K-pop after George Floyd

By Deauwand Myers

Rarely have I gotten into a Facebook discussion on some sociopolitical issue. But I did recently tell a Korean friend, one who always pronounces my name wrong, that the brouhaha over Jay Park's remixed video and calls of racism and discrimination from fans and foes alike was odd, and probably wrong.

Jay Park and other rappers across the world do have a certain affectation, one that harkens to a particular kind of image of an African American man, invariably from Brooklyn, New York. You'll see plenty of Asian American men present this kind of affectation in their daily lives. The sin, cultural appropriation, is then bandied about towards them.

Cultural appropriation is an empty copying of another's culture without any intellectual or historical appreciation therein.

If you didn't like Korean rappers and their borrowing styles of hip-hop and mannerisms from America, then you don't like K-pop at all. R&B, jazz, rock 'n' roll and hip-hop are uniquely Black American vectors of expression, along with the fashion, mannerisms and styles therein.

K-pop liberally borrows from these traditions. I don't have a problem with that. What I do have a problem with is K-pop artists doing the borrowing without the cultural and historical knowledge of those said traditions. So a Korean ballad singer or rapper wearing blackface as a joke shows a deep lack of understanding of the culture and history from which they make a living, and this rank ignorance is offensive and, yes, anti-Black.

Jay Park is Korean American, and besides experiencing white supremacy and anti-Asian sentiment himself, he does have an understanding of the African American experience. He employs Black people and collaborates with Black people. So for me, giving Park and others with similar backgrounds the cultural appropriation moniker is reductive.

A more nuanced, and perhaps incisive, critique of Park and some Asian American men, and just non-Black men in general, who practice what I call the "Brooklyn affectation," is this: why do these men (and sometimes women) only imagine Black Americans in this narrow, "urban" box?

Not all Black people are from Brooklyn, and not all Blacks living in Brooklyn act this way. Not all good hip-hop comes from Brooklyn ― Nas, Notorious B.I.G., Lil' Kim, and Jay-Z notwithstanding. Not all Black people wear braids or carry guns or drink forties (none of these are wrong, mind you, e.g. some iterations of malt liquor are good). In fact, per capita, this particular image of a Black person most conjured up in the minds of too many is a minority of Black people in America, and denies the vast complexity of the lived, Black, American experience, in culture, geography, history and modes of style and fashion.

The Brooklyn affectation, if it is problematic, may play into stereotypes of Black Americans: they are dangerous; they operate on the fringes of society; they can't conjugate verbs; they are sexually pliant; they lack education and good family lives; they are ensconced in poverty and criminality. Deadlier, and more succinctly, the Brooklyn affection asserts this: African Americans' lives are de facto transgressive, and their expressions are themselves transgressions. This is why too many young people of all races who aren't Black find hip-hop so alluring; consuming it is a safe way to transgress against their parents and society, because Black people are bad and listening to their bad music is dangerous.

Succinctly, the Brooklyn affectation imagines African Americans as two-dimensional constructs without any interiority or agency. It robs Black people of their humanity.

There are worse things than the Brooklyn affectation. Artists who lean into this as their main form of expression can commit a sin almost worse than racism: being boring. There's just an intellectual laziness to it I don't find interesting, certainly not enough to pay for their music.

My Black friends, most of whom disagree with me about Park's cultural appropriation controversy, have a right to dislike the copying of Black forms of art without attribution or understanding of the history from which it comes, particularly after George Floyd. We are even more sensitive to anti-Black behavior.

At the same time, the ever-increasing globalization of societies makes policing cultures borrowing from other cultures less and less productive. Particular styles of braids and cornrows are certainly Black and African in origin, but almost every culture has had some form of braids in their history, Koreans included. The same can be said for fried chicken, sweet potato pie, rice dishes and barbecue. Even Black soul food/Chinese cuisine fusion restaurants exist.

There are problematic things about K-pop, not least of which is the brutality and exploitation the young Koreans producing it too often experience. And yes, the rap verses in a BTS or Exo song will inevitably have some Brooklyn affectation to them. This doesn't rise to the level of Twitter outrage. Corn on pizza…that's a travesty worth tweeting about.

Deauwand Myers (deauwand@hotmail.com) holds a master's degree in English literature and literary theory, and is an English professor outside Seoul. The views expressed in the above article are the author's own and do not reflect the editorial direction of The Korea Times.