Book review – K-pop Confidential
Kpopalypse is back to review more books! This time we’re reading “K-pop Confidential” by Stephan Lee!
A kind caonima who knows that I’ve been on the hunt for k-pop themed books to check out recently sent me a copy of “Kpop Confidential” to review. Let’s take a look at it – does it meet required standards?
K-POP CONFIDENTIAL
Author: Stephan Lee
Chicken House, 359 pages, softcover, 198mm x 128mm
ISBN – 978-1913322298
Amazon link so the author doesn’t hate me for this snarky review and can still make a buck
When I wrote the Shin Hana series of books , the objective was to do something like Jessica Jung’s “Shine” and “Bright“, but with a Kpopalypse flavour, something that would talk about the inside of a hypothetical Korean pop business but in a caonimaish way that would entertain my more mature website readers specifically, rather than the average younger/less mature k-pop fan who might be looking for something light. Whether I succeeded or failed, you can be the judge of that, but I never gave much thought to how someone else would tackle the same task. However there have been quite a few authors who have taken their own stab at an “inside k-pop” type of book and Stephan Lee is one of them. I was interested in checking this book out just to find out how this type of subject matter would be approached by someone a little bit more hooked into the mainstream than I am, so I was pretty happy when a caonima sent me a paperback copy of this book. Stephan Lee is definitely more big-time than Kpopalypse, he wrote for Entertainment Weekly, now works at Netflix doing something or other (no he is not in the credits for Kpop Demon Hunters), flew to Korea to interview k-pop idols, and his book even has its own… teaser video?
No, K-pop Confidential wasn’t made into a movie or TV series, although apparently he tried to make it happen but it didn’t pan out. So what’s the book about, exactly? Well, it follows a young fifteen year old k-pop hopeful called Candace Park and her journey into k-pop stardom. The entire story is told first-person from her point of view. Here’s the back cover of the book which will give you a pretty good outline of what to expect:
It’s a pretty typical k-pop stardom-chasing book outline, Korean-American girl tries out for an agency’s training program to be an idol, girl gets in despite not expecting to, girl enters the trainee program after convincing her reluctant parents, girl finds out gosh it’s really tough doing this k-pop thing but YOU GO GIRL YASSSS QUEEN (no, literally, that’s pretty much what people tell her, more on that later) and so she gives it her best shot and of course she does well but there’s a few setbacks because groupmates are bitchy and there’s a love triangle because why wouldn’t there be, and gosh how is she going to reconcile that with being a k-pop, and… you don’t really need me to do any more plot synopsis here. Other than maybe the book’s last ten pages, you can probably guess exactly what kind of story you’re going to be told here, and you’d be at least 95% right. This means that the book is very predictable in terms of story structure, but hey at least you know what you’re getting – paying for thing X and getting thing X isn’t a bad thing, so I’m not going to mark it down just for that. No, there’s plenty of other, much better reasons to dislike this book, and you might have already sensed a couple of them from this paragraph alone. Let’s start by talking about the positives because Kpopalypse is so nice like that.
Okay, so that’s all the positives done and talked about, let’s now move on to the… okay, just kidding, this book actually does get one thing pretty much right, which I was impressed and even a little surprised by. And that one thing is…. drum roll… it doesn’t sugar-coat the idol business. The depiction of the harshness of the k-pop industry here is… well it’s not perfect, but it’s about as accurate as I’d expect a book like this aimed at younger audiences to get and touches on a lot of key points. Idol starvation diets, long training schedules, the total control over the trainee’s lives, the constant scrutiny, the public weigh-ins and resultant beauty standard/weight loss coaching, the unnecessarily extreme belittling that goes on, it’s all covered fairly realistically. It’s clear that the author has done their research, spoken to real people who have been through the system, and has based this book off real shit that actually happens behind the scenes. This is a very good thing. Given that the audience for this book is obviously teenagers who might be into the k-pop business and maybe might be considering that path themselves, and that this is an important message for those people to receive, one more voice speaking out about how incredibly harsh the Korean idol business is behind the scenes especially in a format like this one, is a voice worthy of support. The book and the author do deserve praise for this aspect alone so if the author of the book is reading this, sincere thank you for this despite all the horrible things I’m going to say about your book very shortly.
Some other quick positives: the chapters are short, so this book is ADHD-friendly which is nice, and… oh, in one scene someone sends the character a shit Koreaboo clickbait article and her reaction is “ugh who caresssssss”. So that’s a definite plus. If I can think of any other positives I’ll put them here later. I’ll now start shitting on this book, and this will contain significant spoilers, so if you just want to know if you should read this, my answer is “probably not, unless you’re very young and/or undemanding of what you read, plus you like k-pop”. Great, now let’s get into all the ways in which I found that this book sucks.
