Factory Girls (original) (raw)

“And I wouldn’t want them to just do New York, Chicago, L.A.,” Jacobson went on, pacing around his office. “I’d want them to go to Alabama and Missouri and Kansas. We need them to eat, breathe, and sleep this stuff. So that’s going to be an interesting negotiation.”

Ultimately, Jacobson faces the same conundrum as Lee Soo-man: how do you come up with music that appeals to both the East and the West, without alienating the fans of either? Jacobson said that he was commissioning hundreds of songs from a broad range of songwriters—Asian, American, and European—as more and more Western writers become aware of K-pop’s potential. “I don’t want to lose the Asian flavor. I want songs that speak to Girls’ Generation’s brand and also speak to the sound in America right now.”

Half an hour before the Anaheim show, I was backstage, on my way to meet Tiffany and Jessica, the two members of Girls’ Generation born and brought up in the U.S., who are both in their early twenties. An S.M. man was guiding me through the labyrinth of dressing rooms, where various idols, mainly guys, were having their hair fussed over and their outfits adjusted. There was a lot of nervous bowing. My minder hustled me along, telling me what questions not to ask the Girls. “Was it sad to say goodbye to your friends who didn’t make it?” he said. “Do you have a boyfriend?” He paused. “This is all going to Korea, and it’s a little different there,” he said. “So if we could stay away from the personal questions like boyfriends.”

I began by asking the pair about the challenges they had faced in adapting to Korean culture. “I thought I would be able to adjust, because my parents spoke Korean at home,” Tiffany said. “But I didn’t even imagine how different it would be. American culture is so open compared to Korean culture, which is really conservative. So I would be, like, ‘Hi!’ and they were, like, ‘You don’t say “Hi!” You bow!’ ”

And what were their living circumstances like now? Tiffany said, “Six of us live together, and the other three live like a minute away. So we’re always going back and forth to each other’s houses.”

Do netizens chronicle their movements on the Internet?

“Yeah, that’s true,” Jessica said. “I’ll be at a restaurant and it will be on Twitter in, like, ten minutes.”

“What’s it like living with that?” I asked.

“I think we’ve been brought up to be really careful and to take responsibility in our actions, in order to be in this position,” Tiffany said. She added, “We always stay at home.”

I mentioned a news item I had seen about how the Girls tried to disguise themselves in the streets of Seoul but that their limbs alone—the shape of their arms and legs—gave them away. Was that true?

“It is,” Tiffany said, shooting an accusatory glance at her arm. “It’s just so . . .” she paused, searching for the right thing to say. “Freakishly cool!”

From out in the arena came a long, low wailing sound—the screams of the fans, dying for the idols to appear.

“O.K., we have to go,” the S.M. man said.

But I did have one personal question for Tiffany. “Your eye smile: did you learn that or is it natural?”

“No,” Tiffany replied, giggling. “My dad smiles this way.” She eye-smiled me from two feet away: a jolt of pure cultural technology.

“How long has the Republican Party been courting you?”

As I was heading back toward the stage entrance, I came upon a circle of idols tightly bunched around a small man in a dark-blue suit. He was quietly giving some sort of exhortation; occasionally, he paused and the group would send up a shout. Moving a little closer, I recognized Lee Soo-man. I was struck by the rapt attentiveness with which his “family” hung on his every word. He was directing his remarks at EXO, his new Chinese-Korean group; all twelve members were present. With each shout, the twelve EXO boys bowed deeply from the waist.

Not all members of the S.M. family are as close to Chairman Lee. In recent years, several family members have sued the company over abusive treatment and so-called “slave contracts.” Perhaps the most notorious case is that of Han Geng, a Chinese-born, Mandarin-speaking dancer. S.M. discovered him in Beijing in 2001, and he débuted as a member of Super Junior in 2005. In 2009, he accused the company of, among other things, forcing him to sign a thirteen-year contract when he was eighteen; paying him only a fraction of the profits earned; fining him when he refused to do things the company asked him to do; and making him work for two years straight without a single day off, which Han claimed caused him to develop gastritis and kidney disease. The Korean courts ruled in Han’s favor, but shortly after the ruling he withdrew the suit. He has since left the group.

S.M. initially defended its long-term contracts by pointing to the costs of housing, feeding, and training recruits for five years or more, which can run into the millions of dollars. But the furor over “slave contracts” damaged S.M.’s reputation among netizens, and in recent years its contracts have become more equitable. Girls’ Generation’s members are rumored to have signed up for seven years each, with salaries of a million dollars a year, which can hardly be called exploitative.

Other agencies employing an S.M.-style factory system may be less progressive. In February, 2011, three members of KARA, a hugely popular girl group with D.S.P., one of the smaller agencies, filed a lawsuit claiming that, even though the group earned the agency hundreds of thousands of dollars, each member was paid only a hundred and forty dollars a month. The agency disputed that figure, and eventually the two sides settled. The onerous restrictions that some agencies place on idols have been widely publicized in Korea. Another small agency, Alpha Entertainment, forbids its female trainees to have boyfriends and bars any food or water after 7 P.M., according to the Straits Times, Singapore’s English-language newspaper. They are not allowed to go anywhere without supervision. When the paper asked the mother of Ferlyn, one of the Alpha trainees, how she felt about her daughter’s regimen, she replied, “What the girls have gone through so far has been quite reasonable. The company has invested a lot in them, so they need to work hard for the company. I am not worried about Ferlyn. I want her to follow her dreams and make it big.”

