This post contains the results of the Kpopalypse 2015 End Of Year Caonima Activity Survey!

There were nearly 600 responses to the survey, thanks to all the caonimas who enjoyed caonima survey activities!  Even though my readership has increased, the grand total of 588 completed responses was a little bit less participation than previous years – this is probably a result of my new survey software which doesn’t let the same person fill it out twice as I know that on previous surveys exceptionally bored people did multiple entries.  A new statistic which hasn’t appeared in Kpopalypse surveys before is completion rate, which held steady throughout the survey period at an impressive 92% – only 8% of respondents (48 in total) lacked the required determination levels to see the survey through to the end, and caonimas from 60 different countries participated!  Let’s get on with the results – read on for all the survey data that is true and factual!

Question 1: Hi! How are you? Answer in as much or as little detail as applicable.

Most of you were good!  Several people asked how I am – I’m good also!  Some answers to your questions and concerns:

Will there be any gif’s of Choa’s wardrobe malfunctions? – I feel like that’s a specialty of Zaku at Anti Kpop-Fangirl given that the most popular post ever in AKF is a Zaku wardrobe malfunction post.  I’ll leave covering this topic to the master!

I’m debating whether or not to spend $50 on imported chocolate that I have a yen for because it’s unavailable in my country. – DO IT.  Kpopalypse is pro-chocolate.

Do you like board games? – Yes!

A crazy girl is trying to fuck me and she’s kinda hot so what do? – I recommend that you hold out for a less crazy person.  Plenty of fish in the sea.

A great day today, huh?? I sure love Crayon Pop! The twins are adorable! Choa is so cute and innocent and would never harm anyone in any way!  Choa if you’re reading the results I ask that you return my three children to me safely. I’ve done all you asked for. – Reposting for your family’s safety.  Good luck.

I have compiled a playlist of sad kpop that includes plenty of Big Bang and 2NE1. What do you think of that? – I don’t think of that.

I’m ok, I’m a bit hungry though. Should I have cereal or eggs and toast? – Live dangerously.  Flip a coin.

I’m a childhood educator where I was told today by a child, “We like Pokemon cards but we don’t like you”. At the end of the day though, here I am. What is life? – This video may help!

I’m good, thanks for asking. Nobody ever asks these days. Well they do, but do they genuinely mean it tho? Or is it because we’re so conditioned to say so? Do you really mean to ask how are you? – Yes!  I ask this question every survey because I care about the welfare of my readers!  Although I would still blog if I had no readers, I’m very grateful for everybody who takes time out of their day to read my posts and do my surveys, even if they hate me!

On to the next question!

Question 2: How do you feel about doing another Kpopalypse survey?

Most people wanted to do the survey, or just wanted to see what was inside, which makes sense!  A bold 4% of you were willing to do the survey even though you hated every minute of it – thanks for your contribution!

Question 3: I’m using Polldaddy because Google Forms is broken as fuck. How do you feel about this?

Most of you didn’t care about my survey software issues and just wanted to be asked about rimming Joy’s ass.  Unfortunately for you, the survey didn’t have any questions about rimming Joy’s ass in it (apart from this one).  Feel free to add how you’d feel about rimming Joy’s ass below in the comments to this post to make up for the shortfall.

Question 4: Drag the text boxes up and down to rank the following in order of quality, from highest to lowest.

Apologies to those of you who didn’t like these “ranking” questions because you were doing them on your mobile phones where it’s really hard to drag the boxes up and down.  I didn’t realise this myself until I tried to access my own survey via a phone after people kept mentioning it and I realised that the format does indeed suck dick for phones.  In any event I randomised the order of answers in this question so that even if you had trouble dragging things, if you decided not to drag anything at all and skipped the ranking questions it wouldn’t bias any result in particular over multiple responses.  From most popular to least popular, the results are as follows.  Included is the “weighted ranking”, a lower number means more popular.

Hyosung’s boobs – 3.59

Seolhyun’s ass – 3.77

Joy’s thighs – 3.96

Kpopalypse’s humour – 3.99

Sulli’s prophylactics – 5.56

Anti K-pop-Fangirl’s author vetting process – 6.29

Ailee’s judge of character – 6.66

Hwayoung’s worth ethic – 6.73

Asian Junkie’s web host – 6.78

Bom’s surgeon – 7.41

I think “almost as popular as Joy’s thighs” should be my new slogan.  Also, confirmed proof that Allkpop is “The Great Satan”!

Question 5: This is (probably) a picture of Joy from Red Velvet.

Are you able to tell the Red Velvet members apart?

Sadly, my Red Velvet Identification Test post didn’t seem to help the majority of people.  Fortunately, a lot of you already knew the Red Velvet members well!  Cheers to you!

Question 6: How often do you read Kpopalypse posts?

Given that I don’t usually post more than twice per week, most people had a fairly logical reading ratio, although I do admire the people who have determination to check my posts more often than this!  Of course those who read my crap less than once per week may have missed the opportunity to complete the survey altogether, so this probably skews the results.  The 1% of you who found the survey through ESP, please share your secrets with the rest of us!

Question 7: People are always asking me shit about fancams but I really don’t give a flying fuck about fancams. Should Kpopalypse write more about fancams?

Most of you were under no illusions about your chances of getting fancam posts out of me, which was great to see!

Question 8: Given two selections in a multiple choice question of equal merit, which would you pick?

I had the answer “the second option” listed as the first option, and vice versa, causing some of you much psychological distress.  I appreciate those who struggled on through this question and completed the survey.

Question 9: What completely non k-pop related topic would you like to see Kpopalypse devote an entire overlong pointless post to?

It’s well know that cats win the Internet so I wasn’t surprised that they also appeared at first place here, however I was quite amazed by the amount of people who actually wanted to know more about Australian politics, which trailed felines by only three votes!  Dan Akroyd is now unsubscribing from Kpopalypse blog.

Question 10: Rank these apocalyptic scenarios in terms of likelihood, from most likely to least likely.

We all know that the apocalypse will come one day – but how will it happen?  Here’s the results of the next ranking question, along with weighted ranking values, with most likely scenario at the top:

JYP whispers his own name at a subatomic particle and creates a black hole, swallowing the Earth – 3.23

Shit music disease from multiple simultaneous trap comebacks infects the human race and turns everyone into maggots – 3.54

Artificial intelligence hears Red Velvet’s “Dumb Dumb“, decides humans are a bunch of dumb-dumbs and kills us all – 3.74

Excessive SM box MV manufacture influences climate change-triggered apocalyptic weather event which wipes out 99% of humanity – 3.92

Seo In Young poses with Taeyeon for a magazine, the voids under their bras collide and Earth fries in the resulting dark matter explosion – 4.42

Chain reaction Fukushima nuclear power plant explosion poisons all parts of the Earth not covered by SM box material – 4.45

New 2NE1 album is released in 2016 and is actually decent, billions die in shock – 4.67

Looks like the world could end in any number of ways, however CL probably won’t be involved – this time.

Question 11: Here is a picture of IU.

What is IU most likely to be thinking in the above picture?

Results were reasonably even but a greater amount of people felt that IU was thinking about Eunhyuk’s pearly gifts.

Question 12: Rate the following properties of Kpopalypse’s writing in terms of your personal enjoyment.

Most people seems to like all aspects of Kpopalypse apart from fap material, which scored a “meh” overall.  Is this because I don’t really care that much about writing basic fap posts so I rarely do it, because you’re not seeing the type of fap posts that you’d like to see, or it is because my readers don’t like fap material in general?  Maybe a question for a future survey!

Question 13: What religion are you?

I made sure that I included what I felt were all the important mainstream religions in society today, but I also put in an “other” category so nobody felt left out, just to be fair to anybody who was into some strange cults or whatever.

Question 14: Are you an honest person? (TIP: answer carefully – this is probably a trick question.)

An honest person would tell the truth and answer “yes” to this question.  A liar on the other hand would lie, and answer “yes” to this question.  That’s why there was only one option for this question.  I’m sure you’re all honest anyway and only upstanding honest truthful people read Kpopalypse.  By getting you to answer this question I could be assured of the accuracy of all the other questions.

Question 15: This is a picture of Seo Jisoo from Lovelyz.

How does Kpopalypse cope with the emotional burden of always picking the correct side in a k-pop scandal?

Most of you picked the correct answer as Kpopalypse does not do recreational drugs (except chocolate)!  However all human experience, including listening to Lovelyz, is converted to chemical reactions in the brain so it could be argued that drugs is also a correct response.  The picture of Seo Jisoo was just there to remind you that if a news outlet actually has to change their name to “The Fact” to legitimise themselves, they probably publish a lot of lies.

Question 16: How do you feel about Seo Jisoo returning to Lovelyz?

Most people weren’t Lovelyz fans but were still happy to hear the good news.  I didn’t bother putting in any negative options as part of my continuing quest to promote positivity in the world of k-pop and banish negativity and cynicism.

Read the following carefully and make sure you understand it.  There will be a question about it later.

Many people thought I was trolling with this, but a few of you picked up that it was actually directly related to a later question.  I guess a lot of people didn’t read it carefully enough.  Feel free to read it carefully again now in case you didn’t understand it earlier when you did the survey.

Question 17: Social Justice Warrior corner! Which important social justice issue would you like to see confirmed SJW Kpopalypse cover next? As these issues are all very important, you can choose multiple answers for this question if you wish.  (TIP: those with a slim grasp on their own sexual identity may feel threatened by this question.  Kpopalypse recommends a cold shower while repeating the mantras “I am not a faggot bitch” and “I did not masturbate to the answers”.)

Survey participants could choose multiple answers, but had to pick at least one.  Here’s what you selected, from the most popular answers downward:

How we need more global warming to make the planet hotter so people take off more of their clothes more often and see each other’s naked bodies glistening in the heat and are more tempted to have gay sex – 250 votes

How there needs to be more global conflict so men in sexy uniforms can bunk more with other men and potentially have gay sex – 212 votes

How global population needs to increased unchecked so each individual human has more potential gay sex partners – 203 votes

How nuclear power needs to increase so there are more nuclear accidents and humans all get infected with radiation, then we will glow in the dark and it will be easier to see each other while hooking up in dingy nightclubs for gay sex – 188 votes

How guns are great because penetrating other people with hard objects is similar to gay sex – 179 votes

How clubbing baby seals needs to continue so gay people can watch horrifyingly graphic documentaries about it while they cuddle up together on the couch comforting each other, which may lead to gay sex later – 173 votes

How fossil fuel use needs to be increased globally so humans continue to have access to the byproducts of petroleum production to make dildos for gay sex – 155 votes

It looks like according to readers global warming is the one thing most needed to make the world a better place for gay people.  Let’s keep burning those fossil fuels so we can have more gay sex for everyone!  Gosh it feels good to be making a difference.  If only two gay people get laid as a result of this post, it was all worth it… *wipes away tear in corner of eye*

Question 18: Do you like J-pop?

Although I was curious as to the answer of this question, I also didn’t want to place any of my readers in the awkward position of actually having to admit that they liked J-pop.  I have too much respect for all of you to do that to any of you, so I think these survey options were a good compromise.

Question 19: Do you like K-dramas?

I honestly didn’t expect K-dramas to get a slightly cooler reception than J-pop, but there you go.  Another survey, another opportunity for Kpopalypse to be learning stuff about his readers!

Question 20: This is a picture of T-ara.

When I started blogging, I made a promise to consistently post gratuitous pro T-ara content until people learned to be nicer to them, as a way to counterbalance the dumb T-ara hatred everywhere on the Internet at the time (late 2012) plus annoy everyone.  Should I continue to do this?  Pick the response that most closely matches how you feel.

Results were fairly even here, with “I like T-ara” being the most popular choice by a slim margin.  Note that the third and fourth responses were exactly tied with 20% of the vote each.  No option for a “no” response was given because I know that you’d all rather prefer I continue to write about T-ara.

Question 21: Which group or person should be featured in upcoming Kpopalypse fanfictions?

Martina and BTS were the clear losers here, whereas Sulli was the most popular choice by a reasonable amount.  Berry Good collected the highest amount of “meh”.

Question 22: Rank the nine different types of Kpopalypse post in order of preference, from most to least preferred.

How you ranked each category in terms of preference, from most popular to least popular, with weightings:

Trufax – 3.66

Reviews – 3.68

Technical – 4.06

Fap – 5.11

Kpopalypse-specific – 5.40

Cao Ni Ma – 5.42

Interviews – 5.55

Fiction – 5.87

Nugu Alert – 6.08

For contrast, here’s what’s actually generated traffic to my site over the past week that the survey was active, sorted by category:

Kpopalypse knows what you sneaky cao ni mas are really up to… and to think you all answered question 14 with “yes”, tsk tsk!  It’s okay though, Kpopalypse forgives you and knows that you’re only human.  Please now put away the lube just for the moment and continue to read the rest of these survey results.

Question 23: Would you be interested in daily/almost daily content if it was shorter, i.e video reviews and small opinion items similar to what other sites do, if it didn’t intrude on the existing longer content?

I’m leaning toward “no” personally (for the reasons shown) but I was curious as to what you readers thought.  It seems that a lot of people would appreciate daily content, but it’s hardly a unanimous feeling – is it worth changing the way I do things?  I’m thinking probably not, however maybe a small move in this direction (say, a weekly recap/review feature similar to what some other AKF authors do, but just for Kpopalypse blog only so as to prevent double-up) might be an idea.  I’m still thinking about whether this is a good idea, so feel free to add your own thoughts about this below in the comments.

Question 24:

Thoughts?

The answer was a free text field, but many responses were similar so I’ll briefly summarise the most popular types of response in pie-chart form:

People comparing Hyangni’s “Be My First Love” to Kyary Pamyu Pamyu were clearly getting swayed by how the video looked rather than how it sounded, Kyary’s strictly conservative J-pop-by-numbers sounds nothing like this!  Mind you, I only asked for “Thoughts?” and didn’t specify whether I wanted you to talk about music or visuals, so it was a shit question really – hint, hint, ask.fm users.  Personally I only like the song’s unusual turn at the two minute mark, the rest of it leaves me a bit cold, but then I’ve heard plenty of shittier songs released that year.  Condolences to all the Germans who missed out on the fun thanks to GEMA, you’d think that country’s government would have learned something in the last century or so about controlling other people’s lives but I guess not.

Question 25: Crystal ball time, test your super future prediction skills! In 2018, how many members will EXO have?

Most of you weren’t very hopeful about EXO staying together, probably a reasonable assumption given the current rate of members leaving – or maybe it’s just wishful thinking from people who don’t like the group.

Question 26: Why is Kpopalypse so rude?

Many readers did their research on Kpopalypse and worked out that Australians are just all a bunch of cunts.

Thanks for completing the Kpopalypse survey!

This picture of cao ni mas experiencing cao ni ma love was included at this point in the survey to thank the 92% of readers who bravely slugged through the survey content.

Question 27: What was the most perplexing thing about this survey?

Hopefully this question was enough to motivate some of you to be more proactive about your life.

Question 28: If you have any other feedback for Kpopalypse that this survey didn’t give you the opportunity to give, please use the following text box to do so. This text box is optional.  DISCLAIMER: feedback may be used for good or evil.

The final question wasn’t really a question, just an open-ended invitation for you to put down whatever you wanted, or even nothing at all.  Some answers to your questions and concerns:

If you find, idk, some way to incorporate Red Velvet’s Dumb Dumb into a post, that’d be appreciated. – actually it’s been incorporated into quite a few Kpopalypse posts already, including this one!

I’m really hungry but I’m a poor NEET and the only thing I have is rocky road ice cream. Should I eat it? – Yes!  Starvation could lead to death!

More interation with kpopfap subreddit. – Unforunately, posting my fap posts there probably doesn’t meet their rules.

I am a youtube whore, i click on all sorts of suggestions and recommendations in search of stuff i have never heard before. I have been consistently delighted by your nugu alerts. I could pretend, um, *remember* you care about feedback and suggest some myself. – anyone with suggestions for Nugu Alert, please use my ask.fm and don’t forget the Nugu Alert rules (less than 20,000 hits for any of the artist’s videos).  If I don’t respond, don’t worry – that’s usually a good sign rather than a bad one, it means I’ve added your video to the list for consideration.

is it just me or was this survey shorter than the previous one? running out of questions? – it’s just you, but if you’re still not sure you can check here.

FUCKING REVIEW SOME JAPANESE ROCK BANDS, I TYPE THIS EVERY SURVEY GODDAMN – and I ignore it every survey for a reason, this isn’t j-rockalypse

You’re perfect. Don’t change. Stay golden, Ponyboy. – cheers!

I hate the rating stuff. I was on my phone and it took forever. – yeah I might completely scrap or at least reduce the number of ranking questions next time  just because of their phone-unfriendliness.  Sorry about that, I didn’t realise how much of a pain in the ass they were going to be.

This is “Netizens”. I don’t comment often, but thanks for the time you put into your articles and posts. That includes your comments on other websites like netizenbuzz. Watching those people get upset by your thoughts and logic is almost as enjoyable as this survey. Almost. – glad you’re enjoying my content!

why do all you people care about is sex and dirty side of kpop. You ruin it for people like me. Sorry. – sex isn’t dirty.  Your attitude to sex has been corrupted by society.  I’m trying to help you see the light.  Don’t hate your natural bodily functions and desires, they are not dirty, they are in fact holy and should be celebrated.

Once again, thanks for all the trufax and extinguishing BS from the kpop fandom, plus fanfiction and other goodies. Also, I realized one reason I like your blog in particular: you might say that X song is bad, but you don’t say others have shit taste or make them feel bad for liking what you don’t like. So actually, you aren’t a rude cunt at all! Hahahaha. Others just need to lighten up and have a sense of humor. – trufax!

This is the only kpop blog (or any blog in fact) which I follow and routinely check for updates everyday. Btw, what does kpopalypse oppar think about his sasaengs?-KpopalypseSasaeng – I love you all!  Just don’t mail me any menstrual products or stalk my dorm thank you.

More SJW content please. It’s hot reading you going all SJW-ish. That’s what I really fap to. I mean it. – I’ll see what I can do.

More T-ara. – Eunjung picture at the bottom of this post just for you.

I like hearing your opinions, not because I always agree with them, but because you actually have your own. Please continue never using the word slay. – thanks!

Fuck you – no u

Keep up the blog, it’s the best kpop related blog around. Special mention for the technical posts, something nobody else does (at least not in this way) and it’s really instructive for non-musician fans to learn and stop saying shit around and learning to recognize and judge properly the ones who do. Thanks! – cheers!

pls notice me oppa – you are officially noticed, feel free to now bask in the validation

Bring back Sulli_fag. – you’ll have to take that issue up with the Anti Kpop-Fangirl admin team, I’m only a writer on that site and I have no say in their author lineup or what gets posted besides what I post there myself.

This was my first Kpopalypse survey and it was a blast. Though we don’t agree on everything (I liked Orange Caramel’s Cookies Cream & Mint and K.Will+Mamamoo’s Peppermint Chocolate) your entertainment does meet required standards so it’s all good. Keep up the good work! – glad you enjoyed!  There will be another survey like this every 6 months!

