People ask me about the Kpopalypse radio show from time to time, and how they can listen. Since this blog was originally created by me as a companion to the radio show before it took on a life of its own, I think it’s time I got off my ass and put some radio information up here. This post therefore has all the facts that you need to know about the Kpopalypse radio show.
KPOPALYPSE is a Korean pop radio show on Three D Radio, 93.7 FM, broadcast in Adelaide, Australia.
It also streams live worldwide at the Three D Radio website which is why you may find it relevant – anyone in the world with an Internet connection can listen, you just have to tune in at the right time.
I am the DJ of this show. I started DJing this show in early 2012, before I started blogging, because I realised that there was no regular Korean pop program on radio in my city. Since I was liking k-pop at the time (and still do), and I had the power to change that reality, I did!
The show broadcasts at 4pm every Monday, Adelaide time (GMT+9:30 in Northern Hemisphere summer, GMT+10:30 in Southern Hemisphere summer), for one hour. The Internet stream is only a live stream – there is no way to listen to previously broadcasted shows, or to listen to shows at different times (unless someone sneakily records it and puts it on the Internet of course, but gosh I wouldn’t know anything about any “Kpopalypse Bootleg” posts out there ahem).
The show focuses on Korean pop. Here’s what gets played:
Korean pop music – new releases, requests and older tracks.
Japanese, English or other language music made by Korean pop artists are still considered Korean pop, regardless of the language used, these will get played. People don’t call American pop artists “English pop” because they’re singing in English, do they? No, they’re called American because they’re products of the American music industry. Same applies here.
Other music styles by Korean artists will get played occasionally, just to mix it up a little. Korean hip-hop, trot, rock, metal, punk, reggae, classical and traditional music have all been played on various occasions.
Your requests will get played, if they fit into one of the above categories.
Here’s what does not get played:
Japanese pop or other Japanese music by Japanese artists
Asian music from other Asian countries besides Korea, unless the Korean music business is also involved in some way or it’s in some other way directly relevant to k-pop
I do take requests on most shows. The main exception to this is if the show for that week is a “themed” show where every song fits a particular theme or idea.
You can request songs via Twitter, the Facebook group or the OneHallyu thread at any time, but just before the show starts is best, or I may forget your request when the time comes!
People who live in Adelaide can also ring the station but it’s generally a very bad idea as the receptionist will usually answer the phone instead of me (because I’m talking between every song I don’t answer phones while I’m on-air because there’s literally no time to talk) and good luck trying to convey a Korean group and song title to some poor receptionist who has probably only ever heard of PSY.
Don’t send requests via ask.fm, they will always be ignored. I am not anonymous (contrary to a weirdly-held popular belief, I don’t have a secret identity!) and therefore I don’t ever accept requests from anons. If it’s good enough for me to be public, it’s good enough for you.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Request rules:
No Gangnam Style, Gentleman or Gee. Nothing against those songs, I just think they’re overplayed. You can hear them anywhere.
I generally have no issue playing songs I personally dislike as requests so just because something might have made it into my most hated songs lists doesn’t mean you can’t request it anyway.
Swearing in songs, adult themes etc is fine, and given the choice between a “clean” and “dirty” mix I will always pick the dirty one if available.
One request per person, per show – to give everyone a chance. If you make more than one, I will pick one.
I generally won’t play more than one song by the same artist, per show – so fans of certain artists don’t unfairly dominate.
There’s not much point requesting anything just released in the last week or so because chances are that in most cases it’s getting played anyway. I spend a lot of time playing new releases.
Requests are always at my discretion, I have no obligation to play any requests at all, but I’ll usually do my best to accommodate people if I’m taking requests.
Don’t request Little PSY or you will make the DJ cry.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
The OneHallyu thread has playlists of each show, these are published shortly after each show ends.
A random selection of music videos of songs that were played on the show is posted to the Facebook group after each show. The banner image for the group also changes each week. It’s usually something high quality that could be used as a computer desktop wallpaper, and the gender of the artist usually alternates each week.
KPOPALYPSE is the only radio show that I am aware of anywhere in the world to have its own official drinking game so if listening is getting boring and you are above drinking age pour yourself some of your favourite beverage and get completely smashed and choke on your own vomit and die like a rock star drink responsibly!
Every so often I might give something away on-air. Giveaways can only be won by station subscribers, or those willing to subscribe. (You can subscribe from anywhere in the world and the Three D Radio website has more information on this.) I don’t do this very often, because I’m usually giving away stuff from my personal collection and I like my collection to be bigger rather than smaller. If you win something from Kpopalypse you are truly one of the privileged so give yourself a round of applause!
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Hopefully this post has been helpful, sated your curiosity, and maybe you might even enjoy listening to the shows! But if not, that’s okay – just enjoy this blog and my continued tangenital postings!
Once again I’m going to be delivering you three MVs with less than 20,000 YouTube hits each and we’re going to put their nugu credentials to the test! Let’s get started!
Today’s theme is awkward-as-fucking-shit dancing. K-pop doesn’t usually get the dancing wrong, and even in the rare instances when it does, the wrong dancing often becomes a popularity point, so finding videos that had stupid-looking dancing AND were unpopular enough to qualify for Nugu Alert was difficult. However as always my determination levels were high enough to see the task through to completion.
Let’s start off with a video that was simply born for a Nugu Alert feature.
A-Force – Wonder Woman
How this video hasn’t gone viral yet across the Internet community is completely beyond me. This is a music video that seems tailor-made for places like Encyclopedia Dramatica and 4chan. I was surprised myself when I clicked on this much loved/loathed video recently and saw the tiny amount of hits that it had. I’ve seen it posted on k-pop forums before whenever “worst song ever” or “cheapest MV” type topics come up, so I just assumed that it was already infamous among international k-pop fans and I really thought it would have a bit more traffic by now. I guess not, and it’s a shame because all corners of this Earth really need to know about A-Force’s “Wonder Woman”. If this post goes a little way toward helping A-Force become viral, I can die happy knowing that I have achieved something in this world – maybe not something good, but at least something.
The team behind A-Force’s “Wonder Woman” gets literally everything wrong: unbelievably bad dance routines, leaden Bedazzler-makeup (pre-2NE1!), terrible music, hopeless visual design, incorrect lighting… and on and on it goes. They couldn’t even get the video aspect ratio right, making everyone look like pudgy dwarves, and it could be argued maybe that’s the fault of the uploader, but then almost nothing else on the uploader’s channel has wrong aspect ratio so I don’t think it’s an excuse. I’m one of those people who hates wrong aspect ratio, if I’m visiting a friend and they’re watching TV with incorrect aspect ratio setup and they were too stupid to notice or too lazy to care, I have to be really OCD about it and spend the next half an hour fucking around with their remote control figuring out how to change it. It’s lost me a few friends, but who needs friends like that – if you’re going to spend your life watching TV (which has to be the second-laziest activity on the planet) at least have enough determination to do it correctly.
I challenge you not to laugh out loud when you see the dance routines for the first time. The “Nazi goose-step” at the start is just the beginning – wait until you hit the “shuffling crab” and “crying baby” solo routine from the guy with the makeup that looks like a tyre fell on his head while he was changing his motorbike oil, you’ll be in stitches. You also have to see A-Force do this song live, where at least they got the makeup and lighting right, because the backstage makeup coordinator at Music Core probably took one look at them and said “right – you people are not going up there with that shit on your face, wash it all off and we’ll start again”.
The looks on Tiffany and Yuri’s faces at the end of the performance say it all:
They can’t believe it either. It’s hard not to feel sorry for everybody involved. If I ever did a “30 worst songs of the golden years of k-pop” post, this song would be a serious contender for #1 position. Luckily for A-Force, such a list would be impossible for me to create because most of the truly awful music from the last few years has already been lost in time and would take too long to collate and put together. In the meantime just enjoy this video or at least take a lesson from it: make sure that if you ever debut in k-pop, you do it with a company that at least knows the basics. Suddenly that new Chad Future video is looking a whole lot less awkward in comparison.
YouTube views at time of watching: 6466
Notable attribute: the fact that it’s not a massive viral hit
LUMI-L – Cup Of Coffee
On the other hand, LUMI-L’s “Cup Of Coffee” is quite listenable and competently produced overall. LUMI-L herself is even actually really cute (it helps when your stylist actually knows something about styling) and there were certainly plenty of worse songs that were released in 2013. So why wasn’t this a big hit with the international k-pop community?
Maybe it’s got something to do with that hand-dance in the chorus, which does look a little bit ridiculous and out-of-place especially on the male backing dancers, although next to what we just saw above from A-Force it’s actually looking pretty tame and at least it’s fucking synchronised. I guess on such a furniture-laden set they didn’t have much choice except a dance that is all arms. Or maybe it’s the typically bizarre k-pop MV plot about the guy crushing on some fat chick complete with the usual painfully-overdone Korean humour. When the song starts off with first person perspective doughnut-cam you know that the usual Korean obsession with body image is in full force and I’m amazed that the more flag-waving feminist k-pop bloggers didn’t have a field day with this and write a fucking thesis on it… oh wait, of course, they didn’t write about it because it wouldn’t generate as much web traffic as the 247th article about sexy concepts. Silly me, how could I forget. As usual it’s up to me to put in the hard yards and highlight the gender issues nobody else wants to discuss because it’s not trendy. Anyway here’s a live version with LUMI-L looking just as qt, the silly dancing somewhat obscured by the lightshow and no overweight extras clogging up the entertainment arteries.
YouTube views at time of watching: 11577
Notable attribute: makes you wish your favourite FPS game had a doughnut melee weapon
AshGray ft. Gilme – Killheel
Don’t be fooled by the relatively high amount of hits. This song is very deep in nugu territory – the few people who clicked on this one were clearly just fapping to the incredibly awkward-looking English teachers making a little extra money on the side dancing in a video that they hope their friends back in Canada or wherever don’t see. I have a female friend who went to Korea for a while to teach English and I half-expected to see her turn up in this thing, which would have been great because then I could have given her some shit about it online and she would have been mortified about being busted being awkward in a video for $50. This video is worth a look by you just so you can check to see if anyone you know is in it.
Anyway the group clearly aren’t stupid – they know that they need the dancing girls to draw you into this fairly average pop music so they mostly stay out of it visually, and while it’s not anywhere near as raunchy as that song from Fresh Boyz (see Nugu Alert Episode 1) the effect is still the same, because men are desperate and horny. Check out the amount of hits for the live versions of the song that don’t have dancing girls in them:
I could post a video of three minutes of the brick wall in my lounge room just sitting there being a brick wall and it would get more web traffic than some of these. Poor AshGray – nobody is supporting these nugu fucks. Why don’t you go right now and buy their fucking shit out of sympathy, tell them Kpopalypse sent you. Also tell them that I’ll interview them, someone’s gotta help these poor cunts sell a CD, they must be broke as shit – you can tell because they couldn’t even afford Gilme’s appearance fee for the MV so they just got the models to mime those bits. The group are probably begging on the streets or whoring themselves out in gay brothels to make a buck right now so I think you should give them some cash. I won’t link a live video up here though because you k-pop fans have already made it quite clear through your online activity that you don’t want to actually see their faces.
YouTube views at time of watching: 13461
Notable attribute: your friend from Uni who went to Busan for 6 months to teach English is probably in this
FINAL SCORES
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.That wraps up Episode 3 of Kpopalypse Nugu Alert! I hope your quality of life has been improved, and you’ve learned some valuable life lessons, or at least had a laugh. Nugu Alert will return!
People are always requesting that I review things for their entertainment, and since I’m so eager to please you lovely blog-readers out there, how can I say no? However I don’t want to just review the same stuff everyone else does, in the same way. This post is therefore a review of some crazy sick gory horror films, because I’m into that sort of thing. I’m also into T-ara, so why not combine the two interests into one delicious set of reviews for your enjoyment?
As a fan of k-pop and also a fan of horror movies, I find my potential to be strip-mined of all potential income and left destitute and homeless to be seriously under-utilised by the Korean pop industry. Companies will insist on shoving their boys and girls into sappy romances, boring dramas and comedies with horrible Korean-style Captain Obvious humour which I guess the content creators need to do because netizens are such thickears that they don’t seem to get jokes unless they’re explained with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, but that doesn’t mean the result isn’t fucking boring as shit anyway. Some girl being called ugly and falling down a flight of stairs from 3 different camera angles, and then in slow-motion with sound effects added, that’s about as much fun to me as pancreatic cancer. If I want to see ugly people being clumsy and laugh I can just install a mirror in my own stairwell at home. However, if at the bottom of those stairs someone then comes up and stabs the person in the throat and there’s blood everywhere and the rest of the cast start shitting themselves and wondering if they’re next, now we have some fucking entertainment, cunts. But who can I reliably turn to in the k-pop world, to give me the dramatic thrills and k-pop related material that I as a brainwashed k-pop/horror fan with too much disposable income sorely need?
Ah, Kim Kwang Soo, CEO of Core Contents Media. I knew you’d come through for me, once again. KKS has no problem with going where nobody else dares and putting his k-pop starlets into grisly and highly entertaining slasher films. It’s such a great marketing idea; if you love the idol, you get to see them perform, and if you hate them, you get to watch them (probably) die. It’s a win/win straight from the man who knows all about winning (T-ara still together and selling out stadiumsacrossAsia? Check.) Add another notch to Kim Kwang Soo’s gigantic list of achievements in making the k-pop world more awesome for everybody.
As it happens, there are not one or two but at least four horror films that feature T-ara members (and maybe more that I haven’t discovered, feel free to enlighten me in the comments below), and occasionally other k-pop group members as well, and they were all released or in some way chaperoned by CCM. Maybe you’ve seen these films, maybe you haven’t. If not, prepare for some (spoiler-free) reviews that should educate you as to whether these films are worth a watch, depending on what criteria you believe to be the most important to you. On the other hand, if you have already seem these films, prepare for some opinions that you may or may not agree with, written in my usual style that always generates lots of love from the k-pop community.
Let’s start with the film that most of you probably already know about and have seen.
WHITE – MELODY OF DEATH (aka WHITE – MELODY OF THE CURSE)
Plot synopsis: a bunch of girls are in a k-pop group called “Pink Dolls” who are flopping horribly, especially in contrast to rival girl group “Pure” (played by After School in a brief cameo where they perform “Bang!“). One of the members of Pink Dolls finds a scratchy videocassette recording of an unknown group performing a song called “White”. The group’s producer likes the song and decides to remake it with Pink Dolls, it becomes a huge chart-topping hit, and then people start dying in mysterious and highly gruesome ways heavily reminiscent of the Final Destination series.
Appeal to general horror fans: average, at best. “White” eschews overt gore, instead aiming for a slow, psychological atmospheric horror vibe similar to a lot of Japanese horror films, but only partially succeeds. While the soundtrack and general look and feel of a great psychological horror film is there, the scriptwriting and characterisation necessary to hook the viewer into the action definitely is not. T-ara’s Eunjung plays the main character and she’s honestly a little bit Mary Sue, and although Eunjung is in nearly every scene she doesn’t really have a lot to do except stand around, look pretty, act like a nice person and occasionally become traumatised. She does a reasonable enough job of the minimal amount of work that the script requires, but they could have given her a bit more light and shade, and with so much of the plot riding on her character it would have made the slower parts of the film where nobody is dying a lot more engaging if she had something more meaty and interesting to do than be a goody two-shoes. As it stands the film feels overlong and the interesting bitchy support characters all die far too quickly. Perhaps if the “curse” took out a handful of extras to satisfy the body count and let the support actresses live a bit longer, there could have been some more dramatic scenes of Eunjung being pulled by the hair and forced to lick toilet bowls by the other girls or something.
Appeal to k-pop fans: plenty. “White” is the only horror film anywhere that I know of which is also specifically set within the k-pop industry, and while I’d stop short of saying it’s a “must-watch” k-pop fans will definitely want to watch it anyway just for this reason alone – there’s simply no other film out there like this right now. Where the script actually gets it right is that it’s willing to dig behind the facade of k-pop and show you stuff like member ostracision and bitchiness, groups being ridiculously overworked, support staff being cunty, faked vocal performances, and even behind-the-scenes “favours”. A cynical person may think a Core Contents Media production might have reason to hide such goings on in the seedy underbelly of k-pop but no – it’s all right there. You’ll finish the film wondering “I wonder how much of that shit is true in the k-pop world”, and of course I would have no idea about any of that ahem cough probably quite a fucking bit ahem.
Appeal to k-pop fappers: Eunjung gets tons of screen time, which will please fans. Even though she’s in long hair for most of it, which doesn’t suit her, anyone biasing Eunjung heavily will get over it while they stare at her face which is constantly zoomed in on. She doesn’t wear anything that revealing, but then it’s Eunjung the second most tomboyish high profile girl group member in all of k-pop so what do you expect. Fappers need not come for After School, they’re not in it long enough to work up a rhythm.
Plot synopsis: a kid called Bin has his parents murdered, so his relatives look after him, not knowing that the “creepy kid” is a standard horror movie cliche and that a bunch of people are about to get fucked up. Cue limbs flying everywhere, lots of gore and some voodoo mysticism bullshit that you won’t care about.
Appeal to general horror fans: quite a bit. The film is pretty short, rocks quite a bit of gore straight out of the gate, and after a short period of the usual redundant character exposition typical of horror films the body count starts piling up. Not too many minutes ever go by without somebody losing a limb (amputation deaths are apparently a specialty) and while the liberal use of blood and body parts arguably comes at the expense of some dramatic subtlety, you won’t give a fuck. The plot is a bit of a weakness being fairly cliched and the spiritual angle that comes into the film later might seem a bit insipid and weak, but if you’re happy to eat popcorn, watch people get mangled while their stumps squirt blood and not question the logic of what you’re seeing too much, you’re in for a good time.
Appeal to k-pop fans: T-ara’s Hyomin is in this, as a supporting actress who gets a reasonable but not excessive amount of screen time. The other members of T-ara also appear in a couple of very short cameo scenes as her friends, including a trip to a nightclub… to dance to “Roly Poly“, of course.
Appeal to k-pop fappers: Hyomin is rocking a snugly-fitting school uniform in almost every scene she’s in and looks astonishingly good. Don’t be fooled by the somewhat awkward looking movie poster art – Hyomin in motion is a different story, and you will fap. Plus, if that’s not enough, she has a bath scene. Straight women and gay men watching “Ghastly” should prepare to have their sexuality called into question. You have been forewarned.
Plot synopsis: during mid-term exams, a school comes under lockdown by an unknown person(s) or force. Students are then made to resit a new mid-term exam as a group, and one student is killed for each answer that is either incorrect or not given within a certain time period.
Appeal to general horror fans: if you just read the above plot synopsis and thought to yourself “well, that sounds completely fuckin’ stupid, how is that going to work”, your suspicions are not unfounded. The plot (which only a country as exam-obsessed as Korea could come up with) really does defy logic and has holes in it large enough to drive a school bus through, but the film ends up being excellent anyway, mainly due to a terrific sense of pacing. In particular the music score is expertly deployed to add a real sense of urgency to the film, and by the time everything kicks into high gear you’ll stop asking yourself questions like “but couldn’t they just [insert really obvious way for the entire class to save themselves here]” and will be hanging off the edge of your seat waiting for the next hapless panicky student to get speared on something. It’s not on the level of classic Korean horror like “A Tale Of Two Sisters” but it’s still damn entertaining.
Appeal to k-pop fans: T-ara’s Eunjung is in this film, but only has short appearances as a ghost. The rest of the k-pop related screen time belongs to Seeya’s Nam Gyuri, who does a solid job of looking like a freaked out schoolgirl who doesn’t study enough. Whether that’s relevant to you or not will depend on how relevant you consider a group that disbanded in 2011, but it may not matter because…
Appeal to k-pop fappers: …she isn’t unattractive. Unfortunately the cinematography is also pretty dark and grimy so you don’t exactly get much of a good look at her… but she is a 20-something year old girl in a school uniform, so there is that. You might get some fap time out of this if you enjoy girls screaming and not being able to see them very well.
Plot synopsis: during mid-term exams, a school comes under lockdown by an unknown person(s) or force. Students are then made to resit a new mid-term exam as a group, and one student is killed for each answer that is either incorrect or not given within a certain time period.
(You’ll notice that I just copied and pasted the plot synopsis that I wrote for the original Death Bell, that’s because the screenwriters copy-pasted the plot, too. Death Bell 2 is a sequel in the fine Asian B-grade cinema tradition of “let’s pretend the first film didn’t even happen”.)
Appeal to general horror fans: Death Bell 2 has the same plot as the original but without the original’s sense of pacing and timing, so it bores quickly. The film tries to compensate by ramping up the gore significantly compared to the first film, and if nothing else you probably won’t forget the “motorcycle” scene, but it’s not enough. The acting in the sequel is weaker too. T-ara’s Jiyeon is a main character and spends most of her scenes staring blankly like she doesn’t know what the fuck’s going on, maybe T-ara had a lot of schedules during the filming and she was just a bit tired… but then the other actors are mainly no better. There’s a reason why they usually cast 20-somthing year old actresses to play schoolgirls – a few extra years of acting lessons makes a difference.
Appeal to k-pop fans: Aside from Jiyeon, T-ara’s Boram has some blink-and-you’ll-miss-them appearances. Apparently she had a good six or seven minutes of screen time initially written and shot and was a significant supporting cast member, but then her part was cut to ribbons in the editing room, a practice which is not that uncommon in the film industry generally speaking. It’s a shame to lose her parts in the film probably for the sake of pacing and maintaining audience interest yet for the film to turn out so uninteresting anyway.
Appeal to k-pop fappers: Jiyeon was barely legal in my country when Death Bell 2 was released, which probably means that she was illegal in yours, but then, maybe you’re into that sort of thing. However, just like the first film, Death Bell 2′s visuals are grimy as shit and it lacks the kind of clear cinematography necessary for a decent fap in any case.
Hopefully you enjoyed this post, and it makes a nice little change from everyone else’s reviews of k-drama and stuff that you’ll see on every k-pop blog ever. If you find more k-pop related horror films, let me know and this post might just see a sequel!
A lot of people seem to think I blog about Korean pop because I’m some kind of hater. Strange as it may seem, I actually like Korean pop music, and that’s why I write about it. Of course this obvious fact escapes many fuckheaded people and I have to bear the slings and arrows of those who think I’m only here to knock k-pop down a peg, just because I didn’t write a glowing review of the latest written-while-waiting-in-the-urinal-queue trashy k-ballad from their fave. However there’s another type of hater that I also come across, less-often discussed on k-pop bogs – the people who already hate k-pop on a more general level and say that “I shouldn’t be listening to that”. You all know the type, because you’ve all had the same conversation with these music snobs that I’ve had:
In this blog I’m going to collect some of the most often-heard objections to k-pop and come up with some sensible, rational non-fangirly replies that you can use at your leisure to win arguments, influence people, or just make everyone who is giving you problems shut the fuck up for a change! Welcome to the Kpopalypse Defence League!
Rather than invent arguments against k-pop and then tear them down, I’m going to bring the fight directly to the most influential haters that I can find by linking the three most articulate, well-written, thoughtful posts that I can locate (in under 30 seconds of searching ahem) lamenting the alleged shittiness of k-pop – and then I’m going to take their arguments apart.
I really like this guy’s snarky tone and humourous writing – he’s almost as much of a worthless cunt as I am! We’d probably get along well in person, and his blog has a nice design with writing that’s clearly had some decent effort put into it. Pity he didn’t put the same amount of effort into backing up his arguments or knowing what the fuck he’s talking about where k-pop is concerned, but then that’s pretty typical of anybody who goes out to shit on an entire musical genre, generally speaking. I honestly doubt the sincerity of his “loathing”, he’s probably just taking the piss for a laugh and a few website clicks, but let’s look at his top 5 “reasons” to loathe k-pop anyway, because they touch on some fairly familiar territory .
1. It makes other Asians hate themselves
Short answer: lol racist stereotyping
Long answer: ….because he met one girl at a ferry terminal with seemingly zero fucking self-esteem who wanted to look like a k-pop idol, and thought he’d stereotype an entire race of people’s reactions based on his impressions of that one girl (and maybe a few others he’s met too, that perhaps he’s not telling us about). I guess he thought that Asian listeners of k-pop who enjoy the music but are rational enough to see the image-making side of it as pure fantasy couldn’t possibly exist… or at least they didn’t fit with his argument, so he just left those people out. Then he covers his racial stereotyping tracks by accusing k-pop of racism generally and goes on to call out k-pop songwriter Jenny Hyun as racist. Well, the bit about Jenny is actually correct… I guess pot, meet kettle. Also, it’s a separate issue from the music.
2. The lyrics are stupider than 1000 glue-sniffing retards
Short answer: no shit – it’s pop music
Long answer: this sort of objection ties into a larger argument that popular music has become infected with stupidity lately. Not true – pop music in all countries of the world has always been stupid. Truly insightful lyrics are rare, and the reason why is obvious – most people don’t actually listen to music specifically for the lyrics (the sole exception being rap and even that’s debatable given the roughly equal stupidity of a lot of rap lyrics).
