C. Cicadas

Butter, BTS, and my personal Seoul Asylum.

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far far away, I taught in Korea three summers in a row. My gigs were always in August, and every time I went, the cicadas were making an enormous racket there all day and all of the night. I have read that the cicadas that are currently hatching on the east coast here are part of a 17 year cycle, and it makes me wonder: in Korea are waves of them buried underground in layers, so that there is a new set ready every summer? All I know is, if I were in Maryland or Georgia right now and I heard a cicada chirping, it would take me back to those hot wet days, dashing through subway stops in between monsoons, singing gross GNR songs at the 24-hour Noraebang, eating patbingso and kim-chi flavored noodle bowls, just generally having the time of my life.

sunset over seoul: view from my hotel.

One summer my class consisted of sixteen students, only three of whom were girls. The other thirteen boys were like the world’s largest K-Pop group, supple and charming and full of funny gestures and remarks but they had ants in their pants all day long. They were so rowdy that on the first day of class they were throwing a soccer ball around inside at lunch time and instantly broke a window. We had to take a break every hour or they’d go bananas. The classroom was tiny, so we’d push the desks against the wall and do five sun salutations, only then could they settle down to work.   

I always remember that group of students when I watch K-pop, and especially so this week when I saw the new video for the song “Butter” by BTS, the smash-hit Korean band who are by far the top selling act in the world at the moment. I am reminded of them especially during a moment in the middle of the new video when a golden curtain is pulled aside and the seven members of BTS are seen on a miniature basketball court, where they gracefully begin to do one of those patented K-POP/hip-hop dances. Something about that court and their dance on it, encapsulates to me that skewed, romantic notions that my Korean students had about America….and maybe also, that we have about them.

Gymnasiums in America don’t look like that. For one thing, they’re bigger. And they’re grimier; much closer in reality to the one depicted in the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video, which also re-imagines the high school gym as the site of a rock concert. Both videos transform a generic American landmark; Nirvana’s vision of it is demonic, and (to my mind) more emotionally accurate. But BTS’s version isn’t entirely nonsense. My students in Korea went to school for 14 hours a day. They had to learn everything twice, first in Korean and then in English; they were constantly being forced to do pedagogically crazy things like read all of “Huckleberry Finn” out loud. They had been taught to revere American schooling, but the only thing they really wanted in life was a school that had a soccer field and a gymnasium.  Space is at a premium there, so the known fact that there are green lawns in front of many K-12 schools – basketball courts, football pitches, baseball fields, swing sets— enchants them, and that scene in “Butter” really encapsulates that dream.

“Butter” also inevitably reminded me of is that butter is really expensive in Korea. Once I bought a single cube there that cost 8 dollars. Granted it was the very nice Irish kind of butter, but I had no choice, that was the only kind available. I used to get it at SSG Super at the Dogok stop, which was where I changed trains for work. Koreans don’t eat that much butter, so perhaps it looks more decadent to them, and when I saw the shot in the video of a stack of pancakes with butter dripping over them, I flashed suddenly on a restaurant in Gang Nam that just serves American pancakes. I think it was actually called “PANCAKES AND BUTTER.” (Note: I just looked it up on TripAdvisor, and it’s actually called BUTTER FINGERS PANCAKES.) It was a two-story place, kind of fancy, and the name was in English characters, in garish neon (like everything in that hood), and my friends and I went there one night and discovered it was a very chic and groovy date site. The place was all decked out like a Korean idea of an American breakfast chain – i.e. much cuter than the real thing – and it was full of Korean couples having the time of their life pretending to be in an American Denny’s.

Meanwhile, Lisa and Tiffany and I were having the time of our lives having night-breakfast at midnight in the middle of Seoul, and there was a sort of mutual perfection to it, a shared misunderstanding, and it is that exact feel that goes a long way to explaining the enduring appeal of BTS.  The group’s 7 members seem totally unreal, and just like seamless underwear, it makes you wonder how they got that way, and why. If you read a little bit about them, you know they came out of the KPOP factory fully formed, and at first that seems a little soulless. But it’s not really soulless, any more than the pancake restaurant is not really not American. It just that K-Pop takes a referent – like ‘pancake,’ or ‘butter,’ or ‘gymnasium,’ or ‘hip hop,’ and then it twists it into a shape that is finer and a lot more funny and fun.

My stop: Guryong. I dare you to find.

I know most rock fans and older people can’t understand the point of BTS, but perhaps the best way to explain their appeal is to note that they have effortlessly reconfigured notions of gender and masculinity into something far better than the model we have been subjected to; a model which has reached the very limit of its use-value. Masculinity is gross, but BTS are not. They look so soft and mild. Their limbs are fluid – like butter – their gestures serene, and when, in the video, they kiss their wrist to the viewer, I recall what my mom once told me about her high school in Long Island in the 1940s, which was that the most popular boys weren’t the best-looking ones: they were the ones who were the best dancers.  

By contrast, American men cultivate physical rigidity: they always try to look hard and strong. When I coach boys in diving, I invariably can’t get them to point their toes into the board because their feet have been encased in hard leather shoes that don’t let their ankles bend every day of their life since they were two. It’s kind of sad. I like to think that the flexible bodies and hairdos of BTS portends a more flexible kind of masculinity, and certainly their kinder gentler ideology and the way their 26 million-strong fanbase cheekily trolled a number of truly noxious elements of our society implies that they do.