What are your thoughts on SHINee (both the members and their music)? – both of these topics have been covered in previous posts more than once, time to do some searching!

I wish you a day more pleasant than motorboating Hitomi Tanaka. –  gosh, I’m honoured, this is possibly the nicest thing anyone has said to me in a survey!  Thank you!

Thanks for staying woke, you keep me from getting too caught up in the glitz and mostly artificial happiness of the kpop world. I also appreciated how you included a question about supporting T-ARA and then slipped in the cha euntak thing in. I mean, you weren’t lying… there totally was a question about that later. Also, question 8 was really clever. I had fun answering this, so thanks, and have a nice day! – You’re welcome!

Thanks again to everyone who did the Kpopalypse 2015 End Of Year Caonima Activity Survey!  Kpopalypse will return at a future date with more stuff and things!

Emotionally detaching yourself from a k-pop idol might be something for which you require guidelines.

For this tutorial, you will need:

Let’s begin.

1. Realise that you have a problem.

Perhaps you notice yourself falling in love with a k-pop idol, or perhaps you have been in love with a k-pop idol for a length of time already.  It could be an idol such as Gfrend’s Umji, shown above for illustrative purposes, or it could be another idol, male or female, young or older.  Does your infatuation with an idol represent a problem for you?  Consider the following questions:

• Is comparing other people to your idol preventing you from having normal relationships?
• Is spending money on your idol putting your financial position in jeopardy?
• Is the time taken to track your idol’s activities interfering with work, household activities or sleep?
• Is the topic of your idol the only conversation point of interest to you in your daily life?

If your answer to any one of these questions is yes, then you have a problem, and this tutorial can help.  (If your answer to all of the above questions is yes, then you’re probably too far gone and your brain is likely only good for mincing up and turning into dog food, but feel free to use this tutorial anyway in the unlikely chance of regaining some small semblance of mental functionality.)  Chances are that you have already reached the first step, which is why you are reading this post.  Congratulations, recovery is only a few more simple steps away!

2. Confront your fear.

Once you realise that you have a problem, fear is a natural response.  Fearful thoughts may include (and may not be limited to) any of the following:

• How much will I be emotionally hurt if I give up my idol?
• If the recovery process is lengthy, can I cope or will I turn to binging on jelly snacks?
• What if I fail and relapse, clinging to the idol even harder, will I be doomed?
• Can I cope with the humiliation of admitting I’m a spasticated fangirl bitch?
• Will my k-pop peer group ostracise me now that I’ve realised they’re all retards?

It’s natural to have these thoughts, but there is only one effective way to deal with fear which is to tackle the issue head-on.  Running from your fears means that they control you, but being proactive puts you in the driver’s seat of your own fear.  Once you are in control of your fear, you are empowered to drive your fear off a cliff Grand Theft Auto style – and hopefully hit some fangirls at the bottom for extra style points.

3. Realise that your idol does not actually want you in their personal life.

Sure, idols definitely like and are grateful for their fans, because fans are an idol’s bread and butter.  Without fans, there is no celebrity status and without celebrity status there’s no sponsors rocking up on the company doorstep to present your idols with a big wad of cash to advertise snack food they’re not allowed to eat.  However, your idol does not want to have a personal relationship with you, for the following reasons:

• You’re nuts
• No, really – you’re fucking nuts.  Do you even know how crazy you are?
• You’re not a celebrity so they can’t relate to you
• They don’t have the time
• They don’t want to lose their virginity oops too late
• They don’t want to be perceived as promiscuous by a hypocritical public

Notable exception: if you’re Seungri.  Seungri will probably fuck you.  The rest of them, not so much, so quit dreaming.

4. Set a realistic goal.

It’s important not to overextend.  Going “cold turkey” on your idol might seem ideal but isn’t suited to everyone and could result in a powerful relapse where you spend days on end drooling over fancams and SNS messages with no sleep.  It’s okay to wean yourself off your idol crush slowly but surely, try using these techniques:

• Still look at their pictures but unfollow their social networking accounts
• Listen to the music of other groups occasionally
• Plan a big night out to coincide with your idol’s livestreamed performance or TV appearance
• Make a conscious effort to be less of a drooling, shambling fuckwit

5. Get a hobby (besides k-pop, you dumbass).

It will take time to wean yourself off your idol crush, so you could probably use some non-k-pop-related mental distraction.  Umji demonstrates the ever-practical hobby of collecting twigs in plastic bags above, however not all hobbies are ideal.  There are some hobbies you may wish to avoid as they may just serve to remind you of k-pop and your crush and are therefore not considered hobbies for the purposes of this tutorial.  Examples:

• Dancing
• V-logging
• Forum trolling
• K-pop blogging
• Photography
• Clothing design
• Hair styling
• Prostitution
• Chart manipulation
• Jelly snacks
• Duckface selca-taking

6. Focus on the future

Instead of thinking about your past of loving your idol, try to imagine life without your k-pop idol by focusing on the future.  Exciting future events that you can look forward to include:

• The outcome of the US/Russian proxy war in Syria
• A forthcoming alien invasion staged from Australia
• The impeding death/rebirth of the universe
• The next video by JAV actress Hitomi Tanaka

Just be careful not to confuse “the future” with “Chad Future“, or you may find yourself back where you started.

7. Be patient

Don’t expect success straight away, it takes time to get over heartbreak!  Falling out of love with your idol crush won’t happen overnight, but it will happen!

As it’s coming up to Halloween, here’s a scary k-pop themed horror fanfiction for you all to enjoy!  Have fun reading and don’t worry, Kpopalypse doesn’t do jump scares!

Picture this.

You’ve a young female music fan living with your parents and attending senior year of high school.  You’ve always liked pop music TV shows, like [insert country here] Idol, X Factor and The Voice.  Although it’s obvious to you that to a degree these shows are fake and manufactured, they nevertheless warmed your cynical heart – in such a commercial industry seemingly so image-focused, just the sheer premise that talent mattered meant something to you.  You might not always like the songs, or even the singers, and definitely not the decisions of the judges, but you could certainly listen and appreciate the artistry of a talented vocalist excelling at their craft.

Then something new happened.  You discovered and fell in love with k-pop.

You spent the first month of your interest in k-pop discovering the many outlandishly lavish music videos and getting blown away by the catchy songs.  After a while however you noticed something – while the videos were almost universally great, the live performances were usually a disappointment.  Certainly not in terms of dance or staging, but vocally – k-pop performers really aren’t all that good as live singers, for the most part.  It’s frustrating to watch k-poppers sing over backing tracks that contain their own voices, why don’t they sing over instrumental versions of the tracks instead?  Are they hiding something, perhaps just coasting along and letting the backing track’s vocal do the heavy lifting?  Thus began an obsession with the science of vocal pedagogy, MR Removed videos, and finding/stanning the absolute best singers in k-pop, after all how can you stan anyone who isn’t truly talented?  You’re not interested in becoming a singer yourself, you just wanted to make sure you’re supporting true talent.

A year into your life as a k-pop fan and now you have a large forum presence and your own blog dedicated to k-pop vocals, frequently visited by many people with the same obsessions – you’re fully absorbed into the world of the k-pop vocal analyst.  It’s little wonder that when you see the following advert circulating around all the vocal forums you visit, your heart starts racing:

After spending a while to calm down, you read through some of the forum discussions about this topic.  After all, it pays to research.  There’s so many scams out there, one has to be careful.  Would Ailee really host a k-pop vocal camp?  Is it too good to be true?

Taeyeonfap666 – this sounds great but there’s obviously going to be a ton of us wanting to go to this and only limited places.  It’s probably very expensive, I bet the people who get to go are all rich.

Bomsux – I’d do it just to meet Ailee, she’s the best vocalist in k-pop for sure.  Or nearly the best.  Please don’t argue about it just for once, everyone.

Istantruvocals – what exactly is a “k-pop vocal fan camp”?  We don’t have to sing, do we?  Please don’t make us sing, Ailee, I just want to listen to your amazing voice.

Freeminzy2NE1 – I hate it how k-pop events don’t tell you everyone who will be at the event.  Don’t they want the extra sales from fans?  Seems dodgy.

KRYing4Suju – I went to one of these last year hosted by Kyuhyun from Super Junior, it was pricey but unforgettable and totally worth the money, it really helped me with a lot of questions I had, definitely a life-changing positive experience.  I can afford the cost but I’m not sure if I can afford to take a week out of my life, although if it was Kyuhyun again and not Ailee I probably would.  Sorry, Ailee fans!

Yoloswag420 – I heard Jimin from AOA is going to be the keynote speaker at this.  I can’t wait.

Davichiwonderland – I’m going to this, I don’t care what I have to do!  I don’t care how much it is!  Anyone wanting my spot will have to fight me!

The general consensus among the vocal fan forum community seems to be that the event is legit, but pricey.  It figures – surely everyone would want to go, and seven days of accommodation and food plus meeting k-pop stars, the costs to put on such an event must be through the roof!  You look further on the event’s website, the event organisers even include transport from Incheon Airport into the cost, all you have to do is buy a plane ticket and turn up at the airport, they do everything else!  The economics don’t bear thinking about, but what does bear lots of thinking about is that you’ve got the savings to go to this.  All you need is your parents’ permission.

You wander into the dining room, where your mother and father are talking after dinner.

“Mum, can I go to this?  It’s in Korea, but… I have the money, and it’s school holidays” – you show her a printout of the advert.

Your mother looks the advert up and down.  “This is in Korea?  And you’ll be gone for a week?  No, definitely not!”

You look to your father.  “Dad?”

Your father sighs, and looks at the advert for a long time.  He then looks at your mother and takes her hand.  “You know… I honestly think we should let her go.  It’ll be good for her independence to travel, and it’ll teach her some new things.”  He winks at her.

Your mother is aghast and draws her hand away from his.  “No way!  She’ll be alone in a strange country!  I’m not letting her go, anything could happen!”

An hour of arguing later, and they agree to let you go to the event, under the conditions that you keep in constant touch via social networking every night to let them know that you’re safe.  You couldn’t be happier!

—–

After an uneventful flight, you arrive at late afternoon through the gate at Incheon airport.  After you move through customs you see an older Korean man wearing a suit and holding a sign with your name on it.  You wave, walk over to him and introduce yourself.

“Hi, I’m here for the Ailee vocal camp!”

“Ah. welcome, good to see you!”, he replies, smiling warmly.  “I’ll be your driver.  How was your flight?”

“Good, I guess.  I’m really tired, but I can’t wait to get to the camp!”

“We will be there soon.  Come with me, we’ll collect your bags and then the drive is about one hour.”  The man motions silently for you to walk with him and you follow him to baggage claim.

At the baggage check you scan the conveyor belt for your luggage.  Feeling awkward, you decide to break the silence.

“What’s the Ailee camp like?” you ask.

“It’s interesting.” he replies.

“Interesting how?”

“You will not forget it.  A uniquely positive, life-changing experience!”  The driver smiles at you again, that same warm smile.

You spy your luggage and the driver helps you grab the bags, then ushers you out to a waiting van.  As you enter the van you notice that you and him are not alone, a girl a few years younger than you with long blonde hair sits in the van’s back seat, waiting.

“Hi, I’m Sarah!” says the young girl in a chirpy, rapid-fire voice.  She continues talking excitably with barely a breath as you settle into the vehicle and the driver starts moving.  “You might know me as Davichiwonderland on the forums, wow I’m so happy to be going to this!  Imagine meeting Ailee it’s going to be OH MY GOD SQUEEEEEEEEEEEE I can’t wait to ask her all about her singing and stuff, she’s the best, I really like her, oh except Haeri is maybe a little better because Davichi is my bias you know that’s why I’m Davichiwonderland but oh my gosh I’m just so excited and it’s so great to be here and how are you?  I’m so good I really like posting on the forum a lot and this is like living my dream and I get to meet Ailee and OH MY GOD I wonder who else is there, who do you think will be there besides Ailee?  I think it’s going to be IU I really think IU will be there that would be nice IU’s really nice too but I think Ailee is a bit better her voice has a bit more resonance you know and she has better vibrato because that’s important oh my god I’m so excited I haven’t eaten all day but I’m not even hungry because I’ve been thinking about this I didn’t get much sleep last night but I’m so excited right now and…”

You sigh and look at your phone.  59 minutes  and 13 seconds to go.

—–

59 minutes  and 13 seconds later, the sun has gone down and you’re still on the road.  Sarah is still talking.

“…and you know there was this girl on the forums and she said that Ailee is the best, but I’m not sure about that she’s good really good and I mean really good as in really really good but she’s not at Beyonce’s level who is just AMAZING or Mariah’s level and is just AMAZING too or she was before she stopped taking care of her voice because you know that’s important and so many singers don’t do that, I mean why wouldn’t you look after your talent rather than letting things side, you know I think there’s a lot of drugs and alcohol that singers do and they get the good life and they just start buying all the drugs and all the alcohol and having it all at once and that’s really bad for them so they have health problems and then they get dumped from their contracts because they can’t sing like before I think it’s a real issue I don’t know why people don’t take it more seriously because we’ve lost so many great singers all the time this way like Whitney Houston who had that crack habit from that asshole Bobby Brown who must really be a dirtbag she could have had anyone she wanted why did she pick that loser oh my god he’s such a douche and his music is bad too and he can’t even sing properly he like strains and everything it’s so painful to listeOH MY GOD, DRIVER IS THAT IT?  IS THAT WHERE WE’RE STAYING OVER THERE?  IS THAT IT?  OH MY GOD!” – the van starts noticeably slowing and Sarah points up ahead at an old mansion.

“Yes, this is it” says the driver, smiling.  You’re happy but you begin to wonder if he has more than one facial expression.

Sarah starts spazzing annoyingly.  “OH MY GOD OH MY GOD IT’S SO BEAUTIFUL IT’S LIKE A PALACE WOW I CAN’T WAIT OH MY GOD WOW AILEE IS IN THERE AND EVERYTHING IT’S SO PERFECT THIS IS GONNA BE AMAZING”

The driver brings the vehicle to a stop and turns around in his seat, he looks Sarah dead in the eye, and his smile vanishes.

“Please be aware, that in Korean culture it is important to be silent before your elders.  When you see Ailee or any other staff you must be very quiet and speak only when spoken to, or she will see it as a sign of disrespect.  Disrespectful behaviour may mean that Ailee becomes upset, and you do not want Ailee to get upset.  Do you understand?”

Miraculously, Sarah shuts up.  You wish he had said this an hour ago.  The driver smiles again.  “I am glad that we have an understanding.  Please exit the vehicle.”

All three of you exit the vehicle and enter the building through the main doors, which lead into a small hotel-style reception area decorated with flowers.

“Glad to see the last stragglers have made it” says a lady in a formal suit, behind the reception desk.  She’s reading a newspaper and doesn’t even look up, she looks incredibly bored.

You recognise her instantly as Moonbyul from Mamamoo.  Fortunately, Sarah doesn’t recognise her so you’re spared and earful of spazzing.  Moonbyul points off to a doorway on her right.  “Everybody’s in there waiting”, she says.

You wait until Sarah is safely out of earshot and whisper to her: “Moonbyul?”

“Yes what is it?” she says, looking up from her paper from the first time, giving you a withering stare.

“You’re an idol – why are you a reception person?” you ask quietly.

Moonbyul rolls her eyes.  “That shit doesn’t pay the bills.  Now get going through the door, don’t hold things up any more than you already have.”

You move through the doorway into a large meeting room as Moonbyul resumes reading, muttering something under her breath.  You shut the door behind you.  In the meeting room there are several people sitting in a circle on chairs.  One of them is Ailee, all the others are girls and boys your age or younger.  Ailee looks amazing, like she does in all her videos, just as you’d imagined.  There is one vacant seat left, Ailee motions to it for you to sit down.

“Great!  Now we’re all finally here, we can get started!”  Ailee’s tone is a little irritated, but unlike Moonbyul she’s doing her best to hide it by smiling.  “So, I’m Ailee, as you know, and this is my k-pop vocal camp!  We’re going to learn lots of fun things about k-pop vocals and you’re going to get to meet all sorts of k-pop stars!  Are you excited?”

Everybody in the circle responds with an emphatic “yes”, except Sarah who says “yes oh my god yes oh yes I’m totally excited I just can’t wait oh my god”.  Ailee drops the smile off her face and stares down Sarah blankly until Sarah shuts up.  Ailee then instantly resumes smiling and continues.

“So.  We’ll get to the learning and all the complicated stuff.  For now, it’s late so let’s go around the room and introduce ourselves, then we can have some food and you guys can get some rest!  Starting from you and going around in a circle, tell the group a little about yourselves!”  She looks to the girl on her left.

“My name is Sally, and I’m 14 years old.  I like k-pop and I love good singers!”

“Feel free to be a bit more specific” Ailee prompts.

“Well… I really like YOU, and I like BoA, and…”

“BoA?” Ailee interjects, raising her eyebrows.  “Okay, that’s enough.  Next person, tell us about yourself.”  She motions to a slightly chubby guy who seems a little nervous.

“Hi, I’m David, and… do I have to give my age?”

“You’re telling the story”, Ailee replies.

“Okay, I’m 16… well, 16 and a half if you go by Korean age…”

“Nobody cares about Korean age.  Be relevant” quips Ailee.

“Okay, sorry… um, and I really like Sistar and Hyolyn especially, because…”

Ailee interrupts, cutting David off.  “Tits, right?  You can say it.  Because of her tits.”

David stares at Ailee, dumbfounded.

“Repeat after me, David.  ‘I like Hyolyn because of her tits’.  Go, your turn, say it.”  Ailee stares at David with no discernable emotion.  David spends a few seconds stammering, he doesn’t want to say it in front of her, his face goes quickly red.  After about five seconds Ailee gives up.  “Forget it.  Next!”

Sarah is next.  “Hi I’m Sarah and I’m so happy to be here and this is going to be so wonderful and OH MY GOD AILEE I LOVE YOU YOU’RE THE BEST!  CAN I HAVE YOUR AUTOGRAPH?  CAN I TAKE A SELCA WITH YOU?  YOU’RE SO PRETTY OH MY GOD I LOVE YOUR LONG HAIR AND YOUR LIPS AND YOUR VOICE IS SO AMAZING AND I THINK EVERYTHING ABOUT YOU IS GREAT AND…”

The door that you came through opens.  Moonbyul appears and looks at Sarah with a puzzled expression.  Sarah can’t see Moonbyul because of Sarah’s position in the circle.  Ailee and Moonbyul give each other a little nod.  Moonbyul taps Sarah on the shoulder and Sarah turns around.

“Hey, you’re Davichiwonderland, right?” she asks, smiling for the first time.

“Yes that’s me oh my god you know who I am?” Sarah replies.

“Yes, sure!” says Moonbyul, smiling.  “Hey you know what, I’m going to pull you out of this group and we’ll return later, okay?  You want to meet Haeri, right?”

“OH MY GOD HAERI FROM DAVICHI IS ACTUALLY HERE??!?  OH MY GOD WOW YES YES YES” – Moonbyul puts her hand over Sarah’s mouth, and then puts her finger up to her lips indicating Sarah to be silent.

