On Noise, Dissonance, and Political Possibility
Image by Amber Lee. Adapted from photograph of participants celebrating the impeachment of South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol, December 14, 2024, by Ahn Young-joon (The Associated Press); Protest Against Importation of United States Beef in Busan, May 31, 2028, by Migojarad (Wikimedia Commons); Untitled, by Unidentified (American), 1936 (Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the General Services Administration); and Color Splatter, December 7, 2020, by Illestpreacha (Wikimedia Commons).
Editors’ Note
The piece below began as a conversation on the political possibilities and pitfalls of noise—on how sonic agency, musical dissonance, and signal interferences can disrupt or reinforce the status quo. But noise also marks this conversation and unsettles the conditions of its reception. Situated in a particular moment in time, the thoughts we have set down remain subject to the contingencies of ongoing life.
One of the points that came up in our conversation below pertains to the role of noise in the discourse around Korean actor Kim Soo-hyun’s scandal. On May 7, weeks after that conversation and days before the scheduled release of this issue, Kim Sae-ron’s family announced their criminal charges against Kim Soo-hyun for violating the Child Welfare Act. As more details come to light, the events themselves and the significance of the discourse around them will continue to shift. For now, we simply want to note that the details of the case deserve full scrutiny and, also, that the particular attention economy surrounding it should not distract us from the more systemic failures that facilitate the exploitation and abuse of women and children here and elsewhere.
We write here both the original context of our conversation and the subsequent developments that must alter its reception. Confronting a similar dilemma back in 2016, Teju Cole observed that not knowing how “unanticipated events” might retroactively inflect our words is no reason for not “set[ting] down [the words] anyway.” “The duty of critical writing,” Cole reminds us, in a metaphor not too far from the one we’ve explored in our own conversation below, “is to listen to the noise of life without being deafened by it.”
YIN YUAN
Politically in South Korea, a lot has happened since our first issue back in August 2024. In December 2024, the now ousted former South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law in the country. Lawmakers ended martial law after six hours and impeached Yoon, who was then formally removed from office by the Constitutional Court in April 2025. This is South Korea’s first martial law crisis since democratization in 1987 and, now as then, massive protests by the people played a pivotal role in the fight for democracy.
K-pop fan practices—waving K-pop light sticks and singing and dancing to K-pop songs—marked the recent protests against Yoon in highly visible and sonic ways. Of course, South Korea has a rich history of protesting through song (norae undong, which translates into “song movement”) that dates back to the 1970s and 1980s, when youths led the charge in protesting the military regimes of Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan. Known as minjung kayo (literally “songs of the people”), these protest songs were composed in universities, factories, labor unions, and progressive churches and tended to be seen as antithetical to mainstream popular music, though that strict binary between activist and mainstream music has been persuasively questioned by Chang Nam Kim in his contribution to Revisiting Minjung.
From our vantage point, what is particularly interesting is that minjung kayo first circulated within activist circles before being adopted by mainstream mass culture, while the contemporary political adoption of K-pop songs moves in the opposite direction. Songs like Girls’ Generation’s “Into the New World,” aespa’s “Whiplash,” G-Dragon’s “Crooked,” and 2NE1’s “I Am the Best” were not composed with explicit political intent. Rather, their political utility comes precisely from their mass popularity and virality in everyday contexts, since catchy beats that everybody can groove along to provide a way for organizers to energize and unite the crowd.
For this second issue of MENT, I interviewed cultural anthropologist and feminist Haejoang Cho. Cho observed that South Korea’s history of political struggle especially during the 1970s and ’80s paved the way for social movements centered on creative self-expression. Youths rebelled against the authoritarian education system, skipping school and forming indie bands to proclaim their own sense of self. This cultural wave, Cho argues, sowed the seeds for a popular culture whose growing presence on the global stage is now known to us as Hallyu.
Since then, as Cho and many others have pointed out, the mass culture industry has appropriated the initial spirit of creativity, fashioning idols and actors as neoliberal agents in service to state interests. And today, we are in a moment where worldwide experiences of economic and social precarity have created hopeless and atomized individuals, with the spirit of resistance increasingly feeling like a distant dream.
But in this climate, seemingly “apolitical” practices of everyday life, such as singing and dancing to one’s favorite music, also become ways to care for oneself and for each other and, in the process, perhaps begin again the collective work of dreaming toward a better future. If protest in the 1970s and ’80s helped birth Korean popular culture, today that popular culture is itself nourishing the spirit of protest. I really resonated with these words from a protester who explained why they were carrying a K-pop light stick. “To endure [the] pain [of protest],” they said, “you have to have something to enjoy in it so that people can stay hopeful for a long time even when it drags on.”
