‘Where all my bad girls at?’

Abstract

This article examines the polyvalence of racial(ised) representations in K-pop performances. The analysis of K-pop star CL’s (2013) song and video ‘Nappeun gijibae’ (‘The bad girl’) demonstrates how the artist projects an assertive femininity by embodying and localising the Bad Bitch: a sexually agentive figure of womanhood from US hip hop. CL’s use of African American English and conventionalised hip hop tropes helps resignify gijibae, a pejorative Korean term for women. By shifting between decontextualised styles invoking a different time and place, CL is able to build a kind of chronotopic capital that transforms fragmented styles into an empowered cosmopolitan femininity. However, although CL’s performance challenges Korean gendered norms in its use of local linguistic resources, her selective appropriations of US Black and Chicanx cultural signifiers reproduce narrow images of racialised femininities and reify a hierarchy of valuation along lines of gender and race.

English's expanding linguistic foothold in K-pop lyrics

“…Fortunately, these examples were sparse. While the coding of English and Korean tokens was admittedly blunt, this analysis opts to treat transcribers' choices to privilege English orthography as significant within this article's overall argument for K-pop's accelerating globalization (Garza, 2021).…”

“…'This could be blamed on the artificiality of the genre' and that 'idols themselves usually have little chance to apply themselves in the lyrics of their songs' (Jin, 2016: 129). Instead, many scholars associate K-pop's growing global appeal to its polished performances (Yeo, 2018), appeals to fantasy and desire (Lee, 2012) and the dynamic hybridization of diverse cultural artifacts (Jin, 2016;Garza, 2021). However, whether lyrics are of priority to K-pop consumers or not, their lingering linguistic footprints remain interesting to language scholars.…”

“…In post-war South Korea, transcultural flows could be described as unidirectional consumption 1 and subsequent adoption of mostly Black U.S. musical genres (Anderson, 2020). And while that pattern continues to this day (Garza, 2021), scholars question the unidirectionality of these transcultural flows as Korean cultural exports proliferate (Jin, 2016). However, Jin also argues that power differentials between Korea-U.S. media flows and global-local markets mean that flows between Korean and Western media markets are not reversed but moving bidirectionally.…”

“…Linguistic studies on English use in K-pop have identified syntactic patterns of borrowing (Lawrence, 2010;Yang, 2012), appropriation of African American Language (AAL) (Lee, 2007;Garza, 2021), code ambiguation (Ahn, 2021;Lee, 2022), and English use in artist names and song titles (Yeo, 2018;Kang, 2022). However, few (if any) studies have quantitatively examined Yeo's proposed phenomenon of moderation within the lyrics themselves.…”

Virtue Signaling and the Linguistic Repertoire of Anti‐Blackness: or, “I Would Have Voted for Obama for a Third Term”

“…The function of this type of presentation is ultimately self‐serving. Racialized appropriation can also be embodied through the use of non‐linguistic signs, such as raised fists in photographs, black squares for profile pictures, and other media (Garza 2021).…”