I hesitate to write on the topic of sexy concepts at all, because it seems like such incredibly obvious territory. However, I keep getting asked about Stellar's "Marionette" video and sexy concepts in general every day about 10 times, so I thought I'd better tackle it. You don't mind, do you?
Concern-
trolling about sexy concepts in k-pop has reached a new high point thanks to the release of Stellar's ass-clenching, stocking-wearing, substitute-jizz-dribbling "Marionette" video. You've mostly already seen it, but here it is again anyway.
I won't bother to explore all the facets of this song and video or do a traditional review, as there's already plenty of excellent writing about this MV
here,
here and
here.
I'm sure that I also don't need to explain too much about the
marketing wisdom behind it, as much of this is also covered in the linked articles. A quick recap: Stellar have been around since 2011, and have released
severalunpopularsongs, and sustaining a flop group that makes no money for two years isn't cheap. With nothing left to lose, naturally the label went all-out on the sexy concept a last-ditch attempt to make this group viable and interesting to the public, and thus profitable. Who can blame them? The marketing move has paid off, at least for now - Stellar has been giddily surfing the wave of conservative moral outrage and their new video has raked in more web traffic than all of their other videos combined. Who knows what the long-term effects will be, but it's still a far preferable situation to the ass-end of k-pop that they were in up until now.
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I thought it would be more interesting and effective to talk about some of the objections that people have to "sexy concepts" and sexiness in k-pop in general, because even though all of this stuff is supposedly "obvious", it can't be all that fucking obvious because the same old arguments keep coming up EVERY SINGLE FUCKING TIME somebody does a sexy concept. Since the frequency of this is now approaching several times per month, I figure I can save myself a lot of typing down the track if I cover off the key objections to sexy concepts in one blog post. Then I can just link you whiny pricks to it in a few months time when some nobody group releases their new song "tits out for the CEO" or whatever.
Let's split our sexy-concept objectors into a few broad categories:
The religious argument
In the early days of Christianity before the printing press appeared and made bibles cheaply available to the masses,
the contents of the bible were closely guarded and regulated. Part of the reason for the church wishing to keep the bible under wraps was probably because all those monks didn't want to share what was actually their porn stash.
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"As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste." - Song Of Solomon 2:3I don't think it takes a religious scholar to figure that metaphor out. Or what about this:
"Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father."And they made their father drink wine that night: and the firstborn went in, and lay with her father; and he perceived not when she lay down, nor when she arose. And it came to pass on the morrow, that the firstborn said unto the younger, "Behold, I lay yesternight with my father: let us make him drink wine this night also; and go thou in, and lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father." - Genesis 19:32-34And you thought the Japanese had the monopoly on father-daughter incest porn. There is
fucking, fucking and more fucking all throughout the bible, making it
the world's first mass-produced media item to use a sexy concept.
And don't even get me started on other religions - the ones that don't
teach you how to fuck will
dangle the carrot of virgin-fucking as a reward for following the rules. How low can orthodox religions go in the pursuit of sexy concepts? Lower than the girls in Stellar, I suspect.
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The feminist argument
A little anecdote from personal experience, in "Entertainment Radar" format to protect the innocent/guilty:
Model Q is a female
burlesque dancer in her 20s and a self-described feminist. She performs a burlesque strip show that tours around various venues, generally these are music venues rather than actual strip clubs, where she's often the "half-time entertainment" between music acts. The dance routines she choreographs herself, to music which she also selects, she reveals exactly as much/little skin as she wants to, and she gets paid for it. She manages herself and keeps 100% of her earnings (after taxes). Offstage, she's quite shy and sexually conservative, not a "slutty" type at all, and describes her act partly as a way to challenge and overcome her own naturally shy personality by forcing herself temporarily into a more bold, brash stage persona. Q also used to be quite unhealthy and overweight in her teens but through careful dieting and exercise has attained a much more toned body, something that she is proud of.
