28 Thoughts on "28 Reasons" / On K-Pop

The following is written in response to the performance video of the K-pop song “28 Reasons” by Seulgi, released in October of 2022.

I - Impressions

1. Where have I been. I closed my eyes to K-pop since high school then opened them again, with nothing more than a little peeking here and there once in a while, and it’s like a beautiful and terrible monster spawned one hundred-fold (one hundred heads? One hundred babies?) during that time.

I found the music video for Seulgi’s 28 Reasons and a ton of jaw-dropping K-pop from this list of top K-pop songs of 2022 by Dazed, a British culture magazine. I’m not a subscriber to the magazine; I hadn’t known about it before. I was bored and clicking through random points of interest. Experiencing the piece and the various music videos in it was mind-blowing (I had known about none of them).

Increasingly I find that I cannot willfully ignore the growing power and influence of K-pop sweeping over the world. All the more reason to really look at it, then.

2. “How can you move on from this?” asks the first comment shown. When you let your mind go along with the mood of a K-pop song, it can become intoxicating.

I’ve always listened to pop music for the mood. 기분 (kibun), or mood, is a powerful determinant, much more directive, in the Korean mind. A lot of action can be justified and explained due to bad kibun. One could even frame it as that the constant and conscious aim of all social interaction is to form and maintain the good kibun of oneself and others.

3. Dancers observe technique in those moves that requires restraint. Restraint. Beauty and seduction in restraint. “There’s a lot to unpack,” an American voice might say. But why unpack when holding back has its own charms?

4. The outfits: Tomb Raider meets hard metal in a solid 90s throwback. It’s like when I wear my black cotton crop t-shirt with my gray climbing pants, but with a lot more hardware.

5. “What is that half circle thing in the middle-back??” asks Erik. I tell him that it seems to be a stage set with the industrial themed look to create a certain illusion that accentuates the V-alignment of the dancers. It’s not enough, though, and we sit for a moment stumped.

Then, it hits us.

It’s the other stage that they periodically cut to. The whole thing was compactly produced in one room. This blows our minds. (I can see the contemporary balcony up above!)

6. 28 reasons. Why 28? It seems to stump a lot of people.

“28 reasons 몰라도 돼.” 28 reasons you don’t have to know, says a portion of the lyrics.

Ok, more seriously. It’s not about the significance of the number 28. 28 is a signifier, a container. It is like a nice oblong ceramic container within which you think there are a specific number of objects (14? 28? 72? Nobody knows!), but it doesn’t matter. It’s been slapped on with a label that says “28.” Oftentimes -- if not always -- I find that in East Asian thought it’s not primarily, certainly not exclusively, about the subject/object/thing itself. The thing itself is not meant to be taken in as a thing in itself, but rather as stand-in for or in conjunction with something else. It is all about context and how any piece is simply part of the greater and dominant harmonious and natural whole in which change is only a cyclical part of sameness.

“It could have been 29, a prime number!” says Erik, and I see his point how the divisibility of 28 by 7 and 4 makes it less special.

7. There is an urge to want to bother/tease (괴롭히다) something that you dote on.

The last time I was at the beach, overwhelmed by the incessant waves in the endlessly open ocean, I imagined that the waves were bothering me and pushing me mercilessly out of playful love.

II - Dualities

8. In a world(view) where there can only ever be good or bad, and nothing in-between, bad girl energies can create space and liberty for a girl trying to be good but finding it hopelessly impossible to try to maintain a regard as such.

9. The thing about accepting the age-old Daoist truth that we are all made of good and bad, without any motive for change, is that it is a conservative stance.

10. First, there existed the good vs the bad with room for nothing else. Then came along the desire for “nothingness;” absence of desire and self. This nothingness provided respite and refuge. The nothingness did not, however, counter any pre-existing forces –and neither did it ever promise to do so.

I would like to offer a potential alternative view: human experience without moral value (or with “neutral” value), but valuable in the mere fact that it is lived experience.

