It’s Kpopalypse book review time again!  Read on as Kpopalypse reads books about k-pop, so you don’t have to!

Hello, I Love You

Author: Katie M. Stout

St. Martins Griffin, 304 pages, hardcover, 254mm x 191mm

ISBN: 978-1-250-05259-9

e-book ISBN: 978-1-4668-5459-8

RRP: US $18.99 – CAN $21.99

Amazon link so the author doesn’t hate me for this snarky review and can still make a buck

I got sent a press release email about a month ago by someone in the marketing department of St. Martin’s Press, talking enthusiastically about a new fiction book called “Hello, I Love You”.  The email gave a brief plot synopsis and also stated the following:

This June St. Martin’s Griffin will publish Hello, I Love You, a debut YA (young adult) novel by Katie M. Stout.

Katie Stout’s novel is a wondrous blend of dynamic characters, witty dialogue, and KPOP—the music that has taken the whole world by storm.

Sweet, fun, and romantic, Katie M. Stout’s Hello, I Love You explores what it means to experience first love and discover who you really are in the process. If you would like a copy of Hello, I Love You for an online review or feature, please send a mailing address.

My initial reaction was “fuck yeah, I’ll review this!  Send me a copy!  Send me ten copies!” – why not?  I was mainly curious to see if a piece of young adult fiction about k-pop could outperform the trash on AsianFanFics – if so, then I’d have a good time reading it, and if not, I’d have a good time laughing at it.  Also, my last book review went down like a lead balloon just swimmingly, so I figured you folks would appreciate the entertainment of me not writing crappy fanfiction but throwing down on someone else’s fanfiction for a change.

So – what is “Hello, I Love You”?  Here’s a scan of the back of my advance reading copy that the lady from St. Martins nicely posted out to me:

Note “blog outreach” is actually listed as part of their official marketing campaign – which is kind of scary when I think about it.  I find it hard to imagine some girl in an office tasked with the mission of “blog outreach” cruising around k-pop blogs, stumbling across my own blog of all places and thinking “yeah – let’s send a press release to this guy”.  I figure that there’s only two possibilities as to how this occured:

1. She just saw that I write about k-pop and figured “ahhh, publicity” and didn’t investigate what I do any further than that because she was busy spamming every blog with “kpop” in the title and maybe it was close to lunchtime (hey Katie maybe you should have a word to her, just saying)
2. She’s a cao ni ma and thinks that my review of this would be hilarious

So let’s get down to it.  What is this book about, and more importantly, how good is it, and should you read it?

The story is about an American girl called Grace Wilde (!) who is blonde, pretty and oh-so-famous in America and who the tabloids are writing about a lot because her brother was an oh-so-famous country rock star or some shit.   She’s having a hard time dealing with her oh-so-famous family and lifestyle, because nobody really understands how internally tormented she is, so she runs away to South Korea where nobody knows how oh-so-famous she is and attends a boarding school.  There she meets oh-so-famous Korean musician Jason Bae (!!!), who is in an FTIsland-style three piece manufactured k-pop pseudo-rock group called Eden (okay the group name is actually realistically awful), and who also happens to be the brother of the girl who she is boarding with.  Did I mention that Grace is oh-so-famous and that tabloids write about her?  The first problem with this book, if you hadn’t guessed yet (her name alone is a giveaway), is that the main character has a bit of a case of the Mary Sues.  She’s just too much of a special snowflake, and our author makes sure that the reader knows just how special and unique she is:

I finger my own blond curls, which flattened along the journey but still hang down to my elbows.  Momma likes to call my hair my “crowning glory,” a gift from her side of the family.  I’ve always loved it; it matches perfectly with what my sister, Jane, calls my “hipster look,” but I now realise [that in Korea] it makes me stick out like a goth at a country concert.

And trust me when I tell you, that’s pretty obvious.  I’ve been to my fair share of concerts, both country and otherwise.  When your did is one of the biggest record producers in the country music business and your brother has topped the country charts five years in a row, you start to learn your way around the Mecca of the music lover.

Of course she’s also the only American at the boarding school, because if she wasn’t, then she wouldn’t be so special and unique.  You get the idea.  It’s far from the most extreme case of Mary-Sueism that I’ve seen in fiction, but I would have liked the story a lot more if the main character was just a little more ordinary and thus believable.

Anyway in the story Grace checks out Jason’s band and then things start gradually simmering in a typically teen romance kind of way.  That’s the first 35 pages of the book revealed, and honestly if you’ve read to that point and you’ve got half a brain, you can probably write the remaining 270-odd pages yourself.  The second negative point with “Hello, I Love You” is that it’s completely predictable and the basic teen romance plot outline of “girl meets boy > girl crushes on boy because he’s hot even though she also realises he’s a dickhead > girl gets to know boy deep down and he’s really alright underneath the 57 layers of fuckwit > shit looks like it’s about to happen between them but then it doesn’t for some trivial bullshit reasons > eventually everyone changes their smelly tampons and everything is okay” is strictly adhered to.  There are no surprises here and an attentive reader will see every twist coming at least 100 pages before it happens thanks to the author telegraphing everything miles in advance.  When a random photographer shows up in one scene and oddly takes a photo of unknown-in-Korea-but-oh-so-famous-in-the-US Grace instead of k-pop star Jason, it’s obvious that the author is setting up American tabloid journos tracking her down at her Korean boarding school later on in the book.  When Jason scores a part in a k-drama with a hot female lead, it’s clear that the hot female lead is inserted as something for Grace to get jealous about, and that this is a device insert partly to give the narrative some friction.  When it’s mentioned that one of the members of Eden is a good dancer, you know straight away that eventually he’ll be thinking about going the k-idol route instead of being stuck behind an instrument.  I don’t feel bad about spoilering any of this stuff because all I’m doing is demonstrating how the book does a great job of spoilering itself as you read it – the only unknown about these plot points is when they will occur, not if.  The only twist that might catch some people by surprise is the unexpected meaning of the book’s name, and even that development can be spotted way in advance for those who have knowledge in certain areas and are paying attention…

Mind you there’s nothing wrong with predictability as long as you enjoy the ride, and the ride in “Hello, I Love You” is surprisingly enjoyable – but not for any k-pop related reasons, as the k-pop aspect of the book is actually a lot more incidental than hyped.  It figures too, as according to the author the story was never originally meant to be set in Korea anyway, but was changed to a Korean setting down the track for ease of comprehension and marketing reasons.  What keeps the narrative moving forward is the romance between the two lead characters which is quite engaging and page-turning, mainly because it’s all told from the female character’s point of view and she’s a relentlessly clueless self-sabotaging fuck-up moron (and of course she has to be – without her being this way, there is simply no story for her to tell).  This characterisation is welcome because besides being funny it chips away at her initially-established cloying Mary-Sueism and makes her much more likeable, also giving the book some much-needed realism and somewhere for her character to grow.  You’ll want to read the next chapter because you’ll be curious about how (and how much) Grace will make a blundering assclown out of herself next, not because of anything to do with k-pop.

There’s one more catch this book had in store, that I initially didn’t expect – and in a way, this was the book’s biggest twist.  As I read through the book I started to get sick of the author describing Grace’s chest constricting and/or heat running up the back of her neck every time she sees Jason, that certainly got a bit repetitive – then I realised that the author was continually focusing on those things because she was avoiding discussing what was happening in the main character’s genital region.  It also dawned on me that the characters have the most clean-mouthed, goody-two-shoes, G-rated arguments ever.  Things don’t get very racy either – anyone coming to this book expecting romantic liaisons and bedroom scenes with their favourite k-pop stars, which I imagine would be one of the main drawcards of a book that markets itself with the “k-pop fiction” label, is going to walk away with some seriously blue ovaries, so forget about any fap value (unless you’re really into exposed collarbones on guys or western girls trying to use squatting toilets).  For a book that’s supposedly “young adult fiction” the “adult” part of the equation is sorely neglected.  I also noticed that church is mentioned a few times in the book kind of just in passing, like it’s no big thing for people to go to church like that’s what people normally fucking do – even though Christianity is hardly a major big deal in Korea – yeah, okay I see what you did there, author.  A bit of research later and it turns out that the author is a “Christ follower” on her SNS and a Christian charity worker – notice how the book blurb mentions that she works for a charity but not that it’s a Christian one, that’s the book company doing their best to portray the author positively while also trying not to scare off readers worried about having religion forced down their throats.  While it would definitely be a stretch to say that “Hello, I Love You” is preachy in any way, there’s a subtle (and to be fair, probably unintentional… but then again, the k-pop group IS called “Eden”…) undercurrent of conservative religious moral perspective running through it which I couldn’t help but pick up on.  It’s not necessarily a bad thing – it’s probably better that the author write true to her own perceptions and values rather than try and throw in lots of edgy, trendy swearing or whatever (I know that might sound ludicrous coming from Kpopalypse, but swearing a fucking lot is consistent with my personal values, just like not swearing is (presumably) consistent with hers).  Just be aware that it’s a thing, and while it may not bother some readers, for a music industry insider, the world the author is painting looks candy-coated and difficult to swallow as a result.  I mean, the main character’s chart-topping music star brother has a drug abuse problem that doesn’t involve anything illegal?  Come on now.

For what it’s worth for k-pop fans, the parts of the k-pop world that the book does handle aren’t too unrealistic.  The group Eden write their own material, an unfortunate narrative necessity which rubs up against another narrative necessity – the fact that they don’t like their own songs and play like a bunch of robots, but that’s about as unbelievable as the proceedings ever get, at least for a casual reader who isn’t in on k-pop’s intense behind-the-scenes skullduggery that the book completely avoids even discussing.  Fangirls are portrayed by the author in a way that rings true (rabid dangerous zerglings), as are the entertainment gossip media (lying slimy cunts) and the celebrities themselves (cautious and skittish), and other details of Korean life like food (non-westerner friendly) and traffic (insane) seem plausible enough to indicate that the author does indeed know some stuff about Korea.  Forget about your bias turning up in the book though – apart from a few well-known western rock bands that are referenced, the music industry world portrayed in the book is a fictional one.  The closest this book comes to an actual known k-pop star is some celebrity girl called Na Na but it’s not that Na Na (although it’s possible the character was modeled on her).  Despite the blurb on the back you don’t have to worry about Teen Top turning up.

In the end it doesn’t matter much though, because most importantly of all, the author can write, and this carries the book despite its faults.  It’s definitely not the AsianFanFics-style muddle that I feared it might be, it’s quality writing that’s quite engaging, and I blew through the book’s 300-odd pages pretty quickly without ever feeling like I was forcing myself to read it just so I could write about it later and be intolerably snarky about it.  If you can look past the slight Mary Sue aspect, the lack of any really juicy k-pop related content, the somewhat conservative narrative and general predictability of it all, there’s a decently entertaining “let’s fall for a total douchebag” love story here to be had, if that’s what you’re into fiction-wise.  Personally, I dig it – it’s nice to be reminded occasionally that girls still love douchebags, as a certified asshole it warms the heart to know that I am actually exactly what women want.

Final rating: 2 unrealistically perfect female characters out of 5…

…but add an extra one if you don’t know anything about the Korean entertainment industry and therefore the fact that none of the characters do any sex work, visit any sex workers or encounter any advertising for sex services during the entire book doesn’t bother you or strike you as odd in any way.

You said that you wanted it, so here it is – a sequel to “T-ara vs AOA – The Final Fap“!

While this post does work as a standalone story, it’s a lot more fucking entertaining and the various references in it will make far more sense if you’ve already read the original, so read the first part by clicking here!  For those who have already done so, read on, cao ni mas!

You’ve heard the stories.  Everybody has heard the stories.

One minute they’re organising a protest, the next minute they’re gone.  K-pop fans.  It’s been spoken about several times before, and you’ve seen it on your favourite k-pop forums.  A group of concerned fans, worried about the increasing objectification and depersonalisation in k-pop, will talk about organising a protest rally.  Then they’ll go down to the street in Gangnam where all the agency buildings are and actually have the rally… and then they’re never seen on the forums again.  At first you thought it was because they became so disillusioned with the current state of k-pop after their protest didn’t achieve anything that they quit following the music and the forums altogether.  That seemed like a logical assumption, but now that assumption has changed – because of what happened to your high-school crush.

You’re a 15-year old female k-pop fangirl and you were crushing hard on Hyunaisaslut57 who was in your class – at school he was a quiet, nerdy shy kid with confidence and acne issues, but on the forums he was a brave self-described “online feminist k-pop activist”.  You admired his ability to construct arguments showing the evil of k-pop’s portrayal of women, and his last post “Why Gain Is Classy And Hyuna Is A Slut part 15″ (tl;dr – “Hyuna shakes her tits but Gain makes art that raises questions”) was amazing.  You figured that he might be very intelligent and astute, and you dreamed of getting to know the real person behind the forum persona.  So far you’ve been too shy to approach him – it’s tough to get to know someone when both people are shy!  Then he went to that protest and he hasn’t been seen at school since.  At first you thought maybe he was just sick, but then you saw the “missing” poster in the school corridor posted a few days later by the local police.  You knew something was up – something big, but to this day he still hasn’t been found.

A few weeks later, you noticed another protest being organised.  A forum thread appeared – “LET’S DO SOMETHING ABOUT THE STATE OF KPOP IN 2015!!!!!!!!!”, screamed the heading.  The original post in the thread ranted passionately about the current state of play in k-pop, tits and ass being used everywhere in videos for both the male and the female groups, and criticised the previous group of protesters for being “pussies” for abandoning both k-pop and the cause of social justice in the music business straight after the protest was over.  “Don’t think just one protest is enough and then you can vanish, we have to keep up the pressure!” the original post ranted as it gave instructions for a new protest, and invited as many concerned people as possible to attend.

That’s what’s brought you here.

You’re sitting on a bench across the street from the SMTown building, watching a small group of protestors from the forum thread wave signs and chant something about objectification that you’re just a little too far away to clearly hear.  You’re not part of the actual protest, and you haven’t spoke to any of them, they don’t even know who you are or that you’re observing, and you don’t want to get directly involved with any of them.  It’s not that you disagree with them, in fact you completely agree with everything the protestors stand for, but you know what happens to people who protest about k-pop objectification – they vanish.  You’re here to watch what happens to them, and hopefully in the process try to solve the mystery of what happened to your crush, and bring him back from wherever he is.  You’ve brought your mobile phone to record as much evidence as possible and alert the authorities if need be, a portable camera so you can save your phone charge for calls, some sandwiches, a water bottle, a small torch and even a pocket Swiss army knife, which all fits neatly into the small backpack you’re wearing.  It seems a little paranoid, but you have no idea what to expect so therefore you’ve come prepared for any eventuality.

Who knows if anything will happen, but better for nothing to happen and for you to feel a little over-prepared and silly, than to be caught short in a dangerous scenario.  If something does happen, you’re ready to go all-out for Hyunaisaslut57 – whatever it takes to find out where he is and bring him back to safety… if that’s even possible.  A shudder goes through your body as you consider the worst, but you push it to the back of your mind, as you watch the group of protestors yell and wave signs.  Passers-by look at them oddly, but they don’t understand – this is important.

-=*=-

The hours pass and the protest group gradually moves down the street, from one agency headquarters to the next.  You do your best to keep a low profile, pretending that you’re waiting for someone or just browsing in the shops across the street.  You haven’t drawn any undue attention to yourself, and none of the protestors know what you look like, so it’s not like they’ll have any chance of recognising you, they’ve got enough people looking at them oddly to pay attention to some random girl.  It’s starting to get very boring though, especially their tedious slogans, and the group has had zero reaction yet from anyone apart from odd stares from strangers, certainly none of the workers in the buildings have paid them any attention at all.  You start to wonder – is this protest really achieving anything meaningful?  You continue to pretend to window-shop across the street and start thinking that maybe this isn’t the best use of your time.

Your pondering is cut short when you notice some police squad cars pull up on either side of the protest group, who are now in front of the Chrome Entertainment building.  One of the cars turns their siren on and then off for a brief second, startling everyone.  A bus also pulls up beside one of the cars.  A female police officer wearing a motorcycle helmet gets out of one of the cars and starts talking to someone from the protest group.  You’re too far away to hear what’s being said… but why is she wearing a motorcycle helmet when she was in a police car, not a motorcycle?  She’s soon joined by another female officer, who is about the same height and also wearing a helmet.  They have a long discussion with the group, you wish you could hear what the conversation is about but you don’t want to blow your cover, however from everyone’s body language it’s clear enough that the protest group are in some kind of legal trouble.  After a few minutes of talking more police get out and the protestors are handcuffed and herded into the police bus.  They’re being arrested!  It occurs to you that maybe Hyunaisaslut57 is in jail somewhere… but if so, why would there be a wanted poster with the police looking for him distributed around your school?

The bus engine starts and the bus slowly drives off.  You’re too young to have any motorised transport so you take your phone out from your backpack to search for the location of the nearest police station and how you’re going to get there.  However before you can begin looking, the bus turns off the street completely and into a driveway behind a building only a block away!  Why aren’t they going to the police station?  Oh well, at least you don’t have to figure out transport options now.  You wait about 30 seconds so you’re not too conspicuous and then walk briskly up to the building to take a closer look.

FNC Entertainment.  You know this agency as the home of CNBlue, FTIsland, and AOA, that obnoxious slutty girl group with the miniskirts that all the boys like.  Ugh.  It pains you to think about them – they were so much better with the band concept before they became slutty whores.  You walk around to the back of the building and up the driveway into the parking lot to see if you can find the bus, just in time to see a parking garage door set into the building close behind it.  The bus, and all those protesters, are somewhere inside the building now, doing god-knows-what.  You have to get in there!

Looking up, the FNC building is large and imposing, several stories tall with large windows. Anyone on the upper levels who happens to be looking outside can probably see you right now, standing in a car park looking lost, not to mention very conspicuous.  It’s probably not a good idea to try to access the building at this time, you resolve to come back in the evening and attempt to enter under the cover of darkness.  Sighing, you begin the journey home.

-=*=-

That night after dinner, you catch the bus back into town and reapproach the FNC building.

The front entrance is brightly lit, with imposing metal bars and rails no doubt designed to keep the sasaengs at bay when groups enter and exit vehicles.  You’re not going to walk straight in the front door, so you scout around the building for any other way to get in.  You move up the side and around to the back of the building, the car park that you entered easily enough earlier in the day now has a gate across it.  Looking around you try and find another access point.  You notice a ventilation shaft on the side of the building at ground level.  Is entering a building via the vents as viable in real life as it is in computer games?  No time like the present to find out, fortunately you’re fairly small so if anyone can do this it’s probably you.  It seems like the only option so you pull out your Swiss army knife and start undoing the screws that hold the vent cover in place.

After a few minutes, the vent cover is off, and you flick on your torch and crawl inside, doing your best to close it behind you while still leaving it loose enough to re-open easily if you reach a dead-end and have to go back out.  Inside it’s dark and the pocket-sized torch isn’t nearly as powerful as you hoped it would be, only allowing a couple meters of clear viewing.  You persist anyway, inching along slowly on your knees.  Progress is slow but steady for about about two minutes, until the vent shaft abruptly slopes 45 degrees – downward.  You shine your torch into the darkness.

You can’t see where it ends, the torch isn’t powerful enough.  Should you risk it?  You wonder what could be at the bottom of the slope, and think about how whatever it is, you’re probably not going to be able to get back up this way.  You ponder if maybe you should give this up and go home, as this might be your last chance to reconsider.  Then you think about Hyunaisaslut57 – he needs your help!  So do all those protestors, who knows where they are now, but police buses don’t go into k-pop agency garages and never come out again, something sinister is up, you just know it.  Taking a deep breath, you awkwardly twist around in the narrow space to arrange yourself feet-first and gradually ease yourself down the slope, pushing at the sides of the ventilation shaft with your hands and feet to prevent you from losing your grip and sliding down at full speed.  You inch down the slope gradually for about 30 seconds, but then something happens – the walls of the ventilation shaft start getting slimier and slimier, they’re covered with some sort of mucky film.  It becomes harder and harder to maintain a grip.  Fear suddenly rises through your chest – this was obviously a terrible idea!  What were you thinking?  You’ve got to get out of here!  You start to panic and clamber at the sides of the shaft desperately to try and extract yourself but this only ensures that your grip becomes even worse, and in a split second you’ve lost any contact with the sides and are plummeting through the darkness.

After only a second of travel (although it feels like ten), your feet slam up against a metal object and you come to a stop.  You then hear a loud creaking, as the entire shaft that you’re in starts moving back and forth, wobbling on an axis.  Light appears at the side of one of the shaft panels, and before you can react the entire bottom of the shaft you’ve just slid down on breaks apart and you fall onto a concrete surface, knees first.  You slide out from under the rest of the now broken vent, get up and look around.  You’ve emerged into part of an underground car park.  The vent that you fell out of was attached to a large silver commercial-sized air-conditioning unit.  Your exit has broken the fan off the side which now lays on the concrete floor next to the part of the vent that you just slid out from under.  Someone is probably going to notice that this unit isn’t working and come to inspect it eventually, so you move quickly to one side of the car park where there are some lifts and stairs.

Lifts probably aren’t a good idea, so you take the door into the stairwell.  The stairs go both up and down, and you pause for a minute to consider your options.  You figure if anything is hidden here surely it’s on the lower levels away from the business as usual of the upper floors, so you decide to take the downward staircase as far as it will go.  Five flights of stairs later, you reach the bottom – who knew that the building went so deep?  As you approach the fire door, you can hear a faint whirring machine noise on the other side.  You quieten you footsteps and open the door very gently.

The door opens into a small corridoor behind a large, brightly-lit dressing room.  As you open it, the machine sound becomes a lot clearer and is now easily recognisable as a hair-dryer.  You peek your head around the corner.

You can see T-ara’s Hyomin, drying her hair.  You recognise her instantly, you were fuming when she released that disgusting “Nice Body” video, so unfortunately you know what she looks like all-too-well.  Her eyes are closed to protect them from the hair-dryer’s heat blast and she hasn’t noticed your presence.  You duck your head back behind the corner quickly, and move back into the stairwell, leaving the door slightly ajar so you can hear what happens in the dressing room.

“HYOMIN!” – you hear a female voice call out to her.  The volume startles you and you flinch, nearly accidentally slamming the fire door shut in the process.

“WHAT?” you hear Hyomin reply.  You can’t see her from around the corner but it’s obviously her.

