sabotage!
Salvation!
K-Pop Has It All

The rumblings of a legendary fan uprising began in September 2008, in the weeks leading up to the biggest annual event in South Korean pop—the Dream Concert, where 70,000 fans gather to watch dozens of artists perform. Seating at the Dream Concert has always been a political affair, with seats distributed to fan groups in blocks based on the popularity of their idols—an arrangement that gives just a few fan clubs the power to control the crowd. In 2008, the most popular artists were the dashing boy groups TVXQ, SS501, and Super Junior. Armed with the knowledge of their numbers, their fans formed an informal union. They called themselves CARTEL, a portmanteau of their fan club names. Their goal—like many unions that have come before them—was sabotage.

There was a new girl group on the scene, and veteran fans felt that the up-and-coming Girls' Generation, with their girl-power theme songs and pink light displays, needed to be taken down a peg. So on that fateful September night, CARTEL staged a 70,000 person coup. When Girls' Generation took to the stage, there were no colored lights, no cheers, no coordinated fan chants. Instead they walked out into an abyss, now known as the “Black Ocean.”

For eight agonizing minutes, every light that shone through the crowd went dark. When the nine teenaged members of Girls' Generation opened their mouths to sing—trembling, their voices shaking, their synchronized movements slipping in and out of coordination—they were met with silence. When the crowd finally started to make some noise, they chanted, seemingly spontaneously, not for Girls' Generation, but for their rivals, the Wonder Girls.

Though Girls' Generation would eventually recover from this psychic death, the first Black Ocean was an act of coordinated vandalism. Its object was to crush the dreams of teenaged girls and their fans, hardly a cause worth celebration. But the methods of this demolition were giddily, spectacularly effective. It proved what politicians and police departments are now learning: that fan groups within K-pop are prepared to mobilize and capable of executing a plan when driven by unifying passion.

My first introduction to K-pop came ten years after the Black Ocean, at the start of 2018, after hearing that Jonghyun, a pop star who had broken out as a soloist after initial success with the boy group SHINee, had committed suicide. I immediately set out to learn more about this singer, whose final music video had the same eerie, elusive power as Aaliyah’s “Rock The Boat”—a beautiful, erotically ambiguous face suspended in cosmic metaphor.

The outpouring of grief at Jonghyun’s death recalled Rudolph Valentino, Leslie Cheung—deaths so tied up in the very idea of tragedy that they demand mourning become a full theatrical production. I wanted to understand how fans had managed to get billboards of Jonghyun placed in the Seoul subways, how votes were being whipped on his behalf for Korea’s daily competitive music shows, and why any of this organization even existed in the first place. The more I watched, the more the unflagging energy of these efforts became a source of boundless fascination. Jonghyun’s fans organized for months and years following his death, culminating in a push to stop Twitter from removing his public profile—the rare protest against Twitter policy that actually won. Understanding the world that surrounded Jonghyun required understanding an entire industry. As a fan of both infrastructure and classic Hollywood-style studio systems, I was a goner. I fell for K-pop and its fans and never looked back.

For K-pop neophytes, it’s easy to see the outcomes of obsession, but not the meticulousness that sustains it. As someone who is not Korean and does not speak the language, I became acquainted with the platforms used by international fans to keep up with the news. Getting into K-pop was the most purely futurist experience with the internet I’ve ever had—log in and a new universe appears, fully formed and always growing. On Twitter, I started following Korean fansites and Korean-to-English fan translators, who labor for free to provide up-to-date records of new performances and subtitles for international audiences who want to follow along. I looked to forums like OneHallyu and r/kpop for daily gossip, and I quietly lurked on private KakaoTalk chats that were started by fans who didn’t want to post their gossip publicly. Once immersed, it became clear the relationship of international fans to the Korean music industry is not without its strains, some of them severe. Black K-pop fans have been subjected to virulent racism, largely from fellow fans who spit venom on anonymous boards like CuriousCat. There have also been incidents of racism and ignorance from stars, with performers donning blackface or appropriating styles and symbols from other cultures. In these cases, watch as the gears of cross-cultural communication flip a switch to operate in reverse. International fans post their critiques, which translators courier back to the Korean music companies that manage stars, in hopes of educating their idols and obtaining a proper apology. In this economy of traded understanding, no amount of context is ever enough. Politics and cultural histories pass between fans as quickly as pictures, the only satisfying answer to the plea embedded in the K-pop lover’s discourse: “I want to understand.”

Scratch the surface, and find that many idols are just one generation removed from poverty. The current stars belong to the first generation born after authoritarian rule ended in 1987, and the memories of the time before glamour are rarely discussed in depth. Instead, sorrow seems to bubble up uninvited and unprocessed. It’s there when a faded star from the early days of the Korean music industry weeps at the sight of a respectful cover performed by the ascendent generation. It’s there when superstars recollect childhood memories of neighborhoods that were once strongholds for the fallen military dictatorship. Sorrow’s sister, anger, appears in the rap scene, where upstarts prove themselves singing bitter odes to capital and forever war. The candy-colored chaos of K-pop music videos has a kind of anarchic resonance—fun can only come after reality and memory have been thoroughly obliterated.

For those inflicted with revolutionary longing, looking to another country’s culture reveals that struggle is everywhere, that all people are fighting the same battles up the same hills. If the Black Ocean was an early indicator of the power these fan communities could wield, then the 2016 protests at Ewha Womans University demonstrated that K-pop could converge with transformative political action. 200 young women gathered for a sit-in at the college administration offices after deleterious changes to the school’s curriculum were enacted. They were met by 1600 armed police. Just before the officers charged, the students began to sing. The song they chose was the debut single from the once-vanquished, now-immortal Girls' Generation. The standoff was taped by an officer at the front line—in the video’s last moments, the students finished the song’s first chorus holding hands.

The video, and the violence that followed when the police attacked, prompted outrage from students and alumni, who demanded an investigation. The president of the university was disgraced, but her corruption was found to lead up a long ladder into the national government, all the way to the country’s then president, Park Geun-hye. When the corruption allegations were published in the South Korean press, millions marched for Park’s resignation. When she was impeached, removed from office, and eventually put on trial, “Into The New World” played in the streets.

Pop culture doesn't really change the world. Pop colors the day, it gives people something to look forward to—another video, another song, another tantalizing morsel of gossip. It does not inherently provoke or provide structural change; pop is not a protest. It’s a product to be consumed, an indulgence. But the gift of pop is that it actualizes a fantasy: visions of a world that doesn’t yet and maybe won’t ever exist. The very best pop music is like a dream before interpretation—like revolt, it’s an invitation to the new world.

Teo Bugbee is a full-time union organizer and sometimes-writer based in New York City.