Everyone’s seen lyrical comparisons like this:
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
It’s easy to take the most repetitive part of song A and contrast it with the least repetitive part of song B and shake our heads and use it to back up any argument that we want about who is better and why, look:
Easy come, easy go, will you let me go?
Bismillah! No, we will not let you go. (Let him go!)
Bismillah! We will not let you go. (Let him go!)
Bismillah! We will not let you go. (Let me go!)
Will not let you go. (Let me go!)
Never, never let you go
Never let me go, oh.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
To other men that respect what I do
Please accept my shine
Boy I know you love it
How we’re smart enough to make these millions
Strong enough to bear the children
Then get back to business
That wasn’t difficult to do. Oh wow, suddenly Beyonce’s song has the insightful thought-provoking lyrics and Queen’s lyrics are so lazy, boring and repetitive. Well gosh. I guess by “lyric comparison meme logic” that must mean Beyonce is better. Uh-huh.
Anyone who thinks that modern music k-pop or otherwise has the monopoly on shit repetitive lyrics has obviously never heard “Surfin’ Bird”:
A-well-a everybody’s heard about the bird
B-b-b-bird, bird, bird, b-bird’s the word
A-well-a bird, bird, bird, the bird is the word
A-well-a bird, bird, bird, well the bird is the word
A-well-a bird, bird, bird, b-bird’s the word
A-well-a bird, bird, bird, well the bird is the word
A-well-a bird, bird, b-bird’s the word
A-well-a bird, bird, bird, b-bird’s the word
A-well-a bird, bird, bird, well the bird is the word
A-well-a bird, bird, b-bird’s the word
A-well-a don’t you know about the bird?
Well, everybody knows that the bird is the word!
A-well-a bird, bird, b-bird’s the word
A-well-a…
Long answer: not required. Also, it’s a separate issue from the music.
4. It’s more corporate than Bank Of America or Haliburton
Short answer: Yeah nah, go back to business school.
Long answer: Okay then, let’s look at the figures. The big three labels in k-pop made combined sales of $155 million in 2013, which sounds impressive but once you take away expenses, each label only made a few million dollars profit each, and JYP Entertainment even posted a loss. Still big business though, right? Well, contrast that with the biggest labels in western pop – let’s start with Universal Music who made over $4 billion in revenue for 2010 with an operating profit of $470 million. In other words, Universal’s net profit after expenses was three times what every “big” label in Korea made, put together, before their expenses were taken out (important, because k-pop labels have a fuckton of expenses, what with managing the lives of all those stars so closely). Sony Music (home of the author’s faves, Judas Priest) had similar figures in 2012, positing revenue of $5.5 billion and a net profit after expenses of $463 million. And yes the k-pop labels are smaller arms of bigger corporate conglomerates but don’t even get me started about how much money the western parent companies make. Believe it or not, by western business standards every single k-pop music label, including SM Entertainment, would probably only qualify as a reasonably large independent record label. Also, it’s a separate issue from the music.
Oh but you didn’t mean “corporate” in terms of money made, but in terms of the inner workings of the music machine? Well then, let’s move on to…
5. It’s not even art, but rather the opposite: anti-art.
Short answer: I’m sorry but I think you mean “art that you don’t happen to like”.
Long answer: it’s worth looking at the first few sentences of his argument to demonstrate the problem with it:
K-pop is never artist generated. It’s dreamed up in board rooms full of dudes in suits who reek of garlic and soju. The songwriting is farmed out to people whose job it is to shit sugary gold.
Let’s fix it:
K-pop is artist generated. It’s dreamed up in board rooms full of artists who reek of garlic and soju. The songwriting is farmed out to other artists whose job it is to shit sugary gold.
People who create art are artists (even if you don’t happen to like the art it’s still art, objectively speaking), and someone still had to create those k-pop songs. So what if it’s not the same person as the guy or girl who is singing it? In k-pop, the performer isn’t usually the artist, it’s more accurate to say that they are a crafter, and their job is to help craft the artist’s vision, the artist being “those evil nasty people in the boardroom putting food on their tables by conceptualising entertainment for me to enjoy how dare they” or “that guy being the mixing board in the studio what an asshole how dare he genuinely like pop music enough to want to devote his life and livelihood to making it”. It’s the difference between an architect and a builder. Who would refuse to buy a house just because the architect wasn’t also the person who laid the bricks? People who purchase property accept that those are two very different jobs and not everybody can do both effectively. Why should it be any different for music?
The problem is that people attach a qualitative definition to the term “art”. They throw the term “art” around like it’s a compliment, and if something doesn’t meet their personal standard they’ll say “that’s not art” but that’s incorrect. All music is art by definition. Just because you think some art is bad doesn’t mean that it stops becoming art… it’s just “bad art” (to you – it might be good art to someone else). Like it or not, even “The Baddest Female” is still art. Yes, I went there.
This forum post on a social anxiety forum of all places (can’t imagine why a place like that would attract k-pop haters gosh no ahem) hits on some good points and I basically don’t disagree with much of it. However, if the author thinks that it’s only Koreans who do this stuff, think again. Let’s hone down on some key points:
Short answer: I’m sorry but I can only admire JYP for this. Someone buy him a beer!
Long answer: Sleeping in shitty falling-apart dives sounds just like a punk tour, and brings back memories of some of the tin sheds and concrete floors I slept on back in my touring days. No singer or musician worth a damn is afraid of shitty accommodation! JYP might have even learned the visa trick from the Australian punk scene as I can think of countless punk groups who have been snuck into my country on holiday and student visas to do tours. I can’t name names obviously, but if you’ve ever read about how some D-list band’s tour got cancelled or postponed due to “visa problems” it’s because they tried to cross borders on a holiday or student visa, the cluey customs staff eyed their road-weary musical gear with suspicion, ran their names through a Google search, found their tour announcement entries, and said “you’re a professional band on tour, you need a working visa, wtf is this shit”. (Also sometimes naive groups from foreign countries slip up and give themselves away – especially easy to do if there’s also a language barrier.) This type of shit happens all the time, and it happens because holiday and student visas are easier to get. And who knows, maybe JYPs explanation is legit anyway. I highly doubt it, but you never know. Also, it’s a separate issue from the music.
2. Korean performers must sleep with executives etc. to get into groups.
Short answer: Yeah and that never happens in the West ahem.
Long answer: I can’t give you examples because I have no proof, but certain names in western pop were apparently quite skilled in the art of blowing the right person at the right time, and it had quite a lot to do with their career advancement. That’s all I’m gonna say so don’t bother asking for more details. Also, it’s a separate issue from the music.
3. Slave contracts suck monkey cock.
Short answer: Yes they do. So maybe don’t sign one, how about that.
Long answer: I’ve discussed the unfairness of k-pop contracts a lot in my marketing post, and it’s also been well documented elsewhere just how shitty things can be. I think it’s very important to raise awareness about things like contractual obligations in the music business, which is why I made that post. I hope that people continue to be aware of the pitfalls and the industry can reform one day. However, if someone understands the terms and conditions of such a contract, chooses to sign it anyway, ends up in a group like EXO and enjoys the experience, who am I to tell them that their decision was wrong? Also, western contracts aren’t much better sometimes, and occasionally, they are worse. Also, it’s a separate issue from the music.
Boldly, this blogger has decided to focus somewhat on the actual musical content. Wow! Most people who write about music tend to sidestep talking about the music itself, usually because they don’t possess the specific language to talk about musical ideas coherently. Not that he’s always talking about musical ideas coherently either (“uninspired melodies” sounds cool but what does it actually mean in real terms, for instance), but at least he’s making it clear that if we’re assessing the quality of a musical genre, the music itself is of primary concern, not bullshit like what visa the group fucking flew in on or how many 15-minute breaks they get for milk and cookies during dance rehearsals. The comments he makes about shitty segues are certainly fair and I agree with that 100%. He also acknowledges that any deficits in k-pop also appear in western pop and that the two genres are basically the same, saving me the trouble of pointing it out, also admits that some k-pop artists do have good songs, and best of all he even has a crack at k-pop’s irrational fans who dive under an Internet bus for their favourite groups! Bravo for this guy, he’s pretty good! So why wasn’t this blog post called “why pop in general sometimes sucks” then, why is he even bothering to single out k-pop in particular if he readily acknowledges that it’s basically the same anyway? Well, as he says near the end:
K-pop is the mainstream trendy thing right now, so it gets the most attention.
He’s done it for the web traffic, I guess. Well played.
I hope this post has been useful to you and given you some ammunition for when someone comes up to you and says “why do you listen to k-pop, that shit sucks, man” and you ask them why and they list off a bunch of shitty not-very-well-thought-out reasons. If I can deconstruct the above arguments, you should be able to do pretty well against some random douchebag. If nothing else, remember the following:
Good luck out there in real life and in cyberspace. Kpopalypse Defence League is looking out for all kpop fans! (Except those extreme fangirl crazies, you lot need to chill the fuck out, you’re making the rest of us look stupid by association, thanks for understanding.) Feel free to share stories of your victories against haters in the comments below!
Like everybody else who follows k-pop, I’ve been reading about Kris leaving EXO, after all it’s been pretty fucking impossible to avoid. In fact it’s even interrupted my blogging schedule – I had a completely different blog about 80% completed and then this fucking shit turned up and crashed the blogging party, demanding that I write about it, simply because I know people will not stop asking me about this stuff if I don’t write about it.
While I honestly have no major emotions about EXO in any particular direction (other than at least “Overdose” is better than “Growl”), it’s been vaguely interesting to watch the reaction to their line-up situation in Korea. Many people are calling Kris lazy and sticking up for the rest of the group… but a thought occurred to me: if it were a female group, this would never happen. Whether it’s T-ara,Girl’s Day, 5Dolls, miss A, Sistar, Jennie Kim, SNSD, Crayon Pop… it doesn’t matter which group it is, when a member is having trouble, that member is an angel and the rest must therefore be evil bullies. Because anonymous people on the Internet said so.
I thought it would be interesting (to me, maybe not to you or anyone else but oh well) to turn the tables. How would the EXO/Kris situation be received by the hive-mind if they were judged by the same standards that netizens use to judge female groups? Read on in the following hypothetical scenario (I have to bold this part or some dumb motherfuckers won’t understand the point of this blog) and find out.
EXO bullied Kris out of the group: the ironclad evidence*
1. SOLID VIDEO EVIDENCE OF BULLYING OMG SAY IT AIN’T SO
Observe from 8:33. Other members beating up Kris. Tsk tsk.
Look at this other EXO jerkoff (I don’t know which one he is but it doesn’t matter because they are all not Kris and therefore equally bullies) using Kris as a leg-rest. If you want objectification, forget that tits-out Hyosung video because it’s right here. Total dehumanisation, he is nothing more than furniture to the other members.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
“My leg is on you. What are you gonna do about it?”
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Kris responds: “What’s the deal bro? I thought we were pals?”
Yes some of you have noticed that I wear a hat like this on my stream – to show SOLIDARITY WITH KRIS AGAINST BULLYING that’s right. Someone has to stick up for him. It’s me, Cypress Hill’s Sen Dog and Kris against the world.
Kris has reimagined EXO as a frightening dragon, a wild beast with sharp teeth, terrifying paddle-feet (or maybe wheels?) and no mercy, destroying everything in its path. Do you see him smile in this picture? No, you do not. Do you see anything in the dragon’s path in this picture? No you do not. That’s because the dragon already destroyed everything else in the world. Like Kris’s dreams.
Another picture, that Kris drew of EXO. His self-portrait is on the far left. Notice how he is on the outer edge, and the distance between his figure and the rest is greater than any other EXO member in the picture. He has surely been ostracised and is relaying this subconsciously through his artistic endeavour – it must be true because I’m referencing an academic article that I didn’t actually take the time to read properly but sounded about right just from the heading to back up my point. Meanwhile the group is imagined as a wild beast with a Ku Klux Klan hat, which might not have anything directly to do with bullying but is just weird so we know something strange is going on.
Kris is a private person. When he first joined SM as a trainee, he was very motivated and wanted to learn everything, like a child. But he was told before directly by staff that he wasn’t good at anything, even up to this year.
Incredible. It sounds so true, especially because it fits the argument that I’m already making. That’s important, because if it didn’t, I’d have to disregard it and that would be a shame.
SM staff won’t even let him display his harmless tattoo:
He’s saying “I’m the king, and you’re a dirty cao ni ma” (with a pirate hat, no less – no doubt a sly reference to getting stiffed on profits from group activities). The rest of EXO are playing dumb but they should have seen his contract lawsuit coming as soon as they saw these pictures, but they didn’t because they are bullying bullies who only care about bullying.
We all know how much emos get picked on. Entire chunks of the globe are attempting to bully them out of existence as you read this. From strife-torn countries to comedy TV shows, emos are safe from bullying nowhere. It’s safe to say that if you are or ever were an emo, you’re probably getting bullied by somebody, somewhere, even if you don’t know it yet. So of course Kris is getting bullied for this. You’re probably bullying him right now.
Yes that’s right, it’s KPOPALYPSE FANFICTION TIME once again!
Some readers have been saying that I don’t focus on the guys enough in my writing. I hear you! So, for all those readers out there craving some man love, here’s a fanfiction featuring the hunkiest, chunkiest man in k-pop, Super Junior’s Shindong, because I’m always willing to listen and take on board constructive criticism. The fan feels from this post to those craving some sexy male romance should be so intense that once you’ve read it all, you’ll be begging for me to get back to writing about k-pop girls instead just to give you the opportunity to cool your hormones down a bit.
You’re female, Korean, 20 years old, a University student, heterosexual and you’ve also been a k-pop fan for a while. You’ve got a passing interest in quite a few groups, but most of all, you like Super Junior. They’re the group that has stayed with you right from the start of your interest in k-pop until the present day, and it’s impossible to listen to old hits like “Sorry Sorry” or “Bonamana” and not feel nostalgic. You admit that their newer material isn’t all that great in comparison, but you still avidly follow their every move anyway, and there’s one big reason why:
Shindong. Who can resist his raw, animalistic, barely suppressed sexuality? Not you, that’s for sure. You’ve done your best to cover every square inch of your bedroom with Shindong posters, and they’re starting to cover the ceiling as well. You make sure to catch all of his appearances on stages and variety shows. Lately, you’ve even been writing him letters professing your undying love at the rate of about one per week (you’d write more if University wasn’t so busy), but he never replies. Surely it couldn’t be mere rudeness, could it be that your true confessions just get buried under the sheer avalanche of fan mail that he receives daily? There’s no way of knowing for sure, but as your studies at University progress, the harsh reality of a life without ever touching the flesh of Shindong draws closer and closer. Each new day is like a slow rejection of your ultimate goal delivered in bite-size chunks, but you’d rather be biting into Shindong’s chunks. Is there any hope for your dreams?
One day you’re at the computer doing your daily Shindong fap image search, when you stumble across something that makes your jaw drop right to the floor.
Your knee-jerk reaction: that bitch. You’re fuming. How dare she touch that which is rightfully yours! Did she write him a letter every week for the last two years like you did? Does she even listen to any of Super Junior’s songs? Who the fuck is this bitch, anyway? You bet she just nodded and pretended to care when he cried on her shoulder about being refused the extra sweet potato at the SM cantina. Only you understand Shindong’s needs. Only you are truly made for him.
The days wear on, and the initial feeling of “how can I kill that slut?” subsides, gradually becoming supplanted by a new, more considered, more thoughtful question: “how can I take that slut’s place?”. You sit and think about it for a while. How does one do more than dream about getting into bed with their idol, how does one actually get to be with them, for real? You go on the Internet and take a look at some other past and present idol relationships for clues:
Super Junior’s Shindong – model Kang Shin
SHINee’s Jonghyun – actress Shin Se Kyung
B2ST’s Junhyun – KARA’s Goo Hara
2PM’s Nichkhun – SNSD’s Tiffany
Se7en – actress Park Han Byul
After looking at these examples and dozens of others just like them, both real and speculated, a harsh reality dawns on you: people in showbusiness only ever date other people in showbusiness. That settles it. If you want Shindong – and you do – then you need to get into showbusiness. You must get into showbusiness. You will get into showbusiness somehow, and Shindong will be yours.
There’s only one problem: you’re completely fucking untalented and useless in every way imaginable. You can’t sing, you can’t act, you can’t entertain at all, you shit yourself even whenever you have to do anything like speaking in public, you’re basically a shy mousey creature with no presence or self-confidence whatsoever. Sure, you’re okay with being told what to do and following instructions like the Korean school system has taught you oh-so-well, but you have no creativity to speak of, and thinking for yourself is way outside of your comfort zone… you’ve been raised as a consumer, not a creative artist. How on earth does someone as bland and wallpapery as YOU get a foothold in the big scary world of entertainment?
Three months later, you’re a trainee at SM Entertainment. You did well at the auditions: you read the guides, you followed the instructions, you did what you were told. Now you’re bunking in a crowded dorm room with six other girls, with a plan to debut at some far-flung date in the future… maybe. It’s not an easy life, with every day consisting of a full schedule of exercise, dance practice, PR coaching, language coaching, voice coaching, and eating bland salad and brown rice. You have no contact with the outside world, no contact with family and friends, no computers, no TV or mobile phones, no income, and no time off. To make matters worse, the girls you dorm with are intolerable – you find them impossible to relate to or have a normal conversation with, as everything has an undercurrent of competitive bitchiness. They’ve clearly all got their eyes on the lights of super-stardom, whereas you try not to think about the bigger picture of k-pop, just about surviving one day at a time, and that each day is edging you closer to Shindong.
By far the majority of your time is spent in the gym, working on dance routines, increasing your modest flexibility and honing your physique in increasingly smaller increments to the idealised, sculpted, super-skinny k-pop body archetype. Your dancing and movement skills are very sub-par so you receive intense coaching in gymnastics and it’s evident that SM takes this side of things super-seriously. You’re rarely alone while exercising – the gym is crowded and people drift in and out all time time, occasionally even including people from other groups that you recognise (no Shindong though, although it doesn’t surprise you that a gym might not be the most likely place to run into him). The first time Amber from f(x) turned up to give some dance tips there was a fair bit of fangirling from the other girls in your group, but everyone’s over that type of shit now and just gets on with it. You’ve seen all the f(x) girls except Sulli and about half of SNSD but you don’t see the guys as much, you’re not sure why. Maybe they keep them separated on purpose?
One day, while practicing your stretches, your group’s young male gym coach walks in and stops you.
“Listen up. Your flexibility is still rubbish. There’s no way you’re going to be ready for a debut with the slow rate you’re progressing. Management decided that you could use a little extra help.”
You notice that there’s a girl standing next to him. Dressed casual and wearing big sunglasses, it takes your brain a little while to register that it’s Sunny from SNSD – you’re not used to seeing her with the normal hair that she has nowadays, plus without her signature makeup.
The gym coach continues. “Sunny here used to be crap too, just like you. Every week from now on, Sunny is going to spend half an hour with you, helping you to gain more flexibility. She’s going to show you what she did to become a fully functioning member of the world’s biggest female k-pop group. Aren’t you, Sunny?”
Sunny doesn’t react, you notice that she’s completely oblivious – she still has her phone earbuds in, and you can hear the music from them from where you’re standing – some trot song. The coach reaches over and pulls the left earbud out of her ear by tugging the cord harshly.
“Hey, fucking watch it!” Sunny looks at your coach, annoyed. “My ears are a precious asset, you know! No ears, no original lineup SNSD you fucking asshole!”
The coach repeats himself to her: “….aren’t you, Sunny?”
“Aren’t I what?” Sunny takes off her sunglasses and removes the other earbud. Damn, she looks like a completely different person with no makeup at all. You could walk right by her in the street and not even know who she was.
The coach sighs. “Fuck, you weren’t even listening.”
“WHAT?”
“Look… this is the girl. Teach her stretches and shit, like we discussed. Can you do that?”
Sunny looks you up and down briefly. “Yeah sure, whatever.” She stares back at him for a few seconds, and there’s a brief awkward silence. “Okay, so can you please fuck off now?”
“I don’t get to watch?”
“Fuck. Off.” Sunny stares the coach down and waves him away.
“You’d better not jerk me around on this”, the coach says under his breath while walking to the exit.
Sunny yells after him. “You wish, fuckhead!”
After he leaves, Sunny turns back to you and her demeanour changes, she instantly settles down and becomes more relaxed. “I’m sorry about that, but I fucking hate that cunt. Such a tits pervert. Come with me, I need a fucking cigarette.”
Sunny grabs you by the wrist, and starts walking towards the gym’s fire exit. “But what about the exercises?” you ask.
“Fuck the fucking exercises. Do you enjoy being a gym slave? Plenty of time for that bullshit later.”
Sunny reaches the fire exit, and pushes the door. It rattles but doesn’t open.
“FUCK! They fucking locked it again. Give me a minute.” Sunny takes her phone out of her tracksuit pants and speed-dials a number. You hear only Sunny’s half of the phone conversation:
“Hey, cunt.”
“Open the door you piece of shit.”
“Yeah well what are we supposed to do if there’s a fucking fire?”
“I can see who I want to see.”
“No shit. So fucking what. Open it.”
“Open it, faggot.”
“Do you care about SM Entertainment’s investment in our talent, you fucking cunt? What about our fire safety, cockhead?”
“You’re such a piece of shit. I heard SM is in the market for a new gym coach. Could just be rumours… but you never know.”
“Here’s a joke: What’s ugly, a stupid bitch, and should fuck off? YOU. Now open the door.”
“I fucking hate you. I hope you trip and die, asshole. I might start eating bananas and leaving the peels around the gym so you better watch out.”
Sunny hangs up, and gives you that famous broad smile. “He’ll be here in a minute to open it.”
Every week, you meet with Sunny at the gym for “exercise”, which routinely consists of 20 minutes of Sunny smoking in the fire exit, 5 minutes of Sunny abusing the gym coach, and 5 minutes of her doing a few stretches with you at the end of each session before the gym coach returns so it looks like she’s been working you out the whole time. Once during a particularly slack session where she did nothing but smoke and talk about the bitchy personal politics within SNSD (“we dorm separately so we don’t murder each other in our sleep”) she even sprayed you in the face with a water bottle and when the coach returned said “look how hard she’s been sweating”. You start to look forward to the Sunny “gym sessions”. It’s a break from the grinding routine, and you start to feel yourself bonding with Sunny, as much as it’s possible to bond with someone who speaks random profanity as a second language.
One day you’re both outside the building by the fire exit. Sunny is sitting in her favourite spot on the small stairway leading up to the entrance, smoking as per usual.
You are sitting next to her. She looks at you with a thoughtful expression.
“I’ve been wondering about you. You’re not like the other girls here.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re not here for the same reason that they are. You’re not interested in being a k-pop star. There’s something else going on with you, isn’t there.”
You feel nervous. She’s onto you, might as well come clean, you suppose. “Well… okay, well… there’s this guy…”
Sunny immediately cuts you off, laughing and clapping. “HA! I knew it! Same reason as me! I can pick them a mile away!” Sunny puts a hand on your shoulder and reassures you “Don’t worry, nothing to feel ashamed of! How else are we going to get laid by these popstars, right?”
You stop and feel embarrassment and confusion. It can’t be true – Sunny is just in k-pop for the D? You feel like you have a million questions, yet you’re speechless.
Sunny laughs and continues. “What the fuck else do you think I’m in this for? You know I’m Lee Soo Man’s niece, right? It’s not like I need the money. So… who is it?”
“Who is what?” You knew what she meant, but you’re playing dumb in the hope she says “never mind, forget I asked” or something similar. You really don’t want your Shindong love to be outed.
No such luck. “This guy, the one that you’re putting yourself through this bullshit for. Who is he? It IS, a guy, right?”
You feel very awkward, you’re worried that Sunny is going to laugh at you. After ten seconds delay you mutter “….. Shindong.”
Your worries were well-founded. Sunny seems to think this is hilarious, she spends the next half a minute rolling around on the stairwell in paroxysms of laughter. You sigh deeply – you knew this would happen.
Sunny puts her hand up to your shoulder again. “Hey, it’s just funny, that’s all! Sorry for laughing, I can’t help it. It’s sweet… really.”
You grudgingly forgive her. She’s not being mean about it. “So who are you after, then?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Why not? I told you mine! Fair’s fair!”
Sunny shakes her head. “Yeah, but it’s different for me – I’m a celeb. If it leaks…” Sunny puts her fingers up to her throat to indicate a knife slicing it. “Revealing who we’re dating has to be done with exact timing. It’s the rules. Anyway, you should be happy.”
“Why?”
“Because…” Sunny takes a long drag on her cigarette before continuing, “…I can probably get you a date with him.”
You can’t believe it. “Really? You would do that, for me?”
