#sources: 4 published texts + one 2 hr long press conference

[storkmuffin]

idk if you've answered this before, but what are your thoughts on the hybe vs mhj situation? I haven't really been following it, so idk what to believe. I just hope newjeans will return, i loved their music!

OK. So I'm going to assume that this was sent in good faith, bc you really don't know and you are genuinely curious and it really is about your love and concern for the Idols in NewJeans. Because when I first got this I was like OMG this is a bomb! They're trying to kill me!

In the hopes of avoiding any potential wrangling with ARMY members, Hybe fans, 방시혁 fans & haters, woman haters, 민희진 fans & haters, and, why not, fans and antis of NewJeans, I am going to give you the very boring, very factual answer first.

Corporate structure:   Hybe owns 80% of Ador, Min 18%, Ador employees 2%. The board of Ador had Min at the top, with 2 others. The 2 others used to be Hybe people, and then they were switched out for Ador people widely agreed to be Min loyalists. The representative of Ador is Min.

This is untenable if there’s ever a conflict between Hybe and Ador, as corporations. Hybe has the right to open a shareholder's meeting for Ador, but they don't have a Hybe associated person on the board of directors, so they don't have the actual ability to make it happen if Min and her board don't want one. Hybe had no choice but to engage in the very annoying legal procedure of contacting Ador through a lawyer to say, in writing, Min, get out, and we're gonna have a goddamn shareholder meeting.

Hybe made a lot of strategically unwise decisions in the corporate structure, but then so did Ador and Min. Min should've sought more than 18% - if she had 34%, she could have properly fended off Hybe's demand to force a shareholder meeting without having to do that explosive press conference. It is not technically possible for a mere 18% shareholder to 'wrest control' of anything, just from the sheer math, as well.

My opinion of the situation is that the k-pop industry which did experience an unexpected and massive growth all of a sudden is going through pretty painful growing pains in becoming sophisticated as an industry. You know, they're great at finding and cultivating talent, making entertainment, and marketing that entertainment, but they're not that mature as a capitalistic enterprise. Whatever legal team or lawyer that put the Ador ownership structure together was evidently subpar OR whoever made the final decision ignored sound advice, because people at this level of capitalism are supposed to think about what will happen if humans start to hate each other, and set up systems accordingly so that nobody has to expose anybody else. All these rich people who were, thus far, respected & famous for being talented first and foremost, should have thought ahead and built in some steps so they could work out their disagreements discreetly, in an orderly way. Instead what happened was that Hybe apparently felt it had no option but to personally attack Min, viciously, through the media, and that left Min thinking her best option was to immolate herself in an act of attempted murder-suicide of honor destruction.

Still here?

OK. So!

From here on out this is my personal interpretation of the whole thing.

Min is a kind of artist for which I don't think we have recognition yet, because it's new. The closest I can come up with is Multimedia Storyteller. She 'builds' concepts for Kpop Idols, right?  So one of her major talents is knowing exactly how to appeal to the most number of people in the fastest, deepest way. The best option for the storytelling about her conflict with Hybe is to call them exploitative pigs who fuck around playing golf on weekdays and ride around in chauffeured cars on the backs of employees 'slaving away' underneath them, taking credit for the 'actual value' that the 'slave employees' contribute for 1/n-th of the exploitative pigs' annual bonuses. This is a goddamn Dolly Parton song, is it not?  The story she tells  - about being the little guy who just wants to go a good job and go home, and actually DID A GOOD JOB, but got fucked over is extremely resonant if you’ve ever had a job that required any kind of creativity (be it making actual art all the way to problem solving skills).  If you’ve ever loved your profession or a project you worked on for a salary, if you stayed at a job you found oppressive because you just really liked the actual work or because there was nowhere else to do that work, there’s an enormous emotional resonance to much of the story she tells  about herself

I don’t know if you know this, but ‘golf’ in S. Korea stands for a lot of things because it’s so bloody expensive.  I have friends who golf, and NOT counting golf lessons at specialized centers, the cost of golf clubs and outfits, the fact that you generally have to have your own car and drive out to the course in a country that produces 0 drops of oil,you will still be spending, at minimum, around $400+ per outing. So when Min says “I don’t golf,” she’s trying to let the ordinary Korean person know that even if she earns an immense salary, she’s more like them than someone like CEO Bang, who is presumed to golf. 