“Can you come and help me?  I’ve got jelly stuck in my cleavage again!” the voice shouts.

Hyomin turns off the hair-dryer and sighs loudly.  “Can’t you fucking do it yourself?”

“But it’s all slimy and… ewww!  And I’ve already got my corset on!  You’ve had big boobs a lot longer than I have, I need your expertise!  I’m worried I’ll void the warranty on these!” asks the unknown voice.

“Alright, alright… give me a moment… fuck…” Hyomin sounds frustrated.  You can hear her drop the hair-dryer on the dressing-room table and walk off somewhere.

You wait a few seconds, creep out back into the corridor and peer around the corner again.  Hyomin isn’t there but you can hear her cursing under her breath, she has gone somewhere else in the dressing room, which seems to actually consist of multiple connected rooms.  You see a wooden door on the other side of the corridor, so you quickly rush to it and open it, then close it as soundlessly as possible.  Just after you close it behind you, you hear Hyomin’s voice get louder again as she returns to the dressing room and walks through it to the corridor you were just in a moment ago.

“I need a fucking cigarette after touching those tits – fucking hell” she mutters to herself as you hear her loudly opening the fire door that you originally entered the corridor from.  You guess that she’s going to the carpark to light up.  You breathe a sigh of relief – that was a close call.  Leaving the door closed you look ahead of you, at a long brightly-lit corridor with polished wooden floors and multiple doors on each wall.

The corridor extends for what seems like a hundred metres in both directions.  How large is this place?  You could be here all night trying to find Hyunaisaslut57 – and then when/if you do find him, how the hell are you going to get both him and you out of here?

You open the nearest door on the left side of the corridor.  It has a sign on it: “GREEN ROOM B6″.  You can’t hear anything on the other side, so you quickly enter and close the door behind you.  The sign didn’t lie, it’s a room that is green.  The walls are green, there are also several green couches here, and two large fridges.  You sit on the nearest couch for a moment and catch your breath, and you become conscious for the first time that your knees are grazed and actually really hurt from hitting the concrete when you fell out of that ventilation shaft earlier.  There is also a full-length mirror here, and above it is a TV screen.  You watch the TV, it’s showing a feed from a closed circuit TV camera in another room.  The image is of a gymnasium, and there’s an inflatable pool in the middle of the floor, with a red/purple substance in it.  The camera pans across the room… and you gasp as you see a bunch of naked people, tied to chairs!  You recognise some of them, they’re the protestors who were driven here!  Why are they tied up… and what’s that pool for?  You keep watching the camera.  The vision cuts to a different room, a large space that looks like a small factory floor.  There’s a machine in the center of the room, featuring large conveyor belts and cogs.  It’s seemingly switched off, and it’s not apparent what the machine is for.  The camera pans across the newly-displayed factory room, and you notice that the machine is connected to another machine, which doesn’t seem to have any moving parts at all, just an esoteric silver box with a few holes in it.  The vision cuts to a different room – it’s one end of the corridor that you were just in!  Shit – you didn’t notice any camera in there!  Where else are there cameras, you wonder?  You figure that you’d better keep watching the screen to find out.  Your heart then sinks in panic as you realise that there’s a possibility that you’ve been filmed going into the “green room” and that you may be discovered.  You perk your ears up for any outside noises and look around for a hiding space should somebody enter.  There isn’t really one here, except maybe under the couch.  The CCTV vision cuts to a fourth room, an open-plan office.  The camera pans across – there are a few people seated at computer terminals and wearing telephone headsets, looking as if they are deep in conversation, but most of the seats are empty.  Then the CCTV loop begins again, returning to the gymnasium.  You shudder as you see the naked, imprisoned protestors pan across the screen a second time.

You can’t stay here, it’s only a matter of time before somebody finds you – but since the corridor is under surveillance, how do you avoid being seen?  You think for a moment, and then an idea comes.  You take out your phone and make a video recording of the CCTV.  This has two functions – firstly, you’re collecting evidence of what’s really going on here, but secondly, and more importantly for your immediate situation, you’re timing how long the CCTV takes to loop around.  You consider that if you time your travel correctly to avoid when the CCTV is scanning the corridor, you can move between rooms undetected.  After you make a full recording and play it back you notice that the recording loops after one minute exactly, with 15 seconds spent on each room.  You access your phone’s stopwatch feature, and start a timer from zero the corridor appears.  Now, every time one minute elapses on the stopwatch, you know that the camera is focusing on the corridor for the next 15 seconds after that before it changes rooms allowing you undetected travel.  You quietly cheer yourself on for being such a smartypants, wait for the next 15-second period of surveillance to be over, and swiftly exit the green room.

You quickly move to the next door.  There is a sign on it, that says “BAD THOUGHTS ROOM B6″.  What the fuck is that supposed to mean?  You don’t hear anything on the other side, so with only 45 seconds to make your move, you quickly enter the room and shut the door behind you.  You get the shock of your life as you see T-ara’s ex-singer Areum in a chair, looking directly at you!

“What are you doing here?” asks Areum.

You rush to think of an answer to cover yourself.  “I’m…. your biggest sasaeng!  I finally found you!  I love you Areum!  Can I have your autograph?”

“You are not my sasaeng.  Don’t be silly.  I know why you’re really here”, Areum replies, completely deadpan.

You realise that you have nothing for her to sign.  You must look stupid.  You drop the facade and your heart sinks.  Is she onto your real reason for being here?

Areum continues.  “You’re having troubled thoughts.”  Areum points to the wall.  “Troubled thoughts obfuscate the reality omnipresent in the brick.”

“W…what?” you exclaim.  You are in shock.  What is she talking about?

“A brick is strong, like the strength of T-ara, yet brittle, like the vulnerability of T-ara.”  Areum stares at you blankly, her stare is piercing but shows no discernable emotion.  “Is T-ara not the perfect sensory embodiment of the brick’s physical form?  Stay here a while, and strive to become like the brick.”

This is making no sense at all, and you’re feeling very uncomfortable. “Um… no, that’s alright.. I’ll just be leaving now”, you stutter.  “Er, please don’t tell anyone I came this way.”

“Does a brick speak?” asks Areum rhetorically as she covers her lips with her hand.  Although you’re thankful for her co-operation, this doesn’t make you feel very reassured.  You quickly check your phone’s stopwatch to gauge the moment when the camera focuses on the corridor outside again.  You’ve got 8 seconds to get out, or you can wait another 23 seconds here with Areum.  Getting out seems preferable.  Areum’s gaze remains fixated on you as you exit.

You quickly move to the next door.  It is marked “SITUATION ROOM B6″.  With no time to think further, you quickly enter, and immediately realise that this is the open-plan office that you saw the CCTV focus on earlier.  There are people in here, but they are all distracted by computer terminals and conversation in their headsets.  You duck down low behind an office divider and make your way quickly to an unmanned cubicle.  Your mind races as you struggle to remember the sequence of the CCTV camera – where was this room in the sequence?  That’s right, it was after the corridor, so it wouldn’t have seen you enter.  You lie down under a desk and catch your breath.  You’re safe for now.

You can hear the voices of some of the office workers, chattering away.  You decide to listen in for a while, maybe they’ll provide some clues as to what’s going on.  Various disembodied overlapping voices float around the room:

All I need is the 16-digit code on the front of the card and the expiry date …

No I don’t need the code on the back …

T-ara situation hotline, report your position relative to the target …

Why is it so hot in here, don’t tell me the air-conditioner is off again …

Thank you for calling the FNC/MBK Jelly Wrestling hotline, how can I help you? …

Yes, you can order for other people, but they must be over 18 years of age on the date of the event …

They should let us adjust the air-conditioner, how come only the manager is allowed to do it? …

T-ara anti activity spotted in netcafe co-ordinate 253-256 …

You can use American Express but this carries a 3% surcharge, we recommend Visa and Mastercard …

Await clearance to engage hostile T-ara anti, netcafe co-ordinate 253-256 …

Your confirmation number is 690238 …

Thank you for calling the FNC/MBK Jelly Wrestling hotline, how can I help you? …

It sucks how just a few minutes before a game we get overloaded with these Jelly Wrestling calls.  Why don’t they call earlier …

Yes, Choa is in this fight …

T-ara situation hotline, report your position relative to the target …

Yes, you can still pre-order tickets, but the event starts in 10 minutes and you must be seated before commencement or you will be denied entry, will you make it in time? …

Thank you for supporting FNC/MBK Jelly Wrestling! …

All of a sudden you hear a scratchy noise coming from the roof.  The building’s intercom comes on with a radio-hiss noise.

A female voice clears her throat and starts talking. “Attention, attention.  This is a fire drill.  All those in the basement Situation Room B6 please terminate your calls and evacuate immediately.  Follow your designated fire warden and assemble at your fire safety meeting point.  Please remember to use the stairs, not the elevator.  Remember no smoking in the stairwell or any other place within the building during fire drills.  Do not re-enter the building until given clearance to do so.  Thank you for your co-operation.”

You hear the group of workers get up from their seats and file out of the exit door.  Fortunately none of them walk behind the desk that you’re hiding under.  You hear some random chatter as they lethargically move out:

Shit, not again …

I’m due for my break soon, I hope I can take it straight after this is over …

Why a fire drill 10 minutes before a game, this is really going to piss off the Jelly Wrestling customers wanting last minute tickets …

Five flights of stairs, I don’t get paid enough for this shit …

Damnit, I nearly forgot my phone …

A minute later and the office workers are gone, their noise replaced with the steady hum of computers.  There’s no point staying here, you have to keep focused.  You look at your phone, considering the optimal time to make your next move, when the building intercom crackles to life again, emitting another hissing noise.

The same female voice clears her throat again, and talks.  “Hello, little girl.”

Then silence.  Uh oh.

“You might as well come out and show your pretty face.  I know exactly where you are.”

Oh shit.  You stay hidden.  Maybe she’s bluffing you into showing yourself.

The voice sounds pleased with herself, almost happy.  “You know, it was absolutely the cutest thing ever watching you time the camera-switching on your phone and moving from room to room.  That was very cleverly thought-out, I must say.  However, did you know that the vision-switching of the cameras in the green room has nothing to do with when they’re on and off, and in fact all the cameras are on all the time, and that they record all the time?  I not only know which room you’re in, but also which desk you’re hiding under.  Take a look at the PC box next to you on the floor there and tell me if it doesn’t say that it’s computer 57″.

You look at the PC.  There’s a small sticker on the side.

The voice continues.  “Fortuitous that you should hide with that particular computer, isn’t it?  Hey, I wonder what else ends with 57?  Don’t think about it too hard.  Anyway, why don’t you come out from under there and wave hello to me.  If you look straight across from that desk there’s a TV on the wall, and you can see me, just like I’ve been seeing you.  Let’s meet each other!”

You’re shaking like a leaf.  The voice not only knows exactly where you are, she also knows why you’re here – which means she’s probably holding Hyunaisaslut57 hostage.  There’s no point hiding anything anymore.  You gradually get up from under the desk, stand up and turn to face the TV.

It’s T-ara’s Boram.  She gestures to you and then smiles.  “Give me a wave!” she says.  You wave slowly.

Boram keeps talking.  “Of course, I know why you’re here.  I also know what you want, because I’m smart like that!  Don’t worry, you and your friends will be reunited a lot sooner than you think!  All you need to do is follow my instructions, and you can be together in perfect safety!  How does that sound?  Does that sound good?  Don’t bother talking, I can’t hear your voice from here.  A little nod will do nicely.”

You nod slowly.

“Okay, maybe not that little.  That nod didn’t have very much determination in it.  Can you give me a better nod than that?  Please nod like you mean it.”

You nod a little more vigorously.

Boram smiles.  “That’s better.  Now, I’m going to give you directions to a special place.  Please pay careful attention because I don’t like repeating things unless I’m being paid.  Turn to your right.  You’ll see a door at the far end of the office, take that door out into the corridor.  Then turn right again, go all the way to the end, through the door that says it’s a fire exit, up one flight of stairs, and then through the next door that also says it’s a fire exit.  Can you do that for me?”

You nod again, being careful to show minimum required determination levels so Boram doesn’t ask you to nod a second time.

“Oh come on.  That nod was pathetic.  We wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to your friends as a result of me misinterpreting your body language.  Please nod again.”

You nod again, harder.  Boram smiles.  You’re close to tears – she’s very obviously enjoying this.

“Settle, kettle!  That was nearly a headbang!  Please don’t injure yourself, the paperwork for workplace accidents is very time-consuming.  Anyway, since you seem to really like timing things, you have 30 seconds to arrive.  Don’t be late, or something bad could happen!  I’ll be seeing you again, one floor up!”

The image of Boram on the TV vanishes, replaced with a live feed from the jelly wrestling arena.  AOA’s Choa and T-ara’s Jiyeon stand in the inflatable pool with jelly up to their ankles, sizing each other up in an obviously rehearsed manner before the inevitable fight begins.  No time to watch – you run to the office door, into the corridor, sprint all the way to the fire exit which is a good 50 metres, run up the flight of stairs and put all your weight onto the door at the top.  You emerge onto a factory floor, with two large machines – the room that you saw earlier in the CCTV footage.

The intercom comes to life again.  “28 seconds!  I’m impressed!  Now look over to your right!”

On the right side of the room are some large industrial mesh-style balconies.  On these, you can see five of the protestors, all teenage boys sitting on chairs with their hands and feet firmly tied and wearing gags.  One of them is instantly recognisable as Hyunaisaslut57, the others are all people from the protest group that you saw earlier today.  Below their balcony position is one of the two large machines that dominate the floor space, a confusing system of conveyor belts and metal cogs.

“Please – take the stairs, come up to the balcony and meet your friends!” Boram giggles.

You make your way across the factory floor and up the metal stairwell, your mind racing.  As you are halfway up the stairs, a girl appears from a doorway at the top of the balcony and stares at you. You immediately stop ascending the stairs.

You recognise her as AOA’s Seolhyun.  You always hated her – “what a dirty whore, trust her to be involved with this”, you think to yourself.  Turning away from you, Seolhyun grabs one of the protestors, a skinny teenage boy about your age, stands him up from the chair and pushes him off the balcony.  You gasp as the protestor lands on the conveyor belt with a thud.  Seolhyun then pulls a lever control by the balcony and the machine comes to life, the conveyors slowly carrying the protestor towards a series of cogs.  Unable to move due to the rope around his wrists and ankles, the protestor wriggles in a futile struggle.

Boram chirps up again over the intercom: “This machine is called the Depersonaliser 5000.  We had it installed here only six months ago, it’s the latest in depersonalisation technology!  Watch it work and I think you’ll agree that it’s very effective!”

You scream in horror as the protestor’s body is completely crushed by the first series of metal cogs on the conveyor line, spraying blood and innards all over the gears as they continue to turn unhindered.  You wince at the sounds of cracking bone as the now flat, compressed body is shunted through some more cogs.  Eventually the carcass is ejected from the mechanical process onto a metal tray as a reddish-pink amalgm of minced offal, barely discernable as once human.

“He’s certainly not a person anymore!” laughs Boram.  “But in that state could he really be considered an object?  Now it’s time to use our second machine, the Objectificator GT!  Pay attention and you will discover how objectification can improve our quality of life!”

The metal tray tips up on an axis, and the giblets that was once a teenage k-pop fan are carried into the top of the second large machine, a large metal box.  The box whirs and chugs for a minute, producing horrible grinding and squelching noises, and then eventually falls silent.  From the bottom of the machine, a purple-red gelatinous substance seeps into a long bathtub-shaped tray.  A circular mechanical arm then stirs the gelatinous broth for consistency as it empties into a 44 gallon drum.

Boram cheers, briefly distorting the intercom.  “Bravo!  What was once an annoying, useless, whining person good for virtually nothing at all has become a practical object that can enhance the lives of many people!  After all, everybody loves jelly wrestling!  Now Seolhyun is going to help you and your other friends experience the joys of depersonalisation and objectification!”

You look up at Seolhyun.  She smiles at you and motions for you to resume climbing the staircase.  Nervous and shaken by what you just saw, as well as what is likely to happen to you next, you climb slowly to the top.

“Remove the backpack so you can sit with the others.” says Seolhyun.

You take your backpack off your back and lay it down on the ground.  You then quickly open up the front pocket, and grab your Swiss army knife.  You extend the blade and point it menacingly at Seolhyun’s neck.  Seolhyun responds by pushing her boot into the back of Hyunaisaslut57.

“You cut me with that thing, your friend goes on the conveyor!  Is that what you want, bitch?” Seolhyun snarls.

Boram crackles over the intercom.  “Now that’s not playing fair, little girl.  I’m coming for you, don’t be going anyplace!”  You hear a static noise as the building intercom system switches off.

“Let me have him, and I won’t hurt you!  I don’t want to hurt anyone, I just want to get out of here!” you yell.

Seolhyun spits at you.  “No chance, bitchface.  One fancy move from you and your loverboy is a jelly sandwich!”

You freeze.  It’s a stalemate – one that will quickly change to a situation in her favour once Boram gets here.  You try and think fast of a way to turn the tables, when Seolhyun inexplicably falls forward and collapses on her face, unconscious.  You look at the back of her head, there’s a brown lump there – a broken piece of brick.  You turn around just in time to see Areum scurry away through a door on the factory floor.  No time to thank her for her exemplary brick-throwing skills – you quickly slice through the ropes around Hyunaisaslut57 and the other protestors, and undo the gags around their mouths.

“How the fuck do I get out of here?” you ask the people you’ve just freed.

They all look at each other.  “Um… we were hoping you would know that.  How did you get IN here?” one of them asks.

You sigh.  “Never mind, let’s just go!  The exit is about five floors up, we just need to keep going up.”

“You women have no sense of direction, you’re not going to figure out how to get us out of here.”, one of the protestors comments, seemingly not in a hurry to move.

“WHAT?” you cry.  “Fuck you, I just rescued you, asshole!”

“No, it’s actually ME who has rescued YOU, by protesting against objectification and freeing your mind from entrapment.” he replies.  “Not that you deserve it.  Women have all the power in society anyway.”

“Yeah, it’s women who keep stringing men along by their dicks, they really control everything” one of the other protestors pipes up.

“We do all this fighting for the rights of women, and don’t even get a blowjob out of it or anything.” says Hyunaisaslut57.

“What good is White Knighting for pussy this much if there’s no payoff?” says the first protestor.

“I think we just need to try harder.  Maybe if we start calling out AOA more in blog posts for degrading women, we’ll get more respect from girls we know.” Hyunaisaslut57 replies.

You look around.  Who ARE these people, really?  What have you been doing?

“Wouldn’t it be great if ‘respect” translated into actually getting a girlfriend though”, one of the protestors continues.

“Really, women owe us a hell of a lot for being so nice to them.  Nobody is forcing us to fight for their rights as hard as we do.” Hyunaisaslut57 sighs.

“Yet they still date the assholes, and don’t even talk to guys like us who really care about their feelings.” says one of the others, finishing the sentence.  They all nod in agreement with each other.

A door loudly opens and Boram appears at the bottom of the stairwell, brandishing a pistol.  She turns to face the stairs and points the gun at you and the protestors.  “Nice of you to all wait for me!” she says, smiling gleefully.

Involuntarily, you smile back.

-=*=-

Three weeks later, you’re at home, in the comfort of your bed, with the lights out, looking at your favourite K-pop forum on your laptop.  A new thread appears: “WHY DO ANTI-OBJECTIFICATION PROTESTORS ALWAYS QUIT THE FORUM STRAIGHT AFTER THEY ACTUALLY HAVE A PROTEST?” the title asks.  The actual post rants on for a while about how k-pop protestors don’t really have any courage of their convictions and how nobody has heard from the latest lot since they went down that street in Gangnam, just like the last few lots before them.  Out of curiosity, you refresh the page a few times and watch some replies come in:

Minafapper: I guess they get disillusioned when they realise nobody cares.

Liekthisliekthat: Nobody who is successful at life cares about non-issues like objectification.  So it’s only natural they would fail and give up.

Yoloswag420: Low determination levels.

You think about adding a funny comment, something like “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you”, but you decide that it’s probably better to just lurk on this thread.  It’s getting past your bedtime anyway and reading the screen is tiring on your eyes.  You roll over and go to sleep, not bothering to turn off your laptop.  After a few minutes the screen dims and your laptop’s new T-ara/AOA screensaver flickers in the darkness.

Kpopalypse is back with another POSITIVE post!  Lots of people complain that Kpopalypse is too insulting and condescending, so there’s no time like the present to turn over a new POSITIVE leaf once again!

This post is all about acknowledging and celebrating the wonderful qualities of Kim Hyun Joong… but it’s also about more than that!  Kpopalypse is going to do something extra-special to help improve the quality of his life, let’s read on and find out what it is!

Of course the only way to get this POSITIVE post started is with a lovely picture of Korean singer and actor Kim Hyung Joong.

Gosh, what a nice-looking young man.  Have you seen a man this attractive recently?  Probably not.  Here is Kim Hyun Joong’s old k-pop group, SS501.

SS501 did quite well for themselves over the years, and became a very popular group.  Kim Hyun Joong was able to afford a deposit on this house due to his music success with SS501 and also later on as a solo artist – wow!

Now that wouldn’t be cheap!  He is clearly very popular and successful to afford to buy a big place like that.  Everyone must obviously love and support him.

Wow, look at the dedication of those fans.  It must be Kim Hyun Joong’s sweet personality that attracts such devotion.  Here’s a picture of Kim Hyun Joong welcoming some nice camerapeople to his abode.

He seems like such a smiling happy chap!  Wouldn’t you want to spend time with someone with such a nice welcoming face?  But look out because he can be moody too.

Gosh, what a stare, something must have really upset him when that photo was taken.  Or maybe he’s drawing on his incredible acting talents, refined from his many years working in Korean dramas.

Here he is holding his jaw, like he’s just been in a fight or something, or maybe in fact he’s got the back of his palm up because he’s ready to slap someone.  I’m sure this would never happen in reality and he’s just tapping into his amazing skills as an actor though.

It takes true acting talent to look this threatening when you’re really so nice.  But wait… what are the following photos all about?

These are pictures of Kim Hyun Joong’s ex-girlfriend.  It seems like she’s been collecting some nasty bruises lately – that’s no good!

How is she getting hurt so badly?  We know for sure that it’s not Kim Hyun Joong’s fault because he’s such a nice man and would never do anything to hurt her – so what could it be?