We see such practices of care and solidarity play out online as well. Just as the digital sphere is central to fandom organizing, it has played a vital role in organizing for the impeachment protests. Netizens used social media to circulate rally venue information and to share “protest guides” and “crisis action guides” that include tips on accessible public facilities, “snack support,” and how to safely engage with police and counter-protesters. Activism thus moves fluidly between online and offline and between fandom and political spaces. We see these spaces explicitly coming together in the X account “National K-pop Light Stick Solidarity,” which called for fellow K-pop fans to bring their light sticks and join the protests together. One of the account’s tweets that publicized information for the first weekend rally received 2.31 million views and more than 10,000 retweets.
And, of course, the sonic power of protestors singing K-pop songs together also makes it easier for clips of the protests to go viral, gathering further public attention and generating solidarity.
ANDREA ACOSTA
Actually, scholar HyeYoung Cho thinks through activism along similar lines in her essay, “Intermedial Feminism: Megalia and Kangnam Station Exit 10,” recently published in Michelle Cho and Jesook Song’s edited collection, Mediating Gender in Post-Authoritarian South Korea (2024). She lingers specifically over the translation of activist strategies between online and offline worlds.
At one point, Cho explores the Post-it notes attached to the wall outside of Gangnam Station Exit 10 after the murder of a woman there. Many of these notes carried messages of grief, anger, and protests against the continued violence against women in South Korea. In her analysis, Cho reads the Post-it notes as a protest medium that can be “easily attached and removed and thus are a physical analogue to platforms like Twitter.” But the protest also, she mentions in an important aside, parallels techniques of online fandom organization. Of the women who participated in the Post-it note protest, Cho says: “We can assume that their organizational skills and systematic activities are reflected in their experience participating in fandom cultures that proliferate on sites like DCInside.” After all, she continues, “fandoms in the Korean entertainment industry operate in accord with the unwritten rule that they can survive only if they are organized, systematic, transparent.”
Cho identifies the organization strategies of digital fandom, particularly entertainment industry fandoms which can be quite female-oriented in South Korea, as something that might prime its members in critical ways for political protest. We’ve seen this parallel reemerge in the massive showing of K-pop light sticks during the anti-Yoon protests.
I think the link between political activism and fandom participation is more complicated than just this one example, but it’s critical to note that the relationship itself does exist—and has been at the foreground over the past year.
Yes, Ji-yeon Kim, the creator of the “National K-pop Light Stick Solidarity” account, shared in an interview that her experience boycotting the entertainment agency of her favorite K-pop group also trained her in raising her voice against Yoon. Her comment is worth quoting here at some length: “When the entertainment industry thinks of us as consumers and acts recklessly, I don’t tolerate it. That experience has allowed me to shout ‘We cannot accept this president, we will reject Yoon Suk Yeol.’” Kim’s words highlight how fandom practices do not just pave the way for activism in a more explicitly political sphere but themselves entail a political orientation, especially as such practices draw individuals into collective confrontation with powerful corporations.
Of course, there are also many ways in which the enabling relationship between fandom organizing and political activism breaks down. We’d be remiss not to consider those instances as well.
This is the question that keeps me up at night sometimes. I think there’s profound potential in the organized online fandom—much of my own research has really lingered over this potential—but I also think we often see the difficulty of effectively translating digital fan organizing into political work offline (and vice versa). We’ve touched on this briefly in Issue 001, with our interview with ARMY For Palestine and the challenges they’ve faced in making BDS strategies legible to online fan communities.
In other words, the digital strategies developed by online feminists worked, but sometimes they did so in limited or short-lived ways. This, Cho argues “is the nature of recursive feedback. Because a [digital] object does not return [or refer] to the same place but instead moves” and is dislocated from its original context, digital language and protest itself emerges as an unstable method: one that must always navigate the noise, misinterpretations, and distractions of online space.
I think, in line with Cho’s insights, we could say that noise itself emerges as an interesting formal property to consider alongside activist or political efforts.
Can you say more about what you mean by “noise” here?
Noise, in the history of telecommunications and computing, has often been framed as a problem. As Claude Shannon, a pioneering figure in the development of Information Theory, famously noted in 1948, “the fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point.” Noise, in other words, becomes the property that interferes with a clear or legible “signal” transmitted across or between different systems. In the signal-to-noise ratio, we tend to want the signal to be the stronger element.