(note: not a picture of Q - Sistar's Bora is here purely for illustrative/fap purposes)
One day model Q is getting ready to perform at a venue. She is approached by someone backstage, another female who we'll call K. Q has never met K before and has no idea why K is there.
K asks Q who she is and what's she's doing backstage. Q explains what her act entails.
K: "I can't let you do that."
Q: "Why not?"
K: "I'm a feminist and this is exploitation!"
Q: "What? I'm a feminist too - and it's my own body, I'm proud of it and I can do what I want with it! It's not up to you! Who the fuck are you anyway?"
K: "You're not going onstage with that act, and that's all there is to it."
Sure enough, K complained to management and got Q's show shut down - only a few minutes before she was due to go onstage.
Who is the real feminist in this situation - the person who thinks female bodies should be shamefully covered up, or the person who thinks they should be proudly exposed? The person who wants to earn money for herself or the person who wants to stop other women from earning money for themselves? If K's hypocrisy was a chocolate mud cake, how sharp would the knife need to be for you to cut it and give a slice to your grandmother? Do arguments about "exploitation" even apply when it's you exploiting yourself? Isn't exploitation supposed to be wrong
precisely because the person supposedly experiencing it is not the one in the driver's seat?What about in other situations where a company is involved? Do you think the girls from Stellar were cruelly forced into their latest promotions? We'll never know for sure, but I think the smart money is on the idea that they were at least complicit, if probably not actively suggesting it. Park your pathetic high-horse "gender studies college student"-grade moralising in the handicapped zone of your brain for a moment and actually think about it for a few seconds; if you were some girl in a group and have wasted a few years of your life in training and then another two years being active in a total flop group, you'd be well and truly sick of that shit by now, and you'd see the clock ticking on your own viability as a future idol. If you weren't completely demoralised by that point you'd probably be thinking "fuck it, what the hell can we do to get some attention and success - it's time to go hard or go home". Maybe Stellar hated their sexy concept and were dragged kicking and screaming onto the stage in those high heels and stockings. Or maybe they begged their CEO to give them a sexy grown-up concept for a change, so they could be successful like all those other groups and finally get paid. Chances of both are slim though - the label probably just said "this is your next concept" and they said "okay then" because they understood the importance of being a solid team. Whenever you see a sexy concept and cry "exploitation", it pays to check in with the people who are actually supposedly being exploited, because
you never know, maybe they're cool with it.
If you actually do some research on groups and their most/least liked concepts,
the ones that the artists themselves tend to dislike the most are usually not the sexy ones, but the ones where they look like
fucking dorks. If you're any kind of celebrity or in the public eye in any form people are inevitably going to rub one out to your picture anyway whether you look cute, sexy, feminine, masculine, sleazy, take-charge, slutty, princess-like, submissive, tough, dominating, scungy or whatever because sexual preferences come in all different flavours. Every female concept is a "sexy" concept to somebody... as is every male concept. Most of the people complaining about Minah not looking like a bookworm anymore probably just have a
sexual fetish for bookworms.
The concerned music fan argument
"Oh but I'm not some crazy feminist prude or religious nutter..." I hear you say to yourself "...I'm just sick of all the sexy concepts. There's so many of them, it's getting so old!"
It's true that there's a lot of them. Hell, even the
male groups are doing sexy
female concepts now:
Why do you think that is? Well, it doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure this out. If you remember the
Bloomberg documentary I posted a while back about the k-pop business, you'll remember the following quote about k-pop in general:
"
...it gets people talking - in an age where chatter is the main currency, that's what you've got to do."