A quick look inside Kim Hyun Joong’s house and all is explained.  Look at those coffee tables.  They seem to have really sharp edges.  Anybody could easily fall and bruise themselves on those.  However as Kim Hyun Joong now has a hefty mortgage on this amazing house, I’m sure that he can’t just go around buying new furniture at a whim just because his girlfriend is a little bit clumsy every now and then.  Of course, it’s not her fault that she’s clumsy either, so let’s not be hating on her and instead put the responsibility where it belongs – his agency.  This is really something that KeyEast Entertainment should be footing the bill for – they can afford all those fancy music videos, so why not a simple coffee table?

Click the picture of Kim Hyun Joong below to sign the Change.org petition!

Together, we can take a stand against non OHS&W-compliant furniture!  Let’s do it for Kim Hyung Joong!

Hello lovely readers!  KPOPALYPSE INTERVIEW is back once again to entertain you all!

This time Kpopalypse is interviewing ex-trainee at SM Entertainment, Neil Hannigan!  Read on to find out more!

Neil Hannigan came to my attention in much the same way that another Kpoplaypse interviewee, Sarah Wolfgang also did – by dropping a Reddit/AMA (Ask Me Anything).  Neil also then followed this up with another thread on Reddit/kpop, and between the two threads he’s answered a good few hundred questions and left few stones unturned about his time at SM Entertainment.  I highly recommend that you check out both threads before reading the interview below, as it will give you a nice overview.  Normally I ignore Reddit threads claiming a k-pop connection as it’s very easy to fake these details, but Neil’s depth in his answers plus his willingness to provide details and verify himself (using documents that I’m not at liberty to republish here) showed that he was the real deal.  Initial enquiries also proved that Neil was not only happy to talk to Kpopalypse but very much on the same page ideologically:

Clearly Neil is someone who has his head screwed on correctly, and kudos to him for surviving the k-pop experience with his health and sanity intact!  What follows is the (only very slightly) edited Skype conversation that I had with Neil about his time at SM Entertainment and what he experienced and observed.  Enjoy… and learn stuff!

Hi.  How are you?  Answer in as much or as little detail as applicable.

I’m pretty good.  I’m a bit cold, I’m a bit sick – but it’s okay!

Thanks for agreeing to do this, I really appreciate it.

No problem.

What made you want to become a k-pop star in the first place and go down this path?

I always had a kind of aspiration to do something, to be on a stage and perform for people.  I’m pretty much white, there’s very little Korean in me, but the western pop music industry is kinda messed up.  I feel like people don’t work enough for the amount of fame they reach, you know, Nicki Minaj, Drake and stuff like that.  They sing about weird things and the music videos are depraved sometimes [laughs]. I feel like in the Korean pop industry people work hard and they actually deserve what they get, and I felt like the practice routine and everything was kind of my thing, and I would actually enjoy it, but it changed pretty quickly when I was actually there on the spot!  I was expecting it to be tough but I didn’t expect it to be that strict.

So I guess you became involved because at least on the surface, it appealed to your moral music industry values?

Yes.

Neil’s schedule as a trainee – source: Reddit

Was there a point where you went from “this is something I’d like to do” to “I definitely can do this, I have a realistic shot at this”?  What was it like getting to the point where you were like “I’m definitely going to give this a 100% shot”?

This thought process formed in 2012 when I discovered some k-pop through my friends.  I listened to it and discovered how the process goes down, how they do it and become what they are.  I felt like I could actually try it and maybe start doing something – but I thought “I’m living in the USA, and this is k-pop, it happens in Korea, how do I do this?” and I Googled some stuff and discovered that they actually hold auditions globally, including New York.  I thought I would just go for it; I really didn’t have anything to lose.  If they reject – good, I’ll just continue with school and everything, and if they accept me, then yeah I guess this will be pretty cool experience-wise and also in trying to reach what I want.  Basically the day came when the auditions went down, the competition was tough because everyone was really talented and I felt like “everyone’s quite more talented than me here!” – it was definitely pretty hard.  It was a weird feeling to see how many people wanted to be k-pop trainees or k-pop stars, I didn’t really expect to see so many people who wanted to do that who are born in America and are more exposed to the western pop music than the Korean pop music.

I know there’s a lot of stuff written about the SM audition process, but it’s generally not from the point of view of a person who has actually been through all of it and gotten to the point of being a trainee.  Exactly what did you have to go through?

When you go to the audition, there are a lot of people there, all of them are between the ages of 12-20 but most of then are 14-15 years old like me at the time.  Some are good at singing, dancing, rapping, and some are good at nothing really, those ones obviously don’t get through!  Obviously some extreme k-pop fans don’t get through too – the judges, they can see people who are really big fans of k-pop so they usually tend to not take them as trainees because they will probably only be there to see their idols which they don’t actually get to see in the audition process!

Neil on Taemin (SHINee) – source: Reddit

The first round, you get called up, and you go in front of three judges (or there were three in 2013 anyway).  You have to do a dance routine which is 1-2 minutes long.  It doesn’t have to be a full song because they just want to get the general idea of if you can dance or you can’t dance.  Then you have to sing, which I tried, but after a couple of minutes they just said “we’re going to stick to the dancing because you’re not good at singing!”.  [laughs] That’s the truth – I’m not a good singer at all!  After that they will not tell you if you’re in or not, they’ll just say “If you’re in we’re going to let you know in a couple weeks’ time”.

Almost a month after that, I actually got through the audition process and they called me in again for the second audition where they look for potential trainees who have the star quality and potential to get in.  Basically I got through because this other guy was a pretty good singer but at the last minute he bailed out of the whole process, he didn’t even come to the audition because apparently he had some issues with his parents or something, and there weren’t really many left!  There were only two of us, so we got through.  It was kind of lucky, I really didn’t think I would get through.  I thought it would require more talent, but apparently the New York City auditions weren’t going that well, but they had to take someone, they have to take at least one person from each region because they were looking for trainees at the time.

So they have a target to meet, they have to take at least one person?

Exactly.  Then you go to Korea, they present your parents with the whole option and how it all goes down.  In my case the contract got sent to America to my parents, and translated into English for them, but my friends read it through and there were quite a lot of grammar mistakes in the contract even though it was an official contract!  It was pretty weird.  My parents read it though, they were kind of reluctant to sign it at first because it was kinda strict, but I said it was my lifelong dream and I really wanted to try this.  They signed it, I went to Korea and then it’s the trainee process from there on.

Did they ever suggest that a lawyer look over your contract?

I didn’t have any say in anything there because it was up to my parents.  If I would have said yes I wasn’t 18 at the time, and if my parents said no, then that’s it basically.  They wanted my parents to go to Korea to sign the contract, but my parents aren’t that good at advanced Korean so they had to translate the contract.  My Dad had to work, my Mum wasn’t really available at the time to go to Korea just to sign the contract…

I guess what I’m getting at is – maybe not for yourself, but perhaps for your parents – was there any room for negotiation perhaps?  To give you a picture of how this works in the west; if you were to sign with a major western label they would actually make you sign the contract with a lawyer present, and if you went to sign the contract without a lawyer present, they would refuse to let you sign it.  They would actually say to you “come back when you have a lawyer to look over the contract, and then sign it”.  (Interviewer note: this practice developed recently in the west not for altruistic “let’s help the poor struggling artists” reasons but as a way to combat artists being able to nullify unfavourable contracts in court down the track without penalty by saying “I didn’t know what I was signing, it wasn’t explained to me”, and/or “I was drunk/high at the time”).

No, that was not the case there.  Even if you would get a lawyer, if you want to negotiate any of the clauses in the contract, they will pretty much deny the contract, because they…

…they have many other potential trainees to choose from?

Yeah.  SM want you to sign the contract how they wrote it, they don’t want to change anything for any individual.

We’re not going to talk about what’s in the contract, I know we can’t – but having a non-disclosure agreement in the contract itself is fairly unusual (for a music industry contract).  Why do you think SM might be so secretive about it?

It’s probably… most definitely because of all the drama about “slave contracts” and everything, and when you read it through it actually comes off like that, even though it’s not really, because the trainee contracts are not that bad.  They’re so secretive about it because the contract is so different from western pop music contracts, you’re not allowed to do so much stuff.  They are allowed to control the things you eat, they are allowed to control how many hours you sleep… if all that basically gets out, every point of the contract, that will probably cause a stir-up with “slave contracts”.  That’s probably the reason why they’re so secretive about it, it wouldn’t be good for the press and everything.

I think that a lot of people these days would have a pretty good inkling already of what an SM contract would be like.  It’s interesting that SM don’t want to go down the route of “well the cat’s out of the bag now – why not be really open about it and try to clear our name a little bit”.

I actually hope that other SM trainees who don’t renew the contract would actually get involved in the k-pop community and talk about some of this stuff.  I think that would actually get SM to be a bit more open about it, given that so many people already know what’s going on.  I think it’s because so many trainees get laid off every year, and so many people don’t renew the contract and they stay silent.  They forget about that part of their lives and continue to go to school and get a job and start a family, they don’t really talk about the stuff that’s happened there because 80% of the trainees are Korean-born, they live in Korea, they have a certain level of respect.  Even though some stuff is not in the contract – there isn’t a clause in there that says “you can’t do an AMA on Reddit” – but Korean people still won’t do it because it’s a matter of respect and secrecy.

They want to respect the people who mentored them and looked after them for those years?

Yeah, and I respect the people who mentored me, but I think it’s not a big deal if I reveal some of the info that’s not that bad, but you get taught the secrecy while you’re a trainee, you can’t even talk about stuff like that with your friends at school.

Neil on plastic surgery – source: Reddit

In terms of streetwise advice, what words would you give to someone who told you that they just got accepted as a trainee?  Not just SM – assume just a big k-pop label of any sort.

Probably I would tell them no matter how hard you work, always remember that there is a chance you won’t get to be on a stage.  Don’t live for it – you have other things to live for besides being a trainee.  That’s a mistake that some of the other trainees made, they basically thought that this is their life now, completely.  They feel “I don’t have family, I don’t have friends – this is all I’ve got”.  That’s why there is so much underage drinking there, that’s why some of the girls are suicidal, because they get this idea in their heads that this is the only thing they’ve got and that if they let go of this, there’s no life for them – and that’s not true.

How does one even become an underage drinker at a place like SM where everything is obviously very tightly controlled?

There are many ways to smuggle things in there.  There aren’t any guards coming in at night while you’re supposedly sleeping.  Obviously when we come from school, or Sundays when we get a day off, we can go to places and buy something and relax.  The underage drinking most of the time doesn’t happen in the building, it happens outside.

Do they actually train you in being on a stage, or just in doing dance steps to the inch?

There are weekly evaluations where how you act on a camera decides how you will feel on a stage.  There are three judges and all the other trainees sitting there watching how you do the video.  That’s basically an audience for yourself and there are multiple cameras from different angles, it feels like a stage because all of the trainees are there and you’re higher than them.  If you feel confident there that means you’re ready for a stage, if you don’t feel confident there and you mess up in front of your trainees and judges and coaches it means you’re not ready yet.

Neil on trainees as backup dancers – source: Reddit

And that’s a weekly process?

Yes, every two weeks usually.

Do you actually like k-pop musicially – these days?

The new k-pop, not that much.  The older stuff – not the really old stuff, but the supposed “Golden Age of K-pop” – 4Minute in 2010-2011, SHINee’s “Lucifer“, the Golden Age of K-pop was pretty good, the music was pretty good, but nowadays it’s way too westernised in my opinion.   Of course some comebacks are pretty cool but it feels like the same thing over and over again from most artists.  I’m actually listening to a lot of western music, I’m listening to a lot of indie rock music like Two Door Cinema Club but in k-pop I actually like EXO’s “Call Me Baby“, I think it’s a pretty good song.  Their whole album, I gave it a listen, it was a pretty good album to be honest, I liked it.  Of course the new SHINee album “Odd” sounds pretty good too, it sounds a bit different to all the other k-pop releases, especially “View“, it doesn’t sound title-song worthy at first but the more you listen to it the more it becomes clear that it’s a little bit different from the usual stuff you hear.  I don’t really listen to much k-pop these days, there’s only a few things I’ll listen to.  Obviously Beast and 4Minute – I’m a pretty big fan of Cube.

When you were a trainee, did you get much of a chance to do any recording?  Were you ever in a recording studio?

Yes, of course.  They sometimes try your voice for recording.  You go into the studio with one or two producers and they give you something to sing.  They basically teach you how to sing for a recording, because when you sing for a recording it has to be a lot more controlled.  I couldn’t really sing, that’s why I didn’t have those sessions that often, but really good singers had these sessions almost every day, they went to the studio and recorded pieces, figured out how to control the pitch of their voice and everything.

So if you’re a good dancer, they’ll focus more on dance training, and if you’re a good singer they’ll focus more on singing training, rather than the other way around – rather than try to make you an all-rounder, they try to specialise you, would that be correct?

Exactly.  The thing that many people don’t understand is they think if your dancing’s really good they think “yep they will probably focus on your singing because it’s bad” but it’s the other way around.  If you’re good at something they focus on that so you will be best at that.

It makes sense from the point of view of trying to make each of the members in a group distinct in some way.  Why have a multi-member group if the members aren’t different?

Exactly, yes.

Is there anything that you had hoped you would have been asked on the Reddit but that no-one touched upon?

Actually now that I think of it, I think pretty much everything’s been touched on.  In both threads there were about 400-500 questions.

Neil on idol documentaries – source: Reddit

Yes, there were a lot!  You did a pretty good job of answering them all, too!

I lost a lot of sleep on that, but I’m used to it so what the hell!  [laughs]  Pretty much every subject was mentioned and some questions were obviously more stupid than others in the sense of “what does Kai of EXO smell like?” –  I don’t know, I’ve never met him in real life, so… [laughs] !

I read a lot of the stuff about you meeting idols and a lot of people focused on that because they’re a little bit obsessed!

K-pop fans – the usual!

The most eye-opening thing for me was finding out about people self-harming.  I assume it can’t be hidden and that SM are aware that it happens?  Do they have any sort of damage control or help for those people, or is it kind of hidden?

There are therapists at request, but the self-harming types are usually the girls, and the girls really try to hide it, because it shows weakness.  They do it because they don’t want anyone to see it, they just want to feel it – I don’t know how to explain it really, but there wasn’t any drama over there with that because the coaches and managers don’t really focus on that.  Unless it gets too far where they actually bleed to death, then it gets serious, but as long as they are not really disturbed in the sense of training and stuff – as long as they practice the same routine and do everything that they did before, no-one actually really cares and that’s a pretty dark thing over there.

What’s the most common method of self-harm?

It’s probably cutting.  From what I’ve seen, and I’ve heard about this rather than seen it – it’s usually the legs, because you can cover them up really well with sweat-pants while training.  While training you obviously sweat so you have a top or a T-shirt on and if you cut your arms everyone can see it and then the rumours start; “oh, this girl is mentally weak, she cuts herself, she’s not worthy of being an idol”.

Neil on SM Rookies – source: Reddit

How aware of the media perception of idols do you think people who are undergoing training are?  I understand you have no Internet, would it be true to say you’re completely cut off from all that?

On Sundays we went out and some people got their laptops and phones and stuff.  You can potentially update yourself in that kind of sense but no-one really did it because no-one was really interested in that stuff, everyone was just so self-involved.  Only if something big about SM’s going on like the whole EXO fiasco, that usually gets out because we are at one of the buildings, not through the Internet [but when stuff does come through the Internet] it’s usually through the guys who browse Inven, which is like the Reddit of Korea.  Some of the guys before they became trainees they enjoyed video games and such, the usual thing in Korea, and Inven was the only thing that could keep them updated in that sense, so if anything was discovered it was through Inven.

I don’t think I have too much more to ask you, I think you’ve covered off quite a lot.  I think pretty much anything I haven’t already asked you is already in the questions you’ve answered on the Internet.  Do you have anything else that you’d really like to say that you really think should be in the article?

If anyone wants to become a trainee you shouldn’t really care about your race, SM are open to foreigners being trainees, you’ll see that I’m pretty much white.  Of course there’s some favouritism going on for Korean trainees but it’s not that bad.  It’s not like really racism, it’s just that it’s Korea so Koreans get maybe a little more respect.  Definitely if anyone wants to try out and you’re from Vietnam or Thailand or America or Europe you should just go for it.

So you would still recommend the path of a trainee for people who really wanted to do it?

Yes, if they are completely sure that they want to do it and try it out, and they’re young enough that they can lose two years of their life for potentially something bigger, I just say go for it.  There’s really nothing to lose.

Okay, thank you very much for talking to me!

No problem!

Neil Hannigan, May 2015

That’s it for another Kpopalypse Interview!  Are you, or do you know someone who is/was doing something in the k-pop industry and who would like to do a Kpopalypse Interview?  If so, get in touch!

About this time last year I made a post tracking down the greatest k-pop asses.  Since a year has gone by, it’s time for an update, as a lot changes in a year of k-pop ass!

I’m not any more of an ass-man in 2015 than I was in 2014, so once again I’m leaving the important decision of who owns the best k-pop ass completely up to you, the readers!  Click the ass below to vote!

CLICK HERE TO VOTE FOR K-POP ASS

A results post will be forthcoming once I get enough replies!

K-pop fans will probably already be familiar with the term iljin (일진) – a Korean word for young people who prioritise fun, positivity, social skills and being sexy over lonely boredom and pointless, soulless drudgery.  Iljins aren’t interested in studying 624 hours per week, crying into their pillows every night about their lonely boring futureless existence and whining on the Internet every two seconds like most people you know, but instead channel their many positive qualities into their productive future careers as highly successful businesspeople and celebrities.

Are you, or is someone you know a complete loser who could use some assistance and advice from someone who isn’t failing at life?  Have you ever wanted to know how to embrace the positive side of existence and become a stunningly charismatic, successful and fun-loving iljin that Korean netizens are rabidly jealous of?  What amazing trufax can we learn from these living, breathing success stories?  Wonder no more as Kpopalypse takes you through the 8 steps to iljin success!

Of course, the successful life of an iljin doesn’t come easy!  Nothing is ever achieved without hard work and determination, fortunately Kpopalypse is here to break down the important steps of becoming an iljin so you too can one day achieve your dreams of not being a complete waste of oxygen!  Just follow these tips!

1.  HANG OUT WITH FRIENDS

Here’s some photos of Kang Minkyung back in her school days hanging out with friends after class and having a good time.  When these photos were leaked, Korean netizens were horrified – how dare Minkyung have a party with friends after class while they stayed home and studied!  However netizens need to realise that recreation is important, studies have shown that taking time out of one’s busy study schedule has several positive benefits such as a more relaxed mental state and less predisposition to slit your own fucking throat.  Having some relax time with her friends certainly didn’t hurt Minkyung who went on to join stunningly successful k-pop duo Davichi and release a whole bunch of hit songs.  You’ll probably never reach Minkyung’s level of success, but if you start incorporating hanging out with some friends into your weekly routine now maybe you’ll be about 4.72% less of a fuckhead at some point in the future, so why not try it?

2.  PARTY IN NIGHTCLUBS

Wonho from Monsta X pictured above knows all about the iljin life and that naturally includes partying in nightclubs.  It’s worth practicing how to party in nightclubs, because you wouldn’t want to have a social situation like partying in nightclubs sprung on you at some point later on in life when you least expect it, leaving you feeling awkward and not knowing what the fuck to do with yourself.  Parties can be difficult for even experienced partygoers like G-Dragon due to the enforced, artificial nature of the social interaction.  You may find yourself in need of some social lubricant to help smooth things along, so why not…

3.  DRINK SOJU

IU thinks that you could use a refreshing drink of soju to loosen up a little, and you probably could, you sad pathetic loser piece of shit.  With a common alcohol-by-volume ratio of 20%, it’s not too difficult to get fucked up and forget about your worries like how to behave in awkward social situations or whether you’ll pass that exam about that subject that you don’t care about so you don’t have to repeat the same boring shit next year.

4.  SMOKE CIGARETTES

Wonho from Monsta X also knows all about the joys of tobacco.  Sure, cigarettes make you smell like a homeless person and they have a bad reputation because of that whole link to lung cancer thing, but don’t worry!  If you do get cancer from smoking it probably won’t be for at least a decade or two, and in the meantime there’s some surprising health benefits.  Since you can’t smoke indoors legally in most places now, you’ll have to go outside a lot to be a regular smoker, and heaven knows that today’s young people could use a bit of extra sun and outdoor time away from their computer screens.  Enforced time outdoors also means that you might meet other people and strike up conversations!  Advanced socialising with these other people also increases the likelihood of opportunities to…

5.  ENGAGE IN SEXUAL ACTIVITIES

No, I’m not talking about fapping (for once), but sexual activities involving another human.  I know this may seem a scary proposition to many of you, but while solo sexual activity is certainly fun, sex is ideally experienced as a two-person event.  Don’t worry about pregnancy, condoms never break if you use water-based lubricant and don’t get your dirty disgusting unclean fingernails all over them, and there’s no point using religion as an excuse for not fucking as every religion is basically just a thinly-veiled instruction manual on how to put hot throbbing dicks into gaping wet cuntholes.  Your idols are definitely doing it, so why not join in the fun?  If you’re lucky and your iljin skills are high you might even get some cigarettes out of it.

6.  VISIT COOL WEBSITES

In this connected age even the most active and successful of young people still get on the Internet occasionally, but with millions of sites active, where to go?  Successful iljins like Secret’s Hyosung prefer Ilbe, fun-filled Korean humour site dedicated to making you laugh with fun images, thoughtful content and good times.  Did you know that Kpopalypse articles have been reposted to Ilbe?  All the more reason to visit – I guess that makes me an honorary iljin.

7.  WEAR FASHIONABLE CLOTHING

Here’s one of k-pop’s biggest groups BigBang wearing popular North Face jackets, which are all the rage in Korea.  The latest fashion trend favoured by upstanding young iljins, I’m still waiting to find out where I can redeem my iljin points accrued from being reposted to Ilbe for a cool North Face jacket like the ones above, I could use one as it’s cold in Adelaide right now.  Last night it was 2 fucking degrees, fuck that shit, it’s the iljin life for me, they know how to keep warm.

8.  TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF AND YOUR FRIENDS

Way from super-iljin concept group Crayon Pop didn’t take any crap when some slutty skank-whore at her school started slobbering on her boyfriend’s knob, she got her posse of 100 Way’s Girls together to rip that bitch a new asshole.  Nobody messed with her or her friends ever again, and nobody will mess with you either if you take a leaf out of the iljin manual of sticking up for yourself if someone tries to take advantage of you or the people you care about.  The iljin lifestyle doesn’t just teach success, it also teaches upstanding morality and survival skills!

