Well, I can’t think of a better date to launch this blog, can you?

This blog is designed for listeners as a visual accompaniment to the radio show “Kpopalypse!” on 3D Radio 93.7 FM, Adelaide Australia.  It will have content on it that will reflect what I’m talking about on the show, but it may also be relevant to k-pop fans in general.

I’m not actually using this for anything yet, but I will be.  This blog probably won’t get used much, certainly not every show, and it won’t be as active as the Facebook group (which gets new content daily), but if I’ve got something lengthy that I want to put on the Internet and the Facebook group just doesn’t have the room or it would look too “messy”, it will go here instead, and I’ll link to it from there.  Just to keep things neat.  That’s literally the only reason why this blog exists.

Remember that the Facebook page is at this link:  http://www.facebook.com/groups/213090135468923/ – if you listen to the show, and you haven’t joined it, you should.

Also, for international folks – although the radio show is based in Adelaide, Australia, you can actually listen to it from anywhere in the world on the Internet, just go to http://www.threedradio.com and click one of the streaming links in the top left.  The show broadcasts only at Monday 4-5pm Adelaide time (GMT + 9:30 in southern hemisphere winter, GMT + 10:30 in southern hemisphere summer) so if you click the links and you hear something else instead, check your timezones.

That’s all for now.  Enjoy these appropriately apocalyptic videos from T-ara, with a story in two parts, that should get you in the mood to deal with zombies/meteors/aliens/whatever affects the world according to some Mayan calendar or whatever the fuck.

Part 1: Day By Day/Don’t Leave

Part 2: Day & Night/Sexy Love

These are my favourite k-pop songs for 2012, and I played through most of this list on the NYE show.  My radio show is only an hour long so I didn’t have time to fit in all of these, but this is the list I was working from.  These songs are just the ones that I personally liked.  Not necessarily the ones that were the most successful.  Certainly not necessarily the ones that anyone else will like, not that I care, because we all have different music taste, don’t we (and I will relentlessly and cruelly bash you over the head with mine as if it’s the gospel truth for the rest of this blog).  Or the ones with the best videos (although in almost every single case I do happen to like the videos anyway – it’s hard to go wrong with k-pop videos really).

I apologise to those who prefer guy groups as my list is skewed heavily in favour of the girls.  I’m a guy, I like listening to girls more, what can I say.  I try to keep the gender split kind of even-ish most times when I go on air, because I know that lots of females who listen like to hear from the guy groups so I do my best to cater to that, but when it comes to “my favourite songs”, well, that’s another story and you’ll just have to deal with the full force of my horrible sexism, oh noes.

22.  AOA (Ace Of Angels) – “Get Out”

I really like the concept of rookie group AOA as a creation floating somewhere mysterious and ill-defined between an idol group and a rock band, but while I wasn’t that taken with their debut “Elvis” I thought it showed a lot of promise – if only they had a better song, I thought.  “Get Out” is that better song – a great rock track that blends ska guitar rhythms and pop sensibilities and is easily as good as any similar attempts that comes to mind from western groups over the last decade and a half.  I hope to see a full concert from these girls one day with no mimed instruments – even though they’re not actually playing their instruments in the video, it’s clear to anyone with a musical background that they obviously can.  The video also deserves special mention for the great “lets dress up the girls as attractive leading females in Hollywood films” concept which is a unique stroke of marketing genius, even if their awkward insistence on dressing up the cute guitar player as Mathilde from The Professional gives me uncomfortable Pedobear feelings despite the fact that I know she’s at least 20.  And those marching band outfits are to die for.

21.  Hyuna – “Ice Cream”

I’ll admit it – I didn’t like Bubble Pop much.  The best thing about that tune for me was the organ-grinder noise that cut in at the end of every 8 bars, which was terrific and kept me listening, but the actual song?  Certainly not terrible by any stretch, but it didn’t get me that excited.  On the other hand “Ice Cream” is gold.  As soon as PSY finishes messing around in her truck and that beat kicks in, the appeal is immediate, and the song never loses momentum from there.  A lot of netizens don’t seem to like Hyuna for various reasons, mostly ranging from “she’s a slut” to “she’s probably a slut” but my extensive experience dealing with sexually extroverted performers ( >.> ) tells me that she’s probably a lot less slutty than most girls out there in the music biz, not that it matters because frankly if she’s hoovering the cock and enjoying it good luck to her and it’s actually no-one’s fucking business anyway.  Oh and some people think she can’t sing but then she is 4Minute’s designated rapper so what the fuck do you expect, you might as well get stuck into Notorious B.I.G. because he can’t sing like Pavarotti even though he’s equally as fat.  This song is good fun times, the rapping is great, the singing is fine for what it is and honestly who could ask for a better comeback from Hyuna… or a better video.  One of the great things about the breakthrough of PSY’s “Gangnam Style” is that it’s drawn some attention to her.

20.  Gang Kiz – “Honey Honey”

Gang Kiz was one of the biggest rookie group commercial disasters in k-pop, certainly the biggest for 2012, with a lot of money being poured into them for basically no result (although a lot of that money was just in flights and accommodation so it’s not really the “biggest budget filmclip ever” that some people claim).  I’ll never completely understand why Gang Kiz bombed so hard.  All I can think of is that because this song is fairly similar to T-ara’s “Lovey Dovey” which was a huge hit, people already had that song and didn’t want to effectively buy the same song twice.  They probably shouldn’t have sampled that “woo ooh ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooh” bit because that kind of makes the similarity really obvious.   Anyway who cares because the song itself is great and I actually think it’s even a little bit better than “Lovey Dovey”, I think of it as a 2.0 version.  I certainly bought the goddamn thing, think I give a fuck if no-one else did?  Whatever reason it bombed, it certainly wasn’t because the song sucked, because it doesn’t.  The video is seriously entertaining too, it doesn’t completely make sense to me (especially that ending wut) but it’s a nice ride and it’s also a good video accompaniment to T-ara’s Paris & Swiss photobook which uses many of the same locations.

19.  Sistar – “Loving U”

More holiday videos and this time the Sistar girls are off to Hawaii.  Hey, here’s some trivia for you – apparently most of Hawaii is a dirty polluted shithole because apparently there’s nowhere to put rubbish and most of the island is just kind of slummy and smelly with lots of poor people because there’s also fuck-all jobs.  Or so I’ve been told, I don’t know how accurate my sources are, maybe it really is a paradise, what the fuck would I know, I’ve never been there.  Anyway, Sistar are only visiting the nice touristy areas so I guess that doesn’t matter much for the purpose of this blog.  The song is really good anyway, nice and bright, with some great vocals as always by these girls and it’s even got a little bit in the middle that rips off The Beach Boys’ 80s acoustic ballad “Kokomo”, which is a song that everyone reading this probably loves but would never admit to because it’s not “cool” like their 60s stuff that everyone pretends to like just to be hip but nobody actually listens to.  And hey it beats shoehorning in a trendy-but-awkward dubstep breakdown (which is why a few of your favourites probably didn’t make this list).  So there.  And I didn’t even mention how Sistar have the best bodies in k-pop are really talented and I admire them so much.  I’ll even forgive them for holding those horrible Dylan-esque cardboard signs.

18.  Spica – “Russian Roulette”

Spica on the other hand actually aren’t that pretty.  That’s a good sign though – whenever you see girls in a k-pop group and they are not the kind of girls that you would cut off limbs for just to get their attention, you know that they have been put in the group for some other reason besides their physical appearance (i.e actual musical talent exists).  As it turns out, Spica have some killer voices and while “Russian Roulette” doesn’t showcase it as much as “Painkiller”, I think “Russian Roulette” is the better song, certainly the one that I prefer, probably just because it’s more upbeat.  Also it doesn’t share the same title as a Judas Priest album, I guess that might also help, because most things look a bit shabby in comparison to Judas Priest amirite.  But Spica have voices so good that they can even make the usual turgid ballads sound halfway decent.  You’ll notice that ballads don’t get much of a look-in in this chart of mine here, I really think most k-pop ballads are pustulent, putrescent worms on the face of the Korean music industry and that they would just go away.  With very few exceptions.

17.  Yangpa ft. Lee Boram (SeeYa) & Soyeon (T-ara) – “I Know”

Here’s an exception.  Yangpa is a k-pop veteran having been in the industry since at least 1996.  This new song has “Core Contents Media trot-esque ballad” written all over it, as it’s basically the same melodically and structurally as T-ara’s “We Were In Love”, “Day & Night”, etc… just without the rap.  And to be honest I’m happy for the absence of rapping in ballads like this.  This is certainly the best iteration in terms of instruments and so forth and it’s a ballad without the horrid R&B-lite trimmings that are fashionable nowadays and ruin so many slow songs in k-pop and elsewhere.  Say what you want about CCM and their shithouse PR and their CEO who says and does the most bizarrest things with seemingly the image-sensitivity of a brick (although I do like how much he makes netizens cry), the one area where CCM consistently delivered in 2012 is the songwriting department, and that is what matters when you’re making music, not the other bullshit and gossip which you can frankly all bash up your ass.  Also I like this video because T-ara’s Eunjung is in it who is always great on screen without exception and I also dig the one-take thing which is a refreshing change from the schizophrenic cutting that characterises k-pop videos generally (espcially CCM’s ahem).

16.  4Minute – “Volume Up”

Back to the dance floor numbers, and the appropriately-titled “Volume Up” sure is a subwoofer-wrecker, great for airing out your car stereo system and removing the dust and spiders, or freaking your pets right the fuck out.  Definitely my favourite 4Minute song ever, with a great brooding atmosphere which is nicely complemented by the expensively gothed-up video (over $130000 spent on set design alone, apparently).  Some people don’t like the high budgets on these things, but I think those people are losers who just have the wrong attitude to life – I look at this stuff and think to myself “they spent that money on me, on my entertainment, God bless them”.  God bless those outfits and bodice-clutching dance moves, too.  People rave about Hyuna in 4Minute all the time naturally but I think Sohyun steals this one, at 1:53 here she looks devastatingly gorgeous with the black funeral dress and that skull on her lap, hopefully when I die bits of my corpse will also get to be in a 4Minute video one day and she can fondle them.  I should try to find out where I can sign up for that.

15.  Phantom – “Burning”

As previously mentioned, I’m not a massive fan of the guy groups.  It’s more than just sexual preference (although that is undeniably a factor and for any k-pop fan to deny that sexuality plays a role is to just not be honest).  I just like the sound of female voices in this style of music better, in that sense I feel that it’s no different to someone preferring strawberry icecream over chocolate or vice versa.  Also I think songwriting for the guy groups is more generic generally, they all do the same tricks, they all have the soaring high-vocal chorus, similar melody lines etc, it’s just overall less experimental in a genre where experiments are generally pretty low-key as it is.  My point being, when you see me highly recommending a guy group song as one of the best of the year, you know that it fucking impressed the shit out of me.  This song certainly did.  I like the melodies, I like the way the rap is intelligently written and integrates seamlessly into the song without wrecking the general mood, I like the post-rock guitar sounds and most of all I like the fact that it sounds like an actual band but it’s not some conservative throwback sleepytime Playschool crap like Busker Busker who no doubt would seem like a “nice change” from all the electro idol pop to people actually living in South Korea but sounds exactly like The Wiggles to the rest of the world who have actually heard what indie hipster crap music is meant to sound like and can see that Busker Busker isn’t even half as good as the last 5 completely shithouse Weezer albums no-one bought.  Anyway Phantom are great.

14.  miss A – “I Don’t Need A Man”

I’ve got to admit, I didn’t like this when I first heard it.  At all.  I was literally jumping up in my chair going “holy hell what is this fucking shite JYP you fucking cocksmoker I didn’t want this R&B fucking shit aaaaaarrrgh”.  Then it was stuck in my head for the next week non-stop and I had to apologise to JYP for calling him all those names.  He truly is a genius.  Once I warmed to it, this song is so relaxing with those sine-wave keyboards and that “dit dit dit dit dit” thing, and the perfect integration of rapping and sung vocals, it just seamlessly grooves along, like a massage for the ears.  Sonically it’s utterly unique in k-pop, nothing sounds even a little bit close to it.  JYP sure has some eclectic listening going on because he’s always doing something different to everybody else, and he rarely gets it wrong.   Sure, he’s often a bit retro, and GOOD.  There should be more of it.  And what fucking great lyrics in this song.   Okay, there’s the obvious irony that they do need at least one man (JYP) to write their songs, but then everything in k-pop is a fraud so I’m cool with it.  If you want “integrity” you’re in the wrong music genre, go listen to… oh wait, no other music genre has any integrity either, because integrity is a fictional concept in music that’s just used as a marketing tool to make you buy stuff… so never mind.  Also, I think Min and Jia are both way sexier than Suzy, to the point where they make Suzy look astonishingly bland.  Just putting that out there.

13.  2NE1 – “Scream”

Okay, so I can’t give you a video of 2NE1′s “Scream”.  Why not?  Because all the video versions available either have half the song missing, or have had the audio fucked with in some way to get around copyright control (which works, but it makes the result borderline unlistenable and thus defeats the purpose).  Blame shitty Japanese record labels who police YouTube with an iron fist.  I suppose I could have put “I Love You” here instead which is a good song but I really thought “Scream” was the standout track for 2NE1 this year, so in lieu of the actual video here’s a gif of Bom being more attractive than everybody reading this and also showing that 2NE1 basically has the right attitude to life:

You can’t see a picture of Bom on the Internet in Korea these days without netizens whining about the “plastic surgery monster”, “she’s addicted to plastic surgery I hope she gets the help that she needs” etc but to be honest I think they’re just jealous of her astounding beauty and she’s had very little work done.  She looks the same to me today as she did in 2009.  Seriously.  All that shit you think is a changing face every other day is just the effects of erratic sleep patterns, various quantities of studio makeup/lighting/Photoshop, diet, exercise, that lymph node disease that she has which makes her face swell up from time to time, your inability to set the aspect ratio of your TV correctly, you being a pedantic cunt and dozens of other factors.  Besides, who cares anyway… how is getting plastic surgery really any different to getting a tattoo or a piercing or those fucking hoop things in your ears or a spike through your cock or any other number of things to modify your appearance to make yourself look more [fill in the blank].  Sorry about the lack of audio, just take my word for it that “Scream” is awesome.  On the show itself I played “I Love You” instead, which wasn’t bad either.

12.  Girls’ Generation/SNSD – “Paparazzi”

SNSD’s relative lack of performance in the Japanese market this year compared to previous years really hasn’t surprised me, as I really thought “Flower Power” was beyond average, and don’t even get me started on “Twinkle”, “Dancing Queen” or “All My Love Is For You” – ugh.  Some songwriters over there at SM really need to re-read that part of the Cultural Technology Handbook that tells them how not to write a song that sucks acres of cock.  On the other hand, “Paparazzi” is brilliant, one of their best songs ever, with a driving, propulsive beat and some great keyboard riffs, it’s right up there with “Mr. Taxi” as one of their greatest moments.  SNSD will never translate to the ultra-cynical-about-girl-groups western world in the way that some US pundits (who have probably been bankrolled by SM in some shady media play that far outstrips anything YG or CCM have been doing lately) are predicting, but if they can keep doing songs this good I don’t really care who likes it and who doesn’t.  I also like the audacity of them building a whole city street on a theatre stage complete with actual paved bitumen and working lights and then chucking some water around so it looks like it’s just been raining… honestly who thinks of this shit, they need a medal or something.  I’d love to know what this video cost them.

11.  U-KISS – “Believe”

U-KISS are a group that really should be bigger than they are in Korea.  But then, Korean netizens are generally pretty clueless about what constitutes listenable music in general not to mention a whole host of other things so it should be no surprise that they don’t really give a shit about this awesome group.  Fortunately, the rest of the world’s k-pop fans have really latched onto U-KISS and they have a big following in several countries, especially here in Australia where I get requested to play them nearly every time I broadcast!  The Eurodance-inspired “Believe” has got to be their best song this year and it’s so good that the sight of multiple effeminate eyeliner-sporting guys prancing around can’t ruin it for me, nor can the cringeworthy rapped intro or the disturbingly narrow road tunnel that they dance in… who builds roads that narrow?  Maybe it’s designed to be one centimetre smaller than the width of a saesang taxi, but I still wouldn’t feel too safe dancing there, what with Korean driving being what it is.  I like it how there’s a light in that tunnel, implying that there’s a motorcyclist patiently waiting for them to finish their dance routine so he can get through, must be the only time I’ve ever seen a Korean on the road give way to something.  It’s only a matter of time before “rookie group squashed by truck while filming a music video” is a headline on shitty k-pop news sites, it’ll probably be one of the only actual true and newsworthy things they write about that year.

10.  Ailee – “I Will Show You”

What a killer song from this girl.  “I Will Show You” is essentially an updated k-pop reimagining of “I Will Survive”, as it has a near-identical song structure and is just as awesomely catchy, but benefits a whole lot more from modern production, and Ailee being both more talented and prettier than Gloria Gaynor plus the fact that this doesn’t have an “overplayed gay club anthem” vibe to it… well, not yet, anyway.  It’s been a karaoke favourite in Korea for a while now so I reckon it’s only a matter of time.   It doesn’t have quite the same message as “I Will Survive” though, as that cheeky little smile Ailee does at the end of the video indicates that the whole “Okay, so you dumped me – fine, I’ll tart up my image and look uber-hot and get attention from other guys and have an awesome life and destroy you mentally by rubbing it all in your face enjoy your loneliness mwahahaha” was actually just a sneaky ruse to get her man back, changing the meaning of the song from female independence to female relationship manipulation… but then this is Korea where aegyo is considered an actual desirable quality instead of something that would just irritate the shit out of someone, so I guess no-one should be surprised.  Personally I think Ailee looks better as the dorky girl at the start than later on when she’s all generically glammed-up, which for me further chips down any kind of “empowerment” message this thing is meant to contain, but without the visuals there’s no denying this song is one of the most brilliantly written disco-anthem vocal showcases out there.

