The Daily: 8 January 2026

Spoilers! Though not much… Because even if you haven’t seen the movie, you know how it goes.

I got sort of sucked into K-Pop Demon Hunters last fall. This is a weird thing for me. As a rule, I don’t like pop anything. Too vacuous and irritatingly, infectiously ear-wormy. I’m also not really a movie person. For one thing, my eyes aren’t that great, so I feel like I’m missing important things. But also, I can’t often lose myself in a screen story to the point that I can sit still for any great length of time. Too many other things to do in life.

Now, I do frequently have screens or music going while I am exercising indoors, and last fall I bought a tiny treadmill to switch things up (and save my backside from the stationary cycle). I mostly read on the bike while listening to music, and I had every intention of doing the same on the treadmill. In fact, I have a high folding table that I could use as a desk while I am walking. Or that was the plan anyway. Get some exercise while I’m writing. Win-win, right? 

Well, that plan was thwarted right off.

It seems that some folks experience a form of motion sickness when reading or focusing on a screen while on a treadmill. And it seems that I’m one of those people. It’s fine while I am walking. But it wallops me when the treadmill stops. I get so dizzy I can only collapse into the nearest chair and wait for the world to stop spinning. It helps a little to have my hands on the desk, I guess because my body is getting movement information from my hands, but it still makes me a bit sick afterwards. However, looking up does not seem to have the same effect. Again, perhaps because my brain is getting motion information from other parts of my body to negate the weird stuff that is happening in my legs. So, I can watch movies or podcasts on my big screen… and that has led to a general increase in viewing.

But I’ve found that I don’t like to walk while I’m watching anything that requires intellectual or emotional processing. So, I’ve been watching light things. Light things like K-Pop Demon Hunters. Which has the further advantage of being rather bouncy, good for exercise. And it’s on Netflix, which means easy access…

So, there’s all that going for it. But that still doesn’t explain why I got so involved with this movie and the music in it. It’s not the story. That’s rather pedestrian and has too many gaping holes in it. For example, how and why does this girl have bi-species parentage? And when she loses her love irrevocably and for all time, there’s only one tear… Really? Seems a tad cold. And then, while the animation is good, it’s not Miyazaki. The dancing is a series of poses because that’s easier to render than actual motion. And facial expressions flip back and forth between three-dimensional somewhat realistic and flat caricature. Now, some of that is intentional, but much is just lazy art. Or maybe one of those winks to say that this is all fake. Which doesn’t really play well, in my opinion. We know it’s fake. There are flying people and actual demons, after all…

But I kept turning it on when I got on the treadmill. I even bought the soundtrack CD so I could listen to it in the car on the way to Brooklyn. (I like bouncy driving music… My favorites are DeadMau5, Industrial Monk, and Thylacine.) So, I finally sat myself down in my head and tried to figure out why this movie was so appealing. But it wasn’t until I started to prepare a post for Elvis’ birthday (which is today!) that it finally clicked.

This movie is a metaphor for music and performance.

For those who have not seen it and do not want to become addicted to K-pop, the premise is that there are demons who are stealing souls, feeding on our lives. But long ago, demon hunters arose; and, through the ages, successive generations of hunters continually appear to protect humanity. They do actually fight demons. But more importantly, they use their beautiful voices to ignite the human soul and bring people together, uniting the community into a powerful wall of defense between the human and demon worlds.

And that is the best description of music I have ever encountered. We sing to bring our souls together and banish the demons that plague our minds.

In the movie, as the defensive wall was finally nearing completion with humanity all united under the most recent trio of hunters, the demons decided to fight back with music of their own, a demon boy band. (Which, incidentally, is quite possibly the best ever explanation for boy bands…) And this is where the metaphor is extended from music for music’s sake to performance for… well… power…

The first song the boy band plays is perniciously infectious. Even the king of the demons is humming it. Even the hunters can’t stop themselves from dancing to it. The song itself is trite waffle, but you hear it once and you will never get it out of your head. It is designed to worm its way into your life and captivate you, entrance you, hold your attention hostage… while the demons feed on your deeper soul.

Of course it works, and the hunters and their wall are broken…

But then, when the demons are free to feed on all of humanity, the demon boy band really shows their hand. Their victory song, “Your Idol”, is one terrifying cartoon! Because it’s not about those demon boys on stage in Korean gats. (Though, if you want an even scarier version of the Saja Boys, watch this…) This song is about performance. It’s about power over. It’s about narcissism. It’s about that bottomless need for attention, undivided attention. This is the dark side of music, when it turns on us and begins to feed on our souls.

I'll be your idol
Keeping you in check, keeping you obsessed
Play me on repeat 끝없이 in your head
Anytime it hurts, play another verse
I can be your sanctuary
Know I'm the only one right now
I'll love you more when it all burns down
More than power, more than gold
Yeah, you gave me your heart, now I'm here for your soul
I'm thе only one who'll love your sins
Feel the way my voicе gets underneath your skin*

It is this dark side that dominates modern music. This dark side is the goal of music when music becomes a profit-seeking industry. This narcissism, driving clicks and sales, always putting the performer in front of people, putting the performer in front of the performance, in front of the music, this is what is rewarded in the music industry. Worse, the musicians who seek to make soul-igniting beauty are penalized. They are ground into oblivion. No contracts, no concerts, no way to bring their music to the world, nor even to support their lives. If you are not a performer, then these days you are probably not a musician except in the most private sense.