While wanting to educate the k-pop hopefuls is commendable, I’d say that the author is actually a little too conscious of who their audience might be, in a way that actually weakens the writing. Our main character Candace Park has internal dialogues and sometimes actual conversations with other characters in cringe Gen-Z online-speak, everyone’s “yass-queen”ing and “slaying” each other and the top word in just about every character’s vocabulary seems to be “waaah”, I can only assume that this is the author trying to appeal to a young audience and it just feels like weak pandering, because people in the real world don’t actually talk like that except sometimes “ironically” as a joke. The author’s attempt at trying to get the kids on board doesn’t cross over into actually explaining themselves though. There’s a k-pop glossary at the rear of the book (written in-character by one of Candace’s friends, a clever touch) where you can find out the definition of a few Korean words (some slightly technically wrong but it’s in character so whatever) plus what terms like “fanchant” and “killing part” mean if you weren’t able to guess, but anyone reading this book probably already knows a bit about k-pop and doesn’t need it, because why would you even pick a book like this up if you didn’t already have a strong interest in k-pop. The author would have been better off with a glossary of cringe Gen Z-speak and a primer on western pop as this book is packed full of constant, tiresome references to western pop stars and western pop culture, many of which I didn’t even understand. How the hell would I know how Missy Elliot rapped at some three-initial event that probably happened half a decade ago that I didn’t watch and what a reference to that is supposed to mean? What the fuck is a “smize” and “broken doll”? What’s “dutty wining”, is that a typo? The author should have put shit like that in the damn glossary, not stuff like “comeback” and “finger hearts”.
The references to pop culture both east and west are everywhere in this book, often multiple references per page of writing. The author does something that I recommend authors do NOT do in their fiction writing, which is reference real groups, brands, media entities and events. Not because it’s bad writing or anything (that depends), but because the chances of you getting your ass sued or your book taken offsale by book vendors for infringement are very high (I can only assume that being a fairly big media entity himself, the author here got the appropriate clearances). However in this case, it is bad writing. Most of these references appear as either metaphors (“Jinjoo’s pigtails are now Netflix-red”… jesus fucking christ get the corporate cock out of your mouth please) or comparison points (“the ubiquitous Korean style of make-up is soft and ‘natural’, but Mr Oh uses western techniques seen on the Kardashians and drag queens”… right, okay then) or just cheap ways to keep k-pop readers who like existing k-pop groups engaged. More than one chapter is actually titled after “Into The New World” and aspects of the song are dwelled on to the extent that they border on becoming a plot point, also I hope you like Blackpink being referenced a lot and I mean a lot. All of this just screams laziness and “let’s bait k-pop fans into giving a shit about this book by validating them through mentioning their faves over and over”. If you’re writing fiction, why not use your imagination when you get the chance, rather than leaning on existing popular culture? You’re already constrained enough as it is just by writing about k-pop at all, why box yourself in even further by refusing to fictionalise things like big k-pop groups. They do have a fictional k-pop group called Queengirl in there, plus SLK, the male group that love interest One.J is from, so the author can do it, he just chose not to do it consistently, either because it was easier, or because he wants to bait k-pop fans into sticking around, or maybe a little of both.
This type of laziness also permeates the story in general, in all sorts of other ways. To give just one of the more egregious examples: in “K-pop Confidential” the agency’s building is split in half with the boys on the north side and the girls on the south side, with the two halves separated by a glass wall so the boy and girl trainees can still see each other in places like the cafeteria and gym. The plot excuse for what the main character Candace calls the “gender glass” is that management thinks the girls will be more motivated to lose weight if they know that the boys are looking at them (what benefit to management the mirror has by also functioning in the other direction is not mentioned). This “gender glass” is supposedly an essential enough component for the agency to have for this specific reason, that it justifies a whole bunch of extra engineering and infrastructure; the two halves of the three floors and rooftop of the 100-storey(!) building where the agency reside have separate stairwells, elevators and security. Clearly this silliness is all a device inserted purely for plot reasons; it’s hard to establish a love triangle with a boy trainee you’re not allowed to ever see or interact with, so the author had to work out some way for the girls and the boys to regularily get a look at each other, and this is the half-assed solution he came up with. I feel like a better writer would have been able to come up with a more realistic way to handle that kind of obstacle.
