Korean/한국어: 어떻게 나는 <케이팝 데몬 헌터스>를 미워하는 걸 멈추고 좋아하게 되었는가

Step 1: I watched it.

But only after everyone and their aunt had done so, and I found myself aggressively screeching the chorus of “Golden,” face streaked with tears while driving to umma‘s house.¹

Ugh, where do I even begin?

For a lot of diaspora Koreans who remember a time before the global K-content machine went into overdrive², the fervor over the latest bazillion-streamed-K-inspired-Netflix original movie K-Pop Demon Hunters may evoke strong feelings of both pride and discomfort.

For me, it’s pride at the fact that the words coming out of those animated characters’ mouths are mixed with Korean. It’s a language that my maternal grandmother who passed away this summer at 93 was forbidden to speak at school up until the Japanese government finally f–cked off at the end of the Second World War.³ She didn’t go to school past that, as girls back then weren’t seen as good for anything other than unpaid household labour and bearing the next generation of sons to populate the official family registry.⁴

A language that my mother told me to forget once we moved to Canada, calling it “useless.”⁵

At the same time, I felt that amorphous and primal cringe at what appeared to be such explicitly exploitable IP in lockstep with the spirit of the times.

That is, utterly shameless grift.

I mean, “Soda Pop” sounds like a mashup of every single K-pop boy band’s attempt at breaking the Billboard 100 since BTS’ “Dynamite.” It’s the antithesis of what I classify as “music.”⁶

But on a cloudy Tuesday afternoon in December, I set all my half-baked prejudices aside and settled down to watch K-Pop Demon Hunters with my expectation meter set to “Just Get To The End.”

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Step 2: I got the hidden message.

To my immense relief, once you get past the K-stereotype-heavy opening sequence (and okay, a couple others), the more darkly subversive and complex elements begin emerging from the woodwork.⁸

It actually critiqued Korean music companies’ corporate greed and unhinged fan culture, along with (mostly) affectionate and realistic depictions of the city of Seoul and Seoulites. I also loved the sendup of Korean variety show tropes (“The leather has betrayed us” remains a mysteriously sublime line).

Most of all, the song “Takedown” put a floodlight on the elephant in the room– the truly “ugly as sin” face of a mercilessly money-hungry and image-conscious society that ends up eating everyone alive with shame.

It’s one that almost ate me alive as well, but I got out before it was too late.⁹

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Step 3: I listened to the real main track.

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양념 Score

🌶️🌶️🌶️

_{^{out of 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️}}

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postscript 1

Also now would be the best time to say that it all started with Audrey in my algorithm. That being said, Ejae and Rei Ami’s voices have also really grown on me.

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postscript 2

This is just the tip of the iceberg, but 2 good reads on the complicated feelings diaspora Koreans in the US and Canada have around the sudden ascendence of the K-tsunami that I’ve got saved these days in my Bookmarks bar below:

1. The Dissonance of Being Mainstreamed
2. Rising Popularity of K-Pop and K-Dramas Forces Shift in Korean Identity

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postscript 3

I have a lot more to say on Korea, obviously. To be continued.

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1. This happens a lot more often than I’d like to admit. 🥲 ↩︎
2. Starting around summer 2012 with that runaway hit single I’d put in the same category as Boney M’s Rasputin and Eiffel65’s Blue. ↩︎
3. Not before doing this though. And then the ugly merry-go-round keeps going round and round until we’re all covered in 💩. ↩︎
4.  Things have gotten a lot better now, at least procedurally. Hawon Jung’s book Flowers of Fire gives an excellent overview of the women’s rights movement in contemporary South Korea. You can also check out my interview with her in postscript 3. ↩︎
5. This, and many other episodes from my childhood are part of Why I Read. ↩︎
6. To the concerned BTS Army / person with nothing better to do than read these footnotes: the “It” in this sentence is referring to Soda Pop, not Dynamite (which I do love btw, along with Euphoria and a couple of other bops 💜 Beth ). ↩︎
7. AllAcronyms.com – NFG ↩︎
8. And it has to be said: thank f🌶️ing God this isn’t a K-version of Barbie. 🙇🏻‍♀️🙏🏻🥹 ↩︎
9. I hope you brought the egg tarts. 🧋🍮 ↩︎