JYP's Formation of the Girl Group "Vcha" was Always a Problem

I am only a casual K-pop consumer. After all, I'm nearly 39 years old, far outside the target demographic for K-pop. But I'll casually listen to a fairly broad variety of music, maybe never delving super deep into any of it. Similarly, with K-pop, I'm always a little bit on the outside of major events happening.

    Many years ago, the only way I was consuming any K-pop at all was thanks to rhythm games. Dance Dance Revolution 3rd Mix Plus was marketed directly in Korea. Dance Freaks was the Korean-marketed version of Konami's Dance Maniax series. ParaParaDancing was the Korean version of ParaParaParadise. And then eventually I would start dabbling in Korean-made rhythm games like Pump It Up, which would often feature popular K-pop tracks, eventually evolving to feature the music videos from the artists. 

    Solo artist Psy's Gangnam Style would blow K-pop wide open worldwide in 2012, despite several previous attempts from various Korean artists and groups to do this in America and elsewhere. Even mega-star BoA, known for making it big in the Korean markets, and even known in America for her songs found in the anime series Inu Yasha, hadn't found the right formula for breaking into North America, despite having an entire English language album tailor-made to gain traction in the US. But today, K-pop is relatively widely consumed everywhere, including the US. Many groups are nigh unto unavoidable, with BTS getting plenty of American radio play. You can find T-shirts of any number of K-pop groups inside your local Hot Topic if you walk in there right now. Some of these groups might not completely be household names yet, but your teenage girls definitely know them, and the people who know them are absolutely spending their money on their merchandise and concerts. I myself have actually attended two separate KCON LA events, as well as one of their super concerts. I've been to a lot of concerts in my day. I'm approaching middle age, and I'm the cringe millennial that actually attended a Linkin Park concert during their Meteora tour in 2004. A scream-o Nu Metal rock/hip-hop group like Linkin Park was definitely loud. But never in my life have I ever been in a venue where the crowd was as ear-splittingly loud as they were at KCON LA. This is a level of dedication that is beyond your wildest imagination.

    My husband and I have occasionally been suckers for these Making The Band-esque series featuring K-pop groups. It's how he ended up getting particularly invested in the enormously popular group Twice. They were formed through a reality TV show titled Sixteen, hosted by famed musician and producer J.Y. Park, who owns and operates the enormous Korean record label JYP. It had all of the high-stakes drama of any given reality TV show, but was also pretty cruel in some ways. After eliminating several girls, the grand finale narrowed the final group down to only a few members, and with only two members left, rather than picking one of the girls on stage as a final member, J.Y. Park announced to a room full of fans waiting to see the final line-up that a girl he had eliminated from the show several episodes prior was to be the final member. That member, of course, was shocked beyond belief and came up on stage absolutely sobbing her eyes out. The formation of the group felt pretty disgustingly emotionally manipulative, even for a reality TV show. And yet, here they were, now fully formed into the group known as Twice. Twice has now been operating for nine years and is one of JYP's biggest cash cow groups.

    We've watched other reality shows, such as a few iterations of Produce 101, both in Korea and in Japan, and Produce 48 which pulled members from Japan's popular idol groups like AKB48 and HKT48. Japanese idol groups have enormously different expectations on performance and interactions with fans than Korean idol groups do, which is part of what made the Japanese iterations of these shows so interesting. Frankly, in Japan, it is significantly less important that you are a good singer and a good dancer. People care way, way, way more about whether or not you're young and cute with a bubbly personality and you look like a creepy middle-aged man might actually have a shot at dating you. It's a completely different beast from the K-pop machine, which demands perfection in all areas and will work you until you break in order to achieve that result. For that reason, in a lot of these Japanese-based shows, you see Japanese idols completely unprepared for the kind of work it takes to be a K-pop-style performer, and even the judges have to sit and have a conversation with each other saying, "What the hell are we gonna do? None of them are good. Or, maybe, it's less that they're not good, and more that they never even started training in the ways we need them to perform in the first place. Not a single one of them is ready for any of this." And in these shows, only a couple of Japanese girls even make it out into the big leagues at all, and still end up being planted into groups of mainly Korean performers. Sakura Miyawaki is one of those rare Japanese performers, pulled from AKB48, who was able to put in the work necessary to survive the K-pop machine, and has to this date now been in two separate K-pop groups, currently in the huge-hitting girl group Le Sserafim, who even performed in this past year's Coachella.