Speaking of obstacles, Candace Park herself doesn’t seem to have too many. This fifteen year old character is Mary Sue to the core, cruising through audition processes with her incredible singing talent and outperforming other trainees who had been there for years, while getting not much more than a bit of tantrum-throwing from her idol-in-training peers and management for fucking up dances in ways that would have had other trainees either out on their ear immediately or the victim of intense hazing because Candace is just so charming I guess. She’s a complete natural in the recording studio too, kicking ass easily and getting everything right despite never having worked in a recording studio before. No meaningful levels of stage-fright or nervousness either, she’s a natural on stage as well despite no experience; one of the later plot-twists (if you can call special snowflake Candace succeeding at yet another thing she’s never done before a “twist”) involves her spontaneously comedy-improvising her way out of having to do a too-difficult dance move. Not to mention she gets the whole love triangle going with trainee Youngbae (who is both “young” and “bae” and yes Candace actually narrates that joke and no it’s not any funnier when she does it than when I do it) and also One.J who is like the biggest k-pop idol star in Korea who was ever big, and here we have our answer as to why even though the author name-drops big groups like crazy BTS isn’t mentioned in the book at all – because they’d be direct competition for One.J and then the corners of Candace’s special one of a kind snowflake lattice would melt because she wouldn’t be kissing the biggest kpop star ever ever ever. Oh and she’s a songwriter too of course and you already know that her songs are great and everyone loves them, they have “profound” lines like “maybe your double eyelids make you see two / you can’t tell what’s real and what’s just illusions”. Did I mention that Candace is fifteen years old and has all this incredible talent and charm? Just in case you missed that. Truly a character without a struggle, any small hiccups along the road to her fame and fortune are resolved within a few quick page-turns. This makes her very boring, and also kind of annoying and self-centred – don’t be surprised if you find yourself wishing for her downfall and rooting for her bitchy dorm-mates instead, the only people on this entire planet besides management who don’t seem to like her that much, but of course even they secretly do like her because who could possibly be immune to Candace’s charms, she’s just so adorable and talented…
Oh, and I know what you’re thinking, all you pearl-clutching k-pop fans; “isn’t Candace a little too young for all this spicy love triangle stuff”? While Candace is fifteen, One.J is only sixteen, and the other boy Youngbae… well, I actually missed where his age is specifically mentioned, but “he’s young and he’s bae” and he’s also the maknae of his group so it’s at least implied that he’s of a similar age to Candace. Plus they’re not exactly sucking each other off or having threesomes or getting gangbanged or anything, this isn’t a Kpopalypse novel. Mind you Candace does debut on television at fifteen in the book, which in the eyes of k-pop fans is on the same moral level as holding a Burzum concert at the Holocaust museum… so make of it what you will. But if you’re going to boycott the book because of young people in immoral power-unbalanced relationships or whatever, then you do you, but I’d politely suggest that boycotting the book simply because it sucks is a far better reason.
The last thing I want to mention about the book, is the ending, and from skim-reading the reception that this book has had elsewhere, this is something that pissed off almost everyone who read it, including quite a lot of people who otherwise liked it. Everything just sort of gets wrapped up – or rather doesn’t – in the last ten pages or so, with Candace making a decision that doesn’t feel realistic or in-character at all but just seems to be there so she gets to have her “I have learned that the k-pop industry is not very nice” moment, and we the readers get to have a little condescending lecture from her which we really didn’t need because the book actually did quite a good job of showing how shit the industry was up until that point (even if it didn’t do such a good job of… well, anything else at all, really). It’s frustrating and clearly there to leave room open for a sequel (it exists and is called “K-pop Revolution” so consider yourselves warned) but it leaves too much other stuff unresolved and it will make you question why you bothered. At least I know why I bothered – so I could write this review, or course.
Having said that, if you can switch your brain off, and I mean right off, as in all the way off, as in “I just want some k-pop related words on some pages to read while my phone does updates before I get back to doomscrolling TikTok” off, then it’s a light, breezy read which won’t demand very much of you. Very young and/or very undemanding/uncritical readers might actually love it, and if those readers can absorb the central message of “the k-pop industry is actually kind of broken” without getting bothered too much by how the book lacks pretty much everything else that a good book requires, then that’s a win for them and for society at large. And since we know dumb cunts are a majority in the k-pop space, this book definitely has its audience. Just know that since you’re here on Kpopalypse.com reading this review, that probably already puts you in the top five percentile of k-pop fans intellectually, which means that this book will probably just piss you off. I’m giving it one “shooketh” out of five (yes that’s a word in this book, “Shakespeare levels of shook” apparently), but add an extra two “shookeths” if you had to look up both “Burzum” and “Holocaust museum”.
Are you a brave writer of k-pop books who would like to see me review your work? If so, get in touch!
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