On idols, idol history, and idol fandom

[adevyish]

Taking a break from usual programming to rec The Idol Cast for anyone into the history of East Asian idol pop. The site is split into sections — the main page with the podcast (newer episodes are transcripted), the blog posts, and a few other sections.

As someone who grew up around EAsian pop and used to pour over articles in 11pt Arial or Verdana I can no longer find, it’s been really nice to read articles by someone who writes like they were there for it.¹ I’m still working my way through the posts and transcripted podcasts, but anyway here’s a few highlights amidst my grand thesis of boybands.

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I. Not Atom Boyz Again

Episode 27: The Taiwanese Wave Dramas
The rise and fall of Taiwanese pop cultural dominance, from Teresa Teng to Fahrenheit. And of course, Meteor Garden.

This episode suggests that a successful Taiwanese idol must be popular on an idol drama, likely based of a shoujo manga where the idol is playing a charming-yet-vulnerable guy.

There’s been no culturally relevant Taiwanese boyband since Fahrenheit broke up. You can argue this has to do with the rise of K-pop, or perhaps companies realizing it is much cheaper and less fraught to debut solo idols — especially if they have to launch via idol dramas. Now DD52 and Atom Boyz have taken K-pop idol learnings and brought it back to Taiwan, but are the groups debuted from them sustainable?

DD52 aired in 2020, but: winner G.O.F (Wildfire) released one song then nothing,² runner-ups Pink Fun (Sony) seem to have carried out some AKB48 popularity vote shenanigans for who got to be in their latest single, and my faves HUR (AOA) aren’t exactly attracting huge crowds at free performances.

With Atom Boyz, there’s four debuted/ing groups: AcQUA fka Mercury (Seed), Venus (Wildfire/TPOP), Ozone fka Earth (Sony), Fenix fka Mars (Wildfire/TPOP). And none of these are the winning group that is still promised a debut.³ Atom Boyz wasn’t exactly testing anyone on their acting ability, CFs for Gogoro aside, and having to send so many idols onto dramas to make them individually popular seems impossible.

Venus got a debut primarily because a few thousand fans crowdfunded over NTD$7M (nearly US$240k) for their debut. However, before that but after Atom Boyz ended, Jhen and Mike of Venus got a little MC corner on a show on Atom Boyz’s TV station. They did so well that the station handed them, and Venus by extension, a primetime Sunday slot for a new variety show that seems to be based on Weekly Idol. Is it possible to sustain a male idol group in Taiwan by variety television alone? Especially when the main characters are being sold as “the male 大S and 小S” (中文) instead of “your ideal boyfriend”? Twice has a decent female fan following in Taiwan, sure, but can a boyband be sold like an old-school, variety-star girl group?

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II. 2014, the Cursed Year

Episode 50: The Rise and Fall of the Hip-Hop Idol

This goes over a lot of K-pop history, but as someone who was adjacent to ToppDogg fandom around the disintegration of ToppDogg: oof. It reads accurate to the histories of BigHit that 2016-and-earlier Bangtan fans had documented but are now completely buried.⁴

That said, I will add a small caveat because I disagree a lot with their analysis in Episode 9 of early Bangtan and 1D, claiming a lack of polish leads to a lack of appeal. The whole appeal is the chaotic camaraderie as expressed in short Youtube videos — 1D’s video diaries and TV parodies (Spin. The. HARRY.), and Bangtan’s “bombs” (Taehyung and Jimin jumping on a hotel bed lipsyncing to “#SELFIE”!) With both groups, I only really got into the music after I’d binged hours of content on Youtube. Who cares if idols are polished, it’s about the personality.⁵

Episode 36: A Brief History of Boy Bands
From the Beatles and the Monkees to One Direction and BTS.

I’ll jump straight to the internet era section of this episode. Arguing that Bandom carried the boyband torch in the 2000s, they say:

the post-2000 boy bands made very little impression on mainstream culture and existed mainly in closed fandom ecosystems which were moving increasingly online or accessible only through cable television.

This is interesting because it reflects what happened in K-pop idoldom in the mid-2010s as it transitioned from the second generation (mainstream in Korea) to the third generation (increasingly niche). Episode 52, on SuperM, talks about this a bit as well.

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III. The Exes

I haven’t listened to it yet (no transcripts, which I prefer), but Episode 47 features an ex-Larrie who runs a blog about being an ex-Larrie. I’ve read some of this person’s blog, and they do have really deep knowledge on One Direction fandom, the kind that comes with being a former Dark Larrie. However, they seem to blame the fandom as a whole for the worst members of fandom. I see it as similar to “someone blogging through a bad breakup” — and that’s valid! It’s just also incredibly biased. (Though, there is no such thing as an unbiased source when it comes to The Larries.) I am fairly sure I was in the same circles as the author, and well — I disagree with their assessment of the fandom.

Tbh, this blog is probably one of the best public documents of 1D fandom, because the fandom itself is hostile to documenting its fandom history. Documenting 1D, yes, documenting the fandom: hell no. One Direction fandom doesn’t like to self-document for a reason: 1D fans were made fun of, a lot, by mainstream media for being too crazy and too deluded. There were television documentaries about how crazy the fans are.⁶ If you don’t document, they can’t weaponize your own work against you.

So it irks me when I see this author specifically trying to make a name for themselves among the music newsletter sphere — I think I’ve seen their blog mentioned by Penny Fractions. With no other accessible fan histories, these music journos take what this blog says as the truth. And what they are saying confirms the view: yes, all 1D fans are utterly crazy and hopelessly deluded, and also, the ultimate evil: a part of a cult.⁷

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—. Notes

¹ It used to be so much easier to find good sources on EAsian pop just by googling, but I can no longer find these articles because now pages 1–10 of search are just clickbait. If anyone can find that interview with the person who almost made it into SNSD but her parents pulled her out and she moved back to the US…

² Fans accused G.O.F’s agency of being too busy with Atom Boyz to organize a second comeback, and apparently none of the members had or have signed contracts — yikes! Incidentally, Fenix fka Mars and Venus are both being managed by the same agency. (Wildfire and TPOP are both subsidiaries of Golden Star involved in Atom Boyz; the music videos are being released through TPOP but the Instagram bios point to Wildfire.)

³ On the status of Atom Boyz winning group Uranus: scandal-hit Kidz, who said he was withdrawing from the group, has started showing up at performances again.

⁴ The best surviving English-language fan history of early Bangtan is probably this LJ post by fearnoworld.

⁵ Another point of contempt this podcast has for 1D is that 1D are proud to be an anti-boyband. But 1D are not unique in this! Contemporaries and rivals The Wanted didn’t dance either and had a very laddy image, likely to distinguish themselves from polished boyband JLS. It worked for The Wanted, until breaking America broke them.

⁶ Fanlore’s 1D editor is an “anti”, as in anti-Larrie, and is very stringent about what points of view can live in the 1D pages. So much for “not privileg[ing] one fannish viewpoint over any other”.

⁷ One of the primary 1D songwriters, Julian Bunetta, called the fandom a “cult” too. (He then attempted to dig himself out of this hole by claiming he meant it positively, as in “cult classic”.) Actually one argument that this blog makes is that Sony is responsible for the cultishness. I don’t agree with them; imo Sony is evil but not that competent. For one thing, it’s still acceptable to criticize your faves, or their sales tactics, in 1D solo fandoms — one of which is still under Sony. Contrast a BTS tumblr update account admin being run out of the fandom in ~2017 over saying it was okay to not stream 24/7! (See also Episode 24.)