2023-04-27 01:28:53
When the news of the suicide of the singer Moonbin, from the well-known group of K-Pop Astro, many wondered another one? There are so many cases of self-inflicted deaths in this musical scene, that every time a new artist joins the list, the faces of so many young people who took their lives due to the gigantic and unbearable pressure they suffer in the world automatically come to mind. this entertainment industry. Sulli, Goo Hara, Cha In-Ha and Yohan, found dead in their apartments, as was Jonghyun, who left a note in which he confessed to being “broken inside” and “devoured by depression”; Ahn So Jin, who died after jumping into a tenth floor void; U;Nee and Lee Seo Hyun hanged in their room… Neither in the years of the psychedelic explosion of the sixties, nor in the self-destructive punk explosion in the seventies, nor even in the years of the bacchanalian chemistry of the raves in the nineties they left such a trail of death behind him. So it is worth asking, is it a question that has more to do with Korean society than with music?
In South Korea, the suicide rate exceeds 26 per 100,000 inhabitants, well above the world average, which is less than 10. So obviously, these events do have a certain relationship with the mental health of its population in general . But does K-Pop help reduce that index, or rather the opposite?
The facts speak for themselves. The working conditions of its artists exceed the Stakhanovite even before they became stars, since all of them go through training schools that require an insane number of hours of vocal and physical training a day to reach quasi-robotic perfection, and that without taking into account the exaggerated amount of time that they have to spend in makeup and hairdressing -if not in cosmetic surgery- to have a virginal look, especially girls, and also in generating content on social networks to multiply their promotional channels.
Hence, apart from suicides, there have been many deaths from heart attacks despite their youth, and also from traffic accidents as in the case of Seo Jae-Ho, the protagonist of one of the first K-Pop dramas. In March 2004, his boy-band, called Wanted, was late for a performance and his manager, who was driving the car they were traveling in, preferred to put work before the safety of his boys and ended up crashing into a truck with the balance three of the youths seriously injured and Jae-Ho killed instantly. The same thing happened to the girl-band Lady’s Code in 2014, during a trip on their tour bus. One night when they had several performances, their manager demanded their driver step on the accelerator and several kilometers later they crashed into a guardrail. All the girls in the group were seriously injured and two of them died days later in the hospital.
A very distinctive element of this musical genre, and one that is devastating for mental health, is that you cannot be a K-Pop artist over thirty. We will never see a K-Pop Madonna, or a Kylie Minogue, or even a Beyoncé, much less a Dolly Parton, because in this world a kind of ‘lolitism’ that borders on pedophilia is openly claimed, in which that the artists compete with each other to be the cutest young lady on the scene wearing infantilizing outfits. All of them know that they have very little time to succeed before being put off the market as ‘old’, and that turns K-Pop into a meat grinder that destroys the soul and the psyche. This has also favored the appearance of numerous sexual scandals such as the one carried out by Seungri, from the famous group Big Bang (which has sold more than 140 million records), who was forced to abandon music when he was accused of providing girls to large investors. of the K-Pop industry.
This work ecosystem does not seem very healthy for young people in their twenties. But the fine line that separates life and death in K-Pop is an insurmountable taboo on the scene, which lives in a kind of omertá where the important thing is not the lives of the artists, but the cultural conquest of the West. And for example, a button: a couple of years ago, when the South Korean Embassy organized a K-Pop festival in Madrid through the Korean Cultural Center, ABC interviewed several of its participants but had to accept a veto: no questions about mental health and suicides at the scene.
Only some groups that have become so world famous as to be stars (and therefore models) for Western youth have dared to capture this issue in the lyrics of their songs. ‘Trauma’ by Seventeen, ‘Breathe’ by Lee Hi or ‘Borderline’ by Sumni are some of them, although the best example could be that of ‘No’, one of the biggest hits in the genre, BTS, which says: « A nice house, a nice car, would these be happiness? Are parents really happy in Seoul? Dreams disappeared, there is no time to rest. It is a cycle, from school to home or to an internet cafe. Everyone lives the same life, we are pressured to be number one. Students live between dream and reality Who is it that has turned us into study machines? They classify us. Whether it’s being number one or the one who isn’t smart. There is no choice but to accept it, it is the survival of the fittest. Who do you think makes us step on even our friends?
Unfortunately the problem is getting worse. According to Korea’s state agency for creative content (KOCCA), which has been offering psychological counseling for aspiring singers and K-pop stars since 2011, the number of cases seen has increased eighteen-fold in the last few years. last ten years. Cho Jung-hwa, a well-known coach of artists in the genre, admitted to The Korea Times: “Young aspiring singers, whose average age is 15, often undergo several years of brutal vocal and dance training to achieve his only goal in life: to debut. Due to their schedules, many of them are not even aware that they are psychologically exhausted… They put sweat and tears into becoming a singer, but are always afraid of failure. So when they feel like their skills aren’t improving enough, they become extremely anxious about the unpredictability of their future.” And he warns, “K-Pop record labels should provide mental health help to idol trainees, or else they won’t be able to grow up as psychologically strong adults and deliver positive messages to the public.”
After so many untimely deaths and suicides, the perception of the K-Pop singer as a risky profession is already out of the industry’s control. So, as Lim Myung-ho, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at Dankook University, points out, this business model will need to change if it is to present an image to the West that allows it to survive and continue to expand. “Celebrities avoid going to a psychiatrist or psychologist because they fear their mental health will tarnish their image, and for their record companies, doing psychological check-ups may seem unnecessary in the short term for their managers. But in the long term it will help their financial success by guaranteeing the mental stability of their stars, and therefore their professional lives.
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