“Haeri doesn’t like loud noise much, so you have to be very quiet.  Do you know she has a hearing condition?  Loud noises can really hurt her so try not to be loud okay?  Anyway come with me, we’ll go to meet her now, she’s just a few rooms down the hall.” Moonbyul and Sarah disappear off together.  Ailee clears her throat.

“Right, sorry about that interruption.  Okay, next person, tell us about yourself!”  Ailee points to a girl with bobbed hair who looks about your age.

“Hi, I’m Amy and I run the forum about k-pop vocal analysis, I’m 17 years old and I’ve been studying vocal pedagogy since…”

“Oh, you’re one of those people” Ailee interjects.  “I see.  I see” she says slowly, nodding to herself.

“What?” asks Amy.

“Oh, nothing.  Keep going.  Tell us more.”

Amy starts talking.  “So I really got into vocal pedagogy when…”

Ailee puts up the palm of her hand quickly.  “Actually no, stop there.  Next person!”  It’s your turn.

“Actually I like vocal pedagogy too, it’s neat” you say.

“Oh great!” Ailee smiles.  “Saves me the trouble.  Next!”

You breathe a sigh of relief while the next person starts talking about himself, a young skinny guy.

“I’m Mark and I’m 13 years old.  I really like T-ara and…”

Ailee interrupts again.  “Why do you like T-ara?  Your balls don’t look like they’ve dropped, have they really?”

“I just like the…”

“Sure you do.  Do you jerk off?”

“What?”

“You heard me.  Do you jack it?”

“What?”  Mark looks confused, he doesn’t know what to say.

“I bet you do.  I bet you jack off all the time.  Every day, wake up, jack off, go to school, jack off, come home, jack off, jerk it jerk it jerk it all fucking day.  Try not to mess up the sheets too much tonight, someone has to clean those.  Next!”  Ailee motions to the last person in the circle.

“Hi, my name is Leanne and I’m 15, and I really like singers who have a lot of resonance in their voice, like…”

Ailee interrupts her.  “Actually, enough of this.  Let’s eat.  All of you, head through the door on the other side of where you came in, there’s an all you can eat buffet.  Do any of you have any special dietary needs?  I think one of you was a vegan from the ticket info?”

Leanne speaks up.  “I’m a vegan.”

Ailee nods.  “Okay well, I guess you won’t be eating, but everyone else eat up and then follow the signs to the dorms.  I need to rest my voice, I’ll see you all tomorrow!”

Ailee gets up and walks out of the room, smiling and waving at everyone.  The entire room says “Goodbye Ailee!” and move next door to where the food is.

The buffet is amazing!  Rows and rows of all sorts of Asian meat dishes.  Leanne unpacks and eats some kind of roll she brought with her, everyone else tucks into the meat buffet and then gets settled into the dormitory, one room with several bunk beds and no windows.

That night while getting to sleep the conversation naturally turns to Ailee.

“She’s not what I expected” says David.

“What did you expect?” asks Sally.

David sighs.  “I don’t know, she was really blunt.  The way she’d smile and be really blunt at the same time, I don’t get it.”

“She cut me off, I didn’t like that” says Amy.

“Maybe she’s on her period” offers Mark.

“Ewww, you’re gross!’ says Leanne.

Mark shrugs.  “Well, maybe she is though.”

“Maybe you’re a dickhead though” retorts Leanne.

“Has anyone seen Sarah?” you ask.

“I guess she’s still with Haeri.  Weird how she got picked out like that.  Why didn’t we get picked?” says Sally.

“She probably paid extra – seems like the type” David replies.

“We might get picked tomorrow” you reply.

Everyone eventually goes to sleep.  You text your parents that you’re okay and then doze off.  You sleep with some difficulty, thinking about what the next day will bring makes it hard to switch off your brain.

—–

The day starts at 8am with Moonbyul wheeling in a breakfast cart and offering everyone a choice of various cereals or raisin toast.  Everyone orders except Leanne who once again eats something that she brought with her.  You’re still the only one who recognises Moonbyul.

“Hi, good to see you!” you say to Moonbyul.

“Don’t talk to me.  Cereal or toast?” she snaps back abruptly.

“Toast, thank you.”  Moonbyul hands you some raisin toast and says nothing further to you.  She serves the others and then leaves.

At 9am on the dot Ailee walks into the dormitory.

“How are we all?” she says, smiling.

“Good!” everyone responds.

“That’s great!  Today is the first day of your vocal appreciation education!  Is everybody looking forward to it?”

“Yes!” replies the room.

“Fantastic!  I’ve brought in a computer with some songs on it!  Spend the day listening to them, and do some vocal analysis – there’ll be some questions on the songs this evening, plus you’ll get to meet new k-pop stars!”  You notice the laptop in Ailee’s hands, she sets the laptop up on a dressing table by one of the bunk beds.  “I’ll leave this with you all, meet me in the meeting hall at 6pm… and don’t forget to use the outdoor facilities, everything is there for your use!  There’s outdoor gym equipment and basketball hoops if you need a break – remember that there’s no such thing as too much exercise!  Plus the views are great!”

Ailee smiles and leaves the room.  Everyone huddles around the computer, while David accesses it for the songs.  It takes him about 10 minutes to find any songs on the laptop at all, as they’re deep in hidden subdirectories, but David eventually figures out the nuances of the computer’s search function and finds the following four songs only:

The whole room stares at each other.

“She’s kidding, right?  Vocal analysis, on these songs?” asks Amy.

You shrug and look around.  Nobody has any answers.

—–

At 6pm, everyone from the dorms is in the meeting hall sitting down on a row of chairs before a small stage – everyone except Sarah, who nobody has seen or heard from.  Ailee enters the room, to a round of applause.

“Hi everybody!  Glad you could all make it!”  Ailee smiles and waves.  “Before we get into our questions, we’re going to listen to a keynote speech from our good friend Jimin from AOA!  Everybody give Jimin a round of applause!”

Everybody claps politely.  “Why Jimin?” Amy and David ask each other.  Jimin appears from the side of the stage, takes a microphone off Ailee with a quick “thank you”, and clears her throat.  She doesn’t look as good in person as in the videos, but boy does she sound exactly the same!  Jimin then begins a speech in her characteristic vocal tone, one which you’ve never been able to stand.  You grit your teeth and bear it.

“Hi, I’m Jimin, the motherfuckin’ top madam.  It’s good to be here.

How would you feel if you knew that today was your last day on Earth?  What would you do differently?  You would probably re-prioritise your life.  Perhaps you would stay home from work or school, and spend more time with loved ones, friends or family.  Maybe you would travel, or experience something completely new.

What if you knew that something was happening, or about to happen, that had the potential to completely change everything in your life, that there was no going back from, and that you could do nothing to stop?  Would you tell everyone, or keep it a secret?  If there was something that you could do to stop it, would you?

The landscape of both Korean and international k-pop music fans is undergoing a paradigm shift.  Vocal analysis has been on the rise for the last decade, largely thanks to people such as yourselves who are spearheading the cultural movement of k-pop fans in this direction.  As a result, vocal analysis has now reached a critical point.

Cycles of analysis are ever-shortening.  The “cycle of analysis” is the aggregate time between when a note is produced by a singer, and when that same note is analysed by people who run and participate in k-pop vocal threads, forums and so on, people such as yourselves.  Due to the current wide popularity of vocal analysis, combined with the exponential growth in k-pop product and k-pop’s global reach, plus the rush of fans to study each new product that appears, all of which are exponentially increasing, mathematical models now show that we will soon reach a point called “global vocal analysis singularity”, which is when the popularity of vocal analysis is widespread and the aggregate “cycle of analysis” time drops to near zero, or under one second.  At this point it will not be possible for singers to produce a note without billions of analysts dropping all other activities to study the note that was just made.  At this point, everything ends – death by vocal analysis.

Ailee K-pop Vocal Fan Camp is committed to being proactive about reducing the risk of a “singularity event” which could stop all society from functioning.  There is something we can do to avert this fate, and that is why we have brought you here.   Thank you.

Jimin leaves the stage to polite but confused applause.  “I don’t get it.  What was that all about?” you ask.

Amy shrugs.  “I don’t know either, I honestly wasn’t really listening.  I hear that squeaky voice and I just tune out every time.  Why is she even here?”

Ailee re-enters the stage.  “Go and grab some food from the buffet, and then go back to your dorms, everyone.  You questions are waiting for you there!”

Everyone walks to the buffet and picks up a plate of food, except Leanne, who once again is not catered for.

“I’ve had enough of this!  I wrote ‘vegan’ when I applied for the ticket and they said they would cater for me, I want something to eat!  I paid good money for this!”  Leanne storms off in the direction of the kitchen.  You follow and watch what she’s doing, you can’t hear her over the kitchen noise but she’s obviously talking to the chefs about getting them to make her something that complies with her diet.  Leanne comes back two minutes later with some kind of sandwich roll in her hands.  “About time!” she says as she begins eating.

About halfway through eating the roll, Leanne starts making strange gestures with her tongue.

“What’s wrong, is everything okay?” you ask.

“Yeah, fine – I think I swallowed a hair though.  I can feel it stuck to my throat, it’s gross!  There’s not much hygiene in that kitchen!”

Leanne eventually locates and spits out the hair, and you both look at it.

“Ewww, I should report them to the health department” says Leanne.

You examine the hair.  “That hair is blonde – and long.  That’s weird.  Did any of those chefs have long, blonde hair?”

“No.  None of us do either.”

“Oh wait, except…”

“…Sarah.”

You both look at each other not knowing what to think.

After dinner you go back to the dorms, where you immediately notice everyone else is looking a bit odd.  You’re about to ask what’s wrong, but you don’t need to.  Mark shows you the question form.

“This isn’t what I expected”, says Amy.

“This is just hypothetical, right?” asks David.

Nobody knows how to fill out the form.  What do the questions have to do with vocal analysis anyway?  Nobody can figure it out, so everyone leaves it blank.

—–

No-one in the vocal camp group gets much sleep.

At 8am Moonbyul appears, wheeling in a breakfast cart and offering everyone a choice of various cereals or raisin toast.  Everyone orders except Leanne who doesn’t eat, she’s out of self-brought food.  You’re still the only one who recognises Moonbyul.

“Cereal or toast?” Moonbyul asks you.

“Moonbyul, what the hell is going on?  Please help us understand!”

Moonbyul backs away from you.  “Don’t you FUCKING ask me for shit!  And don’t use my name!  Cereal or toast?” she whispers.

You sigh.  “Toast, please.”

Moonbyul is angry, she almost throws you the toast on a plate, serves the rest of the room and then leaves.

At 9am on the dot Ailee walks into the dormitory, carrying a laptop.

“How are we all?” she says, smiling.

“Good!” everyone responds, half-heartedly.

“Did you all complete your questions?” asks Ailee.

Everybody looks at each other in nervous silence.  Ailee picks up the question forms, none of which have been filled out.

“Oh wow, none of you did any of these.  How can we continue to do the k-pop vocal camp if you guys won’t participate?”

“We didn’t know what to write”, says Amy.

Ailee sighs and approaches Amy, furious.  “Amy, are you not a vocalpedagogist or whatever the FUCK it is you people call yourself?”

Amy nods.  “But these questions are not about vocal…”

“What does it say on the top of the form?  READ IT!”

“It says vocal analysis questions, but…”

“So are you telling me that you’re willing to get up on your high horse and be a fucking expert in vocals on the Internet, but you can’t answer three SIMPLE FUCKING QUESTIONS about your life?  Is that what you’re telling me?”

Amy is silent.

“Fine, say nothing.  Here’s the laptop, there’s two more songs on it.  Get to work.  More questions tonight, plus I expect the other forms filled out completely tomorrow, by everyone!”  Ailee dumps the laptop on the dresser and storms out of the room.

After Ailee leaves, Amy says “fuck this.  Ailee is a psycho bitch!  I’m out of here right now!  Goodbye everyone!”  Amy packs her bags and rushes out the door.  Everyone else opts to fill in the form instead with just anything, hoping to pacify Ailee with results.

The next laptop is opened and David searches for the songs.  Now that he knows what he’s doing, they’re easy to find and he gets the results in under a minute.  Everyone remaining gathers around to watch.

Once again, not exactly ripe vocal analysis material, although you could probably write a small thesis on how Bom strains her notes and doesn’t connect them properly if you had to.  The other camp members listen to the songs over and over to try to figure out what Ailee might want, but you’ve given up.  You go out to the exercise yard and shoot hoops for a while, and spend some time texting your parents.  You don’t want them to worry and pull you out of the camp, you’re also trying not to worry yourself about Ailee’s tantrum so you tell them everything’s going fine.

—–

That night, there’s nothing happening at the meeting hall, so the vocal group all go to the buffet.  It’s very quiet, there are no chefs on duty this time, or anyone else around, but the buffet is full –  all the food has been prepared earlier and left waiting for you.  Everybody except Leanne grabs a plate, Leanne instead goes straight into the kitchen.

New question forms have been left on the dining table this time, you pick one up and take a look.

“Um… guys… come and take a look at this…” you say.

Your words are interrupted by Leanne screaming.  Leanne comes rushing out of the kitchen.  “It’s Amy!  She got Amy!  And Sarah!”

You look in the kitchen, Amy and Sarah’s severed heads are both sitting on the kitchen benchtop, with a large butcher’s knife sticking out of Amy’s forehead.  Some of the flesh from Sarah’s skull has been cut away into thin strips, that look a lot like the thin strips in the buffet pork tray, which all of you except Leanne have been eating daily.  It’s impossible to look at the kitchen scene or the buffet further.  Everyone except Leanne starts feeling instantly violently ill and vomiting, Leanne instead starts running in circles and panicking.  “Let’s get out of here!” she screams over and over.

You try to compose yourself while wiping away the chunks of vomit from your mouth.  “That’s what Amy tried, look how she ended up.”

“We can’t run, we have to defend ourselves!” exclaims Mark, between regurgitations.

Everybody rushes into the kitchen and raids the kitchen drawers to grab knives.  Nobody wants to touch the big butcher’s knife embedded in Amy’s skull, but the kitchen is well-stocked with knives so soon everyone has a weapon.

“There’s only one of her, there’s five of us.” says Sally.  “I think we can take her on.”

All of a sudden a loud banging noise is heard, and you are blinded and knocked back onto the floor of the kitchen.  Something has landed on your face.  You wipe your eyes, to find Sally is now with you on the ground, except that she has only half her head left.  You realise that what you just got knocked back by was possibly her exploding brains.

“Four”, says Ailee, holding a shotgun and pointing it at all of you.  “Don’t try any fancy shit.  Everyone drop the knives and let’s go, back up to the dorms.”

Ailee marches you all into the dorms, closes the door and locks you all inside.

—–

No-one in the vocal camp group gets any sleep at all, the night is spent planning how to escape.  The plan is to rush Moonbyul when she appears at 8am and make a run for it.

At 8am Moonbyul appears like clockwork, wheeling in a breakfast cart, at which point everyone makes a rush for the door.  Prepared, Moonbyul has a pistol already drawn and shoots Mark in the stomach as he’s the first person to nearly reach her.   Mark doubles up on the floor, bleeding and in pain.  You’re still the only one who recognises Moonbyul.

“Cereal or toast?” Moonbyul asks Mark.  “Don’t make me wait!”  Mark is unable to say anything and just groans in pain, so after a few seconds Moonbyul gets bored of waiting and shoots him a second time in the chest, killing him instantly.

“Cereal or toast?” Moonbyul then asks you.

“Toast please”, you reply as quickly as possible.

Moonbyul hands you a plate of raisin toast, with double the slices this time.  She serves the others, leaves and locks the door behind her.

David starts crying.  “Well that idea was shit!  What are we going to do now?”

Leanne says “Ailee arrives in an hour.  We’re probably doomed.”

However Ailee doesn’t turn up at the usual time.  The hours pass uneventfully.

—–

At 6pm Ailee unlocks the dormitory door and enters.  She’s brandishing a laptop, plus the same shotgun that she used to remove Sally’s cranium.

“Final exam.”  Ailee places the laptop on the dresser.

“…Ailee?” Leanne says.

“Yes, what is it?” Ailee replies.  You wince – you can’t see this ending well.

“Why are you doing this?”

“Do you know how much I fucking hate you vocal fans?  You’re so pathetic.  I can’t sing a note without it appearing on ten different sites with people talking about how I could have sung it better.  People with NO talent, MINIMAL AT BEST singing ability, NO understanding of the technical aspect, and ZERO creativity to do anything else besides piss about on the Internet stroking themselves off acting like they’re FUCKING EXPERTS about shit that they don’t even know the first thing about and picking apart everything.  You people are the reason why I have to overdub my voice fucking ten times on everything.  I fucking hate you all so much, you disgust me.  I wish I could kill each and every one of you, but there’s too many of you pieces of shit.”

“But… I just like voices that are resonant, what’s wrong with that?”

Ailee quickly shoots Leanne in the stomach.  “DID YOU HEAR THAT?  My shotgun barrel is 26 INCHES LONG, that’s a RESONATING FREQUENCY WAVELENGTH of 454.2 Hz! YOU FUCKING DUMB BITCH!  RESONATING FREQUENCIES ARE IN EVERYTHING!”   Leanne is already dead but Ailee keeps screaming at her.  “YOU FUCKING STUPID CUNT VOCAL FAGGOTS OBSESSING ABOUT POINTLESS SHIT!”  Ailee shoots Leanne a second time for good measure.  “LISTEN AGAIN!  THAT’S BETWEEN A4 and A#4, I SUPPOSE YOU GIVE A FUCK ABOUT THAT TOO YOU FUCKING WASTE OF SPACE!”  Ailee then storms out of the room, slamming it and locking it behind her.  You and David, now the only two left alive, both breathe a small sigh of relief that she didn’t go gun-crazy and kill you both as well.

David opens up the laptop and searches for songs.  Only one this time.

The intro seems bitterly ironic.

—–

At 8am Moonbyul appears, wheeling in a breakfast cart and brandishing a pistol.  However neither you nor David intend to try anything after yesterday.

“Cereal or toast?” Moonbyul asks.

You and David both choose toast and are given double portions each.  Moonbyul then lumps the bodies of Leanne and Mark onto the breakfast cart and wheels them away.  She also leaves behind a couple new question forms.

Both you and David fill out “yes” for all three questions without hesitation.

—–

Ailee arrives at 6pm, unlocking the door and opening it slowly.  She’s still carrying the same shotgun.

“Forms”, she says.  You hand the forms that you and David have filled out over to her.  Ailee looks them over.

Ailee sits down on the edge of the bed.  “Okay, quiz time.  I need to know that I can trust you both to do this correctly.  Anybody can fill out a form, it’s another thing to actually have a brain.   Let’s start with you”.  She points the shotgun toward David.  “I just released two new songs – what are they?”

“‘Mind Your Own Business’ and ‘Insane’“, David replies.

“Correct!  Now – which song do you like more, and why?”