    One largely Japanese-built group that was created in one of these reality shows is the girl group NiziU (pronounced kinda like "need you"). It's another instance where producer J.Y. Park tried to make Twice happen a second time, except in Japan. Similarly to shows like Produce 48, in their own reality TV series titled Nizi Project, Park was finding it a little difficult to work with Japanese and Japanese-American performers because they have not been training in the beast that is the K-pop production machine, and even their early debut in Japan as a fully-realized group was kinda rough. But after about another year or two in the oven, they improved quite a bit, and even released Korean-language music that took off pretty far. It took a little time, but JYP somehow managed to do it yet again and create another hit.

    Realize, J.Y. Park himself has seemed very desperate for years to create a global explosion in K-pop and the music industry itself. He's repeatedly tried to make huge acts happen in America, but it keeps not meeting his expectations. Things have been working out pretty well with Japan as of late, with many artists making Japanese versions of their singles, or even new singles unique to Japan, and Japan has wholly bought into K-pop. The explosion has been huge in Japan. For what it's worth, JYP's model is working in Japan. But he desperately wants it to work in America, too.

    So that's when the reality show titled A2K happened, in 2023. Short for "America to Korea," A2K was planned to be yet another one of these J.Y. Park-hosted reality shows to farm the best of the best from across America to create a new super group which he would go on to name Vcha. The show toured five cities, pooled several girls from these auditions, and finally built and debuted Vcha with the single titled Y.O.Universe. They recorded a few songs, had a couple of singles, one comeback, and even tagged along with Twice as their opening act on a handful of performances on one of their tours.

    But soon, it was clear things were going bad. First was the announcement from JYP that Kaylee--the youngest member of the group at just 13 years of age--was taking a break from group activities for her health. Nobody heard anything from the group for months. Occasionally their social media would wish the group members a happy birthday, and that's all you would hear about it. But finally, the shit hit the fan when we learned in the last couple weeks that Vcha member K.G. was suing JYP Entertainment for a litany of child abuse issues, including physical and mental abuse, demanding repeated practice on injured limbs, required use of lavish accommodations resulting in debt of over $500,000, constant video surveillance including the monitoring of their eating habits, causing the eating disorder of another member of the group, and then further causing a member to attempt suicide by swallowing 42 sleeping pills, among other things. Keep in mind, every member of the group to this day is still a minor. All of these things were happening to children. It's especially not good that this was happening under contracts from JYP's American branch, which causes them to bump heads with America's child labor laws.

    All of this is standard practice in Korea, by the way. Koreans, and to some extent Japanese people, have become fairly desensitized to the slave labor that is the K-pop industry. JYP Entertainment themselves have been caught doing these same practices with other groups, like forcing one of their talent to eat nothing but ice cubes for a week in order to lose weight. Even in the case of their insanely popular girl group Twice, one member, Jeongyeon, suffered a horrific spinal disc herniation, underwent back surgery, took a hiatus due to anxiety, and resumed group activity just a couple months later. She had been gaining weight because of injections that are common after spinal surgery, but despite this, she was still required to perform, and it's been obvious that the record label has been sidelining her due to her weight gain--weight gain that, I must reiterate, was caused by the company overworking her to the point of literally breaking her back, and now they put her in the biggest, frumpiest clothes they can find in the company wardrobe, and focus on her in music videos significantly less than they do every other member of the group. It's bad, and JYP deserves to feel bad. This almost completely mirrors what had later happened to K.G. from Vcha, who had to repeat a dance move hundreds of times in rehearsal to the point that she tore a ligament in her shoulder, and despite doctor's orders, JYP forced her to keep practicing at full capacity while they kept giving her injections to force her to keep going. Like, what the fuck is happening over there in that industry?

    None of this is new, by the way. I can guarantee, if you've heard of it happening even once, it has absolutely happened hundreds of times over to any other favorite group or group member (a.k.a. "bias") you can think of. They're all working under these same conditions, and nobody is doing anything to prevent it from happening. We keep hearing about lawsuits, injuries, bands breaking up and leaving record labels, harassment and assault--every horrible thing you can think of has happened in the industry, and we just keep making it, idolizing it, and feeding it. And I get it, there's no ethical consumption under capitalism, but at some point, something's gotta give, right? You can only hope that maybe K.G.'s lawsuit against JYP Entertainment is part of that breaking point since now you're fuckin' around with American child labor laws.