Sunny shrugs. “Sure. Why not? When do you want to see him?”
You stare at Sunny in complete disbelief. You’re trying really hard not to completely spazz out like the crazy fangirl you are… people inside the gym might hear, this is not something you want them to know about.
Sunny smiles. “Ha, forget I asked. Let me ring the Ram up.” Sunny takes her phone out of her handbag.
“Who’s Ram?”
“Boram, you know, T-ara. She’s part of the D-hunter club too, hell, her sister’s group is even called ‘D-Unit’, if only people knew how true that was. Those two are stinking rich, they’re even more loaded than I am, they don’t give one solitary fuck about any of this idol shit. You’ve seen how useless they are on TV. They don’t practice, they don’t do shit, they just scheme to get their pussy lips around popstar cock, all day, all night. She’s determined too. If you’re a male idol and Boram wants you, look out – she’s unstoppable! But anyway, Ram knows Shinsadong Tiger, and Tiger knows Shindong. So we’re gonna get Ram on the case and she’s gonna get you some of that Shinsadong Shindong dong.”
You nod. You’re very appreciative, but it tears you up a little inside to hear Sunny being so crass about sex and especially about your true idol love. He’s more than just a piece of meat to you, it’s offensive. Still, she’s doing you a massive favour, so you stay quiet. Sunny makes a call, and rolls her eyes when the phone goes to an answering service.
“Hey Ram you fucking slut. Call me back. Got a job for you, top priority. Do it, whore.”
Sunny hangs up. “She’ll ring back fast. She’s good like that. Bitch does fuck all else with her day when she doesn’t have schedules. I’ll give her one minute.”
30 seconds later, Sunny’s phone rings. The ringtone is Super Junior’s “Sexy, Free and Single“, hearing the song at this time seems appropriate and cheers you up. Sunny picks up the call without stopping to look at who it is. You hear her half of the phone conversation:
“Hey slut.”
“Yeah, um… there’s someone I want you to meet.”
“Yeah, I think you might want to help her out.”
“Oh, you will. So, can you do it?”
“How’s tomorrow sound, at this time?” Sunny looks at you and asks “Tomorrow’s okay, isn’t it?” You nod quickly.
“Yeah yeah, it’s cool. Come around to the usual spot. Oh, and do you have some smokes? I’m running low.”
“Yeah of course, I’m always good for it.”
“See you then, whore.”
Sunny hangs up. “It’s on.” She smiles at you. You think – if only her fans knew what was really behind that smile. The idol world is so different to anything you ever imagined.
The next day, you’re with Sunny outside the fire exit. Sunny isn’t smoking, she tells you that she ran out of cigarettes earlier that day. She’s in an antsy mood – “I’m so hanging out for a fucking smoke, holy fuck… but Ram’s like clockwork, it’ll be cool soon” she says. You’re still a long way off meeting Shindong yet, but you can’t help but be a little nervous about this preliminary meeting, not because it’s Boram (you never really cared about T-ara, you’ve always seen them as one of those groups that are more for the guys, you honestly couldn’t even tell someone what their last few singles were called) but because it’s one important step closer to Shindong.
Sunny is just about to check her phone when you hear a loud “what’s up, bitch?” coming from the street.
“Hey, you fucking slut!” says Sunny. You’ve never heard the word “slut” said in such a friendly manner before. Boram and Sunny walk up to each other and give a quick greeting embrace. You notice that they’re both exactly the same height, it’s kind of amusing. Boram then looks over Sunny’s shoulder, at you. “This is the girl?”
Sunny doesn’t turn around, but has a big smile. “Yeah, that’s her. And guess who you’re going to be teeing her up with?”
Boram looks back at Sunny. “Who?”
Sunny tries not to laugh. “Shindong!” You feel a sense of dread. What if she laughs?
Boram looks at Sunny blankly, for about ten seconds, while Sunny continues to try not to laugh. Then Boram and Sunny both suddenly start laughing, uncontrollably. Oh great. You feel a tear well up in your eye. Fuck this getting picked on shit, this is like back at the dorm with the other girls.
Or so you thought. Boram notices that you’re starting to get upset, and comes over to you. “Hey… hey… don’t be sad. We’re just joking around. Hey cheer up. Look, you’re going to meet Shindong, okay? I’ll tee it up. I can tee up anything, I’m Boram.” Boram flashes you a big smile. She’s charmismatic, it’s impossible not to like her. You start to dry up.
Sunny interjects. “Do you have my smokes?”
“Yes, bitch. In the bag!” You notice Boram has a brown paper shopping bag with her. She hands it to Sunny, who opens it hastily, revealing two large cigarette cartons.
“Oh my god, you got Camel Crush! You can’t even get these in Korea! How?”
“Hyomin.”
“Fuck. She’s a miracle worker, how does she do it.” Sunny starts tearing open a carton, while Boram pinches her own cheek and moves it back and forth quickly against the side of her face, making a squishy, wet noise. Boram and Sunny both start giggling as Sunny lights up, then they both turn their attentions back to you.
Sunny speaks first after taking a drag. “So… how do you want to do this?”
“Well, I already spoke to Tiger, he hasn’t got anything on right now. So it can happen tonight…. um, as long as Shindong’s free… I guess. I mean, yeah, he probably is, but we’ll check.” Boram clears her throat and looks at you. “Is tonight cool?”
You resist the temptation to scream OH YES MOTHER OF GOD YES YES YES PRAISE JESUS. You nod quickly and say “yes” as quietly and politely as possible. You even manage a little bow. You could kiss her feet.
“Great. So listen up.” Boram stares directly at you with a very serious face. “Sunny will contact you later today, and if she gives you the all-clear, you’re gonna sneak out of the dorm tonight, then Tiger will pick you up and you’ll go for a drive to pick up Shindong. Then, if all goes well, Tiger will park the car somewhere secluded and leave you both in privacy to get to know each other a little better. Sunny will go with you at first as a passenger though so you’re comfortable, and it’ll make things less awkward if you don’t have to deal with Tiger directly. Don’t worry, Tiger is harmless… but he’s a bit of a weirdo. Not like us sensible people. So go do your thing, wait till you hear from Sunny. You got it?”
You nod. “Yes, thank you!”
Boram and Sunny both smile at you. You smile back. You couldn’t be happier. Well, actually, you could… Shindong could be whispering sweet nothings in your ear, but you’re confident that this will come.
That night you’re having a shower while the other girls practice their routines in the gym. You’ve gotten into the habit of long showers, it’s the only time you ever get some privacy. When you emerge, you go to your bed where your newly-washed gym clothes are waiting, and put them on. If there’s one thing you can’t complain about at SM, it’s the laundry staff, who are like clockwork. As you put on your trackpants, you feel something scratchy stuffed inside the pants leg. You take it out – it’s a small folded piece of paper:
You smile to yourself, and hide the note in your trackpants pocket. You allow yourself to spazz internally for a while before joining the others in the gym.
At 3:29 AM, you head to the gym fire escape. You’re still in your gym gear, and the other girls are still practising. They’re used to you heading out to the fire escape by now so they all ignore you – they all assume you’ve taken up smoking because you always reek of Sunny’s second-hand smoke but in fact you haven’t touched a cigarette yourself since you entered SM as a trainee – you figure that Shindong wouldn’t approve. You open the door (thankfully it’s not locked) and Sunny is there waiting for you.
“Ready to go?” she says.
“Yes.”
“Got the note?”
You hold up the note. Sunny grabs it and puts it in her handbag. “Can’t be too careful. If the others found that, you’d be up shit creek. Follow me, quickly.” Sunny starts walking briskly to a black sedan that’s waiting, with its engine running. You follow her and both get in the back seat.
“Hey Tiger, we got the cargo. Let’s go!” Sunny yells at the driver.
“Buckle up!” replies Tiger, not looking back. You look around the vehicle. You notice that you’re in an unmarked taxi – there is a CB radio and a charging meter.
Sunny puts her seatbelt on and motions for you to do the same. “Do what he says. Before you get to meet anybody, we’ve got to lose anyone trailing us, and that usually requires some snappy driving.” You fasten your seatbelt, but not before Tiger lurches the car into an acceleration that makes you nearly lose your balance on the carseat. Sunny helps steady you as you adjust.
After a minute of driving, Sunny asks “so Tiger… how are we doing?”
“Look behind you. Do you see the blue car?”
Sunny looks behind her. You also turn to look but Sunny stops you, pushing your head down instead. She whispers at you harsly “keep down… if anyone sees you and notices you’re an SM trainee, it’s over!” Sunny then speaks louder, addressing Tiger over the engine noise. “Yeah, I see it. Sasaeng?”
“Paparazzi!”
“Shit! Did they see us get in?”
“I don’t think so. But we’re gonna have to change cars. It’ll be no problem.”
“Okay.”
Tiger starts talking into the car’s CB radio. You can’t quite make out what he’s saying as he’s talking quiet and the engine noise drowns him out. You can also hear the scratchy replies from the CB system but you can’t make out the exact words. Tiger continues to drive quickly.
“Is everything going to be okay?” you ask Sunny.
“Yeah, sure.” Sunny seems a bit more on-edge than her response suggests. “Here’s what’s going to happen. We’re going to drive into a parking garage that we usually use to lose these fucks. In there, we’re going to change cars. We’ll get in another car, another driver will take this car, and the paps will follow the other car. They’ll eventually get wise and start hunting for us again so we can’t fuck around, we have to do this fast, so be ready to move as soon as we park. You got all that?”
“Yes.”
“Good. We do this all the time so don’t worry. It’s pretty routine SNSD procedure.”
A few minutes of fast and more than slightly scary driving go by, and then the car starts slowing down and pulling into an underground parking garage. When the car stops Sunny yells “Go!” and you, her and Tiger all get out, and rush to another waiting car, a black people-mover minivan with tinted windows.
You all buckle up and the van moves off quickly through a different exit.
“Did we lose them?” asks Sunny.
Tiger waits a full minute before responding. “Yes. They have no idea. We lost them for sure. Now we go to the meetup.”
Sunny breathes a sigh of relief, and reaches for a cigarette. You suddenly become aware of a burning smell… but she hasn’t lit up yet.
“What’s that smell?” you ask.
Sunny sniffs the air, she seems to notice it too. “Yes Tiger, what is that fucking smell?”
Tiger chuckles. “Oh! Yes, this van used to belong to Son Ho Young from g.o.d – he tried to kill himself, by setting it on fire! It was a wreck after he burned it, so I bought it off him, real cheap price! Then had it refurbished, new upholstery, new covers, new everything! It’s quite safe. However, I still can’t get that fucking smell out! I don’t know where it is hiding!”
You start to feel creeped out. “When I meet Shindong… is it going to be in this vehicle?”
Tiger replies from the front seat. “Yes, but don’t worry! The smell goes away, soon you will be looking right into Shindong’s eyes – and you won’t even notice it!”
Yuck. The combined odour of charcoal and melted plastic seem to be getting stronger rather than weaker, now that you know what it is. Still, it’s a small price to pay.
What seems like at least an hour of driving goes by and you notice you are now on the semi-rural outskirts of Seoul. Sunny has been chain-smoking her new cigarettes the whole time, but the van’s smell is still stronger. You’re starting to get tired and impatient when the van leaves the bitumen road and starts moving along a bumpy dirt track. Another few minutes of driving and the van comes to a halt.
Tiger turns around to face you. “Shindong is not here yet, I think he got held up with his vehicle change, but he will be here soon! I will get out now.”
Sunny unbuckles her seatbelt and gets out of the car. “See you later. He’ll be here soon.”
“But wait… you’re not going to introduce me?”
“Come on. You don’t want me cramping your style now, do you?” Sunny winks at you. She has a point. You smile and wave from inside the van as she leaves with Tiger, both of them walking down the dirt track together, into the darkness.
You sit and wait. You become aware that you are involuntarily shaking. You’re not cold at all, or at least you don’t think you’re cold, so it must be nerves – and you know you sure are nervous about this! That car smell is still bothering you though, but you don’t want to get out because it’s dark and there’s no street lighting. You wait patiently, and you don’t have to wait too long. After a few minutes, you hear another car approaching, and you look out the window to see approaching headlights get bigger, and then come to a halt.
Approaching footsteps. A male voice, recognisable instantly to you as Shindong (thanks to your extensive video “research” collection of all his variety and MC appearances) calls out.
“Hi, are you in there? Wind down the window so I can see your pretty face.”
Your heart skips a beat. You wind down the tinted window of the car and poke your head out. What happens next is a bit confusing. You find yourself suddenly looking not outside, but at the ceiling of the van. That’s odd, you could swear that your head was just outside before – how did that happen? You also become aware of a throbbing sensation in the side of your head growing stronger. Wow, it really hurts! You put your hand up to your face… it feels wet and sticky. Pulling your hand away, you notice that it’s covered in blood.
The door of the van opens. A figure stands before you, illuminated by the car headlamp. It’s…. Boram?
It’s definitely Boram. She’s carrying a baseball bat. There’s another figure next to her, in the shadows, you guess that’s Shindong but you’re not really at the right angle to focus. You try to adjust your position but a stabbing pain shoots through your skull, stopping you.
“Hey there,” says Boram, flatly. No emotion of any kind from her voice. She raises the bat above your head. Everything goes black.
You regain consciousness and become aware of elements of your predicament in the following order: You’re alive. You’re sitting in a chair. The pain in your head is astounding. You can’t move your arms. Your arms are in fact tied behind your back. Your mouth is gagged. You’re in a dark room. Your legs are tied to the chair. Boram is standing in front of you. The dark room isn’t actually a room but is some kind of sewerage tunnel. Boram is playing with her smartphone, she swings her baseball bat idly in the other hand. Boram isn’t much taller than you when she stands than what you are when you’re sitting down, which would be amusing under any other circumstance apart from this one. Strange how you never noticed that before with Sunny.
Boram speaks to you, but doesn’t break eye contact with her smartphone. “I was going to just beat you to death with this bat, but… well, I got bored. Then Shindong thought of something much more appropriate for you.”
You’re horrified. This is Shindong’s idea? You wince in disbelief and hurt. Boram then looks at you, and continues.
“Don’t look so shocked. Don’t you think he gets sick of you pathetic stinking fangirls signing up to agencies just to get close to him? Why would he bother when he has me and Sunny? We’ve all been fucking each other for years, you know. Our little secret. Please don’t tell anyone… not that it’s likely in the next few minutes.” Boram smiles at you – she’s rubbing it in. You’re furious. You could kill her! Your eyes widen with rage, but this just seems to make Boram smile at you even more.
“So, you’re probably wondering what’s going to happen next. Well, as it happens, Jiyeon’s new song… have you heard her new song? I have, it’s so great! Anyway, it’s going to be released in…” Boram pauses to check her phone for the time, “…about five minutes. You might wonder what that has to do with your situation. You are wondering about that, aren’t you?” Boram pockets her phone, picks up the bat, and lines it up with the side of your head. You nod an affirmative response – no need to be in any more pain than necessary.
“Well, Jiyeon’s a hot sexy bitch, so when that video comes out, all the male Jiyeon fans who are eagerly sitting at their computers waiting for it to go live… and maybe some of the female ones too… they are all going to be getting very excited, of course.” Boram puts the bat down on the ground. Thank fuck for that. “A good proportion of them are probably going to masturbate, and that’s going to take them about one minute and one second. We timed it – that’s what the song’s about, don’t you know. Then a lot of those fappers will want to clean up, so they will need to use either the toilet, the bathroom basin or the shower straight afterward to dispose of all the spunk. Can you imagine every desperate and horny Jiyeon fapper in Seoul cleansing themselves of jizz all at exactly the same time, and what that does to a city’s sewerage system? Now, look up.”
Enduring considerable pain, you move your head to the required angle. You see that a large concrete sewer pipe extending down from the ceiling is dangling a few feet directly above your head. You are directly below the large opening, which is big enough to fit a person inside, and any sewerage coming from it has only one place to go – right on top of you.
“Seeing as how being saturated in cum seems to be your main mission in life, Shindong thought that it would be appropriate if you were to experience all the spunk you were ever going to receive in your lifetime – that is, if you were actually going to live for any decent length of time – in one hit. Isn’t that right, Shindong?”
Shindong’s form comes into view. He looks at you, you can’t tell if he’s fascinated or horrified – maybe both – but it’s clear that he doesn’t like what he sees. You’re not sure how you feel, either. Boram walks over to him and gives him a kiss on the cheek, then on the lips, then with the tongue. You look down – this is impossible for you to watch. They talk softly:
“Come on baby, let’s get out of here.” says Shindong.
“No shit. This place will be a biological hazard zone in about 10 minutes.”
Boram and Shindong walk off, arm in arm. You struggle for a while to try and free yourself but there’s no point, you’re securely tied down and going nowhere. You think about how you’ve wasted your life, about how it came to this. Eventually you hear the distant rushing of fluid through pipes, gradually drawing closer, like a building storm, like a swarm of fangirls chasing their unfathomable dreams straight to hell.
A while I made a post that discussed various technical aspects of vocals from an audio engineering rather than a singing point of view, because inquiring k-pop loving minds wanted to know all about vocals and there really aren’t any other posts that I’ve seen out there in the k-pop fan’s world that tackle vocals from any point of view other than either a fan’s or a singing teacher’s perspective. In the vocal post I discussed the technical ins and outs, and I also asked if people were interested in a similar post about the backing tracks and instrumentals of k-pop. As it happens, some of you said that you would like a post like that, so here it is. Be careful what you wish for, hey.
Some of you bright sparks out there have been noticing that there’s a bit of a “real instruments” trend seeping through Korean pop music lately – obviously synthesized electronic dance music is starting to take a backseat to pop music with real drums, guitars, brass, strings and keys. Clearly this is just another cyclical change in music fashion and it’s probably a reactionary trend to the proliferation of dubstep breaks shoehorned awkwardly into every second upbeat k-pop song released over the last two years whether the dubstep material suited the song or not (thanks “Bubble Pop” for launching that shithouse trend – not). So the question this blog poses is not “are real instruments good or bad?” (nobody cares, you dimwit) or “will the proliferation of real instruments last?” (no it won’t) but “how much of these so-called “real instruments” are actually ‘real’ and not synthesized or machine-generated”?
If the title of this blog post didn’t already give it away, the short answer is “not a fucking lot”. Okay, all you people who complain about my posts being condescending or having really obvious information in them or me having a snarky tone or being a cunt or whatever else can fuck off now. Yay! For the rest of you still reading – nice to have you on board, ladies and gents.
A SHORT AND HOPEFULLY NOT TOO BORING HISTORY OF POP MUSIC RECORDING
In the early days, music recording was monophonic, or mono for short, which means that everything was recorded onto one track of big-ass magnetic tape (or if we’re going back reeeeeally far, a wax cylinder), and then vinyl records were cut from this. The recording was made very simply – the engineer would stick a single microphone into a room, say “okay guys and gals, hit it”, the entire ensemble would play and sing at once, and it would be recorded through the microphone onto the tape machine. Mixing elements was done by physical distance – how close you got to stand and sing or play next to the microphone meant how important you were to the song and how loud your input would end up in the final mix. Obviously drums, brass and other loud instruments that could potentially dominate the mix were recorded very far away, whereas vocals would be relatively close, so the final result is that (hopefully) you get a nice “balance” and everything can be heard “just right”. In practice it didn’t always work out this way, usually due to money – too much or too little echo could easily ruin a recording by making the individual elements harder to balance, and finding a room that sounded “just right” when a whole band played in it was difficult. Recording studios that had good-sounding rooms which were able to reliably produce hit records were acutely aware of this problem and charged a premium for their services.
Then something happened – some wise-ass inventor and musician by the name of Les Paul thought up a neat trick called multitrack recording. He figured out that magnetic tape could be divided into vertical sections and you could record different things onto each section, and then combine these sections later onto another tape for a final mix. What this meant in real terms is that the volume of each individual instrument could be individually adjusted before the final mix was made, so you could always achieve that perfect balance between volumes even if you recorded it under less-than-ideal conditions. Les Paul got crazy fine pop idol pussy over this radical invention (as well as a few other innovations, like the famous Gibson Les Paul solidbody guitar) and produced several hit recordings with singer Mary Ford using his fancy multitrack studio which was cutting-edge technology at the time. The recording industry were slow adopters of this new technology, gradually progressing from mono to stereo (two tracks, one for each ear, but essentially the same procedure) and then finally by about the late 1960s multitrack recording had finally gained enough popularity to become the industry standard practice. Only classical music still records similar to the old way with a stereo microphone over the conductor’s head picking up the entire room (which is why the symphony orchestra still has a particular seating arrangement).
The interesting thing about multitrack recording that is often neglected by people who prefer “real music” over “that EDM rubbish”, is that tracking each instrument separately creates a completely artificial acoustic construct. Multitrack recording means that instead of recording for example a whole drum kit by hanging a microphone over the top of it and hearing it the way your ears naturally would, you can record each drum in the kit individually – you can put a microphone right up an inch away from the snare drum, another one right up to (or even inside) the big bass drum, another one up to each individual cymbal and tom, and so on. Then you can mix and balance it all to your heart’s content (or at least until you run out of expensive studio time) until it sounds great, and it probably will sound great but what this method will never sound like is the natural real sound of a drumkit. There’s simply no way that you can stand in a room and hear a drumkit that way, because you don’t have twelve different ears that can all go right up to a drum skin at the same time (and if you did, listening to a drummer would send you deaf really fuckin’ quickly). This practice is called “close-micing” and most instruments in a multitrack recording have been recorded “close-miced” for the past 40 years. The point being, you can forget about “hearing the real sound” – to hear recordings that have a “real” acoustic perspective you have to go back to the 1950s, and you wouldn’t want to anyway – what qualified as an acceptable instrument sound on a 1950s recording sounds laughable and amateurish by today’s standards. In the realm of pop music, the artificial version is what today’s listeners prefer.
Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Let’s now go deeper and have a look at some individual instruments, and some of the common ways that their sounds are “created”.
Back to drums again and it’s common knowledge these days that most drums in k-pop are generated by a drum machine, playing stored drum samples. What you may not know is that most live drumming on recordings, when it appears, is also machine-generated.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Okay, let me explain. Say you’re an audio engineer and you’re sitting in a studio trying to get “that perfect sound” out of a drumkit, but no matter what you do, it still sounds like absolute wretched anus. Your client is a moron, his $100 drumkit is a rattling, squeaking out-of-tune piece of shit, but you can’t afford to annoy him because he’s the one paying the bills for the studio session and he’s emotionally attached to his drum kit like a crippled infant to a security blanket and insists that it is “the best shit ever, man”. Your client only has so much money so you really are under pressure to not go overtime and pull this great drum sound out of your ass. If you don’t deliver the sonic goods as fast as possible, you know for sure that he’ll blame you because according to him his kit is so good that any shortfall in sound quality must therefore be your fault… but with his Fischer-Price hunk of junk there’s just no way it’s going to happen. The way you see it, you’ve got two choices:
1. Keep moving microphones around, adjusting the drum kit and the room environment until the drumkit sounds great, which could take any amount of time.
2. Put some drum triggers on the kit and use them to trigger drum samples.
Easy choice. You attach some little orange clips to his drumkit – these are your drum triggers. “What the fuck are these things, man?” your idiot client asks while drooling and gently scraping his knuckles along the studio carpet. You spin some bullshit story about them being “rim stabilisers”, and you also leave all the drum microphones set up as well so he doesn’t get wise. Now every time the drummer hits a drum skin, these triggers send a little “go” signal to a big box called “my kickass drum sounds 101″ full of pre-recorded drum samples of every type of popular drum kit sound, all perfectly in tune and recorded with brilliant clarity in a studio much more expensive than yours somewhere in the USA or Germany or wherever the fuck. When your drummer hits that snare drum, the drum box plays a recording of a snare drum from some snare drum sample library, and that is what gets recorded. What if you don’t like the sound? Fine – ask the drum module to instead play one of the other 199 snare drum sounds in its internal library until you hear one that you like. Once your recording is done, you invite your client into the control room to listen and you play him the finished product. He smiles and says “I told you my drumkit fuckin’ kicked ass, man!” – little does he know that he isn’t even listening to his own kit, he’s hearing himself playing samples of a much better kit. In the meantime, you take his money and usher him out the door.
These days drum machine technology is excellent and can sound exactly like a real drummer with no problems, but drum machines have a disadvantage – they only play in repetitive patterns, and sometimes the natural variance of a real drummer (or the desire to fool dumb k-pop fans into thinking they’re hearing “real music”, whatever that means to their pea-brains) is desired. Sure, you can make a drum machine sound like a real drummer if you really want to by programming it really fastidiously instead of using repetitive loops, but who’s got time for that? Get in a professional drummer but make them use a triggered drum kit and you’ve saved yourself the time of trying to get a good drum sound AND the time that you may have spent programming the drum machine to sound “more human”. It’s a lot quicker to trigger proven sounds that you know are going to work, than to take a chance by trying to record the natural sound of drums that may or may not sound any good. Triggers are used all over pop recordings these days because it’s a time-saver, and in a recording studio, time is money (literally).