David thinks for a moment.  “Well, I thought ‘Insane’ had the better vocal performance in terms of overall feel, but then I really liked the high notes in ‘Mind Your Own…”

Ailee shoots David in the face killing him instantly and spraying blood and brains all over the rear wall of the dormitory.  “Gosh, I’m so terribly sorry, that’s the WRONG FUCKING ANSWER”, she yells as David’s corpse falls to the floor, leaking blood.  Ailee then turns the shotgun towards you.  “I trust you have a more satisfactory answer?” she asks.

You think for a moment, but you’re really not sure.  “‘Insane’ was okay but I liked ‘Mind Your Own Business’ more, but I’m not sure why.  It was just a better song, I guess?”

Ailee releases her grip on the shotgun.  She smiles at you.  “Congratulations.  You are cured.”

—–

It’s the next morning and you’re on the plane back home.  You never told your parents about any of the events at the K-pop vocal camp, even though you could have texted them at any time – if they found out, they’d never let you have any freedom ever again!  Also, what could they do from another country away?  Nothing, obviously – you were trapped.  It was traumatising seeing so many people die in front of you, and not knowing from one moment to the next if you were going to live or die yourself… but there’s one thing you can’t deny, you learned a lot… and perhaps also unlearned some things.  It’s probably better that way.

You’re on your phone making a post about how you’re putting your k-pop vocal blogging on indefinite hiatus, when the passenger next to you taps you on the shoulder, to alert you to the arrival of the airplane food trolley.

“Cereal or toast?” asks the air hostess.

It’s a clear day on the beach, with just you and Qri, there’s not too many people around, the sun is shining brightly and Qri looks great in her correctly-proportioned striped top.  However, behind her sunglasses you can sense that all is not right with Qri.  You’ve been talking about the world of Korean entertainment all afternoon and as you speak, her attention wanders.  Something seems to be increasingly on her mind, and you get the feeling that Qri seems to want to tell you something profound to shake your preconceptions… but what could it be?

You have no idea if what Qri is telling you is true or not.  As long as she keeps wearing clothes like that, you figure that she can continue to believe whatever she wants to believe.

K-pop albums.  I get so many fucking questions about k-pop and albums it’s ridiculous, and I couldn’t be fucked answering any of them really, but it seems that you all really want to know everything about albums so here I go with a post about albums where I try to compile all of your questions about albums into one big thing.  I hope you all people who want to know about albums appreciate this post and I never have to answer any more questions about this shit again.

Yes, I’m aware that this post will probably backfire and I’ll now get more questions about this shit than ever before, plus a side-helping of a bunch of smartass cunts picking apart this post and telling me that I’m wrong about this or that, pointing out meaningless exceptions, snobbily telling me I’m condescending because I dare to make educational posts about things they already know, etc.  Oh well, read on and hopefully the people who strangely like my posts will be more entertained about this bullshit than I was when I wrote it and the rest of you haters will be able to restrain your natural urge to be a snobby elitist cuntosaurus.

So, what technically constitutes an album?

A collection of songs.  The very first albums were sheet music sold in a book or folder format, then when audio recording formats finally became cheap enough to able to be purchased by ordinary folk (around 1900), albums became collections of shellac discs that were usually 10″ wide (but not always) and designed to be played at 78 revolutions per minute (RPM).  78 RPM shellac was a really crap format though because they only had a playing time of a few minutes per side so you needed multiple discs to constitute an album, plus the weight of the discs was heavy and the audio quality mostly wasn’t great.  When the lighter 12″ 33 RPM vinyl format was adopted by the industry after World War II that could store nearly half an hour of music per side with generally better audio fidelity, people transitioned to this “long-playing” format, hence the term “LP” being used interchangeably with “album” from the 1940s until the late 1980s when compact discs (CDs) finally overtook vinyl as the most popular physical album format.  Albums have been issued in several formats since (including cassettes, Minidisc, laser disc and several others) but the most common physical format currently is still the CD.

10″ 78 RPM shellac records, annoyingly heavy, shit-sounding and impractical, only hipsters and your great grandparents own these

How is an album different to a mini-album, a single, or an EP? 

A mini-album is just an album with a shorter running length.  There’s no completely set-in-stone global consensus on where that line is drawn, although some countries have rules for determining if a collection of recordings is long enough to qualify as an album for chart purposes and also if mini-albums qualify or not.  Korean mini-albums average at about 6 tracks whereas a full album is usually about 12 tracks.

A physical “single” paradoxically has two tracks, the A-side (the song you bought the single for, also called the “feature track”) and the B-side, another song.  The extra song is there because vinyl has two sides and it was not much extra expense to cut something on the other side of the vinyl and give the consumer an extra track.  Singles later transitioned to CDs and are now almost exclusively digital in most markets, however this practice of giving out a free “B-side” track is still common even now as a way to showcase the artist’s less commercial material when you also buy their hit.  CD singles often have more than one B-side track.

An EP is an “Extended Play” single. The most common format for an EP is four tracks, or two tracks per side of vinyl.  Extended Play format was used for artists who released very long singles mainly in the 60s and 70s, that wouldn’t fit over the running length of one side of 7″ vinyl.  It was never the dominant format.

There’s also 12″ vinyl singles which usually have extended mixes, these are still a popular format for club DJs, plus there’s quite a few other terms like “maxi-single” etc which are mainly just record companies making things up as they go along.

What are the main differences between k-pop albums and western albums?

K-pop albums have:

• Much more lavish packaging (usually)
• Big photobooklets with lots of pages (usually)
• As many pervy and slightly creepy photos of your biases that will fit into the space (usually)
• Horrible liner notes where the performers thank God over and over insipidly (usually)
• Photocards and souvenir items (sometimes)

Oh and they come with a CD mostly, but nobody uses that bit, so just throw it away or use it as a fancy reflective drink coaster.

The closest equivalent to Korean albums in terms of physical presentation is the western “box set”, except in the west the “box set” isn’t the regular edition of the album but a special version.

Tiffany’s god-bothering thank-you notes aren’t unusually extreme by k-pop album standards – this emphatic bubblegum-pink religious tract is from the “Oh!” album

Why are Korean albums so insanely packaged?

K-pop companies have worked out over the last few years that it’s only die-hard fans who buy physical albums these days, so they’re meant to be something special for the fans.  Insane packaging of k-pop albums really kicked into high gear as a standard practice at the start of the Golden Age (2008-2011), before this CDs were usually in standard jewel cases.  Companies now realise that most fans actually already have electronic copies of the music and are buying the physical product chiefly for the photobook, for the same reason that many people who buy vinyl albums these days never play the vinyl and often don’t even own a record player – people like to fetishise the package, and fans like to feel like they’re supporting the artist by buying something extra.

I have a Korean single and it’s called a “single album” but has only two tracks on it, huh?

Korean singles tend to use the word “album” to refer to the book that comes with the CD rather than the CD itself which harks back to the original pre-shellac 19th century definition of an album as a collection of pages, in the same sense as a stamp collector’s album.  Given the substantial amount of content in a k-pop single’s booklet vs what you average western CD booklet has, this kind of makes sense.

After School Blue’s “Wonder Boy” is a “single album” with only two tracks on the CD, but the photobook is just as big and filled with pages of pervy/weird/creepy photos as any full k-pop album.

What’s a repackaged album?

Sometimes after an album is released, a k-pop agency will decide to release a follow-up song to promote the album again.  The catch is that the follow-up song isn’t actually on the album, so they release the same album again a second time, with a different booklet, a different name and with the extra song included.  The plan is to make hardcore fans buy the same album twice.  SM, Woollim and MBK are all notorious for doing this, but they’re not the only ones!

The “repackaging the same stuff with different extra content to grab a second sale” practice actually started in the American market, with CD singles – a company would release a feature track with a couple B-side tracks, then release another single with the same name and the same A-side but slightly different artwork (usually just a different colour) and different B-side tracks.  Diehard fans would want ALL the different B-side tracks so they would buy the single twice, and because both singles had the same name it counted in the music charts as purchases against the one item, increasing theoretical likelihood of good chart positioning.

In k-pop, because the photobook is a large reason why people buy physical albums, a repackaged album isn’t as much of a rip-off as it might seem, as usually (but not always!) the photobook content completely changes in the repackage.

What are photocards?

K-pop albums for groups often come packaged with a special photocard of a random group member (two at most).  Not all agencies do this for every album, but many do.  Sometimes the photocards are small laminated things with rounded edges, like miniature playing card size, sometimes they are bigger.  The idea is that die-hard fans will want all the photocards, or at least more of them than one purchase will give them, so they will buy the album multiple times.  Alternatively, they might want to trade their album photocards with friends, so a conversation like this may transpire:

You: “Have you bought the new Lovelyz album yet?”

Friend: “No, should I?”

You: “Yes!  I want a Seo Jisoo photocard but I didn’t get one in mine… but you might get one, and then I can trade you for yours!  She’s the best ever cum in my life!”

Friend: “But isn’t she a puppy-kicking rapist?”

You: “No, she’s a symbol of freedom from the oppression of rumour-mongers and netizens who’ll believe any old shit they read on a gossip site, laying bare the stupidity of the electronic hive-mind and serving as a shining beacon leading the way for society to ascend into a bright future.”

Friend: “Okay, I’ll buy it just to shut you up and also so I don’t ever have to hear that ‘best ever cum in my life’ joke again.”

The net result is the same – somebody buys the album a second time.

Just to confuse the issue, some k-pop albums have the actual booklet divided up into separate cards rather than bound pages.

The best ever photocard in your life.

What’s a “limited edition” album?

“Limited edition” is ultimately sketchy press release jargon that means nothing, because while it may seem legit, all that “limited edition” in practice means is “limited to however many we can sell”.  For instance, T-ara’s “Paris & Swiss” photobook and CD set had an initial run of 7000 copies, a “limited edtion” – however initial orders for the package worldwide exceeded 7000, so the company just said “fuck it” and printed more of them.  They could sell more, so they did, and why wouldn’t they?

How many k-pop albums do you own?

The amount of k-pop albums I own is usually holding steady at about 100 at any given time.  I buy a lot but I also give away a lot of them for radio competitions.

My k-pop bookcase at home. There’s another shelf that didn’t fit on this picture, and a few others that are so big that they don’t fit in the bookcase at all.  Have fun squinting heavily and spotting your faves!

Are k-pop albums worth buying?

It depends!  They’re worth it for me because they’re great items for prizes.  As for whether it’s worth it for you, be aware that the most sensible outlook is to buy it for the photobook.

What about the music on k-pop albums?

What about it?

Well, is it any good?

Generally the feature tracks are always the best tracks and you’re wasting your fucking time buying the entire album for the actual music because the rest of it is all bullshit.  There are some notable exceptions to this, but usually this is the case.

Are there any other reasons why I should be wary of buying k-pop albums specifically for the music?

Yes, those of you foolishly planning on this would do well to be aware of the following sneaky cao ni ma record company tactics:

• Padding albums with instrumental mixes – sure, aspiring singers or players might want an instrumental mix to practice over, but most people don’t.
• Remixes that aren’t – watch out for the “remix” which isn’t any different to the original apart from a slightly different intro or middle eight bars.  MBK love doing this one.
• Foreign language versions – do you really need a song in two different languages you can’t understand instead of just one when the songs are otherwise identical?
• Autographed albums – while it’s nice to get the scribble of your bias on your album, if he or she signed a thousand albums like this, the value of yours hasn’t actually increased that much but the value to the label for them to do this is huge.  Say an album sells for $5 more with a signature and your bias spent an hour doing 1000 signatures, that means for one hour’s pen-work he or she just made the label $5000.

Copies of T-ara’s AND&END album during 1000-album signing before being shipped to retailers.

Tracklist for Stellar’s “Marionette” mini album. First track is a really short intro. Track 6 is an instrumental of track 2, track 7 is a not-very-different remix of track 5. At first glance it looks like you’re getting seven songs here but you’re actually getting only four.

Why do k-pop albums mostly suck so much?

The problem isn’t with k-pop albums, it’s with pop albums in general.  Most pop albums around the world suck just as much.  To understand why, we have to look at the methodology that creates a pop album.

In the early days of contemporary pop album making, the album constituted the hit group’s A-side, their B-side, and just enough extra “filler” material to get the album over the line so it technically constituted an album for contractual and chart purposes.  These extra “filler” songs would usually be ballads, for the simple reason that ballads have a slower tempo, which means that you can stretch the same amount of song material over a greater length, increasing the chance that you’ll need less of these songs before the total running length of the entire album meets contractual requirements to be called an album.  If you go to any albums that you own you’ll notice that this is true and that the slow songs usually have a greater running length.

Another common variation is the “rejected singles” album, which consists of the A-side, B-side, and the other songs are all tracks that were submitted by songwriters and producers for feature track material but which didn’t make the cut.  It’s easy to spot an album like this, every track is by a different producer!  When a pop album is being made these days it’s quite common for the executive producers to spread the word that they’re hunting for feature-track material through song solicitation services.  The best one gets used, the “almost but not quite” ones get album filler status.

It wasn’t really until the 1960s when companies started to think of an album as a cohesive whole with different tracks that complement each other or at the very least which are meant to sound as good as the feature track in their own right.  However this isn’t always the objective that’s wanted, it’s usually “corporate wisdom” which dictates whether pop albums go down this path of not.

It’s worth telling the story of singer K to understand how market pressures may not be always conducive to creating a decent pop album.  Singer K was a newly debuted female singer who had a massive, MASSIVE hit about two decades ago with a hugely iconic first single that was everywhere, and I mean everywhere, globally, a #1 hit in several countries, if you’re between the age of 25 and 55 and have listened to radio at least once in your life I guarantee you that you’ve heard of this song even if you don’t remember who sung it.  We’ll call this iconic global pop hit song “Smoking Cock“.  Once “Smoking Cock” was released, the singer and her mastermind producer J got a big pat on the back by the record label execs who said “rightio, good job team, now get to work on making an album that is just as good”, so for the next few months singer K and her shit-hot producer J who co-wrote “Smoking Cock” with her slaved away making a fantastic album.  The result was great – each track was a little bit different.  Nothing sounded quite like “Smoking Cock” (which while a good song was certainly very one-dimensional), instead each track on the album fit together nicely as a whole and showcased a different unique side of singer K, essentially setting her up for a fate as a critical darling with a long-term career (think Tori Amos, Bjork, etc).  Producer J was immensely proud of what he had achieved with singer K and presented the final product to the label:

Label: “Nope, I’m sorry, we don’t want it.”

J: “What?”

Label: “There’s no Smoking Cock part 2 here.  What are we going to release as a follow-up single?  It’s too intellectual and fancy, please start again and give us some hits.”

J: “But we put our heart and soul into this and it’s great!  This album will set her up for the long term!”

Label: “We need another Smoking Cock.  This album doesn’t have it, don’t waste our time and money.  We gave you clear instructions!  This is a business!”

J: “Nope, I’m not doing it.”

Label: “Then we’ll hire someone else if you don’t want to do what you’re told.”

J: “Fine, fine… I’ll get you your fucking hit…”

Producer J reluctantly scraps the album and starts again from scratch at the insistence of the label, this time working with the clear instruction “we need another Smoking Cock or GTFO”.  Singer K is also unhappy as she also loved the initial album, but she cooperates in the hope that it will all work out in the end and maybe if she maintains her high profile they’ll get the leverage to do what they want at some point down the track.  With both the singer and producer having lost their creative focus, the resulting album is a weak patchy mess, a collection of songs that all sound more or less the same, similar but slightly inferior versions of “Smoking Cock”.  The album is released and does poorly critically, landing singer K with an undeserved reputation as a one-hit wonder who got lucky with “Smoking Cock” and doesn’t know how to do anything else, which of course only pours salt on singer K’s and producer J’s wounds as they know this isn’t true in reality.  The album does well commercially, but disappoints the music-buying public who were getting a little worn out from overexposure to “Smoking Cock” and was hoping for something a little different from her album.  As quickly as her success came, the public stopped listening.

Producer J goes back to the label and says “I told you so!”  The label says “okay, well the first album was a hit so for the second album you can do what you want”… but by this time it was too late.  K and J are now given free reign, and the second album was the departure that they always wanted to make, but by this time singer K had gone dead in the marketplace, nobody was listening and the album completely flopped.  The label then cut their losses and removed singer K from the roster.  The label simply had no thought about grooming singer K as a long-term artist in the first place, they just got addicted to those quick “Smoking Cock” bucks.

But there are exceptions in k-pop, yes?

Yes.  The better albums in k-pop usually happen when one artist gets to work with one producer, or a small group of producers consistently AND those producers show the ability to write decent songs or have a consistent vision driving all the songs.  Another exception is when the album has a really good concept that unifies all the songs.  The worst albums are usually a different producer on each track, or just a ton of shit ballads clogging up the second half of the album for reasons previously mentioned.

Name some good albums, please.

Oh god.  If I must.  I do this with extreme hesitation because I don’t want people to use this post as a lightning rod on forums to champion their biases and I also think people give my opinions on music way too much unwarranted importance.  It’s only one person’s opinion, calm the fuck down.  However if I don’t answer this, cunts will keep on asking me until I do so let’s just get it out of the way.  Just a few examples of k-pop’s rare decent albums (pictures not to scale):

T-ara – Absolute First Album – very good album, most tracks are great and the same producers worked with most of them.  “Breaking Heart” repackage also exists with two extra songs but inferior packaging.

IU – Modern Times – retro 1930s/40s concept unifies the collection.  I think there are two different repackages for this album that you can get, but the extra tracks suck.  Not sure how the actual package differs.

Wonder Girls – Reboot – retro 80s concept unifies the collection, the best tracks are great, oddly the feature track is actually one of the worst tracks on it.

f(x) – Pink Tape and Red Light – f(x) get a bit more scope for unusual content than other groups on SM due to their different marketing flavour, therefore less generic ballads and more unique pop songs that can stand on their own.  Fans will notice how when f(x) perform on shows they often do non-feature tracks.

2NE1 – To Anyone – same producers for most of it once again, plus they were actually on-form back then and could write things that didn’t go SWAGSWAGYOLOYOLO.

That will do, it’s enough.  You can discover your own good and bad k-pop albums (mostly bad).  And let’s not forget the one mini-album review that I did and will hopefully never do another of.

What about if I’m a rational person who is buying the k-pop album only for the pretty packaging?

It’s worth nothing that different labels tend to package albums slightly differently.  Here’s what I’ve noticed from the copious amounts of physical product buying that I do:

SM – always top quality packaging in terms of appearance but frequently impractical as fuck.  Good luck working out how to get the CD out without damaging everything around it.  You will always get a photocard.

Girls’ Generation – “The Boys” album.

YG – weird boxy packaging and other inconvenient gimmicky shapes that make filing a pain but at least you can always find the CD quickly.  YG love metallic and weird looks.  In a earthquake that destroys your bedroom your k-pop CDs will probably emerge from the rubble unscathed.

2NE1 – “second mini album”.

JYP – not as insane as YG or as annoying as SM, size/scale of the packaging seemingly directly related to how much money the group is making!

miss A – “Touch” mini album.