9.  Wonder Girls – “Like This”

Netizens, being generally stupid and concerned with everything but actual music, are quite obsessed by the notion that JYP fucked up by trying to break Wonder Girls in the US, and that they’ve lost fame because of that and the label is in financial trouble and, and… stuff.  Personally, I don’t consider being the third-largest label in k-pop a precarious scenario, but netizens are nothing if not drama queens whose perception of the realities of the music industry is microscopically tiny.  Think I give a fuck anyway, this song rocks.  It’s the kind of upbeat R&B/hip-hop fusion that the US forgot how to make circa 1992 and its debatable that they even came up with anything this good before then.  Loving that old-school beat and the sunny lyrics, and the fact that the vocal wank isn’t dolloped on too thick.  The video looks like it would have been a ton of fun to make too, and it’s got a great spontaneous, down-to-earth vibe that suits the song perfectly, even though it’s actually a carefully-planned affair that was months in preparation, like any good flashmob is.  It’s good to see k-pop giving a nod to flashmobbers, and it’s also good to see Wonder Girls in general doing their thing, because they are a group that really should be more popular.

8.  T-ara – “Day By Day”

If I was rating 2012′s songs by video quality instead of song quality, this would be #1 by a country mile.  T-ara’s “Day By Day” video is a post-apocalyptic leather-clad swordfighting, muscle-bike-riding, blood-spilling, bitchy-stare-giving epic (well, half an epic – the “Sexy Love” drama version video contains the conclusion to the story here) that makes Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” look like something you shot in your backyard with a portable video camera, a few drunk friends and a reject-shop makeup kit.  The song itself is almost as good as the video, an obviously Ennio Morricone-inspired mid-tempo ballad that would fit equally well in a spaghetti western or indeed just about any other epic movie if it wasn’t already in the one that CCM made for it.  And yes, I know the linked video actually has two songs on it (the other one being the also Morricone-esque and almost-as-awesome “Don’t Leave”), but the dance version of this song’s video is a bunch of near-unwatchable hastily-edited high-strobing seizure-inducing slop so I felt strongly compelled to use this one instead to maximise your viewing pleasure.  Don’t thank me all at once, now.

7.  Orange Caramel – “Lipstick”

I’ve been waiting for Orange Caramel to finally release a goddamn album for ages, and when this song came out as the lead single I nearly hit the roof with joy – it’s exactly the kind of upbeat trot-meets-Stock-Aitken-Waterman silliness that I’ve always loved about their best songs and that I hoped they would continue doing.  The k-pop gods are looking after me.  If SAW were capable of productions this catchy and crisp I probably would have bought those Kylie Minogue and Mel & Kim records back in the day.  I’m not sure what drugs the video director was taking though, the video doesn’t have even have visual references to lipstick anywhere in it and is all about… table tennis.  Because, well, of course, right?  Hey, at least it’s different.  I honestly can’t say I’ve seen a music video remotely like this, ever, and in an era where we’re seeing a lot of “people dancing in a room with oddly-lit geometric shapes” type videos dominating k-pop lately, it’s honestly refreshing.

6.  f(x) – “Beautiful Stranger”

“Electric Shock” was the big and I mean BIG hit for k-pop’s biggest label SM Entertainment this year, sweeping international download charts in almost every country in the world with Internet access, it was the first genuine k-pop international cross-cultural hit, beating PSY’s “Gangnam Style” to the punch by over a month and even topping high-profile comebacks by SNSD, TVXQ and Super Junior, something I’m sure SM didn’t expect given how little promotional energy they seem to put into f(x).  However, “Electric Shock” mini-album track “Beautiful Stranger” is actually an even better song, and I’m convinced that f(x) would have gone even more ballistic globally had this song been given the feature-track treatment instead.  Only featuring three of the girls (Amber, Krystal, Luna) and being essentially a showcase for Amber’s rapping, it doesn’t suffer a bit for it and has a similar mood and rhythmic feel to “Love The Way You Lie”, but with better singing, more interesting melodies, more charismatic rapping and the added bonus that you don’t feel forced to imagine Eminem and Rihanna’s crappy recent dysfunctional relationships while you’re listening to it.  No official video of this song exists, so instead I’ve used this excellent fan-made version with visuals cobbled together from all their other videos, which does a pretty good job of thoughtfully featuring the right girl at the right time and synching lips where possible.

5.  miss A – “Touch”

This was by far the sexiest “sexy” comeback of the year, because the group didn’t just look sexy, but the song actually sounded sexy, something that’s usually completely forgotten with any kind of sexy comeback.  Just for example, there’s no way anyone could get aroused by the music to Gain’s “Bloom”, regardless of how hot the video was, I mean, it’s written by the same songwriters who wrote IU’s hits, and it certainly shows.  On the other hand JYP clearly exercised his “ladies’ man” muscle to bring us this track, and if those low “mmmm” things at the end of the verse phrases don’t get you going, then I guess you’re just not into girls.  Women liked the track too, and I know this because everywhere I went when this was released, they were into it.  It was a female who thrust the “Touch” mini-album in my hand initially and said “you MUST buy this or I’m not talking to you”.  When I was on holidays in Sydney earlier this year (to see the Super Junior concert that didn’t even end up happening because the tour manager broke a toenail or something) I would walk into random gift shops in Chinatown and this song would come on and all the girls behind the counter would start signing it and doing the dance movements, no shit, it was a miss A stage everywhere I went.  I wouldn’t have been surprised if people started throwing rose petals everywhere.  And to think so many journalists and bloggers liked “Lips” more – proof that you don’t need to know anything about music to be a journalist or blogger.  Yeah, “Lips” is great too, but it doesn’t have the same sexiness or Jia going “mmmnmmm” and it doesn’t have that cool pitch-bendy keyboard thing so anyone who likes it better than “Touch” can suck it, because JYP doesn’t care about your opinion and neither do I.

4.  T-ara – “Sexy Love”

T-ara related music in this list a lot because T-ara are a lot more awesome than most other groups – for sheer consistency of song quality, regardless of all other factors, almost no-one in k-pop can hold a candle to T-ara, and anyone who genuinely hates this group just doesn’t like Korean pop music, period.  For those not up with the latest k-pop gossip, you may not know that T-ara were majorly hated on in 2012 in Korea, over some rumours that they bullied former member Hwayoung out of the group, that grew just because they chose to tell her off for her slackness via Twitter instead of privately.  The rumours were/are obvious bullshit, of course (as was the laughable “evidence” netizens collected to support their case, all thoroughly debunked at http://hyotheleader.tumblr.com/post/30319546274/rumor-vs-fact-t-ara-bullying-case-full-compilation ), Hwayoung was actually removed for some pretty good reasons, and I sure know that if my bandmates said they were going home to rest their broken ankle and then fucked off to the beauty shop to get their nails done instead I’d give them a serve on Twitter too – that doesn’t mean I’m a bully, it just means I have some fucking standards for human behaviour.  In the music industry that’s an asset which is all-too-rare!  But since Korean netizens are mostly school age bullies/bullying victims themselves, they don’t understand much about how the real grown-up world works (let alone the music biz), so the false rumours struck an emotional chord with them and hence they still can’t let it go to this day.  Especially hypocritical as netizens were practically begging CCM on hands and knees to kick Hwayoung out before the controversy happened – be careful what you wish for, hey kids.  So that is why you’ll see really weird like/dislike ratios on this video on YouTube, etc, in case you were wondering.  This song was recorded and produced at the peak of the controversy and it shows, with a reinvigorated T-ara bringing their A-game and slamming out a great Kraftwerk-meets-Kylie Minogue-circa-”Can’t Get You Out Of My Head” dancefloor stomper with Mike Tyson ferocity.  When T-ara wear flats instead of high-heels, you know they’re not fucking around, and the robot theme reflected in both the image and music (and copied from SNSD’s “Visual Dreams”?  Well, SNSD copied it from Kraftwerk so fair’s fair) is a sly “fuck you” aimed directly at netizens for not allowing the girls to be human and act like humans.  One of their best songs ever, it would have probably got #1 had they used the slightly superior rhythm track that appears in the teaser at 10:23 in the Day By Day video (above) instead of the one they ended up going with.

3.  BigBang – “Monster”

BigBang were also no strangers to controversy in 2012, and while the rumours surrounding them had maybe a little more believability than the derp-circus of blatantly obvious netizen lies that haunted T-ara, I really couldn’t give two fucks once again.  G-Dragon could be passing the blunt with Snoop Dogg Lion while Seungri makes a stunt-cock cameo in his next “Doggystyle” (Lion-style?) video shot in the back of a panelvan driven by Daesung while riding over pedestrians and I just wouldn’t care.  At all.  Half the artists that I like outside of the world of k-pop have trouble staying out of jail, so why should I apply different moral standard to this genre.  If Burzum can still have fans so can anyone in Korea.  Also that thing Jesus said about people in glass houses not throwing stones, and I don’t mean to get all Jesus on you and shit but I thought that was one of the better bits of a book that I largely disagree with.  Once again, just like T-ara’s “Sexy Love”, “Monster” was a calculated reply to their haters, made a little more obvious with that fantastic chorus that you will have lodged firmly in your head after you hear this song for the first time, or any other time for that matter.  The whole thing is so utterly well-crafted, treading exactly the right line between emotionally engagement and danceability, and if I were a heterosexual female I’d probably lose my shit over this group and saesang them everywhere, even Seungri with his Mickey Mouse hairstyle.

2.  IU & Fiestar – “Sea Of Moonlight”

This song is such an obvious rip-off of a-Ha’s 80′s new wave hit “Take On Me” that it’s not funny, not only utilising the same chords and structure but even the same keyboard tone.  However, I can’t bring myself to hate them for it – in fact quite the opposite: “Take On Me” was one of the very best pop songs of the 80s, and for IU and Fiestar (and whoever actually wrote this) to not only rip that song off wholesale but improve on it is a thing of sheer beauty.   The whole song is brighter, sunnier, better produced not to mention far better executed vocally thanks to IU basically being a goddess of the larynx, and listening to “Take On Me” after hearing this is like taking off your comfy slippers and putting on boots made of lead that are two sizes too small.  Fiestar hadn’t yet debuted when this came out, and the video cutely plays on the theme of IU being a mother figure, taking them under her wing and helping them on their way to implied success in life and the music industry.  It’s too early at this point to tell how Fiestar’s career will pan out for them, but that girl who wears the beanie at the end that looks like the reservoir tip of a condom is really cute so I hope she at least has a long career.

1.  Rania – “Style”

I must admit, I had long given up on Rania as a crappy group that I would never have any interest in whatsoever.  “Pop Pop Pop” and “Dr. Feelgood” were both go-nowhere songs that did absolutely nothing for me (with great visuals though I must admit ahem), and when I heard that my bias in this group, the Thai girl Joy (who had the cutest English speaking accent ever), had quit to focus on god only knows what, I really had stopped giving a shit about them even marginally.  So I’m as surprised as you are that they’re #1 on this list.  So what happened?  Well, they got YG to write a song for them instead of Teddy Riley, that’s part of it, but even by YG’s generally extremely bloody high songwriting standards this song is amazing.  Perfect synth arrangements, vocals that are sparse enough to let the music breathe but thick enough to provide a catchy chorus where it counts, lyrics that address the familiar k-pop theme of possessive men in relationships but with metaphors sophisticated and clever enough to rival any rapper, this song honestly doesn’t have a single thing wrong with it and makes all similar recent attempts at 80s synthpop by the likes of La Roux and Goldfrapp look positively half-assed.  Brilliant.  The only mystery to me is why YG outsourced this amazing song instead of keeping it for one of their in-house groups, but I guess I don’t really care who sings it tbh as long as I get to hear it.  Hell, I don’t even miss Joy anymore.  Much.

Thanks for reading this self-indulgent nonsense, I hope you enjoyed it, or at least got a laugh out of how crazy I am.  Feel free to share your equally worthless opinions below in the comments.

Let me put this into perspective – I don’t look like your average k-pop fan.  When strangers see me walk down the street with headphones on and judge purely by appearance they’re probably more likely to think that I’m listening to skinhead punk rock than anything like what you’re going to see in this blog.  The fact that I like k-pop always catches my friends by surprise, even my own girlfriend was like “YOU?  Like THIS?  No way…” when she found out.  So I thought I’d write this blog purely for my own benefit, so when people ask me about how and why I got into k-pop I can just lazily throw them a link to here rather than have the same conversation with each one of my friends and acquaintances about this, over and over.  And of course if any of them or anyone else happens to be entertained by this post, then that’s also great.  Conversely, if you don’t like it… I don’t know, you could always read something else, right?  Just a thought.

So.  Although I look like (and arguably am) a dirty aging punk rock scumbag who barely scraped through grade school, I’m actually very musically educated, probably far more so than whoever you are reading this right now, and that’s not even bragging, it’s just statistical truth.  Over a decade ago, I went to university for years and studied music, and walked out with a degree.  Then I went back in and did a graduate degree, plus a technical audio degree, just because I could do them.  I passed everything with top marks and little effort.  (Just stating facts once again.  If I wasn’t going through relationship hell in the last half of my Uni degree I would have done even better and would probably be lecturing there by now.  To this day I still get annoying spam mail from the university’s “Alumni association” asking me to be a part of their little hipster club just because I completed all of my degrees within the top 10% of graduates.  I haven’t bothered to write them a letter back to tell them to go and fuck themselves yet, I guess I’m just too busy being a nice guy.)  Anyway, while I was doing all this education, one of the many things that I studied was ethnomusicology – which is the study of music within culture.

The ethnomusicology lectures I attended weren’t that big, there were only half a dozen of us students.  “Music as it applies to culture” at this high level isn’t a popular, trendy subject – most university music graduates aim for further studies in performance or other more glamorous fields.  At one point each of us had to give a presentation to the group on an ethnomusicological topic.  I honestly can’t remember what I chose to present to the group, but it was probably boring as batshit.  I also can’t remember the name of the Korean girl in the group who chose to present a lecture to us all on k-pop.

Her English skills weren’t great, but they were good enough to get the job done, and when she started showing us video clips of the then-most-popular k-pop idol boy group H.O.T. it didn’t end up mattering.  The videos spoke for themselves.

She talked mainly about H.O.T. (being clearly an obsessed fangirl and making absolutely no attempt to hide it) with a few references to other groups such as S.E.S. and then went on to talk about the insanity of the Korean education system and how this affects the music.  She them proceeded to play a track with a heavy metal sound mixed in with the boy-group sound and said that most music with this kind of hybrid typically had lyrics dealing with either the problems in the Korean education system, or with the personal struggles of people going through that system.

I don’t know if this video here was the track she actually played, or if it was another one, but it’s certainly a good example of the kind of sound I’m talking about.  This is going back nearly 15 years so it’s hard for me to remember exact details.  To be honest, H.O.T.’s music didn’t impress me at the time – and still doesn’t.  While I liked the ambition it showed, k-pop seemed very clearly at least half a decade if not more behind western groups in terms of sonic production, visual style and music choices overall (James Brown “Funky Drummer” samples in the late 90s – we’re talking seriously out of step here, folks).   I was just intrigued that something like this existed at all, and since I’m a fan of all music generally I made a mental note that k-pop was a thing that existed and that I should really keep an eye on it just in case it starts getting better.

Fast forward a decade – I’m done with the education system and the band I’m in is on tour.  I’m a fairly anti-social person on tour, I really don’t like to hang out with the other guys much except when we’re at the venue about to play a show, the rest of the time I do my own thing.  It’s the way I prefer it, nothing against the other guys, I just like my space away from the madness.  With a few hours to kill before the show, I always like to wander the local city districts looking for interesting shit, like good places to eat and buy music.  In this particular case, I found a store dedicated to media from Asia (innovatively titled “Media Asia”) that had a ground floor full of DVDs and an upper level entirely dedicated to Asian popular music.

Going straight to the upper level of this building, I quickly encountered some ridiculously-packaged CDs, and walls adorned with several bigger-than-life-size posters of Girls’ Generation.  I looked at the ultra-sleek airbrushed-to-perfection images of the girls and thought to myself “okay, I obviously have to buy some of whatever THIS group is doing and check it out, I sense I’m missing out on something here”.  So I bought a DVD of collected Girls’ Generation stuff and some other stuff, and took it home.  There it sat for a month before I really had time to look at it properly.  But when I did… goddamn…

“Gee” was nothing new, I’d seen it before on some Internet forum where some guy was trying to weird some other guy out with something as cutesy as possible… and it wasn’t bad, but “Oh!” really sold me, and then there was the amazingly well crafted “Mr. Taxi”, “Visual Dreams” and “Chocolate Love”, all songs that made me think “this is as good as anything else out there in pop music… and a damn sight better than most of it… plus the performers actually seem somewhat talented… have I just discovered the ultimate musical utopia?”  A quick search of YouTube verified that this was indeed the case, and led to even better groups…

Damn.  This one was like La Roux’s “In For The Kill” but with better melody, better production and FAR more attractive performers.  I love La Roux but stopped listening to them immediately after discovering T-ara and haven’t started back up again.  Once you’ve had a six-course banquet it’s hard to go back to beans and rice every night, what can I say.  To this day I can’t find any artist in k-pop or any other pop for that matter with songs that match T-ara for sheer consistency of quality, and remember this is a qualified music professional talking to you, not some fucking grade-school nugu, so before you say “you don’t know what you’re talking about” STFU because I most certainly fucking do.  This song was my first confirmation that k-pop was not just keeping pace with but significantly ahead of the western world’s pop machine.