11. Fans note that Seulgi has said of this song that it plays into how she has often portrayed a bad side of herself on stage while fans would see the good side of her off stage. She was leaning into this duality about her when she wrote the song. She will continue to show more of her bad side in her music for this reason.

I tried a playlist of female K-pop songs, and found Last Dance by Youha, most definitively a sexier song (if less complex) than 28 Reasons. In a dance video, Youha said that when she does more “mature” songs like this one, she wants to be cute, and vice versa. Human beings are so unsatisfiable, she observed. (This was the moment I grew out of the enchantment of her song.)

Last year, I would lament in an all-girls Korean identity discussion group for Korean-Americans about how girl groups in K-pop would either be “good” (innocent and cute), or “bad” (mature, sexy, and completely in control). This was not helpful for the process of knowledge and development of one’s sexuality.

12. For a time, the wide permissibility and variability in the presentation of oneself by Koreans would confound me. Now, I understand the broader dynamic –the focus on the collective and emphasis on context for group harmony over the individual’s needs for expression-- that allows for this to be the case, and in turn how matters of individual intent get absorbed in the collective. There is a lot of room for advantages and harms in the meeting of the Korean collectivist and western individualist dynamics. What is clear to me: the collective –often at the behest of a designated leader, who often attained that position due to some pre-existing power— acts as a barrier against change this way.

13. I don’t deny there is something particularly satisfying in hearing Korean language in non-Korean and western spaces, though it comes mostly from an advantage quickly diminishing as non-Koreans learn to speak the language better than I.

14. The way that I, as a Korean-American, am finding much-needed visual representation in media through the sheer force of Korea’s growing global cultural presence certainly adds confusion to what already feels like a tenuously defined self-conception for Korean-Americans as a racial minority in the west.

It is also terrifying.

“As a matter of fact, the modernization was not achieved voluntarily, i.e. not by the revolution from below but by the order imposed from above. In a word, Korean society was modernized in the pre-modern way... Now we also see an attempt to solve the problem of modernization not only from the standpoint of Western liberalism but also from the perspective of Post-Marxism as well as from Confucianism,” says Korean philosopher Halla Kim in his entry for Korean Philosophy in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. K-pop is a big part of this modernization achieved from above.

III - Performance

15. There is a pit inside me, wherein lies another self. It expresses itself in the sticker collection called “Can’t Hide What’s in My Mind Ver. 2” in Kakaotalk. This self feels inadequate and shameful in the face of excellent performance. It disconnects itself from my body and makes itself difficult to locate.

16. Of all the different video renditions of Seulgi’s 28 Reasons, my favorite is the performance one. Maybe it’s because I can see the dance in completion. Maybe it’s because I like that it is labeled as a performance, and it is as if we are forming a neat pact as performer and viewer that it can and should be regarded as such.

17. The other day I watched this and went along with the booty-shaking urge to get up and dance. I got in front of the mirror and made some moves with some *looks*. It did not make me *feel* sexier or hornier. But it did rather inspire me to pose and perform sexiness. Which can be fun challenge but also leaves me feeling hollow.

One could say that it’s just not the right girl group K-pop song to feel sexy –that I’ve got it all wrong with this song. It’s not about feeling sexy; it’s about wielding it for power. (Yes, kink may use power for sex, but the kink props and costumes here are about using sex for power!)

18. All modes of personal expression can be instead/simultaneously a mere performance for a desired end.

Suppose you were able to measure this on a scale, with personal expression on one end and performance on the other. You could even use the scale for any and all actions. Could it help us better understand ourselves as human beings?

19. I have seen youth who seemed to express their feelings most strongly and confidently through moves from K-pop dances. They are not expressing much one moment, while hanging along there with their group of friends. Then the next, they move to some choreography with passion, keenly aware of how their moves draw eyes on them.