MBK – consistently amazing and generously chunky photobooks for T-ara, smaller packaging for everyone else.  They know which side their bread is buttered on.  Expect hilarious Engrish usage.  You will not get a photocard unless it’s a Japanese edition.

Lots of T-ara albums.  Note the size of the bookcase needed to display them!

Woollim – neat-looking but a pain in the ass to actually do anything with other than look at, similar to SM.

Lovelyz – “Girls Invasion” album.

CUBE – random as fuck, no discernable pattern to anything, complete lottery pick as to what you get.  If you’re really lucky there might be a CD in there, have fun getting it out once you find it.

4Minute – “Volume Up” and “4Minute World” mini albums.

Starship – big pages, so you can fap or cut it out and pin it up to your locker.  Thoughtful.

Inside Sistar’s “Touch N Move” album.

Pledis – singles are in crap jewel cases, albums are in whatever their visual designer thought up after he rolled out of the wrong side of the bed that morning.

Orange Caramel “Lipstick” album and photocard.

Smaller labels will sometimes go for DVD-size cardboard cases and the really stingy ones will use an actual plastic DVD case or a CD jewel case, but you’d be surprised how many smaller labels actually have quality packaging that’s just as good as the more well-known labels.  Japanese editions are almost always in standard (western) sized jewel or cardboard cases, probably because Japan still has a heavier emphasis on physical product that actually sells in reasonable quantities and Japanese retailers don’t want to deal with finnicky-shaped boxes.

Is k-pop album packaging expensive or tricky to make?

Depends on what’s used.  It’s a complex area that I could devote a whole separate post to (but won’t).  Some basic rules:

• Colour printing is up to three times as expensive as black and white printing.  Black and white is rarely a purely aesthetic choice, it’s usually used to cut costs.  Note that pure black and white is not the same as grayscale (shades of grey), there’s an expense difference there also.
• Standard CD and DVD sized cardboard and jewel cases are cheap because they are a standard format that most people use, economies of scale at factories making such items means less costs.
• Economies of scale also mean that companies which move many physical units such as SM pay little per unit for their custom EXO packages for example.
• Graphic design and printing of packages is time-consuming and the number one cause of delayed album releases worldwide.

Three examples of innovative English usage from the booklet of Gangkiz’ “Mama” mini album.

Why do k-pop albums have so much English use in them?

For the same reason that English crops up in the songs themselves, English is trendy in Korea.  The more an album is being pitched to young trend-followers, the more English use you can expect in both songs and album art (so for instance, trot and ballad albums aimed at older audiences within Korea often have relatively little English compared to the latest boy-band release).  Also some English helps the albums to sell internationally and it’s easier for filing and sorting when dealing with multi-regional shippers who are used to dealing with English-labelled product.

The rear covers of Big Bang’s “Still Alive” album, and trot performer Tae Jin-Ah’s “I Love You Darling/LA Song” album. Note the differing quantities of English usage.

Where can I buy kpop albums?

Kpopalypse recommends YesAsia who are reasonably cheap (comparable to western album cost) and so far have never fucked up any of my shipments, they also give free shipping to my country if I buy over a certain amount.  I’ve heard KTown4U (previously known as DVD Heaven) is also good with reasonable costs although I’ve never tried to buy from there.  I don’t recommend Amazon, I find their shipping times to be crazy and often things arrive damaged, but people from the Americas might have a better experience.  I also recommend staying away from EBay and secondhand sellers.  Do you really want a package someone else has already fapped to?

–

That’s it for this post!  Hopefully you’ve enjoyed this excursion into k-pop albums and never feel the need to ask another question about them again ever!  Yay!

Some of you Americans out there have stopped shooting each other long enough to notice that certain k-pop videos are blocked on YouTube.  So, what’s going on?  Why is this happening?  Is there justice in this world?  How will you survive?

I’ve never made a post especially catering to my American readers, but they represent a sizeable minority of Kpopalypse readers so here’s a little post just for them!  Yay!

Here’s a video of Lovelyz’ “Ah-Choo”.

What a great song.  Pity you can’t watch it if you’re American, as Woollim channel is blocked at the moment in the USA (although it may be fixed by the time you read this, see below), and they’re not the only ones.  So why is this happening?

Until recently, all YouTube content was free to watch, but anyone who was uploading content and agreed to have paid advertising randomly inserted before or during their videos could earn a small sum of that advertising revenue from YouTube themselves.  The amount of money possible to earn isn’t that large – Psy earned about US$2m from two billion YouTube views, so assuming that’s the normal kind of rate, 1 million views would get you $1000, but even that’s an optimistic figure to base other people’s earnings around because an ad attached to a Psy video is probably “worth more” than an ad attached to Spica or Mamamoo or your friend’s shitty self-consciously forced, overacted v-logging.  However a little bit of money is better than no money, so most content providers who get decent web traffic signed on for this enterprise.

Despite all this advertising everywhere, YouTube actually doesn’t make any net profit and never has, so some bright sparks at YouTube thought it would be a good idea to launch a new subscription-based model called YouTube Red to help change this.  For $9.95 per month, YouTube Red subscribers get the following:

• No advertising (because they hope like hell that you haven’t heard of AdBlock Plus)
• The ability to watch YouTube in the background on a mobile device (because watching a video while not watching a video is important)
• Exclusive video content (which at the time of writing hasn’t yet been created but it involves shit v-loggers overacting again)
• New Hitomi Tanaka webcams each week EDIT: sorry I was thinking of RedTube.

Of course you’re an intelligent, streetwise k-pop fan and so you’re not going to want to pay for any of this fucking crap, you just want to watch Lovelyz and Infinite videos, but you can’t.  However YouTube says that their video experience shouldn’t change for people who watch for free.  So… why has it changed?  Here’s where it gets a little complicated and hopefully I can explain this in a way that isn’t as confusing as Kei’s headwear choices:

The problem is that content creators who have already signed up to the existing ad-carrying deal mentioned above now have to resign to a new deal so that anyone who is subscribed to YouTube Red can have ad-free status and is legally exempt from having to carry their advertising that it was previously agreed all users (without AdBlock Plus ahem) would see.  Most content creators have signed this agreement happily, but not all of them.

If a content creator doesn’t agree to the new terms, this means that YouTube can’t legally make their video available to ad-free YouTube Red subscribers, which means that anyone on the new subscription deal paying $9.95 actually gets less content than free users do, rather than more!  This obviously makes YouTube look like a bunch of fucking morons, and since YouTube probably doesn’t like looking like a bunch of fucking morons, they have decided to level the playing field for their userbase by setting the videos to private of anyone who doesn’t agree to the new terms, therefore YouTube Red subscribers and normal viewers both get the same (crippled) access to existing content rather than YouTube Red subscribers getting slightly less.  So your access to certain k-pop videos has been revoked because YouTube have backed themselves into a corner with existing agreements and now need to legally weasel their way forward.

However, don’t lose hope!  Three things to keep in mind:

The situation is probably temporary as fuck

The main reason why labels such as Woolim, Brave Brothers, J-Tune Camp and others haven’t signed onto the new deal is probably language barrier, they likely just didn’t know what the fuck it all meant.  Let’s be honest, do YOU read carefully and respond to every piece of bullshit that Microsoft, Google or whoever throws into your inbox?  Expect most if not all of them to sign onto the new YouTube Red deal over the next few days once they realise that there’s an impact to their viewer base going on.  K-pop companies like having international fans and they won’t want to jeopardise that, and once they agree to the new deal their videos will be unprivated and you can recommence fapping.

There are ways around this shit

Ask the Germans who have had pretty much all of YouTube’s music content blocked since day one.  The YouTube Red blocking only affects USA viewers right now so a proxy server can make it look like your computer is from another country (just don’t pick Germany).  There are plenty of proxy services to choose from, just don’t use Hola which is a piece of shit that allows you to be held legally liable for other people downloading illegal stuff.  Lots of users recommend Tor browser but to be honest Kpopalypse is not an expert in this area, other sites may be more helpful however.

In a worst case scenario k-pop agencies will rise to the challenge

Unlike the Japanese market, Korean agencies value the newfound global reach that k-pop’s first Golden Age gave them and actually want you to watch their shit for free.  Most companies host their videos on more than one channel, and if YouTube tanks completely for their purposes by paywalling everything and the cat you can expect to see k-pop agencies take up a different streaming service in response like DailyMotion, Vimeo or something else.  You can also watch k-pop videos on Korean video portals, if you can navigate them.

Here’s Lovelyz’ “Ah-Choo” on the 1thek channel.  If the video link earlier didn’t work, this one might, because unlike Woollim, 1thek has agreed to the new YouTube Red terms.

See, not so bad after all!  Now you Americans can get back to the important things in life like eating apple pie and shooting things.  Yay!

Welcome to the first edition of a brand new series, Kpopalypse roundup!

A SHORT INTRODUCTION TO KPOPALYPSE ROUNDUP

One of the takeaways of my Caonima Activity Survey is that Kpopalypse readers would like more content and especially more reviews.  Waiting a whole year to find out what I think of new songs is certainly pissing some of you off.  However, Kpopalypse readers also don’t want to lose the unique flavour of what makes Kpopalypse blog what it is, have new content replace existing postings, or for me to copy or double-up on content that you can get on other blog sites without making it uniquely Kpopalypse somehow.

The solution I’ve come up with is to have a bonus weekly post that’s tied specifically to the Kpopalypse radio show, where I run through each of the new releases that I played on the show and what I think of them.  I used to post videos of most of the new songs I’d play each week on the Kpopalypse Facebook page, but instead I’ll post them here.  This way, the post won’t take up any more of my own time than the Facebook postings did so this new content means the total amount of Kpopalypse postings will increase, PLUS it’ll satisfy radio listeners who can have everything in one nice neat spot AND people who don’t give a shit about my radio show but just might like to know what I think of the new stuff that came out over the last week will be happy too.  It’s a win/win/win!

Some things:

• These posts will be short with very little thought put into them compared to my usual posts!
• Regular radio listeners will know that generally speaking I do NOT play to my own personal music taste but try and give a broad cross-section of everything, so expect a range of opinions, not just “I played this because I liked it” because how often I play songs I dislike might surprise you!
• These roundups are not meant to be complete, I won’t be focusing on EVERY new release, only the ones I played on the show.
• Requests will never feature in the Kpopalypse roundups unless they’re also new releases that I was going to play anyway.
• These posts will not feature anywhere else apart from Kpopalypse blog.  Also, as minor posts they also won’t feature in the Kpopalypse article index.

Let’s get started!

NEW RELEASES 26/10/2015

Twice – Ooh-Ahh

I’m not keen on this.  It’s Shannon Williams’ great “Why Why” ruined with too much random noise and cheerleading clutter.  Also how many times is k-pop going to re-do T-ara’s “Lovey Dovey” Zombie MV?

DIA – My Friend’s Boyfriend

To some extent this song suffers from the same problem as the Twice song, there’s just too much going on.  There’s a great song here but it’s lurking under 57 layers of noise so nobody can hear it.  I still liked this better than the Twice song, and it’s also the best DIA song so far by a wide margin, but listening to this wears my ears out.

SHINee – Sing Your Song

A pedestrian ballad for the Japanese market, I think it’s pretty safe to say that only SHINee fans will appreciate this.

IU – Twenty-three

IU seems to be heading towards Lim Kim territory with this one and I’m so not into it.  The snide video and lyrics poking fun at her public image are great and she looks better than ever but the song is the kind of unremarkable disco/funk boredom that Gain does every other week.

N.Flying – Lonely

The best ballad of tonight’s show, with nice enough instrumentation and raps that don’t drag on too long but certainly it’s nothing special.

Click-B – Reborn

Click-B are the veteran k-pop group who did “Love Letter” (covered last year by Berry Good), one of the only decent pre-Golden Age k-pop songs.  This new song is nowhere near as good unfortunately, generic tough-guy k-pop 101.

Andup ft Incredivle – It’s Me

This week’s best rap song out of the ones that I found.  Actually a decent beat, something that Korea knows how to do when it feels like it.  Very short but that just means it doesn’t overstay its welcome.

BONUS SONG

Pure Boy – Wedding Day

This inexplicably uncanny video would be worthy of Kpopalypse Nugu Alert if the group didn’t have another video with over 150,000 hits.  Simple pop fun, just don’t think about it too hard.

Kpopalypse will return next week with another Kpopalypse roundup!

Hello and welcome to another edition of the officially most unpopular and nugu Kpopalypse series ever, Kpopalypse Nugu Alert!

It’s time to scout out and reel in another fresh crop of nugus!  Read on and let’s get the nugu fun started!

Idols getting into acting is a topic that divides opinions among k-pop fans as well as fans of Korean TV series, dramas and movies.  Several people just love seeing their bias on the TV screen cutting their teeth in a dramatic role, while others feel that idols generally don’t do a good enough job for them to be worthy of taking the place of regular actors and worry about job losses and financial hardship among the regular acting crowd.  Of course the economic reality is that even if their acting is sub-par, the idol’s star power will usually provide a bit of extra interest in the audiovisual content for their legions of crazy fans to get excited about so their inclusion ultimately means more employment for everyone as a lot of shows probably wouldn’t even be very economically viable at all without their star power.  Like their inclusion or loathe it, the reality is that idol actors provide an important economic function and aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

However, what about when the shoe is on the other foot, and actors who are not musicians find their way into drama music videos?  This is a side of acting which pays the bills for many Korean actors and actresses, plus another way in which the Korean music industry helps feather the nest of starving thespians.  However you don’t often hear so much about actors getting MV work and it attracts far less controversy, probably because it’s less easy for cynical media and rabid anti-fans to twist this kind of activity into the usual trendy “look at these idol bitches ruining everything again” narrative inside their own heads.  The popularity of music videos with drama content means that the relationship between idols and actors is not adversarial at all and in fact quite symbiotic, and as a result nowhere does the actor/idol debate seem more stupid than within the entertainment industry itself.

The following Korean music videos demonstrate this important and vital symbiosis by featuring outstanding acting skills, showing idols (okay, would-be idols) and actors working together, flexing their professional thespian abilities to breaking point, all in the name of entertaining you, the viewer.  Please now appreciate the following nugu videos so the efforts of these individuals are not wasted.

Blast – Git It Girl

Let’s kick things off with an outstanding reader submission.  K-pop boy group Blast invite you with their catchy slogan to “Be The Blast”, and remain true to their moniker by spending most of the required singing and dancing quota of “Git It Girl” in what looks like the inside of a nuclear reactor undergoing some routine maintenance.  They’ve also got the moves, with lots of only-slightly-awkward shuffling, a hot jacket-slide-off routine at 2:19 and an outstanding finishing-the-song move of a calibre rarely seen in k-pop nugudom.  The real star of the show here however is of course the acting, as the boys of Blast sleaze, creep and sexually harrass their way through various interactions with a lady who has seemingly had a gutful of their shit and is holding out for a more popular k-idol to throw in her chips with.  You can almost hear them say “I want you to be my blast, baby” or some other horrid pick-up line as the girl rolls her eyes and laughs at their mop-tops.  The various eyebrow-raising and bitchface expressions all throughout the video are pure gold, and the creepy dudes getting consistently rejected and never getting what they want is an unusual plot-twist for k-pop MVs where constant advances from pushy douchebag guys usually ends in a generous dose of classy-sexiness – but Blast are modern reconstructed 21st century men who get it into their thick skulls that no means no – eventually.

YouTube views at time of writing: 11755

Notable attribute: incredible freeze-frame drink-throwing skills, where’s Seungri’s towel when you need it

Nugu Alert rating: high

Tina – Happy Day

At the start of this video an old woman (who actually looks like Tina herself with a grey wig) see a young couple and reminisces back 40 years ago to a time when she and her partner were young and hot and all the technology was exactly the same.  Her first fond memory of yesteryear is of them spending lots of time having an absolute laugh-riot at an airport terminal, because airports were such hilarious places back then.  Further exciting locations include a three-star hotel with a crappy water-feature in the courtyard, a generic shopping mall and boating on an only slightly polluted river, with our couple smiling a lot and generally being really thrilled to be out and about.  I guess their day jobs when not on holiday consisted of gold-farming shitty computer games in rotating 12-hour shifts if all it took to generate such an exuberant reaction was staring longingly at some wavy bits of water.  Eventually Tina wraps up her holiday reminiscing thinking about that time they all got rip-roaring drunk and danced and sung a much better song than “Happy Day” with a bunch of losers in front of some hut somewhere.  The acting performances are outstanding and by the end of this video you’ll be thoroughly convinced that Tina and her partner are just as insane and easily amused as the video is portraying them to be.

YouTube views at time of writing: 11119

Notable attribute: at least 80% of budget probably spent on CGI heart at 3:30

Nugu Alert rating: high

Blissday – My Pride

Many years ago, I was chatting with a (sadly now deceased) friend who was a Visual Kei DJ and who had quite a strong obsession with Japanese culture generally.  She told me about how she collects “lolita magazines”, and after some confusion on my part she clarified that these magazines were not what I was thinking but were in fact completely legal and dedicated to “lolita fashion“.   She then gave me a couple of these magazines to flip through, and I spent the next ten minutes looking at hundreds of pages of lolita fashion models, all wearing slight variations of seemingly the same Rococo-inspired outfit.  One particular lolita fashion model caught my eye due to her stunning appearance and uncanny smile in every single photo.

Me:  Who is this girl?  She’s kinda cute but also kinda weird looking.

Her:  Oh, that’s [can’t remember her name], she’s a well-known celebrity and one of Japan’s top lolita models.

Me:  Her smile is strange, there’s something about it.

Her:  Yeah, you’re not imagining that.  In order to have such a perfect smile, some lolita models get surgery on the sides of their mouth where a slight upward cut is made, so after it heals it looks like the model is smiling all the time.

Me:  No shit?  That’s fucked up!  What do they do if they’re sad?

Her:  They’re not paid to be sad.

I don’t remember who the girl in the lolita magazine is these days and I definitely couldn’t recognise her from a photo, but if you’re curious to know what that uncanny surgically-altered smile looked like, you can see the actress in Blissday’s “My Pride” video make almost exactly the same smile that I remember at 0:03, 0:08, 0:11, 0:15, 0:23, 0:32, 0:35, and so on.  Trust me, you’ll get to know it well by the time this song is over.  It’s a completely captivating and terrifying performance from the actress, with her glazed-over stares directly to camera completely convincing.  The whole experiences comes off like a Blair Witch Project/Cloverfield style POV horror film of balladeering hell where you’re trapped in an endless cyclical relationship where you court this creepy girl over and over again and your mouth is taped shut so you can’t just scream out “let’s just be friends”.  All the film is missing is for the camera to pan down at the end of the video to show the iron chains around your ankles that shackle you and her together… but then, you do end up marrying her at the end of the video which is kind of the same thing.  I couldn’t even write a horror fanfiction this disturbing.

YouTube views at time of writing: 76

Notable attribute: how good an actress is she to get so convincingly fucking fascinated by a few green leaves at 2:46

Nugu Alert rating: extreme

Thanks for reading!  Kpopalypse Nugu Alert will return again at a future date with more nugus!