But, to complicate Shannon’s paradigm, we might also imagine a political activism that wishes to disrupt the easy or assumed transmission of a clear signal to the people–to introduce noise into our received social messaging. Sometimes, such noise functions as an intentional effect meant to disrupt the status quo. So, when is noise useful? And when does it trigger a breakdown of activist goals?
On the usefulness of noise, I’m reminded of Ligia Prezia Lemos and Mariana Marques de Lima’s piece on Brazilian fan activism featured in this issue. The authors explore how Brazilian fans mobilized on social media to defend the 2024 K-drama Love in the Big City against conservative boycotts, using their own conspicuous fan work to advocate for LGBTQ+ representation. Lemos and Lima name this a kind of “visibility” practice, but the metaphor of sound is operative as well in the essay’s discussion of hashtags as an amplificatory technology. We see this sonic dimension in one of the calls to action posted in a Brazilian fan community, where the poster asks fellow fans to use tags to “make this thing boom” and generate enough counter-noise to silence conservative protests (“shut everyone up”).
The aural metaphor here also draws on the real-life potency of sound, a potency underscored by the K-pop soundscapes that characterize the protests against Yoon. Led by emcees and guest performers and amplified through microphones and loudspeakers, K-pop songs provide the sonic backdrop for protestors to assert and unify their variously marginalized voices, whether it be through performatively interpreting the lyrics of “Into the New World” or chanting “Impeach Yoon Suk Yeol” to the beat of “Whiplash.”
By “taking up . . . sonic space,” protestors, a majority of whom are young women targeted by the anti-feminist politics of the Yoon administration, exercise what Tom Rice calls “acoustical agency.” Ji-yeon Kim notes that singing “Into the New World” together provided a sense of “liberation in a space where our (women’s) voices were overwhelmingly loud.” Affirming this sentiment, her fellow protester adds that young women have “always spoken up . . . it was society that treated it as ‘noisy noise’ and ignored it until now.” Leaning into this noisiness, so to speak, allows protestors to disrupt the kind of business-as-usual routines that silence the voices of the marginalized. The K-pop soundscape thus becomes a way for young women protestors to “amplify their grievances and right to exist through the use of performative sound,” to borrow the words of media scholar Nimalan Yoganathan.
Iam also interested in the way this “performative sound” is sometimes dissonant and unsettling. Part of the appeal of protest songs like Girls’ Generation’s “Into the New World,” I think, lies in the familiar pop music structures that make it easy for different voices to come together. But what happens when the music itself is difficult, fragmented, or even abrasive? How might such music embed a sonic politics or noisy provocation of their own?
This issue features an interview with Emma Chang (Umu) from the ReacttotheK YouTube channel. I initially wanted to speak with her primarily for the way Emma and her channel participants tend to lean into the strange, weird, and sonically dissonant features of K-pop music that other fans might reject as unpleasant.
As the interview explores, sonic discomfort is not unrelated to questions of politics and the public. Emma brought up, for instance, George Gershwin’s genre-defying mix of classical and jazz forms in Rhapsody in Blue (1924), as well as the musical dissonance of Stravinsky in his work The Rite of Spring (1913). Stravinsky’s composition, in fact, was so dissonant that it allegedly provoked a riot in 1913. While other sources suggest that it was not so much a riot as simply “a lot of noise,” the slippage between noise and riot in this infamous account can also be quite telling.
In K-pop, this legacy of musical dissonance reemerges in the styles of groups like NMIXX, Stray Kids, and aespa, as well as in much of what the producer Dem Jointz has done for the industry at large, including and especially for NCT. In the mixed, and sometimes negative, fan responses to these dissonant styles, we can perhaps sense a continuation of that noisy protest that broke out in response to Stravinsky.
In our interview, Emma notes the intentionality of these sonic breaks with convention. However unhinged or chaotic the production, the formal musical decisions being made behind the scenes ensure that this chaos is carefully and deliberately arranged. As such, we might read these dissonant styles not as spontaneous or artistically random but as political breaks with the status quo. And even when these productions do not provoke a riot or a democratic protest movement, they seem to at least open space for alternative ways of thinking with music: not just the music production as such but also the cultural traditions it embeds and the audience affinities it invokes.