The Lady Gaga-ish vocal tone of CL in particular was an initial barrier to me liking 2NE1, but I got over it after a few listens.  With an image like THAT there was no way I could continue to ignore them, and before I knew it I was singing along to every song in their catalogue.  Eh eh eh eh eh (guess which one, ha).

Everywhere I looked in “What’s Related” on YouTube there were more great songs.  In this example k-pop even turned made-for-TV Europop into something not only listenable but genuinely incredible, with only a few subtle changes, like an actual budget, more charisma, better production and removing the sleaze (and I’m a big fan of sleaze, so increasing the quality of anything by removing sleaze is like some kind of magician’s trick as far as I’m concerned).  And to think this was the same company that brought out H.O.T…

Shit.  K-pop just blew my mind.

-

Another thing:

I never intended for this blog to be consumed outside of my immediate circle of radio listeners and friends in the music scene and elsewhere, but it’s come to my attention that this is happening anyway just because people in the international community are interested.  Gosh, that’s nice, I guess I really don’t care who reads this, or how popular/unpopular it is, it’s here for my personal satisfaction as a compliment to the radio show that I run and really no other reason, however if some of you are extracting some entertainment value out of all this (even if it’s just to laugh at my opinions and ranting) then all good.  Be aware that this isn’t like other k-pop blogs where people just let anyone say any old shit – I police my comments section with an iron fist.  I don’t care about how many or few comments I get, I’m not interested in popularity or being trendy, I only care about comment quality.  I’d rather have no comments than some dickheads on here talking grandiose amounts of turd.  Some of you people reading this are probably from one of those strange, unusual countries that has concepts like “freedom of speech” enshrined in your constitution and feel that this is offensive because you believe that you have some kind of God-given right to be a complete cunt on the Internet.  Well, my country doesn’t have anything like that, so your freedoms to act like a child-molesting fuckstain in public for entertainment certainly don’t apply as far as I’m concerned.  You have the freedom to either be nice on my blog or STFU and those are the only two options you get.  If you can deal with that, I’m sure we’ll get along just fine.  Here’s a lovely heartfelt message to show you all just how much I love you.

Oh shit… sorry, wrong one.

That’s better.  Peace and love, folks.  Friends, don’t let friends drive drunk.  Respect the elderly.  Look both ways.  Buy pets from animal shelters not pet stores.  Etc.

Okay, there was going to be this grand k-pop concert happening in Australia in a few days, and I was going to go to it.

Looks pretty good, right?  Well, scratch all that because it got fucking cancelled.  Well, okay, “postponed” is more technically correct, as I believe the company involved is going try and reschedule it for later this year or early 2014, but it might as well be cancelled because I’ve already booked flights for Sydney and now I’m just going to go over there and twiddle my thumbs (and raid Sydney’s Media Asia ahem).  I had a meet-and-greet pass for this concert too, so I was going to get to meet my ultimate k-pop bias who is Raina from After School/Orange Caramel and now that’s not going to happen either.  THANKS FOR CRUSHING MY DREAMS, [name of organisers deleted because I'm a nice guy].

On top of that, I had planned to take a ton of photos over there and do a big blog for your entertainment/education about what it’s actually like to attend one of these big k-pop events, but of course, now that’s not going to fucking happen either, is it.  NO IT IS NOT.  Fuck.  I guess “what it’s like” is a lot like sitting around at home blogging because the fucking gig got cancelled, ISN’T THAT RIGHT [name of organisers deleted because I'm a nice guy].

So, it looks like YouTube is the closest I’m going to get to seeing any live k-pop in the near future.  So I thought this week on the radio show I’d do a quick round-up of my favourite live k-pop performances on YouTube.

I might as well start with Orange Caramel, then (sob, sniff).

Here they are, doing a great rendition of the old trot song “Love’s Battery”, on some TV show, but it’s done in typically uptempo Orange Caramel style (not that OC don’t also do ballads, but the upbeat songs are what they’re known for and rightly so) and they’ve even slipped in some of the dance routines from their other songs.  Raina (wearing the cowboy hat) is the best singer in OC, but Nana and Lizzy do a fine job too.  It’s a simple song anyway, what makes this performance awesome is… well, just LOOK at it.  Do I really need to explain the appeal of this to you?  What are you, ten years old?  Have your balls dropped yet?

This performance is After School Blue, which is the “aegyo half” of After School’s lineup at that time – thus, Raina and Lizzy are also in this performance.  One thing I really like about After School and Orange Caramel is that they use little or no backing vocal track in live performances.  It’s common practice in k-pop for artists to just play the studio recording live on stage, complete with vocals, but with a sort of ‘karaoke EQ” job done on it so the vocals are a bit lower in volume, and just sing over the top of that.  I have no idea why it’s usually done this way as opposed to singing over an instrumental mix.  The cynic in me thinks that perhaps it’s because some of these girls can’t sing that great, but I don’t buy that explanation given how much training they go through, and even the very worst Korean pop vocalists can make a far better fist of a vocal performance than SAW-era Kylie Minogue or Spice Girls.

I think a far more likely explanation is that mixing live vocals smoothly in k-pop is just difficult, and it allows the engineers some margin for error in setting levels.  To explain why it’s so difficult for engineers to get it right, let’s take a look at one of my favourite T-ara performances:

This particular T-ara performance is from a concert for the military, and it’s downright hilarious to listen to the soldiers all go predictably apeshit when T-ara get into their booty-shaking moves.  There wouldn’t have been too many clean sheets in the barracks that night.

Now I’m a big T-ara fan, but I’m the first to admit that they’re probably one of the most shortchanged groups out there when it comes to raw vocal talent.  In this performance the group has seven girls, two with very strong, trained voices (Eunjung, Soyeon), two with quite weak voices (Qri, Boram), two somewhere in between (Jiyeon, Hyomin) and one who is basically only a rapper and therefore just decoration in a song with no rap parts and shouldn’t really even be holding a microphone in this song at all (Hwayoung).  I’ve got no problem with all that though – better skill doesn’t always mean a more appealing performance, often it’s the reverse because people who can show off often do show off and that can take away from the original vision and melodic structure of the actual song.  That’s why Kurt Cobain sold more records than Steve Vai, and it’s why I’ve got every CD T-ara ever put out at home but I still haven’t gotten around to buying anything from the far more vocally skilled but musically unlistenable CSJH The Grace.  The problems with the mix are clearly audible – Hyomin is mixed too high at 0:41, most of the other girls are too quiet, someone who isn’t singing obviously still has their mic on and gives it a decently audible knock at 1:50 that nicely stuffs up one of Soyeon’s parts, Eunjung also doesn’t sit right at 2:04, and so on.  These things are hard for an engineer to anticipate because every girl is singing at a different volume, and has the microphone at a different position relative to their mouths when they DO sing, and these positions and volumes constantly change over time, and on top of that not everyone is singing all the time, so the only window of opportunity to make adjustments is when the vocals are actually going.  When Hyomin cuts in at 0:41 and she’s way too loud, the engineer must quickly look at who is singing, then has to find out which one of the 64 faders on his mixing desk controls her vocal and fix the problem.  This takes him about four seconds, and you can hear Hyomin’s vocal volume decrease between 0:41 and 0:45 as the engineer realises what’s happening and quickly makes that adjustment, and that’s about all the time he’s got because she only sings about 4 seconds worth of vocals right then.  For a good engineer this is almost instinct.  If the engineer was any slower than that, he would have missed his chance – the vocals would still be too high and the next time Hyomin sung a part in the same song it’d still sound bad.

All of these are mixing issues, nothing to do with the actual singing quality.  These type of problems are further compounded when k-pop singers use headset microphones, which most of them do.

I really love miss A’s “Touch” comeback stages, with the rose petals, and they’re such great dancers so it’s always a pleasure to watch them, and Min and Jia are super-hot.  The vocals are a bit shaky though, and once again the actual singing quality of the performers has little to do with it.  Headset mics mean that singers can’t “gain ride” as they sing by pulling the microphone further away from their mouths when they do a high note, and bringing it back in close for the whispery parts, to even out the volume.  So if the singers can’t do that, how can it possibly come out sounding even?  One answer is a shit-ton of compression on the vocal channel, which does all the evening-out automatically, but this then brings in a host of other problems (fluctuating ambient noise, the potential for feedback in low gain stages, automated gain-reducing response times that are set on a strict timer and don’t adapt to the delivery of contrasting vocal parts, etc etc)… or the engineer can do it himself, riding the gain depending on the singer’s voice, but this requires prior familiarity of both the song and how the singer sings, plus how the singer might feel like singing the song on that particular day, and in the meantime the engineer also has to be watching everything else that’s happening.  In short – whichever way you slice it, good fucking luck.

So when it all actually sounds pretty good live, it’s a minor miracle.  Backing track or not.

I love this performance of arguably SHINee’s two greatest songs, they totally nail those dance routines to the wall, and it even sounds pretty damn good.  Plus I can’t get enough of that jump at 6:59 and I must confess that I’m guilty of looking through every live performance of “Sherlock” on YouTube that I can find to see if I can find one where they fuck it up and they never do.  SM artists always seem to have these big-ass headset microphones on with the big circular diaphragm that covers almost their entire lips, and I don’t know if those mics are better or what but it makes sense that the biggest label in k-pop can afford the most expensive shit, even if it’s kinda ugly looking and the fangirls don’t get to see their idols’ unobstructed faces.

Of course it logically follows that it’s a lot easier and a lot less to think about to mix just one vocalist, and that’s the real reason why solo performers just tend to sound better than groups.

BoA’s “Only One” dance routine is totally amazing, as are a lot of SM routines, they really have choreographers who think outside the square.  I’m no dancing expert (dancing is one of the few fields of music performance that I actually know as little about as the average layperson) but I know when I like what I see.  Also a great song, and one that BoA wrote herself.  It’s unusual but refreshing to see self-penned k-pop as feature tracks from the big label artists.

I also can’t go past TVXQ’s “hulk dance” moves in the “Catch Me” breakdowns.  How do people even think up this awesome shit.

Another great facet of live k-pop performances, whether it’s live on a TV show or live on a stage, is the set design and props.  Here’s 2NE1 taking full advantage of their ‘female empowerment’ motif by pushing around various hapless captive guys.

Even more impressive is that the live concert version of this that they performed at around the same time is exactly the same, but I couldn’t find a video of it.  Just go and buy 2NE1′s “Nolza!” DVD and check it out there, you won’t regret it.

2NE1 are great to watch because of their amazing stage presence, especially CL.  She’s got that sort of stage power that only the best rock and metal singers have, people like Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson, or Axl Rose in his prime.  If Axl chucked a sickie before a G’n'R set I could very easily see CL filling his shoes and belting out Paradise City or something.  Sure, the audience would hate it but in terms of stage presence, she could do that.  2NE1 are also a group where the four individual personalities really shine through separately on stage, something that can’t be said of a lot of groups to be honest.  They probably sacrifice a bit of visual cohesion for that, but that’s okay, it’s better to be unusual than in-sync.

Another favourite prop of mine in live performances is snow.  Here’s T-ara getting snowed on:

Notice the much better vocal balance and performances compared to the previous T-ara video, and how everyone actually sounds great this time.  Nothing to do with the song itself which is actually a much harder task to perform than Bo Peep vocally, the real reason for the improved vocal quality is that ballads have longer vocal phrasing which gives engineers more time to think and pull correct levels.

Another thing I’m a fan of in k-pop performances is any kind of overt hip-hop influence:

This performance by SPEED becomes increasingly insane as it goes on, starting off with some pretty standard rapping, then we get the great hand-dance from “It’s Over” and some phenomenal floor moves from the group near the end.  Both the songs are amazingly good, probably my new favourite male k-pop group.  Trust CCM to deliver the top-notch song quality as always.  Also I love the random Davichi members who just turn up out of nowhere.

E.via is another great artist, highly underrated, with rapping skills like this she needs to be more popular.  A pity she’s in some Block B-style mess with her record label right now, I hope she sorts it out and releases more stuff.

I’ve got to admit I’m not a wild fan of GLAM but check that floor move from 0:22.

I am a wild fan of Crayon Pop though.  A group doing genuinely different concepts in the k-pop scene, these girls deserve to be adored.  I love the popping and locking moves and the random splicing of Daft Punk in there (which isn’t on the studio version, obviously).  I actually hate Daft Punk for the sheer weight of their mind-numbing boring repetition but 8 bars of it in the middle of a Crayon Pop song is pitching my tolerance of their Johnny one-note crapstep about right.

You can see where all this is going.  The best thing about k-pop live performances is that competition is fierce and everyone is trying to upstage each other all the time, and find a way to be remembered.  That’s where it gets really interesting.  Before you know it, here comes CL with a fucking parrot.

Or A-JAX with occupational-health-and-safety-unfriendly dance moves (at 3:00):

Or Sistar, with their byun-friendly dance routines and outfits.  Look at all the guys in this video getting busted perving while totally slack-jawed – hilarious, and honestly who can blame them:

Or f(x) just… being f(x), which is enough.

I’m going to leave you with Amber from f(x) and Eunjung from T-ara together covering PSY’s “Champion”.  Because it’s awesome.

If you don’t absolutely love Amber and Eunjung together, you suck and don’t even talk to me or click on this blog ever again you fucking cunt, cheers.

Anyway that’s it.  I hope you enjoyed the live gig report that wasn’t.  Maybe next time someone organises a k-pop event down here they’ll actually know how to do it right and I’ll actually get to see it, and then I can blog about it, now wouldn’t that be nice [name of organisers deleted because I'm a nice guy].

I didn’t want to waste my flights to Sydney to go and see the k-pop concert that got canned, so I thought I’d go to Sydney anyway and do a bit of shopping. Since I can’t blog about the concert, I’ll just blog about Sydney instead and share with you the k-pop and travel-related knowledge I gained while wandering about, just in case you should ever happen to find yourself in Australia’s biggest city as a k-pop fan and wonder where and how you can buy stuff:

* The Sydney train system is awesome and runs like clockwork on weekdays, but weekends are hit and miss because they’re always doing track work. This can add tons of time to a journey so plan in advance for delays if you’re travelling on a weekend. The train system is also really expensive, and not just the tickets. Don’t buy anything from the train station vending machines where a single bottle of water starts at $4. In the city you can get off the train and find people selling water and snacks on street corners for 25% of the price less than a block away. There is also a train line that goes directly from the city to the airport which is worth knowing about, and fuck me that shit is expensive but it’s probably still cheaper than a taxi. Use the trains, the buses are shitty and don’t run on time because every time there’s an accident on the freeway (which is, all the time) your bus gets stuck in traffic and FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DON’T EVEN CONSIDER DRIVING ANYWHERE EVER EVER EVER. And don’t bicycle it on the freeway or you will die as some poor unfortunate person found out while I was there.

* If you are k-pop shopping (which you will be, because you have good taste, and because the k-pop gig you will have come to see will no doubt be cancelled by the time you get there, so you will need something to fucking do), you will want to get off at the Central station and go directly to Media Asia which is on 50 Dixon St (which is actually a mall) and only a few blocks away. There you will find pretty much everything you could ever want that’s k-pop related – CDs, merch, k-dramas, etc. Everything is helpfully sorted by genre and taste (in a genius move, the boy bands and the girl bands are on different shelves) and you can even buy pop and movies from other Asian countries as well, should you happen to be one of those strange raincoat-wearing people who likes a lot of that j-pop stuff.

* Sydney also have Korean gift-shop chain Morning Glory but the k-pop selection there isn’t significantly better than that in other Australian cities, and as usual things are in glass cases so you can’t really browse properly, and only one of the many city chain stores actually stocks k-pop – in this case, the one you’re looking for is not the one in the Dixon St mall next to Media Asia but just up the hill and around the corner on Goulburn St. Might be worth a look if you’re a VVIP member but don’t get too excited – my collection at home is bigger. Significantly bigger.

Good luck playing “find the artist”.

* You’ll probably trip over a few bums on your way. Sydney is full of homeless people, but they’re not like the homeless where I live who will come up to you and molest you in public for change. Sydney homeless folks just stand on a busy street corner with a cardboard sign asking for stuff. One guy had a sign that said he wanted money for his vet bills. He had three dogs with him – the dogs looked healthier than he did. In the meantime I can’t afford to take my own cats to the vet so fuck that. Another guy wanted $5 which I thought was a bit optimistic. I refuse to give money to homeless people because you never know if they’re really going to do with it what they say they will (I went out with a girl many years ago who told me she would beg for money for food and use it to feed her heroin habit, she said on a good day she could make $80 an hour), but I’ll help them out in other ways when I can. Some other guy had a sign saying he just wanted food and water so I gave him my water bottle. This instantly makes me a more charitable person than at least 95% of you reading this and probably 100% of Korean netizens.

