Note: This article contains spoilers for “K-Pop Demon Hunters.”
In my home, “K-Pop Demon Hunters” is currently a near-daily indulgence. (By my son’s request, but I confess to inwardly rejoicing whenever he asks to watch it.)
The animated musical tells the story of the members of Huntr/x, a trio of Korean singers who are secretly (as the film’s title indicates) a magical group of demon hunters. They’re the latest in a lineage of musically gifted hunters, actually, who carry the baton of preventing the goblin-esque creatures and the fire-god who controls them from taking over the human world through the power of song – and, on occasion, martial arts moves and glowing weaponry.
It’s a total hit, and well beyond the confines of our New York City apartment – it’s taken up residence for weeks in Netflix’s top ten most popular films, while its soundtrack has become the highest-charting one of the year.
But woven throughout this cartoon delight and its infectious K-pop tunes is a beautiful – and rather timely – message about the power of women’s creativity. A power that is so strong that some seek to curtail it. And I don’t just mean the notorious mistreatment of young talent in the actual K-pop industry.
Indeed, it’s not lost on me that, less than a year before this film debuted, the Taliban officially banned women in Afghanistan from singing. The Islamic fundamentalist group, which has controlled the central Asian nation with an increasingly clenched fist since reclaiming power in 2021, declared a woman’s voice to be something “intimate” last August. As such, women there can no longer read aloud, pray – or sing – if they are around other people.
An entire nation of women barred from bringing their voices together in harmony – lest they be imprisoned… or worse.
Denying An Intrinsic Right
As a longtime choir member, I know the physical, emotional and social boosts that the unparalleled joy of harmonizing provides. But beyond what I derive from it as an individual, it also serves as a uniquely powerful manifestation of the concept of a whole being greater than the sum of its parts. However many voices you bring together on a given song, there is always something larger, something intangible, that is made when voices are raised together.
The magic lies in the “together.” In order to successfully pull off any choral piece, everyone involved has to be (metaphorically) unified. Singers honor one another by learning their parts with intention, then bringing that work to the collective and listening closely to others, to figure out how their voices can best blend. To create a unit, a feeling, a moment, an experience.
To deny others this joy and connection is a soul-level betrayal.
The movie gets this concept. Near its end, there is a moment when Huntr/x is torn apart by the demon characters and their leader, Gwi-Ma. It’s not a physical attack – the demons don’t use their claws and fangs to take the lead in the battle. Instead, it’s a metaphorical gnashing, in which they crush resistance and individuality by amplifying their victims’ most deep-seated fears and doubts, until they’re rendered hopeless. Quite literally soulless.
And as such, compliant.
In the real world, it’s not mythical monsters threatening humanity, and women in particular, in this way. Rather, it’s other humans – men, especially – who separate and subjugate by cutting off women’s access to the particular power of singing together.
Because they’re afraid of what women can do when our voices are joined and synced – what our “together” can create when we make it our own, and how it might threaten their feeble grasp on control. They’re afraid of the songs of freedom and justice we can sing, and teach to others.
They’re Afraid of Women Winning
When the demonic force succeeds in breaking Huntr/x down, the only thing that brings them back to one another – to the love that they share, and the power they generate as a group – is singing together. Once they’re united and harmonious again, they’re unstoppable; the trio rather quickly triumphs over the evil that sought to tear them, and others, apart. The protective barrier separating the demon realm from the human world is refortified, thanks to the joining of their voices – and the voices of everyone the evil forces sought to control and consume.
It’s not just fiction fodder – I’ve seen firsthand how harmonizing grounds people in love. One especially potent example: My grandmother and my four great-aunts comprised The DeMarco Sisters, a sister singing group that enjoyed quite a bit of popularity in their day. But as families sometimes do, the DeMarco Sisters would fight, sometimes over the family dinners we gathered for throughout my childhood. Yet before those evenings ended, the sisters would sing, hopping on familiar harmonies and smiling at one another once more, well before the last note rang out.
Sometimes, a sing-through of “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows” says “I love you, no matter what” better than words ever could.
I’ve directly experienced this connective power in my own performance work, too, a thousand times over – my own generational experience with music as a force of good. Which makes it almost impossible for me to imagine women being cut off from such warmth, power and bonding.
But in the same world where “K-Pop Demon Hunters” is presently being enjoyed en masse, there are women being purposefully held back from joining together in song at all, and have been for a whole year – because their leaders thrive on their oppression.
Which is why those of us whose voices can still ring out, uninhibited, must speak against them. And sing against them. Over and over again. Perhaps in a round, which both grows and layers upon itself with each pass – until the oppression is drowned out and the harmony is all that remains. ◼️