Which is really not the point of making music…

Music is a sound wave. By its physical existence, it is a shared phenomenon. It is a relationship that binds the musician and the listener. But modern music has been reduced to a means, a tool used to suck up our attention, our money, our lives. It is no longer reciprocal; it’s a weapon, a cage. The flow is one way, away from the listener, toward the money.

Elvis Aaron Presley was a musician who crossed the divide between igniting and feeding off our souls. And his story ended as these stories often do. In a sequined jumpsuit in Vegas… Well, maybe not everyone descends that far… But those who travel the path of performance rarely live long, happy musical lives. Most become the performance, the all-consuming need, the voracious appetite for attention.

To be sure, when he was young, he already had the drive, the desire to be a star. But he also had music. He had song, a voice that he used to bring people together, to ignite our souls. Some of that song was blatantly stolen from those who were less privileged, but at least in the beginning his primary need was to sing, not to use his voice and gyrating hips to become fabulously rich. However, that wealth is the only reward of song in this disconnected world, and in time that wealth became his goal. The music was ancillary to the gold pendants and flashy cars and Tennessee mansions… and drugs.

And you can hear that in his work. Can you name one song from late in his career? Or hum it? Sing the lyrics? I have several Elvis albums, and I can say that the late stuff is entirely forgettable. By that point, the point was Elvis the performer, not Elvis the musician. On the other hand, I bet nearly everyone on the planet can hum “Love Me Tender”, among several other songs of his youth, when the goal was music, when the goal was to bring us together in listening, to heal, to inspire, when the goal was to ignite our souls and banish our demons.

I think, right from the beginning, that I heard this metaphor in K-Pop Demon Hunters. I just didn’t know I was hearing it because… why would you expect anything profound from a demon boy band and a trio of blade-wielding teenagers… (with a three or four story hall of fabulous costumery… just how that was inserted into a Seoul apartment seems like Gallifreyan Time Lord technology… “bigger on the inside”…)

The K-Pop story ends in redemption. The teenage hunters win, with a whole lot of loss in the victory. But the important lesson is that a song can still unite even in the middle of the performance. Of course, this is a fairy story. We can have our fabulous costumery and yet remain focused on healing and protecting and singing ourselves free of our demons. (Of which fabulous costumery might be a big one… given sequined jump-suits and so on…) But it is a story of hope to contrast with the degeneration of Elvis, which is the far more common tale in industrial music.

In contrast to late Elvis, the hunter trio, Huntrix, just keeps getting better. Their music is more beautiful, more powerful, more amazing with every release track. How often does that happen in this age of industrial music? How many musicians manage to keep making better music? How many musicians even manage to craft new music in the face of obsession with ratings and social media rank and sales? So much music today is rehashed. Nothing original under the sun, these days. Because you can’t be original in this system. You can’t take creative risks. You have to toe the line, do what has been proven to make money. You have to perform, not create. Performers lose themselves in focusing on themselves… Witness Elvis, arguably one of the greatest voices of all time, turned into an embarrassing cliché in the end…

I think the final movie scene is the crucial difference. There is a refrain repeated exuberantly all through the movie: “For the fans!” After the final battle seals the wall, the hunters are ready for a much-needed hiatus on their capacious couch. But as they are heading home from the public bath house, they encounter a trio of kids oo-ing and ah-ing and giggling over their phones, all wearing Huntrix-brand clothing. Fans!

Now, a performer would either pull up the hoodie and scuttle away or find some way to dominate the situation, make it all about them, all about the performance. But the Huntrix girls are focused on the fans, making music for the fans, not making music to get fans. The fans are real individual people they love and want to please. (Yes, this is a fairy tale…) Almost shyly, they approach the fans and start talking with them. Not at them. With them. And listening. Responding. Not performing, connecting.

For the hunters, that connection, uniting the fans into a golden wall of harmony against the pain and discord of our demons, that is the point of music. In other words, music is the point of music. And that is why they win. That is why they avoid the performance and make music to the end.

And that, I think, is what is so appealing about this movie. It’s about us all together. Not about them…

It’s about music!

But watch out for that “Soda Pop” song… it will never leave…

(For the record, these are some highly talented demons and hunters! It’s worth listening just for the amazing voices and production!)

*Songwriters: Byoung Hoon Kim / Eun Jae Phoebe Kim / Hee Dong Nam / Hong Jun Park / Jeong Hun Seo / Joong Gyu Kwak / Jun Seok Lee / Mark Sonnenblick / Yoo Han Lee

Your Idol lyrics © BMG Rights Management, Universal Music Publishing Group

©Elizabeth Anker 2026