* Speaking of money, prices for Media Asia and Morning Glory are about the same. You’re still better off cost-wise buying online at YesAsia, but the good thing about browsing is that it’s easier to find shit that you didn’t even know about. I bought a 2CD edition of T-ara’s Roly Poly that I didn’t know was a thing that existed.

* There are also some stores around that have k-pop stuff that looks like it’s for the Chinese market (oo-argh me hearties, thar be knockoff DVDs). A store called Laser City is in one of the malls off Dixon St and stocks these weird video DVD compilations of k-pop sorted by artist, and they seem to have one for every popular artist. The strangest thing of all is that for artists who only have a few videos out, they will fill up the rest of the DVD running time with live versions, and then when they run out of those – songs from completely different artists! The f(x) compilation that I saw there had about 10 different groups on it. Also some of the DVDs are a bit temperamental in certain DVD players – but on the plus side, they are really cheap, so it might be worth taking a punt, especially if you’re trying to track down hard-to-find Japanese-market videos like 2NE1′s “Scream”.

* Laser City and Media Asia both stock k-dramas, and for around the same price. I must admit I’ve never really gotten into k-drama, but I figured I’d give it a go, so I picked up some k-dramas with T-ara members in them. I have to keep it relevant to k-pop, and that way, at least if the drama is shit I can still get my value from watching the T-ara members. I’ll post some DVD reviews on this blog once I’ve gotten around to watching them (don’t hold your breath). Also I want to financially support k-pop idols being in dramas because I think that’s a good thing which should be encouraged. Don’t give me that shit about “they’re taking away opportunities from real actors” crap, idols draw international audiences into the dramas and give exposure to the other actors that DO appear that they otherwise probably wouldn’t even get. In netizen fantasy-land an idol is supposed to be an amazing singer and nothing else, but an idol’s job is really to be a jack of all trades, a multi-faceted media personality who can do a little bit of everything – it’s what they do. So don’t hate on them for doing their job, because it marks you out as a fucking retarded dipshit, like the reporter in this video who got his ass served by someone with an actual brain:

Justin Timberlake was the best thing in A Social Network so fuck that reporter.

* Still on the k-drama here, I picked up a copy of “Five Fingers”, the infamous flop drama that T-ara’s Eunjung was going to be in, but then was booted out from at the last minute because the production company stupidly thought that netizens’ trendy T-ara hate was a relevant litmus test of popular opinion, ha, WRONG. Predictably, the drama flopped without Eunjung’s presence in it. That however hasn’t stopped the production company from using her image on the front cover anyway!

There she is on the far right – what a bunch of cunts her production company are. It says a lot about her grace and humility as a person that she didn’t take them to the cleaners for every penny they had.

* Speaking of T-ara and how awesome and popular they are (and I WILL keep mentioning them in every single blog until netizens learn to be nice to them), I just happened to be walking by a karaoke bar and what was on the big screen but T-ara’s “Sexy Love” video. This is in a city where 95% of the population only know “Gangnam Style”.

So much for “their career is over”, etc. In the meantime, a nearby clothing store had a “nothing over $10″ sale which included a whole rack of “Gangnam Style” t-shirts, which tells you everything you need to know about the likely future prospects of k-pop as a mainstream western cultural phenomenon for the time being. K-pop as a whole has all the signs at the moment of a stock that’s been over-valued. It’s never going to be more than a niche concern in the west for the immediate future, yet people are pushing it like it’s the next big thing. Hence big budget k-pop concerts that fail at the last minute, many talented artists consistently almost-but-not-quite breaking it in the west, the big three k-pop labels taking a dip in share prices every time their quarterly reports come out… but that’s okay though. Something doesn’t have to be popular to be good. It just means things might be a bit frustrating for a while, as people gradually get a clue. People promoting k-pop in western countries need to stop believe the industry’s own hype and should think smaller if they want the events to actually happen, here’s hoping that they learn from the dismal failure of the Heart concert. As Australia experiences higher Asian populations, the fortunes of k-pop here will change, but it will be a gradual shift, not a big explosion.

So that’s my Sydney trip, or the relevant parts anyway. Oh, if you want to eat in Sydney I recommend a great Vietnamese restaurant called Pasteur which you’ll find on George St on your way from the trains to the k-pop stores. Best place I’ve found to eat in Sydney – and cheap (well, cheap for Sydney). Tell them KPOPALYPSE sent you (and it’ll confuse the shit out of them and you might get kicked out but it’ll be funny and you can tell me what happened). And don’t go to the tourist areas, that’s for dickheads who do dickhead stuff like look at buildings and go “wow” like they’ve never seen a fucking building before in their lives. Peace and love, kids.

Today a fellow DJ, Mr Adam Mondayitis (who does the show before my own, full of weird and wonderful music that you should check out sometime), mentioned that he could devise a great KPOPALPYSE drinking game from my show, given that k-pop tends to conform to certain rules and trends. I hastily agreed with him and told him to send me a list. He’s done so, and it’s suitably inspired – I’ve also edited and added to it significantly. Thanks to him and also Millie Williams for help with this.

(Oh, and this is for speculative entertainment purposes only, KPOPALYPSE encourages responsible drinking by adults only. *high-fives legal team*)

KPOPALYPSE DRINKING GAME

MUSIC AND LYRICS:

Your personal ultimate k-pop bias (only one permitted, must be declared before game starts) has a solo part: 1 shot per part
Eurovision-esque key change near the end of the song: 1 shot
Completely out of place dubstep drop: 1 shot
“Oppa”: 1 shot per song
“Molla Molla”: 1 shot per song
Rap bit out of nowhere and at warp fucking speed: 1 shot
Cringeworthy swag/thugged-out spoken song introduction in English: 1 shot
Cringeworthy aegyo-style spoken song introduction in English: 2 shots
Nonsensical Engrish chorus or refrain: 1 shot (for each new lyric heard, not for repetitions of previously heard lyrics)
Girl group cutely mispronounces something: 1 shot (for each new lyric heard, not for repetitions of previously heard lyrics)
Money note: Skull for the duration of the money note
Male group R&B ballad with less balls than your average eunuch: 1 shot
Random-sounding English swearing from a Korean hip-hop artist: 1 shot per swear word
Synth that sounds like an air raid siren: 1 shot (take another shot at the end of the song if it contained no rapping)
Astonishing similarity to a Western pop hit from 5 years ago: 2 shots
Astonishing similarity to or blatant sample of an 80s pop hit: 2 shots
Whenever I play PSY’s “Gangnam Style” or Girls’ Generation’s “Gee”: Finish the bottle. If the bottle is less than half full, open a fresh bottle and drink that.

GENERAL BROADCAST RELATED:

Complete failure of myself to get my tongue around a band or song name: 1 shot
I forward-announce a song and it takes over ten seconds to be audible after I stop talking: 1 shot
Annoying MV sound effects noticeable in the audio stream: 1 shot per song
I try to play a song and it won’t play at all: 2 shots
A song stops halfway through for no apparent reason: 2 shots
I mention the Facebook page: 1 shot
I mention this blog: 2 shots
I give something away on air: 2 shots
I give something away on air and you win it: Finish the bottle. If the bottle is less than half full, open a fresh bottle and drink that.

EXTRA-MUSICAL FLUFF:

The following count only if specifically mentioned on-air by me before playing the song:

Androgynous male in the group: 1 shot
Androgynous female in the group: 2 shots
Male group have their shirts open in the video for the song: 1 shot
Female group showing unusual amounts of cleavage for a k-pop group: 1 shot
Song from male group containing member who just started National Service: 1 shot
New song from female group who just ousted a member over some petty crap: 1 shot
Female wearing an item of clothing with polka-dots on it on the CD cover: 1 shot
Male group with token female: 1 shot
Female group with token male: 2 shots
Group played that is currently in the midst of a controversy and this is explicitly mentioned on-air as at least part of the reason for the airplay: 1 shot, or 2 if it’s a cross-group speculative love affair controversy.
Plastic surgery mentioned: 1 shot
Whenever I play a song hated by the K-pop world and say I like it: 1 shot for a female group, 2 for a male group
Whenever I play a song that I say I don’t really like that much even though it’s by a group that I usually adore: 1 shot for a male group, 2 for a female group
K-pop merchandise mentioned: 1 shot
Justin Bieber singing toothbrush or other outlandish Western pop merchandise mentioned: 2 shots
Whenever I mention a controversy and explicitly take the side of either the Korean netizens or Korean music press spreading the controversy instead of the artist I’m about to play: Finish the bottle. If the bottle is less than half full, open a fresh bottle and drink that.

Sage advice courtesy of Adam Mondayitis: For those who actually want to play this game for real, do NOT do this with shots of straight spirits, unless you are Shane MacGowan you will probably die. Do it with sips of beer if you want to get crazy party drunk, or do it with shots of a medium strength liqueur (Cowboys, a Baileys variant, Midori, Tia Maria etc) to get completely fucked in half drunk. Trust me on this, I know as much about heavy drinking as Alan does about K-pop.

Sage advice from me: don’t play this game. Or if you absolutely must, at least don’t play this game and then ask me the next day where your shit is that you left at the party last night, or what actually happened there. Because I wasn’t there, I went home. Do you think I wanted to put up with your drunken ass singing “Sorry, Sorry” in my ear all night?

And just in case you wondered if I just made that Justin Bieber thing up, here you go – enjoy.

T-ara gifs courtesy of roselily01 and qrination at Allkpop. Bieber picture courtesy of my local chemist.

Some of you may have noticed my generally negative comments about netizens (Korean Internet users who comment on articles) from time to time. That’s because netizens are mostly fucking stupid, herd-mentality misogynist, racist dickheads – just like the kind of people who comment on YouTube videos. The sad twist is that in Korea, netizens do actually hold a certain amount of actual power (albeit far less than they act like they have) and aren’t completely disregarded like they are in the west. There’s quite a few blogs out there that write very insightful articles about Korean pop media and the baffling statements from netizens who leave comments on Korean pop media articles. I could cover this phenomenon in-depth, but it’s such well-worn territory that I hardly see the point. Sites like Netizenbuzz, Asian Junkie, Anti K-pop Fangirl and many others deal with these issues far better than I ever could, the Netizenbuzz FAQ is where I would start for anyone completely new to this.

So instead of boring you all rigid with a lecture on the length and breadth of these turds and their stupidity, I thought I’d have a little fun on “Quickmeme”. The following images will hopefully give you a brief run-down of what I think of the netizen point of view on life in an entertaining format without me having to write a fucking boring essay about it.

For those who already know all about netizens, the following images won’t need explaining and you’ll instantly resonate with them in some way. For the rest of you, I highly recommend that you search out the aforementioned blog sites and do some reading. Make sure you’re away from sharp objects or you may just spontaneously stab yourself in the throat as all faith in humanity is lost and a wave of “I don’t want to live in this world anymore” washes over you.

I actually used almost no poetic license with these. Most of them are direct quotes from netizens, and ALL of them refer to real life events (avid k-pop gossip followers will know which ones).

Stay safe, kids. And don’t be a fuckwit on the Internet. Peace.

I thought it might be nice to reprint here as a nice introduction to my worldview and taste in k-pop. Enjoy. Or not. I’m pretty sure these weren’t the kind of answers the OP was fishing for.

1. Who was your first boy group? That I heard of – H.O.T. That I liked, SHINee.

2. Who was your first girl group? SNSD.

3. First song? That I heard, probably H.O.T – We Are The Future. That I liked, SNSD “Oh!”.

4. favorite girl group? T-ara.

5. Favorite boy group? SPEED, although BigBang is close behind.

6. Favorite song? T-ara – Roly Poly. The perfect k-pop song, structurally, melodically, production-wise. The benchmark for the entire genre.

7. first OTP? I had to Google this just to find out what it meant. One True Partnership? Are you people fucking kidding me? I don’t really do this shit… I mean, I’m an adult, I have actual partners, I don’t need a pretendy one…

8. Favorite OTP? see above

9. Kara or SNSD? SNSD are more consistent quality overall but I think a few select KARA tracks like “Wanna” are better than anything by SNSD. So I dunno, you choose.

10. Exo or BAP? Not familiar enough with EXO’s material to give an informed opinion.

11. SJ or Bigbang? BigBang just going on latest output, but SJ have some great earlier songs.

12. Bias from girl group? Raina from Orange Caramel, although if she’s not returning my calls I’ll settle for T-ara’s Eunjung.

13. Bias from guy group? I’m a heterosexual male but if I ever go gay I’d like to think I’d be into BigBang’s T.O.P. because he’s rather suave. Although knowing my luck if I turned gay tomorrow I’d be into some weedy little pipsqueak like G-Dragon. I guess you never know until you go.

14. Favorite SNSD song? Chocolate Love (I know f(x) also did it but SNSD’s is better).

15. Favorite Nu’est song? The one that isn’t a ballad but doesn’t have a needless dubstep drop shoehorned in at the 2-minute mark, how about that. Sorry, my memory is hazy on Nu’est.

16 Favorite BAP song? One Shot, although any song of theirs where they’re doing the heavy metal/rap influenced “look how badass we are” thing rather than the sappy One Direction-ish “we’re nice guys really” thing is good.

17. Dorkiest idol? maybe SNSD’s Seohyun. Dorky in a good way, like a librarian. I’d ask to see her reference section.

18. most underrated group? Crayon Pop by a wide margin – something genuinely different in a genre where most acts are the same. Of course they get hate, which just means they’re awesome.

19. Most mature idol? I don’t know what you mean by “mature” here so I’ll pass on this one.

20. best rapper? E.via (now Tymee) – a rare case in music where the technically best performer is also the most tolerable to listen to.

21. Best vocalist? 2NE1′s BOM! I know she can’t sing, but if we’re talking about “who I actually like to listen to” as opposed to “who can sing the best”, I’ll take Bom’s broken, stuttery, strained, jaw-flapping mess over the intolerable showoffy wank of the technically best singers in k-pop any day. Bom has basically no natural ability and sings with pain a lot due to her lymph node condition, but she DOES IT ANYWAY, BECAUSE FUCK IT, I’M GONNA BE A SINGER AND FUCK YOU and because of that her delivery has charisma and charm which is 100000 times more important than actually knowing what you’re doing – ideologically, she’s more punk-rock than anything in k-pop. Maximum respect.

22. best leader? T-ara’s Soyeon by such a wide margin that it’s not even funny. To lead T-ara through the crisis and hate that they had to continued commercial success shows true guts and, dare I say it, REAL determination (as opposed to what netizens think determination is in their wet power fantasies). She makes other k-pop “leaders” look like leaders in name only. She didn’t even give up the leadership role at the end of last year (which she could have easily done and was expected to do so – T-ara have rotating leadership and they usually swap it every 12 months) – clearly she’s keen to be certain the ship is sailing right before she lets go of the wheel. You can’t fuck with that integrity.

23. Best maknae? I don’t generally keep track of idol’s ages. T-ara’s Dani springs to mind. Any 13 year old girl getting hated on by cyberbullies before she’s even debuted but who refuses to give up or even acknowledge the hatred deserves respect. Imagine yourself at that age and every fuckhead in the world with a keyboard and an opinion thinks you’re shit, thinks you’re being raped by your CEO, or thinks you should debut in some nobody group instead of the extremely awesome group you’re going to debut in, wouldn’t it just make you want to load up an AK47 and pay a surprise visit to some Internet cafes, of course it would. Netizens should thank Dani daily for the fact that they are still breathing.

24. weirdest idol? I don’t know what you mean by “weird”. Most people who meet me think I’m weird so I’m not going to go around pointing fingers at someone I don’t even know. Idols do a job, they’re not actually like that, so if they have a weird image it’s just part of the job. You people all know that, right? I’m stating the obvious, right? Right?

25. Favorite variety show? Fuck variety shows, seriously. I hate how they underline the jokes with stupid captions and replayed footage because they seem to think their audience are all idiots who won’t understand the joke unless it’s shoved down their throat multiple times. Patronising trash made by morons, for morons. Fuck. All. Variety. Shows. (And before any of you fucking start, I think western TV is trash too. I don’t watch it, I don’t even have working TV reception where I live and although that situation would cost me about $10 to rectify, I can’t justify the expense, so I haven’t watched TV in my own home for about 11 years now).

26. Block B or BAP? Either/or. Both very good when they’re not doing ballads.

27. Zico or Bang Yongguk? Don’t care

28. Banghim or Kaisoo? I’m a thinking adult who is not mentally ill, so I don’t do this “ship” stuff. Although “banghim” has a nice ring to it, hahaha.

29. Banglo or Taoris? see above

30. DaeJae or HunHan? see above

31. Least favorite idol from girl group? Don’t have one, although I always get a few of the girls in SNSD mixed up and that annoys me, I wish they would dye their hair different colours for easier identification. Sunny had the right idea, but she’s one of the few who doesn’t actually need colour-coding because she’s easily identifiable by her short height, unique face and actual boobs.

32. least favorite idol from boy group? Don’t have one, some of SuJu come off badly in public statements sometimes but I don’t know them personally so I won’t judge, my experience in the music industry is enough to tell me that you can never judge any celeb by the dumb-ass public statements they make.