Using samples has another advantage – volumes are more consistent, reducing the need for compression (an effect which is explained in the vocal production post). Those of you who listen to that extreme metal stuff with the double-kick drums going at light speed might be interested to know that usually the volumes between the two kick pedals are evened-out electronically. I was in on a studio session once where the drum player’s kick drum playing was so inconsistent and unrecordable that the engineer assigned him the ultimate drummer humiliation – he was made to redo all his fast double-kick work again by repeatedly tapping on a sample keyboard with two fingers. I’ve never seen a more embarrassed drummer in my life than at that moment.
Oh, and another thing – drums, like any other instrument, can be Auto-tuned. Remember Brad from Busker Busker’s controversial interview where he said that the producers of their cover of SHINee’s “Juliette” had to “Autotune everything, even the drums”? He’s not making that shit up.
Bass guitar is one of those instruments that is synthesized an awful lot these days, and the reason why is fairly straightforward – electronic synths can actually go a lot lower than a bass guitar. Sure, you could use an upright bass (also known as a double bass) instead which is a full octave lower, but there’s a trade-off – an upright bass doesn’t have all that much sustain, unless you play it with a bow classical-style and then the sound has all the sustain you want, but doesn’t have much punch. To get the deep, thudding, punchy, sustaining, subwoofer-friendly bass frequencies that modern pop music listeners like to dance and use drugs to, you need machines. There’s three common ways to synthesise bass on a recording:
Make a bassy noise with a synthesizer and program it into your track or play it in real time
Use a tone-generator and a gate to trigger bass to the peak of another instrument
Synthesize sub-bass from a live instrument by sampling it and then pitch-altering the sample
The first point is self explanatory but the other two may not be, so here comes the technical fun.
A tone generator is basically just a box that makes a sound, you can buy them or you can download them for free, they’re electronically ultra-simple and you can even buy them in kit form from electronic hobby shops and assemble one yourself. A gate is an audio signal device that will either let a sound through it, or not let a sound through it, depending on input. If you set a fat bassy tone to go through the gate, but keep the gate closed until it gets a signal from a bass drum, every time the drummer hits their bass drum they’ll also open the gate and let through the tone. Here’s the concept explained in a diagram.
The result: combining the two signals gives an instant thick-sounding bass drum with a nice sub-bass underneath. This technique is called “gate side-chaining” which sounds a little kinky, because audio engineers like to tell themselves they’re doing something sexy when they’re really just being ultra-nerds fucking around with machines at ungodly hours of the morning when everyone else is listening to the fruits of their sonic labour in nightclubs, partying and getting laid.
The other trick, sub-bass synthesis, isn’t so complex. Just feed your bass signal into something like an octave divider pedal that makes everything lower, then carefully recombine that signal with the original signal. There are other techniques too but I won’t go into them here because I’m too lazy, this post is fucking long enough and I want to get to the next picture of a cute AOA member just as much as you do. The bottom line – the bass that you are hearing on a k-pop record is usually just a synth but in the rare cases where it’s not, it’s usually been juiced up in some way by added synth elements such as these.
It’s easy to sample and play a guitar sound, but completely synthesized guitar is still relatively rare, because guitar is quite a difficult instrument to synthesize convincingly. A notable example of completely synthesized guitar is T-ara’s “Cry Cry” where all the flamenco-esque guitar parts are (fairly obviously) produced by a keyboard. This is unusual – most guitar playing in k-pop is “real” – but only up to a point. Let’s look at electric guitar first.
Professional electric guitarists are an unusual breed of players in that they almost all hate the natural sound of their own instrument and don’t consider it good enough for a recording or a live stage! Most electric guitarists are absolutely in love with signal processing, to the point where guitarists working in the pop and rock fields sport extensive pedal boards full of signal processing effects that they lay at their feet on live stages and step on during songs to trigger and alter sounds. Here’s a pedal board of a well-known professional guitarist (guitar nerd points for you if you know which one):
To explain exactly what this board does, and the different varieties of guitar processing in general and what they do, would require another blog all of its own, but this level of effects processing on a guitar signal is by no means unusual (the amount of times I’ve had to patiently wait to get onto a stage while a previous band’s guitarist dismantled their crazily overblown effects setup, I couldn’t tell you). Of course not every effect is on at all times, guitarists will mix and match according to the song, essentially “playing” their effects like another instrument in itself. Digital sound alteration for guitarists is so common these days that they even have a special word for when they go without it: “clean”. It’s a very unusual guitarist who voluntarily steps on a live stage with “a clean sound”. And all this processing is before the signal gets into the mixing board in the studio!
I know what you’re thinking – “but my faves all play acoustic guitar!” They’re not exempt – most modern acoustic guitars sport hidden battery-powered electronic pickups and can be plugged into effects units just like an electric guitar can, so they can use all the same toys.
The little black control unit adjusts the volume and frequency response of the inbuilt pickup. Just saying this here because if I don’t, someone will ask me “what’s that fucking black shit dude”.
Acoustic guitars are actually very commonly post-processed on k-pop recordings as well. The current trend in k-pop is to gate acoustic guitars extremely heavily. Remember the gate that we talked about before? Well, it has another function. You can set a gate “threshold” so the gate opens up once a signal that passes through it reaches a certain volume level, and to close once it dips below the threshold. This is actually the more common use of an audio gate, and on a diagram it would look a bit like this:
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.The red sections of the signal get completely removed, leaving a sound which has no natural decay but just starts and stops very sharply, leaving an uncanny dead silence in between strums. Juniel and BTOB both have songs with heavily gated acoustic guitar (they use muting as well, but gates are used to “tidy up” any loose ends – k-pop’s perfection obsession at work) but they’re not the only ones, just two examples that spring readily to mind. The common 1980s “big drum” sound (popularised on Phil Collins’ hit “In The Air Tonight”) also uses this technique as do many other drum mixes from the period.
The other thing to keep in mind with all guitar parts in k-pop is that the guitar player usually didn’t play the whole thing as you hear it. If the song has two verses which are identical, the engineer will usually sample the first verse of guitar and then copy and paste the part over to the second verse so it sounds exactly the same… or vice versa if the guitarist happened to fuck up a bit less in the second verse than the first one. Guitar solos, when they appear in k-pop, are often also cut-and-paste collages of the best bits of multiple attempts at guitar solos, which is as easy for an audio engineer to create as for a writer to cut and paste pieces of a massive overlong boring essay together (like this one, for instance).
Keyboard technology in 2014 is very kick-ass and newfangled keyboards are capable of pretty much any fucking thing. The modern keyboard is basically a computer and if you check the specifications of professional grade keyboards you’ll notice that they are not just instruments but sample generators, programmable machines and digital signal processing units all in one. This means that a keyboard can make any sound that any other instrument can make, plus a few more. Most importantly, many keyboards can be programmed, meaning that a keyboardist doesn’t actually need to play a keyboard in real time, they can press a few buttons and out comes “here’s one I prepared earlier” like in the cooking TV shows where they don’t want to make you wait 40 minutes while a pasta bake roasts in the oven. Combine keyboards with drum machines, MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface, a computer language that allows instruments to talk to each other) and other sequencing tools, and they become even more powerful.
The modern keyboard is basically the musical portable magic-trick-box. Who remembers that scene in the film White: Melody Of Death (which I hope by now you’ve all seen) where the lead vocalist is worried about getting her money note right, so the producer has someone standing by in a booth off to the side of the stage who sings just that one note for her when the time comes? In reality, this wouldn’t happen: setting up a booth like that would be too logistically difficult and it would be far too easy to get caught. It would make much more sense to store a sample of the correctly-sung note on another instrument such as a keyboard and get someone to trigger it at the right time. Keyboards can be used to sample and play back all sorts of shit including…
BRASS
Brass parts are nearly always keyboard samples. Sometimes a solo line may be recorded individually and concept albums like IU’s deliberately retro “Modern Times” have legit instruments but those big brass stabs in the more modern k-pop songs… almost always samples, played on keys. “Real instruments” my ass.
WOODWIND
Same here. Nobody plays fucking woodwind instruments, get real. What do you think this is – it’s not 1850, you bitch.
Here’s an interesting one. A symphonic string sound is a very easy thing to synthesize and most electronic keyboards of any worth have a really good and convincing “orchestra strings” sound built into them from the factory. However, the sound of just one violin playing on its own is something that modern synthesizers can’t get right yet, the technology isn’t quite there. The reason for this is that violins are played with a bow and there’s so many factors involved in bowing an instrument that computer programs actually still have a hard time figuring it all out. With twenty violins playing at once, they all blend into a smooth mush which is easy to copy, but the somewhat harsh and highly variable sound of bowing means that if you hear a solo violin, it’s probably not synthesized (although it may still be a sample). Give the tech another 10 years at least to get it together, then we may start to hear a decent synthesized violin… but probably not. It may always be cheaper to give a real violin player a bag of heroin in exchange for cutting a cool violin solo on a recording than learning how to use some kick-ass violin simulator that only does the job about 80% right.
…then you’re wrong. Never mind the whole debate about “what does ‘substance’ actually mean” or “why do we give a fuck about comparing pop music from different countries anyway” – the fact is that most of what has a “live band kind of sound” in k-pop is pretty much machine generated on every level that it possibly can be, so this argument falls on its ass right at the first hurdle. The modern k-pop “live” sound is actually a product of various technologies coming together to make that sound happen. It’s the same in western pop too, but it’s probably even more the case in k-pop where there is a “perfection” aesthetic and producers are generally a lot more conscious of smoothing over their product and leaving no rough edges behind. Welcome to the future of pop music! It’s the futuristic, forward-thinking musical elements of k-pop that attracted you all to the genre and this post in the first place, right? Right? Hey, where are you going…?
There’s a dichotomy going on with my writing and Internet activity, that some of you have noticed:
I’m not really someone who gives much of a shit what other people think of me, or what other people think of just about anything at all, for that matter. Other people can say and do their thing, I’ll say and do mine – as long as it’s not severely impacting the quality of my life in some tangible way, people are entitled to their opinions and it’s all good.
Netizens (both Korean and international) and their constant thoughts (or lack thereof) about all sorts of things are something that I often think are ridiculous, and I enjoy holding some of these people up to contemptuous ridicule. Since I’ve started blogging I have a love/hate relationship with netizens because although their opinions are generally worthless and provably wrong it gives me endless blogging material which I can honestly only be thankful for.
This has caused a few people to ask questions along the lines of…
It’s a good question. This post has the answer, and it’s not what you think… well, not exactly.
To get our answer, we have to take things back a few years, long before the days of Netizenbuzz posting everysame-oldarticleaboutT-ara they can find just to showcase the hate comments while simultaneously ignoring more newsworthy articles with more mixed netizen reactions that don’t fit their narrative, and go back to the days when Hwayoung was still picking up bottles of nail polish remover in the CCM dorms. Believe it not, my first exposure to netizens wasn’t even the T-ara controversy, but the title of this video:
I looked at that title and thought “what’s a netizen?”. Then I looked at the video. A few minutes later, after I’d wiped myself down, I thought “well, that wasn’t really all that racy, it’s not like they actually got their boobs out or anything, whoever netizens are they must surely be some complete fuckheads to not appreciate these expertly choreographed visuals”. I made a mental note that these mysterious “netizen” people were obviously not to be trusted or worthy of a second thought, and I got on with my life.
Then July 2012 happened to T-ara. No need to boringly recap all that mess, but how time flies, hey… and to think some people in Korea (plus a few trendy Koreaboo hipsters on western sites who wish they were Korean) still crap on about this shit like it was yesterday. Hwayoung was only in the group for 20 months, which means that Korean netizens have now been cyberbullying T-ara members over some shit they have zero proof of having even happened for longer than she was even in the group to begin with getting her nails painted and having long, luxurious baths. Gosh.
At that time I was an avid reader of Allkpop, but I found that I couldn’t get very good news from them about this situation, because… well, it’s Allkpop. They just translate equally dodgy Korean news sites for the most part, and in the rare cases where they do have some kind of “exclusive”, they tend to really fuck it up one way or another (and to think one of their mods took a swing at me for lack of journalism or whatever – come on now, you’re an Allkpop mod – talk about throwing stones from inside a glass house). In the Allkpop forums (RIP 2013) people started to post Netizenbuzz links instead of links to news sites partly because Netizenbuzz had more comprehensive lists of T-ara’s so-called “bullying”, and also because the article netizen comments weren’t the cheesy ones featured in the record-label approved press release articles that Allkpop and other “news” sites would publish but were the actual real comments people left. I followed these links over the next few months and here’s what I learned from Netizenbuzz:
Netizens are Korean Internet users (an important point, I didn’t actually know this before I clicked the site)
The entertainment business is very concerned about what netizens think of them, to the point where they will listen and change practices to appease them
Netizens are understandably very cynical because Korean Internet media is so awful
The cynicism of netizens is very shallow and surface-level: they make up their mind what they want to believe in advance and then look for “evidence” to support their pre-existing belief, instead of approaching investigating matters with an open mind to genuinely find the truth of a situation
Netizenbuzz was happy to ride to notoriety on the back of T-ara articles, but they don’t like T-ara and never have. That should be obvious to anybody by now, but for those who don’t believe me check out their editorial tone here, here, and here from old articles before the site really took off in popularity, and then compare that to this. Looks like being editorially sympathetic to performers and/or clarifying out-of-context “evidence” is a-ok – as long as it’s not in a T-ara article. Tsk tsk.
Credit where it’s due though – Netizenbuzz has been really educational for me, and I’ve learned a lot, so I’m very thankful for the site’s existence. It’s still a better bet than most “official news” sites, and I do still recommend it as compulsory reading for anyone who wants to understand the insanity of netizens, in Korea and elsewhere – especially the FAQ, which is excellent and probably the best content the site has got, it’s just a pity nobody fucking reads it. I actually have nothing against the site and I repeatedly send traffic there, and have been doing so for months and will continue to (which is more than I do for Allkpop) so people saying that I’m hating on NB can really just STFU. I just think it’s a shame that the extreme T-ara hate of the netizens and the thinly-veiled dislike from the site itself (however impartial they might be trying to be) is really repetitive and boring and got old about 21 months ago.
Of course, all hate for T-ara everywhere is all purely on the Internet only. The girls halted their careers a bit back in the day, but that was only because media outlets and sponsors were worried about the impact that the hatred might have, and not from any actual impact of the hatred – a bit like how stockbrokers worry about share prices falling, so they dump all their shares, and then because they dumped their shares, the prices fall, even if they weren’t going to if they had hung onto them. T-ara hate has always been overestimated by wishful antis and in 2014 it doesn’t translate to the real world anymore at all. The girls of T-ara have been back on track for ages now doing photo shoots and press, they got their lucrative endorsements and CF deals back, other groups of alltypes are happy to be publicly associated with them, their songs are still selling,overseas business is fine, and none of this looks like it’s changing anytime soon. Even the amount of hate that T-ara received at the peak of the bullshit is questionable. Not a single projectile was ever thrown in anger on a live stage. Not a single documented incident exists of anyone from T-ara suffering any direct abuse in person, to their face. Antis couldn’t even manage to give them a proper black ocean last year like they managed with SNSD in 2008, with several fandoms of other groups proudly saying “we’re a good fandom, WE didn’t participate in any T-ara black ocean” – and a protest that nobody wants to admit to even being a part of is a failure on every possible level that it can fail on.
So… now that we’ve established that nobody else except the Internet’s most extreme dickheads care about netizens, why should I care, of all people?
For the real answer, we need to look at this video.
T-ara’s Day By Day drama version. I’m sure you’ve all seen it. It’s that amazingly ambitious dystopian future video that absolutely blew everyone’s motherfucking minds and then a month later everybody decided that they hated it because they were morons with weak, feeble brains and hating T-ara was suddenly trendy. Forget about the main video though, at least for the moment, and instead skip to 10:23. What do you hear?
It’s a preview of their follow up single “Sexy Love”… but wait, it’s different. The backings are better – way, way better. In fact, this shit sounds fucking amazing, holy living fuck. In this form it could have been the best song that T-ara ever did, ousting faves like Roly Poly, Like The First Time and the sadly neglected never-played-on-a-live-stage-even-though-it-would-be-the-perfect-concert-opener One & One from my favourite k-pop songs list. Of course, we didn’t get that song in this form, did we? No we fucking didn’t, instead we got this:
“Sexy Love” in it’s final form is still a decent song, actually I think it’s one of T-ara’s best – but it could have been even better still if they’d used the original backing track instead of that robot shit they ended up going with (which is still good, don’t get me wrong. I dig the robot shit. It’s just not as good). So what the fuck?
My theory goes like this: T-ara’s “Sexy Love” was all completely musically done and dusted by the time “Day By Day” was released, in typical CCM form it would have come out pretty shortly after “Day By Day” did – and we all know what CCM are like with rapid-fire MV releases, so we know this is true. All that was left was to shoot the MV (which only takes a day or two in the music biz – on MV shoots you work 24 hours around the clock until it’s done). Then, all that bullshit about Hwayoung and controversy and blah blah happened and CCM delayed things a bit to give everyone time to cry about it. However, money needs to be made and you can’t have a hiatus forever – selfish piece of shit netizens wanted T-ara to disband but T-ara as a machine employs dozens, maybe hundreds of people, and what are they gonna fuckin’ do, shelve this massive money-making entity and have their employees not eat and pay rent because you still need to change your fucking tampon over some bullshit that isn’t even any concern of yours? Get real, fuckhead. So the group gets back on track, but there’s a problem – the girls, now cyberbullying targets of the Internet’s most worthless trash, are upset. It’s hard for them to pull the usual fake smiles and fanservicey bullshit that these groups have to do for the new song, a bright upbeat number – every few minutes one of them has to go off and cry, meaning that the makeup artists constantly have to reapply and renew their makeup which takes hours, their animal ears are slipping off their head from the tears getting in their fringes, it’s just a mess. The video shoot is shelved – this concept just isn’t going to work, the girls just aren’t ready for the emotional labour required. Then, somebody has a bright idea: “what about a robot love-doll concept?”.
Looking over it, everyone concludes that the robot concept has several huge advantages, the main one being that the girls don’t have to emote and fake smiles. All they have to do is keep a dead, stony face and move a bit.
The only good Arnold Schwarzenegger acting is in The Terminator (the first one). Let’s face it – the dude is not a highly trained actor, he can’t act any emotions at all and is always as stiff as a board. The film people knew this, so they cast him as a robot with no emotions, a role for which he’s perfectly suited. T-ara girls with their new robot love concept could now be given the same instructions as Arnie – “just hold in your emotions completely and do the robot moves”. It’s a lot easier to keep your emotions inside and not ruin your makeup with tears if you don’t have to pretend-smile and aegyo.
Other advantages of this concept include the idea that it’s a sly dig at netizens, it’s basically saying “you want T-ara to be perfect robotic angels of love instead of actual human beings who make mistakes? Okay, here you go, happy now?”, but it also allowed T-ara to jump on board with the dubstep trend in a way that actually made musical and conceptual sense and didn’t compromise their core sound with a ton of languid WUBWUBWUB. This conceptual change however meant that the backing track had to also change to suit the robot concept, because there was no way that the previous more fluid-sounding track was going to work with their new dance moves and expressions.
So that’s why I think we got the decent but somewhat inferior robot backing track to “Sexy Love” and not the kick-ass amazing original. Sure I like my eye candy posts etc but at the end of the day I’m a radio DJ and I wouldn’t even be into k-pop at all if the music wasn’t up to it. Netizens can talk all the shit they want and hate all my favourite groups, I don’t give a solitary fuck, but the minute that their pathetic wailing affects the actual musical content, then it affects me, and that’s when they’ve crossed the line. The trendy cyberbullying by worthless Internet fuckheads over a situation that at its worst was probably no different to what any group of girls living together experiences anywhere in the world, changed what could have been the greatest k-pop song of all time into a less-good version, and for this reason netizens are a force that I will always oppose… at least until they reflect and return with a more mature image.
I hereby pronounce July 2nd, the day that the “Day By Day” MV was released, to be Global Netizen Stupidity Day and Sexy Love Backing Track Day Of Mourning. On this day, all regular readers and followers of Kpopalypse should take a moment to reflect on the stupidity of hive-minded netizens across the world, how the Internet is making people dumber instead of smarter by allowing dumb people to share worthless ideas and thoughts more easily, and how music fans should never be persuaded to put unconfirmed gossip from rumour sites between them and their favourite songs. Here endeth the lesson.
I’m aiming to write the definitive k-pop ass post soon. However, I’m not really an ass kind of guy, I’m more of an upper-body appreciator, so rather than using mere guesswork and speculation I thought I’d outsource the selection of asses to you, the lovely readers. With the help of online survey software, I’ve devised a short questionnaire to find out which asses you consider to be the best in k-pop. This survey will be up for a week, or until I get enough responses, whichever comes first. Enjoy!
Here’s the latest list of changes to the Kpopalypse site!
2012 Best Songs post: rewritten, edited to look sexier and now expanded from 22 to 30 songs! Please note that if you were linking from somewhere else to the 2012 post, the URL has now changed so your link will now be broken, you’ll need to edit it.
Plagiarism post: broken video link removed and content edited slightly, headings improved.
JongTomi post: headings improved. No more new Hitomi boobs added, sorry.
All Nugu Alert series posts: a popular nugu video channel on YouTube went down and broke most of the links I was using. Fixed and repaired all links.
Drinking game post: rearranged and sexed up a little, broken image link removed
Let me know if you spot more broken stuff! And yes I’m aware of the link to Allkpop forums in my netizen post is not working, but I think Allkpop are working on a fix. Or maybe they’re not…. but hey, who cares, it’s only Allkpop, it’s not like it’s anything important.
Also let me know if you spot reposted or translated Kpopalypse articles or discussions, because I’ll link to them from my index!
Here it is, the one you’ve been waiting for – the ass post!
Because I’m not really an ass kind of guy, I left the selection of asses up to you – this list does not reflect my personal preferences but what you, the reader, enjoy the most. I constructed this post in three stages using the following process:
I put up a survey using your suggestions (plus a few more) so you can rate the suggested ass.
I collated the data into the post that you’re now reading.
If your fave isn’t in these lists – it’s probably your own fault. You should have nominated them when you had the chance, so it’s a little late to complain now. Let’s be honest though – they probably wouldn’t have held their own against the winners anyway. Drop your browser down low like a twerker and check out the results below.
WARNING: GIF-heavy post. I’ve used GIFs rather than still images as GIFs are less likely to be shopped, so we’re more likely to be evaluating the true assets in question. Those with slow computers or Internet might need to click to load the page and then go make a cup of coffee or something while it loads.
Question 1: How are you?
I always ask how people are because I’m such a friendly person who is all about making friends and being nice to everybody at all times. The results:
The survey didn’t have ass pictures because the survey is all about working out what ass pictures to give you. I thought that would have been fairly obvious but I guess maybe not to everyone. The survey software doesn’t really allow me to insert eye candy anyway, but I would have if it were possible! Anyway sorry to anyone who felt click-baited by Qri’s delicious ass movements and I hope that this bottom-heavy post makes up for it.
Question 2: Rate female ass!
A big list was provided and participants were asked to vote once for each ass that met required standards. I had over 600 responses, but not one single nominee scored 50% or higher, showing that within the realm of k-pop ass, subjectivity is king. Here were the 13 winners, starting at #1 and working down, because when posting about asses we always move downward.
I honestly didn’t pick it – did you? The Secret singer, underwear model and sexy Ilbe bug subjected my ass poll to some quick and thorough democratisation by turning up at the top of the vote, never once slipping from the top position (although at one stage during the voting process, she was only in the lead by one solitary vote-click). 47.4% of all poll participants decided that Hyosung met required standards.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
There will be two GIFs for each winner in this section but since Hyosung is the winner and good GIFs of her ass are oddly hard to find, here’s a couple more especially selected by Kpopalypse for your enjoyment.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
#2 – GIRL’S DAY – YURA – 292 votes
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
A firm favourite to do well, we all knew that Yurass would perform nicely in the results, especially as she may have picked up some sympathy vote from regular readers after having been left out of my boobs post. Happy now?
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
#3 – SISTAR – BORA – 274 votes
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Not one to usually top k-pop beauty polls, participants demonstrated excellent objectification prowess as per poll instructions to “rate asses only regardless of all other factors, positive and negative” by isolating and appreciating the Borass.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
#4 – T-ARA – HYOMIN – 253 votes
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
The #4 “love suggestion” was T-ara’s sexy ex-iljin goddess, proving that bad girls gone oh-so-good are the hottest. Apparently a common iljin activity is to make others participate in “forced masturbation” – don’t we know it! No need to force us, Hyomin – we’ll cum if we must!