That’s it for another Kpopalypse post!  Kpopalypse will return soon with the results of the ass survey!  Until next time, be safe and embrace the 8 steps to iljin success!

It’s been a year since the last Kpopalypse ass post, so that means we’re due for an update!  What’s changed in the world of k-pop ass?  Which k-pop asses are generating the highest amount of faps?

The results from the Kpopalypse ass survey are in and it’s time to find out the greatest k-pop ass masterpieces of 2015!  Read on and discover the trufax about k-pop ass!

WARNING: post contains lots of high quality GIFS of ass, they take a while to load!

I wanted to do another ass post, but I’m not really an ass-fapping kind of guy, I’m more of a boobs man, that’s why my boobs posts are my own selections whereas my ass posts are popular vote decided by surveys.  So I’ve decided to make the ass surveys a yearly thing and I’ll do them at roughly the end of every financial year.  Lucky you, right?

The last time I did an ass survey, I made a huge list of k-poppers and people could tick as many boxes as they wanted, but of course they were restricted to the selections that those boxes represented.  This time I thought I’d try doing it differently, by giving people free text fields to fill out.  Voters got to choose up to five female options and up to five male options, anyone they wanted within k-pop.  This way there would be no problem about people being upset that I left out their fave, a fairly common complaint with last year’s survey.  Another common complaint is that I neglected the male asses last time, so this time you could vote for any male ass (even though most readers didn’t).

The 2015 survey was carefully designed to prevent bias of any kind.  No lists, images or nominees were included in the survey deliberately, so as not to exploit the “power of suggestion”, and also to not unfairly advantage particular k-pop performers.  (The exception was the GIF of Qri’s ass that contained the survey link, but I didn’t mention that the ass belonged to Qri and I knew Qri wasn’t going to be one of the top contenders anyway.)  A lot of people who voted last time voted for ALL the asses (which in terms of poll effect is exactly the same as voting for no asses), so even though I had about the same amount of participants as last year there were less points across the board because the numbers aren’t being artificially inflated by people who didn’t really care and just liked ticking boxes.

The 2015 survey was also shared in a few more places than usual, because I wanted to get a broader feel for how people felt about ass than just my own readership.  Reddit/kpopfap helpfully agreed to host a link to the survey, and when that happened this changed the results across the board significantly.  Certain k-pop stars who had no showing in the poll results whatsoever under my own blog readership started heavily collecting votes once Reddit/kpopfap got involved, most notably Fiestar’s Jei and several members of Hello Venus.  The leaders also flip-flopped several times due to valuable input of Reddit/kpopfap’s seasoned perverts.  Thanks very much to them and also to fiddle.se, grey-nim, Perving On Female K-pop and all others who are documenting or fapping to k-pop ass.  This post wouldn’t exist without you… well, actually it probably would – but it wouldn’t look as good!

The results were completely up to you.  Here they are, starting from the top down, because when posting about asses we always move downward.  The winner of the Kpopalypse Ass Survey is…

#1.  SEOLHYUN – AOA

(2014 position: #22)

Seolhyun didn’t make a huge splash last year on the ass radar, but over the last 12 months the influence of the AOA camp has gradually increased and Seolhyun’s ass popularity has skyrocketed as a result.  After starting off slowly, AOA’s Seolhyun obtained a commanding lead in the survey once the Reddit/kpopfap community fired up their web browsers, but then was overtaken again several times before finally finishing the race ONE VOTE in front at 92 points!  If you didn’t want her to win and you forgot to cast your vote for the opposition, now’s the time to kick yourself, in the meantime it seems that the pretty asses are AOA!

#2. YURA – GIRL’S DAY

(2014 position: #2)

Yura had a very strong showing which probably will surprise nobody, and streaked into the lead early on in the competition with double the votes of anybody else at one point until Seolhyun gradually caught up.  Even though Girl’s Day haven’t really been rocking the ass-waving as much this year as previously, there’s no doubt that Yura’s reputation as a masterpiece of ass has by now been heavily consolidated.

#3. CHOA – AOA

(2014 position: did not chart)

Choa didn’t get on the radar whatsoever last year, but AOA’s ass-friendly dance routines and rising public profile have changed all that this time around.  With nearly 80 votes to her name, Choa shot straight into the realm of the top contenders with little effort.  Many people who voted for Seolhyun also swung a vote Choa’s way, and the gap between her and the #4 position was over 20 votes.  (It’s also possible that a few of you meant to vote for Crayon Pop’s Choa, that’s why in the survey I asked people to also specify the group name, fortunately most of you got this right.)

#4. HYOSUNG – SECRET

(2014 position: #1)

Last year’s leader (to the disbelief of many, but don’t blame me – you guys voted for her), Hyosung still picked up a strong chunk of votes for 2015.  For someone best known for her boobs, Hyosung has nevertheless continued to ingratiate herself to the world of k-pop ass-fappers to an admirable extent, especially given that good quality ass footage of Hyosung is harder to search up than you might think (because her boobs generally get in the way).

#5. DAHYE – BESTIE

(2014 position: #14)

BESTie are still languishing in nuguland to some extent, but Dahye’s ass at least seems to have found recognition.  Maybe the rest of their group will follow closely behind her behind into the mainstream of k-pop consciousness, or maybe they’ll continue to languish at the rear, but in the meantime… hey are you even reading this?

#6. YURI – GIRLS’ GENERATION

(2014 position: #5)

Yuri has retained her top-10 billing in the ass world as far as the raw data is concerned, but there’s a catch – almost everybody who voted for Yuri also included the important caveat “…but I mean the OLD Yuri, not how Yuri looks now, fuck that” or words to that effect.  Should Yuri even be included here given that her poll results are hardly relevant to 2015?  Well, you voted for her, so here she is, along with some GIFs from two years ago because apparently nobody wants to see what her ass looks like these days.

#7. HYUNYOUNG – RAINBOW

(2014 position: #20)

I’m not sure what Hyunyoung did to raise her stakes in the ass game this year.  Maybe it was all that black-swanning around on live stages, maybe their agency finally worked out how to promote Rainbow to fappers properly, or maybe something else, but who really gives a shit?  I’m too busy looking at her in the red dress above to come up with a witty conclusion to this entry so let’s just move on.

#8. SOYOU – SISTAR

(2014 position – #9)

With her group being regular high achievers in “best body” polls Internet-wide for many years, Sistar’s Soyou now reigns at the top as “the k-pop girl with the best ass in that group of k-pop girls with the best asses”.  Maybe her songwriters haven’t been able to write anything worth a shit in the last two years, but I’m willing to tolerate all those horrid “Love The Way You Lie” clones as long as Soyou gets to rock tight-fitting clothes on live stages from time to time.

#9. BORA – SISTAR

(2014 position – #3)

Soyou even beat out Bora by a vote or two.  Trufax.

#10. HYUNA – 4MINUTE

(2014 position: #8)

I don’t recall Hyuna doing much in the way of showing her ass this year, but I think people vote for her in ass polls for the same reason that people in third-world countries vote for Britney Spears or Megan Fox in beauty polls – she’s somebody they know, a recognisable brand name of fap.  They might not have seen a picture of her in three years so they don’t know she’s all different now, but once you get to that level of brand recognition where Hyuna is at, what you actually look like hardly even matters.

#11. HYOLYN – SISTAR

(2014 position: #10)

Do you know how hard it is to find recent high-quality GIFs of Hyolyn/Hyorin/however the fuck you spell it’s buttcheeks?  Harder than the penis of the judge on the right of the below GIF.  Nobody gave a shit about Dasom in this survey by the way.  Poor Dasom.

#12. TIFFANY – GIRLS’ GENERATION

(2014 position: #12)

I used to go out with a girl who had a body a bit like Tiffany’s.   Seeing her ass rotating in front of my face here gives me memories of when I rotated my face in front of that other girl’s ass, and then rotated my dick inside.  Maybe some of you have had similar experiences, it would explain Tiffany’s enduring popularity with ass voters.

#13. CL – 2NE1

(2014 position: did not chart)

No, really – how did CL even get here?  Most of you who voted for her also included “I’m not trolling, seriously, check out CL’s ass” or words to that effect, and I’ll admit that she does seem to have a finely toned rear end… but better than Minzy’s?  You folks seemed to think so, and who am I to argue?

HONORABLE MENTIONS

#14. Hani – EXID (2014: did not chart)

#15. Nada – Wa$$up (2014: #7)

#16. Minzy – 2NE1 (2014: #15)

#17. Gain – Brown Eyed Girls (2014: #32)

#18. Jei – Fiestar (2014: did not chart)

#19. Hwasa – Mamamoo (2014: did not chart)

#20. Hyomin – T-ara (2014: #4)

#21. Jiyeon – T-ara (2014: #11)

#22. Krystal – f(x) (2014: did not chart)

#23. Naeun – Apink (2014: #35)

#24. Nicole – KARA (2014: #6)

#25. Jimin – AOA (2014: did not chart)

#26. Uji – BESTie (2014: did not chart)

#27. Sunny – Girls’ Generation (2014: did not chart)

#28. Min – miss A (2014: #29)

#29. Hyejeong – AOA (2014: #41)

#30. Eunsol – Bambino (2014: did not chart)

#31. Youngji – KARA (2014: did not chart)

#32. Eunjung – T-ara (2014: #19)

#33. Qri – T-ara (2014: did not chart)

#34. Victoria – f(x) (2014: #18)

#35. Seoyoung – Hello Venus (2014: did not chart)

#36. Nari – Wa$$up (2014: did not chart)

#37. Ailee (2014: #16)

#38. NS Yoon G (2014: did not chart)

#39. Joy – Red Velvet (2014: did not chart)

#40. Minhee – Stellar (2014: #42)

#41. Bomi – Apink (2014: did not chart)

#42. Fei – miss A (2014: #17)

#43. Jaekyung – Rainbow (2014: #21)

#44. Taeyeon – Girls’ Generation (2014: did not chart)

And here’s a video compilation courtesy of isaymyeolchigr!

MALE ASSES

I wanted to do a proper poll for male asses but you guys mostly didn’t vote for any male ass at all, so that kinda fucked me up.  So much for all those claims of wanting male eye candy, I guess that was all bullshit.  On top of that, there doesn’t seem to be any equivalents of fiddle.se for men, you ass perverts need to lift your game and start some high-quality GIFfing if you want a proper Kpopalypse post!  For what it’s worth, the clear leader was…

#1. XIA JUNSU – JYJ

Junsu and his “duck butt” (what the fuck is a “duck butt”?  I don’t even know, but apparently he has one according to JYJ fans) had 59 votes, 20 in front of the nearest competitor, a huge lead.  Rest assured that SM’s evil, corrupt influence doesn’t extend to Kpopalypse’s blogging… or at least, not until they pay me!

Here’s the rest down to #13:

#2. Junho – 2PM

#3. Jimin – BTS

#4. Sehun – EXO (if this gets moved to #1 later you’ll know the money transfer from SM cleared)

#5. Minho – SHINee

#6. Shindong – Super Junior

#7. Kai – EXO

#8. Rain

#9. Doojoon – Beast

#10. TOP – BigBang

#11. Sungjong – Infinite

#12. Onew – SHINee

#13. J-Hope – BTS

After that there’s so few votes per individual that it’s barely worth even counting.

Thanks to everybody who voted for this, I appreciate your patronage.  As a bit of bonus content, if you ever wondered how people choose to answer my “Hi!  How are you?  Answer in as much or as little detail as applicable” question that I put at the start of every survey, here’s a dump of all the answers from this time around, with some comments by me (in bold text)  Kpopalypse will return again soon, but in the meantime happy reading!

Inquiring minds have noticed the lack of quality in current k-pop and wish to know the answer to the following question:

What does Kpopalypse want to hear in k-pop?  More importantly, will any of it actually happen?  Come on a journey with Kpopalypse as he explores k-pop’s musical trends and shows areas for future improvement!

Music fashion in the west goes in cycles.  For example, the sounds of the 1980s were cool in the 80s, then in the 1990s the 1970s sounds were trendier, but by the late 2000s a lot of the 80s sounds had gained popular currency again.  The 80s also had a revamped revival of 1950s themed music, and around 1990 there was also a blues revival spearheaded by John Lee Hooker, who had his original recordings in the 1940s.  Korean pop is no different in that there are fashions that move cyclically, however because Korean pop at the moment is moving and developing very quickly due to the large quantities of material being produced and very high levels of competition, phasing in and out of trends is happening at a much quicker rate than in the west.  Let’s look at some musical trends that have affected k-pop and how their influence has waxed and waned over the years.

POSITIVELY-MOVING TRENDS IN 2015

HARD AUTOTUNE INDEX (HAI)

The use of hard Autotune in k-pop peaked during k-pop’s Golden Age (a few years after it peaked in the west), with songs like Super Junior’s “Sorry Sorry“, T-ara’s “Bo Peep Bo Peep” and most of 2NE1’s early output exploiting the effect heavily.  However no sound fashion trend lasts forever, and while Autotune sometimes does crop up in newer songs, it’s generally now considered to be “that sound that k-pop used a hell of a lot a few years ago and doesn’t really use much anymore”.  Kpopalypse predicts that the use of hard Autotune will remain minimal for the near future – newly-discovered effects tend to spend a few years almost completely out of the sun after they’ve run past their initial spike of popularity.

VOCALFAGGOTRY AGGREGATION GUIDE (VAG)

People caring excessively about vocal technique died off during the start of the Golden Age but then re-emerged as an equal-but-opposite reaction to the excessive use of hard Autotune in k-pop – people developed a desire to want to hear the “real voices” again (even though this “realness” is actually an illusion) and k-pop labels rushed to cater to the demand.  Kpopalypse predicts that the vocalfaggotry trend will gradually decline due to the same oversaturation that depopularised Autotune plus the fact that Autotune’s lack of popularity right now will make the need for an equal-but-opposite musical trend redundant.

NEGATIVELY-MOVING TRENDS IN 2015

FLACCID ENNUI LABOURING CURRENT HIPHOP (FELCH)

Rap music has been popular in Korea since the idol wave of the 1990s, however as the rap audience has matured, their tastes have become mellower as they turn to slower, softer songs less likely to cause offence at tea parties or rattle their wheelchair spokes out of position.  This means that rappers wishing to retain their maturing core audiences have softened their musical approach to suit.  Kpopalypse expects that the current hip-hop trend of soft-as-shit weaksauce jazz/R&B infused limp nursey-rhyme beats in hip-hop will hold steady due to Korea’s aging demographic offsetting any musical counter-trends.

YOLO EFFECT AND SWAG TRACKING (YEAST)

Horrible yoloswag trapturds in k-pop have been on the increase, largely thanks to highly influential artists like G-Dragon championing the style (which is odd behaviour for someone who supposedly likes Wu-Tang Clan but whatever).   Kpopalypse predicts that more k-pop performers will leap on this bandwagon and that yoloswag will reach a peak before (hopefully) dipping again in a few years time.  This peak will be helped along by the FELCH charted above, as a growing number of new listeners bored by FELCH but also uneducated in the ways of what actual proper hip-hop beats sound like will consider ratchet yoloturds to be the equal-but-opposing option instead.

NEUTRAL TRENDS IN 2015

RETROGRADE IN MUSIC JAMS OR BACKINGS (RIMJOB)

There’s been a strong current of retro-themed songs in the k-pop landscape ever since JYP proved that he could throw his sound back to 1960s girl groups and still create a hit.  Secret, IU and TVXQ all took the retro theme back to even earlier decades along with many others and all achieved success, cementing the “retro concept” as a viable option in k-pop.  Kpopalypse predicts that while it will never be the main focus of k-pop, this trend will continue at current levels.

SYNTHESISER PROLIFERATION ENTERING RECORDED MUSIC (SPERM)

After heavy use of synthesisers and programming throughout the Golden Age, a “real music” trend emerged, with the pendulum swinging back in favour of “real” instrumentation.  Of course, this trend is actually illusory in real terms with the “real” sounds being largely also programmed, but the reason for the apparent shift is that technology has improved to the point where almost all instruments can be convincingly simulated now.   The pace of technological advancement gave k-pop engineers more options to work with naturalistic sounds, however the popular synth noises are now making a slight return and integrating into tracks alongside more natural (but often synthesised) sonics, blurring the lines of what is “real” from a listener’s perspective.  Kpopalypse predicts that obviously electronic sounds will see a levelling out in popularity at roughly current levels.

So that’s enough about what’s actually going on.  What about the trends that haven’t hit Korean idol pop in a meaningful way yet, that Kpopalypse would like to see happening more?

TRENDS THAT COULD USE MORE PRESENCE IN 2015

DISTORTED INSTRUMENTS CONQUERING KPOP (DICK)

Distorted guitars have been chugging away sneakily in the background of k-pop ever since the days of H.O.T but the closest that k-pop has ever gotten to any kind of genuine heavy metal takeover is when B.A.P debuted and looked like they might become successful consistently working a hard rock/metal idol concept.  Of course this didn’t happen because after their first few songs their label insisted that they change things up a little and do some softcock rubbish to appeal to Korea’s pussbag demographic.  Sure we’ve got Pritz now but who knows if they’ll stick with the metal thing consistently, and other groups like KARA are really doing metal by stealth instead of openly (using the same sonic layouts but without turning the guitars up all the way).

SUSPENDED HARMONY IS TAKING HOLD OVER LARGELY EVERYTHING (SHITHOLE)

Suspended harmony refers to the alternating use of dissonant and consonant intervals in a harmonic motif to create tension and resolution in a manner consistent with pre-Baroque era vocal counterpoint norms.  For those that aren’t music theory literate and don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about I might bother to explain it in an upcoming post if I wake up one day feeling super fucking nerdy.  In the meantime know that every time I hear suspended harmony used in a k-pop song I nearly jizz myself and each year there’s usually one or two really awesome k-pop songs that exploit suspended harmony to some extent (and usually by MBK), but rarely any more than that.  I’ll probably get a million questions on ask.fm related to this, to which my reply is – I’ll probably post about it more one day when I run out of other blogging ideas and could actually be fucked, until then don’t interrupt my fapping rhythm with questions about this thanks.

ANNOYING NOISES ARE LOVELY (ANAL)

Suspended schmended, there’s one thing everyone with functional ears definitely understands and that’s an annoying fucking noise.  Kpopalypse loves annoying noises in all songs and thinks there should be more of it.  However k-pop producers tend to disagree, going down the path of “let’s leave a kettle overboiling in the studio kitchen and then sample and loop it for lulz“, “why don’t we put 20 times more input into this gadget than what it can handle and see what happens” and similar activities all-too rarely.  I guess in lieu of any decent music k-pop idols will have to continue to annoy people with their scandals and non-squeaky-clean behaviour instead.

JIMIN ON CRACK KEEPS SAYING THINGS REALLY AWKWARDLY PLACED (JOCKSTRAP)

As the only person alive who has heard Dr. Dre’s Detox, AOA’s Jimin possesses the secret rap knowledge that could save k-pop and in fact all music everywhere.  Every time Jimin says “Hey!” on a track or some other clunky line of English, k-pop’s future gets just that little bit hotter, fresher and flyer.  It also annoys a lot of people, which is fantastic.  However even these days with Jimin currently working at full capacity with both AOA and rap side projects, her collective output accounts for a tiny minority of all k-pop music.  FNC needs to start outsourcing Jimin’s trademark vocals to other companies and besides lifting the quality bar and annoying lots of people who undoubtedly deserve to be annoyed, it’ll be a great little earner – who wouldn’t pay dearly for a guest spot from the hip-hop master?

That’s it for this post!  Thanks for reading, Kpopalypse will return!

Yes that’s right readers, it’s the return of:

Kpopalypse returns yet again with more nugus to entertain you all!  Read on and discover more k-pop nugus to enrich your life!

It’s the tenth episode of Kpopalypse Nugu Alert!  Wow, that means that there are now more episodes of Nugu Alert than Star Wars!  Who would have thought that this series could actually last ten episodes?  Certainly not me – Nugu Alert isn’t one of the more popular topics for Kpopalypse in terms of hit rates or comments.  Fortunately, I have high determination levels to keep the series running plus not give a shit what anyone thinks about it.  Just as well for nugu fans!  Let’s get it started and check out some nugu videos.

This episode of Kpopalypse Nugu Alert is dedicated to freaky cheap-but-effective camera filters and effects.  When you’re a group that’s a little on the poverty-stricken side, just the mere act of getting filmed by a camera is enough to break the budget, there’s no extra cash floating around for much in the way of fancy-pants CGI, flashy box-making shenanigans or visits to the auto rental shop to get some sports cars to pose in front of.  In these situations, the solution to keep the video interesting-looking may well be to go up to the editor and say “hey, the video is in the can but I’ve got to be honest, it looks kinda boring – can you add some kind of cool image effect to this to spice it up?”.  Let’s have a look at some nugus and their video directors’ creative solutions to tart up their low budget productions.

The Solutions – Love You Dear

On the more popular end of the scale, The Solutions probably aren’t that nugu, perhaps due to success in Korea or maybe just Eat Your Kimchi pimping them out a fair bit.  They actually seem to have a bit of a following, and you can tell by the relatively high budget look of their video compared with what you’ll see later on in this post.  However they’re worthy of a spot on Kpopalypse Nugu Alert anyway due to their choice of camera effects and the fact that most k-pop fans reading this probably don’t know them so why the fuck not.  You probably all know that trick that film directors sometimes use where they physically move a camera away from a subject while at the same time zooming in the lens as close as they can?  The resulting effect (and its opposite twin – moving the camera up close while simultaneously zooming out) is one of disorientation as the background warps around the subject, and it’s often used in film to make a vista in an outdoor scene seem more pronounced, or to show disorientation – Alfred Hitchcock was the first person to use it in the film “Vertigo” hence it’s sometimes referred to as the “vertigo effect”.

It’s a great effect when used in isolation to highlight a scene, but the video director for The Solutions thought it would be a fantastic idea to utilise this effect for nearly half of the entire goddamn video.  The song is actually pretty solid as far as generic pop-rockers go but the visuals are something else – if you can make it through this entire thing without feeling extreme motion sickness you’re doing better than me.  By about the end of the second verse shit does eventually stop moving around so fucking much but by then the damage is done and you’re probably well and truly talking on the porcelain telephone.