    But a big part of what I wanted to write about is a completely different truth as it relates to the idol group Vcha.

    They were never even good.

    That's probably really controversial to say in the middle of stan culture that demands that you be nothing but positive and uplifting to these K-pop idols, and I understand that that's especially true because it would be mean if you said that these literal children aren't good at what they're doing, which is why I hesitated ever saying anything like that out loud on the internet prior to now. My husband was oftentimes a lot more adamant about it than me. He'd say, "That's it, I'm gonna say something!" And I'd have to tell him, "Don't you dare, the K-pop stans will come out of the woodwork and eat you alive." He's probably gonna say something now that I've written this, though.

    But here's the second part that goes hand-in-hand with this. It's JYP's fault that the group is bad.

    I kept looking at what the reaction to Vcha was on social media. I checked Twitter, I checked the YouTube comments under episodes of A2K, I watched reaction videos to their singles, everything. And largely, stans completely drank the Kool-Aid. They kept rooting for these girls every episode of A2K, saying they kept improving, praising how talented they were, and all my husband and I could think was, "Are we watching the same show?"

    A2K is an absolute disaster of a reality show.

    For comparison, you should also check out yet another J.Y. Park-hosted reality casting show titled Nizi Project Season 2, this time forming an idol group of Japanese boys rather than Japanese girls, resulting in the formation of the boy group titled Nexz. This show was being uploaded to YouTube concurrently alongside A2K, and the difference is night and day. The Japanese auditioners from Nizi Project Season 2 were significantly more prepared than anyone during the entire process of A2K. They managed to go to various cities and grab dudes who have been practicing singing and dancing their entire lives, some of whom had even been training in Korea prior to the show. These guys were serious, and there were genuinely talented and practiced guys that J.Y. Park had his pick from.

    This was not even close to the case during the filming of A2K.

    The process for A2K was so bad that no amount of editing could have possibly hidden it. I frankly can't even believe that they allowed it to go out the door at all. I don't know what their process was for announcing this talent search, because it looks like almost nobody even knew about it. Every shot looks like next to nobody showed up. And even in the editing process, the narrative goes out of its way to tell you that J.Y. Park was struggling to find anybody that matched his needs in any of the cities he visits. In fact, during the episode where he visits Atlanta, he finds almost literally nobody worthy of recruiting at all, and settles for literally the very last person that walks through the door. In the case of Kaylee in particular on the day that she auditions (who is 12-years-old at the time of recording), she is rushed in near the last minute and tells J.Y. Park that she literally only just found out about the competition a couple of days ago, so she hasn't even rehearsed her audition in full, but he takes her anyway. What the hell happened here?

    Looking at the video that JYP put up on their YouTube channel in 2022 in regards to this competition, it looks like even to this day, only barely over 660,000 people even watched the video announcing they would be doing a talent search. And surely not all 660,000 people came from the five cities they were auditioning in. In fact, we know they weren't, 'cause somebody came to one of the cities from Florida when they didn't have a Florida-based audition day, and at least two of the girls were Canadian. Frankly, it feels like the auditions weren't well enough advertised in the first place. And then the people they ended up with in the training leg of the TV series were largely people that only recently became aware of K-pop in the first place. These aren't people who have had any level of professional training, by comparison to almost every other reality K-pop group-forming show, even under JYP. In the first three episodes, it's hard to look at the way J.Y. Park is approaching the forming of the group and not think that he has these ridiculously high standards, and that he keeps dismissing people who might have at least been okay for the forming of the band, only to realize as he's reaching the end of it that he hasn't managed to find anybody worthy of training, because somewhere along the way the entire casting process got completely fucked up. Either they didn't send out a loud enough casting call, or they didn't target the right people, or something, because it's clear that there's a huge problem. And despite the words coming out of Park's mouth, the results are actually screaming from his body language. He's trying so hard to be kind (but also a little backhanded) about how good he thinks each contestant is. Meanwhile, if you were flip-flopping between watching episodes of A2K and Nizi Project Season 2 like we were, you'd see he was being super nitpicky about singing and dancing, even facial expressions, and about how each contestant's performance made him feel emotionally. Even some incredible talent was picked to shreds, because he's already got access to some incredible talents, and now he's here to whittle that talent down to the absolute cream of the crop. Not the case with A2K! Back in America, Park is stuck with whatever slim pickings he ended up with, and even through the editing, you can tell he knows it.