Min was born in 1978. Bang was born 1972.  This matters.  Gen X/ Xennial women were the first generation of Korean women who routinely received college educations, when their grandmothers were barely sent to elementary school.  Perhaps not unrelated, they also started the death of our birthrate by choosing to not marry and not have children and being fine with those choices.  So they were the start of a kind of liberated woman,, but the norms with which Gen X Korean women are raised are still very 19th Century.  Being a ‘nice’ woman or a ‘good’ woman (착한 여자) means being a bit naive, a lot accommodating and guileless. Staying eternally innocent, a little bit helpless, a little bit still in need of protection from ‘the world’ and so on, even as you’re the extremely well paid CEO of a whole freaking company.

So much of what Min said in the famous press conference reflects this contradiction. She got herself an education, competed to get into a hard driving corporate enterprise (SM Entertainment), worked very hard and achieved so much that she became a personal protege of the founder of SM, became famous and rich and powerful inside a harsh industry, and then, when she reached the end of the road at that company, immediately got a major job offer, with much flattery, by SM’s direct competitor and new big game in town, Hybe, by personal direct contact by the founder CEO.   Everything about this shows a savvy, clear-headed, ambitious person.   She shows some of this self in the press conference - she threatens Hybe, challenges her anti-s, names names.  She says of herself, I’m the type of person who has to do everything herself, and that she knows Bang is afraid of her because nobody ever says no to him but she will tell him he’s incorrect right to his face.

But she says she doesn’t care about money.  She says she never understood the Ador contract.  

A lot of Min’s antis talk about how unbelievable this is, but actually, I believe her. There’s only so much you can, as an individual, fight your own upbringing and the cultural norms that were injected into your brain before you were 10. A certain amount of stupidity is required to be a good woman, you see, and being a woman who really wants to make a lot of money is ugly in every place I’ve ever heard of.  You can argue with me about this and I will expose you for a liar. Accordingly, I think she may have adopted "Does Not Understand Contracts" as one of the facets of being, in the end, a Good Woman (stupid but lovable and protected).

Min apparently also entirely believed every single thing Bang said when he was luring her into his company by way of flattery and big promises that weren’t actually reflected in her employment contract.  She wanted acknowledgment, in a ‘my daddy approves of me’ type of way, or maybe, ‘I’m the most respected girl in class’ way, from Bang and the other people at Hybe.  And that makes a certain amount of emotional sense, because she is an artist but an artist who is never trying to express HERSELF.  She’s always behind the scenes. Her job in some ways is to be invisible.  So being recognized FOR HERSELF was probably immensely seductive and exciting.

But you know, when someone is too good to be true in a business engagement, you’re supposed to take a step back and ask yourself… But why? What do you actually want from me?  What can I lose and what do you gain by buttering me up?

Bang wanted to ‘buy’ Min’s talent  to add to his own skillset, and to grow his business.  He ‘bought,’ in essence, insider access to how Min Heejin puts a world-beating girl group together.  That doesn’t seem evil to me. That’s just how capitalism works. If you have something valuable, like Min Heejin’s Girl Group Making Methodology, it’s up to you to safeguard your intellectual property. Min, having believed that she was being hired by a fan of her work, was outraged and wounded when it became finally clear to her what deal she’d actually struck. 

What Hybe and its CEO Bang are trying to do is entirely different in nature from what Min has done and want to do. Min wants to alter the art of Kpop Idoldom. She wants to improve it, and she puts her heart and soul into the groups she makes, to both make art with and through them, and to make Kpop itself follow her vision.  She’s an insider who takes an outsider stance.  What the company HYBE wants to do is make Kpop properly industrial, to make the technology of Kpop (how to put together an Idol group, create a narrative for their concept, and market them with the right songs, visual content, concert performances and goods) exportable, and the creation of idol groups themselves less dependent on the vision of individual, idiosyncratic Storytelling artists.  People exactly like Min, in other words. Min Heejin, an artisan Kpop Maker, was recruited by Hybe, Kpop capitalists, to work for an enterprise whose ultimate goal is to make artisans like her irrelevant.  She calls it 'copying' but that's Hybe's point. Hybe doesn't want to just export Idol teams and their content, they want to export Kpop itself.

The morals of the story as far as I can tell are these, then:  (1) It’s fucking vital to read every word of your goddamn contracts. (2) If a potential employer sounds too good to be true, you’re being used, so fucking pay attention. 

The other thing I learned from Min Heejin’s press conference was confirmation of a bunch of things that I’d gotten through osmosis, by stanning.

Idols sell youth.  You must, must, absolutely must, debut as young as possible. 

As a result, the Idols’ parents are exactly like ballet mothers. No more, no less.  Parents also become incorporated into the marketing of idols. 

The teams are put together, deliberately, exactly like sports teams.  The team ‘owners’ play poker or chess with the human ‘players.’  Kpop Idoldom is not at all different from sports and like, rookies and recruitment from college teams and such.

Books, pamphlets, sources I have relied on: