{"id":793303,"date":"2019-02-21T06:19:47","date_gmt":"2019-02-21T13:19:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/?p=796791"},"modified":"2019-02-21T06:19:47","modified_gmt":"2019-02-21T13:19:47","slug":"k-pop-has-so-many-lookalikes-that-the-government-stepped-in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/music-news\/k-pop-has-so-many-lookalikes-that-the-government-stepped-in\/","title":{"rendered":"K-Pop Has So Many \u2018Lookalikes\u2019 That the Government Stepped In"},"content":{"rendered":"
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As K-pop<\/a> sweeps the global music scene, young musicians are increasingly vying to rise to the top of the genre \u2014 and too many of them look exactly the same, according to South Korea\u2019s government. Over the weekend, officials gave local TV producers and broadcasters new guidelines that suggested restricting the number of K-pop singers on a show at any given time, in order to curb the pressures of plastic surgery among viewers in the country.<\/p>\n

\u201cAre the singers on TV music shows twins? They seriously look identical. Most are [K-pop] idol group members,\u201d wrote South Korea\u2019s Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, adding that the \u201cuniformity among singers\u201d promotes a narrow view of beauty, according to the Korea Times<\/em><\/a>. The organization called the appearances of K-pop stars \u201cexceedingly similar\u201d (\u201cskinny, similar hairstyles and makeup with outfits exposing their bodies\u201d) and\u00a0also said that \u201covert concerns for how one should look on TV\u201d can negatively affect teens and children, many of whom are already raised in a culture that encourages plastic surgery. Some K-pop acts openly promote surgery themselves: All four members of girl band SixBomb, for instance, underwent multiple operations and documented their transformations<\/a>\u00a0in light-hearted videos.<\/p>\n

Many K-pop music fans weren\u2019t keen on the government recommendations. After an online petition circulated to protest the guidelines and a politician from the opposing party called them totalitarian, the ministry said on Tuesday that it did not mean to cause \u201cunnecessary confusion\u201d and will revise some of its recommendations. The suggestions are intended to prevent media from negatively influencing people\u2019s daily lives, it said.<\/p>\n

Yet more broadly, the whole affair is also another example of how closely K-pop stars are regulated. Last fall, the government-sponsored South Korean entertainment industry \u2014 which oversees all K-pop acts\u00a0in meticulous fashion<\/a>, assembling groups and often requiring singers to hand over control of their entire public personas \u2014 drew attention when it fired two singers<\/a> for dating each other. Former stars have detailed extensive management contracts that dictated how they could look, dress or act at all times. There\u2019s a bit of irony, then, in the government\u2019s broadcast recommendations now trying to curtail the very situations that it helped spawn.<\/p>\n

via:: Rolling Stone<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As K-pop sweeps the global music scene, young musicians are increasingly vying to rise to the top of the genre \u2014 and too many of them look exactly the same, according to South Korea\u2019s government. Over the weekend, officials gave local TV producers and broadcasters new guidelines that suggested restricting the number of K-pop singers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[98],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-793303","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-music-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-14 09:52:11","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSMT The Mountain","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/793303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=793303"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/793303\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=793303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=793303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=793303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}