Sulli: how K-pop’s pressure kills

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Kay Ean Leong responds to the suicide of South Korean pop star, Sulli, and reflects on the toxicity of the K-pop industry.

It’s a Monday morning – 14th October, to be exact – and I’m midway through a dreary lecture on a subject I can now no longer recall. I scroll through Twitter in a feeble attempt to rein in my sleepiness. Suddenly, I glimpse a headline from the BBC that jolts my body and mind awake. The female K-pop star Sulli, aged only 25, was found dead in her home in South Korea.

Sulli, who was born Choi Jin-ri, was best known as a member of the wildly popular girl group f(x). Formed by one of the three entertainment behemoths, SM Entertainment, f(x) had dominated the music scene for much of the early 2010s, releasing singles such as Electric Shock (which now has 124 million views on YouTube) and gaining international recognition on charts like Billboard. After her abrupt departure from f(x) in 2014, Sulli continued developing her career, appearing in films like Real and dropping her solo album Goblin. Although I had long abandoned K-pop, the news of Sulli’s death still sent me reeling. She was only two years older than me, and, beautiful, talented and popular as she was, was undoubtedly an aspirational figure in my adolescence.

In her suicide, Sulli joins the ranks of other K-pop artists struggling with their mental health. Fellow labelmate Kim Jong-hyun had only two years prior killed himself with carbon monoxide after a lengthy battle with depression. In May, Korean press revealed that singer Goo Ha-ra had attempted suicide while in June 2017, the rapper T.O.P. (Choi Seung-hyun) was admitted to intensive care following a suspected drug overdose.

Of course, the music industry has consistently been plagued with mental health problems. From composer Robert Schumann flinging himself into the Rhine way back in 1854 to the very recent hanging of Keith Flint, and the many others between them (Amy Winehouse, Ian Curtis, Kurt Cobain, Chester Bennington…the list goes on), the trope of the “tortured artist” is an enduring one. Some musicians perhaps even capitalize on that stereotype, romanticising vicious cycles of drug-addled self-destruction in their songs or stage personas.

Often, there are multiple triggers. The music industry is cutthroat. It is almost impossible to break in, let alone, make it big. Nicki Minaj, for one, attributed her suicidal thoughts to the constant rejection she encountered at the start of her career. Even at the peak of fame, musicians can experience debilitating performance anxiety – as in the case of Adele, who made public her battle with panic attacks. Others, like Bennington, fought personal demons – alternating between states of sobriety and substance abuse – induced by past trauma.

Sulli’s death could just be another in the lengthy record of musicians who suffered silently. But in many ways, it was not.

June 21st, 2018 – followers of Sulli’s Instagram get a notification that the star has just gone live on the application. For the next ten minutes, she stares wordlessly in the dark, the blue light from her phone rendering her face more pallid and ghostly than usual. She does not cry, but her eyes are rimmed with tears.

In another Instagram video, the celebrity says to the camera wistfully, “I am not a bad person. I'm sorry. Why are you saying bad things about me? What did I do to deserve this?”

Following these two incidences, both fans and press alike go wild with speculation. What is wrong with her?

K-pop is a notoriously manufactured industry. While we ordinarily think of budding musicians as coming together, making and experimenting with music, and subsequently, if all things go well, signing a record deal, the situation is entirely different in South Korea. Potential artists are first scouted through auditions at a very young age – Sulli herself was only eleven – to join a trainee program with an entertainment firm. Once selected, trainees undergo rigorous instruction, with daily singing, dancing, acting and language classes alongside formal education. A day can last for over twelve hours. Under such contracts, which can continue for many years, trailing even into the peak of their careers, their entire lives are governed by their companies. They live in dormitories, follow a strict curfew, and have their diets and mobile phone usage stringently managed. Barred from dating or going out, trainees are deprived of typical adolescent experiences. Even after making it big, K-pop artists lead a stressful life. With each EP or album that is dropped, K-pop bands engage in a circuit of promotional activities, encompassing international tours, appearances on weekly television music shows and variety game shows. This cycle repeats a few times a year. Outside of this schedule, they are expected to act in Korean dramas and act as spokespeople for fashion or lifestyle brands. It’s a stressful and solitary existence in this well-oiled machine.