Hey everyone, it’s Kpopalypse back again with more amazing life lessons to share with you lovely readers!  After the stunning success of my previous life lessons post, it seems that some k-pop fans are still struggling with life’s many challenges.  Thankfully, Kpopalypse is here to help all you caonimas achieve and succeed at life, this time with a little bit of help from Ailee!

Of course, it’s hard to get any k-pop fan to pay attention to anything these days if it doesn’t involve watching k-pop MVs, so that’s where Ailee comes in!  If there’s any k-pop idol out there who knows exactly what it’s like to get fucked around by some cocksmoking assholes it’s definitely Ailee, and to this end Ailee has been pretty good about making sure her MV directors insert plenty of important life lessons into her videos to help k-pop fans lead happy, fulfilling lives.  Let’s take a closer look and see what we can learn!

Super important warning: by necessity this post contains music video plot spoilers.  If you haven’t seen these videos before and you care deeply about following the stories, I suggest that you watch them before reading my text, just in case you get things spoilered for you and become upset…. hahaha, who am I kidding, nobody is fucking reading this shit.  You’re all either:

• Playing the videos and fapping to Ailee
• Looking up Ailee’s nudes and then fapping to Ailee
• Fapping to Ailee’s voice
• Throwing the device you’re reading this on across the room in disgust

…so I can pretty much say whatever I want here.  Also you might want to keep the volume knob close to hand for your own sanity as these songs vary in quality quite a lot.  Anyway let’s move onto the videos!

Heaven

To maintain a good relationship with your partner, it’s essential to know where the boundaries are set.  It’s important to understand the other person and cater to their needs and desires, but it’s equally vital to allow the other person to express their own individuality by both having your own lives outside of the relationship, not getting too close at times when it isn’t appropriate, and giving the other person their breathing room in which they can freely express themselves and be their own person.  Relationships which fail to incorporate these important aspects rarely last long!

In “Heaven” we see Ailee with her boyfriend, watching some footage of them on TV.  He’s clearly not really into it (it’s obvious by his expressions and body language) but he’s just staring at her.  Later on we see Ailee eating, and her boyfriend is staring at her again.  He’s already finished his meal, yet he won’t fucking leave the table and go and do his own thing, instead he obsessively watches her eat, counting every last calorie to make sure she adheres to her strict idol diet.  Then in the next scene, she’s reading a book and he’s talking to her and reading over her shoulder.  Ailee does her best to hide her irritation but clearly having her boyfriend hover over her being a jerkstick is bugging the shit out of her.  Finally, we see Ailee in bed, and her crappy boyfriend doesn’t even go down on her or jack off on her asscheeks or even give her a cuddle or a gentle goodnight kiss on the lips but just leaves her alone – the one time when he should be doing something proactive, he wanders off into the other room to play Call Of Warcraft or whatever.

The moral lesson is delivered at the end of the video, where Ailee swaps Mr Jerkus out for another upgraded boyfriend, and the ex smiles – he’s pleased.  Clearly he wanted to be dumped anyway, he was just too chickenshit to say anything, so he just acted like a crappy boyfriend until she finally had a gutful of his cloying neediness and impotence.  While that’s one way to get dumped he could have saved her a lot of heartache and himself a lot of League of Duty time by just walking the fuck out.  Mind you he also could have continued to feel Ailee’s boobies and pursued his dreams of being a pro gamer/oxygen-sponge if he actually stopped being such a nosy cunt prying into her private business right from the beginning.

I Will Show You

In 1978 the song “I Will Survive” was released by Gloria Gaynor, a single woman’s disco anthem all about telling your ex-boyfriend to fuck off when he turns up at your doorstep and wants you back because although it was hard at first you’ve gotten over him and you realise he’s a loser who plays Defence Of The Battlefield all day.  Ailee’s “I Will Show You” (aka the last song of Ailee’s “not complete shit” period) obviously rips off “I Will Survive” musically, with the sad forlorn introduction about missing some douchebag giving away to disco-rockin’ female independence.  Thematically the songs are similar too, but the video for Ailee’s song has an important twist.  At the start of “I Will Show You”, a very deglamorised, nerdy and yet smoking hot Ailee mopes about because her ex is fucking some new chick.  Then the whole “I don’t give a fuck about you” Gloria Gaynor routine starts as Ailee transforms into a independent, liberated and somewhat less-hot, tackily dolled-up version of herself who yells and waves her arms a lot.  Now that Ailee has uglified herself down to his level, the hapless guy realises he’s fucked up and lost his chance at love, so he pursues Ailee his one true soul mate.  After she toys with him, ignoring his advances, spitting on him, punching him in the chest and all that fun stuff, eventually she says “fuck it, I’ve tortured him enough, I think he’s got the point now” and takes him back.

The lesson here is that people always want what they can’t have, and people always look more desirable when they’re unavailable.  Unlike the Gloria Gaynor song where she seriously straight-up hates the dude and wants him to get the fuck out for good, Ailee’s “independent woman” routine was just a fake-ass act to make him think that she was unattainable and therefore desire and want her back more.  Of course once they got back together he’d no doubt be reminded exactly of why he dumped her in the first place (probably all that waiting patiently in the studio lounge while she spent hours overdubbing her own fucking voice 57 times on every song) and they’d probably split up again for good this time, but with any luck he got to blow his load on her tits Seungri-style a few more times.  Use this knowledge to your advantage when you start pining for that ex who was a total cunt to you – he/she is probably still a cunt, but cunts look a lot prettier when you’re not directly reminded of all the shit they used to do that pissed you off, like singing Beyonce’s ultra-crap “Crazy In Love” as if it’s in any way listenable or worthy of use as anything other than a torture device.

Singing Got Better

There’s a common business expression that’s particularly prevalent in the music business – “don’t shit where you eat”.  This expression bothers a lot of uptight cunts but it’s actually very practical and useful advice, and what is translates to for musicians is “don’t fuck anybody in your own group”.  The reason for it is fairly obvious – if the sexual relationship breaks up, the musical relationship will either also break up, or become so poisoned that it’s not worth the heartache of gritting your teeth and continuing with.

There’s another disadvantage of being in a group with your sexual partner, and that is that you have to be around each other all the fucking time.  Relationships benefit from a bit of time away from each other to get some perspective, but when you live together AND you work and travel together it’s hard to escape – it can all get a bit much unless you’re the extremely clingy lovey-dovey type (and then it’s probably going to get too much for the other person after a while).  Too much close proximity can cause you to lose your rational perspective of events.

Ailee isn’t behaving particularly rationally in “Singing Got Better”, she’s clearly losing perspective from overexposure to her creative partner.  At the start of the video, Ailee is clearly dressed for her partner’s funeral, then we go onto a flashback section where she’s working with her boyfriend songwriter.  While songwriting, the guy she’s with starts eating some fucking slop, after swallowing a mouthful he realises that he is eating pure shit.  Ailee however feeling sadistic from too many nights in the touring van putting up with his music taste insists on spoonfeeding him another few doses of gruel, which he calmly accepts but clearly isn’t very happy about, giving obvious fake smiles as he endures it for the good of the signing partnership.  Later, he’s seeing off a female friend with a polite kiss and as she is leaving Ailee arrives and sees them together.  Ailee being all irrational and shit naturally assumes that they’re fucking, but actually he was just confiding in her about Ailee’s clingyness and weird insistence on treating him like he’s two years old with the whole creepy spoonfeeding thing.  Ailee gets mad, he tries to explain but she isn’t having any of it, she goes nuts and then obviously hires Way’s Girls to take care of the problem.  Songwriters, don’t become another statistic – friends don’t let friends sleep with band members, no matter how hot they are.

Mind Your Own Business

Seemingly inspired about equally by T-ara’s iconic anti-netizen smackdown and Johnny Noh’s morally sketchy piss-poor journalism-lite, “Mind Your Own Business” is pure revenge fantasy.  Kicking off with some maudlin bedroom scenes showing Ailee crying over Allkpop’s lost journalistic integrity, we move onto a scene where her picture-leaking ex-boyfriend is cornered in a parking lot by some Way’s Girls subordinates who proceed to vandalise his fuel-efficient economical SUV thus deducting several points from Allkpop’s environmental credentials.  Devastated by this loss to his reputation, the man calls the attention of the local constabulary who quickly detain the vandals in some stylish prison uniforms, while the murderous Ailee makes a gesture indicating that she will kick his ass when she gets out.  Security at the prison is craptacular, so the girls escape and trash Daniel Lee’s bedroom.  He walks in and Ailee burns the last remaining topless photo and then subjects Daniel to some genital violence, because if there’s one thing that always makes everything okay, it’s violating someone’s private parts.  The score now settled, the video ends.

When the Ailee nude photo leak happened, lots of people piped up with statements to the effect of “well she was stupid to pose for nude photos in the first place”, but when it’s your boyfriend for his “private collection” there’s a certain level of trust there that you don’t expect to see broken (and a big fuck you to all the guys out there who do break that trust, because you’re the reason why I can’t get any of my smart, streetwise girlfriends to pose nude for any photos that I take – goddamnit).  Of course she should have known that he was connected to Allkpop but you’ve got to remember that Allkpop was once a fine morally upstanding site so there’s no way she would have suspected such a thing to happen.  What’s also worth knowing is that nude picture scams are quite common in the modelling industry generally and scammers will prey on young hopefuls, dangling the carrot of paid employment in exchange for a few “sample pictures”, click here for details on how such a scam actually happens.  Pictures often just get kept for fap purposes but can in some cases be on-sold to porn sites, used in banner ads etc, you never know where they end up, and of course once it’s on the Internet it’s there forever somewhere, there’s no getting rid of it.  What happened to Ailee has probably happened to someone you know personally who is just too terrified or embarrassed to say anything.  Don’t get caught by sneaky picture scammers because not only can you not turn back the clock but when you get busted exacting revenge most prisons you get sent to afterward are slightly higher security and have somewhat more attentive guards than the one in Ailee’s MV.

Insane

Ailee’s latest video at the time of writing, “Insane” is one of those “one take” videos that k-pop are so fond of, although it’s not really one take because like most videos of this nature the director uses quick panning transitions to cheat the eye.  During the video, Ailee is sleeping in bed when some pervert comes along and tries to take a look at her in her underwear.  Disappointed to find out that she sleeps with a substantial amount of clothes on, the guy then spends the next three and a half minutes trying to escape the scene as Ailee chases him around a series of rooms, trying to disorientate him and wear him down with confusing movements and horrible balladeering.  These sophisticated self-defense techniques work well – the man is no match for Ailee, eventually he decides he’s had enough and he closes the door on her, deciding that he’ll try Gain’s room down the hall (classy-sexy sequel coming soon courtesy of Mystic89).

While the self-defense techniques used in this video are advanced and shouldn’t be tried by anyone not able to produce unpleasant ear-piercing caterwauling and erratic, confusing dance moves as effectively as Ailee, there’s something to be said for women learning basic self-defense skills.  Self-defense isn’t trendy for women at the moment, the prevailing politically correct attitude being “men should shape up their behaviour, women shouldn’t have to defend themselves” and that may even be true but until we live in fucking Disneyland there are going to be creeps out there so it’s good to know how to deal with them.  If you get really good you can even learn advanced moves like how to kick Daniel Lee in the nutsack.

Anyway that’s it for this blog post and hopefully you were all entertained and educated by these amazing life lessons!

This post contains the results of the Kpopalypse 2015 End Of Year Caonima Activity Survey!

There were nearly 600 responses to the survey, thanks to all the caonimas who enjoyed caonima survey activities!  Even though my readership has increased, the grand total of 588 completed responses was a little bit less participation than previous years – this is probably a result of my new survey software which doesn’t let the same person fill it out twice as I know that on previous surveys exceptionally bored people did multiple entries.  A new statistic which hasn’t appeared in Kpopalypse surveys before is completion rate, which held steady throughout the survey period at an impressive 92% – only 8% of respondents (48 in total) lacked the required determination levels to see the survey through to the end, and caonimas from 60 different countries participated!  Let’s get on with the results – read on for all the survey data that is true and factual!

Question 1: Hi! How are you? Answer in as much or as little detail as applicable.

Most of you were good!  Several people asked how I am – I’m good also!  Some answers to your questions and concerns:

Will there be any gif’s of Choa’s wardrobe malfunctions? – I feel like that’s a specialty of Zaku at Anti Kpop-Fangirl given that the most popular post ever in AKF is a Zaku wardrobe malfunction post.  I’ll leave covering this topic to the master!

I’m debating whether or not to spend $50 on imported chocolate that I have a yen for because it’s unavailable in my country. – DO IT.  Kpopalypse is pro-chocolate.

Do you like board games? – Yes!

A crazy girl is trying to fuck me and she’s kinda hot so what do? – I recommend that you hold out for a less crazy person.  Plenty of fish in the sea.

A great day today, huh?? I sure love Crayon Pop! The twins are adorable! Choa is so cute and innocent and would never harm anyone in any way!  Choa if you’re reading the results I ask that you return my three children to me safely. I’ve done all you asked for. – Reposting for your family’s safety.  Good luck.

I have compiled a playlist of sad kpop that includes plenty of Big Bang and 2NE1. What do you think of that? – I don’t think of that.

I’m ok, I’m a bit hungry though. Should I have cereal or eggs and toast? – Live dangerously.  Flip a coin.

I’m a childhood educator where I was told today by a child, “We like Pokemon cards but we don’t like you”. At the end of the day though, here I am. What is life? – This video may help!

I’m good, thanks for asking. Nobody ever asks these days. Well they do, but do they genuinely mean it tho? Or is it because we’re so conditioned to say so? Do you really mean to ask how are you? – Yes!  I ask this question every survey because I care about the welfare of my readers!  Although I would still blog if I had no readers, I’m very grateful for everybody who takes time out of their day to read my posts and do my surveys, even if they hate me!

On to the next question!

Question 2: How do you feel about doing another Kpopalypse survey?

Most people wanted to do the survey, or just wanted to see what was inside, which makes sense!  A bold 4% of you were willing to do the survey even though you hated every minute of it – thanks for your contribution!

Question 3: I’m using Polldaddy because Google Forms is broken as fuck. How do you feel about this?

Most of you didn’t care about my survey software issues and just wanted to be asked about rimming Joy’s ass.  Unfortunately for you, the survey didn’t have any questions about rimming Joy’s ass in it (apart from this one).  Feel free to add how you’d feel about rimming Joy’s ass below in the comments to this post to make up for the shortfall.

Question 4: Drag the text boxes up and down to rank the following in order of quality, from highest to lowest.

Apologies to those of you who didn’t like these “ranking” questions because you were doing them on your mobile phones where it’s really hard to drag the boxes up and down.  I didn’t realise this myself until I tried to access my own survey via a phone after people kept mentioning it and I realised that the format does indeed suck dick for phones.  In any event I randomised the order of answers in this question so that even if you had trouble dragging things, if you decided not to drag anything at all and skipped the ranking questions it wouldn’t bias any result in particular over multiple responses.  From most popular to least popular, the results are as follows.  Included is the “weighted ranking”, a lower number means more popular.

Hyosung’s boobs – 3.59

Seolhyun’s ass – 3.77

Joy’s thighs – 3.96

Kpopalypse’s humour – 3.99

Sulli’s prophylactics – 5.56

Anti K-pop-Fangirl’s author vetting process – 6.29

Ailee’s judge of character – 6.66

Hwayoung’s worth ethic – 6.73

Asian Junkie’s web host – 6.78

Bom’s surgeon – 7.41

I think “almost as popular as Joy’s thighs” should be my new slogan.  Also, confirmed proof that Allkpop is “The Great Satan”!

Question 5: This is (probably) a picture of Joy from Red Velvet.

Are you able to tell the Red Velvet members apart?

Sadly, my Red Velvet Identification Test post didn’t seem to help the majority of people.  Fortunately, a lot of you already knew the Red Velvet members well!  Cheers to you!

Question 6: How often do you read Kpopalypse posts?

Given that I don’t usually post more than twice per week, most people had a fairly logical reading ratio, although I do admire the people who have determination to check my posts more often than this!  Of course those who read my crap less than once per week may have missed the opportunity to complete the survey altogether, so this probably skews the results.  The 1% of you who found the survey through ESP, please share your secrets with the rest of us!

Question 7: People are always asking me shit about fancams but I really don’t give a flying fuck about fancams. Should Kpopalypse write more about fancams?

Most of you were under no illusions about your chances of getting fancam posts out of me, which was great to see!

Question 8: Given two selections in a multiple choice question of equal merit, which would you pick?

I had the answer “the second option” listed as the first option, and vice versa, causing some of you much psychological distress.  I appreciate those who struggled on through this question and completed the survey.

Question 9: What completely non k-pop related topic would you like to see Kpopalypse devote an entire overlong pointless post to?

It’s well know that cats win the Internet so I wasn’t surprised that they also appeared at first place here, however I was quite amazed by the amount of people who actually wanted to know more about Australian politics, which trailed felines by only three votes!  Dan Akroyd is now unsubscribing from Kpopalypse blog.

Question 10: Rank these apocalyptic scenarios in terms of likelihood, from most likely to least likely.

We all know that the apocalypse will come one day – but how will it happen?  Here’s the results of the next ranking question, along with weighted ranking values, with most likely scenario at the top:

JYP whispers his own name at a subatomic particle and creates a black hole, swallowing the Earth – 3.23

Shit music disease from multiple simultaneous trap comebacks infects the human race and turns everyone into maggots – 3.54

Artificial intelligence hears Red Velvet’s “Dumb Dumb“, decides humans are a bunch of dumb-dumbs and kills us all – 3.74

Excessive SM box MV manufacture influences climate change-triggered apocalyptic weather event which wipes out 99% of humanity – 3.92

Seo In Young poses with Taeyeon for a magazine, the voids under their bras collide and Earth fries in the resulting dark matter explosion – 4.42

Chain reaction Fukushima nuclear power plant explosion poisons all parts of the Earth not covered by SM box material – 4.45

New 2NE1 album is released in 2016 and is actually decent, billions die in shock – 4.67

Looks like the world could end in any number of ways, however CL probably won’t be involved – this time.

Question 11: Here is a picture of IU.

What is IU most likely to be thinking in the above picture?

Results were reasonably even but a greater amount of people felt that IU was thinking about Eunhyuk’s pearly gifts.

Question 12: Rate the following properties of Kpopalypse’s writing in terms of your personal enjoyment.

Most people seems to like all aspects of Kpopalypse apart from fap material, which scored a “meh” overall.  Is this because I don’t really care that much about writing basic fap posts so I rarely do it, because you’re not seeing the type of fap posts that you’d like to see, or it is because my readers don’t like fap material in general?  Maybe a question for a future survey!

Question 13: What religion are you?

I made sure that I included what I felt were all the important mainstream religions in society today, but I also put in an “other” category so nobody felt left out, just to be fair to anybody who was into some strange cults or whatever.

Question 14: Are you an honest person? (TIP: answer carefully – this is probably a trick question.)

An honest person would tell the truth and answer “yes” to this question.  A liar on the other hand would lie, and answer “yes” to this question.  That’s why there was only one option for this question.  I’m sure you’re all honest anyway and only upstanding honest truthful people read Kpopalypse.  By getting you to answer this question I could be assured of the accuracy of all the other questions.

