Asian Junkie Asian pop. Without discretion.
One story of significance that I haven’t seen mentioned much in the K-pop circles is that there’s a proposed bill in South Korea right now that’s being sold to the public as a way to curb the propagation of so-called ‘hate music’ to minors via a controversial pre-screening process.
“The amendment to the Music Industry Promotion Act was submitted last week by Rep. Kim Hyun and nine other lawmakers of the ruling Democratic Party of Korea. The bill would require music distributors to pre-screen all tracks to determine whether they contain content harmful to minors before release.
If any song is judged harmful and its creator is under 19, the distributor must block the track from release altogether. If the artist is an adult, the distributor must notify them that the track may be designated harmful to youth in advance, which would restrict it to adult listeners only.“
The aforementioned representative framed it as an attempt to curb hate speech, “Artistic freedom must be respected, but we cannot stand by and do nothing while hate- or crime-promoting songs are distributed online freely, harming peer communities, classrooms and ultimately society as a whole. … Because culture and the arts are the spiritual assets of society, any attempt to abuse them as a means of spreading hate speech must be corrected.“
Mind you, there are already bans on what minors can access as it is, “Under the current system, songs containing sexually explicit, violent or hateful content can be designated harmful to youth after release, which bans minors from accessing them and limits distribution. The Youth Protection Committee under the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family reviews content deemed harmful to youth after they have been released.” The change then is effectively just about the government wanting the ability to prevent the songs from being heard by minors from the start instead of having them available for a couple weeks before being banned, “Lawmakers behind the new bill believe this system leaves a loophole that allows harmful songs to spread online before review — sometimes created by teenagers who are aspiring musicians.“
Notably, violations of the proposed bill don’t carry criminal penalties, rather distributors that breach the screening rule would instead face corrective orders or warnings from local governments. And essentially that’s their own loophole of sorts that the representatives are trying to use in order to get this passed. See, back in 1996, the Constitutional Court ruled that pre-screening music was unconstitutional and an infringement on free speech, so this amendment gets around that by (in theory) just putting the responsibility on the distributors and promising wrist slaps for bad behavior.
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Regardless, there has been consideration pushback to this idea already, especially since this particular issue comes with a lot of historical baggage due to the history of censorship of music in South Korea. Most notably that Park Chung Hee once cracked down harshly on music releases that were deemed “decadent” and “foreign influenced” — not to mention what happened in Korean cinema during that time.
As such it shouldn’t come as a surprise that 11 cultural and art groups spoke out against the bill shortly after its proposal. Among those was Culture And Arts Workers Solidarity, who said, “The bill’s reference to ‘music that is likely to cause clear and serious harm to youth’ doesn’t provide any concrete criteria which would allow subjective judgments of what is harmful. … The idea that strong censorship can prevent hate is nothing more than a fallacy. If this law’s underlying logic were correct, then discrimination and hatred should have disappeared under the authoritarian regimes of Park Chung Hee and Chun Doo Hwan, when censorship was at its most powerful in modern Korean history.” They further go on to say that the bill insults the history of resistance by artists who fought bravely against censorship in the past, and thus urged the ruling lawmakers to retract it immediately.
Based.
As somebody who writes a blog where I’m free to say whatever dumb shit I want, you likely won’t be surprised that I’m not even a fan of the current system that blocks minors from music that is “harmful” — much less this amendment — and for much the same reason detractors in the aforementioned groups also question where the standards will be set for this latest censorship attempt.
The standards of the existing system itself has already been a debated issue as is for over 10 years now, dating back to when they revealed 14-part rules that banned songs “containing obscene expressions; descriptions of sex, murder or assault; and too many slang words, among others.” Mind you, we’re not even strictly debating shit like Cannibal Corpse or something, we’re talking like even “All About That Bass” and shit like that*. And all this is not even getting into the fact that this kind of gating doesn’t even work in an online world and thus could almost only possibly be on the books for the government to abuse at some point.
*Though I suppose one could argue that what is essentially musical absurdism is less likely to be damaging to the common teen than the near-constant reminder that your body is being commodified, commercialized, and observed.
So even if this bill is well-intentioned, given that protest and/or political songs (at bare minimum) are likely to be explicit in some form, it’s not exactly difficult to wonder why so many are concerned about the path this nudges South Korea toward by continuing to erode barriers against censorship.