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
#5 – GIRLS’ GENERATION – YURI – 249 votes
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
For those of you who like your buns tightly packed, there’s Yuri. Being a member of the world’s highest-profile girl group probably didn’t hurt her chances in this poll, but there’s no denying that in eyeballing these GIFS you have just witnessed the fitness.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
#6 – KARA – NICOLE – 238 votes
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
KARA’s “Mr.” still reigns supreme in my eyes as K-pop’s #1 butt dance despite the presence of several recentworthycontenders, and even though she is no longer in KARA, Nicole will probably continue to retain her crown into the near future as the genre’s chief practitioner of butt-dancing.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
#7 – WASSUP – NADA – 225 votes
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Video of Wassup’s recent fanservicey Maxim photo shoot propelled the 2013 nugus from twerking in obscurity to the bright lights of ass-stardom. Nada’s delicious porn-inspired spread for the camera rallied the pervert troops, carrying the flag of glute-appreciation into battle against the haters and her inclusion in the top honours here was assured.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
#8 – 4MINUTE – HYUNA – 205 votes
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Is it poppin’? The verdict appears to be yes, and nobody need ask “whatcha doin’ today” because the answer is shortly going to be “fapping to Hyuna’s ass”. Having seen it in the flesh I can tell you that Hyuna’s posterior looks even better in person.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
#9 SISTAR – SOYOU – 203 votes
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
All that gym work is paying off for Soyu, who doesn’t display her rear talents nearly enough for my liking. The #1 likely favourite of deployed South Korean troops everywhere, Sistar all posses excellent sculpted bodies and their posters have probably seen the inside of more military lockers than any other group.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
#10 – SISTAR – HYOLYN – 200 votes
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Not to be outdone (well, not by more than a few votes), Sistar’s designated swimsuit-wearer Hyolyn also performed strongly. Look at the eyes of the woman in the center of the top GIF – that’s the look of despair at suspecting that your boyfriend is fapping to Hyolyn’s ass instead of yours.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
#11 – T-ARA – JIYEON – 198 votes
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Jiyeon has been amping up the hip-grinding for her latest cumback which has thrust her previously under-utilised lower half into the upper echelons of ass appreciator consciousness. Not too many in K-pop are dropping it low like Jiyeon right now.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
#12 – GIRLS’ GENERATION – TIFFANY – 195 votes
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Unusual for k-pop, Tiffany has a relatively solid square-shaped figure for a female idol but that didn’t deter poll participants from noticing that nature abhors a straight line and that Tiffany still got that ass. These Tiffany ass GIFs are my best friend – are they your best friend?
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
#13 – GIRL’S DAY – SOJIN – 191 posts
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Rounding out the glutes on this ass-poll is Girls’ Day’s Sojin. I always felt she was out-curved by the other members but it seems that I’m the one who got thrown for a curveball by these outstanding GIFs. I may just have to fap to make it up to her.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
HONOURABLE MENTIONS AND SCORES
BESTie – Dahye – 188
2NE1 – Minzy – 186
Ailee – 183
miss A – Fei – 170
f(x) – Victoria – 167
T-ara – Eunjung – 163
Rainbow – Hyunyoung – 163
Rainbow – Jaekyung – 162
AOA (Ass Of Angels) – Seolhyun – 158
NS Yoon G – 156
After School – Uee – 146
Nine Muses – Sera – 146
After School/Orange Caramel – Nana – 144
Clara – 141
Nine Muses – Kyungri – 141
miss A – Min – 140
miss A – Suzy – 139
Lee Hyori – 138
Brown Eyed Girls – Gain – 133
f(x) – Krystal – 126
Spica – Jiwon – 123
Apink – Naeun – 122
T-ara – Qri – 116
Brown Eyed Girls – Narsha – 114
Apink – Eunji – 112
Girl’s Day – Minah – 110
Girl’s Day – Hyeri – 105
AOA (Ass Of Angels) – Hyejeong – 102
Stellar – Minhee – 101
Rainbow – Woori – 101
f(x) – Sulli – 100
Question 3: rate male ass!
Because I intended on having 13 female winners I decided that I would ask for ratings on 13 guys too. Got to keep it fair on the male ass-lovers, of course. No male images here because this post is image-heavy enough, but there’s plenty of good sources of male ass out there. Maybe one of the other Anti Kpop-Fangirl authors can do a big male ass post for the male ass fans, as long and exhaustive as this one. How about it? In the meantime, the results of my male ass poll are in:
Okay, so Amber is actually female, but it’s not my fault you all voted for her.
Question 4: If you think that objectification of asses for either gender is wrong, please put your essay about why here. Please include parenthetical references in Harvard or MLA style where applicable. On the other hand if you’re okay with it, feel free to fill the text field with anything you want. You could let me know of any asses I missed, or how much you enjoyed clicking a certain person knowing that their ass would be counted, or you can whine about how I didn’t include that many male asses (I didn’t get many nominations, sorry). Alternatively you could leave it blank if you believe that ‘less is more’.
One of you hating lolcows wanted to know why I wanted a referenced essay, and suggested that I was implying that only uni students could have opinions on these things. Actually the reason for it is that most of the anti-objectification crowd in k-pop are quite academically inclined and I was curious to see if they would participate and what they could come up with in terms of solidly backing up an anti-objectification argument. Correct referencing is for everybody, not just Uni students, you snobby cunt. One person actually obliged with referenced comments, which was great, and their response is included below because I appreciate the effort:
WTF no EXID Hani? Don’t say it’s our fault for not suggesting it. Why would anyone send it in if nobody can fathom why she wasn’t included on this poll in the first place? Worse still, where is kpopalypse hyungs butt? Where is your integrity as an almost-journalist? Why do I feel so entitled to your writing efforts? Hyung pls. Pls respond hyung. Sauce: Fag, Sulli. “EXID Hani.” Anti Kpop-Fangirl: EXID Hani. N.p., n.d. Web. 3 June 2014.
It wasn’t very anti-objectification though, in fact nobody wrote down a strictly anti-objectification response, because you’re all perverts like me. Many of you sensibly left comments similar to this:
I don’t like boybands (i’m a lesbian) so I’m okay with the lack of dudes in the survey. There is enough fangirling over their ugly asses and their ugly faces as it is. Also i don’t think this is like, objetification? Last week I was watching a movie called “Helter Skelter” which is a satire of the model industry, and one of the characters says something like, “We’ll be forgotten. We’re machines for the processing of desires”, and that also applies for idols. They and their butts are already prepackaged for mass consumption. That’s it, bye :D
And this:
I have learnt it’s OK to objectify celebs. We’ll never know what their true personalities are, so we’ll judge them based on what we DO know, visuals n body. I have to credit you (partly) for indirectly teaching me that. Have a good day, oppa!
And I appreciate it! Glad you guys had fun/fapped.
Question 5: Did you enjoy the survey?
A pretty straightforward question to finish the survey off, because I always want to know if you guys like my content. Results:
And that’s it! Thanks to everyone once again for participating, and even if you didn’t get to participate in the survey thanks for reading/fapping! Also thanks to fiddle.se for the majority of the GIFs and all the other people out there such as Comekpop, Perving On Female Kpop and others doing the Lord’s work and GIFing ass! And for those who were/are horribly offended by anything in the survey questions or answers, don’t worry – Kpopalypse will reflect and return with a more mature image… and more eye-candy!
I’m colour blind. Apparently, this is a completely fucking fascinating subject to absolutely everyone, judging by the amount of questions that I get asked about it when people find out. To cater to this incredible fascination, this post will include some awesome colour blindness facts (so if I get any more annoying questions about it I can just link people to here instead of answering them directly over and over) and also a test so you can test your own colour blindness – with k-pop, of course!
A few quick colour blindness trufax first, for colour vision deficiency noobs:
Like pretty much everybody who has it, I was born colour blind.
Because I was born colour blind, I don’t know what it’s like to see colour the way a non colour blind person does.
I’m not completely colour blind, I’m supposedly “red/green” colour blind, also known as “deutan” or “deuteranomaly”, which affects about 5% of the male population (women can be colour blind too but it’s much rarer). Because every other colour in the rainbow has portions of either red or green in it, this basically fucks me for the whole colour spectrum in one way or another.
Even though I’m colour blind, I still know what colours look like because when I was in school a teacher pointed to a red thing and said “this thing is red“. Bravo, education. Because of this, I had no idea that I was colour blind. I found out the truth when I went for my first job at age 18, and when the optometrist told me I initially thought she was a lying whorebag because her diagnosis took her all of about ten seconds. “But… what do you mean? I can see colour!” I exclaimed. She was right though… that bitch.
Yes I can drive and see traffic lights just fine. I’m not allowed to fly an aircraft though.
I spell it “colour”, not “color”, because I live in a country that doesn’t butcher the English language… well, at least not the spelling aspects of it, anyway.
I’m aware that there are colour-corrective lenses out there but I’ve never tried them, only because I don’t give enough of a fuck to spend money on some shit that isn’t going to improve the quality of my life much. Besides, I don’t know what colour is supposed to look like, so how do I know if that shit is really working the way it’s supposed to?
THE OFFICIAL AND COMPLETELY SCIENTIFIC KPOPALYPSE COLOUR BLINDNESS TEST
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Question 1: Colour blind people are generally adept at perceiving big blocks of uniform colour, but perform poorly when lots of colours are mixed into a tight visual space. Please answer the following questions concerning this video:
How many people are in this video, including backing dancers?
Question 2: Colour anomalies in all types of colour blindness can affect depth perception. Please answer the following questions concerning this video:
What is the approximate width and depth of the stage, in metric or imperial measurements?
What the fuck is Tae Jin Ah wearing, is that shirt really puke-green?
Did you have to focus on the jackets of the backing dancers to prevent nausea?
If the answer to the previous question is “yes”, did it work?
Question 3: Colour blind individuals with various types of anomalous trichromacy can perceive optical illusions and size differentials with fast moving objects. Please answer the following questions concerning this video:
What is the total amount of circular colour-fill stage lights in the background?
Do your eyes sometimes confuse the adults with their miniature doppelgangers?
Did the adult rapper and child successfully synchronise all dance moves from 1:21 to 1:30?
Question 4: Some colour blindness types, in particular monochromacy or total colour blindness, can alter perceived brightness levels, making ambient light seem brighter than it really is. This is true especially in brightly-lit indoor environments. Please answer the following questions concerning this video:
How many different coloured dots are in Raina’s hair?
How many cookies and ice creams are on the stage? Does the number change?
Question 5: Deuteranomaly or red/green colour blindness can make red objects appear to be more distant, and green objects to appear more in the foreground – or vice versa. Please answer the following questions concerning this video:
Did you notice green objects in this video before or after you heard “JYP”?
What percentage of the plants on the rotating rotundas appear as red?
Do any of the rotundas stop moving at any point in the video?
Question 6: Colour perception in people with anomalous trichromacy and dichromacy decreases with light levels and saturation levels, often resulting in confusion in colour perception of the blue-purple-violet spectrum. Please answer the following questions concerning this video:
Do the upper half of the girl’s costumes appear purple at the start of the video?
Do the costumes still appear purple at 0:50?
The brightest lights appear at the very end of the video. Do the costume colours appear to change again?
Congratulations, you’ve completed the ultra-scientific colour blindness test, and you now know everything there is to know about colour blindness! Or maybe not, but hey, at least you got to watch some k-pop videos! Cheers to you!
It’s well-documented (by me) that I’m not much of a fan of writing song reviews. However, song reviews are also something that readers really like, and I always get bombarded with lots of requests to do them, so I try to do my best to cater to popular demand.
The last time I decided to review songs I wrote a Haiku review post, and looking back on it now, a thought occurred to me: Haiku is way too long. Who’s got time to read all those syllables just to find out what someone thinks? Certainly not the average k-pop listener – isn’t our short attention span and need for instant gratification part of the reason why we like k-pop in the first place?
Therefore, to satisfy the thirst for endless song reviews in the most appropriate manner possible, I asked for submissions via my ask.fm for songs that readers wanted me to review and got a bunch of responses, and now I’m going to review each one… in only five words! You’ll be hard-pressed to find any k-pop song reviews on the Internet more thoughtless and tossed-off than these! Enjoy (or bitch, your choice)!
KPOPALYPSE’S FIVE WORD SONG REVIEWS FOR K-POP FANS WITH ULTRA-SHORT ATTENTION SPANS!
Welcome to Kpopalypse Endorsement Test, a new series where Kpopalypse uses product endorsements to answer the big questions affecting k-pop fans! In today’s episode we tackle the following question:
Are Korean actresses ‘on another level’ to K-pop idols?
Some background context for those new to this question: It’s well documented that Korean actresses occupy a more esteemed position in the hearts of Korea’s lonely masturbating Internet-jockey public than Korean pop idols. They truly believe that actors and actresses are “on another level” to idols with a discriminatory fervour bordering on Ku Klux Klan style racist delusion. To netizens, actresses are always prettier, smarter, and more worthy of success than an idol, and woe betide any idol daring to dip their big toe into the sacred realm of acting lest they suffer the slings and arrows of Korea’s most frustrated and powerless virgins. Not that anyone except them ever seems too concerned.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Having said that, wouldn’t it be great if there were a way that we could measure the relative worth of actresses and idols for sure, to find out if this common prejudice stacks up in reality and answer the question concerning the merits of idols vs actresses once and for all? Well, now we can with KPOPALYPSE ENDORSEMENT TEST! Let’s get started!
The rationale of the endorsement test is as follows. The entertainment business has been in recession for decades, it’s no secret to anybody who has been working within it for a while that everything associated with entertainment has been on the gradual downturn globally since the 1990s. Because of this, shit like talent, personality, charm and all that crap doesn’t matter much, or at least not directly – what fucking matters is survival which means money, and lots of it. So how do entertainers make money? Well, idols sure don’t make it with their songs, even top tier groups can’t make much more than pocket change selling music in 2014 (I’ve discussed this in more detail here if you don’t believe). Actresses also don’t make a whole lot from acting – hell, half the time they don’t even get fucking paid at all for that shit. Well, fuck. Most entertainers in Korea with reasonably high profiles and money in their bank accounts don’t make that money through the entertainment industry itself, instead they make the money by attaching their own brand value to other brands and thereby leeching money off other industries that actually are still viable and do make decent money, via endorsements.
Surely, if actresses were truly on another level to idols, it stands to reason that they would naturally endorse higher quality products? This post is going to put the merits of two endorsed products to the test, and through the results, we will know who is truly superior – k-pop idols, or Korean actresses.
Since I’m making this contest, I thought it would be best to lay down some rules. Here they are:
The endorsed products under evaluation must be ones that I have not tried before finding out about the idol/actress endorsement, thus eliminating bias from product familiarity
Endorsed products must be given the opportunity to be experienced in their best possible light
Let’s bring on the reviews!
CONTESTANT #1 – BASKIN ROBBINS ICE CREAM
as endorsed by ORANGE CARAMEL
Everybody who listens to k-pop knows that Orange Caramel are great. Yeah yeah, music is subjective and all that, but if you don’t think Orange Caramel are one of the best groups in any genre of music ever in human history you should probably be killed anyway just because you suck. If you’ve been living under a rock, have never heard of Orange Caramel and are keen to prevent your imminent death, here’s their latest video for you to check out which is really just an extended-play advert for Baskin Robbins ice cream:
After I’d decided that the song was great and fapped to Raina for a while, I noticed that the ice creams they were promoting seemed to look pretty fucking good. I’d however never heard of Baskin Robbins so I figured that this franchise probably wasn’t in Adelaide, Australia and didn’t worry too much about it. Soon enough, someone on my ask.fm proved me wrong and alerted me to the existence of Baskin Robbins in Harbour Town, which is not actually a town but a weird outdoor shopping mall built onto the edge of Adelaide Airport. My chance to evaluate Baskin Robbins had arrived – would Raina’s soft serve taste as good as it looked in the video?
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
It’s worth noting the occupation of the “food stylist” at this point. If you’ve ever looked at mouth-watering pictures of fast food hamburgers, and then been incredibly disappointed with the difference in shape, size and texture of the actual hamburger when you purchased one, you’ll know just how effective food stylists can be. Food stylists aren’t the same as traditional cooks or chefs. A food stylist’s job is specifically to make food look appealing in photographic and video adverts… this often includes modifications which make the food inedible in reality! Some common food stylist tricks:
Hamburgers have pins and plastic inserted between the ingredients to give the layers of food more shape and lift
Roasted meat is only partially cooked, then sprayed with brown paint and stuffed with paper towels
Soap is added to make coffee, milk and other drinks look more frothy
Ice cubes in drink advertisements are usually made of acrylic plastic
Grill marks are often painted on with eyeliner or marker
Hairspray, fabric protector and/or glycerine are sprayed on various foods to make them look more moist and juicy
Ice cream is often actually coloured mashed potato or another substitute material
So for food to live up to the image in the advert is actually a lot trickier than it seems. Will Baskin Robbins ice cream really look and taste like mashed potato with food colouring?
To get the answer, I picked up my girlfriend and we drove over to Harbour Town… after all, what boyfriend worth a damn would leave their girl out of an ice cream expedition? Like shoe shopping and Johnny Depp, ice cream tasting has universal appeal among women and is a pretty safe suggestion for a way to kill an afternoon. It didn’t take us much wandering around to find the Baskin Robbins stall:
So we had some ice creams. They were nice. Then I went back there on my own a couple days later and had more ice creams because I had to return some of the other shit I bought at Harbour Town on the first visit and it was a good opportunity to sample more/better flavours (because the ones I picked on the first visit were the crappier ones). Here were all the flavours that were tried with a rating out of 10 for each:
Chocolate Cookie Crackle – chunks of chocolate, with more chocolate in it, covered with chocolate bits. Somewhere in there was also ice cream. 8.5/10.
Love Potion #31 – some kind of raspberry thing, extremely sweet. It had little shiny sugar hearts in it and when you bit into them there’s a little explosion of raspberry syrup stuff, which seems like the sort of thing that would make perfect sense in an Orange Caramel video. I’m sure it was made of a combination of Fukushima radioactive tailings and baby seal blood, but it tasted pretty damn good so who cares. 8/10.
Chocolate Chip – pretty standard chocolate chip ice cream that you can get anywhere, surprisingly low on chocolate content given the chocolate berko-madness of some of the other flavours on offer but tasted reasonable enough. 6/10
Double Date – the concept was sticky date pudding in an ice cream, but in practice it had a curious almost-coffee flavour, less actual dates than a T-Jinyo gathering and only standard ice cream stickiness levels. Nothing special. 5/10.
Rum Raisin – this flavour was enhanced greatly by the occasional presence of a wrinkly brown substance closely resembling actual raisins. The ice cream tasted like rum too, so a winner on both fronts. 8/10.
Chocolate Mousse Royale – I’m pretty sure that this wasn’t ice cream at all but just a chocolate mousse that they froze a bit, and then added more chocolate chunks to. Can’t complain. 8.5/10.
Despite my raving about food styling above, the ice creams really do look pretty much like they do in the video (pictured above. Left: Double Date, with Choc Chip underneath that you can’t see. Right: Love Potion #31 with Choc Cookie Crackle underneath.)
Click the above link at your peril – you really don’t want to know the amount of artificial ingredients Baskin Robbins use in their ice creams
You don’t get the cool glassware in the Orange Caramel MV, instead you get a crappy paper bucket that leaks onto your fingers and clothing and looks embarrassingly similar to a jizz stain if you don’t scoff the ice cream in under ten minutes
Orange Caramel members did not suddenly appear and offer sexual services, much to my disappointment, but I’m talking to my therapist and we’re working through it
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CONTESTANT #2 – CROWN SLIM COFFEE BISCUITS
as endorsed by KIM JI WON
In order to find a competing actress-endorsed product that could represent the actress-sphere and face off against the might of Orange Caramel and Baskin Robbins, I headed on over to my local purveyor of all things Korean and tasty, the very official-sounding “Seoul Grocery”.
Here it is, next to the equally officially-titled “Computer World”. In Adelaide we seemingly love these ubiquitous-sounding retail shop names. It didn’t take long for me to find something actress-endorsed:
I don’t really know who Kim Ji Won is because I don’t follow Korean films and TV very closely (unless it’s horror film) but I suppose you could look her up on Wikipedia if you wanted. Try to ignore what looks like a fly munching on her right eyeball – that’s actually a piece of cat fluff because my cats can’t leave my scanner alone and love to stick things in it, like their hairballs. I don’t really give much of a shit about this woman, I’m sure most readers know more about Kim Ji Won than me but that’s not important for the purpose of this blog – what’s important is that she’s endorsing these coffee biscuit things, so I bought a pack of them and took them home to asses their quality.
I opened the box up to find that the biscuits were all individually wrapped. No surprise here – Koreans are obsessed with over-packaging, as anybody who buys physical k-pop albums or anything else from Korea for that matter will know.
Taking the biscuit out of the pack, another thing became quickly apparent – when they say “slim” they’re not fucking kidding – these shits are pretty fucking small. Here’s a picture of one of the biscuits, against some Australian, Malaysian and USA currency so you can get a feel for the tiny size of these things.
Three countries’ coins were selected because Kpopalypse is all international and shit, according to stats these are three of the most popular countries for my blog readership so the scale should make sense for a lot of you. If you’re sad that your countries’ coin isn’t in this photo, you can always donate me a coin for the next time I review some pointless shit like this. I do collect coins for this type of thing and I’d really like some from Singapore and Indonesia, and also some Euros because that’s where a lot of the rest of my readership comes from. Sounds like a good idea doesn’t it, yes it does, hint hint.
Once again “food styling” becomes relevant – I’m convinced that the picture of the biscuits on the front is heavily CGI-crafted, because there is no brown squishy center in these biscuits, in fact the center looks more like this:
It’s just some powdery white shit, no gooey brown sludge as promised. The biscuits are also brittle and crumbly as fuck – they break in your hands really easily and it’s actually quite difficult to open the individual packets without snapping the biscuit in the process. They also have a pretty intimidating ingredient list:
Palm oil as the third most plentiful ingredient? Well, fuck me and my health. I guess that’s why they’re called “couque d’asse”. But never mind that for now, how does it taste?
Pretty fucking good, as it happens. I’m not really into coffee but I liked these biscuits because the coffee flavour is more mild. If I had to sum up the flavour I’d say they’re about 80% “plain vanilla biscuit”, 15% “coffee” and 5% “fuck knows but it tastes alright so whatever”. I abstained from giving a rating – as per the rule of giving the products endorsed “the opportunity to be experienced in their best possible light” I gave most of the box to my girlfriend who is way more into coffee than me and told her to rate them instead, she really liked them and gave them an 8/10. She also gave some to her family and responses ranged from “they were pretty good” to “they were fucking good” and she wanted to know where I got them from so the result is generally very positive where it matters most.
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FINAL SCORES AND CONCLUSIONS
BASKIN ROBBINS ICE CREAM – scores from 5/10 to 8.5/10 depending on flavour.
CROWN SLIM COFFEE BISCUITS – 8/10
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CONCLUSIONS
Baskin Robbins scored at maximum higher but also in some instances much lower than Crown Coffee Biscuits. This means that actresses are superior to many idols but some idols are superior to actresses, and therefore it’s impossible to generalise and say that one is definitely always better or “on another level” to the other. Korean netizens can officially therefore STFU, they have been conclusively proven wrong.
I tried some of the biscuits with the icecream, and the flavours matched nicely and were complimentary, which means that it’s okay for actresses to enter into the world of idols, or for idols to pursue acting.
The ice cream looked in real life much the same as in the advert, whereas the biscuits looked fine on the outside but the interior was deceptively portrayed on the box. This means that actresses are more likely to put on a false image for public consumption (which makes sense, they are actresses after all – it’s what they’re paid to do).
Both Crown and Baskin Robbins have a terrifying amount of additives in their products which means that both sugary k-pop and shitty Korean dramas are probably bad for your health. Consume in moderation!
That wraps up this edition of Kpopalypse Endorsement Test! Will this become a series? Will anyone even give a shit about this post? Will I post the version of Orange Caramel’s “Abing Abing” with just Raina’s face in it at the end of this post, just so I have quick reference fap material for later?
Recently I made a post about how to deal with k-pop haters. In this post I focused on the most intelligent arguments that I could find against k-pop and took their arguments apart piece by piece, thereby (hopefully) demonstrating that it’s quite okay to like whatever music you like and other people can basically go and suck a fat dick if they have a problem with it.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
However, it seems that this wasn’t exactly the kind of help that many of you readers needed. Quite a few regular blog followers responded with the observation that not every argument against k-pop is intellectual, and that instead of knowing what to say to the smart guys, you wanted to know what to say to the basic trolls with absolutely fuckin’ stupid arguments that make no goddamn sense at all. Never fear, Kpopalypse is here to help once again!