    Even in the training portions of the competition, you can tell that these girls are wholly underprepared for what they're about to go through. They picked people who've never sung before, people who've never danced before, and we're supposed to be led to believe he's gonna cart them off to Korea and whip them into a super group. That kind of training takes years in the machine, not just the length of one reality show and maybe a few more months on top of that. There are trainees in Korea who have been in the recording studios' training programs since they were tweens, stuck in there for literal years, before they even earn the right to be backup dancers during live performances and music videos. What did they think was gonna happen with an undercooked group of girls who has never had professional training in any of these areas in their lives?

    The answer, apparently, is push them until they break. Even during the competition show, you can see how hard they're being pushed, and while there's improvement, they don't come out looking nearly as clean as literally any other single group that has ever come out of these group-building shows. Not Twice, not NiziU, not NexZ, not any of them. They're rough around the edges, and that's putting it nicely. Their dancing isn't as sharp, and during the handful of televised live performances Vcha was given after their debut, their vocals were way, way, way off the mark. They were in no way ready to both sing and dance at the same time. This is not me saying they couldn't have eventually become a solid group with more time and training under their belts. This is me saying that the A2K process was flawed and did not work, and that their casting process ended up with the wholly wrong people, completely unprepared for the slave labor that was to come.

    Mind you, the slave labor would have never been okay under any circumstances. When it happens to Korean and Japanese artists, it's still bad. They're just the people you less often hear complaining about it, maybe because it takes them longer to break because they have normalized the slave labor part of making K-pop to themselves. But if there was anybody who could have possibly been less prepared for the disaster that is the K-pop industry, it's the girls that JYP picked to join Vcha. I don't know how it is you go to cities like New York and Los Angeles, where there is a crazy abundance of people slaving over becoming the best of the best to break into various areas of the entertainment industry, and what you ended up with the children literally the least qualified to do any of that, and not only that, but you stuck them under heinously abusive conditions and broke them while trying to force them to improve.

    Anyway, it baffles me that there were ever people saying they expected Vcha to be good, when any objective person could have looked at the process and said, "Hey, this entire thing sucks, throw the whole thing out, get people who are genuinely prepared to enter the entertainment industry," but nope, not our good ol' buddy J.Y. Park. Unable to say anything failed, he was now stuck working with what he had, and was more than willing to break his new toys in the pursuit of trying to build whatever this global group is that he's been trying to build for several years now. And for what? The worst table scraps of songs his producers could wrangle? The singles they gave these poor kids were awful. The most Radio Disney songs you've ever heard in your life. Not a single one of those tracks was fire enough to have any sort of lasting power. And I look at these YouTubers goin', "Yeah, they did it! They really succeeded! They were doing so well!" My jaw hit the floor earlier today when I heard one YouTuber say, "Their single Girls of the Year was genuinely the best song from a new artist all year, and I'm saying that knowing that Illit was another debut group this year." Are you joking? Illit? You mean the group with that insanely viral song, Magnetic, that everybody and their mom was dancing to on TikTok for half the year? That Illit?

    Anybody with a pair of eyes and an unbiased personality would have taken one sniff of this whole A2K debacle over the last year and a half and smelled it for the bizarre, abusive scam that it was. Stan culture be damned, it's insane to me to think that anybody saw how that process worked out and didn't instantly worry for the health, safety, and happiness of the contestants involved in that show. And this lawsuit is exactly the correct result after everything that happened. I hope K.G. gets every single thing she's asking for, and that all the other members of the group make it out as whole, well-rounded people in the end.

    And I hope the K-pop stans start looking at the media they consume more critically. They're guilty of toxic positivity that is in no way helping the people that they think they're supporting. Stop for two seconds and think logically about what is actually happening in front of your eyes. JYP would love for you to think that the things you're seeing and hearing about them aren't really happening. You're smarter than that, so act like it, and tell them that's exactly what you plan on doing.

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Special thanks to the following Phobos and Mars tier members: BetaRayILL, Andre

        Extra special thanks to the following Kasei Gumi members: Gomer