33. Favorite indie group? The word “indie” has no meaning when applied to any music scene, so I refuse to answer this question on moral/factual grounds. Often “indie” or “independent” artists refers to groups on major labels with mega budgets, and stylistically in terms of actual music it doesn’t mean anything either because an “indie” band can sound identical to something on any other label with technology these days, especially in ballad form. In the west all the big k-pop labels would qualify as “indie” labels because of their business structure which just goes to show you how meaningless the concept of “indie” is. So this question cannot be answered. All the groups that you think are “k-indie” are actually just k-pop groups with less choreography.

34. Least favorite boy group? 2AM. Boy group ballads are just not my thing so a group specialising in just that is obviously not interesting to me.

35. Least favorite girl group? Busker Busker. Don’t tell me they’re guys, I don’t believe you. No self-respecting man would make music like that. They’re so sleepy and dull that they make the last three Weezer albums sound relevant. It’s easy to see why ultra-conservative South Korea loves them, they’re so docile and non-threatening like a puppy with valium in its dog food.

36. Why do you like Kpop? The better k-pop is recapturing what was great about western pop in the 80s, the west has forgotten how to make good pop music since. Of course there’s a lot of crap in k-pop too, but same goes for any genre.

So I saw the thread on Netizenbuzz about G-Dragon’s hat with the word “cunt” on it.

This picture is actually several months old, and I’ve seen it before, so I have no idea why it’s being brought up in Korean media right now all of a sudden.  It’s a fucking stupid photo, G-Dragon looks like a tool (when does he not, let’s be honest here folks, sure he’s creative and talented but he’s such a weedy looking dude and without his involvement in k-pop nobody would look at the guy twice except to sweep a driveway or something), but it’s also done fairly tongue-in-cheek.  I bet you have gone into a store, seen a fucking stupid hat that you wouldn’t wear in a million years, and tried it on while someone took a dumbass photo of you – that’s obviously what this is.

Of course, Korean netizens are crying about it like it’s their business and they are OH SO SRS as per:

1. [+107, -14] Can he please check the words on his clothing before he wears them? I can’t even imagine how tough his fangirls have it

2. [+108, -10] GD, please think before you wear things. How many times have you been on the chopping block for things like this?

And western netizens are no better, here’s part of the wonderful chat I had with the good people who comment on Netizenbuzz, where everyone strains themselves to be as much like Korean netizens as possible in the hope that one day their dreams will come true and they’ll wake up Korean:

The video I linked, I recommend you all watch it, educational purposes y’all:

And you’ve got NO IDEA how much it pains me to link a video of The Young Turks because I really don’t like them AT ALL, I really don’t like the guy, but the girl is saying stuff that many of my less-uptight female friends have also said, so I thought it was a good example.  It saves me from having to type out all that shit about how opinions on the word aren’t universal among females like you would think and some see it as an empowering word and blah fuckin’ blah…  Anyway… the conversation continues:

And that right there sums up the netizen hive-mind the world over.

Something that I didn’t add to my argument, because whenever I mention to strangers online that I’m a music industry professional and therefore I actually have somewhat of an informed opinion about music industry matters, they act like I just told them to eat their own shit in a bucket: I like G-Dragon’s hat not because I like G-Dragon (I don’t mind the odd BigBang song but I’m not about to drop to my knees and suck the guy off) but because I have actually created clothes like what he’s wearing, for the express purpose of offending as many people as possible. For publicity. Yes, it fucking worked.

Presenting some of my old band’s merchandise, modelled by the lovely Danni Du Bois:

Okay, so the hair and the gun is in the way of the text, but the t-shirt says “PROBLEM, CUNT?” and my old punk band made these shirts and we would sell them at shows.  Both men and women bought them.  One guy even got himself beaten up when he went around town with one of our shirts on, drunkenly yelling “Problem, Cunt?” at people – which is kind of funny actually.  He came back to us after with the shirt ripped and blood all over it and we gave him another one.  We also sold other items of clothing with the same slogan, and had a few different designs.

Obviously I don’t need to explain my position on this any further.  Stephen Fry sums it up nicely, saving me even more typing:

As for the Korean idols who wear supposedly offensive slogans in English, which happens quite a lot it seems, I have no idea how clued in their wardrobe departments are about the swearing and what it means, I would assume maybe some of them know, and the bigger labels all have English-speaking staff, so I’m sure it’s not just all slipping through the net out of ignorance, but I don’t care really.  I laugh when I see idols wearing supposedly offensive shit, I think it’s great, especially as the music is so sweet and syrupy.  I dig the juxtaposition of those elements.

Like I care if others can’t deal with it, in Korea or elsewhere.  Maybe one day they’ll get off their computers and go out into the real world and someone will call them a cunt and their head will spin around and they’ll shoot green bile from their face like Linda Blair in The Exorcist.

I hope someone takes a selca.

Some of you may have noticed that I recently got a blog (the G-Dragon one) published on the blog site Anti Kpop-Fangirl.

Yes, this is happening with my permission! They asked for authors and I applied, I think it’s an entertaining site so I’m very happy that they consider some of my writing interesting enough to be included. From now on, some (but not all) of the content that you see on this blog may also be reposted there. This blog will also continue on as normal, to function partly as a draft blog for the content that will go over there, and also to continue to be available for me to post other random shit that might be on my mind but may not fit in with what Anti Kpop-Fangirl does, because it’s something specific to my radio show, or just not really of the right “tone” for their page.

If you want to know more about their site, all I can suggest is that you read their FAQ which you can find by clicking this bit of coloured text right here.

Some people might wonder why I would write for this site. If nothing else my writing style is a lot more verbose than what they usually do. Well, I think their satirical mission is good – fangirls do take themselves really seriously and desperately need a wake-up call. The situation of rabid k-pop fandoms is really just a situation of lots of people with bad mental health swapping notes on how to avoid taking their prescribed medication (reality). By all means enjoy your favourite artists, their music, and their image, but there are times when people should definitely try to take a step back and assess their mental state. Here are some warning signs for you to look out for:

* when you won’t listen to group B because you feel you’re “betraying the faith” in group A

* when gentle jokes about your biases’ (rumoured or actual) behaviour really upset you

* when you feel like you can’t relate to other people who don’t share your bias

* when you find Korean netizens’ comments to be generally rational regardless of topic

* when you find yourself falling in love with someone you have never met

* when you show up at that person’s door with a quart of your own menstrual blood to throw at them, so you can later brag on the Internet that “he touched my bodily fluids, we are now united”

Look at what happens when people don’t take a step back and instead take things too far:

So that’s why Anti Kpop Fangirl is good. You don’t want to be like these freaks, or one day your bias will disband and then you’ll wake up and wonder what the fuck you did with the last 5 years of your life, just like all those mentally ill Beatles fans had to.

Peace.

If you casually browse any forum devoted to k-pop, you’ll quickly see that there’s a lot of nonsense going around the place about the relative talents of vocalists, as if vocal talent is a criteria that actually means something in this style.  I mean, come on people, since when was vocal talent suddenly a requirement to make production-line pop music?  I must have missed the latest memo that was circulated on that topic, because it seems that there’s tons of fans fighting over who can sing better and who is the most knowledgeable and talented musically, versus who is just a nugu to music that is just being told what to say, what to play, how to stand, where to go, and is the musical equivalent of the “airhead” reporter on Broadcast News (decent film from the 80s, worth a look) who just reads lines from cue and smiles and doesn’t know what the fuck he’s actually on about or what any of the news stories really mean. Of course, most k-pop fans believe that their bias COULD NEVER BE LIKE THAT and is THE BEST EVAAAR AND KNOWS EVERYTHING ABOUT MUSIC, so I thought that even though I personally have no vested interest in this topic whatsoever, it would be interesting to devise a test to set the record straight and see how much they really do know.  Even better, I thought, if this test didn’t require any knowledge of actual music production or vocal skill on the part of  the tester or even any listening to the songs and anybody with access to a computer could do it in an instant.

I have devised just such a test, and I’m going to break it down for you in a nice long tl;dr post only because I know you’re into that sort of thing.

Introducing our test platform, the Shure Super 55 Deluxe microphone.

Shure is the leading manufacturer of live stage microphones in the world and the Super 55 Deluxe is a rechassied version of their popular SM58 vocal microphone (seen on literally every live stage everywhere) with a retro design and a supercardioid response pattern that when superimposed on the microphone looks something like this:

“Gosh, that’s a pretty picture – but I’m so confused!  Whatever could it mean?” I hear you exclaim.  Well, every microphone has a response pattern.  Microphones that are used in live performance are not designed to pick up sound equally from all directions, because if they did, they would pick up not just the singer’s voice but also the sound of the sound system, creating a feedback loop – that’s what happens when someone turns a microphone up really loud and you hear that awful squealing noise.  There is a bit that you are supposed to sing into, and other bits that you are really not supposed to sing into.  To break it down more simply for those of you who need this dumbed down:

There’s actually an approximate 10dB drop in loudness when singing into the microphone from the top.  10dB might not seem like a lot, but remember that the dB scale is logarithmic by a scale of 10, like the Richter scale for earthquakes, where an earthquake at a strength of 8.0 is actually ten times more powerful than an earthquake of 7.0.  So if you’re singing into the top part of this microphone because you have never seen one before and don’t know anything about them fancy microphone things, you’re actually only going to be 10% as loud as you should be.  It’s sort of the equivalent of trying to get a sound out of an electric guitar by blowing on the strings – not impossible, but certainly not the most efficient method or the one that is going to get you the most volume.

So how can we use this information to assess the relative merits of our favourite (or not) k-pop stars?  Well, someone who is trained in music can instantly tell by the way someone holds an instrument, even when miming, whether that person can play or not.  For instance:

Here’s Ace Of Angels performing “Get Out” (one of the best songs last year IMNSHO) on Music Core.  Sure, they’re miming, but you can tell from the way they hold their instruments that they are at least capable of playing them to some standard and are not just models holding them for the first time because the video director suddenly thought it would be a good idea to thrust instruments into their hands.  Someone who is musically trained will instinctively hold their instrument in the correct way, even if they’re just pretending to play it, and it’s actually really difficult for them to hold it any other way.

Hyoyeon from Girls’ Generation however clearly has no fuckin’ idea, and probably had about 30 seconds of guitar coaching before being given that thing for the So Nyuh Shi Dae video (which is a real guitar, btw, not a toy – see http://www.daisyrock.com/products/short-scale-guitars/butterfly/debutante-butterfly-short-scale ). The posture and silly “omg I’m like, holding a guitar” grin gives away her complete lack of experience, but in motion the impression is even worse – she just doesn’t move the way a guitarist does – it’s obvious to any guitar player watching the video that she knows nothing about guitar, period.

The same thing applies to singers.  If you’re a real singer, with real singing experience other than miming to a backing track, and training actually worth a damn, I think it’s fair to say that you probably know a little bit about microphones.  Someone has probably at least shown you which part of the thing to fucking sing in, just like your average electric guitar player also knows how to use an amplifier to some extent, or at least that the sound comes out of the big round speaker thingy.   As previously mentioned, someone with training and experience will automatically use their chosen instrument or device the right way without thought, whereas someone without any knowledge is liable to just use it any old way.

Therefore, as just about every k-pop singer has at one point or another used the Shure Super 55 Deluxe as a prop because of their fashionable retro look, by looking at the way these people use them, we can ascertain quickly who is a dunce and who knows what time it is when it comes to microphones and vocal performance.  Let’s take a look at a few random samples that I dug up in about ten minutes of searching, and see how our favourite k-pop idols fare on the vocal scale.

Here’s Taeyeon belting out a note, once again from the So Nyuh Shi Dae MV. Now that’s absolutely perfect microphone positioning – if the sound was coming out of her left tit.  I’m told she’s supposed to be the “most vocally talented” one, so this is pretty shameful.  But wait, SNSD were nugus back when this came out, right?  Perhaps we shouldn’t be so harsh on this early example, maybe she’s learned how to sing into a microphone correctly in the many years of intense coaching and performance that SNSD have undoubtedly endured since this video came out which would have surely included basics such as how to hold a microphone and sing into it correctly…

…or maybe fucking not. Here’s a still from the “Twinkle” MV five years later, where we can see not only Taeyeon doing it wrong, but she’s spread the cancer to Tiffany and Seohyun. Rock those microphones, girls, just be grateful they’re not plugged in.

Let’s not let the guys off the hook.  Yesung from Super Junior clearly has no fucking idea what to do with that thing in his left hand.  I’d say something like “maybe he’s about to deepthroat it” but I don’t want to inspire any creepy fanfiction, so let’s just say that this guy is clearly a model, not a singer, and leave it at that. Microphone training courses at SM Entertainment clearly = nil.

Other labels are no better.  If the biggest label in k-pop (well, not really – but that’s a subject for another blog) couldn’t be fucked telling their highest-earning stars how to use the tools of their own trade, you can imagine how much more all the other labels suck at it.  Here’s Minzy from 2NEwont (as in “won’t come back on schedule”, “won’t produce anything worth a damn with will.i.am”, “won’t return my texts” etc) in the “Scream” video (great song btw), looking so gangster holding the microphone all crooked and shit. The point where she’s singing into the microphone is in fact the very worst place of all to sing into because it’s right where the dip in frequency response occurs – if she did that on a live stage you wouldn’t be able to hear her voice at all.

I don’t know the name of this guy but he’s from C-Clown and this is a still from the “Shaking Heart” video, where at the start a Super 55 Deluxe descends dramatically from the ceiling, this guy grabs it, and raps “Let me show you the C-Clown swag!”… with the microphone on a 90 degree angle that would cut out approximately 80-90% of any vocal “swag” present. Oops, I guess it’s back to swag school for you.

And before any of you wacky k-pop loving “I’ve got 100 YG videos on my hard drive and I go to dance classes and I order my clothes from G Dragon’s G-Market so therefore I know everything about hip-hop” people get started, it IS possible to hold or dangle the microphone “hip-hop style” and still utilise it correctly so a sound comes out of it. Here’s L.L. Cool J. (of all people) doing exactly the same upside down thing but correctly in the “Mama Said Knock You Out” video:

If someone whose name stands for “Ladies Love Cool James” can use a fucking microphone, I don’t see why it has to be so hard for everyone else. But enough of western rappers being surprisingly proficient, that’s no fun, back to k-pop stars failing.

Here’s KARA’s Seungyeon, from the MV for her solo song “Guilty”. Guilty of not knowing what the fuck she’s doing and making it up as she goes along, it seems.

Back to AOA’s “Get Out” and if I was positioned directly to the right of those keyboards because I wanted to cop a good perv at whatever this girl’s name is without the Nord Electro 2 getting in the way, then the microphone would be perfectly positioned to pick up all my “sweet nothings” as I stared at her (keyboard) rack.

What about Brown Eyed Girls, now they’re a bit older and wiser, and great singers too, surely they can get it ri…

Never mind. This is from the “I Got Fooled By You” MV, a song title seemingly about the microphone itself. Interesting that instead of micing their own tits like SNSD and SuJu, BEG’s microphones are twisted 180 degrees the other way and are actually pointing towards the air about half a foot in front of them which is a shame because I think Gain’s tits deserve their own microphone.

And on and on it goes.  Have fun finding your own Super 55 failures, it seems that literally nobody in k-pop knows anything about this shit so far apart from me (and now, all of you.  Don’t thank me all at once, now.)

BUT WAIT.

THERE IS AT LEAST ONE OTHER PERSON WHO KNOWS.

Yes, it’s Juniel. This girl is so fucking irrelevant that I bought one of her CDs from the only decent k-pop store in my city, which is run by a girl who is Korean and has been listening to k-pop since the 90s and she was all like “you know, I don’t even know who that fucking nugu bitch is”. But Juniel’s “Pretty Boy” MV is honestly the only example I’ve found so far in k-pop of someone who actually knows what they’re doing with the Super 55. I guess maybe she had a bit of performance experience under her belt before getting involved in the k-pop scene, that’s the only way I can explain it. In any event, she’s now better than all of your biases, because she knows how to use a microphone AND she can play guitar.  Fuck me, I think I’m about to faint.

If you find any others like her, put them in the comments below. Maybe we can get them to train the rest. There is hope.

Two months ago an interesting image crossed my path on some news sites that didn’t seem to make much of a ripple in the world of k-pop, but which certainly caught my personal attention a great deal.

Jonghyun from SHINee being wished a happy birthday with a love message from Japanese AV star Hitomi Tanaka.  I first found about this on an Allkpop article which I can’t find anymore and has presumably been deleted in the transition to their shithouse new Adblock-hostile format everybody except them and their advertisers hates.  From memory, the mood of the reaction from SHINee fans in the article was basically something like this:

Because I don’t trust a single thing that k-pop news media says ever ever EVER without rigorously fact-checking (something the news sites themselves seem to rarely even bother to do, preferring to act as a free Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V service), for verification I sailed on over to Hitomi’s Twitter account, to confirm.  There it was.  Then, in tried-and-true k-pop scandal manner, she deleted the tweet, probably after getting an earnest private message from Jonghyun saying “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TRYING TO DO RUIN MY CAREER!?!” or similar.

I then waited for the inevitable flood of rumour-mill articles, and… nothing.  Nobody picked up on this ball and ran with it.  TIEM TO FIX.

This interests me not as a fan of SHINee (I liked Lucifer and… well okay, that’s really about it tbh) but as a fan of Hitomi (won’t go into details, but then I don’t really have to, do I).  Yeah, a few k-pop girls are kind of cute, but…

…let’s be honest.  K-pop girls are not really in the race here.  Hell, I’m pretty sure they don’t even know where the race is being held.

