What (G)I-DLE’s “TOMBOY” Tells Us About K-Pop’s Globalization
Promotional photo of (G)I-DLE courtesy of CUBE
In spring 2022, (G)I-DLE, a five piece girl group from CUBE Entertainment, released “TOMBOY”, a spitfire title track written by the group’s leader and rapper Soyeon. The song is the most successful single to date for the girl group. On YouTube it’s racked up 124 million in just a few weeks. “TOMBOY” recently went to number one on the Korean charts, giving (G)I-DLE their first All-Kill. This number one single is also the first perfect All-Kill of the year for a group not from HYBE, SM, JYPE or YG.
(G)I-DLE, as some publications have pointed out, are redefining what a girl group can represent in K-Pop. Although they are signed to a major label, the girls have creative control of their work. Soyeon, the group’s leader and rapper, writes the group’s songs and has a hand in the creative direction of each comeback.
“TOMBOY”, the group’s latest single, is a song that is perhaps most interesting when one looks at the politics surrounding the music. While the styling of (G)I-DLE is far from “tomboy”, their attitude is more in-line with Western female artists. This is important as the K-Pop industry works to maneuver their influence into the West. As K-Pop expands, it moves from something that was once defined as “cultural products [that are] considered global, but have generally only attracted the interest of people in certain regions.”, as scholar Ryan Shin defined the genre in 2014, to an era of global consumption and global communication.
The slow burn success of (G)-IDLE means they are just now receiving worldwide recognition. Soyeon, Miyeon, Minnie, Yuqi and Shuhua debuted in May 2018. Their fandom Neverland was drawn to the girls because of powerful songs like “THE BADDEST” and “POP/STARS”. They gained even more fans when they competed on the hugely successful Mnet show “Queendom”.
“Look at you, you can’t handle me,” Minnie taunts in the first verse.“Why are you cranky boy?” Soyeon declares in the pre-chorus, “Do you wanna blonde Barbie doll? It’s not here/ I’m not a doll.” And then the chorus explodes with Minnie explicitly proclaiming, “Yeah I’m a fucking tomboy.”
Soyeon’s lyrics are both funny and amusing in her critique of close-minded men. “Your mom raised you as a prince, but this is Queendom, right?” she asks in the second verse, a reference to the men who are coddled by doting mothers, and a flex that they cut their chops on the hit show. (G)I-DLE remind their listeners: If you think a woman’s place is behind him, get the fuck out of their way.
“We’ve swept the Korean charts,” Yuki said in a behind-the-scenes vlog filmed for YouTube when she learned of the group’s All-Kill. She turned to Soyeon to ask how she felt about the surge in popularity.
“I’ve been shocked to see this kind of song can win first place,” Soyeon said. “There’s some bad words in the song, right? There are some words in it that we, as idols, shouldn’t use.” But she questioned these rules.
“I’m not sure why we should follow such a prejudice,” she said with a shrug. The group, she says, had to “go out of our way to convince the company to release such a song.”
“Anyway, we persuaded these people to break [the prejudice],” she said proudly, “and this song became number one.”
“TOMBOY” is successful at an extremely politically charged season in Korea. This year, gender was a key focus in the South Korean presidential elections. Perhaps President Yoon Suk-yeol’s most controversial campaign pledge was to demolish the gender equality ministry (which he later walked back). This pledge won him some of his fiercest support from men, who Yoon reportedly “banked on” to win the presidency.
Anti-feminsit groups rallied behind President Yoon heartedly filled with rage at their perceived gender discrimination. Feminism, they argue, does not support women at all. Instead, they allege, that it is explicitly anti-male. Choe Sang-Hun chillingly reported for the New York Times about a rally held in Seoul where men shouted, “Out with the man haters! Feminism is a mental illness!”
“In South Korea, “women” and “feminists” are two of the most common targets of online hate speech, according to the country’s National Human Rights Commission,” Choe found in his report.
This is the cultural landscape “TOMBOY” is triumphant in. Is that surprising?
There has been criticism towards the song not going far enough in it’s exploration of gender. On the K-Popcast, hosts Stephanie, Michaela and Peter spoke with Hye Jin Lee, Clinical Assistant Professor of Communication at USC, about how the song potentially “co-opts” the feminist movement to appeal to a Western fanbase, which (G)I-DLE is attempting to break into. (A tour for the group in North America begins next month.)
This tension between contemporary Korean culture, which is largely divided, and the needs of a global fanbase warrants further research. In the coming years, companies will likely have to contend with a Western fanbase that expects their favorite artists to align with them on specific political issues. A song like “TOMBOY” would not be greenlight without heads at CUBE signing off on it — something that would never happen as recently as two years ago. I can appreciate the boundaries (G)I-DLE is pushing, even if it feels incremental. In the early 2010s, there was a flurry of scholarship produced on the cultural impact of PSY’s “Gangnam Style”. Ten years later, I hope scholarship explores how K-Pop is developing new systems of marketing to appeal to broader cultures.
What I find most interesting is this question: Will K-Pop companies develop global strategies that reflect the progress of human rights? Perhaps look no further than HYBE allowing Yunjin, a member of the company’s first girl group Le Sserafim, to Tweet her support of Pride month as an indication of where corporations may be headed.
As K-Pop becomes more globalized, I predict that companies will listen closely to what consumers (fans) want from their music and idols. It is this cultural exchange that has allowed K-Pop to succeed, and it is what is necessary to keep K-Pop thriving.
SOURCES
SHIN, RYAN. “Gangnam Style and Global Visual Culture.” Studies in Art Education, vol. 57, no. 3, 2016, pp. 252–64. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/45149285. Accessed 6 Jun. 2022.
The Ladies of (G)I-DLE Are Redefining the Girl-Crush K-Pop Concept with "Tomboy"
The New Political Cry in South Korea: ‘Out With Man Haters’
(G)I-dle’s “TOMBOY” in the context of an anti-feminist presidency
