![[J]ust as our dreams are composite images of material from our unconscious made visible, our pop stars are constructs pulling together material from a kind of collective unconscious, the actualization of social desire.
— Trevor Link, “Pop Utopianism: a Manifesto”
Link argues for K-pop (and good pop music, generally) as a laboratory that synthesizes uninhibited pleasure and total happiness, as a mechanism that allows us to glimpse the distance between happiness and everyday work/leisure. At the end of the post, he has assembled a mixtape of 23 K-pop songs, which you might like to DL whether or not the theory has convinced you. My favourites so far are 2NE1’s “I Am the Best” and Super Junior’s “Sorry Sorry”, which both use the word naega (“I”) as punctuation the way American rappers say nigga, one of those serendipities that make me believe in Satan.
(photograph by Sandra Ciampone)](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lxzv32kzJW1qzo7eeo1_1280.jpg)
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[J]ust as our dreams are composite images of material from our unconscious made visible, our pop stars are constructs pulling together material from a kind of collective unconscious, the actualization of social desire.
— Trevor Link, “Pop Utopianism: a Manifesto”
Link argues for K-pop (and good pop music, generally) as a laboratory that synthesizes uninhibited pleasure and total happiness, as a mechanism that allows us to glimpse the distance between happiness and everyday work/leisure. At the end of the post, he has assembled a mixtape of 23 K-pop songs, which you might like to DL whether or not the theory has convinced you. My favourites so far are 2NE1’s “I Am the Best” and Super Junior’s “Sorry Sorry”, which both use the word naega (“I”) as punctuation the way American rappers say nigga, one of those serendipities that make me believe in Satan.
(photograph by Sandra Ciampone)