The tweet also interests me because I’m aware that a few of the more mentally-challenged fangirls out there enjoy a bizarre religious-cult-like practice known as “shipping”, where they pair their (male) k-pop crushes with other (often male) k-pop crushes in their own imaginations (which seems odd in a society that seems quite homophobic in a lot of other ways but moving right along).  Then the more extreme “shippers” will do the tried-and-true netizen-style “I’d like to believe that this is true, because it kind of seems true-ish-sorta-kinda even though I have fuck-all actual proof and zero insider knowledge, so I’m going to construct as much strawman evidence as I can out of various images, videos etc to support what I already believe and ignore everything else” (see: every k-pop controversy ever) in order to give strength to their OTP (excuse me while I throw up in my own mouth a little).  I’m also aware that one of the more popular ships is “JongKey”.  For a summary of what they believe straight from the hive-mind of the mentally ill, look no further than Urban Dictionary:

Etc.  However, JongKey seems unlikely to me, and more importantly where these things are concerned I don’t really WANT to believe it, so in true netizen style (i.e with no actual evidence, just a bunch of shit and guesswork) I’m going to posit an alternate case for JongTomi.  Take notes.

Jonghyun and Hitomi Tanaka are OTP: THE IRONCLAD PROOF*

1.  Hitomi tweeted Jonghyun to wish him a happy birthday, and told him that she loved him

No big deal, right?  Could be in jest, yeah?  But wait.  How many people’s birthdays do you actually remember?  I only remember two – my own birthday, and my girlfriend’s birthday.  Because it’s important that you remember someone’s birthday if you want them to share a bed with you and do more than hog all the sheets and blankets.  Plus “I love u so much”?  Say no more.

Of course, maybe it’s not like that, and she remembered his birthday instead because she’s a crazy obsessed fangirl herself.  That’s a possibility, but this of course only makes her more likely to fuck him.  So either she’d fucked him already when she sent that tweet, or was just about to, because if I was Jonghyun and I got a tweet like that from Hitomi I’d sure as shit be replying and teeing something up on my next Japan visit.  And don’t think that’s not possible – it’s actually pretty easy to have sex with pornstars, even if they DON’T like you.  Depending on who it is, often you just need to be in the right place at the right time, with some cash and preferably also a camera.  Shouldn’t be too much of a challenge for a celebrity in an A/B-list group.  All that would be lacking is time out of your busy schedule.  Which brings us to…

2.  Jonghyun’s “accident” isn’t confirmed, and the timing suspiciously coincides with Hitomi’s tweet.

At least when Secret and T-ara had car crashes there was plenty of accident porn posted so we knew it was real, yet people were skeptical and nasty because they didn’t want to believe it because they would then have to face the reality of being caught out as worthless cunts cyberbullying car accident victims.  On the other hand good fucking luck finding a single image or video of Jonghyun’s alleged car crash, or any hospital footage or anything of Jonghyun verifiably injured in any way, yet so far nobody has questioned the legitimacy of the accident story, presumably because he’s male and fangirls adore him and not some oppa-stealing whore.  Also:

When did Jonghyun get “nose surgery” after his “car accident” and announce time off?  April 9th. 

When did Hitomi tweet him?  April 8th.

You do the math.

Sure, you might be thinking “she’s just being nice to him specifically because he got in that accident and all” but she didn’t give the same shout-out to Zinger (or whatever the fuck she’s calling herself now) or Soyeon.  Why not?  Because she doesn’t want to bang either of those two, that’s why not.  Look on the Internet for Hitomi lesbian AVs – there’s only a few compared to the mountains of AVs of her taking on 12 guys at a time in the back of a bus etc. – clearly the girl has a preference for guys.

3.  Jonghyun doesn’t give a fuck

He doesn’t even acknowledge or make eye contact with the saesangs anymore.  He looks perfectly healthy too.  A bit tired and worn out maybe, but then you would be too if you had to heft those boobs around on a daily basis for a month.  Clearly he’s thinking more about what’s waiting for him when he gets inside:

If you can, try tearing your eyes away from Hitomi herself and check out that background.  Look familiar?  Yes, it seems obvious that Hitomi has her own Super Junior-style oddly-lit tiled room especially built for her in SM Entertainment HQ.

4.  Hitomi shows signs of being ready for a serious relationship

According to 100% reliable and credible online big-boobs wiki Boobpedia, Hitomi hasn’t made an AV since October 2012.  (If I’m wrong here, please alert me to any newer material, preferably with links to easily-downloaded proof so I can confirm the source thanks.)

Other recent and entirely trustworthy sources confirm that Hitomi is trying to steer her career away from hardcore AVs and into more softcore modelling.

It’s clear that she wants something serious and is steering away from the hardcore sex scenes in the films so she can enjoy sex more in her personal life.  AV sex professionals rarely get all that raunchy when the cameras are off for the same reason why cooks rarely cook at home – if you spend 12 hours a day preparing and cooking food the last thing you want to do when you knock off work is prepare and cook food some more.  The joke’s on you if you date a chef thinking you’re going to get great home-cooked food every day, or date a porn star thinking that you’re going to get to simulate Hitomi’s scenes in “J-Cup Big Tits Temporary Staff“.  You’d be better off paying if you want that – a candlelight dinner and then missionary position with the lights out is far more likely when you’re in a relationship with an active pornstar, because that’s something she can’t get at work.  So how do you make cooking – or sex – more enjoyable in your private life?  Stop doing it at work.  Hitomi is clearly making that transition for the benefit of herself and that special someone.

SUMMARY:

I had a really good summary written but then my blog software didn’t save it, so let’s just look at this picture.  I forgot what my point was anyway.  Tits.

* Actually this is all circumstantial bullshit.  Hey, total lack of solid evidence is good enough for TaJinyo/T-Jinyo, so it’s good enough for me.  Hitomi, if you’re reading this, oppa didn’t mean it.

K-pop and plastic surgery.  Well-worn territory, right?  It’s like bees and honey – whenever you see one, you know the other is close by.  I don’t really care though.  How is getting injections or plastic in your lips/nose/cheeks/ass/boobs really any different to getting those hoop things in your ears that fuck up your earlobes for the rest of your life, or a tattoo that says “fuck” on your forehead, or a piercing through your cock that also extends through your ballsack, or any number of other things people do to make themselves more aesthetically appealing to themselves or whoever?  I wouldn’t do that shit personally but some people obviously would for whatever reason and good luck to them.  Obviously 90% of k-pop stars are plastic-surgeried to fuck and back and it gets pretty obvious when the studio makeup isn’t on them but so what.  Michael Jackson looked ridiculous in the 90s too but he at least probably thought he looked okay and I sure didn’t cry myself to sleep at night over it (maybe a few Neverland sleepover guests did though).  My point being – less people claiming to be against superficiality while simultaneously getting very upset about other people’s superficial appearances, and the world would be a better place, right?

So it’s less in the spirit of voyeurism or criticism and more in the spirit of community education that I now present to you the following story, which may be old news to some but I think it’s a cautionary tale that should be heeded.  While there is quite a bit of writing out there about this specific incident, which is fairly old, there isn’t much within western k-pop blogging sites so I felt that it was a tale that needs to be told to a k-pop specific audience.

Meet former Korean singer and model Hang Mioku.

Charming young lass, right?  Well, okay, maybe she looks just a little like JYP there.  (Thought for today: if you ever find yourself with an awkward boner at some inappropriate time, like at the office, or at your sister’s wedding, just whisper “JYP” to yourself, over and over, while imagining what JYP’s face looks like when he whispers that into the microphone in the studio over the opening seconds of the next 2PM single.  Thank me later.)  Here’s a more flattering photo:

Okay, OKAY, that’s even worse.  It doesn’t help that the photo seems to have been taken at “JYP whisper range”.  Let me try again.

That’s more like it.  Some washed-out photography and blurriness plus a bit of stage makeup does wonders.  I think she’s rocking a bit of an Isabella Rossellini in “Blue Velvet” kind of vibe here, and that’s a serious plus point in case you don’t know.  Here is a picture of Isabella Rossellini from a scene in the aforementioned film, included partly for comparative purposes, and partly because all the images below this one in this post are so fucking terrifying that I feel a moral duty to balance them out with something more attractive.  Trust me, Isabella holding a kitchen knife up to Kyle MacLachlan’s throat looks positively benevolent compared to what you’re about to see further down the page.  Consider yourself warned.

Anyway, even if she’s not your type, you’d have to admit that there are probably people out there more desperately in need of surgical beautification than Hang Mioku.

So the story goes, Hang Mioku was rather fond of having her skin feel smooth and soft, so she went to Japan on a regular basis to get injections of silicone into her face (as you do – there probably wasn’t the proliferation of local plastic surgeons in Korea back then that there is now).  This started at the age of about 28 (she’s now 50-ish so we’re talking pre-idol explosion “trot” era here) and went on for quite a while until the Japanese surgeons said “hey your face has ballooned quite a bit, you’re starting to look a bit wrong, maybe I should stop taking your money now”.  I wasn’t able to source exact dates for these photos but at this point I’m guessing her face probably looked something like it does in this picture of her:

I couldn’t find a non-cropped version of this photo but it looks like she’s resting her head on a guy’s shoulder.  Awww, how sweet.  Hey netizens, if you want a fun project to try in your spare time between perfecting your additional pylon construction tree and leaving crybaby comments on articles about people more attractive and successful than you, try to find a photo of a male k-pop star wearing a blue jacket which matches the same patterns as the one in the above photo of the cropped mystery shoulder guy.  If you find one, then he must have dated Hang Mioku once, right?  (I call this “IU’s couch logic”.)  Anyway you have to wonder how surgeons even let it get to this point in the first place.

Once Hang was eventually refused plastic surgery, she managed to obtain a bottle of silicone on the black market (yes a black market really exists for this stuff, IKR) and did some DIY injections.  Because if you want a job done right, do it yourself, yeah?  Black market silicone is apparently pretty expensive though so after injecting an entire bottle of the stuff (don’t ask how big the bottles are) into her face, she swapped to cooking oil.

The results speak for themselves:

Look at that poor dog, it’s terrified.

At this point, Hang Mioku realised she had made a terrible mistake, and after appealing to the media kind-hearted Koreans donated thousands of dollars worth of money to help her fix her disfigurement.  As they say, it’s not your appearance, but what’s inside you that counts, and no-one knew that better than the surgeons who extracted 60 grams of silicone and cooking oil from inside Hang Mioku’s face and another 200 grams from inside her neck over the course of at least ten operations.  Of course, while her physical appearance has improved drastically, it will never be what it was before, and a bit of makeup still doesn’t hurt.

What can we learn from this story:

*  As bad and unnecessary as it is, your favourite k-pop star’s latest shitty round of surgery could have been worse.

*  In the pre-idol “trot” days of k-pop people obviously still had major issues about their appearance. societal pressure etc blah blah. Or they probably wouldn’t do this shit (you’d hope).

*  Don’t lose your objectivity in the face of praise because plastic surgeons will continue taking money from you and telling you that you look great until your surgery has well and truly hit the fug zone.

*  I couldn’t find any of Hang Mioku’s music anywhere while researching this, which just goes to show that even if plastic surgery makes you famous it still won’t help your music career.

*  Jabba The Hut is an attainable plastic surgery goal if you’re into DIY.  For anything else, seek a qualified professional.

This has been a Kpopalypse Community Service Announcement.  Stay safe, kids.

Picture this.  Imagine that you’re a young girl living in Korea, not necessarily a huge k-pop fan although you probably do listen to some of it, and you’ve been going out with your first boyfriend for a few months now.  You don’t have a lot of time in this busy world, but you make the effort to meet occasionally with him when you’re not studying or working 18 hours a day, he walks with you sometimes and you hold hands together and think pure thoughts.  He’s a little socially awkward but he’s basically a nice guy plus he really seems to like you.  Birds chirp, flowers bloom and all is well in the world.

Then one day, in a rare moment of synchronous study downtime, he invites you to his place for the first time.  He seems like such a great guy, really.  Nothing could go wrong, right?

Of course, this requires careful planning.  You feed his and your parents some bullshit line about it being a “study session” and you get the green light.  You’re really looking forward to it – this is a bit of a step up in the relationship and if it goes well, this could mean big things for you both down the track.  In your mind despite your best intentions to “take it slow” like your parents have been advising, a small part of you is already secretly thinking about where you can get a good wedding dress made.  You can’t help it – it’s just how you think.  After a nice dinner with him and his parents which was a little awkward but you got through it, he invites you to his bedroom to help him with “that assignment”.  You’re trembling in anticipation imagining your future life together as you both make your way to the bedroom door, and then he opens it and you are confronted with this:

What the fuck.  You don’t even know who these fucking girls are pinned up on his bedroom wall, but your heart sinks anyway as you scan the room and barely a square inch of the walls is not covered with this shit.  They’re a lot prettier than you, and he’s obviously in love with them otherwise why the fuck does he have these huge posters up, when your picture isn’t on his desk or even on his computer screensaver…

Fuck, he’s got the same girls there too!  “Is this what I have to compete with”, you wonder to yourself.  In the meantime, the smell of your boyfriend’s bedroom hits you, it smells like a combination of stale semen and despair.  It’s pretty obvious that he’s been notching up some serious jerk time and there’s no prizes for guessing what the fap material is.  You’re pretty sure some of those posters that adorn his wall have been stuck there with his jizz à la the film “Happiness”.  You’re “in love” though, or at least that’s what you told him earlier even though you think it’s rapidly fading now that you’ve seen THIS side of him, so you deal with it instead of bolting out the door, but you’re starting to wonder if you and this guy have a future together.  Over the course of the next few hours you become increasingly uncomfortable – all he seems to care about is his computer games and he gets stressed when you absent-mindedly lean on his posters which it’s really hard not to do because they are EVERYWHERE, plus he keeps talking about some fucking anime or whatever and you hate that shit.  Eventually you finally get out of there and as you beat a hasty retreat back to your own neighbourhood you start thinking about ways to dump him without making yourself feel like too much of a bad person, because you’re kind of chickenshit like that.

Further research reveals that the girls adorning his bedroom’s jizz-encrusted walls are actually a k-pop idol group called “Tee Arr Arr” or some shit and their entire catalogue is basically just a cum-mop for all your current and future potential boyfriends’ fantasies, rendering these guys completely impotent and uninterested in you by the time you actually get to spend any time with them.  A random sample of some of the more popular songs reveals the devastating truth:

“Bo Peep Bo Peep” – something about a nine-cunted fox that seduces guys and eats their livers, probably by sucking it out through their still-throbbing cocks just after sex, obviously a male submissive’s fantasy plus teaching them that women are evil and not to be trusted thereby ruining men for real relationships with commitment and rings and mortgages and stuff

“Roly Poly” – something about liking “this” and “that” which has surely got to be a euphemism for some kinky shit because why else would that little tramp be so non-specific, she must be hiding something

“Sexy Love” – blow-up fuck dolls coming to life, for his pleasure, just LOOK AT IT DAMNIT, who needs a real girlfriend and commitment when you have a robotic hole that is prettier, will do anything you want and never complains that the relationship isn’t “moving forward” as long as you remember to wipe her down afterward

“Bunny Style” – just like “doggy style” except faster, we all know how bunnies like to fuck, a few quick thrusts and they’re done, and then they just want to do it again, yes this sounds like every guy you’ve ever heard about your friends dating and it’s clear that Tee Arr Arr are only encouraging this shit, whatever happened to taking it slow going to the opera first and then having a candlelit dinner while gazing longingly into each others eyes for fuck’s sake

There’s only one solution to this shit.  These girls needs to be stopped.  THEY STOLE ALL YOUR OPPAS, the slutty wenches, and they’re so good at it that they did it before they were even yours!  You don’t have a chance if these singing, dancing, suggestively-flirting-from-the-stage-how-dare-they plastic-surgeried every-mans-dream fantasy girls get there first!  You do a quick net search and it’s revealed that there are many other women in the same plight – finding solace in your mutual suffering, you sign up to an anti-cafe and become a full-time Tee Arr Arr hater.  You swap stories with other females of relationship despair and how one guy couldn’t ejaculate on his partner’s face unless she put on fox ears and did the “Bo Peep” dance, how another girl kept getting told that she was too tall and “why can’t you be short like Boram so you can undo my pants faster”, and so on.  Soon you’re busy co-ordinating “activities” like going to every website you can find and leaving hate comments, downvoting everything positive you can see, posing as a distraught fan on various boards so you can try to turn fans of QBS against fans of N4 and vice-versa, reigniting long-dead rumours that nobody cares about and which may or may not be true but who cares as long as it makes T-ara look bad and then getting all your anti-friends to comment on them, and so forth.  T-ara gradually consumes your world.

All of this activity of course hasn’t gone unnoticed.  Deep within the bowels of CCM offices, next to the room where idols are told to stand in the corner for 5 hours at a time with their face against the wall for having bad thoughts, is the “situation room”.  In here, a bank of wire-tapping telephone operators have been monitoring the activities of the potential girlfriends of T-ara fans.  A pattern has been identified – girl meets guy, girl falls in love, girl is introduced to T-ara through exposure to guy, girl and guy have relationship problems when she realises she can’t compete with T-ara’s jizz-sponge-like properties, girl becomes T-ara anti.  Data is collected, committees are formed and meetings are held.  What to do about the rapidly escalating situation?