Kpopalypse’s secret Anti Troll Squadron has done the hard work for you, the readers! We’ve collected five of the dumbest and most common objections to k-pop perpetrated by oxygen-wasting knuckle-scraping morons and given you the material you need to fight back!
1. “Listening to k-pop is fucking gay/you’re a faggot/you’re a girl” etc
Obviously this first response is mainly directed at male fans who are having their maleness called into question due to their music taste. Female readers may wish to skip to the next section, or read on anyway and find out exactly how lame guys can be to other guys.
Trufax: when growing up I was always the unpopular weird skinny kid who was shunned in the schoolyard and bullied mercilessly. On top of this, I had long hair! I can’t count the amount of times I’ve been called a faggot, so I’m the perfect person to advise you on how to most effectively deal with this particular situation if you’re experiencing it. I’ve met plenty of actual gay people who get called gay a lot less than I used to. The gaydar of your average schoolyard homophobe isn’t too accurate to say the least.
“You’re a faggot” is a very standard bullying type of response that male k-pop fans get and it’s easily refuted. It’s important not to get trapped into a morality debate here about whether homosexuality is right or wrong etc, all that matters is that the other person thinks it’s wrong – that’s a weapon you can work with. Also don’t worry about denying being gay, “no I’m not” is exactly the kind of whiny response they’re trying to bait out of you and in any event what’s wrong with being gay especially if it annoys the fuck out of people. Hell, I sometimes wish I was gay simply for the advanced trolling possibilities that gayness offers. Your best bet is a response like:
“So… what sort of music should I listen to instead?”
They’re on a losing argument here because all music everywhere is packed full of gayness and therefore every genre of music has gay performers and artists everywhere. If they’re into metal then Judas Preist is their favourite group, just because they like Rob Halford… or if they’re into more extreme metal then Gaahl of Gorgoroth is their fave… after all it’s always the bad boys who are the sexiest. If they like rock music then surely they like straight-as-a-bowling-ballFreddy Mercury, after all who doesn’t like Queen? Classical fans would no doubt be into Liberace, etc etc…. you get the idea. Just change their fave depending on genre. The exception is hardcore rap which doesn’t have any high-profile openly gay performers but the closeted homosexuality in rap music and videos is so real you can smell it so don’t let that put you off using it as an example anyway.
If all they say is “anything but that faggot k-pop shit” and they refuse to tell you their music taste for fear that you’ll use it against them, then that’s obviously a sign that they’re into something even gayer than k-pop, so be sure to mention stuff like Samwell’s “What What In The Butt”, “Hop” by AZIS and “Life At The Outpost” by Skatt Bros as their favourite music. Be sure to play these songs at them at every opportunity and insist that they love it – congratulations, the shoe is now on the other foot! Mercilessly bash them over the head with their favourite gay artist that you’ve helpfully nominated for them and soon enough they will be the ones getting upset and trotting out the “stop being so homophobic” defence which is basically checkmate for them because they’ve just admitted that homophobia is dumb and therefore their own objection to k-pop is based on bullshit. Now you can make a peace deal. Or, they can STFU.
2. “You’re obsessed with Asians!”
Sometimes people like to harp on about the race thing, because harping on and on about race is what racists do, and there’s lots of racists about. The typical dilemma goes something like this:
Like with the “faggot” insult, the key get these dickheads to stop is to make them wish they never fucking started. It’s easily achieved, especially if you’re an arch cunt like Kpopalypse who doesn’t mind making enemies and pissing people off.
If they’re online cyberbullies, you’re laughing already. Get them to flip their keyboard over and read the back. What country is it made in? Well, well. So… why are they using a Chinese keyboard? They’re obviously even more obsessed with Asians than you are. At least you admit it, they’re still hiding in the closet, in denial – pathetic. Now get them to flip over their mouse and read the back. Repeat the process with their computer monitor and any other peripherals. Gosh, not one made anywhere apart from Asia. Talk about obsessed! “But that’s where everything is made now!” – a convenient excuse that doesn’t let them off the hook, I bet they never even tried to investigatenon-Asian computer hardware let alone actually buy any. Happy to wallow in their Asian obsession and use only Asian products when it suits them, tsk tsk.
If you’re with them in person you can have even more fun. Pretty much everything that they see and touch is going to be made somewhere in Asia so be sure to remind them as much as possible that this indicates a latent obsession that they have with everything Asian. Clearly the fact that they find your k-pop taste so interesting clearly demonstrates their complete obsession, and this is confirmed because the clothes on their back are Asian, their shoes are Asian, their phone is Asian, and so on. Why don’t they have an American/Australian/European made phone? Obsessed with Asians, clearly. Why do they wear all those Chinese clothes? They just want to feel something that an Asian made right up close to their skin, so they too can feel more Asian. I bet they even wear Asian underwear, it’s probably the only way they can get turned on. Because everything is made in Asia you can go anywhere with this idea that you want to. Keep on about it for long enough and soon they’ll be all like “okay, OKAY just shut up about it!”. They’ll think twice before mentioning it again… but if they do, repeat the process until they learn! Don’t worry, it won’t take long.
3. “It’s not REAL music, it’s all about image!”
Because pop music from other non-Asian countries is never about image…. oh no.
Yup – all about the music – no manufactured image here, hahaha. Hell, even western groups that specifically shy away from portraying a visual image of themselves still have to present something visually and that becomes their image. Nobody would think of Pink Floyd as an image-driven band for instance but they still have an image – the iconic album covers, the distinctive staging that they use… any group in any genre is still working with visual media to some extent and is still presenting an image. Even classical musicians dress nicely in formal clothes and iron their shirts, while on the other end of the spectrum punk groups deliberately dress down. It’s all the same thing at the end of the day. But don’t bother trying to argue this rationally, just show anyone giving you shit the above photos and laugh in their faces.
4. “They don’t even play their own instruments!”
Neither do half the artists pictured above. Can you guess which ones?
Hopefully this post has been useful! Don’t forget to share your stories of success (or failure) against the haters, and remember that the ultra-secret Kpopalypse Anti Troll Squadron is looking out for you!
It’s halfway through 2014 when writing this post and I already can’t count the amount of people who have asked me to throw down my opinions on my favourite songs of 2014. However, I deliberately make a point of not doing lists like that in advance in order to give every song a chance to be included, so you’re just gonna have to wait. In 2013 I even mercilessly mocked people who released “best of the year” lists many months before the year was over, so damned if I’m going down that route myself. While you’re waiting, to keep you happy/shut you up how about a similar post with a list of my favourite k-pop songs from the past few years before I started blogging?
Note before you read ahead that this post contains 30 YouTube videos and might take a while to load on slow computers or on your crappy iWhatsit or whatever you kids use these days.
I refer to 2008-2011 as k-pop’s first golden age – it’s the time when k-pop songwriting not only caught up to but for the first time significantly overtook western pop music in quality and style and created world-beating pop productions that grabbed the attention of global listeners. Before 2008 Korean pop music was always behind the pack in many respects, but by the end of 2011 it was clear that k-pop’s songwriting and production values were easily able to better anything that the west was offering. The songs were (and still are) highly derivative – let’s be real, everything in k-pop is a western copy, but k-pop was able to transform itself into a superior clone in many respects that combined the songwriting smarts of various eras of western pop with modern engineering and production skills that surpassed many of the originals.
After the 2008-2011 plateau I believe that k-pop has backtracked a little from this point. I’ve titled this post “k-pop’s first golden age”, hinting at the possibility that k-pop could have a second golden age. I don’t know if or when it will happen, but I do know that if it is coming, we’re definitely not there yet. Most musical genres don’t peak twice, but at the same time k-pop probably isn’t going anywhere and will continue to evolve and adapt, whether the song quality peaks again or not.
1. This list is my personal opinion on what the best songs were during this period so if you disagree… that’s nice, but I don’t really give a fuck so you can spare yourself the energy of pointing out how wrong you feel that I am. I’ve always known that music is subjective and nobody’s opinion is superior so if you feel strongly about anything you read here, think a little before you write that 200 word essay on why your fave got ignored. Maybe do your own list to make yourself feel better, how about that for a suggestion. Then everyone else can hate on your picks and you’ll know how I feel.
2. I’m sure many fangirls will disagree with the fact that this list is almost exclusively girl groups, but that’s just too bad because with only a couple of exceptions I don’t think the male groups had much to offer musically during this period. If I did separate best-of posts for each year more guy groups would have made it on, but I’m not going to do that because I’m too lazy.
3. I’m considering doing a “worst of” list for these years as well but it’s very difficult as most of the really shit songs from this era have already been lost in time and their dreadful MVs are proving impossible to track down. Although I’d like to do one, a “worst of the golden age” list may or may not appear at some point in the future depending on how my research goes, but if it does, it definitely won’t be anytime soon.
4. Only feature tracks with MVs qualify for this list because I don’t have the time/money to listen to every k-pop album ever, plus I want this post to be visually interesting (read: fappable).
5. Where are the nugus? Well, you’ve got to remember that quite a few of these groups were nugus at the time these videos came out.
6. Yes, I’m biased – what would be the point of this list if I wasn’t?
Let’s get started.
30. Girls’ Generation – Gee
Yes, I’ve put “Gee” at #30, not #1, I didn’t accidentally mix up the numbering order – deal with it, Sones. E-TRIBE were always a production team incredibly ill-suited to k-pop. Their typically densely-textured ear-assault always seemed better suited to some kind of industrial music than k-pop, and given that most of industrial music’s greatest artists have long since peaked in terms of creativity I think there’s a real market opportunity for them in this area. However, if you put a blindfold on a machine-gunner and ask him to spray an entire box of ammo at a target on the other side of a football field there’s still a mathematical chance he’ll hit the bullseye eventually, and E-TRIBE’s normally wayward aim was true on the day that they penned “Gee” for Girls’ Generation. The pacy analog synth-driven backing atonal enough to come from a Front Line Assembly b-side mitigated SNSD’s super-cloying aegyo which would have sounded cringeworthy over just about anything else, cementing the group’s pop stardom and ensuring E-TRIBE enough of an income stream to make the rest of their songwriting career unimportant. Which was just as well for them, because they never made anything even remotely this good ever again.
29. 2NE1 – I Am The Best
It’s hard to imagine in 2014, but there was a time just a few short years ago when 2NE1 were at the top of their game, and every new song of theirs was looked forward to with heavy anticipation as something that would undoubtedly be special. Nowadays the group’s releases have sunk in quality so drastically that just the mere suggestion of heavy anticipation of a 2NE1 track reads like a strange scenario lifted out of one of my fiction stories, but this was honestly the way many regular k-pop fans felt back then, even outside of the 2NE1 fandom. The introductory synth riff to this song is as ball-wrenching as it is distinctive, and while the song arguably never peaks beyond the first 30 seconds of shock and awe, “I Am The Best” will remain one of k-pop’s best party-starters and speaker-system-testers for the forseeable future. Bonus points for a visually astounding MV with several iconic moments that 2NE1 haven’t topped since and likely won’t.
28. Brown Eyed Girls – Abracadabra
Every time I go to watch this video, I head into the task with the resolute determination that this time I’m going to finally work out what the fuck’s going on in the story. Then I always get distracted at about the two minute mark when Gain (is it actually Gain? Maybe it’s one of the other girls, I don’t give a fuck) gets slammed up against the wall and her clothes get torn off. Then I sort of lose myself thinking about the sexual appeal of that moment and then the video ends and suddenly I’m like “what the fuck happened what’s going on here SHIT I forgot to pay attention again” and then I press play and go from the start of the video and the process repeats itself. All of this constant repetition and replaying has really embedded what I initially felt was a fairly average song deeply enough in my head to earn it a place on this list which I guess was probably the idea. There’s a lesson here, k-pop record companies.
27. KARA – Step
KARA’s “Step” is one of the straight-up rockingest songs in k-pop, and I’m aware that “rockingest” isn’t a word but it describes this song very well as I’ll use it if I want to. No surprise that it came from KARA songwriting regulars Sweetune who specialise in sneaking heavy metal influences into pop music (more on that later), this song is loaded with crunchy riffs and a great Queen-style harmonised chorus. It’s just a shame that the music video is offputting and one of k-pop biggest eyesores, the set design and fashions on display here are simply terrifying and the MV nearly made it into my colour blindness test post for its formidable retina-shredding power. Like the lights in The Day Of The Triffids, it’s possible that no human alive today has actually watched “Step” all the way through and survived with their vision undamaged.
26. After School – Bang!
Out of all the songs on this list, “Bang!” has to be one of the weirdest. Most of the elements in the backing track don’t fit together in any way at all except rhythmically, but it all works because it just means more disparate and catchy elements that all get lodged in your head at one point or another. One day it’s that dit-dit-dit-dit keyboard part in the chorus that I can’t shake, the next day it’s one of those stupid raps with the horrible English that gives you secondhand embarrassment just from listening… but thinking about it some more, I must admit that just puts them more or less on par with most western rap lyrics these days. Speaking of embarrassment, I imagine it’s pretty difficult for a high school kid to explain their way out of having “after school bang” still sitting in their Google search bar when their parents or siblings want to use the computer so be grateful that this blog post allows you to conveniently find this video without actually having to type that in anywhere.
25. Sunny Hill – Midnight Circus
This song was sort of like “House Of Fun” by Madness given the high-gloss k-pop treatment with juiced-up melodies and production, crazy high-budget staging and hot girls of course. There’s a token guy in this “co-ed” group but nobody really gave a fuck about that dude (and he obviously realised it, recently leaving the group to focus on a career in music production). This song is proof that k-pop at its best can and does take musical influence from any goddamn place it pleases, and that’s one of the things that has kept me into the genre, the willingness to draw on a wide palette of styles to construct the product. Oh, and hot girls. Sunny Hill were always an A-list group for me, like a more left-field Brown Eyed Girls. Like.
24. f(x) – NU ABO
Everybody who likes f(x) always whines about how SM aren’t giving them the same treatment that they give SNSD, but a careful listen to a song like “NU ABO” should tell them exactly why. Play this song, ignore the vocals completely, and focus on the shit in the background. If you’re using your ears actively, after a while you’ll be asking yourself “wait… what is that fucking shit in the background?”. Whoever wrote this song basically just made a dance track full of beats and weird noise. There’s not even any chord changes, when they go to a new section, they just replace the weird noise with some other weird noise. As a fan of Merzbow and Einsturzende Neubauten I appreciate this kind of thing, even if it’s at nowhere near the same intensity level. Like SM were ever going to give f(x) the SNSD treatment – come on now. It’s obvious that they’re after something totally different here, a left-of-centre boutique faux-artsy pop group experiment, just to see how it flies. Fly it does. Even Amber’s horrible raps can’t ruin this, but I understand that she’s gotta be there or Sulli’s hotness would overload and crack people’s computer screens so it’s all good. But you can stop asking where your official fanclub name is and where your official colour is and why they don’t get world tours and concerts and all that bullshit because SM are actually trying to do something different here for once, so maybe you should appreciate it for what it is instead of whining like a little spoiled cunt, now how about that.
23. 4Minute – Heart To Heart
There was a time when new 4Minute songs didn’t sound like they were written by someone trying to impersonate their own fart noises with a synthesizer, and actually had listenable melody, harmony and structure. Listening to them these days, who would’ve thought? “Heart To Heart” is one of the best songs from back in those times of old, and hearing it in retrospect makes the fall of 4Minute from quality pop vehicles to Bravesound’s broken Moog mechanics feel even more tragic. It’s enough to make a k-pop music fan want to cry… but if you’re feeling down, just skip to 3:30 and check out one of the girls trying to deliver an emotional line directly to the camera with a hairstyle straight from 2NE1′s nightmares. You’ll cheer back up again faster than you can say “even Dara would sack her stylist for that”.
22. T-ara – Bo Peep Bo Peep
Back in the early days of T-ara, CCM ran a poll and asked netizens which song should be T-ara’s lead single from their first album, “Bo Peep Bo Peep” or “Like The First Time”. Netizens voted slightly in favour of “Like The First Time”, so CCM went ahead and released “Bo Peep Bo Peep” anyway, because even though “Like The First Time” is a better song, fucking with netizens is hilarious, right? A song about a nine-tailed fox that kills gullible men after they fap should have tipped off Koreans to exactly what kind of trolling was in store from this group in the years to come, and the hilariously repetitive catchy-from-first-listen chorus and mocking lyrics implying that you’re a fucking sheep being led to the slaughter just underline the idea that in the often overly fanservicey world of k-pop T-ara is a group that is not and never will be about what you want. Even the butt-dancing is so quickly cut (an editing practice that would become a T-ara MV trademark) that it’s literally impossible to fap to, but like the song says, “don’t lose your temper so easily”.
21. Orange Caramel – Shanghai Romance
Everybody likes to talk about cultural appropriation like it’s such a hot topic these days, so I’d like to say that as a part-Chinese person, I’m deeply offended by Orange Caramel’s “Shanghai Romance”, how dare these Koreans pretend to be Chinese and make us look all twee and shit and insult my culture by wearing those hats and clothes like it’s silly and… oh, who the fuck am I kidding, like I give a shit. Sometimes you just gotta loosen up a bit, take the carrot out of your ass, wipe the turd residue off it and say “well, they didn’t mean any genuine harm or insult by it, so okay then, I think I can deal with it, I’ll find a way”. I actually think it’s important in this multicultural global connected world to try and promote getting along with people rather than to nitpick at everything and get people racially fired up about stuff that they probably wouldn’t have even thought to be offended by had someone not pointed it out. Although if I ever catch that Raina in person I’ll be sure to punish her severely – I’m not sure how, but I’ll think of something, probably involving lots of spanking and tying her to that biplane. She’s the leader of this group so she has to take responsibility. In the meantime this song is good. Or something. Sorry, I’m a little too distracted thinking about Raina tied to the plane’s wings with her bare buttocks exposed to review this properly now, maybe another time.
20. Girls’ Generation – Mr. Taxi
Where I live a lot of women are afraid to catch taxis because they’re afraid they’ll get raped by the drivers. A lot of taxi drivers on the other hand are afraid to drive a taxi because they’re worried about getting stabbed by the passengers. Perhaps adding more glamour and glitz to taxis is the key and if everyone sat down, chilled out and listened to SNSD’s “Mr. Taxi” for a while that would make everything better… or maybe not, but it’s still a great song anyway. “Mr. Taxi” was SNSD’s debut original song for the Japanese market (although it did also get a Korean-language release later) and as far as Japanese releases go they never topped that great earworm chorus for sheer catchiness. I guess someone over at SM drunk all the “hypertonic”.
19. Sunny Hill – Pray
I always take time out of my k-pop writing routine to regularly take a big smelly literary dump on the worthless ballads that Korean pop music produces. These songs are 99% filler trash usually lazily thrown out by songwriters to pad out the length of an album or mini so it meets minimum contractual length requirements, or even worse, heartless, soulless, showoffy exercises in displaying singing technique to satiate k-pop’s legions of obsessive-compulsive sycophantic fans. Of course, I say 99% because very occasionally, a good ballad is produced, and here one is. Showing a rare combination of melodic restraint, brevity, moodiness, sensible lyrics, and even a decent video with a worthwhile subtext (that those who like to parade around morally upstanding religious values are often doing so to cover up the fact that they are just as shady as everyone else), it’s easy to see why it got banned from Korean TV – Koreans clearly can’t fucking handle this kind of high quality in a ballad. I guess go back to your vacuous sappy candy-coated bullshit, you pathetic Starcraft nerds.
18. Girls’ Generation – Oh!
“Oh!” always impressed me as the superior companion song to “Gee”, with the same type of production ideas being used but married to a song with better melody and less cloying cheesiness. It’s like they listened to “Gee”, thought “okay, how can we do that sort of thing again, but make it even better” and scientifically applied themselves in exactly the right areas. While “Gee” gained popularity outside Korea as a gimmicky viral video that spread quickly in computer nerd circles precisely because the aegyo overload didn’t translate to western audiences (the true reason for its high YouTube hit rate, something Sones generally ignore), “Oh!” on the other hand was just a solid song with some hot girls dancing that people liked. I don’t really “get” the cheerleader thing in this video though, I must admit. My school didn’t have that shit, the girls in my classes were too busy getting stoned, applying hairspray and listening to bad 80s music to be bothered with pom-poms and choreography, so watching the “Oh!” MV is like a peek into a parallel fantasy universe where hot girls actually give a fuck about sports. Also the locker room is clean and neat so you know this is pure fantasy. Speaking of fantasy, whoever decided to put Sunny in that red shirt and suspenders was a genius and certainly helped along a few fantasies of my own.
17. Wonder Girls – Tell Me
One of the first really astoundingly good k-pop songs, it’s no shock that this smooth and very 80s production comes from JYP, the most unashamedly retro of all k-pop producers. JYP’s production here is mid-80s pop all the way, right down to the distinctly inappropriate and hilarious sampled moaning that I’m sure he had a lot of fun creating with one of those five girls (my money’s on Sohee). No wonder they all went Christian on him, it was probably a planned tactic to stop him from turning them into k-pop’s 2 Live Crew. Plus, what other k-pop video has a streaker in it? Talk about wearing his heart on his sleeve, never mind which girl is the hottest because JYP probably fapped to this before you did.
16. SHINee – Lucifer
I’m sorry but boy band songs are mostly generic as fuck. The music that mattered in the k-pop revolution was nearly all female and the reason is (warning: music theory incoming) because songwriters actually write songs for the guy groups differently, usually favouring simpler harmony and pentatonic instead of diatonic melody. This matters because anyone can shit out a semi-acceptable pentatonic melody over chords I, IV and V after about one improvisation class in any given instrument, but it won’t ever sound any more than thoughtless. Maybe it’s because the songwriters feel that the crazy girl fandoms will carry the groups to fame with fan power so not much effort is needed in the actual song, but whatever because with SHINee a notable exception was made so bravo to SM for making a guy group song that I can listen to without throwing up. “Lucifer” is actually really cohesive with great synth riffs, a tight structure and just enough blues-scale wank to show that they can sing more than one note but not enough to wreck the thing with aimless warbling like just about every other guy group song from the period. Also, that dance, that fucking dance, easily the most iconic dance in kpop. Props to anyone who can do that, how come the female groups never get dances this cool. Credit where it’s due – if there’s one area where the guy groups are streets ahead every time it’s definitely the dancing, even impressive girl stuff like T-ara’s “Lovey Dovey” doesn’t hold a candle to the shit that the male groups get forced to do.
15. 2NE1 – Fire
[insert comments about how I don't really hate 2NE1 here but they just can't release anything decent lately here] [insert comments about how "Fire" is really good here] [quick superfluous discussion of the musical content that reveals nothing of worth or at least nothing that I can get called out on by some know-it-all in the comments] [mention Dara's silly hair as a precedent for her silly hair in other 2NE1 videos later] [mention the "street" version and how I didn't include it because visually it's boring and I can't fap to Bom in a hoodie] [throw in a quick reference to the "school" live version here and how my friend used to fap to Minzy dancing like she was getting fucked up against a wall at 1:33 until I pointed out that she was only 15 years old at that time and then he felt like the world's biggest pedo] [insert obligatory Bom plastic surgery joke here] [finish with witty conclusion that wraps everything up neatly and gives everyone positive vibes while still reinforcing my opinion that the last half a dozen 2NE1 feature tracks have all been dogshit]
14. Wonder Girls – Nobody
I know people have been wondering about this and will ask me about it, so here you go: I have searched fucking everywhere to find out what microphone Wonder Girls are using in this video and I keep turning up a blank. It’s definitely a copy of the ring-mount carbon microphones that were in popular use in radio in the 1920s and 1930s, but the fact that it seems to fit neatly into a modern microphone stand plus the fanciness and very good condition of the things makes me think this is a JYP studio mock-up. The surround looks at lot like the Blue Ringer shock mount attachment for the Blue Snowball microphone that’s been painted gold a bit around the rim to match the rest of the set and costume design, however what’s inside it definitely isn’t a Blue Snowball. Not that it matters, they didn’t ever actually plug any of these microphones in for any of the Wonder Girls’ performances of this great song which meshes 1960s Motown melody and harmony with JYP’s typical 80s production. So typical of JYP that he’s all over the damn video though, you could joke that JYP is the kind of person who would film himself taking a shit in his own videos if he could, but that’s not even a joke because that’s exactly what he fucking does here. At least he didn’t take a shit (literally) on the Japanese version that they did later. Anyway it’s a pity JYP didn’t realise the strength of and stick with the Motown-meets-80s concept because they would have cleaned up all over SNSD both in Korea and the USA. Oh well, at least they left us with this iconic song.