20. When I was painting last year, I could control the flow of my emotions merely by turning on music. The great divide was this way: music off meant no feelings (if one were to characterize it as repression, then it would have been the repression of sadness), and music on meant the great surge of mixed and intense feelings. It was as if a spigot had been turned on, and the result was that a dam burst. Music on meant an intense period of expressivity and art, after which I would be spent and exhausted.

This meant that the patience and care required to be methodical was largely sidelined by my desperate need for outpour.

21. There was only one loose idea in mind: To be for myself was to express for myself. I needed to be for myself. I would have the permission to do so when I took it. I would believe that I could when I did it.

IV - Seulgi

22. I suppose when I look at this figure known as Seulgi performing on the screen, there is a matter that likely inevitably has an effect on me: in a loose way, it is that she looks a lot like me. When she intently looks at the camera at times, it is as if I am seeing another me performing for an anonymous audience, desiring their/our attention and admiration.

23. In another life, I would have continued to find enough refuge in the pre-laid paths for a girl like me. Take away some affirmations of me and of conceptions of an alternative path here and there, add that I had moved to Korea with all its pressures and the industry seemingly dominating everywhere, and maybe I might have desired to become a K-pop idol. Maybe I might have found a way to get over my two left feet when it comes to choreographed dance, auditioned, and gotten in. Maybe I would have passed all the hurdles over the years of intense training to have debuted and found myself on the local, then global stage. My parents would have no trouble explaining my career choice to their colleagues. My sense of belonging in the world would be so cemented that it would even extend to them.

In this other life, I would have defied all odds and made it as a K-pop star. I wonder if I would feel better about my life then than I do now.

24. But how do you feel, Seulgi? I want to know. How do you feel when you look at the screen like that, making the viewer desire you as you sing and dance for them while you don’t even know where they are or what they look like? Was this the right choice for you? There are girls that want to know. They have monolids like you and so in this small but significant-to-them sort of way feel they are in the minority.

25. “I do not have choice like you do,” might be Seulgi’s response. “In so many ways, in this society, in ways that you could not easily make clear moral judgments on, I do not have choice.”

Very well.

26. I watched “the nation’s MC” Yu Jae Seok interview Min Hee Jin, the creative director from SM Entertainment behind a lot of record-breaking K-pop albums. She left the major entertainment agency to found her own creative agency. Their first group is the chart-topping NewJeans (whose mesmerizing song Attention is also on the list by Dazed), comprised of girls ranging in age from 14 to 18. In it, Min said that she met with the girls’ parents, which for the Korean viewer lends heavy implication as to the parents’ consent. Min Hee Jin clearly seems extremely hardworking, earnest, and humble. Later in the interview she says, “좋은 이모가 되주고 싶고 좋은 엄마가 되주고 싶은 거예요” (I want to be a good aunt and a good mother to them) which leaves me breathless. This statement, abetted by the parents’ consent, marks a clear and direct limit in the girls’ world to me, visible to the global public that is watching K-pop.

At an earlier point in the interview, she says that she had lived for others so far, and not for herself. Her breakaway from SM, where she’d spent away all of her 20s and 30s, then, to establish her own agency, starting with NewJeans, would be the way for her to live for herself.

27. I like to think that when Asian-Americans call for media representation, it is not a longing merely or primarily to see more people that look like us, though this, too, matters. It is for instruction and guidance on how to be for those that happen to look like us, given the particular difficulties presented by a loosely shared cultural and philosophical background that clashes with the western environment. It is a longing for understanding our situation, affirming our experiences, and for showing us what it looks like to partake in this society as ourselves.

28. One day not too distant from now, a child of my own will come across K-pop –at school, or simply, outside. Its enthrallment will reach them faster than their prefrontal cortex develops to critically think about that which moves them. More deeply, they will find in it a readily accessible promise of belonging and affirmation as a multiracial child of Korean descent. They will ask me about it with innocent curiosity and fascination.

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