YouTube views at time of writing: 15113

Notable attribute: erratic camera work bounces around even more than Martina’s boobs in Eat Your Kimchi’s FAPFAP series

Nugu Alert rating: low

Dramatics – You Win

Everybody loves Instagram, it’s the social network that gave us the following life enhancements:

• The eating habits of every female on the planet between the ages of 18 and 30
• K-pop duckface
• Both of the above combined
• Hitomi Tanaka taking a bath

It also gave the world great new photo filtering options, although they’re not exactly options in the true sense because if you use Instagram you’re kinda stuck with them whether you like it or not.  Or at least you’re stuck with them between 3:15pm and 3:30pm every second full moon which is when the website is actually running properly.

If it doesn’t meet Hitomi Tanaka’s lofty standards, it doesn’t meet mine, and that’s why I don’t have Instagram.  Fortunately for those who can’t go a day without looking at photos of things with filters on them, the video team behind Dramatics have gone to great lengths to throw Instagram-style filtering across almost every single shot in their MV.  On top of that you get a cute little story about a young Korean couple meeting and learning how to hold hands and think pure thoughts.  “You Win” indeed!  Unfortunately it’s all a little bit too true to the Instagram concept, with the song being about as frustratingly dull as when some cute person you have a crush on posts continual photos of their meals instead of selcas.

YouTube views at time of writing: 389

Notable attribute: k-pop drama video dares to feature two of the only actors left in South Korea who (probably) haven’t had (much) plastic surgery (lately)

Nugu Alert rating: extreme

Underdog – Zombie Run

It’s difficult to find a male idol-style group that doesn’t have twenty gazillions YouTube hits, especially given the international fashionability of such things and the ever expanding fangirl race with new spawnlings hatching every second, ready to sacrifice themselves at the altar of oppa.  The aptly-named Underdog seem to be in struggle-town though, with their debut MV collecting only a thousand hits in its first week of release.  Even sadder is the fate of their teasers, which barely scraped into double-digit territory:

For once I actually feel like watching a teaser, if only just to make the video editor feel like he didn’t waste precious hours of his life making them.  So what happened to Underdog’s hype machine?  Sure, the song’s pretty bad especially with that ill-advised chorus chant that sounds like a walrus with pneumonia, but it’s not any worse than the last few absurdly popular BigBang releases so it can’t be the music’s fault.  I guess their agency just doesn’t have the right connections, but what they certainly do have is some wild blur-shadow thing, some other squiggly-lines-across-the-image thing, great colour-matching skills, and groovy gift-shop face masks.  The best detail of all is the dressmaker’s dummy inserted behind one scene for no goddamn reason, maybe it’s a prop or maybe the wardrobe department just forgot to remove it, but either way it comes off looking less out-of-place than just about everything else here.  The video is worth a look because why the hell not, and I promise you you’ll laugh at the awkward stares from the member with the overdone makeup and the massive freeze-dried emo rooster hair.  If nothing else at least watch the teasers and leave an encouraging YouTube comment for their creator, the poor guy who made them is probably on suicide watch and could use your emotional support.

YouTube views at time of writing: 1009

Notable attribute: at 2:04 one guy gets left leg caught on a prickly weed and keeps on dancing because he’s a PRO with high determination levels to “make it” in k-pop

Nugu Alert rating: off the chart

FINAL RANKINGS:

That’s it for another episode of Kpopalypse Nugu Alert!  I hope you enjoyed these nugu videos, and thanks to all the folks who have been submitting nugu suggestions!  I often don’t reply to those but I do read them all so keep it up!  Kpopalypse will return in the future with more nugus!

Kpopalypse returns with a new competition post just for you!  Whether it’s about winning an award nobody cares about, getting to #1 on some pointless chart somewhere or coming at the top of some random dicksucking bullshit list made up by some nobodies, it’s clear that K-pop fans love competitions, especially ones where they can get involved and vote as many times as they like!  So hopefully you’ll also like this post, where Kpopalypse investigates which music genre has the most epilepsy-inducing music videos!

Welcome to the EPILEPSY MV CHALLENGE!  Let’s introduce the competitors!

In the WHITE corner representing K-POP we have T-ARA.

Known for their consistently catchy feature tracks, outstanding looks, international success, extreme dateability and high determination levels, T-ara in 2015 are an unstoppable force among Korean pop girl groups (as the people who have been trying to stop them ever since 2012 have gradually found out).  T-ara are also infamous among k-pop fans as “that group with the music videos that bore a hole clean through the viewer’s eyeballs and straight into their fucking skull”, the closest thing k-pop has to BDSM for the retinas.  No wonder Whitehouse founder William Bennett is a fan.

In the BLACK corner representing ELECTRO-INDUSTRIAL we have FRONT LINE ASSEMBLY.

One of the founding groups of the electro-industrial genre, Canadian group Front Line Assembly emerged in the 1980s and combined the soundscapes and harshness of industrial music with synthesisers, drum machines and layered samples plus a strong pop songwriting sensibility, finding creative success and international recognition.  They also made a ton of music videos that have probably sent hundreds of people into epileptic seizures and will make you think twice about clicking on a YouTube link for a group you’ve never heard of ever again in your lifetime.

The challenge for you, the reader – watch the following videos, in their entirety, then vote for each round answering questions concerning your relative impression of their retina-shredding epilepsy-inducing properties and your mental health.  But before we start, a quick warning:

ROUND 1: DIFFICULTY LEVEL – EASY

T-ara – Roly Poly (short MV version)

T-ara’s trademark fast cutting is in full effect for the video to their fantastic disco-themed feature track, with barely a shot in the entire MV lasting for more than two beats of music (just under one second).  The visual harshness is exacerbated by the gaudy colours and nightclub lighting, however the effect is also softened by the occasional long shot and the matching dance routines between cuts, making “Roly Poly” one of T-ara’s easier on the eye videos.

Front Line Assembly – Virus

Front Line Assembly’s “Virus” is characterised by long shots of scenes interspersed with frames of other scenes or stills cut in at rhythmic intervals, creating a deliberately jarring effect that complements the song’s harsh sound.  The barrage of images is reduced during the song’s breakdown where a “synaptic analysis” provides some welcome visual relief, dividing the video into two relatively easily-digestible halves.

ROUND 2: DIFFICULTY LEVEL – MEDIUM

T-ara – Bo Peep Bo Peep (Japanese MV version)

The audio here is from the original Korean version of T-ara’s “Bo Peep” but the visuals are from the Japanese MV which included the first iteration of 7-member T-ara.  Extra member Hwayoung’s presence here however won’t bother anybody, you’ll be lucky if you can even focus on her at all during this video’s rapid-fire cuts.  At least the colours are consistently muted and pleasing and there’s some occasional boob bounce to focus on.

Front Line Assembly – Plasticity

Muted and consistent colours also save Front Line Assembly’s “Plasticity” from the realms of complete unwatchability, as do a welcome decision to use fades rather than hard cuts for many scenes.  This is however mitigated by the excessive amounts of lightning-speed CGI graphic overlays, often cut at a rate of 16 frames to each (quite fast) bar of music.  Good luck keeping your eyes focused let alone figuring out what the hell is going on.

ROUND 3: DIFFICULTY LEVEL – HARD

T-ara – Sugar Free (Big Room version)

With over 650 documented individual cuts, T-ara’s “Sugar Free” is one of the most notorious examples of their MV editor’s aesthetic sensibilities.  The girls may look great but honestly nobody can tell with the cutting happening at this speed. I can’t fap to this because although when my cum shoots out of my balls I might be looking at Eunjung, by the time it hits the computer screen it’s probably switched over to Boram, and that’s just not right.

Front Line Assembly – Mindphaser (original 12″ mix)

One of the most innovative budget MVs ever made, “Mindphaser” superimposed members of Front Line Assembly over the action in Japanese mecha film Gunhed, creating a cool futuristic-looking cyberpunk-style video on the cheap.  To make the effect seamless enough to make the group look like a believable part of the action, the MV director colour-matched beautifully – and then inserted even more cuts than “Sugar Free”, lucky us.

ROUND 4: DIFFICULTY LEVEL – EXTREME

T-ara – I Go Crazy Because Of You

T-ara’s stomping Autotuned Britney-Spears-on-steroids early hit was a full-tilt assault on the senses with a music video to match.  The MV for “I Go Crazy Because Of You” is full of the usual trademark fast cuts, plus strobes and other garish lighting effects that make the group members almost undetectable by comparison despite the fact that they’re front and center in every single shot.  Insert obvious joke about the song title being apt here.

Front Line Assembly – Iceolate

Front Line Assembly’s “Iceolate” doesn’t seem that jarring at first until you realise that half the cuts that have been inserted into the video aren’t really even of anything specifically identifiable and then your brain starts gradually turning into mush as it tries unsuccessfully to filter out the superfluous images.  Oh and did I mention the ultra-fast cutting and hideous colour schemes because that’s also a thing here.

ROUND 5: DIFFICULTY LEVEL – OH FUCK THIS SHIT

T-ara – Day By Day (dance MV version)

Between all the cutting I noticed that T-ara dance in front of six windows in this video, a hint at the inevitable destiny of the once-8-piece group.  This might seem profound of me but not really, I only noticed this shit because the windows were the only thing I could focus on as they don’t reflect the maddening constant strobe lights like everything else.  How the hell the girls filmed this without blinking every time a light went off I have no idea, I’d personally be crying in a corner begging for the strobe machine to stop after a few takes.  I guess it really is a difference in determination levels.

Front Line Assembly – The Blade (Technohead mix)

If you think a mostly black and white MV might make Front Line Assembly’s trademark light-speed cutting more watchable, think again.  The harshness is unbearable plus it’s also very repetitive as they recycle the same footage over and over in this clip.  Things don’t get any easier with the rare splashes of puke-infused colour.  I don’t think I’ve ever felt any more grateful to be colour blind.  Has anyone alive actually even seen this fucking video all the way through without skipping bits?

VOTING

Now that you’ve seen all the videos, it’s time for YOU to vote!  Click the fast-cutting T-ara image below to cast your vote in the K-pop vs Eletrco-Industrial Epilespy MV Challenge! After enough votes are cast, this post will be updated with the results!  Get voting, folks!

Very many folks / seemed to really quite enjoy / my Haiku reviews

As Kpopalypse / is always happy to please / all of his readers

I have now returned / with even more song reviews / in Haiku format

Sit back and enjoy / as I take a runny dump / on all of your faves

The following songs / in a convenient list / alphabeticised

These selections were / requested through ask.fm / by my Caonimas

If the song you picked / is not below I may have / reviewed it before

In my previous / Haiku post, best–worst lists or / five word song reviews

Or perhaps I just / left your shitty song out to / make you really mad

Anyway there is / a horny jizzload of songs / so let’s get started

 *

A.cian – Driving

Falsetto chorus / like being hit in the nutsack / by a bad driver

*

Afrodino – Zzz

Boring smooth soft crap / described perfectly by the / insightful song name

*

A.KOR Black – How We Do

Kemy and Minju / had those two great mixtape raps / so why does this suck

*

Anda – Touch

Sorn from CLC / Will probably look like this / in about ten years

*

AOA – Chocolate

Tedious mish-mash / of all their much better songs / in a crap medley

*

AOA – Come To Me

Waited for Jimin /  to say “Hey!” so I could fap / it was not to be

*

AOA – Heart Attack

Waited for Jimin /  to say “Hey!” so I could fap / ahh, that’s more like it

*

AOA – Time

Nobody wants to / hear AOA’s generic / filler k-ballads

*

Asha – Mr. Liar

Brilliant production / and great beats, shame about the / crappy blues based song

*

Beast – Freeze

Shinsadong Tiger / doesn’t hit gold all the time / evidence is here

*

BigBang – If You

Emotionally / manipulating their fans / for a fast buck works

*

BigBang – Sober

BigBang finally / makes something vaguely like a / proper fucking song

*

Black Nut ft. Genius Nochang – 100

Black Nut is good fun / if only idols also / had his attitude

*

Blady – Oochie Walla Walla

Two zero one five / is the year nugu groups ran / out of MV cash

*

BoA – Kiss My Lips

BoA runs SM / so she saves all the good songs / mainly for herself

*

Boyfriend – Bounce

MV girl is hot / think I might turn the song off / and just fap to her

*

Boys Republic – Hello

Threatens to be good / but doesn’t quite get up there / oh well nice try folks

*

BTOB – I Only Know Love

They only know love / maybe they should have learned some / songwriting instead

*

BTOB – Wow

Okay, this standard / New Jack Swing by numbers is / not too bad I guess

*

BTS – Dope

Ladies if you like / kpop boys in uniform / your porn has arrived

*

BTS – Rise Of Bangtan

I guess now that we / don’t have BAP these days / this will have to do

*

BTS – Spine Breaker

With a name like that / I expected something fast / not this reggae lite

*

Chad Future & Aron – Got It Figured Out

Cannot decide if / Aron or Chad has the worst / creepy camera stare

*

Chae Yeon – Even If I Don’t See

Be honest ladies /  you only picked this song for / Jaehyosturbation

*

Clara – Gwiyomi Song 2

Clara looks stupid / plus the song is pretty crap / can still fap, all good

*

Dal Shabet – Joker

One day Dal Shabet / might hit the pop A-list but / not with this garbage

*

DGNA/The Boss – Admiring Boy

I guess rapists must / like vocal harmonising / in their boy group songs

*

DGNA/The Boss – Rilla Go!

Open World’s rapist / or their new agency’s clothes / not sure which is worse

*

D-Holic – Chewy

Nugus once again / showing the A-list groups a / decent fucking song

*

EXID – Ah Sul Hae

Is it X-I-D / or E-X-I-D? Thanks for / fucking this post up

*

EXID – 1M

Worthless ballad trash / the type that clogs up all the / k-pop albums now

*

EXO – Love Me Right

EXO and football / a bigger styling fail than / Martina’s loose clothes

*

E.via – Really?

Before Tymee days / E.via had proper beats / not shit rap ballads

*

Fiestar – You’re Pitiful

Maybe they refused / the bangbus ride so Tiger / gave them this dull song

*

f(x) – Step

f(x) are odd as / they do have good album tracks / trufax, caonimas

*

4Minute – Crazy

The song G-Dragon / has been trying to write for the / last three years but can’t

*

4Minute – Show Me

The parts are all good / but they don’t fit together / like Hyuna’s body

*

4Minute – Stand Out

Like most k-pop groups / 4Minute’s album tracks are / rejected singles

*

FTIsland – Pray

At least it’s heavy / or as heavy as these groups / are allowed to get

*

Gain – Paradise Lost

Absolute shit song / in a transgressive package / so you notice it

*

Gfriend – Glass Bead

A ben-wa bead song / concept is innovative / but not the music

*

Gfriend – Neverland

Better than Glass Bead / which is just a clone of that / SNSD song

*

Girl’s Day – Hug Me Once

Back when Girl’s Day had /  good synthpop features, not the / lame shit they do now

*

Girl’s Day – Ring My Bell

Awful messy trash / Girl’s Day sound like Sistar now / for the bucks I guess

*

Girl’s Day – Macaron

Cool electro swing / should have been the feature track / their agency sucks

*

Girls’ Generation – Beginning

Designed for concert / lightstick waving, remember / where the on switch is

*

Girls’ Generation – Girls’ Generation

Back when you could tell / which member was which just by / looking at their face

*

Girls’ Generation – I’m In Love With The Hero

With a name like that /  they should have made it sound like / Eye Of The Tiger

*

Girls’ Generation – Oscar

About as good as / SNSD’s album tracks / ever fucking get

*

Girls’ Generation – Party

There are only two / things I watch SNSD / MVs for these days

*

Girls’ Generation – You-aholic

Another basic / SNSD album track / nothing to see here

*

Hello Venus – Wiggle Wiggle

If Hello Venus / did this concept from debut / they would be rich now

*

History – Tomorrow

One of the better / boy groups around now, with a / pleasing lack of swag

*

Honeygirls – Again

Very generic / with that lame whistling shit that / all the groups have now

*

Hong Jin Young – Love WiFi

Not nearly enough / of Hong Jin Young’s boobs displayed / I am disappoint

*

H.O.T – Happiness

Teenage kids try to / sound tough with fake growly voice / quaking in my boots

*

Infinite – She’s Back

This isn’t too bad / at least it has some guitar / that’s something I guess

*

IU – Heart

Too much of this weak / crap in K-pop but at least / this is well written

*

Jimin & J.DON – God

She has heard Detox / but Kpopalypse has not / I’m not fit to judge

*

Jimin – Puss

The only song that / Unpretty Rapstar gave us / that was any good

*

Jin – Gone

A good story to / manipulate you into / liking a shit song

*

JYP ft. Jessi – Who’s Your Mama?

JYP looks like / even more of a pervert / than me, I approve

*

KARA – Cupid

It’s okay but it / lacks the metal influence / of their better tracks

*

KARA – Honey

Back when you could tell / which member was which just by / looking at their face

*

Laboum – Sugar Sugar

Great 60’s girl group / style song that nobody liked / because they all suck

*

Lizzy ft. Jung Hyung Don – Not An Easy Girl

Lizzy sounds great here / but I wish she really was / a bit easier

*

Lovelybut – Such Sorrow

How fucking maudlin / can these sour sobs fucking go / out and get some sun

*

Lovelyz – Amusement Park/Joyland

This is pretty good / Lovelyz have good album tracks / not sure why that is

*

Lovelyz – Hi~

Lovelyz going down / Stock Aitken Waterman path / it does work for them

*

Melody Day – #LoveMe

Decent verses are / ruined by the blues chorus / waste of a good song

*

Minx – Love Shake

If Dal Shabet had / this as a feature track they / might have got somewhere

*

miss A – Mr. Johnny

Let’s not make Johnny / Noh’s ego any bigger / with crap songs like these

*

miss A – Step Up

Glad this one never / came out as a feature track / it’s as shit as “Breathe“

*

Monsta X – Trespass

More yoloswag stuff / but this one is pretty good / catchy synth saves it

*

Mr. Mr. – Big Man

Sounds like music from / an 80s action film scene / not too bad I guess

*

Mr. Mr. – Highway

Boy groups killing each / other with guns, soon the world / will be perfect – shoot!

*

Mr. Mr. – Waiting For You

This song is nothing / great but still better than most / boy group songs that year

*

Nine Muses – Choice

If I had the choice / I would have not reviewed this / lame album filler

*

Nine Muses – Drama

It isn’t bad but / the Tarantinoesque start / outperforms the song

*

Nine Muses – Hurt Locker

This is the song that / “Catch Me If You Can” should have / been like, but was not

*

Nine Muses – Miss Agent

Nine Muses do not / have good album tracks but this / is an exception

*

One Voices – Flush

Very average / song title sounds like a good / idea, flush it down

*

Poten – Go Easy

Nothing special here / but notable for some cool / theremin backing

*

Queen B’z – Bbibbi

Maybe the best song / these nugus have ever had / but still not that great

*

Rainbow – Bad Man Crying

It’s easy to see / why Rainbow struggled for fame / with this boring crap

*

Rainbow – Black Swan

Finally Rainbow / get a good feature track, it / only took 6 years

*

Rainbow – Privacy

Nothing special here / grateful that this song wasn’t / picked as the feature

*

Red Velvet – Ice Cream Cake

Pretty cool song but / I still can’t tell them apart / someone help me please

*

Risso – OMG

I often hate this / type of funk disco thing but / Risso is good here

*

Shannon Williams – Why Why

Why why is Shannon / doing a Traci Lords on / uncle fans, stop that

*

SHINee – One Minute Back

I want my three and / a half minutes back that I / spent hearing this shit

*

SHINee – View

Best SHINee feature / track in a while but all their / others are bad, so…

*

Smells & Reno – Uhm

What is this crapstep / didn’t they get the memo / this is a dead style

*

Smile-G – Superman

Screechy annoying / chorus sinks all the appeal / this song could have had

*

Sonamoo – Love Call

What’s with Sonamoo’s / agency, all their fillers / are better than their…

Sonamoo – Nation’s Little Sister

…fucking shit feature / not that these songs are good but / “Deja Vu” was trash

*

So Yumi – Shake Me Up

This song is good but / still Mina from AOA’s / Audrey Hepburn wins

*

SPEED – Don’t Tease Me

If you don’t want to / be teased please do a proper / MV next time thanks

*

SPEED – What U

I was introduced / to Heelys by SPEED, thanks for / enhancing my life

*

Super Junior Happy – Pajama Party

This was a real thing? / Christ Super Junior released / some pure fucking turds

*

Super Junior-T – Rokuko

The crap keeps coming / seems lovestruck Shindong fangirls / will buy anything

*

TaeTiSeo – Adrenaline

“Holler” was a much / better song, that’s why it was / the feature – trufax

*

36.5˚C – Harley Baby

Disgusting blues trash / I listen to k-pop to / get away from this

*

T.O.P – Doom Dada

The chimps finding a / mic is appropriate for / YG’s career path

*

TVXQ – Android

Nothing all that great / but still better than what they / did as a five piece

*

TVXQ – Humanoids

Pretty sure that this / group were always a two piece / where’s my cheque SM

*

2Yoon – 24/7

Country k-pop song / that is about 1% / country, what a fail

*

Vasco, Shannon Williams & Giriboy – Breath

Yet another dull / rap ballad, Korea has / millions of these shits

*

The Vinylhouse – Negative Love

Boring song that is / well-matched with an equally / boring video

*

Wa$$up – Stupid Liar

Typical yolo / swag shit, Wa$$up should go back / to breakdance music

*

Wonder Girls – Gno

Wonder Girls also / had decent album tracks which / is unusual…

Wonder Girls – Me, In

…k-pop albums are / usually bad because / they are not designed…

Wonder Girls – Nu Shoes

from the ground up as / albums but just the feature / plus leftover junk

*

X-5 – Dangerous

Apt song title as / trainees at their agency / found out all too soon

*

Year 7 Class 1 – White Wind

Someone asked me if / this was shot with a drone – yes! / Click here for the proof!

*

Inquiring minds wish to know the answer to the following question:

It’s fine to say that someone is determined or not determined, but how is determination itself determined?  It’s a good question, fortunately Kpopalypse is determined to determinate determination levels!  Read on for the trufax!