If K-pop is a factory, then its personalities are its products, pristine and perfect to a tee. Or at least they are expected to be. This expectation is implicit in the term attached to celebrities in K-pop vernacular, “idols”. And this is where Sulli, in the eyes of Korean community, failed. Backlash haunted her perpetually, when she openly endorsed South Korea’s revision in its abortion laws, when she made the decision to leave f(x) in 2014 for mental health reasons, and when she appeared nude in Real and studied drug use for the film. Public outcry occurred again when she seemed tipsy in a video with friends (ironic, considering the country’s heavy drinking culture), when she was pictured going braless and defended doing so for her own comfort, and when she went public with her relationship with hip hop artist Choiza, who was fourteen years her senior. For us in the West, these are bizarre and groundless reasons to be policing the actions of a young woman. But in Korea, Sulli existed outside the deliberately crafted space assigned to female idols – one the Guardian describes as a precarious balance between sexual desirability and innocence.

And so she bore the brunt of ceaseless online toxicity. A scroll through her social media accounts exposes how the star was inundated with malicious comments, ranging from name-calling like “attention-seeker” for going bra-less or “druggie” for apparently having dilated pupils during her performance in Real, to more vicious judgements of the slut-shaming or vulgar sort. And despite repeatedly imploring SM Entertainment to take action, nothing tangible was ever done, in part because, according to the company, these comments are made using temporary IP addresses, which are challenging to track down. The hatred got to the extent where she felt the need to defend herself every time she encountered someone.

Even as she endured the vitriol and fought her own battles, Sulli’s public persona was warm and effervescent, for the most part. This is unsurprising because, in line with their hyper-idealised images, Korean celebrities are often reticent about discussing their mental health. Where Western artists are more vocal about their struggles (in fact, whole musical movements, like early-2000s emo, were built on this), there is a strong stigma surrounding mental health in South Korea. Although the country ranks highest on the OECD’s statistics for suicide rates, only one in ten people actually seek professional help, notes the Korea Herald. The unwillingness to address mental ill health stems from social prejudice, which sees the mentally ill as weak and lacking in self-discipline.

For celebrities, the stigma is even stronger. While Sulli was uniquely outspoken about her mental health, others are not. Jong-hyun’s suicide note mentions that his depression was not taken seriously. Normally, mental health-related breaks from the industry are couched in more palatable terms such as “personal issues” or more generalised “health reasons”. That’s because to admit the truth – that an idol was just as human as the rest of us, subject to the same stresses, fears, and anxieties – would be to tarnish the impeccable image constructed over an entire career. It would dislodge the myth of K-pop, revealing that the well-oiled machine isn’t so polished after all.

It’s 24th November, slightly over a month after Sulli’s passing. I’m making the final edits for this piece when I am interrupted by the news. Goo Ha-ra, who had previously attempted suicide, was found dead in her home in Seoul. Police are still investigating the cause of her death. Like Sulli, the 28-year old was one of K-pop’s megastars when I was younger, and she too, had been tormented by unspoken mental ill health, triggered by personal trauma and relentless online abuse. I am deeply saddened, but I am no longer shocked. With the deaths of Sulli and Jong-hyun, the glossy allure of K-pop has already been breached.

What happened to these late K-pop idols resonates, I think, with all of us. They are tales of the devastating toll of treating people like images to be marketed, of expecting infallibility where humans invariably falter. We are living in an age where social media demands that we each have our own hyper-curated online presences. Whether on Instagram or on Twitter, we all need to be “on-brand”, and to stray from that brand can result in swift, and often toxic, backlash, as some influencers have experienced. Already people have recognised the adverse repercussions social media has wrought on our mental health. The reality is that we’re dangerously close to the situation in K-pop. Unlike K-pop, our lives might not pay the price, but we might lose what drives us as humans: meaning and purpose.