Question 15: This is a picture of Seo Jisoo from Lovelyz.

How does Kpopalypse cope with the emotional burden of always picking the correct side in a k-pop scandal?

Most of you picked the correct answer as Kpopalypse does not do recreational drugs (except chocolate)!  However all human experience, including listening to Lovelyz, is converted to chemical reactions in the brain so it could be argued that drugs is also a correct response.  The picture of Seo Jisoo was just there to remind you that if a news outlet actually has to change their name to “The Fact” to legitimise themselves, they probably publish a lot of lies.

Question 16: How do you feel about Seo Jisoo returning to Lovelyz?

Most people weren’t Lovelyz fans but were still happy to hear the good news.  I didn’t bother putting in any negative options as part of my continuing quest to promote positivity in the world of k-pop and banish negativity and cynicism.

Read the following carefully and make sure you understand it.  There will be a question about it later.

Many people thought I was trolling with this, but a few of you picked up that it was actually directly related to a later question.  I guess a lot of people didn’t read it carefully enough.  Feel free to read it carefully again now in case you didn’t understand it earlier when you did the survey.

Question 17: Social Justice Warrior corner! Which important social justice issue would you like to see confirmed SJW Kpopalypse cover next? As these issues are all very important, you can choose multiple answers for this question if you wish.  (TIP: those with a slim grasp on their own sexual identity may feel threatened by this question.  Kpopalypse recommends a cold shower while repeating the mantras “I am not a faggot bitch” and “I did not masturbate to the answers”.)

Survey participants could choose multiple answers, but had to pick at least one.  Here’s what you selected, from the most popular answers downward:

How we need more global warming to make the planet hotter so people take off more of their clothes more often and see each other’s naked bodies glistening in the heat and are more tempted to have gay sex – 250 votes

How there needs to be more global conflict so men in sexy uniforms can bunk more with other men and potentially have gay sex – 212 votes

How global population needs to increased unchecked so each individual human has more potential gay sex partners – 203 votes

How nuclear power needs to increase so there are more nuclear accidents and humans all get infected with radiation, then we will glow in the dark and it will be easier to see each other while hooking up in dingy nightclubs for gay sex – 188 votes

How guns are great because penetrating other people with hard objects is similar to gay sex – 179 votes

How clubbing baby seals needs to continue so gay people can watch horrifyingly graphic documentaries about it while they cuddle up together on the couch comforting each other, which may lead to gay sex later – 173 votes

How fossil fuel use needs to be increased globally so humans continue to have access to the byproducts of petroleum production to make dildos for gay sex – 155 votes

It looks like according to readers global warming is the one thing most needed to make the world a better place for gay people.  Let’s keep burning those fossil fuels so we can have more gay sex for everyone!  Gosh it feels good to be making a difference.  If only two gay people get laid as a result of this post, it was all worth it… *wipes away tear in corner of eye*

Question 18: Do you like J-pop?

Although I was curious as to the answer of this question, I also didn’t want to place any of my readers in the awkward position of actually having to admit that they liked J-pop.  I have too much respect for all of you to do that to any of you, so I think these survey options were a good compromise.

Question 19: Do you like K-dramas?

I honestly didn’t expect K-dramas to get a slightly cooler reception than J-pop, but there you go.  Another survey, another opportunity for Kpopalypse to be learning stuff about his readers!

Question 20: This is a picture of T-ara.

When I started blogging, I made a promise to consistently post gratuitous pro T-ara content until people learned to be nicer to them, as a way to counterbalance the dumb T-ara hatred everywhere on the Internet at the time (late 2012) plus annoy everyone.  Should I continue to do this?  Pick the response that most closely matches how you feel.

Results were fairly even here, with “I like T-ara” being the most popular choice by a slim margin.  Note that the third and fourth responses were exactly tied with 20% of the vote each.  No option for a “no” response was given because I know that you’d all rather prefer I continue to write about T-ara.

Question 21: Which group or person should be featured in upcoming Kpopalypse fanfictions?

Martina and BTS were the clear losers here, whereas Sulli was the most popular choice by a reasonable amount.  Berry Good collected the highest amount of “meh”.

Question 22: Rank the nine different types of Kpopalypse post in order of preference, from most to least preferred.

How you ranked each category in terms of preference, from most popular to least popular, with weightings:

Trufax – 3.66

Reviews – 3.68

Technical – 4.06

Fap – 5.11

Kpopalypse-specific – 5.40

Cao Ni Ma – 5.42

Interviews – 5.55

Fiction – 5.87

Nugu Alert – 6.08

For contrast, here’s what’s actually generated traffic to my site over the past week that the survey was active, sorted by category:

Kpopalypse knows what you sneaky cao ni mas are really up to… and to think you all answered question 14 with “yes”, tsk tsk!  It’s okay though, Kpopalypse forgives you and knows that you’re only human.  Please now put away the lube just for the moment and continue to read the rest of these survey results.

Question 23: Would you be interested in daily/almost daily content if it was shorter, i.e video reviews and small opinion items similar to what other sites do, if it didn’t intrude on the existing longer content?

I’m leaning toward “no” personally (for the reasons shown) but I was curious as to what you readers thought.  It seems that a lot of people would appreciate daily content, but it’s hardly a unanimous feeling – is it worth changing the way I do things?  I’m thinking probably not, however maybe a small move in this direction (say, a weekly recap/review feature similar to what some other AKF authors do, but just for Kpopalypse blog only so as to prevent double-up) might be an idea.  I’m still thinking about whether this is a good idea, so feel free to add your own thoughts about this below in the comments.

Question 24:

Thoughts?

The answer was a free text field, but many responses were similar so I’ll briefly summarise the most popular types of response in pie-chart form:

People comparing Hyangni’s “Be My First Love” to Kyary Pamyu Pamyu were clearly getting swayed by how the video looked rather than how it sounded, Kyary’s strictly conservative J-pop-by-numbers sounds nothing like this!  Mind you, I only asked for “Thoughts?” and didn’t specify whether I wanted you to talk about music or visuals, so it was a shit question really – hint, hint, ask.fm users.  Personally I only like the song’s unusual turn at the two minute mark, the rest of it leaves me a bit cold, but then I’ve heard plenty of shittier songs released that year.  Condolences to all the Germans who missed out on the fun thanks to GEMA, you’d think that country’s government would have learned something in the last century or so about controlling other people’s lives but I guess not.

Question 25: Crystal ball time, test your super future prediction skills! In 2018, how many members will EXO have?

Most of you weren’t very hopeful about EXO staying together, probably a reasonable assumption given the current rate of members leaving – or maybe it’s just wishful thinking from people who don’t like the group.

Question 26: Why is Kpopalypse so rude?

Many readers did their research on Kpopalypse and worked out that Australians are just all a bunch of cunts.

Thanks for completing the Kpopalypse survey!

This picture of cao ni mas experiencing cao ni ma love was included at this point in the survey to thank the 92% of readers who bravely slugged through the survey content.

Question 27: What was the most perplexing thing about this survey?

Hopefully this question was enough to motivate some of you to be more proactive about your life.

Question 28: If you have any other feedback for Kpopalypse that this survey didn’t give you the opportunity to give, please use the following text box to do so. This text box is optional.  DISCLAIMER: feedback may be used for good or evil.

The final question wasn’t really a question, just an open-ended invitation for you to put down whatever you wanted, or even nothing at all.  Some answers to your questions and concerns:

If you find, idk, some way to incorporate Red Velvet’s Dumb Dumb into a post, that’d be appreciated. – actually it’s been incorporated into quite a few Kpopalypse posts already, including this one!

I’m really hungry but I’m a poor NEET and the only thing I have is rocky road ice cream. Should I eat it? – Yes!  Starvation could lead to death!

More interation with kpopfap subreddit. – Unforunately, posting my fap posts there probably doesn’t meet their rules.

I am a youtube whore, i click on all sorts of suggestions and recommendations in search of stuff i have never heard before. I have been consistently delighted by your nugu alerts. I could pretend, um, *remember* you care about feedback and suggest some myself. – anyone with suggestions for Nugu Alert, please use my ask.fm and don’t forget the Nugu Alert rules (less than 20,000 hits for any of the artist’s videos).  If I don’t respond, don’t worry – that’s usually a good sign rather than a bad one, it means I’ve added your video to the list for consideration.

is it just me or was this survey shorter than the previous one? running out of questions? – it’s just you, but if you’re still not sure you can check here.

FUCKING REVIEW SOME JAPANESE ROCK BANDS, I TYPE THIS EVERY SURVEY GODDAMN – and I ignore it every survey for a reason, this isn’t j-rockalypse

You’re perfect. Don’t change. Stay golden, Ponyboy. – cheers!

I hate the rating stuff. I was on my phone and it took forever. – yeah I might completely scrap or at least reduce the number of ranking questions next time  just because of their phone-unfriendliness.  Sorry about that, I didn’t realise how much of a pain in the ass they were going to be.

This is “Netizens”. I don’t comment often, but thanks for the time you put into your articles and posts. That includes your comments on other websites like netizenbuzz. Watching those people get upset by your thoughts and logic is almost as enjoyable as this survey. Almost. – glad you’re enjoying my content!

why do all you people care about is sex and dirty side of kpop. You ruin it for people like me. Sorry. – sex isn’t dirty.  Your attitude to sex has been corrupted by society.  I’m trying to help you see the light.  Don’t hate your natural bodily functions and desires, they are not dirty, they are in fact holy and should be celebrated.

Once again, thanks for all the trufax and extinguishing BS from the kpop fandom, plus fanfiction and other goodies. Also, I realized one reason I like your blog in particular: you might say that X song is bad, but you don’t say others have shit taste or make them feel bad for liking what you don’t like. So actually, you aren’t a rude cunt at all! Hahahaha. Others just need to lighten up and have a sense of humor. – trufax!

This is the only kpop blog (or any blog in fact) which I follow and routinely check for updates everyday. Btw, what does kpopalypse oppar think about his sasaengs?-KpopalypseSasaeng – I love you all!  Just don’t mail me any menstrual products or stalk my dorm thank you.

More SJW content please. It’s hot reading you going all SJW-ish. That’s what I really fap to. I mean it. – I’ll see what I can do.

More T-ara. – Eunjung picture at the bottom of this post just for you.

I like hearing your opinions, not because I always agree with them, but because you actually have your own. Please continue never using the word slay. – thanks!

Fuck you – no u

Keep up the blog, it’s the best kpop related blog around. Special mention for the technical posts, something nobody else does (at least not in this way) and it’s really instructive for non-musician fans to learn and stop saying shit around and learning to recognize and judge properly the ones who do. Thanks! – cheers!

pls notice me oppa – you are officially noticed, feel free to now bask in the validation

Bring back Sulli_fag. – you’ll have to take that issue up with the Anti Kpop-Fangirl admin team, I’m only a writer on that site and I have no say in their author lineup or what gets posted besides what I post there myself.

This was my first Kpopalypse survey and it was a blast. Though we don’t agree on everything (I liked Orange Caramel’s Cookies Cream & Mint and K.Will+Mamamoo’s Peppermint Chocolate) your entertainment does meet required standards so it’s all good. Keep up the good work! – glad you enjoyed!  There will be another survey like this every 6 months!

What are your thoughts on SHINee (both the members and their music)? – both of these topics have been covered in previous posts more than once, time to do some searching!

I wish you a day more pleasant than motorboating Hitomi Tanaka. –  gosh, I’m honoured, this is possibly the nicest thing anyone has said to me in a survey!  Thank you!

Thanks for staying woke, you keep me from getting too caught up in the glitz and mostly artificial happiness of the kpop world. I also appreciated how you included a question about supporting T-ARA and then slipped in the cha euntak thing in. I mean, you weren’t lying… there totally was a question about that later. Also, question 8 was really clever. I had fun answering this, so thanks, and have a nice day! – You’re welcome!

Thanks again to everyone who did the Kpopalypse 2015 End Of Year Caonima Activity Survey!  Kpopalypse will return at a future date with more stuff and things!

Emotionally detaching yourself from a k-pop idol might be something for which you require guidelines.

For this tutorial, you will need:

Let’s begin.

1. Realise that you have a problem.

Perhaps you notice yourself falling in love with a k-pop idol, or perhaps you have been in love with a k-pop idol for a length of time already.  It could be an idol such as Gfrend’s Umji, shown above for illustrative purposes, or it could be another idol, male or female, young or older.  Does your infatuation with an idol represent a problem for you?  Consider the following questions:

• Is comparing other people to your idol preventing you from having normal relationships?
• Is spending money on your idol putting your financial position in jeopardy?
• Is the time taken to track your idol’s activities interfering with work, household activities or sleep?
• Is the topic of your idol the only conversation point of interest to you in your daily life?

If your answer to any one of these questions is yes, then you have a problem, and this tutorial can help.  (If your answer to all of the above questions is yes, then you’re probably too far gone and your brain is likely only good for mincing up and turning into dog food, but feel free to use this tutorial anyway in the unlikely chance of regaining some small semblance of mental functionality.)  Chances are that you have already reached the first step, which is why you are reading this post.  Congratulations, recovery is only a few more simple steps away!

2. Confront your fear.

Once you realise that you have a problem, fear is a natural response.  Fearful thoughts may include (and may not be limited to) any of the following:

• How much will I be emotionally hurt if I give up my idol?
• If the recovery process is lengthy, can I cope or will I turn to binging on jelly snacks?
• What if I fail and relapse, clinging to the idol even harder, will I be doomed?
• Can I cope with the humiliation of admitting I’m a spasticated fangirl bitch?
• Will my k-pop peer group ostracise me now that I’ve realised they’re all retards?

It’s natural to have these thoughts, but there is only one effective way to deal with fear which is to tackle the issue head-on.  Running from your fears means that they control you, but being proactive puts you in the driver’s seat of your own fear.  Once you are in control of your fear, you are empowered to drive your fear off a cliff Grand Theft Auto style – and hopefully hit some fangirls at the bottom for extra style points.

3. Realise that your idol does not actually want you in their personal life.

Sure, idols definitely like and are grateful for their fans, because fans are an idol’s bread and butter.  Without fans, there is no celebrity status and without celebrity status there’s no sponsors rocking up on the company doorstep to present your idols with a big wad of cash to advertise snack food they’re not allowed to eat.  However, your idol does not want to have a personal relationship with you, for the following reasons:

• You’re nuts
• No, really – you’re fucking nuts.  Do you even know how crazy you are?
• You’re not a celebrity so they can’t relate to you
• They don’t have the time
• They don’t want to lose their virginity oops too late
• They don’t want to be perceived as promiscuous by a hypocritical public

Notable exception: if you’re Seungri.  Seungri will probably fuck you.  The rest of them, not so much, so quit dreaming.

4. Set a realistic goal.

It’s important not to overextend.  Going “cold turkey” on your idol might seem ideal but isn’t suited to everyone and could result in a powerful relapse where you spend days on end drooling over fancams and SNS messages with no sleep.  It’s okay to wean yourself off your idol crush slowly but surely, try using these techniques:

• Still look at their pictures but unfollow their social networking accounts
• Listen to the music of other groups occasionally
• Plan a big night out to coincide with your idol’s livestreamed performance or TV appearance
• Make a conscious effort to be less of a drooling, shambling fuckwit

5. Get a hobby (besides k-pop, you dumbass).

It will take time to wean yourself off your idol crush, so you could probably use some non-k-pop-related mental distraction.  Umji demonstrates the ever-practical hobby of collecting twigs in plastic bags above, however not all hobbies are ideal.  There are some hobbies you may wish to avoid as they may just serve to remind you of k-pop and your crush and are therefore not considered hobbies for the purposes of this tutorial.  Examples:

• Dancing
• V-logging
• Forum trolling
• K-pop blogging
• Photography
• Clothing design
• Hair styling
• Prostitution
• Chart manipulation
• Jelly snacks
• Duckface selca-taking

6. Focus on the future

Instead of thinking about your past of loving your idol, try to imagine life without your k-pop idol by focusing on the future.  Exciting future events that you can look forward to include:

• The outcome of the US/Russian proxy war in Syria
• A forthcoming alien invasion staged from Australia
• The impeding death/rebirth of the universe
• The next video by JAV actress Hitomi Tanaka

Just be careful not to confuse “the future” with “Chad Future“, or you may find yourself back where you started.

7. Be patient

Don’t expect success straight away, it takes time to get over heartbreak!  Falling out of love with your idol crush won’t happen overnight, but it will happen!

As it’s coming up to Halloween, here’s a scary k-pop themed horror fanfiction for you all to enjoy!  Have fun reading and don’t worry, Kpopalypse doesn’t do jump scares!

Picture this.

You’ve a young female music fan living with your parents and attending senior year of high school.  You’ve always liked pop music TV shows, like [insert country here] Idol, X Factor and The Voice.  Although it’s obvious to you that to a degree these shows are fake and manufactured, they nevertheless warmed your cynical heart – in such a commercial industry seemingly so image-focused, just the sheer premise that talent mattered meant something to you.  You might not always like the songs, or even the singers, and definitely not the decisions of the judges, but you could certainly listen and appreciate the artistry of a talented vocalist excelling at their craft.

Then something new happened.  You discovered and fell in love with k-pop.

You spent the first month of your interest in k-pop discovering the many outlandishly lavish music videos and getting blown away by the catchy songs.  After a while however you noticed something – while the videos were almost universally great, the live performances were usually a disappointment.  Certainly not in terms of dance or staging, but vocally – k-pop performers really aren’t all that good as live singers, for the most part.  It’s frustrating to watch k-poppers sing over backing tracks that contain their own voices, why don’t they sing over instrumental versions of the tracks instead?  Are they hiding something, perhaps just coasting along and letting the backing track’s vocal do the heavy lifting?  Thus began an obsession with the science of vocal pedagogy, MR Removed videos, and finding/stanning the absolute best singers in k-pop, after all how can you stan anyone who isn’t truly talented?  You’re not interested in becoming a singer yourself, you just wanted to make sure you’re supporting true talent.

A year into your life as a k-pop fan and now you have a large forum presence and your own blog dedicated to k-pop vocals, frequently visited by many people with the same obsessions – you’re fully absorbed into the world of the k-pop vocal analyst.  It’s little wonder that when you see the following advert circulating around all the vocal forums you visit, your heart starts racing:

After spending a while to calm down, you read through some of the forum discussions about this topic.  After all, it pays to research.  There’s so many scams out there, one has to be careful.  Would Ailee really host a k-pop vocal camp?  Is it too good to be true?

Taeyeonfap666 – this sounds great but there’s obviously going to be a ton of us wanting to go to this and only limited places.  It’s probably very expensive, I bet the people who get to go are all rich.

Bomsux – I’d do it just to meet Ailee, she’s the best vocalist in k-pop for sure.  Or nearly the best.  Please don’t argue about it just for once, everyone.

Istantruvocals – what exactly is a “k-pop vocal fan camp”?  We don’t have to sing, do we?  Please don’t make us sing, Ailee, I just want to listen to your amazing voice.