These audience affinities came to the fore at the anti-Yoon protests. When Korean fans of ATEEZ showed up in the streets in December 2024, for instance, they not only carried ATEEZ’s official lightsticks but also joked, “I’m no stranger to revolution.” Jokes like these functioned as subtle nods to the revolutionary aesthetic and themes of ATEEZ’s music, where noisy, bombastic, and experimental songs about revolting against an oppressive government is the focus of an entire album series. If ATEEZ and other “noise music” K-pop groups, then, can provide their fandoms with music to revolt to, or at least make the idea of protest more palatable, then there’s something to be said for their presence in activist moments.
I love the idea that intentional sonic dissonance can help set the stage for explicit political resistance. But to return to our earlier framing of noise as an interference that disrupts the transmission of a particular signal: you asked when such interference might be useful and when it might trigger a breakdown of activist goals. I do think that not all noisy provocations in fandom spaces amplify justice. Sometimes, they use the language of justice but ultimately distract from more urgent structural critiques.
I’m thinking, for instance, of the recent high profile scandal involving top Korean actor Kim Soo-hyun, who allegedly groomed and dated the late Kim Sae-ron when she was still a minor. On the positive side, the commotion that the case created online helped draw greater attention to the realities of sexual exploitation, media abuse, and lack of protection for child actors. One meaningful outcome that emerged is the creation of a petition to raise the age threshold for statutory rape, which has gained enough signatures to become eligible for review by the National Assembly.
At the same time, the whole affair played out like a salacious drama, with the far-right YouTube channel HoverLab releasing a slew of intimate photographs and videos designed to exploit and inflame the public’s appetite for sensational content. On X, K-drama fan accounts not only condemned the actor but also rushed to elevate their own favorite celebrities, opportunistically turning the scandal into a platform for virtue signaling and competitive stan allegiance. In cases like this, noise does not disrupt the status quo enough; it hijacks attention and energy that could be directed toward more material forms of advocacy and instead redirects them toward drama and moral posturing. How much of such sound and fury distracts from the issue at hand and from the structural conditions that make abuses like these possible in the first place? As a society, what concrete steps can we instead take to prevent future harm?
On the K-pop side, I think the ongoing discourse around the NewJeans lawsuit against HYBE and its subsidiary label ADOR also captures this distracting quality of noise in pretty acute ways. In early 2024, when the initial dispute broke out between HYBE and Min Hee-jin, who was then the CEO of ADOR, the disagreement centered on plagiarism, creative infringement, and executive control over ADOR . But later, when NewJeans publicly sided with Min Hee-jin, the investments and interests of idols themselves—their working conditions, the terms of their contracts, and their “trust” in a company—came to the fore. In a now-deleted YouTube live, NewJeans narrated their own negative workplace experiences with HYBE executives, including Hanni’s experience of workplace harassment and the failure of executives to protect the members’ privacy. In effect, the members reminded the public of their own stake in the dispute as workers under ADOR whose conditions would be greatly affected by the result of this corporate fight.
But a lot of the online discourse, both in official media and fan spaces, treated the members’ involvement as unnecessary or needlessly dramatic. The tone and tenor of online discourse veered much more heavily in the direction of inter-group drama, hate, and fanwars. It fundamentally lost sight of the very real labor questions about idol working conditions and contract validity at the heart of the legal dispute and cultivated a lot of noise around other, largely unrelated, topics.
In other words, the NewJeans case exemplifies the way noise online can reframe pivotal labor fights into “scandal.” It’s to the corporation’s advantage to have a contractual dispute reframed as drama—it sidelines the questions of power and labor for much easier questions about like and dislike. The former threatens the idol industry system as it currently functions; the latter simply makes a scapegoat of female idols in the court of public opinion.
I have in mind, too, the way that the other labor-related disputes that have emerged over the past year are always vulnerable to the same distraction techniques. JYP is currently the subject of a lawsuit in California brought forward by the members of K-pop group VCHA, who accused the company of child labor exploitation and unfair business practices; the CEO of Entertainment 143 has been accused of sexually assaulting member Gaeun of MADEIN this past November; and Seunghan’s removal from RIIZE last year continues to have reverberations across the idol industry. In the case of RIIZE, Seunghan had been removed after photo evidence of him kissing a woman and smoking were leaked to the media, but rather than moving to address the violation of their idol’s privacy, SM Entertainment removed him from the group. Seunghan’s case, it seemed, pivoted on the drama of the revealed photos and the emotions they provoked in fans rather than on the labor question at hand: whether or not such routine behaviors should warrant a contract termination for the working idol. We might imagine, for instance, an industry that contractually protects its idols against fan emotions or backlash in situations where their privacy has been violated in this way.