On the surface it’s understandable that f(x)’s Sulli and T-ara’s Hwayoung may seem similar.  Both girls have a reputation for being kind of lazy, not pulling their weight while on the job and jeopardising their respective groups’ careers at one point or another.  But how much of this perception is justified?  Let’s take a closer look at the behaviour of both of these idols, so that their determination levels can be properly assessed.

DIETING HABITS

Everybody knows what Korean idol diets are like – dangerously unhealthy!  Most idol diets consist of food that is high in protein and vitamins but very low in carbohydrates, however carbohydrates are essential for correct brain, kidney and nervous system functioning and the side effects of not enough carbohydrates include constipation, fatigue and depression.   Noticing that Hwayoung wasn’t performing up to par on live stages and concerned about the possibility of fatigue brought on by a low carbohydrate diet, groupmate Eunjung helpfully and caringly used the guise of a Japanese game show to feed Hwayoung a precious rice cake, a prized high-carb item usually forbidden by their agency’s strict dieting regimen.  Hwayoung ungratefully grimaced through the ordeal, making rude unpleasant faces – giving away the truth: Hwayoung didn’t need any extra carbs, and was just underperforming due to chronic laziness.  Eunjung’s thoughtful gesture was a misjudgement that she surely regrets to this day as Eunjung has been criticised for this show of extreme caring and consideration ever since.

Sulli on the other hand knows all too well what it’s like to go without enough food.  Here she is (far right) performing at the World Federation of Neurosurgical Societies symposium in September 2013, however it seems that Sulli had some neurological issues of her own, struggling to keep up with her team’s hectic and demanding dance routines.   Many people criticised Sulli for seemingly being lazy, but the truth was different – those who were paying attention will know that only one month before this performance Sulli was placed on the notorious “Plastic Bag Diet” by SM Entertainment.   Plastic contains no nutrients whatsoever, and can even interfere with the nutritional value of other food, robbing Sulli of much-needed sustenance.  Nevertheless Sulli showed great determination to continue with the show in a reduced capacity and even managed to get through the entire event without collapsing.

LANGUAGE

In the above video you can clearly hear fucking Hwayoung in the background swearing her rude little ass off in Korean saying “fuck” (씨발 ssibal) and “that’s fucking hilarious” (존나으켜 jonna eukyeo), probably nastily bullying the shit out of somebody behind the scenes, as the lazy slut is known to do.  Who knows, maybe the underpaid staff members deserved it but swearing in the fucking background while Boram is trying to do a fucking interview is just being a cunt.  Eunjung, once again being the caring thoughtful member, notices all the fucking bitching and whispers Hwayoung’s name to try and get her to stop the tirade of abuse, but being a complete selfish cunthole who is lacking in determination to shut the fuck up when someone else is on camera, Hwayoung pays no attention and keeps mouthing off like a rude cunting whore.

Here’s Sulli saying “motherfucker” (肏你妈 cào nǐ mā) in Chinese on some TV show nobody watches.   Sulli doesn’t even speak Chinese, so firstly she’s showing great determination here to learn foreign languages, something Hwayoung never noticeably gave a fucking crap about.  Also the tone of Sulli’s voice makes it clear that she’s not actually directing the statement at anyone but is just learning the word, probably trying to differentiate it from the similarly pronounced “grass mud horse” (草泥马 cǎo ní mǎ) so she can promote freedom of expression in China, very thoughtful of her.  Most importantly of all though, she’s not saying it while Boram is trying to do a fucking interview, showing that Sulli is determined not to be a rude cuntfaced bitch.

OH&S COMPLIANCE

Here’s Hwayoung venturing dangerously onto a sporting field with a broken umbrella that has sharp edges and hanging bits.  We all know about the high injury rate of k-pop idols doing sport – these people are musicians, not athletes and they fuck up so often on the sporting field that when they don’t have injuries it’s actually considered newsworthy.  Hwayoung’s carelessness and lack of determination to exchange or fix her broken umbrella could lead other foolishly sporting idol persons to have a serious injury or even death!

Luckily, here comes thoughtful Boram, to the rescue with a smile on her face and an umbrella that actually fucking works.   Pity that Boram is so short that she can barely lift her umbrella over Hwayoung’s head, but she does her best to shield her while Hwayoung stands around sullenly, being a cuntosaurus and acting like everyone else owes her shelter from the rain.  Since when does the shortest person hold an umbrella over the head of the tallest person?

Sulli has the right idea about umbrellas – get the taller person to hold it.  If Minho expected Sulli to hold her umbrella over his head, now that would just be rude, wouldn’t it.  Of course Minho wouldn’t expect that because he’s a nice man who cares about Sulli’s welfare and boobs.

Here’s Sulli again with 2PM’s Chansung, once again doing it correctly.  With a perfectly intact umbrella, Sulli is determined to show proper OH&S compliance!

INTERVIEW TECHNIQUE

Here’s Hwayoung in a T-ara interview and it’s the typical bullshit type of interview that all k-pop groups have to do.  The standard modus operandi of this fucking interview wank k-pop groups do is that everyone must smile all the time, laugh at each other’s lame jokes and pretend that they’re the bestest friends in the whole wide world, or pathetic spoiled entitiled Korean nerds used to having their dicks and clits sucked constantly through the TV screen have a big old cry.  People complain about my blogging being condescending all the time but the fact is that my satirical talking-down to cunts is nothing compared to the ridiculous dumbing-down that k-pop media enforces on viewers, who lap up the emotionally fraudulent presentations of their idols unquestioningly (as long as everybody plays by the rules).  K-pop TV treats you like you’re a stupid cunt who actually believes that everything in these groups is happy families all the time.  Hwayoung never showed any determination to burst this particular bubble.

Here’s Sulli and Krystal in an interview that was hugely controversial.  Why?  Because the girls didn’t smile 100% of the time, and occasionally let their real emotions (i.e “wow this is the tenth interview today, fuck I’m bored, cao ni ma”) slip out.  These girls are over the fake bullshit that they’re paid to do all day, every day.  Unlike Hwayoung who only had a few months of idol bullshit to contend with before being thrown away like the dead wood from a fireplace, Sulli’s been doing this bullshit for a lot longer and is a lot more over it.  Imagine having to smile at work like an air hostess does, all the time.  Now imagine that this work never ends – you have cameras on you at almost all times, superiors to impress, reality TV shows following your every piss, shit and wank, and a constant facade of a perfect k-pop angel to deploy over the top of your real personality.  If you’re anything like a normal person you’d be ready to go postal on some cunts a few weeks into it.  Just look at the psychological meltdowns people have on lame reality TV shows where people are cooped up in a house for only a few weeks together, forced to endure personalities that rub each other the wrong way, and can’t leave.  Now imagine that environment is your entire fucking life.  Those people in that room should be grateful that Sulli only didn’t smile a bit, I’m not sure in her shoes if I’d have high enough determination levels not to take out a kitchen knife and start stabbing cunts in the face for breathing.

SOCIAL NETWORKING USE

When the T-ara controversy hit in 2012, one of the wackiest, most deluded conspiracy theories being spread around at the time by oxygen-wasting losers was that Hwayoung had buried secret messages somewhere in her tweets, that could be deciphered by reading them vertically, as you can see by the screencap above made by some fucking barking mad nutcase.  The tweet above supposedly says “only fans know (the truth)” if you read the first column vertically, but the value of the message as anything more than coincidence is easily disproved because what characters fall into that column depends on what you read it on.

However, people with true attention to the details that really matter will notice something else about Hwayoung’s tweets in the first picture, something that should send shivers down the spine of any mortal on this planet concerned about responsible social networking by Korean pop idols.  Can you see it?  Pay attention and look very closely!  That’s right it’s…

…one of the most severe examples of EXTREME FUCKING DUCKFACE in k-pop.  This tweet here says “facts without truth” but perhaps it should say “duck without water” given that her agency told her to waddle off.  Clearly Hwayoung is nothing but trouble and needs to curtail her Internet use until she can learn to not post mega-ugly duckfaces that make people lose their lunch.

Hwayoung would do well to adopt Sulli’s social networking policy.  Take a look at this post from Buzzfeed Koreaboo and all of the many tweets in it.  What do all of the tweets have in common?  If you answered “these tweets aren’t from Sulli, they’re from some stupid psycho cunt and some other idiots who are dumb enough to actually give her the time of day” then congratulations, you are correct!  As it happens, Sulli posts very rarely.

The tweet from Sulli here says “it’s been a long time” and it certainly has.  Sulli clearly doesn’t give a cao ni ma about social networking, posting stupid duckface photos and responding to dickheads, she’s too determined to have a good time nightclubbing, ironing Choiza’s shirts and trying to get pregnant holding hands and thinking pure thoughts.

It all adds up to a world of difference… in determination levels.

Welcome to another edition of:

Kpopalypse is back,

straight out the fuckin’ dungeons of rap,

where fake nugus don’t make it back!

Suggested instrumental for this rhyme: Mobb Deep – Apostle’s Warning (Havoc)

Kpopalypse is back on the nugu tip
time to get packed for another trip, bitches
call it a nugu mission – this new edition
is awkward cos it puts me in a kinda screwed position
this one is dedicated to the yoloswag Kpopalypse hated
but k-pop is fated to be eclipsed and saturated
with nugus hoping to demonstrate that they have sung a hit
rising with more determination than Hwayoung’s left tit
hoping to advance past the state of having made jack shit
let’s see how these nugus try to cope with it
less than twenty thousand YouTube hits is the nugu limit
videos higher than this don’t qualify to be in it
let’s see which nugus could one day make a cash pile
now come with me on a journey into the yoloswag style
(each review comes with suggested hip-hop beats
so you can practice your fly rap rhymesaying techniques)

Joe Rhee – Already

Suggested instrumental for this rhyme: Genius/GZA – 4th Chamber (RZA)

Joe Rhee appears to be stuck with boring R&B
doesn’t even rap but still qualifies abundantly
for this yolo edition, but “Already” seems to be missing
something more to see, than just piss-poor choreography
the girls listening in the MV would certainly agree,
they don’t even seem to be that interested in being on TV

let alone with some weedy dude who thinks he’s G-D,
how is Joe going to cope in the k-pop industry
if there’s no hope for even those who are paid to be
in the MV to show some fuckin’ enthusiasm
the girls are all like “nope he couldn’t give me an orgasm”
and fuck this soft backing with the hopeless keyboard spasm
good beats these days are hard to find like a phantasm
there sure is a chasm between what Joe Rhee plays
and the kind of backing tracks that I’d like to hear these days
YOLO SWIG SWEG SWAG 420 ALL DAY SLUTS!

YouTube views at time of writing: 17748

Notable attribute: girls employed purely for eye-candy but not paid enough to wear any revealing clothes

Nugu Alert rating: average

Skolor – Skolor

Suggested instrumental for this rhyme: Nonphixion – Black Helicopters (Necro)

This rap guy called Skolor probably won’t make a dollar
perhaps he should go back to school and send a holler
out to his schoolteacher, maybe they can reach a deal on
how to spell his name correct before he makes another feature
It’s sad that Korea has caught this shit from Australia
MCs where I live always write their name like a failure
They sure make us Suffa the way they do things by half
In a room of good MCs here you can sure feel the Drapht
Anyway I digress, it seems that Skolor might bless
us with some good beats because it seems that he can write best
even though he’s not possessed with great skill at least Skolor is trying to be
different, breaking up the sound with some beat variety
might I be presumptuous to lump your brain cells with the uncomfortable
clump of thought that while this smells it’s still better than Tymee
but there’s no need to lie to me I want to figure it out, so
someone please tell me what that fuckin’ interlude’s about
KPOPALYPSE IS BACK – GO TAKE A SHOWER, CUNTS!

YouTube views at time of writing: 2475

Notable attribute: hasn’t been forced to change his logo by SM yet

Nugu Alert rating: very high

GAPP – BaboDdongdogSoccer

Suggested instrumental for this rhyme: La Coka Nostra – Mind Your Business (DJ Premier)

Blackjacks like to think that CL is the queen of rap, but
when it comes to MCing she’d better mind the fuckin’ GAPP
Forget Dr Pepper because GAPP is drinking Welch’s
and she’d better watch out because I reckon that he felches
plenty of Blackjack colon, that’s how he’s rollin’,
your asshole is his goal and I know cos I was told that the
song title means “Moronic Shit-Eating Bastard”
let’s check back on him in a year and then we’ll see how he’s lasted
against the Blackjacks, Redditors and k-pop fans on crack
that lack the exact knack of stacking up what is whack
against the back catalogue of classic k-pop tracks
the fact is that most of these kids don’t know what crap is
they probably think that GAPP is the best that hep-hap is
send them to Kpopalypse and they’ll soon learn what a slap is
then they’ll be looking around for where their shower cap is
REAL HEP HAP BITCH!  CAONIMAS IN THE HOUSE FUCKHEADS!!!!

YouTube views at time of writing: 217

Notable attribute: worthy contender for the title of ultimate world swaglord, currently held by Australia’s Bangs

Nugu Alert rating: extreme

Suggested instrumental for this rhyme: Gang Starr – Above The Clouds (DJ Premier)

That’s the end of yet another Nugu Alert
hope you enjoyed, but if you were someone who got butthurt
before I flirt with some more nugus to stamp on
you might want to pull up your skirt and change your tampon
let’s not skirt around the issue, learning about nugus might
hurt your brain tissue, but nobody will miss you if you
listlessly miss the mystery of k-pop lists
learning twists in nugu history could lead to bliss
Kpopalypse expanding your brain like a cyst,
pissing in the punchbowl of your musical elitist
writing about nugus how I see fit, make sure you
tell your friends all about nugus and continue to check out this shit
the quality should be no secret, let’s now move on
with highlighting k-pop nugus and see how deep things get!

Here’s a question that I received a while back:

The answer is: this one!  Let’s find out all about the personalities of people in the k-pop media and how we can correctly judge them from our high horse and feel socially validated!  Yay!

Looking at someone’s personality rather than their looks in k-pop is an activity that k-pop’s concerned fanbases engage in with very noble intentions, but it presents an inherent and very obvious obstacle: how can you tell when someone is being their true selves instead of just putting on a show for the cameras as per their requirements as someone in the public eye?  Sure, people think they can often “just tell” what their idol, actor or favourite media person is really like due to the “special connection” they feel with them, but anyone intelligent enough to spell their own name correctly and tie their own shoelaces should also be able to understand that people behave completely differently when a TV camera is pointed at them and they know that their whole careers are riding off every little word, gesture and movement.  Idols in particular are naturally worried that if they show any actual real emotion that they might be caught out as people who are not unrealistically angelic 100% of the time by the braying hive-mind of cyber-pitchfork-weilding emotionally crippled Internet bullies that follow k-pop and that this might negatively affect their careers, so all k-pop stars that you see are therefore attempting to be on their bestest behaviour at all times.  Same applies to radio appearances and all other forms of media, even social networking is strictly controlled with the public image in mind.  So how can a casual observer break through the facade and see the REAL person underneath?

To be honest, Kpopalypse has no fucking idea, BUT… other people on the Internet have plenty of ideas!  Let’s take a look at some of them and find out what techniques we can utilise when determining people’s true personalities!

MYERS-BRIGGS TYPE INDICATOR

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a well-known personality type test that categorises people’s personalities into groups of four attributes out of sixteen different possibilities.  It’s long since been thoroughly debunked as a bunch of hocus-pocus bullshit for fuckwits but let’s not let some harsh truth get in the way of a perfectly functional feel-good pseudo-scientific belief system.  MBTI is light on the facts so you can slam it down fast, which makes it perfect for the tough corporate environment where time is money, and if there’s any music genre that defines “tough corporate environment” to a tee it’s certainly k-pop.  Little wonder then that there’s k-pop blogsites out there devoted to assigning MBTI personality types to k-pop idols.  Of course, none of these idols have actually done any MBTI testing, but the k-pop fan’s supernatural ability to “just tell” via their “special connection” seems to be adept at filling in the blanks about how their idol would rate.

TAROT CARDS

Tarot cards are an ancient divination tool used for centuries and therefore unlike Myers-Briggs are completely legitimate… but can you use Tarot to determine the trufax about k-pop idols?  Apparently so!  No need for the idols themselves to consent to a Tarot reading, all you need to do is submit whatever you’d like to know to a reputable k-pop tarot reading site, and let them do the rest!  I had a burning question on my mind, so I acquiesced to the wisdom of the card masters:

I’m still waiting for a response at this stage, but we’ll see how they go at detecting Bambino’s stealthily-hidden flesh-toned panties, if they can manage to detect the carefully-concealed fabric then there’s no reason to assume that they couldn’t also tell you all about your favourite idol’s personalities with authority.  To truly test the power of Tarot, I then went to another site to get a personal k-pop themed reading of my own, they asked for seven numbers between 1 and 78:

The first four numbers spell CUNT and the last three are the numbers worn by Orange Caramel in the “Lipstick” MV.  Hopefully the site owner will be a good enough psychic to read between the lines here and will be able to tell me if anyone in Orange Caramel (preferably Raina) faps to Kpopalypse.  I’ll update this post if I get a result, but I’m sure it will be accurate.

ASTROLOGY

Even though the ancient practice of Astrology has run into a few surprising scientific issues of late, it still gets in newspapers daily across the globe therefore it must be true.  Regardless, whether you’re into Astrology or not, if you want to see whether it can be used to tell you about your favourite k-pop idol you’ve certainly got your reading material cut out for you.  There’s hundreds of examples out there that I could link, but check out this totally legitimate and in-depth analysis of ex-EXO member Kris, which completely confirms my perception of him being a dweeb who would be mercilessly picked on and bullied by the other EXO members.  According to another site Kris also has high determination levels to date Capricorns, which is alarmingly specific and probably means that he’s banging Hyorin right now, sorry Black Nut.  At least there’s a bright side for Kris now after all that tormenting and abuse he went through back when he was an EXO member.

PALMISTRY

The time-honoured art of palmistry is clearly more of a niche concern among the k-pop loving community than horoscopes, I could only find one palmistry-related post which was from some person who did analyses of the palms of all five members of TVXQ because conveniently they stuck their hands in some metal mould or whatever the fuck.  I guess there aren’t many opportunities to clearly see the lines on the palms of a k-pop idol so that’s why there aren’t too many posts like these.  Anyway the person read the palms back in 2009 and didn’t see the breakup of the group coming so oops I guess but maybe the author just wasn’t a skilled enough palm reader to detect the “group lineup divergence line” which I think is somewhere between the head line, the heart line and the fap line.

BLIND ITEMS

While researching for this blog I stumbled across this information (source here) about a popular Korean idol girl group:

Gosh that sounds like a few well-known groups that have risen to fame recently.  It shouldn’t be too hard to narrow down the sneaky culprits with this information.  But is it legit?  Can you trust what some pussy on the Internet writes who unlike Kpopalypse won’t reveal themselves in public or even give their own name out, let alone the name of the people involved in the blind item or the name of their source?   You may have to activate your sense of being able to “just tell” truth from fiction via your “special connection” to idols.  Gosh!

SATANISM

Satanism is a fun belief system which is all about rejecting organised religion, thinking for yourself and being an individual while wearing the same fashions as other people who reject organised religion, think for themselves and are individuals just like you are.  You can also talk to spirits and dead people and stuff which is pretty cool and badass while playing with ouija boards and gambling on Pokemon cards for lots of money which is way more fun than any namby-pamby lame Sunday activity that any crap normal religion is likely to get you to do.  The new Primary video with AOA’s Choa shows you how to do all of this cool Satanic stuff if you’re interested, and if you go to any cool Satanic silver jewelry swap-meets you’ll probably find out all about what your idols are really like while you’re there, after all they’re all Satanists too and Satanists are kind of in the minority globally so mathematically the odds are good that you’ll run into a few of them just in passing.

CHANCE

Speaking of Satanism, buy one of those Dungeons & Dragons satanic board games and pilfer the D20 out of it.  Now you’ve got not only a cool satanic toy for channeling your secret caonima powers but also your own personality determinator!  Think of your favourite idol and roll away.  Here’s what the numbers mean:

1. racist yolofuckstick
2. rude, bad attitude
3. slutty with your oppars/unnies
4. up the duff
5. drug addict
6. surgery addict
7. iljin thug gangster
8. public drunk
9. serial liar
10. drink driver
11. prostitute to pay idol debts
12. rapist
13. all-around generally nice person
14. drug dealer (but doesn’t smoke it so it’s cool)
15. non-OH&S compliant
16. conspiracy theory nut
17. brainwashed religious zombie
18. rarely showers, then high-fives friends, spreading germs
19. thoughtless douchebag
20. sexist motherfucker

Presto – instant trufax at your fingertips!  Well okay maybe not, but odds are that it’s still more reliable than…

K-POP NEWS WEBSITES

What are other writers on the Internet saying?  Could they know what’s really going on and what your idols are really like?  Unless they’ve actually met them in person, it’s doubtful (and if they have they probably are professionally obliged to not be honest about anything negative).  Also media sites have pressure to write about what is trending, popular or widely-discussed, rather than what might actually be the trufax.  The truth about media matters is rarely exactly what it seems, so maybe think twice before hopping on that trendy vilifcation bandwagon, regardless of what it is about or how appealing it might look.

Oh, and about that Lee Jung Hee scandal that people endlessly harrassed me (and every other k-pop blogger) to cover:

If something that an idol (or anyone else) said or did is pushing all your outrage buttons, maybe you should be outraged… or maybe you’re being manipulated by something which has been specifically tailor-made to push those buttons of yours, which is something that Internet scammers are really good at doing.  It’s all very well saying “I’d rather believe in lies than doubt the truth” but if you go through life with that attitude you’re going to get fucked up the ass one day, because that’s exactly the kind of attitude that scammers exploit.

It would be nice if life was completely black-and-white and it was always obvious who is right and wrong, whether your favourite idol was a good or bad person, and how much truth there is in any given situation – unfortunately the world doesn’t work that way.  It’s not a good idea to trust some judgement call about what someone is really like on some shitty k-pop website that thinks it knows best.  You’d be better off with Choa’s Ouija board.

And if you’re now thinking to yourself “but wait Kpopalypse – these criticisms naturally would also apply to YOUR SITE as well, wouldn’t they?” then congratulations – you’re learning fast!

THE THRILLING CONCLUSION

Based on my thorough and exhaustive research above, you can trust sources in the following order, from most accurate to least accurate:

• Become a Satanist, meet idols, do secret handshakes
• Dice rolling
• Hocus-pocus bullshit
• More hocus-pocus bullshit
• Anything written on the Internet, especially by Kpopalypse (scroll back up and click on the text of the blind item if you haven’t already)

Now you have the amazing knowledge of trufax determination!  Remember to use your new-found power for good, not evil!