The answer: “Target”.

Like everything else T-ara do, “Target” is aimed squarely at the genitals of the group’s predominantly male fanbase, but this time it’s teaching them a different lesson – how to give their neglected girlfriends exactly what they want for a change:

Look at the graphic similarity at 2:30 in particular.  T-ara’s mobile phone computer game isn’t a game at all, it’s a recreation of a sex education CGI video, with a anime-style k-pop friendly facelift, creating a positive association between T-ara and getting your girlfriend up the duff.  Little devilish T-ara characters riding on phallic jetpacks shooting little sperm things at a big egg before they inevitably run out of steam is designed to teach lonely fappers the facts of conception, the life cycle of reproduction and the virtues of commitment to your one true love, in a format that your average fanboy fapper might actually pay some attention to.  Of course it’s dressed up like a anime computer game because that’s the most appealing way to present something if you’re going to “target” young guys who barely pay attention to anything these days if it’s not computer games, anime or porn (and all the better if you can combine all three).   Just to drive home the true love message, the egg is even heart-shaped.  At the end it’s “game over” and the vaginal-juice-drizzled T-ara members asphyxiate on the reflux of their own spunk, having tried their best to pump the egg full of their wriggly jetpack-sperm.  They failed, because they’re just a k-pop group, but maybe YOU will succeed?  Don’t waste your seed, because one day it’ll be game over, that’s the implicit message here for T-ara’s legions of zerg-rushing, Hyomin-fapping fanboys.  CCM plan to use the music video’s power of suggestion to restore T-ara’s reputation in the eyes of fan’s commitment-longing girlfriends, one busy uterus at a time.

Well that’s my theory, anyway.  I know what you’re all thinking, but when the pregnancy rates in Korea start mysteriously climbing nine to twelve months from now, I’d just like to say that I fucking called it.

Oh and yes I realise I’ve completely side-stepped the musical content, but then most k-pop reviews do, so whatever.  Why don’t you talk about that in the comments.

There are three categories of post that I make on the Kpopalypse blog.  The most common category these days are the posts I make here as drafts for Anti Kpop-Fangirl (an excellent blog that you should all read, if you don’t already, and I’m not just saying that because I write for them, as I was an avid reader before that was the case).  The second category are posts which are just for my radio listeners because they relate to what’s happening on my radio show.  The third category is “I just want to put this here so I can refer people to it later”, and this is one of those “third category” posts.  I’m sick of explaining how confirmation bias works to people over and over again on forums, blog comments etc – it’s boring to have to type the same shit out all the time for morons who don’t get it, and that seems to be most of you given how much confirmation bias completely plagues the k-pop fandom.  It’s much less time-consuming if I can just throw these people a link to a blog post.  The also-excellent blog Asian Junkie also had quite a good article about confirmation bias in k-pop but I like to explain things my own way, so here we go.  I realise that for those of you with a brain this is actually a really boring topic, so I’ll try not to make it too fucking dull for the people who would rather be reading about tits and ass by inserting some eye candy here and there.  Try not to get too distracted.

A film that’s worth your time generally speaking is “Pi – Faith In Chaos”, the debut film by Darren Aforonsky who also did the brilliant “Requiem For A Dream”.  The film “Pi” or “π” deals not with circles and diameters and shit but with a mathematician who is obsessed with the idea that the stock market isn’t random or controlled by semi-predictable market forces but has a system to it which can be predicted mathematically completely in the abstract.  Presumably he wants to get rich with this incredible secret once he uncovers it, but oddly the “I’m a lazy bum plus a greedy cunt” angle is never fully extrapolated in the film which instead uses the initial idea as a jumping off point to explore the psychological aspects of obsession.  This particular fascination that the main character has with a 216-digit number which he believes holds the key to the stock market is obviously fuckin’ stupid beyond belief, and in the following scene our protagonist talks to a much older and wiser mathematician who tries to drive into his thick skull this obvious truth, in the process explaining confirmation bias perfectly and saving me a ton of typing.

In other words, if you’re looking for X, you’ll find X, whether X truly exists in any significant way or not.

Of course, the above example of confirmation bias (by which I mean the video of the movie, not After School’s pole dancing skills) is fictional, so let’s look at another example, this time from the real world.  The clip you’re about to see is from the documentary “Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey” and it’s an excellent documentary which anyone with any interest in music should watch.  If you have no specific fondness for or interest in heavy metal you should especially make an effort to watch it, as the film is a highly entertaining beginner’s guide which does well to bust many of the stereotypes about the genre, while never pandering to controversy nor brushing aside the style’s uglier elements.  Those who are already metal fans on the other hand will enjoy the experience of watching their favourite music genre being taken seriously in the media for a change, but you probably won’t learn much that you didn’t already know.

Anyway, in the clip below, Dee Snider hands Tipper Gore’s “Parents Music Resource Centre” (or PMRC, a censorship organisation at least as creepy and misguided as Korea’s MOGEF) their own ass on a plate, exposing the confirmation bias at work beautifully.  I won’t ruin it for you by telling you exactly what happens.

It’s relevant because that’s pretty much how all k-pop controversies work.  Netizens make up their mind “I want to believe X” and then they go hunting around for things which reinforce their belief in X while mentally discarding any information that conflicts with X.  Never mind what the truth is, or anything.   Often X is a theory heavily coloured by their own personal experiences – which is why bullying and sex are two recurring themes, as most netizens are young people who are either bullies or bullying victims, or both, plus incredibly sexually frustrated.

I’m sure that the girls in this blog’s pictures will all thank you for remembering this information when their next controversy comes up.

Also, I vote that T-ara, IU, Ivy, Nickhun, Rain and Se7en all get together and do a “We Are The World” style cover of this song.

That’s all for now.  Thanks for reading… if you did actually do any.

I live in Australia, which is a country where we don’t have many of those fancy “rights” things, like what some of you other swanky posh countries get.  Freedom of speech enshrined in the law?  Not fucking likely, cunt.  Right to bear arms?  You can’t even carry around a gun that fires fucking vegetables.  And if they arrest you for carrying that super-deadly shit, you don’t even have the right to remain silent, you filthy fucking criminal scum.  I’m jealous of you folks who live elsewhere and can just whip out the old “you’re infringing on my legal rights” line when the shit goes down, that’d be some cool shit to be able to do around where I live.  Australians are pretty much lucky if we’re not in jail 24/7.  Oh wait.

All of this harsh oppression that I experience daily (exacerbated by my heritage which is German and Chinese, two countries well versed at various periods in history with “shut up and lie in that ditch over there” so you can imagine what my upbringing was like) means that I sympathise heavily with anybody anywhere who flaunts their legal (or imagined) right to act like a complete cuntfaced bitch in public.  Latest exhibit: Sulli of f(x).

Apparently she said “Cao Ni Ma” which means “fuck your mother” i.e “motherfucker” in Chinese, on some TV show nobody gives a shit about.  The official explanation is that she was repeating the word someone else said to her without her knowing what it meant, but given that Sulli has a track record of being called out for being a cuntfaced mole behind the scenes I don’t buy that explanation.  I think she knew exactly what it meant and was getting to grips with the word so she could insult the other Chinese-speaking f(x) members next time they hogged all the good blankets in the dorms.

Now I know what you’re thinking – “HOW DARE YOU BASH MY SULLI SHE IS THE GREATEST”.  But if you are thinking this, well, this is where I’m going to turn the tables.  I’m not bashing Sulli, in fact I think what she did was fucking righteous and awesome, whether intentional or not.  I think that idiots who think idols are perfect angels with no flaws is part of the ongoing mental health issues plaguing k-pop fandoms and that idols should and in fact need to be overtly rude every so often to remind mentally ill fans that they are just human.  I’m fed up with all these nice groups who pretend to be cool with each other all the time when you know that at least 25% of them are a breath away from scratching each other’s eyes out.

Watching any episode of Loen Entertainment’s “Let’s Dance” is always funny as fuck.  (I’ve just picked a random one here.)  I love it how when one member talks, all the others just smile and kind of nod half-heartedly in agreement as if to say “oh yes, that’s such a good point” even when the person speaking is saying something really obvious-as-fuck.  The insincerity is so thick you could cut it with a knife.  You just know that they’re all going to get crammed into a minibus and driven to six more schedules after this video shoot and then they’ll go back to the dorms where they eat together at the one table and then sleep in shoebox-style accomodation so close together they can smell each other’s body odours, while their hatreds of each other inevitably fester and their menstrual cycles gradually synchronise.  That’s life on the production line and it’s a wonder these groups last as long as they do.  How SNSD has survived since 2007 without a lineup change is anybody’s guess.  My point being that I’m not saying Sulli specifically is a cuntfaced mole, I’m say ALL k-pop group members are cuntfaced moles by default because that’s what the industry turns a person into – some are just better at hiding it, others are a bit more emotionally honest.  The ones who come off sweet and nice are either just really good at shrugging off the incredible amounts of fuckery the job brings with it, or have a really good emotional punching bag that you don’t know about – either someone else in the group, or maybe a member of the support staff like a hairdresser or makeup person or something.  So in the context of all that, there’s really no point getting all wound up about one member swearing on some fucking TV show.

Let’s get back to the term “Cao Ni Ma” for a moment, which means “fuck your mother” or “motherfucker” (not “rape your mother” as some Korean netizens have melodramatically claimed in their childlike and transparent attempt to make Sulli look as dirty as possible).  Hey, look at these cute plush toys!

These cute little critters are replicas of a wild animal that lives in China known as the “grass mud horses”.  They live mainly in North China’s Mahler Gobi desert, however river crabs often invade their habitat and this is causing problems for their continued existence.  What the fuck has this got to do with anything, you ask?  Well, let’s look at the pronunciation of “Grass Mud Horses” in Mandarin:

Grass Mud Horses = 草泥马 cǎo ní mǎ – sounds like – cào nǐ mā 肏你妈 = Fuck Your Mother

“Grass Mud Horses” has become a bit of an Internet meme in China, it’s a way of saying “motherfucker” that circumnavigates and parodies China’s Internet censorship.

The region of the Gobi Desert where the Grass Mud Horses are known to reside, is naturally known as the:

Grass Mud Horse Gobi Desert = 草泥马戈壁 cǎo ní mǎ gē bì – sounds like – cào nǐ mā ge bī 肏你妈个屄 = Fuck Your Mother’s Cunt

The “river crab” that threatens the habitat of the Grass Mud Horse:

River Crab = 河蟹 héxiè – sounds like – héxié 和谐 = Harmony

Maintaining a “harmonious society” is a common justification by the Chinese authorities for their Internet censorship.  So the running joke on the Internet in China is that the “Grass Mud Horse” representing freedom from censorship is under threat from “River Crabs” – the Chinese authorities.  It’s a way for Chinese to criticise the government openly in a way that the government can’t do much about without looking ridiculous telling people to stop talking about horses and crabs.

So a bit of cào nǐ mā from Sulli is:

*  A refreshingly honest slip-up in the overly staid world of k-pop

*  A valuable tool to snap fans out of their delusions

*  Symbolic of standing up for freedom against oppression

Therefore, in the interests of making the world a fairer place where people globally can express themselves freely without fear of censorship or oppression from prying fangirls OR prying governments, I believe it’s time that this meme spread to the rest of the world, and we make Sulli an ambassador for global free speech.  Maybe she can lead my country out of the darkness.  What do you think?

I think nui bi 牛逼 – fucking awesome.

There’s a lot on the Internet written about Autotune* and its effects on pop music.  Pity almost none of it is factual or even makes any sense.  I thought it would be interesting as both a kpop fan and a qualified audio engineer to weigh in on the topic of Autotune for the benefit of you folks reading, because if there’s any group of people out there who don’t understand jack shit about Autotune, it’s k-pop fans.  I’m sorry for all of you who come here for the pictures of boobs but this is going to be one of those boring educational posts where you probably don’t need your screen cleaner and wet wipes for a change but you actually might learn some shit.

For both of you still reading, if nothing else, you probably know these two things about Autotune:

1. Autotune is that robot voice thing that works by moving a sung note to the nearest correct note

2. Cher’s “Believe” was the first popular song with Autotune in it.

Of course, you’d be only partially correct with the first point, and completely wrong with the second (yes, the Wiki is wrong).

Let’s tackle the first point first.  Autotune does indeed move your sung note to the nearest correct note.  However, what can be varied by the music engineer is the speed and precision of this movement.  The “robot sound” that we all associate with Autotune is what we hear when this process happens immediately and the sung note is instantly moved to exactly the correct pitch, this setting is called “zero retune speed” (retune speed being the delay that occurs between the singer hitting the shit note and the program dragging it out of the toilet and into the vicinity of where it should be).  However, you don’t have to set it that way, and if you were trying to cover up a shit vocal performance, why would you?  If you had an absolutely fucking crap singer on your hands like [insert your bias here], it would make more sense to be more subtle.  If you want to fool someone into thinking [insert your bias here] is a great singer, well, if they hear that “robot voice”, they’ll know the jig is up, right?  Better for them to think that they’re hearing something “natural”, and if you’re trying to get it to sound “fixed but natural”, too much perfection is a bad thing because it betrays the machine at work.  So with Autotune, you can direct the program along the lines of “with an attack time of 150ms move the incorrect note 90% closer to the original pitch with a simulated vibrato variance of 3% at the attack of the note and 5% once the input level drops below a -5dB threshold”.  All of a sudden, [insert your bias here] can “actually sing, like, for realz, yo, omg, like, no Autotune or anything, they must be like, SOOOO TALENTED”.  Don’t believe that Autotune can work like this?  Check out the official page for Antares’ Autotune which breaks down the key features in their latest version of the software.  (There’s also plenty of YouTube Autotune tutorials that demonstrate various facets of this but I won’t link any because that would be fucking boring.)  Bottom line – you don’t spend precious software development time improving on features like a “humanize function” and “realtime natural vibrato adjustment” if nobody is using them.

So, why do we still hear the robot voice?  It’s an aesthetic choice.  Someone thought it sounded “cool” to do that.  It’s no different to a guitarist stepping on a phaser pedal because they think it “sounds cool”.  You may or may not like the sound of a phaser pedal on a guitar just like you may or may not like the sound of Autotune’s zero retune speed digital snap, but if you’re hearing that noise, it’s because the producer wanted you to hear it.  It’s when you DON’T hear Autotune that you should be more worried about Autotune being used specifically to cover up shitty out-of-tune vocals.  This segues nicely into our second point, which is that Cher’s recording engineers weren’t the first people to use Autotune to fix up some bum notes, but they were the first to set the retune dial to zero (probably by accident while trying to fix some of Cher’s notoriously limp singing) and go “hey, we actually LIKE the sound of that, let’s put it in the final mix that way”.  Then they lied about what effect they were using in the hope that their use of the pitch-corrector would remain a music industry trade secret.  Why would they lie?  Because they were likely using more subtle edits with Autotune to fix shitty vocalists’ bum notes probably for a long time before they worked with Cher, and didn’t want music fans to know that they could do that.  So what WAS the first recording to use Autotune?  We’ll never know, and that’s exactly my point.

Autotune is like Photoshop’s image-editing facilities, but for the voice.  It’s similar in three key ways:

1.  It “fixes” shit

2.  It’s in everything and I mean EVERYTHING

3.  Sometimes it’s deliberately obvious, sometimes it’s accidentally obvious, but when a really skilled practicioner is using Autotune or something like it to hide something, even an expert can’t tell

Watch the following video, and then listen to some of your favourite k-pop songs again.

Someone who only associates Autotune with the robotic-sounding “zero retune speed” setting could be forgiven for thinking that Autotune has somewhat fallen out of vogue in k-pop in recent years, because there are less new releases that feature its signature mechanical tone-snapping oscillations.  This would be incorrect: only “zero retune speed Autotune robot sass” has fallen out of vogue – Autotune as a subtle pitch-corrector that fixes fuckups and makes your bias sound like they know what they’re doing when they really don’t is now more prevalent than ever before.  Professional photographers working with models will routinely run ALL their images through Photoshop and make adjustments, it’s become a standard tool of the trade, and the same applies to Autotune and the music business now.  Every vocal track by every artist with any kind of budget behind them is run through the magic fix-it box.  Only independent artists, artists with a bee up their ass about Autotune (plus the power to make the engineers listen) or artists working in styles where precise vocal pitching isn’t required (rap, punk, death metal) wouldn’t use it (although even in these fields some of them do anyway).  Combine this with k-pop’s obsession with making as “perfect” a product as possible and it’s pretty safe to say that there isn’t a single k-pop album in your collection that doesn’t have Autotune smothered all over it like k-netizen’s cum over a computer monitor showing Dal Shabet’s “Be Ambitious” MV.  Artists in the pop field generally won’t say no to a bit of subtle non-detectable Autotune on their voice for the same reason that models won’t object to a Photoshopper making them look just that little bit skinnier and more toned.

Oh, and because the effects can be made to work in real time audio engineers can trigger them in live performances too.  Without you even fucking knowing.  So you can bash all those “idol vocals” threads on Allkpop and Onehallyu forums straight up your ass, because none of that shit really matters a goddamn.