13. Bom – You And I
…and the best ballad in k-pop belongs to the best singer in k-pop which is 2NE1′s Bom. Yeah, I said it. Why is Bom the best singer in k-pop? For exactly the same reason that the vocalfags hate her – she can’t fucking sing a note, she strains, she can’t connect her notes together – I LOVE IT. Such a commitment to “fuck it I wanna be an idol and no lack of technique is gonna stop me” is not only ideologically highly admirable in a Crayon Punk kind of way but it means that Bom has developed something that no other k-pop singer has - a voice that is instantly identifiable in a blind listening test. In the Korean idol system all idols sound the same because they are specifically trained to sound the same, and then on top of that they all get the same vocal processing, so telling them apart is nearly impossible unless you’re an obsessive listener – the homogenisation is so extreme that even the idols themselves have trouble identifying their own singing parts when listening back to the results (proof in an upcoming blog post, anticipate it fondly). If you still don’t believe me, check out any forum thread where the audio to a k-pop song by a large multi-member female group has been leaked before any video is made available, and watch people guessing who sung what words at what time. It’s the same kind of homogenisation charm-school process that Hollywood actresses from the 1950s went though, and you can’t tell any of them apart just from listening to the sound of voices either without the visual or familiarity with the lines of a film to help you along. Everyone can recognise Bom though, her and arguably to a lesser degree AOA’s Jimin are the only two distinctive singers that female k-pop has. Also the fact that she can’t vocalise much and do the kind of vocal improvisations that other singers do means that the song’s delivery has a nice restraint to it which lets the true melody shine without being coated with several layers of unlistenable overdubbed wank (looking at you, Ailee). I really also like the MV for this because I’ve been in exactly the same situation Bom’s character finds herself dealing with in this video, and yes it ended the same way. Trufax.
12. Super Junior – Sorry Sorry
That great opening riff, wow. Slow it down a bit, play it on guitar instead of keys and that first keyboard line could have been lifted straight from a Black Sabbath record. This song can commit any other musical crime that it wants to (and it does) but solid riff-writing is severely underutilized in k-pop (another notable exception further down this list) and “Sorry Sorry” gets full marks for a backing track 100 times more catchy than any of the actual vocals. Maybe that wasn’t the intention but it works for me, and it seemingly worked for everyone else too because this song catapulted Super Junior to instant super-stardom. SM retried the “Sorry Sorry” formula again and again by copying the beat and the vocal stylings but they ballsed it up each time because each time they got just a little too fancy with it and when writing riffs simplicity is important [insert "Mr. Simple" pun here]. I’ve used the dance version of the video because the dance is cool and kind of hypnotic to watch as the group’s members swirl up and down across the stage like a human lava lamp which actually gives me even more entertainment than the song itself, great as it is.
11. Girls’ Generation – Chocolate Love
It’s fitting somehow for the unashamedly ultra-commercial style that is k-pop, that the best song from the most popular girl group in the genre at the time of writing is actually just an extended advert for a fucking phone. Having mentioned this, you could actually be forgiven these days for not even noticing that it’s a phone advert, especially given that the 2001 A Space Odyssey obelisk devices the girls are holding are probably now a few generations of technology out of date. Labelmates f(x) had a version of this song too, but it sounds rushed to my ear and the heavier accompaniment rubs too much against the smoothness of the melody – SNSD took the pace down a notch and this gave both the melody and the fairly intricate backings a bit more breathing room so you can actually hear them properly. Also it’s nice to see the girls dressing in colours that don’t confuse my eye for a change, that’s probably helped them work their way a few places up on this list.
10. T-ara – I’m Really Hurt
Remember when Girls’ Generation’s “Mr. Mr” teaser photos were released and crappy pseudo-feminist bloggers all jumped for joy about the possibly of them doing a “tomboy” concept? “Wow, this could be revolutionary!” they all said, as if what some chicks wear in a fucking corporate rubber-stamped music video makes a difference to the world. Then do you remember the tears that were extracted from these same bloggers when SNSD only wore the suits for about 10 seconds of the video and maybe one live stage and the rest of the time they were in the kinky nurses getup? Ah, fun times. Someone should have told these moral-high-ground-clutching twits that it wouldn’t have mattered as doyens of jizz expurgation and fangirl arch-enemies T-ara had already been down this same road before with a song many times better than Mr. Mr. and the entire teenage male population of Korea still fapped. No SM-style baiting half-measures here either, T-ara keep the male getup intact for the whole video, only stopping to change suit colour presumably because cumstains don’t show up as much on white clothing. Cross-dressing girls ares always hot (especially Eunjung who was practically born to cross-dress, especially in the bedroom while I conquer/dominate her) and frankly the song being one of the best that k-pop ever produced is just a bonus.
9. 2NE1 – Hate You
The problem with just about every 2NE1 song released in the last 24 months is that the songwriters are really trying to do too much fancy shit to get your attention and prove how cutting-edge they are instead of focusing on making a tune that doesn’t suck. It’s like the pressure is on: “this song could be their next big hit so we’re going to cram everything we possibly can into it to make it the best song ever ever in history ever” and of course whenever songwriters feel intense pressure they tend to respond by writing absolute trendy bullshit (look at the quality difference between what PSY has done pre and post Gangnam Style, for instance). “Hate You” embodies the opposite of that type of attitude – the song keeps it simple with no tricks, no fancy bullshit, just a decent melody, a few rotating chords and some cool synth backing making this easily the best 2NE1 song ever. Also as an added bonus the cartoon CL and Dara are considerably more fappable than their real-life counterparts.
8. f(x) – Hot Summer
K-pop has always been a copyist form and excels at remaking anything western. A revamped, lyrically ultra-sanitised version of Monrose’s “Hot Summer” where the girls sing about being literally hot instead of sexual-metaphorically hot shouldn’t work in theory, but in practice it does anyway. I guess when you’ve got Sulli in your group hotness isn’t something you need to try very hard at, it just sort of happens naturally. All versions of the song are great and this is the only time f(x) have had a feature track resembling traditional ultra-mainstream pop material, showing that they’re quite capable of going down this path should the label choose to let them (spoiler alert: they won’t). There’s even a Japanese version of this song which I think didn’t do that well but I’m linking it here anyway just so I’ve got quick reference to Sulli wearing slightly different outfits so I can fap some more.
7. T-ara – Why Are You Being Like This?
T-ara get their ABBA on for this amazing retro-styled song and the only thing harder than my erection when the chorus comes in is trying to find a high-quality version of this video that also has the correct aspect ratio. Listening to this gem takes me back to the days when melody was actually important in western pop before rap and dancehall musical influences started creeping in heavily and fucking everything up, fortunately most k-pop producers are my age or older and remember the halycon days of pop music that didn’t suck a distended goat’s rectum. Not that I’m against rap or dancehall, I like those styles too, but they don’t go well with this sort of thing, and there’s plenty of proof of that in this song’s awkward half-time rap breakdown which is annoying and needless but mercifully short and not enough of an imposition to ruin what is probably one of k-pop’s best drunken karaoke singalongs. I don’t drink but I almost want to start drinking just to take advantage of how great this song must sound when I’m collapsed on the floor of a karaoke booth choking to death on my own vomit while some girl in a maid outfit tickles my asshole.
6. Secret – Shy Boy
Hey guys and gals, want to call out a k-pop company as being a pack of retards who have no idea what the fuck they’re doing? Well, forget about all your usual targets like SM, YG, CUBE, CCM, JYP etc because give or take a few shit songs and an SNS slip-up here and there all those guys are just fine – instead consider to make your first stop TS Entertainment, Secret’s record label. Secret walked into major, major fame with the utterly brilliant “Shy Boy”, a throwback to 1950s doo-wop music and style. Doo-wop is a music scene analogous to k-pop in many respects that I’m honestly surprised more k-pop fans aren’t into, especially given k-pop fans’ tedious vocal obsession – unlike k-pop, singing correctly in doo-wop music actually matters. “Shy Boy” was ultra-bright, fun, awesome and of such incredibly high musical and conceptual quality that nobody even noticed or complained that Secret had put most of their clothes back on. Then TS (which presumably stands for “Tough Shit”) Entertainment looked at the success of “Shy Boy” and said “hmmm… that really worked out well for us and the fans all loved it, let’s make sure we never ever do that shit again” and went straight back to making Secret rip off Beyonce’s godawful “Crazy In Love” for the 57th time. Someome should do something about this incredible waste of potential for Secret to be k-pop’s first doo-wop/k-pop hybrid group. It’s enough to make me want to throw an egg at TS Entertainment’s headquarters, miss and hit the gutter, or form a protest meeting and then cancel it at the last minute, because that’s what k-pop fans apparently do when they really mean business.
5. Orange Caramel – Magic Girl
In the 1980s, one of the biggest, most successful pop songwriting teams was Stock, Aitken and Waterman (hereafter referred to as SAW). SAW were an unreservedly “high production” trio, much in the style of k-pop production teams: they were always candid about their sometimes controversial techniques, inviting documentary crews to observe the virtues of pitch-corrected vocals (this is pre-Autotune, and yes they could fix vocals electronically back then too), heavy vocal layering and their ability to turn what were basically fashion models with limited musical ability into pop superstars. Their signature sound is a sound that everyone reading this has heard before – think of them as the Bravesound of western 80s pop – they’d reliably milk exactly the same formulas and sounds with each artist and create charting hits with the results, even if they weren’t that different to their charting hits that came immediately before. Sadly, the songs themselves were often very lacking, and the trio made their biggest mistake getting mixed up with then-Neighbours soap star Kylie Minogue’s career for a quick buck. The Kylie/SAW combination didn’t gel, and when Kylie finally realised it in the early 90s in the face of declining album sales she flew the SAW coop to instant international #1 hits while SAW suddenly found their fortunes fading as they were now associated with “that 80s sound” which everybody in the 1990s now wanted to leave behind. Orange Caramel’s true concept is basically recreating SAW as it ideally should have been back then – the same sonics and production ideas but with better technology, catchier melodies and more fappable girls (although there’s definitely something to be said for the fapability of ex-”page 3 girls” Mel of Mel and Kim and Samantha Fox who also recorded under SAW). “Magic Girl” was the ultimate realisation of this concept, a formula that Orange Caramel has only deviated from slightly ever since (at least where feature tracks are concerned) and just to make it super-obvious the intro even copies Rick Astley’s infamous “Never Gonna Give You Up” drum roll; yes, that was a SAW production too. Like Bravesound in 2014, SAW in the late 1980s was everywhere and damn it was annoying at the time but now we reap the benefits thanks to Orange Caramel. Maybe in 20 years from now somebody will repeat history and copy Bravesound’s 2014 style to make it better, here’s hoping.
4. T-ara – Like The First Time
Here’s the song that really sold me on k-pop as an overall genre. I was aware of k-pop’s existence ever since 2000, but when I heard “Like The First Time” the deal was sealed and my attitude concerning k-pop changed from “yeah those Koreans I’ve heard they make pop music like whatevs dude” to “HOLY FUCKING FUCK YEH KPOP YOU FUCK BITCH CUNT WOOHOO”. You see, before I found out about T-ara, I was a big fan of English synthpop group La Roux. In fact, I still like them, I think they have some really good songs, but there’s just one thing about La Roux that bothers me – their singer Elly Jackson is not that hot (well, not to me anyway – I reckon people into f(x)’s Amber might like her so if you’re into her consider yourself notified). When I heard “Like The First Time” I noticed that it sounded quite similar to La Roux’s “In For The Kill” but instead of having to stare at an English Amber lookalike for the whole MV, T-ara featured six hot girls dancing (well okay, five hot girls and one that looks like my mum, sorry Boram) and as an extra bonus the song was actually slightly better (“In For The Kill” is a damn good song too so this is very high praise FYI). Before then I always thought that great pop music had to come from ugly people but T-ara proved to me that I can have my rice cake and eat it too… I was thrilled! I’ve followed T-ara closely ever since and while they may not hit this level of gold again, their hit/miss ratio is still better than any group in k-pop for my money, which is noteworthy in a genre that’s known for inconsistency across the board. Also they’re hot… well, five of them are. Boram I’ll make it up to you with a feature article someday.
3. KARA – Wanna
Don’t be fooled by the keyboards and the pretty girls smiling dorkily straight to camera – KARA’s “Wanna” is a heavy metal song, straight up. Yes, there are some occasional guitars but ignore them, the elements that make “Wanna” a metal song are actually all keyboard-driven and this would still be a metal song in spirit even with no guitar in it at all. Any metalhead worth their weight in low E strings will instantly recognise the use of metal-style pedal-point harmony at 0:44 that could have come straight from one of Iron Maiden‘s better songs. I can only guess that songwriters Sweetune are some closet headbangers because this song is loaded with quality heavy metal riff writing sneaking under the radar so it can get on k-pop TV. As someone who listened to metal a great deal in my teens I appreciate the effort, and I appreciate it even more that I get to watch a video like this and look at Seungyeon whose sexy crosseyes are life itself, rather than some dreary stoned acne-scarred male teenagers with long hair and awkward-shaped pointy guitars. Why did I waste my teens being a metalhead, standing in crowds surrounded by other guys equally as ugly as myself, when I could have been fapping it to Girl’s Day? Oh that’s right, there was no Girl’s Day back then. Bless k-pop and culture technology for improving the quality of my life fuck yeah.
2. After School Blue – Wonder Boy
At some point during After School’s career Pledis thought it would be a good idea to split the group into two halves and have two separate comebacks. Hey, it makes sense on paper – double your money, right? One half of the group was called “After School Red” and featured Nana and all the members nobody gives a shit about and who were on the graduation (read: firing) list anyway and they put out a song called “Into The Night Sky” which is probably one of Bravesound’s better tracks to date but that’s not saying a lot. The other half was called “After School Blue” and had all the most fappable members – Kpopalypse bias-list-approved Orange Caramel members Raina and Lizzy, cute multi-instrumental freak (and I mean freak) E-Young and fapworthy Jooyeon, and their song was called “Wonder Boy” and it fucking shat gold. Basically an updated reimagining of John Paul Young’s “Love Is In The Air” except not shit, “Wonder Boy” was such a good song and the girls looked so good that Pledis had to enlist the help of boy group Nu’est as their live backing dancers just so ugly fangirls would have something to drool over to stop them storming the TV set and attacking the After School Blue girls in a jealous rage during the performances, like a secret agent breaking into a high-security compound and quickly throwing a guard dog a raw steak before he gets mauled. It seems to have worked as all four girls are reportedly still alive at the time of writing, and although Pledis will probably never do the Red/Blue thing again I notice they’re still employing Nu’est, presumably for continual crowd control purposes just in case they ever pull out a girl group song this good again.
Anyone who knows me even a little will find that the #1 is no surprise.
1. T-ara – Roly Poly
You know it had to be this song (or maybe you didn’t, but now you do). “Roly Poly” is the ultimate k-pop feature track and the benchmark for which I measure all other songs in k-pop, their quality scientifically measurable using the fundamental unit RP% or “percent of Roly Poly” (don’t ask me to ever measure any songs like this by the way, I always just get distracted and end up listening to Roly Poly instead). But what is it that makes Roly Poly so good? Let’s break the great features of this song down into dot points because too much truth in a traditional standard paragraph format might just melt your brains.
Song rampantly steals from The Bee Gees’ “Staying Alive” but removes the awful scrotum-bashing male falsetto, to everyone’s benefit
Dance moves and set design in the MV also directly stolen from Saturday Night Fever but I don’t have to look at any Scientologists in flared trousers to appreciate them
Qri’s rap at the start and then the drums and bass kicking in is one of the most blissful and effective k-pop intros ever created, equal to 2NE1′s “I Am The Best” and Super Junior’s “Sorry Sorry” in iconic status, except that Qri is prettier than CL and healthier than Shindong
Same key and harmonic content as GG Allin’s classic punk anthem “Bite It You Scum” (post-scandal arguably the same lyrical message too)
Hwayoung’s rap only goes for four bars and is so comically awful that it’s valid conceptual continuity fuel for a thousand Kpopalypse blog posts and a constant reminder of why removing her from the group was a good idea, as if her slackitude and nail-polishing habits weren’t enough
Invented disco k-pop as a subgenre, there was no disco in k-pop before this worth a shit
Verses so awesome they contain not one but two simultaneous melodies, each of which could carry the song purely on its own
A chorus that will stay in your head to your grave – maybe beyond, perhaps even the maggots that eat your rotting flesh after you’ve expired in a freak k-pop dance routine accident will probably sense residual brainwave vibrations of Roly Poly and start lining up and doing the hand-dance together
On top of all that, it’s the perfect song to introduce someone to k-pop with. I’ve been playing it on my radio show every so often and whenever it comes on someone always enters the control room and says something roughly along the lines of “you know, I think this k-pop you’ve been listening to is fucking shit, and I truly lament the day that you started this radio show of yours and I found out that you liked this complete fucking disposable pop dogshit because I used to respect your taste and opinion… but this song here is cool, what the fuck is this song?“. If that’s not a recommendation, I dunno what is.
This post took me fucking forever! Don’t ask me to do another one of these fucking mega-lists before the end of the year, when you’ll get two of them – my best and worst lists of 2014! Patience is a virtue! All good things come to those who wait! Patience is bitter but its fruit is sweet! Shut the fuck up and wait patiently! Etc!
So, an article just came out about 2NE1′s Bom mailing drugs, and it reminded me that I’d been planning a post for a while now about drugs and the music business. I’m not really that interested in commenting on the Bom situation specifically (after all it’s already been done here, here, and of course here and probably countless other places by the time you read this, and plus I don’t really give a shit about it anyway, if she’s getting fucked up on some good shit good luck to her) but I thought instead k-pop fans might appreciate a general demystification around drugs, the music business, and how likely it is that their bias is about to sell their bodies for a shot of heroin or take bath salts and eat their manager’s face off.
1. I don’t do or condone the use of any drugs whatsoever. I also don’t drink alcohol, I don’t smoke tobacco, I don’t even drink coffee or tea in the mornings. I’m also not on any prescribed drugs. I’m glad I made that decision when I was about 10 years of age to never start doing drugs because most people that I know who are my own age who went down the other path when they were younger are now a complete drug-fucked wreck and on shitloads of medication just to keep their bodies and brains alive after all the damage they’ve done to them. BUT…
2. I’m not a high-moral-ground-claiming, “oh my god that’s so wrong”-yelping, grandiose-lecturing cunt about it – I don’t care what other people do, it’s their own business and in fact I think all drugs should be legal. I think it’s a personal rights issue. It’s your own body, you should be able to do whatever fucking stupid shit you want to it. Drink raw sewerage, eat powdered charcoal, sniff petrol, inject battery acid… your body is yours, and if you don’t have the freedom to control your own body, what freedoms do you have? Nobody should legally be allowed to stop you from doing whatever dumb crap you want to your own body – even if it kills you. That doesn’t mean that I think you should do drugs (in fact I’d advise strongly against it), I just believe no-one should be able to put you in jail for something that you willingly do to yourself just because it’s none of their business AND…
3. I work in the music business. Oh boy.
To get some perspective on what working in the music business means as far as drugs are concerned, let’s start with a taste of some western music industry tales, from me to you in Korean gossip site “entertainment radar” style format to protect the guilty innocent. Of course I wasn’t involved in any of these situations personally or in any business capacity whatsoever because I’m a fine upstanding law-abiding citizen who doesn’t involve myself with or condone drug use. Hell, I don’t even know who these people are, and since it’s well-documented that I have no journalistic integrity whatsoever I’m probably just making this all up for your entertainment (hey: to my lawyer – does this paragraph sufficiently cover my ass?).
1. Large rock festival Z tours Australia and many famous bands play. Headlining act on festival Z’s lineup and large ticket drawcard is group Q, well known around the world for their energetic rock style. The promoters get the rider for Q’s singer (for those unfamilar with the jargon a “rider” is a list of backstage and technical requirements for an artist, for big acts these can be comically fastidious and overblown but believe it or not sometimes it’s for good reason) and notice that a certain form of very hard and very illegal drugs are actually requested on the rider as an essential backstage requirement! They query it with Q’s management, and the response comes back: “no, we are not making this up, yes, this is requested, no, the band will not play the show unless this is guaranteed to be provided”. The promoter says “fuck that, we’re not giving them these drugs!” but doesn’t tell Q’s management this, the promoters just sign off on the contract anyway saying “yeah we’ll do it” because Q is a headlining act which is going to bring a big audience to the festival, they don’t want to risk a cancellation as it would mean financial disaster. The festival happens, Q play the show but their singer becomes very angry about the lack of promised hard drugs backstage (not to mention strung-out, hahaha), then the group’s management does something unprecedented and unexpected – they take the promoters to court for “breach of contract” for not providing the illegal substance… and win. Festival Z has to pay a hefty breach of contract fee and learn their lesson – they resolve to always provide hard drugs in future to international touring artists who request them.
2. In the early 1990s internationally famous band Y tours Australia but didn’t impose similar conditions on the local promoters to provide narcotics. The two principal members of Y are notorious crack cocaine addicts and figure that they’ll just pick some crack up locally on the streets – little do they know that Australia at that time was not a big country for crack cocaine. The group spend the entire tour chasing crack rocks in each city without success, they become sick as a dog from crack withdrawals and vow never to return. The group are still active today and so far they haven’t been back!
3. Group M were a popular girl group. They had a rocking but super-cute image and lots of teenage and tween fans who have been drawn to them by their breakout hit single and squeaky-clean parent-friendly non-sexualised charms. Each member of the group had a separate fan following , each member also had a cutesy Spice Girls style nickname, and “who is your fave out of the girls” was naturally always a busy hot topic on the band’s official fansite. However, those fans (and their parents) would have been horrified to know that in private circles each member of the group had another nickname, each name related to which illegal drug they prefer to consume!
4. Group G are superstars, a household name. During the afternoon they are soundchecking, at a big outdoor arena concert, when suddenly they realise – where’s our guitarist? A search party is conducted. After about 15 minutes of looking (the arena is big), G’s guitar player is found aimlessly wandering through the stands in a complete drug haze. The road crew ask him what’s going on. “Sorry – I lost my way from my bed to the stage”, he says. His bed is in one of the tour caravans, and the stage is right there in front of it and it’s HUGE, several stories tall, you step right out of his caravan and there it is right in front, you can’t miss it. Nevertheless, the road crew oblige him and build a concrete ramp extending from his caravan to the stage side entrance, and tell him “when the time comes, all you’ve got to do is walk out of your caravan and follow the concrete ramp, okay?”. He nods, completes his part of the soundcheck, and then wanders off in a drug-haze again. Night falls, and the concert is about to begin… G are ready to rock, but… “where’s our guitarist?”. He hasn’t shown up. The search party is called out again, this time they find him quite quickly, in the first place they look – he’s passed out inside his caravan. They wake him up, but he’s so drooling and wasted that he can’t even walk – still, the show must go on so anticipating total disaster the road crew resolve to drag him to the stage anyway just to see what happens. Two road crew members slowly and carefully carry him shoulder-to-shoulder up the concrete ramp, a third roadie straps his guitar onto him… and suddenly G’s guitarist springs into action, fully alert, and plays the intro to the group’s first song – like nothing ever happened!
That’s just four examples out of a potentially much longer list. What these examples are intended to do besides amuse you, is illustrate the following: firstly, in the world of music, drugs are everywhere. If you work in the music business and don’t encounter them on a regular basis, you’re just not paying enough attention. Secondly, the music business has its own culture, rules and tolerances, and it’s often completely at odds with the culture, rules and tolerances of the actual society that the music scene is in. Aspects of life that are not generally condoned (at least on the surface) in wider society are often encouraged and even celebrated in the music business, and the higher up you go in the food chain of the music industry, the more prevalent this is. Musical endeavours tend to draw in the more creative free-thinking type of individuals in society, and it’s that same free thought that drives innovations in music which also motivates other “behavioural and cultural innovations”, like snorting cocaine off the buttcracks of hookers – as a result, the music business and the world of organised crime have never been more than a stone’s throw away from each other.
“Rock Against Drugs, what a name. Somebody was high when they came up with that title. It’s like Christians Against Christ. Rock created drugs.” – Sam Kinison
Now let’s talk about Korea and k-pop for a little bit. Korea’s idol music scene has a little bit in common with the western popular music scene (like overuse of dubstep and bad hair), but it also has some important differences.
Korea is a bit more uptight about recreational drugs than most western countries (at least on the surface)
Performers are generally held to a higher physical standard, not just for marketing reasons but also to help their ability to perform demanding routines
Actual performances are rarer and thus each one carries with it more pressure to do well
Performances are held up to a higher degree of technical scrutiny by fans
Performers practice a lot
None of these aspects remind me overly of the western pop and rock music scenes, which people usually get into because they don’t like the idea of working hard for a living. What they remind me of instead is the western world of classical and orchestral music. And guess what? The world of classical music is the world of some seriously drug-crazy motherfuckers. Out of all the different music scenes that I’ve worked in, I’ve encountered drug use most commonly with classical musicians.
I know you probably don’t believe this, or think that perhaps it’s an exceptional case, so I’ll explain.