When an entertainment industry is young, the owners tend to have all the power. In the early days of the movie business, Hollywood studios locked up the talent in long-term contracts. In the record business, making millions off artists, many of whom ended up broke, used to be standard business practice. When you replicate the American entertainment business, and add the Confucian virtue of rigid respect for elders to the traditionally unequal relationship between artists and suits, the consequences can be nasty.

Ironically, for all the money that the agencies invest in idol-making, the success of PSY, the first Korean pop star to break out in the U.S., took place largely outside the factory system. PSY is with the Y.G. agency, but he has never been idol material. His first album, “PSY from the PSYcho World!,” was condemned for “inappropriate content,” and his second, “Ssa 2,” was banned for anyone under nineteen. In 2001, he was arrested and fined for smoking pot, and, during his mandatory military service, he neglected his duties and had to serve again. He’s a Korean pop star, but he’s not K-pop, and by satirizing standard K-pop tropes in “Gangnam Style,” PSY may have subverted K-pop’s chances of making it big in the West. At the very least, that a pudgy guy with a goofy dance can succeed where the most brilliantly engineered idol groups have not suggests that cultural technology can get you only so far.

The first group to take the stage in Anaheim was _SHIN_ee, a boy band. The boys were fun to watch—heavily made-up and moussed male androgynes doing strenuous rhythmic dances. But I’m going to go out on a limb and say that there is no way that a K-pop boy group will make it big in the States. The degree of artistic styling is much more Lady Gaga than Justin Bieber. Perhaps there is an audience of ten-to-twelve-year-old girls who could relate to these guys, but there’s a yawning cultural divide between One Direction, say, and _SHIN_ee.

Still, the fans loved _SHIN_ee, especially when the boys distributed themselves around catwalks set up above the aisles and began greeting audience members with winks and waves. Then the crowd sound turned from a baying into a sort of keening—I had never heard that exact tone at a show before.

I was watching the show from beside the stage when the nine members of Girls’ Generation came out, in bluejeans and white T-shirts, to perform “Gee.” The whole place shouted the hook: “Geegeegeegeebabybaby.” Whenever a song ended, the Girls deployed around the stage. At one point, Sooyoung came to where I was standing and began frantically winking and waving her way through the crowd, wearing a blissful smile and shaking her glossy hair. She was no longer the cold idol I had encountered in the press room but a super cheerleader. It was just as Jon Toth had said it would be: the Girls had come to see us.

But after the Girls left the stage the concert flagged a bit, and I found myself wondering why overproduced, derivative pop music, performed by second-tier singers, would appeal to a mass American audience, who can hear better performers doing more original material right here at home? The Girls’ strenuous efforts notwithstanding, the mythical mélange of East and West remained elusive.

I headed up to the arena’s Premium level, where Interscope had reserved a box. The woman running the elevator told me that she couldn’t remember hearing screaming this loud at a show. She had put in earplugs.

The box held Interscope people from the marketing and A. & R. departments. There were drinks and food—anything you want, Jacobson said, putting an arm around my shoulders and guiding me down to a seat in the front row of the box.

“Now, I am here purely as an observer,” he said, settling into the seat beside mine. “I just want to open my eyes and take all this in.”

Jacobson gestured around the arena. “O.K., notice no one is sitting down. No one. Even up in the rafters. So, obviously, there’s a connection there.” Connection, he explained, was the essence of pop music, according to his boss, Jimmy Iovine. “Jimmy always says it’s all about the connection between the artist and the fans,” he said. “This whole business, it’s just about that connection. And, clearly, people feel that connection with the Girls.”

There were some covers: Jessica and her sister Krystal did Katy Perry’s “California Gurls,” and Amber, the tomboy from f(x), Kris, from EXO-M, and Key, from _SHIN_ee, covered Far East Movement’s “Like a G6”—the only Asian precedent so far for the kind of pop-group success that Jacobson would like the Girls to have in America (even though all the members of Far East Movement were born in L.A. and grew up there). Acts came on and went off, changed costumes and came back on again. In between, we were treated to messages from the S.M. family. At one point, the crowd watched a slightly creepy video with cartoonish illustrations about the love that the S.M. family members feel for each other. Occasionally, the concert seemed like a giant pep rally. But at its best it elicited primal pop emotions that only a few of the greatest pop artists—the Beach Boys, the early Beatles, Phil Spector’s girl groups—can evoke: the feeling of pure love.

When the Girls came out again, Jacobson watched them closely. “O.K., it’s all about humility,” he said. “Look how they bow to their fans. That’s a big part of it.” He started ticking off the Girls’ qualities on his fingers. “First, beauty. Second, graciousness and humility. Third, dancing. And fourth, vocal. Also, brevity. Nothing lasts more than three and a half minutes. Let’s time it.” ♦