Another thing to remember is that before Autotune there was a thing called the Vocoder which has been around since the 1970s, also pitch-corrects vocals and sounds exactly the same as Autotune’s “robot voice” if used in the same way.  A Vocoder works slightly differently however, rather than adjusting your pitch in real-time to a pitch assigned by the software itself, it adjusts your pitch in real-time to a pitch assigned by another musical instrument (usually a keyboard).  This allows a singer to be able to sing ANY note on a keyboard, even notes outside of their vocal range, and even chords.  And it sounds just as robotic-as-fuck as Autotune does, so it’s easy for the untrained ear to confuse the two.  Vocoder is what Kraftwerk, Daft Punk, and J-poppers Perfume use in all their shit, but if you want a k-pop example, here you go:

Programming all those vocal slides and chords would be a pain in the ass with Autotune (but not impossible) however very easy with Vocoder – you just get a keyboardist to plug in and play that stuff and sync the vocals to it – it would take as long to do as the song takes to listen to.

Points to take away from this post:

*  4Minute’s “What’s Your Name?” isn’t a shit song because it has Autotune.  It’s a shit song because Brave Brothers thought that getting Hyuna’s “Ice Cream” and stripping away all the melody and everything else that made that song decent and replacing it all with computer fart noises was a good idea.  That’s a separate issue to Autotune because you can actually get all those exact same noises with a Vocoder if you wanted.

*  If your bias is on the commercial end of k-pop in 2013, your bias uses Autotune, or something like it.  Period.  No ifs, ands, or buts.

*  People in the industry laugh at what fans and singers alike think they know about vocal production/staging.

But Autotune isn’t quite perfect yet.  It still can’t fix up Bom.

Maybe in 20 years or so technology will have advanced and we’ll get computer software that can make Bom’s voice good enough to the point where she doesn’t have to blow out an entire GD&TOP studio session.  We’ll probably have a fix for global warming, overpopulation and the bees-mysteriously-dying-out thing by then, too.

*  When I say “Autotune” you can assume that by this I mean “Autotune plus other pitch-correcting software that also acts like Autotune”.  I know that if I don’t put this disclaimer here some smartass cunt will go “but what about [pitch corrector x nobody has heard of]” or some shit.  Despite what the guy says in the WavesTune video above, It’s really all the same shit and it all does the same job.

ATTENTION BOYS (and girls)

KPOPALYPSE LIVE STREAM is happening in two weeks!

I will be streaming live on Sunday 11th August 9:30 AM my time which is GMT+9:30 (Adelaide, Australia).  This is equivalent to 5:00 PM Saturday 10th August for Americans on PST.  In other words, the same timeslot as AKFG Zaku’s stream last week.  If enough people declare their interest in this thread I will stream again exactly 12 hours later for the benefit of Europeans who get fucked up the ass by the 5PM PST timeslot, so let me know if that’s something you’d like (the extra stream, that is, not getting fucked up the ass, which is your own business that I don’t really care about, although if you feel you must tell me about that too, go right ahead).

The link: http://www.justin.tv/kpopalypse

For those who saw Zaku’s stream, my stream won’t be quite as fancy as his – I’m not going to give a feed of my computer screen, there’s really no point as I’ve got nothing much to show you on there anyway besides lots of porn which I’ll just get kicked off justin.tv for.  It’ll just be me on a webcam answering your questions and maybe getting a guitar out or something if that becomes relevant.

Why am I doing this?

Partly for fun, and because I want to… but mainly because the reaction to my more technical music/audio/industry blogs on Anti Kpop-Fangirl has made me think that some of you might appreciate the opportunity to ask technical or music-industry specific questions live in a streaming format.  I’m a k-pop radio DJ, a music teacher, an audio engineer, a radio station administrator and have been a member of various touring bands over the years, so I have a lot of useless knowledge, but you don’t have to go down that path, you can ask what I think of Raina’s boobs instead if you want, I really don’t care.  But I’ve giving you all two weeks before the stream so you have plenty of time to come up with good questions.  The only questions I won’t answer are obviously too-personal stuff or anything that is obviously just a stupid bitch question.

Things:

* The stream will go on for as long as I feel like it.

* Almost no subject is taboo, and you will quickly learn that I have no shame.  Keep in mind some of the shit I say might get a little NSFW so don’t log into the stream anywhere that might be embarrassing for you, like at the dinner table with your parents, etc.

* I’m male, 39 and not as pretty as the other authors of AKFG.  Sorry about that.  Don’t worry though, I promise I won’t do a Jiyeon on you.

See you there!

I don’t mind admitting it – I liked Gangkiz.  The “Lovey Dovey” rip off “Honey Honey” was great, and the spaghetti western-influenced “Mama” was even better – it actually captured underrated pop/soundtrack producer Ennio Morricone‘s melodic and harmonic choices instead of just lifting his most well-known sound effects and square-pegging them into the round hole of k-pop melody and harmony (most recent example of the latter: BEG’s “Kill Bill”).  Sure, they were just a bunch of models, they sunk like a stone commercially, their CEO is nuts, but like I give a fuck about any of that stuff if the songs are this good.  All that other shit is their problem, not mine.  Maybe no-one else bought that “Mama” mini-album but I SURE DID (ask me to show you on the stream next weekend, you know you want to), and I was sad when most of the members then (understandably) flew the coop.

Oh look, I just typed out a whole paragraph about Gang Kiz without mentioning Haein’s boobs.  What was I thinking.

It’s a tough life being a k-pop fan and also a boobs pervert an appreciator of female upper-body aesthetics.   The genre doesn’t really give me a lot of material to work with, so when I heard Haein left Gangkiz, I lamented the departure of one of k-pop’s few genuinely busty ladies and wondered if I was ever going to see that mousy-haired trashy-looking girl on my computer screen ever again.

FEAR NOT, CORE CONTENTS MEDIA TO THE RESCUE

By now you’ve all heard that quite acceptable but definitely-not-a-Sistar-Loving-U-beater song by T-ara, Davichi and Skull, and seen the accompanying video, but here it is for the three of you who haven’t:

Of course all the T-ara and Davichi fans are having a whine because their favourite girls actually aren’t in it, and some are looking on the positive and saying maybe that’s a smart move because of netizens’ hatred of anything sexy and blah blah… but hang on, since when did CCM ever factor netizen hate into anything in a non-stirring-the-pot kind of way?  That would seem very uncharacteristic of them, wouldn’t it.  No, I think there might be a different reason and as per usual I’m going to use my insider knowledge about how shit actually works in the world of music to take you through a little scenario and tell you why I think the way that I do.  As usual with my posts, it’s time to do some reading, folks (and hey wading through all this text will give time for the gifs to load).

For those of you who don’t know, like most big companies, music labels outsource like a motherfuck.  Distribution is outsourced often – why do you think Loen’s YouTube channel has like almost every k-pop artist on it ever that isn’t in the biggest four or five labels.  All that merch you buy is made by some other company too, not the label themselves (that’s why they get certain details that a fan would notice but a factory employee wouldn’t wrong sometimes, like correct anglicisation and name-spacing).  The CDs and books are printed by someone else too, and you see fuckups in those all the time – I’ve got a Sistar book where Hyorin’s name isn’t even spelled correctly.  Even stuff like payroll is outsourced, would you believe.  SM probably don’t even make those big “boxes” for their dance artists to dance in, there’s probably a special company that does that, and maybe you hate the boxes but SM has a contract with that company to produce x amount of semi-unique boxes per artist per year so tough shit if you don’t like “Groan” or “Screech” or whatever the new EXO thing is called.

When things start to get really interesting here is when the main company and the outsourcing company don’t have the best business relationship in the world.  This leads to two things:

1.  Employees at the outsourced company start giving less of a fuck (more mistakes get made)

2.  Employees or even the company themselves start actively fucking with the program for a laugh (subtle sabotage)

Anything can strain that relationship.  Maybe the main company isn’t paying the bills on time.  Maybe the CEO is just a douchenoz.  Or maybe the artists are annoying to deal with and when they turn up on the outsourced company’s video set all the employees groan “not this bitch again, what a pain in the ass she was on the last shoot”, so they talk her into dyeing her hair bright red and singing in front of a bunch of backgrounds that all look like the inside of a woman’s cunt, so at least they can have a laugh about it later over a beer while watching the end result.

Now let’s do a scenario where we pretend that the main company is CCM and they’re organising elements of the video shoot for the Bikini MV.  Oh boy, what could possibly go wrong here.

KKS’s personal assistant makes the call to the outsourced costume company: “the new song’s called Bikini, we need eight bikini swimwear costumes for the girls, here are their measurements, I need it by the end of the weekend, send it to this address who are the company making the video, now get it done”.  She then calls the also-outsourced video shoot company: “look, they’re gonna send you some costumes on Monday, shoot a teaser on that day while the weather’s good, edit in the evening, then we clear it with the censorship people, we need the full thing in a week, okay go.”

The costumer guy is pissed off.  Eight girls all with wonky anemic measurements that mostly don’t match a damn thing in pre-existing stock means he’ll have to design and make something special for each of them – on the weekend too, as if that’s gonna happen!  It hardly seems worth the effort especially for someone who isn’t exactly a preferred client.  “I don’t care if I lose the business, I have other customers who are better to deal with on the phone and actually pay on time”, he thinks, rips up the measurements he wrote down over the phone and just sends eight random bits of swimwear from off the shelf that kind of look like they might fit a sexy hot girl to the video people, because fuck it.

The video people get the shipment, open it and get pissed off too.  “Fucking typical KKS” they think “none of these half-starved girls even have tits and he wants them in a bikini shoot, with THESE garments?”  They try to pad up Hyomin a bit to do a video teaser but it just isn’t working – the pads keep falling out the side and it’s fooling nobody, plus you can see the ribs and it’s not really that sexy.  Hyomin is nearly passing out just standing there for hours while they fuck around with this shit and really needs some rest.  “Do you think he’ll be mad if we use another girl for the teaser instead?” someone asks.  Shrugs of shoulders all round, who can figure out that KKS guy.  Someone suggests using “that girl from that other group we shot last year, you know, the one with the rack, she’d fit into that red thing” and people start looking around and nodding their heads.  Hyomin happily hands over Haein’s phone number, a phone call is made, and Haein, not particularly busy and eager for the employment, takes the bus down to the beach and does some poses for the crew.  Everyone is happy with the result because it means they get paid and they get to knock off work, and Hyomin’s happy too because she can go back to the hotel and get some sleep instead of fucking around on the beach for hours.

The teaser gets sent back to CCM’s assistant on the email, who looks at it and thinks “damn that’s nice, but why is it that Gangkiz chick though, I thought we got rid of her, where are T-ara and Davichi?”.  They make a phone call to the video people, which rings out and goes to voicemail – the video director went to the pub and switched his mobile onto silent mode when it became clear that he and Haein were actually starting to get along and he could realistically be getting some action soon.

The next day over breakfast after a pretty outstanding morning blowjob from a very gratefully employed Haein, the director discusses the main shoot.  The crew likes the look of the teaser, especially T-ara who are tired and overworked and really don’t want to even be there at all.  “Did KKS like it?” Haein asks.  Nobody knows, the director has had his hands full (so to speak) and hasn’t even noticed that phone message, and on SNS there’s just a “looks great, but can we catch up and talk” or something from the company.   Everyone comes to a mutual agreement: “CCM thinks it looks great, so T-ara and Davichi girls take the next few days off, Haein get some of your friends who need work too and we’ll get them in these bikinis, and let’s do this”.  The main video is then shot, with Haein featuring in a good 50% of it as a token of gratitude, and everyone is proud with the end result as it gets emailed to CCM offices.

By the time KKS watches it, he’s like “jesus christ they sure fucked up here – but hey, we’ve spent enough money already on this shit, and this is probably what they were expecting anyway from the teaser, what the hell let’s just fuckin’ put it out there”.  “But sir… Davichi’s name isn’t even spe…” “JUST GET IT OUT THERE DAMNIT, what am I paying you for?”.

And that’s how (I believe) the most fap-friendly k-pop karaoke beach MV of 2013 was created.  Welcome back Haein!

(Thanks to Comekpop for the bikini gifs!)

A true story:

Last year, I was on tour with my band, driving my piece of shit Mitsubishi stationwagon down the highway in Victoria, Australia, to some tin shed that myself and my musical combo were going to spend the night.   I noticed that we were nearly out of fuel, so we pulled into a country petrol station.  As we were filling up petrol, a queue of cars started to form behind us.  We went into the service station, paid for petrol and some dreaded “road food” and when we went back to my car, just before we were about to leave anyway, I was stopped by some guy old enough to be my grandfather (and I’m not a young guy so you know this guy was seriously old), who got out of one of the cars behind us, and walked up to me especially to say something like “can’t you get a move on?  There’s about half a dozen cars waiting behind you, you know!”.  My response to this person was “we’re done when we’re done, I’m sorry but you’re all just going to have to wait.  We’re getting out of here in a second anyway.  What’s wrong with you younger generation anyway, can’t you be a bit patient?”  He then went back to his car and shut the fuck up, and we got the hell out of there when we were good and ready, and not a second before.

What a cuntbreath.  Can’t he wait ten seconds for us to get in the car without running his mouth like a little bitch?  Anyway, today when reading about the latest G-Dragon controversy, it occurred to me that this random petrol station fuckbrain has a lot in common with every k-pop fan ever.

The entire k-pop industry and culture seems to me to be very much built around the needs of the Internet generation.  There’s a whole strata of information and activity around k-pop that you would completely miss if you weren’t plugged into the Internet.  I’m not just talking about music downloads, or about blogs like this one – the whole promotional machine is Internet-driven.  Teasers are designed specifically for Internet consumption.  Videos debut on YouTube globally long before they hit TV shows.  SNS is now a promotional tool.  If you were to just go down to your local k-pop CD store and buy albums and merch, and had no other involvement in k-pop apart from that and maybe watching it whenever it’s on TV, you would honestly be clueless about almost everything k-pop related.  Everything is interconnected, self-referential and instantaneous, and moving very quickly, something the brains behind the industry are acutely aware of, and doing their best to be at the forefront of, with varying degrees of success.

Unfortunately, this wonderful connectivity through the miracle of technology has had an unfortunate side-effect – everyone has grown accustomed to all this instantaneous access and availability, has grown to expect it, and gets shitty whenever they have to wait for anything for any length of time that would be considered normal in any other music scene.  Everyone wants their new teaser/photoshoot/comeback/tour/blow-up fetish toy NAOW NAOW NAOW.  For example, remember the f(x) fans whining about no f(x) comeback a few months ago?  How long had it been since the Electric Shock mini-album, only about 12 months if that, in any other music scene any group who releases a mini-album in 2012 and then a full album in 2013 is considered to be fairly prolific.

It’s great for the companies to have their audience on a string like this, so they’re happy to play along, nudging fans with teasers and cryptic SNS messages, and releasing things a day or two early to satisfy the impatient masses.  Where it becomes a problem is that fans pandered to and endlessly spoiled by these companies expect instant access to not just music-related content, but everything and I really do mean EVERYTHING related to it, and whining like bitches when they don’t get it.

The perfect example from last year:  T-ara’s “bullying” controversy only escalated because the company didn’t respond to the concerns of fans in what fans thought was a reasonable timeframe (i.e within a few days), so with a lack of official information to work with, fans created their OWN fraudulent “information” to fill the void, and ran with it.  By the time the company bothered to clarify things, people had so much emotional energy invested in their own stupid little theories that there was no way they were going to believe the words of anybody who would actually know the truth – you know, like the people actually involved.

The most recent example: G-Dragon takes a photo with his face blacked out, deliberately ambiguous, very obviously a teaser of some kind.  People quite understandably wonder what it’s all about (which is of course the point of a teaser, proving that it’s fucking working a charm isn’t it), and some people with a bunch of time on their hands think that maybe G-Dragon is being racist and then the company seeing the social media outcry responds by saying that it’s a face-painting thing for something upcoming in a few weeks, implying that maybe you should hold your fucking horses for a bit and settle down with your theories about racism or whatever, at least until you see the end result of whatever the fuck it is they’re working on.  Do people then settle down?  Oh fuck no.  Everybody has to know NAOW NAOW NAOW whether G-Dragon is a horrible racist who hates black people or at the very least a cultural ignoramus because he painted his face black, and speculate on this shit endlessly.  Please.  Just spare me, and chill the fuck out.

From what YG described, maybe what G-Dragon ends up doing will look and sound something like what these white performers painted in black (and red, and white, just like the YG statement said) are doing?

I certainly hope so (and if you think what THEY are doing is “blackface”, you’re an idiot – go look up what the term actually means you daft cunt).  Or maybe it will be something really shit instead but IT LOOKS LIKE YOU’RE GONNA HAVE TO FUCKING WAIT TO FIND OUT ANYWAY, YOU LITTLE SHIT.

If this generation of tech-savvy entitled brats don’t have shit handed to them on a platter and neatly explained in a timely fashion with no ambiguities left over they have to get on their high horse and start pointing fingers at someone, or something, or ANYTHING, so they can feel good about themselves and morally superior, because “well, gosh, you’d never see ME painting my face black for a performance concept because that would be culturally insensitive”, or “well if it was ME in charge of YG I wouldn’t have made 2NE1 wait two years for a comeback” or “SM need to prioritise f(x) as much as SNSD” or “KKS should have held a press conference with all of T-ara”, or whatever the fuck else they think they know about how to do any of this shit despite having precisely zero experience in said field.

I’m sure people could change the world infinitely for the better if they could just stop fucking complaining about it all the time and get up off their computer chairs.  Which seems like a good note to end this blog on.