Many years ago I went to university and studied classical music at the conservatory. I remember the day I went to auditions – there I was standing in the very large foyer, probably the only person in the history of the conservatory to audition with an acoustic guitar worth less than the price of the pen I had to sign the audition sheet with. I got bored so I started reading the student community noticeboards, and the most common notice up on the pin-boards after advertisements for people seeking accommodation were phone numbers of folks you could call to buy cheap drugs. These dealers weren’t selling recreational drugs, but performance-enhancing drugs normally available only on prescription for people with high blood pressure such as beta-blocker steroids Inderal and Propranolol, to relieve the symptoms of stage fright. In the classical music world using performance-enhancing drugs isn’t considered “cheating” (because they only take away nervous shakes and sweating rather than directly improve performance) and there are no drug tests conducted on musicians. Quite the contrary – the conservatory were happy for the ads to stay on the noticeboard, and the use of such drugs is generally encouraged and condoned. If your tutor finds out you’re taking them, he isn’t going to ask to see if you have a prescription or not, he’s more likely to ask you which brand you find most effective and recommend!
That’s not all – of course it isn’t. Classical musicians take all the other drugs the rock and pop musicians take too, on top of these. Various musicians that I’ve met were quite partial to a bit of crystal meth to keep them up late at night practising those long hours, cocaine before a performance to give them extra confidence, and then of course there’s the heroin. Just one example out of many that I could recount: during my time at the conservatory I once made the massive mistake of writing a piece of music for a chamber orchestra and then putting together an actual chamber orchestra to play it at a performance. Looking back on it with the wisdom of hindsight I should have just fucked the chamber orchestra off and used a fucking computer, no shit. There were only six people in this chamber ensemble but not one rehearsal that I organised had all six of them, these bitches were slacker than Hwayoung about showing up to practice (and in true Hwayoung style I had to organise a replacement for one of them mere minutes before the final performance). In particular one of my violinists would almost never show up – one day after getting pissed off and cancelling the session I went down the street to get some food and found him busking in the street outside! I thought to myself “how come you can play your fucking violin out here but not play at my rehearsal?” but then I thought about it and realised that it was the money factor – a great player, he could get decent money busking very quickly, so that was his go-to if he needed quick funds for a fix. Maybe in retrospect I should have made the entire ensemble rehearse outdoors on the street with their money tins out, that could have worked, maybe. Or perhaps I should have just gotten them all into Krokodil and then their arms would have fucking dropped off and they wouldn’t be able to play music anymore which would have made the performance a bit problematic but it would have been funny.
While I don’t work in the k-pop scene (or the classical music scene anymore, thank fuck), I can reasonably guess that because k-pop has got a similar high-pressure environment to classical music, I would expect the same drugs to be in use that people take in the classical music world just to function consistently in that environment. Korean society being conservative and having harsh penalties for drug use only makes this more likely in my eyes – when you’ve got an extremely obsessed-with-appearances morally upstanding society on the surface, an active seedy underbelly is a certainty. I wouldn’t expect high marijuana use (because the last thing a k-pop idol wants is “the munchies”, plus the quality is crap – DMTN’s Daniel was probably telling the truth about not smoking his own stash), and I also think that heroin addictions are extremely unlikely, because being “on the nod” is fine for slack western performers who can get carried around by their road crew like in the example above (oh, and Hwayoung could probably sustain a heroin habit without it interfering with her bath time too much) but in the tough idol system this would directly relate to a lack of functionality. Instead, I’d expect to see drugs that make k-pop idols lives easier rather than harder: beta-blockers to combat debut nerves, methamphetamine for its “go all night” properties, plus massive use of legal prescription or over-the-counter drugs and supplements to control and manage sleep, appetite and energy levels. K-pop drug use wouldn’t be recreational, it would be about “brain management”. Speaking of management, Korean idols are also micromanaged quite heavily and generally don’t have disposable income until the money starts coming in from CF work which can take several years if at all so I’d also expect in some cases for the labels themselves to be very much in on the game, controlling the supply. Some labels would probably even have their own known preferred dealers just like the punk scene I worked in for many years who have special arrangements with label staff and know how to operate their business discreetly.
Some of you fucks are naturally going to say “how do you know all this?” and you’re right – I don’t. I’m guessing just like you, it’s just that my guess is probably a lot more educated than most people’s thanks to decades of experience dealing with every flavour of drug-addled fuck-up you can imagine from all corners of the world and in several different music scenes. My hot tip: expect an Open World Entertainment style scandal that goes right to the top of a company, but with the crime of choice being the supplying of drugs rather than sexual assault. When some startup nugu agency’s CEO gets busted sometime down the track for drug trafficking meth, speed and/or crazy prescription shit without a prescription to his own trainees so they can pull longer hours in the gym remember that I told you this in July 2014 before it blew up. In the meantime, enjoy everyone on all sides of the Bom drug smuggling debate losing their shit over something which isn’t even any concern of theirs.
p.s I might be anti-drugs at least as far as myself and my own life goes but I hate those “straight-edge” wankers. Fucking dickheads turning the simple act of choosing not to do drugs into some kind of fucking religion and bashing everyone over the head with it (often literally). Any of you reading this who are into that trendy crap and also think I’m in with that bullshit, no way. What a bunch of absolute cockheads. In my experience most of them secretly do drugs anyway when no-one’s looking – trufax.
You probably already know the rules, but here they are again:
Less than 20,000 hits on YouTube
Nobody outside Korea gives a shit
Let’s do it.
Everyone who likes k-pop likes to remind everyone else who likes k-pop that Korea’s entertainment business is a conservative arena steered by the moral quandaries of teenage girls with too much Internet access, especially when controversies constantly arise over situations that wouldn’t register a blip on the “care radar” of any free-thinking intelligent adult. However, this observation is sharply at odds with a lot of Korean MV drama activity which continually descends into positively Lynchian territory even when tackling the most benign of subjects. This time on Nugu Alert we’re highlighting videos that have ambitious yet inexplicably surreal Mills & Boon romance style drama videos. Dramas videos are actually quite expensive to create even if the scenes themselves are relatively simple, and I’m not talking about paying the actors (who get paid very little and often don’t get paid at all) – it’s the technical requirements of drama-making that spin out the cost. Therefore I ask you to please watch and appreciate these drama MVs because a lot of money was sunk into them for probably very little return and it would be a shame to see all that effort go to waste.
WARNING: these reviews necessarily have to contain plot spoilers, otherwise discussing them and meeting minimum snarky Kpopalypse observation requirements is impossible, so if like me you are deeply concerned about that sort of thing and want the maximum entertainment value out of this post, watch the videos first before reading the text.
Hong So Hee – Lemon
This video starts off normally enough with our protagonist driving in typical Korean style (changing lanes without indicating), wearing high heels at the airport (clearly masochistic tendencies) and having something creepy done to her ears (that I’d rather remain ignorant of so feel free to not enlighten me in the comments below). A basket of lemons tip over, and being a starving Korean nugu in the entertainment business she naturally steals one for precious sustenance. Then she spends the rest of the video mooning about, reminiscing, having flashbacks and being all miserable and shit presumably because she doesn’t have a partner, but what that’s got to do with stealing the lemon I’m not sure. We don’t see what happened to the guy (maybe there wasn’t the budget for it) but I can only presume that he died in a car accident given the general reckless driving throughout with the couple continually not wearing seatbelts and poking their heads through the sunroof of a moving vehicle (both illegal activities in Australia) not to mention driving with shockingly low visibility. What is it with Koreans and driving? How did the people making this shit even survive to the end of the video shoot without becoming road casualties? I know that if I ever found myself in a car in Korea I’d fucking wear double seatbelts and a crash helmet if I could. Anyway whatever it’s all supposed to mean, it’s entertaining and puzzling enough to make the fairly unremarkable song sort of drift off into the background of your consciousness throughout, which I guess is probably the intention of the video director given how much Koreans seem to love their elevator music.
Youtube hits at time of viewing: 5479
Notable attribute: entire cast and crew of this video probably still alive at time of writing
Nugu Alert rating – very high
Taibian – Pinocchio
There’s a saying in the music business – “don’t shit where you eat”. What this saying really means is don’t mix your personal love affairs with work, because if things go badly it will cause you problems. If you play in a band, don’t fuck your bandmates, if you teach, don’t fuck your students, if you work in an office, don’t fuck the cute guy or girl who comes to change the coffee machine filters etc. Imagine being in a really successful group, having a fling with a band member, it doesn’t work out, you end up hating each other, but you gotta see each other every day anyway because your band has legions of fans and you don’t want to break it up because it’s now your bread and butter. Welcome to the awkward zone. I don’t know if the world of baristas has a similar creed but if not, they should consider it. In this video for some godawful “Bone Thugs N Harmony meets k-pop” trash, the horny coffee attendant recognises an old friend at the counter, then makes a sneaky play for her literally 0.5 seconds after she broke it off with some dude. It seems to work out even after the dude smacks him down… that is, until about 2:50 where everything goes sour for a reason that isn’t explained. She gives him a letter which seems to have something to do with it… but what’s in it? The cuntfaced video director doesn’t want to tell us, he wants to be all like Pulp Fiction and the fucking briefcase about it. But maybe the letter has nothing to do with it, maybe the guy was just a bit over-keen straight out of the gate and she became cautious, I mean, he literally buys her a coffee and then a ring in the next scene – hold your horses there, that’s just a little quick off the mark, son. Whatever happened to dinner and a movie first?
YouTube hits at time of writing: 1694
Notable attribute: smallest face scratch ever shown in a MV fight scene
Nugu Alert rating: very high
AB Avenue – Sad Story
I pity AB Avenue – they obviously had some money behind them, this is not some traditional nugu caper. Looking at this video for the first time, I was expecting them to be huge, and maybe they were massive in Korea but from where I’m sitting, it sure doesn’t look like it. They have a very high-budget and great-looking MV featuring a hot bitch-faced fappable actress which is hosted on 1theK(aka Loen)’s YouTube channel, one of the biggest distributors of Korean MVs out there, yet they still have managed to somehow fucking qualify for Nugu Alert. Their official Facebook has only 383 followers at the time of writing (don’t rush to friend them and boost the numbers – their last update was in 2010) and their MP3′d pirated songs on YouTube actually have more hits than any of their MVs. AB Avenue are a group that surely has the blood of the nugu flowing through their veins, even Gangkiz would be envious presuming such lack of success was actually something to envy. Anyway the MV for this mediocre join-the-dots Davichi-esque snorefest starts with a guy waking up to find out a jilted ex-lover has handcuffed him to a chair and is going to make him pay for dumping her for some unspecified reason. Perhaps he let her go because he got a hunch that she was a psycho killer and wanted nothing more to do with her, if it was me in his shoes I reckon that creepy stare at 1:56 would have tipped me off. Then she decides to kill him (because that will make everything better, oh wait) and she either thinks better of it and turns the gun on herself for being such a bitch, or the guy just has the thickest skull known to man and is able to deflect the bullet back in her direction. It’s pretty straightforward really, the only real mystery here is why nobody watched this back in the day – I guess with idol pop peaking in quality at around the time this song came out, it was enough to overshadow mediocre ballads like this completely. Ahhh… those were the days.
YouTube hits at time of writing: 6569
Notable attribute: actual lips-on-lips visible during kissing scene did not cause the destruction of the Earth
That wraps it up for another episode! Kpopalypse Nugu Alert will return at an unspecified future date to bring you more fresh (or stale) nugus! Until then, drive safely!
I dropped a comment a while back stating that CL was the only female k-pop idol who displayed anything resembling stage presence. This horrified nearly everyone – fans of 2NE1 were concerned that this praise for CL was uncharacteristic of my normal online behaviour and perhaps indicative of massive hard drug use or mental breakdown, whereas everyone else was like “b-b-b-but, what about MY bias? I think they’re great! Doesn’t [insert bias here] have stage presence?”
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Oh the wailing and gnashing of teeth when you tell a k-pop fan that their bias doesn’t have stage presence…. but they really don’t. This post will explain why they don’t have it, and also why you shouldn’t care.
As it happens, most people who inhabit the k-pop online-o-sphere misunderstand stage presence simply because they have no real idea about what the term “stage presence” actually means. Let’s start off with a few things that stage presence is not. Stage presence isn’t:
being above a certain height (you’d be amazed how short a lot of well-known western rock stars are)
Of course, stage presence doesn’t exclude any of the above factors either. You could have all of the above list working in your favour, or you could not have any of it, and you can still either have stage presence, or not have it.
So what is stage presence, then? Well, as per usual all the people asking me about it could have just used Google:
However, your average one-eyed k-pop fan will look at this definition and go “b…b…b..but my bias is impressive!” – well yes, of course he/she is – to you. You’re so deeply in love with them that they could be in an office building downtown trimming their fingernails like Hwayoung and you could be watching them through the window using a telescope from Sasaeng HQ five miles away and you’d still be ‘impressed’ by their ‘presence’. The key words here to remember in the definition above are not “impressiveness” or “manner or appearance” but “theatre audience”. Ahhh.
Here’s Bruce Dickinson, from well-known heavy metal group Iron Maiden, and probably one of the world’s best practitioners of “stage presence”, explaining perfectly how it works. Relevant parts at 0:16 and 1:21, and also observe his stage manner, where he completely dominates the (huge) stage and audience. Ignore the statement from the vocalfag in between who has been brought into the documentary purely for academic “metal should be taken as seriously as opera yes it should” brownie points and misses the point a little.
Contrast that to the following performance from k-pop nugus Bob Girls. Look at the girls, from 8:45, carefully adjusting their costumes and making sure they’re in the right spot to start the choreo. Their strictly choreographed routine that they’re not allowed to deviate from means that they have to play strictly by the stage’s rules. They don’t own the stage, the stage owns them. It’s not their fault, nor does it reflect badly on them as performers – they simply have no choice in the matter. The tight format of idol pop that most groups have to work with simply doesn’t allow traditional stage presence to exist.
Speaking of vocalfags (and this is relevant), a while ago I wrote a post explaining how the vocalfaggotry that Korean fans as well as western vocal thread creators use is all just personal taste and obsessive-compulsive-disorder because the techniques singers use for projection simply aren’t needed in the 21st century when you’ve got a microphone right up to your lips and a team of audio technicians armed with the latest toys in vocal tweaking at your beck and call. Vocal techniques were developed in pre-modern days when getting that voice to the back of the hall without microphones was important, but nowadays it doesn’t matter because the technology does it for you. Yes, you can make a subjective determination “I like singer X because they’re using techniques that singer Y doesn’t have any idea about, and that sounds nicer to my ear” or you can say “because singer X is using better techniques they won’t hurt their throat or lose their voice as much as singer Y, and gosh that would be a shame if Y had to quit singing for this reason” but there’s no objective reason why X is better than Y sonically from a listener’s point of view. You could write a whole thesis about vocal techniques and how Mariah Carey has better technique than Bob Dylan and it’d all be correct but if the listener likes listening to Bob Dylan’s voice more, why does it even matter? In the 19th century yes it would have mattered because Bob wouldn’t have been able to be heard beyond the first two rows of audience whereas Mariah could be heard to the back of the room, but in the 21st century where everyone’s all amplified and shit, it does not matter a bit. This is why I refuse to get drawn into arguments with vocalfags – the mere act of discussing these points is giving their perspective a relevance that it objectively doesn’t have. Nothing that they are saying is technically wrong or untrue by default, it just simply doesn’t matter to the hyper-technology world of modern music in any way other than subjective taste. That’s why the new girl selected for KARA was the prettiest one, not the best singer… as if it was ever going to turn out any other way.
It’s relevant to the stage presence discussion because there’s a similar kind of analogy that can be made with stage presence. In the old days of theatre performance, stage presence was a vital determining factor as to how effective a performance would be. If you’ve ever seen anyone with “theatre makeup” in any other environment than on an actual stage, you’ll know that theatre makeup often looks fucking disgusting up close, and that’s because such makeup is meant to make an impression from far away. Correspondingly, theatrical performers also tend to exaggerate their movements, speech and gestures, to make their stage presence as large as possible, so they can make an impact across the entire hall. Just like there’s no point in a 19th century opera singer affecting a fey, whispery vocal tone, there’s no point in a theatrical performer making a small subtle movement that only the first two rows are close enough to see if they’re performing in front of an audience of 500.
Once again however, just like with vocal performance, modern technology changes everything. Actors for TV don’t ham it up as much as theatrical performers because cameras can zoom in and capture those small details that will be missed by a live audience, making the old exaggerated techniques for presence projection irrelevant (not to mention often silly-looking). Makeup for televised performances is also more subtle than the old-style theatre makeup, and is designed to enhance and/or cover small details rather than make a bold impression at range. Likewise, the k-pop performer doesn’t actually need stage presence to reach the back of a room because there are a bunch of compensatory factors:
Performances for TV only really need to be played to the cameras, not the live audience
A large group of people dancing together in synchronised fashion makes a bigger impression and can be seen from further away, which is one reason for those big boy groups and also why even solo performers have backing dancers for upbeat songs
On live stages camera feeds can be shown to the audience on projected screens to make the idols’ image more up close and personal
Modern arena concert stages often have gangways so the performers can walk out into the audience and get closer, reducing the need to project as far
Emotional attachment to the idols will make the idol seem larger than life in the eyes of the audience regardless
The last one is important in k-pop. Watch a fancam for someone you really like, and then watch another similar fancam for some idol you really don’t give a fuck about, and see if you can detect any difference in stage presence. If you’re as biased as the average one-eyed k-pop fan you’ll probably detect a ton, but in reality there isn’t any difference at all. Both performers are working within the same kind of strictly regimented system and displaying equal stage presence (motherfuckin’ zero), it’s your aching libido and mental attachment to the idol fantasy that is doing the rest.
Companies know all this, so they don’t bother to train idols in stage presence… instead they train them to interact with cameras, and only the first few rows of audience – that smiling-waving shit we all know about. Companies know that the combination of their technology and your deludu brain will fill in the mental blanks required and you’ll have the false impression that they have stage presence anyway (as well as moral virtue, riches, a clean-living lifestyle, intelligence, emotional maturity, etc). CL probably has stage presence by accident by virtue of having a highly aggressive alpha personality that’s usually whipped mercilessly out of idols long before they debut so they can be more “charming” (it’s easily visible on their “Nolza” live DVD, she stands apart from the other members massively in this area whenever she gets the chance to break from the choreo) and she is the only idol who has it, and don’t waste your time linking me examples of other idols who you think might have it because:
I’ll tell you right now in advance that they don’t and
If you’re still even thinking that this question is even important, you’ve just missed the point of this entire post.
CL’s stage presence, like Ailee’s voice, while nice, doesn’t really have any meaningful function – it’s wasted in a genre which doesn’t require it, it may as well be absent. Other performers in Korea who occasionally exhibit stage presence (PSY and Tiger JK are good examples) are not part of the idol system. No coincidence.
Sport. I’m against it generally, and I’m even more against it in k-pop. This post is about why sport and k-pop need to remain separate, and I’ve made it because it’s one of those things that people are always asking me about. Usually I just say “I’m a musician – sport is against my religion” when people ask but since you blog readers are so lovely I feel like I owe you a little more detail and entertainment than that. Also I’m not seeing anyone else blogging about this shit and it’s a Kpopalypse specialty to brazenly wander into topics that other bloggers won’t touch with a ten foot T-ara lightstick for fear of being cyber-stoned to death by the Internet hordes.
WARNING: this post may contain Australian cultural trufax, including gratuitous references to Drop Bears.
I don’t know what it’s like in other countries, but in Australia, sport is a big thing down here and probably the biggest cultural pastime that we have besides getting incredibly drunk and having outdoor barbeques every month of the year. (I know what you people from other countries are thinking, especially those of you who had to endure Paul Hogan’s horrid tourism advertising, but “shrimp on the barbie” is an advertising line for foreign consumption only – in Australia we don’t even call them “shrimp” and most barbeque is sausages and kebabs because shrimp prawns that are big enough to not fall through the metal cracks in the barbeque grill are just too fucking expensive. Oh look at me getting all sidetracked and it’s only the opening paragraph. I can already tell that this is going to be a weird post.) No matter where you go in Australia, you can’t avoid sport, it’s fucking impossible because that shit is everywhere. Believe me, I’ve tried – it can’t be done.
Growing up I noticed that only my school’s total fuckheads were good at sport so I drew the sensible conclusion early on in life that sport sucked a bag of dicks and I didn’t want any part of it so I logically took refuge in the world of music. Music is sport’s natural arch-nemesis, the Yin to sport’s Yang. Key contrasts between the worlds of sport and music include but are not limited to the following:
Sport has cooperative elements but is fundamentally about competition, while music has competitive elements but is fundamentally about cooperation
Sport injuries keep musicians from practising their instruments, while listening to music prevents sport players from hearing their teammates warn them about the hockey puck that is flying toward their head and about to slice their eye in half
It’s obvious to me that sport and music exist on opposite ends of some kind of “leisure spectrum”. You’re either really good at music, or you’re really good at sport, but if you try to be good at both your interest and participation in one activity will always be compromised by the other activity in some way. Want some relevant k-pop examples? Sure you do.
Sport and k-pop should not mix example 1: Wassup’s “Fire”
We can see the negative mix of sport and music here in two ways.
1. It negatively affects the music. The song is shit. There is sport in the music video. Wassup aren’t usually quite this bad, so therefore, it’s sport’s fault.
Clearly, it would be best if music and sport were kept far apart.
Sport and k-pop should not mix example 2: Idol Star Athletics
My guitar students are always getting injuries from stupid fucking compulsory school sport and having to take time off from my lessons to heal their broken arms and hands. I keep telling their parents “tell the kid to not attend sport at all, sport is Mickey Mouse bullshit, it won’t help their career – write the little shits a note to give to their Phys Ed teacher saying that the kid has got terminal ass cancer and is exempt from all sports games on doctor’s orders” but it never works. The parents always just mutter something about “needing exercise” as if sport is the only source of exercise that exists and refuse to heed my advice… then the kid just breaks another arm a few weeks later. So much for the supposed health benefits, I must have missed the memo on how it’s so fucking healthy to break a new bone in your body every two months. Likewise, stupid Idol Star Athletics in Korea injures fappable k-pop performers like AOA’s Seolhyun, preventing their appearance in comebacks.
This is obviously not acceptable. Seolhyun isn’t even my fave but AOA is a rare group where every member meets required standards and we really need all hands (and boobs, and asses, and legs, and…) on deck to maximise fap music appreciation.
Sport and k-pop should not mix example 3: Super Junior’s “Victory”
Here’s Super Junior back in 2010 milking the success of “Sorry Sorry” for the 153rd time, using the same dances and rhythms that we’ve heard from them ad nauseam with minor variations, I guess even SM realised that some shitty soccer game wasn’t worth the effort of writing a whole new song or coming up with any new ideas. No need to mention how much motivation to perform this shitty song gave the Korean team of course, we already know. Shit tossed-off song, shitty team performance – everybody loses when sport and k-pop mix.
Sport and k-pop should not mix example 4: Hyomin fap
Sport and k-pop should not mix example 5: Ailee’s “Fighting Spirit”
So between creating web traffic for 6Theory and singing dicksucking western pop ballads Ailee recorded a World Cup song this year and it’s more listenable than the last couple of feature tracks she’s done but then so is just about anything. Of course because it’s for a sport thing she has to dress as unflatteringly as possible so she doesn’t make ugly fat couch-potato TV sport addicts feel bad, which is reason enough to add this song to the list of reasons why k-pop and sport shouldn’t be together.
Sport and k-pop should not mix example 6: Orange Caramel fap
I find the soccer ball patterns on the front of the costumes confusing to the eye, it makes it hard to make out the contours of the Orange Caramel member’s boobs underneath the clothing. Obviously if they weren’t performing for some World Cup bullshit the patterns would be different and the opportunity for fap wouldn’t have been squandered.
Sport and k-pop should not mix example 7: Music Fucking Core
Does anyone with a life actually give a fuck who wins and loses what on a music TV show? Of course not, if you have half a brain in your head you only care about if you like the song or not and you’re just happy that your favourite group was able to get on the show at all to perform the song so you could watch them. However to the world’s fuckwits, winning and losing on shows like this is terribly important, and that mentality comes from applying a sport-based competitive attitude to music. I’ve blogged before about why music competitions are all bullshit and nothing has changed since then… as if EXO’s “Growl” beating out Crayon Pop’s “Bar Bar Bar” wasn’t enough of a tipoff that something’s amiss.
Sport and k-pop should not mix example 8: Akdong Musician’s “Give Love”
See what bullshit music we have to endure because people win music competitions? Moving right along.
Sport and k-pop should not mix example 9: Shindong in a karate uniform
Scarier than a drop bear, and possibly twice as hungry.
So that oughta do it. If these nine points haven’t convinced you of the strength of my argument, nothing will. Of course if you love sport then all is well and good just keep it the fuck away from music because those two things shouldn’t be mixed. It’s like crossing the streams in Ghostbusters – you just don’t do it. This has been a Kpopalypse Community Service Anouncement.
Image may be NSFW.
