Culture

K-Pop Fans Defuse Racist Hashtags


One of the wonders of witnessing a political revolution led by people who are firmly rooted in online culture is watching new forms of insurrection develop and be deployed almost instantaneously. This week, thousands of K-pop stans—the passionate, Web-literate followers of bands such as BTS, BLACKPINK, Monsta X, GOT7, and others—have been steadily defusing racist hashtags by flooding Twitter with “fancams,” or fan-edited videos of K-pop stars singing, dancing, and serving looks. Fancams are often used to defang or derail an online conversation. Per stan grammar, to post a fancam is to roll one’s eyes; it’s a pointed, efficient way of refusing to engage in unsavory rhetoric while also boosting the presence of something beautiful.

This week, as the hashtag #whitelivesmatter began trending in the U.S., the stans promptly organized, posting enough fancams to make the tag functionally useless within hours. Anyone who clicked was greeted by apparently endless footage of K-pop stars engaged in elaborate choreography. Stans are as savvy as they are righteous—when the tag changed to #whitelifematters and then #whiteoutwednesday, they simply regrouped and reëngaged.

But the K-pop fans haven’t just been hijacking hashtags. On May 31st, the Dallas Police Department posted a tweet inviting citizens to download iWatch Dallas, an app that could be used to upload videos and photos in order to report “illegal activity from the protests.” A user named @belispeek responded to the D.P.D.’s tweet by writing, “I got a video for you,” and then posted a fancam of the South Korean pop star Taemin performing onstage. Shortly thereafter, the call was out: overwhelm the app, neutralize it, and render it nonfunctional. A user named @ygshit helped direct the action: “guys download the app and fucking FLOOD that shit with fancams make it SO HARD for them to find anything besides our faves dancing,” she tweeted. The post received a hundred and seven thousand likes. Two hours later, the D.P.D. announced that “due to technical difficulties iWatch Dallas app will be down temporarily.” (The app did eventually go back online, though it presently has a one-star rating in Apple’s App Store, which makes it far less likely to be featured or to appear in a search.) On June 1st, a user named @ngelwy posted a screenshot advertising a similar app being used by the Grand Rapids Police Department: “you know the drill! SEND IN ALL OF YOUR FANCAMS!!! CRASH THE WEBSITE!!! MAKE THEM TAKE IT DOWN!!! PROTECT THE PROTESTORS!!!” The stans went to work. The next day, the app was gone. “The GRPD is closing the online portal for videos of civil unrest,” the department tweeted.

The Dallas Morning News referred to the action against iWatch Dallas as a “mass prank,” but nothing about what these fans had done felt unserious; it seemed, to me, as if they had disarmed a bomb. If you have not yet witnessed K-pop fandoms at work, it’s hard to understand the ferocity and dedication of these communities—how prepared they are to mobilize, and how powerful their brand of activism can be. Maria Sherman, a senior writer at Jezebel and the author of the forthcoming “Larger Than Life: A History of Boy Bands from NKOTB to BTS,” told me that the idea of acting with incredible speed, and in tandem with other fans, is inherent to the stan experience. “K-pop sociality is predicated on digital coördinated action and publicity,” she said. “Mobilizing quickly is the foundational K-pop stan experience, because those armies take an active, participatory role in their consumerism.” Sherman explained that though it’s not unusual for K-pop stans to engage with viral tweets, normally with the idea of bringing more exposure to their favorite artists, something about this particular instance felt different. “This time, they were emboldened by personal and political ideology en masse,” she said. “It was both a participatory act of protest and an act of fandom that doubled as protest.”

Musically, K-pop is heavily based in New Jack Swing, a style of pop music invented and perfected by black Americans in the nineteen-eighties and nineties. (It reached a kind of creative apex in 1986, when Janet Jackson released “Control,” and it returned to dominate the charts again in the early two-thousands, when boy bands such as ’NSync embraced the genre.) K-pop’s link to black art is unmistakable, which makes the K-pop fan base’s defense of black lives feel appropriate. Sherman also pointed out that the vast cultural reach of K-pop has left its fan communities awake to systems of injustice. “The global nature of K-pop makes it an industry where fans are especially perceptive of racial inequality,” she said. “It makes sense that the issue of racism would be one to mobilize around.”

It helps that K-pop has significant historical links to social commentary. “The group most commonly credited with kickstarting modern K-pop, Seo Taiji and Boys, regularly performed hip-hop songs that attacked societal ills,” Sherman said. “Even Psy’s ‘Gangnam Style,’ beyond its viral horse-dance move, is a subversive criticism of wealth and class. Any perception of K-pop as apolitical is misguided and likely an extension of the belief that every boy band or girl group is frivolous, manufactured, unserious.”

The activism of K-pop fans this week reminded me how important it is to highlight avenues of protest that don’t exclude the immunocompromised or otherwise high-risk people (for whom exposure to the coronavirus during a march or rally might be deadly), or anyone in a financially precarious situation (for whom cash donations to bail funds and other causes might feel impossible). Fan groups—especially when their members are young or female—are often ignored or scorned, which means that there’s also a spiritual kinship to K-pop stans’ support of Black Lives Matter. Their action was a moving and effective gesture of solidarity in a moment that demands exactly that.





READ NEWS SOURCE

This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this site, you accept our use of cookies.