If you live in the Middle Ages in a fucking village and you want something to go away, you chase it out of the town with torches and pitchforks. That doesn't work in the age of the Internet where everyone's villages are connected with fiber-optics - all the nearby super-connected villages will just tune into your village to see what the digital black smoke plumes and screaming is all about and now suddenly your town pariah collects a whole ton of new fans. This is exactly how Rebecca Black became a millionaire, it's why the Westbro Baptist Church won't ever fucking go away either unless the people running it die in a freak vibrator-in-the-communal-spa accident and it's why no amount of hatred could kill T-ara off (if anything the humungous amounts of web traffic generated from their controversy assisted their popularity spread throughout other Asian countries). Having experienced probably the maximum amount of hatred it's possible for a bunch of singing dancing non-political polite-in-public girls to get, other companies have probably seen the T-ara situation and thought "okay... in a worst-case scenario we could still be as successful as T-ara, and they're still making top ten hits in Korean and playing showcases internationally... boy, we'd like to be able to do that... hmmm, how much could something that gets people talking like a sexy concept
really hurt us?".
Girl's Day, Sistar, Dal Shabetand AOA all recently found out the answer to that question was "not a fucking bit".
These days, if you truly want something to go away, here's a tip: rather than linking it everywhere and talking about it everywhere and saying "look at this, isn't this horrid" (when all you're really doing with that action is effectively saying "look at this, look at this, look at this") try shutting the fuck up about it. Completely. Don't mention it, ever. I don't particularly like [censored] so I don't talk about it, and I definitely won't ever talk about [censored] who is a complete [censored]. Of course, with anything sex-related people can't bring themselves to close their gaping maws, because they're secretly so fascinated. How much web traffic did this scene alone generate?
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All attempts to stamp out porn, smut or sexiness in media will always be futile, because biology is always a stronger force than sociology or morality and as soon as you type the word "sex" thousands of people with aching libidos will swarm around like angry bees. If you want proof - more people find my own website by searching for k-pop porn than they do by searching my name:
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My blogging seems to be doing well because of its sexy concept. If you clicked this blog post hoping to read the details about Girls' Generation's breaking sex controversy, you just proved me correct. For those who just skim read my blogs I'm now going to insert a few random images of Girls' Generation members and some text, just so those people don't see a lack of them and get wise to the point of this blog without actually reading a few sentences first, so excuse me while I go off on a bit of a tangent now just for those people. It's the least I can do. I'm also going to put a heading up so those people know when to start reading.
GIRLS' GENERATION'S BREAKING SEX CONTROVERSY
Look, here's a picture of someone in SNSD.
Nice outfit. What's that in her hand. Is it a translucent tissue? Could she be wiping the jizz from her face after a quickie? Oh wait, what's that machine and that cord... oh fuck it's a motherfucking
oxygen mask holy fucking shit.
This picture here is also very pretty and has some cupcakes on a tray. They look really yummy and don't remind me of
anything in particular. What's that on her left? Some dude standing above her, struggling to contain his boner no doubt. Why would she be on the floor like that? A pink mat has been laid out and it looks really soft and comfortable so I can only assume she's going to be spending some time down there, doing whatever she's doing. Gosh. I don't know about you but the vibe here is reminding me a little of Blue Velvet:
Blue Velvet is a really good film and you should check it out, although I think
Lost Highway and
Mulholland Drive are the best of David Lynch's films. Sorry, that's irrelevant, isn't it. This paragraph doesn't actually exist for any reason other than to pad out this section so SNSD fans who skipped straight here can see a block of text on first glance and they'll think that there are some juicy sex controversy details here when in fact this isn't the case and I'm just adding this section on the end to prove my point earlier about people not being able to resist the lure of sexual content especially when it concerns pop idols. No wonder companies repeatedly use these tactics. Notice how I'm using the word "sex" a lot, both in this paragraph and in the blog title, that will probably make it trend higher on some search engines. If this website had attached ads, I could make more money off them this way.
Mind you Blue Velvet was a pretty kinky film (plus it had sex in it) so maybe I'm not trolling and we're going to get a
kinky sex controversy out of this after all. Hell, if
The Human Centipede is
fair game for k-pop, so is anything! Bring on the SNSD Blue Velvet sexy concept! Sex!
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