The Kpopalypse blog now has over 1,000,000 views!  Wow!

Okay, so half of those hits were probably just from people searching “kpop boobs” in Google Image Search, but the other half were from you dedicated caonimas who read my stuff regularly, so thank you!  Kpopalypse has determination to continue posting about k-pop, so expect more posts fondly!

Vocals in k-pop.  Everybody wants me to write about it, but there’s not a lot to say because nobody with a brain cares.  The reasons why nobody with a brain cares are:

• A good singer’s good vocals don’t make a bad song any better.
• Most k-pop vocal performances are faked on some level so assessing them is like complaining that the bunny a magician pulls out of their hat was never really in there.

The first point should be basic common sense to anyone (except vocalfags), so let’s talk about the second point.  What techniques are used to get good vocals out of someone who can’t sing well, or didn’t sing well in a particular circumstance… and how likely is k-pop to be using them?  Let’s find out!  (Spoiler alert: fuckin’ likely.)

We all know about how everybody uses Autotune and other pitch-correction programs these days, but while Autotune can make good vocals sound more accurate, it actually does a fairly shithouse job of making a completely crap singer sound good, because to get the most out of Autotune you still have to be able to ballpark the note and sing to some degree.  There are easier and more effective ways to hide crappy vocals and fool k-pop-loving bias-fueled dumbasses. Here they are.

THE LIVE OVERDUB

Have you ever been to a live concert, been thoroughly unimpressed by the vocals of the lead singer, then seen the same live concert that you were physically at on a DVD, listened to it and thought “gee, I don’t remember the singer sounding all that good, was I just standing in a bad spot for listening?”.  Well, it probably wasn’t you.  The large majority of live concert films feature vocals and even instruments that are rerecorded in a recording studio later.  A classic example is The Ramones’ “It’s Alive” concert film.  In the following footage, only the drums and audience cheering are live, everything else was rerecorded in a studio environment later on:

Don’t think it’s just the crappy punk singers that get this treatment though.  Here’s a video that contrasts Mariah Carey’s live performances on the night with the “official” audio, showing that even good singers often redo their own vocals later in the cozy safety of the recording studio:

The reason for doing things this way is fairly obvious – at a live gig you only have one chance to get it right, whereas in the recording studio singers have the luxury of recording as many takes as they want until they get it perfect (or until the money for studio time runs out, whichever comes first).  If you’re a producer and you’ve spent thousands of dollars hiring expensive camera crews for a live shoot, who wants to reshoot the whole thing again just because the singer had a cold that day?

How likely is this in k-pop?  Fuckin’ likely.  However nobody in k-pop to my knowledge has been caught yet, but give it time.  It’ll be another Kpopalypse “I told you so” moment, and it’ll probably happen where someone who already has a reputation as a good singer gets busted doing a mediocre live performance on fancams that sounds mysteriously better in an official live DVD of the same night’s performance.  Go hunting if you like, maybe you can put together a video like the one of Mariah above, and then I’ll update this post and get you some views.

THE PRE-RECORDED TRIGGERED SAMPLE

Here’s another Mariah Carey “performance”:

A lot of Mariah “you shouldn’t lipsync unless you have a reason” Carey’s vocals for this performance are actually just triggered samples that are played back by the keyboardist, and it’s made quite obvious because it gets triggered at the wrong times. The keyboardist forgets that the song has an extended introduction and brings Mariah’s vocals in prematurely at 0.07, Mariah then gives a “hey” to her left at 0:09, which she cleverly sings to disguise it as a vocal improvisation but she’s basically saying to the keyboard guy in a trying-to-be-as-non-obvious-as-possible-given-the-extremity-of-the-fuckup kind of way “hey stop playing my fucking sample you twit, it’s too early”.  Later on at about 2:20 another wrong sample comes in and Mariah, who by now must be fucking furious, inserts the words “stop singing my part now, baby” as she stares at her backline.  You can bet she punched a cunt backstage after this.

How likely is this in k-pop?  Fuckin’ likely.  Let’s look at T-ara’s tribute to Ennio Morricone and nail-painting, “Day By Day”.

If they’re not already included as part of the backing track, triggers are used in k-pop for money-note substitution/reinforcement.  If you listen from 6:23, Areum’s high note sure sounds very strong, has vibrato half way through, and then descends at the end.  It also sounds equally strong and has exactly the same vibrato and pitch characteristics in this performance, as well as this one, this one here, and so on, either she really is a robot or that’s a sample that gets replayed along with the backing track at that point every time.  In newer versions of “Day By Day” performed after Areum left the group, her triggered sample is replaced by one recorded by Soyeon, which you can hear here and here.

THE PRE-RECORDED KIT & CABOODLE

Listen to this recording of operatic tenor Luciano Pavarotti at the 2006 Winter Olympics, his final performance before he died later that year.  From 2:14:

Everything you’re hearing, including Pavarotti’s signing plus all of the instruments, was actually recorded several days in advance and then just played back through the speaker system with the singer, instrumentalists and conductor all miming along pretending that they were doing stuff.  Essentially, the pre-record is the reverse of the live overdub – instead of singing it properly after the event and then adding it in, the singer sings it properly before the event and then someone just plays it back.

How likely is this in k-pop?  Fuckin’ likely.  Let’s look at AOA’s much-missed-by-hypocrites-who-didn’t-support-it-when-it-was-active “band” concept to find out:

The above video of AOA is completely pre-recorded, which is fairly obvious given that they shot Jimin separately for the rap part.  The backing track is the same one from the mini-album, however the vocals have been rerecorded to make it “sound live” so it’s subtly different from the studio version, then the group just mimes over the top of the newly recorded vocal.  It’s also worth noting that because the new vocal is slightly different, this new vocal would be heard on an “MR Removed” mix and isolated as “evidence of real vocals oh look they’re really singing oh gosh wow”, which is another reason, on top of an existing mountain of reasons, why those MR Removed videos prove nothing are a fucking useless wank for idiots and you should always disregard anyone posting or commenting about MR Removed stuff either positively or negatively as the ravings of a one-eyed lunatic.  Not only does MR Removed videos not tell you how good the vocals are, these videos don’t even tell you if there are live vocals!

The above recording has live vocals but mimed instruments, you can tell by the huge decrease in vocal quality, as well as some live vocal artifacts like the microphone wind-noise blowout at 0:26.  The backing vocals for the chorus from the original backing track are also left in to fatten it up, which is why the chorus still sounds great whereas the verses are a bit sketchy.  AOA don’t always mime and can actually play their instruments live when they want to/are allowed to, but most k-pop groups just completely fake it because it’s easier from a stage rigging point of view to play a recording than set up a bunch of pain-in-the-ass microphones on everything (it’s hard enough setting up the visual props alone), plus the final result generally sounds better.

Anyway, if a group specifically sold as a “band concept” group like AOA in their early days are miming it, you can bet your ass everyone else is.  I guess k-pop has something in common with opera after all.

THE GHOST VOICE

Remember back in the days before electronic gadgetry, when people could really sing?  Gosh, those were the days, right?  Check out this performance of Natalie Wood singing “Tonight”, from the musical “West Side Story”, isn’t it just great.

Here’s another great singer, Deborah Kerr singing “Shall We Dance” from the Hollywood musical “The King & I”.

Oh, but wait.  Both recordings above were actually sung by Marni Nixon, a Hollywood “ghost voice” who overdubbed the vocals of many of the big female stars of the Hollywood musical era.

Marni like all ghost voices went uncredited back in the day so her line of work was a secret for decades, but she did get bit parts in a few films and “West Side Story” composer Leonard Bernstein even paid her 0.25% (a quarter of one percent, woohoo) of his royalties for her work overdubbing Natalie Wood (who was deliberately kept in the dark about how much her voice recordings were being overdubbed by someone else, presumably to not hurt her feelings).

Of course it’s not just film where this happens.  In the pop sphere the most notorious example of this were late 80s pop group Milli Vanilli.

Watch the singer in the blue miss the start of his “I’m in love, girl” line with the microphone high in the air at 1:23.  Not only is he not actually singing, he’s not even miming to his own voice.   Ghost singer/songwriters and backing vocalists provided all of the real vocals for Milli Vanilli, a common practice in commercial pop of the era (although Milli Vanilli were the only ones to get caught in such a career-destroying way).

How likely is this in k-pop?  Fuckin’ likely.  Essentially it’s already happening in many groups, something we know from talking to singers who have been though the idol creation process.

With k-pop groups consisting of several singers, producers have a choice of who they want to get to sing which part.  Producers will call in members one at a time to go through the parts and then pick which vocals sound best for each section, then electronically mess with the parts until even the singers themselves can barely recognise their own voices, this means that weak singers in a k-pop group are usually ghosted by the stronger ones, especially in the choruses.  The line distribution (which members gets the lead vocal line at any particular point) that you see in the video doesn’t always reflect who sung the part on the recording, just who the choreographer thought would look best in the front of the group giving a vocal delivery at that given moment.  Choreographers like to distribute parts as evenly as possible so everyone gets a shot (as that’s what fans want) but this rubs against the reality that each k-pop group only usually has one or two reasonable singers, and since k-pop tends to focus on specialisation, the gulf between the good and the bad singers is pretty wide.  So the bad singers get given their obligatory non-demanding half-a-verse so their fans can see them for a bit and the rest of the time they’re in the front it’s smoothed over or swallowed up by chorus overdubs.  This is how very poor singers in a large group get carried with essentially little problem or issue.  Basically, good singers aren’t needed in k-pop, you only need one semi-acceptable singer per group otherwise it’s a case of “too many cooks”, that’s why SM turfed the vocally competent but completely unmarketable and ear-gratingly hideous CSJH The Grace and replaced them with the younger, hotter Red Velvet doing the same type of songs in a more restrained, disciplined, less vocally wanky style that doesn’t make listeners want to jump in front of a train.

The only time you can’t really smooth things out too much is when there’s groups with a singer that has a very characteristic tone to their voice that can’t be easily replicated (2NE1’s Bom, AOA’s Jimin), you’ve got no choice but to have them stand out, that’s why Jimin says “hey” every two bars in an AOA feature these days.  This is a rare predicament in k-pop overall though, because in k-pop people are actually deliberately trained to sound the same.  That’s why nobody can tell who the fuck is who on “Hidden Singer”, there would be no point to that program at all if the majority of k-pop singers had actual distinctive voices.

So there you have it.  Your vocalfag hobby is even more pointless than you thought it was.  Of course, everyone’s probably going to miss the point of this post and instead use it to be even more of a vocalfag and bombard me with questions about whether I think a certain video has a faked performance or not, or conversely show me a video of their bias actually signing and try to ram down my throat how great they supposedly are, even if their last ten songs are all shit.  That’s okay though, I’m prepared with the ultimate response.

Sulli has officially left f(x), so I thought I’d bring to you this short pictorial to celebrate Sulli’s newfound freedom from having to do shitty idol stuff.  Please enjoy.

Bye folks!  Unlike Sulli, Kpopalypse will return!

I’m a very positive person, and I never intended to write about the idols that I dislike.  However, since making idiots upset is super funny, and everyone keeps fucking asking me about this fucking shit like it’s any of their concern, here’s a list of some random popular girls in k-pop that I DON’T find attractive, and why.  Note that this is only what I think of their appearance, it doesn’t mean that I don’t like them as people, after all who knows what their personalities are really like.

This short list will probably upset some people, but hey, shit happens.  If you think you can handle it, read on!

People seem to get a bit upset when I don’t adore their k-pop biases.  I don’t know why – they should be happy instead, that they’re not having to compete with me for these girls’ attentions, but there’s no telling some folks when they’re on a good thing, people will still bitch and moan.  These are only my opinions on female beauty (or lack thereof), it’s not like I’m anyone important or even that I’m writing about anything important, you’re completely allowed to disagree with what some idiot blogger thinks about some irrelevant crap you know.  It’s also not a complete list, it’s not meant to be, so if I left anyone out it’s on purpose.  Anyway, enough of the disclaimers for weak-minded fucks, all aboard the objectification train!  Let’s get started with none other than:

CL – 2NE1

Contrary to popular belief, I’m no 2NE1 hater, I own several of their CDs and their great “Nolza” live DVD which is one of the only decent female k-pop live concert videos in existence, and I have lots of time for their better early material.  It’s not the girls’ fault that they get shit songs now, I blame Teddy for that.  In fact I’d single out “Ugly” as one of 2NE1’s better songs and everybody who likes k-pop should listen to it.

Hearing CL sing “I think I’m ugly / and nobody wants to love me / just like her I wanna be pretty / don’t lie to my face / telling me I’m pretty” is one of the most unflinchingly raw and honest moments in a genre that is generally not known for honesty across the board.  Who can fail to empathise?  Don’t worry CL, Kpopalypse respects your feelings as a woman and a human and won’t lie to you.

KRYSTAL – f(x)

Sister of fashionista SNSD refugee Jessica who everybody loves, Krystal just like ex-groupmate cao ni ma Sulli is a smart girl who knows what’s up.  Krystal is under no illusions about k-pop and impressing anybody, she knows she’s nothing special without makeup, so does Jessica, and so do I.

Look at the fucking difference, it’s like chalk and cheese.  Krystal has an incredibly common appearance, I could go for a walk around my block and find five girls who look just like Krystal but more attractive versions.  Don’t ask for photos or to move to where I live, it’s not my fault you live in fugly town where the girls aren’t even at Krystal’s level.

AMBER – f(x)

Actually Amber looks okay here.  And stop picking on her appearance, you mean, nasty people, Amber has had a gutful of your shit.  That’s one thing you’ll never see Kpopalypse do, is pick on people’s appearances.  She’s just being herself, man.  Moving on.

SUZY – miss A

I’ve got lots of time for Suzy as a person, she seems like someone with the right attitude to life.  Pity that she looks about as interesting as pastel wallpaper in a hotel room.  Fuck she’s so boring to look at, I can’t even think up any good jokes about it because I can feel my passion for everything about existence turning into a uniform mush of grey nothingness inside my skull with each second I spend staring at Suzy’s face.

No wonder Korea is in love with her, Koreans love dull things like Propofol abuse, Busker Busker and doing overtime at the office while twiddling their thumbs, so I can see how appreciating Suzy’s looks would fit right into that frame of thinking.

YERIN – 15&

Everyone knows Park Jimin is the hot one in 15&.  Yerin, you’re just in the way of my fap, please stop taking up 50% of the camera time in this group’s videos thank you.

DARA – 2NE1

At first I was confused about why Dara was in 2NE1 at all.  She can’t really do anything special, she doesn’t look any good, I thought to myself that surely she’s 2NE1’s post turtle.

Then I found out that she’s really popular for hair and makeup endorsements, and everything clicked into place.  Makeup artists and stylists prefer to work with a clean slate – someone with as bland and unremarkable a look as humanly possible, so they can accurately assess and demonstrate the true transformative value of their products.  If you’re a girl buying makeup and Dara is endorsing it, I’d definitely consider that a worthy recommendation.  If it can make her look acceptable, it’s powerful stuff that’s worth every penny.

HWAYOUNG – ex T-ARA

…and boy, she won’t let you forget it, parading around in the media every time T-ara look like they’re about to have a comeback, desperately trying to catch any reflected sprinkles of fame in her cleavage.  I take back what I said earlier – I guess personality is important for this list after all.

HAERI – Davichi

There’s a cruel trick that girls play on each other where a moderately attractive woman will make a best friend out of a girl who she knows is a little bit uglier than she is, and she’ll invite her out clubbing and double-dating together trying to meet prospective partners (guys do this too, but less often).  The more attractive woman does better in the pickup game because she’s got someone uglier directly in tow for people to contrast and compare her with, as opposed to the guys instead potentially comparing her (perhaps less favourably) to other people who might also be in the room.  You’ll know if this is happening to you if you always go out on town with a friend as your wingperson to “help you meet people” and they consistently see lots of action and you never see any.

You can ask Haeri about that, Minkyung’s been doing that shit to her in public for years.  Word of advice Haeri – cut that sneaky minx loose.  Don’t be seen together, have different circles of friends, and definitely don’t ever go out on the town together and do stuff, like say, appearing on a stage together singing.  Oh what… you’re in a duo group and you contractually have to be together all the time?  Never mind, guess you’re fucked then, forget I said anything.

EVERYONE IN THE CURRENT WONDER GIRLS LINEUP

Robert Palmer’s models looked like fucking shit and the exact opposite of sex appeal in that horrid godawful “Addicted To Love” video and so do these girls.  Only Sohee could have pulled off this atrocious look, JYP you left this shit a little late.  #NoSoheeNoFap

2YOON

I even saw them live so I know what I’m talking about.  Someone has to balance out the hot members of 4Minute I guess, so they can be “taken seriously” by the misogynist horde lining up to slut-shame Hyuna for breathing.

I’m starting to think that “yoon” is Korean for “not very attractive to Kpopalypse”.  Just look at the symbol: 윤 – it looks like something that you wouldn’t be able to stick your dick in without getting your foreskin caught on sharp edges.  I sense a pattern forming.  Speaking of which:

YOONA – Girls’ Generation

Picture this.  You’re a young Korean male.  You go to school, then you go to uni.  Then you get a job in your chosen profession, meet a nice girl, get married and pump out two little clones of yourselves, a son and a daughter.  You get a mortgage on a house, you buy an SUV and park it in the driveway.  You keep your lawns and your front fences clean.  You wave to your neighbours as they blow leaves from their driveways in the autumn.  All is well in your world.

Many years pass.  You gradually pay off that mortgage with your hard work at your job.  You get older, and your children grow up.  They go to school, then to uni.  Then they get jobs and move out of home.  They meet nice people of the opposite sex and settle down and have children.  Sometimes they come to visit.  “Isn’t life great, didn’t I do well”, you think to yourself.

One day you’re at home, it’s a nice day outside but it’s getting towards evening so you’re indoors.  You sit in your lounge chair, TV remote control in one hand, your non-alcoholic beverage of choice in the other.  You turn on the TV.  It’s some kind of TV special with Girls’ Generation, Yoona is there.  You always thought she was pretty, she seems like such a nice girl.  You could imagine a world where she was your daughter, she has that same sweet, pleasant nature.  You watch as she narrates to the camera and prepares a meal.

Yoona smiles from the kitchen bench, looking so proud of her food preparation.  She’s talking to a guy, he’s smiling too.  There’s also a small studio audience who cheer and clap along at the appropriate times.  It’s all fake, and you know this – after all you’re an adult and a mature-age one at that, not some ditzy clueless fangirl – but that’s okay, the innocuous artifice is pleasant enough.  It’s good, wholesome entertainment, just for you, just for your enjoyment this evening.  You watch calmly as you sip your beverage, thinking about your life, the path you’ve chosen, and how everything has come to this moment that you are experiencing now.  Outside the lounge room window, the sun sets gracefully.  Such a calm evening, such a pretty sunset, such a nice girl on the TV.

The next morning, you’re discovered by your partner.  At first she’s can’t even believe that it’s you, but eventually forensics confirm your identity via your dental records.  She swears to the police, black and blue, that she had no idea that you even owned a shotgun, and that when she heard the bang in the night she just thought maybe a tree had fallen on the roof and she noticed that you weren’t in bed yet so she figured you were up and would sort out whatever that noise was so she went back to sleep.  The police ask her if you had been showing any signs of depression lately, or had any problems in your life like large unpaid debts, substance addictions or old enemies.  Your partner shakes her head.

Years later, scientists study your case, and several others very similar to it that happened at almost exactly the same time on that very same evening, comparing the data with the behaviour of confined mental patients as well as results of tests with rats in different types of cages.  They conclude that if the brain of any warm-blooded mammal is consistently understimulated below a certain threshold, that it triggers a mental switch where the subject ceases to value life and gives up on itself.  They conclude that your fatal self-inflicted blow was brought on by a sudden overwhelming, uncontrollable sense of ennui and listlessness created by the complete lack of interesting stimuli in your environment.  When they discover what was on the TV at the time of your death, the scientists nod their heads and sigh: “Yes, this matches the data.  I’m amazed he lasted as long as he did”.

The researchers immediately publish their findings in a well-known scientific journal, where it nets them several million won.  This money comes not from anybody putting the research into use, but from SM Entertainment, who pay all those involved handsomely to swiftly pull the publication from shelves and keep the results quiet, ensuring that the net social impact of your demise is nil, and that your death, just like your life, amounted to nothing in particular.

It happens to everybody once they discover and get excited about a new music culture – it invades not just everyday aspects of their life, but also their subconscious mind.  Kpopalypse is no exception!  Recently I noticed that I was having dreams about k-pop and some of them were so bizarre and fucked up that it would be a shame not to document them for your prurient bemusement.  Please now be entertained as I lay bare the depths of my subconscious for your entertainment and expose myself to potential ridicule in this series of snack-sized fanfictions!

I sign up online to an event that allows you to meet, talk to and take pictures with any five k-pop stars.  They promise on the website that they can get anyone at all, and I’m skeptical but I sign up anyway as I figure that even a failure will make a great blog post.  My list:

• Raina
• Eunjung
• Sunny
• Anyone from Crayon Pop
• SeA (Pocket Girls)

I arrange via the website to meet a guy at some kind of convention in a warehouse, he is one of the event organisers and I give him my list of preferred people to meet.  He starts listing people who can’t make it and why (other music business obligations, mostly), he quickly makes it clear that I’m not going to meet any of the people on my list.  I start negotiating alternatives but it seems that nobody who I am interested in is available.  It’s frustrating, eventually I say “why don’t you give me a list of the people that I can meet and I’ll choose from that?”.  He starts listing off people and they are all people I don’t give a fuck about meeting like Brian Joo, some guy from ZE:A, etc.  Eventually I leave the meeting having resolved nothing.