Each of these cases, then, present urgent questions on working conditions and labor rights for idols in the industry—but each has also been weaponized in digital fan discourse toward unrelated ends.
What kinds or reorientations or reframings might help make fandoms a useful space for organizing around such topics?
I think this question brings us back to the earlier point regarding the challenges of translating online fan culture into political work. One of the reasons this translation does not happen easily around the case of NewJeans and these other groups is partly because there’s a systemic non-recognition of idols as laborers. This non-recognition happens within fan communities when fans misread idols’ intimate labor as something other than work, a phenomenon Adan Jerreat-Poole explores thoroughly in their essay for this issue.
But such non-recognition is also built into the legal system under which idols work. By this, I mean that the South Korean legal system quite explicitly does not recognize idols as legitimate workers. As NewJeans Hanni’s workplace harassment hearing in 2024 reaffirmed, idols are classified not as workers but as “exceptional entities” within the South Korean legal framework. As such, they are excluded from the legal protections and rights of more legitimized workers. I think this exclusion, and the fundamental absence of labor as a framework in fans’ perceptions of their idols, constitutes a critical missing piece in the possibilities of political activism we find in K-pop spaces. Added to the noisiness of the spaces themselves, it’s easy to see where breakdowns occur.
Yes, the prominence of the idol body, useful in many instances as a prominent icon for mobilizing around particular political causes, also obscures our recognition of the idol as a laborer.
Fandom organization that attends to this labor opens up new ways of imagining and practising solidarity. I am reminded of the K-pop fan quoted in Haejoang Cho’s interview, who explained their decision to come out and protest against Yoon in this way: “I came to the streets because I thought I couldn't let my beloved singer live in this kind of country."
Returning to the scene of protest with which we began, a different kind of political possibility emerges—one that not only confronts state violence but also expands the horizons of solidarity. The K-pop songs and light sticks no longer just invoke the idol but recognize the idol as a fellow laborer and human subject. When we encounter the idol not as an unattainable figure of perfection but as a person who must navigate similar social, economic, diasporic, and political conditions, something shifts. And when that shift in perspective also reshapes how we relate to others with far less visibility and power, what new forms of affiliation and kinship become possible?
IN THIS ISSUE
Anthropologist Haejoang Cho recalls Korea’s evolution from cultural colony to cultural producer and explores how shared love for Korean popular media might cultivate communities of care in our present and future.
ReacttotheK founder Emma Chang traces the origins of her YouTube channel and shows how listening with a classical music ear can open up new sonic dimensions of K-pop.
Madeleine Han follows the unlikely routes of the choco pie, examining how this popular Korean snack embodies “cold war” legacies and offers material for reimagining political possibility.
Ligia Prezia Lemos and Mariana Marques de Lima consider Brazilian fan activism in support of Love in the Big City (2024) and ask what such practices reveal about transcultural fandom and cross-border solidarity.
Adan Jerreat-Poole traces the shared conditions of parasocial intimate labor linking K-pop idols and webcam models, thus imagining the possibility of solidarity not only across borders but also between bodies at work.
Turning to K-drams, Anisa Khalifa examines what the murder rom-com reveals about the fears, desires, and realities of women living under the persistent threat of gendered violence.
Sue Hyon Bae reads cancer narratives as another ideological genre, investigating how certain neoliberal scripts of female empowerment can paradoxically reinforce patriarchal structures.
Tracing Gwangju’s material and literary memoirs, Yoojin Kim reflects on what it means to step into the shoes of those who gave their lives for the May 18 Democratization Movement—and to carry their paths forward into the present.
We close with two fan perspectives that explore how being moved by another’s work can give rise to something of one’s own. Singaporean author Camille Chong reflects on the power of “stray-ness” and how Stray Kids emboldened her to wander beyond set paths.
Mixed-media and video artist Izumo shows us how the fan’s human touch can transform and re-animate the polished surfaces of K-pop media.
An act of devotion to the person of the idol who exists both in and beyond the media object, Izumo’s practice returns us to Haejoang Cho’s reflection, bringing this issue full circle. “In a time of apathy and disconnection,” Cho observes, “I believe such devotion and admiration carries profound meaning. I want to explore the civilizational depth of admiration itself.” Ə