Later I go back to the same building and into an upstairs conference room where I’m told he has a meeting set up for me.  He introduces me to two people as Samuel L. Jackson and Sooyoung from Girls’ Generation who are sitting at a table.  I sit down with them.  Samuel L. Jackson looks like he does in “Jackie Brown“, Sooyoung doesn’t really look anything like Sooyoung, in fact she looks much closer to Joy from Red Velvet, but I calmly accepted this turn of events as Joy is prettier to me anyway and by this point I have so little faith in the organiser’s ability to make this event happen that I am just happy to meet any k-pop people at all.  Both Samuel L. Jackson and Sooyoung/Joy are dressed in normal casual clothes, Sooyoung/Joy says nothing but smiles a lot, I figure she doesn’t know any English.  I take pictures with them all, they pose happily.  I am also given a huge document, a multi-page contract designed to show to your friends which “proves” that you met the k-pop star in question, with two halves of the form to fill out, one for each person to fill and sign off on.  It asks all sorts of weird irrelevant personal details (“what flavour crisps do you prefer?” “how many hours do you watch TV per week?”) and I don’t fill it out, figuring it’s probably just pointless data-mining.

It isn’t clear why Samuel L. Jackson is there but it seems like he and Sooyoung/Joy had some kind of business relationship – and definitely business only, they sit far apart and don’t seem to show much in the way of rapport.  Since I can’t really talk to her, I talk to him.  I ask Samuel how he got into k-pop and he starts talking about how he’s branching out from acting because he doesn’t want to keep acting as he gets older, he wants to “diversify his motherfuckin’ income stream”.  He doesn’t really seem that interested in k-pop as music but just the business aspect.  At one point he gets up and complains about how he’s “sick of all these motherfuckin’ k-pop girls in my motherfuckin’ office”.  I get the odd feeling that Sooyoung/Joy is oblivious to his business plans.  She smiles a lot at me (but never at him), sits with her arms by her sides and says nothing.

I’m hanging out with some guys from an unknown soon-to-debut k-pop group in an empty warehouse, I’m not sure why I’m with them.  We then walk across some streets, the scene looks a bit like in the BTS “War Of Hormone” video because they are in similar clothing and keep doing weird swag moves like there is music playing, but there isn’t.  I decide to split up from the group because I see a record store and would rather buy stuff than walk with some strange guys with weird hair acting oddly.  I go in and look around, the store is very dusty, and the sole shop attendant is an old man, he is busy packing up furniture and tells me that it’s his last day before the store closes down.  Lots of things are on special, naturally I search for any k-pop.  Eventually in amongst everything else I find a small k-pop section, and a sign saying “12 k-pop CDs for $13”.  I pick up an armful of nugu groups I had never heard of and can’t remember the names of.  I go to pay for them but it’s difficult to navigate the store generally because my cat is there and she kept climbing on empty shop fittings and getting in the way.

I am reading Asian Junkie.  A new article appears: “EXPOSED FISTS BANNED BY MOGEF, TIFFANY/SUNNY EXPLAIN”.  The crux of the article is that exposed hands that form fists are no longer permitted in k-pop dance routines as they are considered obscene as they could resemble a sexual object (i.e a fist used for fisting).  The article takes a few shots at the MOGEF in usual IAFTB-Asian Junkie commentary style and then links to a YouTube video with an interview.  I watch the video and Sunny and Tiffany are being interviewed on some Korean TV show by a middle-aged Asian host who looks a bit like Shinsadong Tiger (but it isn’t him).  The TV show setup looks a bit like the “Weekly Idol” TV show with a pure white backdrop except that everybody is sitting down.  The host asks (in English) how the ban will affect Girls’ Generation.  Tiffany replies (also in English, in her usual chirpy L.A. girl accent) that the routines have been modified.  She then stands up and as “Catch Me If You Can” plays she demonstrates a dance routine where her hands are outstretched, and shows that by rotating her arms a certain way while doing the other movements, she can still form a fist without the fist itself being completely visible to the cameras, thereby getting around the new censorship guidelines.  The host is impressed, and the unseen studio audience applauds in polite admiration.

I’m teaching a co-ed class of Korean high-school kids how to dance.  Even though it’s a dance class, they are all seated at vintage wooden school desks in a traditional classroom-style arrangement.  I have to encourage the class to select a piece of music for them to learn the dance to.  I ask to the classroom “How about something like Kara’s “Pretty Girl“?  The whole class groans.  One of the male students says under his breath “I think we’d prefer to be doing EXO.”  The headmaster is in the room as well, he’s watching how I teach and assessing me to see if I make the grade as a teacher – noticing the student reaction, he tells me to go outside, with no explanation given.  I walk out of the class and down the hall.  The hallway has glass windows and I can see into the class that I just left, where the students are.  Even though I can’t hear what they’re saying, I can tell by the looks on their faces they’re obviously a lot happier that I’ve left the room.   They’re having conversations with the headmaster, I assume they’re discussing what EXO songs they’d like to dance to.

I am in a music store playing with a new keyboard that I want to buy.  I find a really amazing keyboard with a brand name that I’ve never heard of (and can’t remember), it has powerful sequencing abilities and great sounds.  I have a desire to make the world a better place by combining the sounds of 2NE1’s “Crush” album with Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”, thereby making 2NE1’s new material listenable.  I believe that this new equipment can do the task.  I purchase the keyboard.

I then walk over to the local council office to get a busker’s license.  My plan is to do a street performance and spread this new hybrid music to the masses, but I don’t tell this to the lady at reception, I worry that if she finds out that I’m incorporating elements of 2NE1 into my music she might refuse the busker’s license.  She asks me a few questions about the music I’m playing and I’m deliberately vague.  Eventually she goes away to check with someone else, and then comes back, she says they’ll give me the licence for now, but it could be pulled at any moment if there’s any “funny business”.  I nod in agreement.

I go into the local mall and set up my equipment.  One of my friends from the experimental music scene is there, he asks me what I’m up to.  I tell him I’m doing a performance soon but I’m deliberately vague to him also because I want it to be a surprise.  Eventually I’m fully set up and I start to play, a collection of keyboard and triggered samples of Pink Floyd and 2NE1.  A small crowd gathers.  At one point a choir that happens to be busking a little further down the mall starts singing along with what I’m playing, they sound great.  The result sounds quite unlike both groups and the overall reception is mild but positive.  A concerned council member also watches but he doesn’t recognise any of the songs, so I’m allowed to play unhindered.

As a CL rap section starts I leave my keyboard (thank god for sequencing) and walk over to a nearby house and CL is there, she’s moving from one room to the next and rapping (similar to 2NE1’s “Scream” video, but the song playing isn’t that one).  Then the music ends and we start talking, she’s a nice person, we start walking up the walls outside the building like in Fiestar’s “We Don’t Stop” MV while we talk.  She tells me about how The Black Keys are a shitty group.  I wonder about how I’m breaking the laws of physics, and suddenly I realise that it’s possible because I have died and that I’m actually now a ghost.  I can’t remember the exact moment when I died, or what killed me.  My consciousness drifts above my coffin and I watch my own funeral, there is a pastor who informs a gathered crown that I have died of shit music disease.  He warns the people against the dangers of combining 2NE1 with any other music at all, and that with more education about the dangers of bad music deaths from shit music disease such as mine could be preventable.

I’m on my way to interview Sistar.  They’re having a fanmeet inside a shopping centre, and I spend a great deal of time circumnavigating the large structure complete with multi-storey car park trying to find the right entrance.  Eventually I come across a room full of very young fangirls making Sistar posters with crayons and glitter and I know I’m in the right place.  I exit this room and walk down a large corridor that goes around in a big U shape, right in the middle of the U there’s a theatre stage and Sistar are on the stage, sitting on bar stools.  They are talking to an assembled audience which I can’t see because the stage lights are really bright but I peer out into the darkness and I guess there’s maybe 200 of them.  Sistar are fairly unstyled with no makeup and basic jeans-and-T-shirt style clothing and as a result look really ordinary, like in the “Tic Toc” MV.  I think about how much studio makeup and lighting must change their appearance.  I start talking to Hyolyn and ask a couple introductory questions but then I realise that I’ve forgotten my recording equipment (a portable DAT player) so I excuse myself and run back through the corridor to pick it up.  When I start returning back down the corridor with the gear I see Bora by a doorway and we start talking about trivial stuff and I forget to meet the others.  I don’t bother to record anything.

I’m in a bookstore.  I see a friend of mine who works there and also is a local book publisher.  I ask him if he has any books about k-pop.  He laughs at me and asks me “why are you into that faggot shit?”.  I reply “because I’m a fucking faggot, obviously, now do you have any k-pop books or what?”.  He laughs and says nothing.  I get frustrated, not about him calling me a faggot (which I don’t care about and is completely normal) but because he isn’t answering my question.

I hear about Canadian punk band SNFU coming to Adelaide, so I’m on my way to a local venue to see them.  Randomly on the street a guy recognises me and shouts out “hey, Kpopalypse!” – a young, tall punk guy with a red mohawk introduces himself to me as someone who frequents my ask.fm and asks me lots of questions about music.   We talk as we walk to the venue, he tells me that he’s linked me SNFU videos anonymously and also has asked me questions about recording studios.  We get to the venue and see Lizzy from Orange Caramel sitting at a table with some other people drinking so we join her.  I ask Lizzy if she can do a wink so I can photograph it on my phone, she nods and then pulls a weird grimace that isn’t really a wink but looks more like she’s got something in her eye.  It looks like she’s trying to wink but doesn’t know how, which I find strange because she winks in music videos all the time.  Then my newfound punk friend asks if she can get naked so he can take a photo, but Lizzy gets all pissed off, folds her arms, pulls a sulky face and won’t say anything further to anybody.  Everyone around the table then gets mad at the punk guy because they were hoping to see Lizzy get naked later on that night, and thought that they had better odds if they didn’t say anything directly about it to her.  One of the other guys slaps him, saying that now he’s blown the opportunity for the whole group to see Lizzy nude by getting their intentions out in the open.  Lizzy sips a beer and eyes everyone around her suspiciously.

Giving up on Lizzy, myself and all the other guys around the table get up and go backstage to see if SNFU are there.  We enter a doorway to the right of the main stage and find that the backstage area isn’t a backstage area after all but is instead some kind of bunker.  The doors lock behind us and we’re trapped in the room.  A voice tells us that we’re now in an Orange Caramel Boot Camp facility and that we’re going to get attacked soon, and we have to defend ourselves or die.  A mechanical wall opens up revealing lots of weapons, everyone around me takes a gun.  I’m the last person to take a weapon, I take a pistol which is the only firearm left, plus a police baton.  For the next few hours we’re attacked by continual waves of of rotting zombies.  Each time a new group of zombies appears, an Orange Caramel song plays over the PA system to signal their approach.  We eventually manage to fend them all off and survive but defending their attacks is exhausting.

I’m watching a dance practice video on YouTube, some nugu group I’ve never heard of.  The girls in it look exactly like the girls in Wa$$up but it’s not them.  All of the girls are wearing tracksuits and tank tops, and practicing the dance routine for a new song.  The guy holding the camera wanders up to one of the girls, a lookalike of Wa$$up’s Dain, and pushes her onto the wooden floor of the gym.  He then sits on top of her stomach, lifts up her tank top and starts playing with her boobs.  The Dain lookalike has no reaction to this – even though she’s lying on the floor face up with the cameraman sitting on her, she still continues to do the arm movements for the dance routine, and stares ahead of her blankly not making eye contact with the man or his camera lens.  I think about how this is a new concept I’ve never seen before in k-pop and I wonder if other dance practice videos will copy this new trend.

I’m in the green room of an old theatre, during set-up time for my band.  I’m watching a monitor high on the wall of the green room that gives me a view into the audience area.  Someone tells me that when there are no gigs on the audience area doubles as the offices for Asian Junkie.  I look to try and recognise AJ himself but I just see a bunch of young employees, then I realise that I don’t even know what he looks like.  However working at a desk at the rear of the audience area I can clearly recognise Johnny Noh from Allkpop.  I’m shocked that he’s working for the Asian Junkie office… or perhaps he is just a guest?  I can’t really tell why he’s there, but the staff all seem to know him.  He gets up and starts making jokes about how he wants to kick some girl in the head, he has a perpetual smile on his face and is just as annoying as I’d imagined him to be.  I decide that I should tell him about why I don’t like him.

I walk down to the audience area and towards him.  He says “Hi, I’m Johnny Noh, who are you?”  One of the girls in the work area says something in his ear, presumably she’s telling him that I’m Kpopalypse.  I start telling Johnny about why he sucks and he says “why don’t you fight me?” – I agree that this is a good idea.  We get in cars and drive out to an undisclosed quiet location so we can have a fight undisturbed by authorities.  He starts trying to race me in his car but there’s a flash and suddenly my car loses power, I think I’ve blown up the engine.  We get out of our cars and start attacking each other with large wooden axes.  After a few swings Johnny lands his axe blade deep into my stomach.  I look down, it doesn’t hurt at all but I can see that the blade is in really deep and it probably wouldn’t be wise to continue fighting.  I put down my axe and tell Johnny that he’s won this round.  Johnny’s smile never leaves his face the entire time.

I’m doing my radio show, I put on a copy of something from the new as-yet-unreleased 2NE1 album.  I’m holding the album cover in my hands, some messy-looking thing in yellow and bright blue.  Some friends come into the radio station and ask me what the song is, I say it’s the new 2NE1.  They ask if I’ve got a physical copy of it and I say no, quickly hiding the album cover under the radio control desk, in my lap.  I don’t want them to look at it, I want to keep it all for myself.

I’m writing my best songs of 2015 list, with the help of a friend.  I am reading out the reviews and my friend is typing them.  When I get to #2 I just reel out an exact reversal of the review of CL’s “The Baddest Female” i.e “this song isn’t the worst k-pop song ever.  It’s also not the best k-pop song ever.  However, that’s only because of the song that got to #1 on this list, and…”

Sunny from SNSD releases a solo song and I watch it on YouTube.  The song is complete crap, but I notice that the Korean-language chorus lyrics sound a bit like “I want you to hit my ass” in English, and this increases my enjoyment of the song significantly.

I’m in the cinema with my girlfriend, we’re watching a documentary called “Kpopalypse: The Man, The Myth, The Legend”.  The documentary starts out with a caption – “Part One: The Man” and then opens with a panning shot of a bunch of fangirls.  As each fangirl appears on the screen, text comes up above their head showing their online name, nutty Sulli stalker Jinnabit is identified as one of the fangirls, the others all have weird computer-gamer-style names that I don’t recognise.  They all look elementary school student age as well as messy and unkempt.  A completely cheesy male cinema-preview-style voiceover explains how Kpopalypse has fought against the fangirl plague for the greater good of humanity.  I talk to my girlfriend about how camp and cringeworthy the documentary is and she agrees.  “This is only ‘The Man’ part, imagine how much more cheesy this is going to get when we get to ‘The Legend’ part!” I say to her.  We continue to laugh and cringe awkwardly as the documentary then pans over various stills of Kpopalypse biases and the narration starts talking in-depth about the origins of the Kpopalypse bias list and how fortunate the chosen females are to be included in it.  “People are going to think you’re a complete wanker!” my girlfriend says.  “That’s okay, everyone already thinks I’m a wanker anyway!” I reply.  We both laugh it up hysterically.

I’m with a work colleague and he is interviewing JYP.  We’re sitting together on a footpath by the beach, it’s a sunny day, there are several people about, and many seagulls exploring the beach and chirping loudly.  JYP is wearing aviator shades and a loud Hawaiian shirt, he looks very relaxed and calm.  The guy I’m with asks JYP why he takes so long with his comebacks.  JYP says “people who follow my artists don’t realise it, but I work on stuff every day.  It’s not just about what you see, there’s a whole hidden world behind k-pop.”  JYP is asked to elaborate by the interviewer but he just gazes at the circling birds and says nothing.

I’m having lunch in an alfresco section of a restaurant.  It’s a sunny day and I’m seated at a white decorative metal table like the type that one would find in a botanical garden, I have a beautiful view of a seaside harbour across a cobblestone street.  I see two people in the street close by, they’re dressed identically as pandas and they’re fighting with sticks.  The violence is worrying as the two people are laying into each other really hard, but I relax when I also notice a game show host with a microphone and a camera crew in tow, and I realise that it’s staged and they’re actually filming the fight for some kind of TV show.  Eventually the fight is over – nobody wins, time has just run out so they’ve stopped filming.  The two people in panda suits take off their panda heads and reveal their faces, they are IU and Boram.  They both look exhausted and their faces are sweaty, they swiftly drink from water bottles provided by the camera crew.  The MC, an Asian female who looks about 60 years old, comes up and starts talking to me about my blogging.  She asks me what I think about when I blog, I tell her “I don’t really think about anything, I just write and I let others do the thinking”.

Hi there, cao ni mas!  Since Seoul Fashion Week is coming up soon, Kpopalypse is back with another episode of the much-loved Kpopalypse Fashion Class, and this time we’re delving into the fascinating world of polka dots!  This post contains all the trufax you need to know on how to use polka dots to enhance female boobs and look hot, or to make someone else look hot, with lots of k-pop girls as examples!  Grab yourself a drink and let’s get started!

Some history: polka dots were invented as a clothing pattern at the same time and place as the Polka dance, in 19th century Eastern Europe.  However the fashion and the dance aren’t directly related, they just happened to become popular at the same time.  Okay, that’s the historic portion of this post over, let’s now move on to important things like TITS.

Polka dots, much like horizontal stripes, are know to possess form-enhancing properties.  However, there are some rules.  Let’s look at some examples so we can better determine the correct utilisation of polka dots.

Firstly, it should be noted that dots that are just randomly placed on a garment will not have the desired effect.  You can’t just whack a dot anywhere and hope for the best, as Eunjung’s costume designer seems to have done above.

This picture of IU is another demonstration of incorrect pattern use.  The irregular pattern is confusing to the eye and therefore provides no boob enhancement.  Note that the polka dot pattern is very specific.  Dot patterns should conform to the following specific diagonal grid-based pattern for maximum fap effect:

The specificity of the pattern may seem odd but the regularity provides a helpful way to discern form.  The proof is in the results – here is the correct polka dot pattern this time applied to Eunjung.

The resulting application of polka dots gives a nice contouring effect to Eunjung’s upper body and allows for greater depth perception.

I don’t know who the fuck this girl is because I don’t watch k-dramas, she looks a bit like Bom on drugs (i.e she looks a bit like Bom) but her clothing is a good demonstration of another important facet of polka dot styling which is that the dots have to be close together.  Large spaces between the dots in the pattern reduce the contouring effect and won’t give the desired enhancement.

The pattern isn’t the only factor to consider, there is also a maximum allowable dot size limit.

For the purposes of optimising clothing for boob enhancement smaller dots are better.  Krystal’s polka dots here are slightly above the ideal size limit for any enhancement effect to occur.

Ex-groupmate and partner in crime Sulli has the right idea, and her form actually comes off looking a bit more curvy thanks to correct polka dot size even though in reality Krystal is bustier.  The slightly irregular pattern is a downside but it’s not as irregular as IU’s pattern earlier and the spacing is still consistent enough with small enough dots to give the right effect.  This isn’t pseudoscience or Kpopalypse just making up this shit for fun, this is a known phenomenon called the Ebbinghaus illusion and can be observed thusly:

Both orange dots in the above picture are in fact the same size but the orange dot on the left seems smaller at first glance because it’s surrounded by other bigger dots.  Likewise, bigger dots on fabric will make any other nearby features like the curves underneath the fabric seem smaller, whereas smaller dots will make these features increase in apparent volume.  Imagine that the grey dots are the dots on a dress and the orange dot is the boob you’re trying to enhance.  The Ebbinghaus illusion is a known truth of graphic and clothing design.  In k-pop, costume designers even exploit this illusion to even out discrepancies.

Soyeon on the left isn’t as busty as Jiyeon or Hyomin behind her, but the relatively smaller dot pattern on her clothing helps her maximise apparent volume perception.

Colour is also important.  Sunny’s dress colours here aren’t optimal for boob enhancement, mind you Sunny is quite busty anyway so she needs little help in this area.  The best options, in order from most effective to least, are:

• Dark dots on a white background
• White dots on a dark background
• Any two colours on opposite ends of the colour wheel (complementary colours)
• Anything else

Tiffany manages to compete with Sunny’s volume quite easily just by using the most ideal dot colour combination (black on white), even though Tiffany is definitely not as top-heavy.

Different colour combinations can work well as Soyeon demonstrates, the key is high contrast between the dots and their background.

Sulli looks great here but as far as her boobs are concerned she may as well not have wasted her time with white-on-white polka dots.

The last and probably most obvious thing to consider is that clothes need to be form-fitting around the area that you want to enhance.

Qri looks great here and even busty but it’s actually the frills that are providing the busty effect (frills may be covered in a future edition of Kpopalypse Fashion Class).  The actual dots aren’t providing any apparent volume increase to her boobs in this circumstance.

Sunny Hill demonstrate the effect of clothes where the dots follow form closely, as well as the relative bustiness produced by differently sized dots of the same colour.  Strange as it may seem, a plunging neckline of polkadots actually reduces apparent boob size, because the neckline appears bigger than the boobs it’s inviting you to look at – the Ebbinghaus illusion in effect once again.

Notoriously well-endowed Hyosung from Secret is wearing polka dots here but doesn’t noticeably out-bust the other members of her group here because what she’s wearing just isn’t that form-fitting.  The other members also have thicker layers of clothing to make up the shortfall.  Yes k-pop stylists think of this shit, you can bet that the first thing they do when planning an MV shoot is have a discussion where they say “okay, how are we going to make this work so Hyosung’s tits looks great but so do the others”.  The stylist here aimed for “equal bustiness”.

JYP doesn’t give a crap about “equal bustiness” though, he gave the members of miss A all the same clothes here.  I guess it figures that he didn’t really put much thought into it as he’s an ass man.

Here’s an iconic T-ara performance which reverses the miss A look, with polka dotted jackets and plain colours underneath.  The effect is broad-shouldered as a result of the dots sitting on their shoulders, and the less booby girls have been given lots of extra layers and accessories underneath so they can keep up with the more plainly-styled Hyomin and Jiyeon.  Look closely and you can see that the polka dots here are in fact stars – a “polka dot like” object will suffice if it’s symmetrical and utilised in the same proportion and pattern as polka dots.

The final example is Orange Caramel.  The boob size scale of Orange Caramel is Raina > Lizzy > Nana, therefore Nana gets the dots snugly fitted on her boobs to boost them, Lizzy gets no dots, and Raina gets dots on her accessories instead to reduce her boob size.  Orange Caramel’s stylists use the power of polka dots to either enhance or distract, and achieve apparent “equal bustiness” easily.

Anyway, that’s it for another Kpopalypse Fashion Class!  Hopefully you learned something along the way, or if not, maybe you fapped to cute k-pop girls!