Freeminzy2NE1 – I hate it how k-pop events don’t tell you everyone who will be at the event.  Don’t they want the extra sales from fans?  Seems dodgy.

KRYing4Suju – I went to one of these last year hosted by Kyuhyun from Super Junior, it was pricey but unforgettable and totally worth the money, it really helped me with a lot of questions I had, definitely a life-changing positive experience.  I can afford the cost but I’m not sure if I can afford to take a week out of my life, although if it was Kyuhyun again and not Ailee I probably would.  Sorry, Ailee fans!

Yoloswag420 – I heard Jimin from AOA is going to be the keynote speaker at this.  I can’t wait.

Davichiwonderland – I’m going to this, I don’t care what I have to do!  I don’t care how much it is!  Anyone wanting my spot will have to fight me!

The general consensus among the vocal fan forum community seems to be that the event is legit, but pricey.  It figures – surely everyone would want to go, and seven days of accommodation and food plus meeting k-pop stars, the costs to put on such an event must be through the roof!  You look further on the event’s website, the event organisers even include transport from Incheon Airport into the cost, all you have to do is buy a plane ticket and turn up at the airport, they do everything else!  The economics don’t bear thinking about, but what does bear lots of thinking about is that you’ve got the savings to go to this.  All you need is your parents’ permission.

You wander into the dining room, where your mother and father are talking after dinner.

“Mum, can I go to this?  It’s in Korea, but… I have the money, and it’s school holidays” – you show her a printout of the advert.

Your mother looks the advert up and down.  “This is in Korea?  And you’ll be gone for a week?  No, definitely not!”

You look to your father.  “Dad?”

Your father sighs, and looks at the advert for a long time.  He then looks at your mother and takes her hand.  “You know… I honestly think we should let her go.  It’ll be good for her independence to travel, and it’ll teach her some new things.”  He winks at her.

Your mother is aghast and draws her hand away from his.  “No way!  She’ll be alone in a strange country!  I’m not letting her go, anything could happen!”

An hour of arguing later, and they agree to let you go to the event, under the conditions that you keep in constant touch via social networking every night to let them know that you’re safe.  You couldn’t be happier!

—–

After an uneventful flight, you arrive at late afternoon through the gate at Incheon airport.  After you move through customs you see an older Korean man wearing a suit and holding a sign with your name on it.  You wave, walk over to him and introduce yourself.

“Hi, I’m here for the Ailee vocal camp!”

“Ah. welcome, good to see you!”, he replies, smiling warmly.  “I’ll be your driver.  How was your flight?”

“Good, I guess.  I’m really tired, but I can’t wait to get to the camp!”

“We will be there soon.  Come with me, we’ll collect your bags and then the drive is about one hour.”  The man motions silently for you to walk with him and you follow him to baggage claim.

At the baggage check you scan the conveyor belt for your luggage.  Feeling awkward, you decide to break the silence.

“What’s the Ailee camp like?” you ask.

“It’s interesting.” he replies.

“Interesting how?”

“You will not forget it.  A uniquely positive, life-changing experience!”  The driver smiles at you again, that same warm smile.

You spy your luggage and the driver helps you grab the bags, then ushers you out to a waiting van.  As you enter the van you notice that you and him are not alone, a girl a few years younger than you with long blonde hair sits in the van’s back seat, waiting.

“Hi, I’m Sarah!” says the young girl in a chirpy, rapid-fire voice.  She continues talking excitably with barely a breath as you settle into the vehicle and the driver starts moving.  “You might know me as Davichiwonderland on the forums, wow I’m so happy to be going to this!  Imagine meeting Ailee it’s going to be OH MY GOD SQUEEEEEEEEEEEE I can’t wait to ask her all about her singing and stuff, she’s the best, I really like her, oh except Haeri is maybe a little better because Davichi is my bias you know that’s why I’m Davichiwonderland but oh my gosh I’m just so excited and it’s so great to be here and how are you?  I’m so good I really like posting on the forum a lot and this is like living my dream and I get to meet Ailee and OH MY GOD I wonder who else is there, who do you think will be there besides Ailee?  I think it’s going to be IU I really think IU will be there that would be nice IU’s really nice too but I think Ailee is a bit better her voice has a bit more resonance you know and she has better vibrato because that’s important oh my god I’m so excited I haven’t eaten all day but I’m not even hungry because I’ve been thinking about this I didn’t get much sleep last night but I’m so excited right now and…”

You sigh and look at your phone.  59 minutes  and 13 seconds to go.

—–

59 minutes  and 13 seconds later, the sun has gone down and you’re still on the road.  Sarah is still talking.

“…and you know there was this girl on the forums and she said that Ailee is the best, but I’m not sure about that she’s good really good and I mean really good as in really really good but she’s not at Beyonce’s level who is just AMAZING or Mariah’s level and is just AMAZING too or she was before she stopped taking care of her voice because you know that’s important and so many singers don’t do that, I mean why wouldn’t you look after your talent rather than letting things side, you know I think there’s a lot of drugs and alcohol that singers do and they get the good life and they just start buying all the drugs and all the alcohol and having it all at once and that’s really bad for them so they have health problems and then they get dumped from their contracts because they can’t sing like before I think it’s a real issue I don’t know why people don’t take it more seriously because we’ve lost so many great singers all the time this way like Whitney Houston who had that crack habit from that asshole Bobby Brown who must really be a dirtbag she could have had anyone she wanted why did she pick that loser oh my god he’s such a douche and his music is bad too and he can’t even sing properly he like strains and everything it’s so painful to listeOH MY GOD, DRIVER IS THAT IT?  IS THAT WHERE WE’RE STAYING OVER THERE?  IS THAT IT?  OH MY GOD!” – the van starts noticeably slowing and Sarah points up ahead at an old mansion.

“Yes, this is it” says the driver, smiling.  You’re happy but you begin to wonder if he has more than one facial expression.

Sarah starts spazzing annoyingly.  “OH MY GOD OH MY GOD IT’S SO BEAUTIFUL IT’S LIKE A PALACE WOW I CAN’T WAIT OH MY GOD WOW AILEE IS IN THERE AND EVERYTHING IT’S SO PERFECT THIS IS GONNA BE AMAZING”

The driver brings the vehicle to a stop and turns around in his seat, he looks Sarah dead in the eye, and his smile vanishes.

“Please be aware, that in Korean culture it is important to be silent before your elders.  When you see Ailee or any other staff you must be very quiet and speak only when spoken to, or she will see it as a sign of disrespect.  Disrespectful behaviour may mean that Ailee becomes upset, and you do not want Ailee to get upset.  Do you understand?”

Miraculously, Sarah shuts up.  You wish he had said this an hour ago.  The driver smiles again.  “I am glad that we have an understanding.  Please exit the vehicle.”

All three of you exit the vehicle and enter the building through the main doors, which lead into a small hotel-style reception area decorated with flowers.

“Glad to see the last stragglers have made it” says a lady in a formal suit, behind the reception desk.  She’s reading a newspaper and doesn’t even look up, she looks incredibly bored.

You recognise her instantly as Moonbyul from Mamamoo.  Fortunately, Sarah doesn’t recognise her so you’re spared and earful of spazzing.  Moonbyul points off to a doorway on her right.  “Everybody’s in there waiting”, she says.

You wait until Sarah is safely out of earshot and whisper to her: “Moonbyul?”

“Yes what is it?” she says, looking up from her paper from the first time, giving you a withering stare.

“You’re an idol – why are you a reception person?” you ask quietly.

Moonbyul rolls her eyes.  “That shit doesn’t pay the bills.  Now get going through the door, don’t hold things up any more than you already have.”

You move through the doorway into a large meeting room as Moonbyul resumes reading, muttering something under her breath.  You shut the door behind you.  In the meeting room there are several people sitting in a circle on chairs.  One of them is Ailee, all the others are girls and boys your age or younger.  Ailee looks amazing, like she does in all her videos, just as you’d imagined.  There is one vacant seat left, Ailee motions to it for you to sit down.

“Great!  Now we’re all finally here, we can get started!”  Ailee’s tone is a little irritated, but unlike Moonbyul she’s doing her best to hide it by smiling.  “So, I’m Ailee, as you know, and this is my k-pop vocal camp!  We’re going to learn lots of fun things about k-pop vocals and you’re going to get to meet all sorts of k-pop stars!  Are you excited?”

Everybody in the circle responds with an emphatic “yes”, except Sarah who says “yes oh my god yes oh yes I’m totally excited I just can’t wait oh my god”.  Ailee drops the smile off her face and stares down Sarah blankly until Sarah shuts up.  Ailee then instantly resumes smiling and continues.

“So.  We’ll get to the learning and all the complicated stuff.  For now, it’s late so let’s go around the room and introduce ourselves, then we can have some food and you guys can get some rest!  Starting from you and going around in a circle, tell the group a little about yourselves!”  She looks to the girl on her left.

“My name is Sally, and I’m 14 years old.  I like k-pop and I love good singers!”

“Feel free to be a bit more specific” Ailee prompts.

“Well… I really like YOU, and I like BoA, and…”

“BoA?” Ailee interjects, raising her eyebrows.  “Okay, that’s enough.  Next person, tell us about yourself.”  She motions to a slightly chubby guy who seems a little nervous.

“Hi, I’m David, and… do I have to give my age?”

“You’re telling the story”, Ailee replies.

“Okay, I’m 16… well, 16 and a half if you go by Korean age…”

“Nobody cares about Korean age.  Be relevant” quips Ailee.

“Okay, sorry… um, and I really like Sistar and Hyolyn especially, because…”

Ailee interrupts, cutting David off.  “Tits, right?  You can say it.  Because of her tits.”

David stares at Ailee, dumbfounded.

“Repeat after me, David.  ‘I like Hyolyn because of her tits’.  Go, your turn, say it.”  Ailee stares at David with no discernable emotion.  David spends a few seconds stammering, he doesn’t want to say it in front of her, his face goes quickly red.  After about five seconds Ailee gives up.  “Forget it.  Next!”

Sarah is next.  “Hi I’m Sarah and I’m so happy to be here and this is going to be so wonderful and OH MY GOD AILEE I LOVE YOU YOU’RE THE BEST!  CAN I HAVE YOUR AUTOGRAPH?  CAN I TAKE A SELCA WITH YOU?  YOU’RE SO PRETTY OH MY GOD I LOVE YOUR LONG HAIR AND YOUR LIPS AND YOUR VOICE IS SO AMAZING AND I THINK EVERYTHING ABOUT YOU IS GREAT AND…”

The door that you came through opens.  Moonbyul appears and looks at Sarah with a puzzled expression.  Sarah can’t see Moonbyul because of Sarah’s position in the circle.  Ailee and Moonbyul give each other a little nod.  Moonbyul taps Sarah on the shoulder and Sarah turns around.

“Hey, you’re Davichiwonderland, right?” she asks, smiling for the first time.

“Yes that’s me oh my god you know who I am?” Sarah replies.

“Yes, sure!” says Moonbyul, smiling.  “Hey you know what, I’m going to pull you out of this group and we’ll return later, okay?  You want to meet Haeri, right?”

“OH MY GOD HAERI FROM DAVICHI IS ACTUALLY HERE??!?  OH MY GOD WOW YES YES YES” – Moonbyul puts her hand over Sarah’s mouth, and then puts her finger up to her lips indicating Sarah to be silent.

“Haeri doesn’t like loud noise much, so you have to be very quiet.  Do you know she has a hearing condition?  Loud noises can really hurt her so try not to be loud okay?  Anyway come with me, we’ll go to meet her now, she’s just a few rooms down the hall.” Moonbyul and Sarah disappear off together.  Ailee clears her throat.

“Right, sorry about that interruption.  Okay, next person, tell us about yourself!”  Ailee points to a girl with bobbed hair who looks about your age.

“Hi, I’m Amy and I run the forum about k-pop vocal analysis, I’m 17 years old and I’ve been studying vocal pedagogy since…”

“Oh, you’re one of those people” Ailee interjects.  “I see.  I see” she says slowly, nodding to herself.

“What?” asks Amy.

“Oh, nothing.  Keep going.  Tell us more.”

Amy starts talking.  “So I really got into vocal pedagogy when…”

Ailee puts up the palm of her hand quickly.  “Actually no, stop there.  Next person!”  It’s your turn.

“Actually I like vocal pedagogy too, it’s neat” you say.

“Oh great!” Ailee smiles.  “Saves me the trouble.  Next!”

You breathe a sigh of relief while the next person starts talking about himself, a young skinny guy.

“I’m Mark and I’m 13 years old.  I really like T-ara and…”

Ailee interrupts again.  “Why do you like T-ara?  Your balls don’t look like they’ve dropped, have they really?”

“I just like the…”

“Sure you do.  Do you jerk off?”

“What?”

“You heard me.  Do you jack it?”

“What?”  Mark looks confused, he doesn’t know what to say.

“I bet you do.  I bet you jack off all the time.  Every day, wake up, jack off, go to school, jack off, come home, jack off, jerk it jerk it jerk it all fucking day.  Try not to mess up the sheets too much tonight, someone has to clean those.  Next!”  Ailee motions to the last person in the circle.

“Hi, my name is Leanne and I’m 15, and I really like singers who have a lot of resonance in their voice, like…”

Ailee interrupts her.  “Actually, enough of this.  Let’s eat.  All of you, head through the door on the other side of where you came in, there’s an all you can eat buffet.  Do any of you have any special dietary needs?  I think one of you was a vegan from the ticket info?”

Leanne speaks up.  “I’m a vegan.”

Ailee nods.  “Okay well, I guess you won’t be eating, but everyone else eat up and then follow the signs to the dorms.  I need to rest my voice, I’ll see you all tomorrow!”

Ailee gets up and walks out of the room, smiling and waving at everyone.  The entire room says “Goodbye Ailee!” and move next door to where the food is.

The buffet is amazing!  Rows and rows of all sorts of Asian meat dishes.  Leanne unpacks and eats some kind of roll she brought with her, everyone else tucks into the meat buffet and then gets settled into the dormitory, one room with several bunk beds and no windows.

That night while getting to sleep the conversation naturally turns to Ailee.

“She’s not what I expected” says David.

“What did you expect?” asks Sally.

David sighs.  “I don’t know, she was really blunt.  The way she’d smile and be really blunt at the same time, I don’t get it.”

“She cut me off, I didn’t like that” says Amy.

“Maybe she’s on her period” offers Mark.

“Ewww, you’re gross!’ says Leanne.

Mark shrugs.  “Well, maybe she is though.”

“Maybe you’re a dickhead though” retorts Leanne.

“Has anyone seen Sarah?” you ask.

“I guess she’s still with Haeri.  Weird how she got picked out like that.  Why didn’t we get picked?” says Sally.

“She probably paid extra – seems like the type” David replies.

“We might get picked tomorrow” you reply.

Everyone eventually goes to sleep.  You text your parents that you’re okay and then doze off.  You sleep with some difficulty, thinking about what the next day will bring makes it hard to switch off your brain.

—–

The day starts at 8am with Moonbyul wheeling in a breakfast cart and offering everyone a choice of various cereals or raisin toast.  Everyone orders except Leanne who once again eats something that she brought with her.  You’re still the only one who recognises Moonbyul.

“Hi, good to see you!” you say to Moonbyul.

“Don’t talk to me.  Cereal or toast?” she snaps back abruptly.

“Toast, thank you.”  Moonbyul hands you some raisin toast and says nothing further to you.  She serves the others and then leaves.

At 9am on the dot Ailee walks into the dormitory.

“How are we all?” she says, smiling.

“Good!” everyone responds.

“That’s great!  Today is the first day of your vocal appreciation education!  Is everybody looking forward to it?”

“Yes!” replies the room.

“Fantastic!  I’ve brought in a computer with some songs on it!  Spend the day listening to them, and do some vocal analysis – there’ll be some questions on the songs this evening, plus you’ll get to meet new k-pop stars!”  You notice the laptop in Ailee’s hands, she sets the laptop up on a dressing table by one of the bunk beds.  “I’ll leave this with you all, meet me in the meeting hall at 6pm… and don’t forget to use the outdoor facilities, everything is there for your use!  There’s outdoor gym equipment and basketball hoops if you need a break – remember that there’s no such thing as too much exercise!  Plus the views are great!”

Ailee smiles and leaves the room.  Everyone huddles around the computer, while David accesses it for the songs.  It takes him about 10 minutes to find any songs on the laptop at all, as they’re deep in hidden subdirectories, but David eventually figures out the nuances of the computer’s search function and finds the following four songs only:

The whole room stares at each other.

“She’s kidding, right?  Vocal analysis, on these songs?” asks Amy.

You shrug and look around.  Nobody has any answers.

—–

At 6pm, everyone from the dorms is in the meeting hall sitting down on a row of chairs before a small stage – everyone except Sarah, who nobody has seen or heard from.  Ailee enters the room, to a round of applause.

“Hi everybody!  Glad you could all make it!”  Ailee smiles and waves.  “Before we get into our questions, we’re going to listen to a keynote speech from our good friend Jimin from AOA!  Everybody give Jimin a round of applause!”

Everybody claps politely.  “Why Jimin?” Amy and David ask each other.  Jimin appears from the side of the stage, takes a microphone off Ailee with a quick “thank you”, and clears her throat.  She doesn’t look as good in person as in the videos, but boy does she sound exactly the same!  Jimin then begins a speech in her characteristic vocal tone, one which you’ve never been able to stand.  You grit your teeth and bear it.

“Hi, I’m Jimin, the motherfuckin’ top madam.  It’s good to be here.

How would you feel if you knew that today was your last day on Earth?  What would you do differently?  You would probably re-prioritise your life.  Perhaps you would stay home from work or school, and spend more time with loved ones, friends or family.  Maybe you would travel, or experience something completely new.

What if you knew that something was happening, or about to happen, that had the potential to completely change everything in your life, that there was no going back from, and that you could do nothing to stop?  Would you tell everyone, or keep it a secret?  If there was something that you could do to stop it, would you?

The landscape of both Korean and international k-pop music fans is undergoing a paradigm shift.  Vocal analysis has been on the rise for the last decade, largely thanks to people such as yourselves who are spearheading the cultural movement of k-pop fans in this direction.  As a result, vocal analysis has now reached a critical point.

Cycles of analysis are ever-shortening.  The “cycle of analysis” is the aggregate time between when a note is produced by a singer, and when that same note is analysed by people who run and participate in k-pop vocal threads, forums and so on, people such as yourselves.  Due to the current wide popularity of vocal analysis, combined with the exponential growth in k-pop product and k-pop’s global reach, plus the rush of fans to study each new product that appears, all of which are exponentially increasing, mathematical models now show that we will soon reach a point called “global vocal analysis singularity”, which is when the popularity of vocal analysis is widespread and the aggregate “cycle of analysis” time drops to near zero, or under one second.  At this point it will not be possible for singers to produce a note without billions of analysts dropping all other activities to study the note that was just made.  At this point, everything ends – death by vocal analysis.

Ailee K-pop Vocal Fan Camp is committed to being proactive about reducing the risk of a “singularity event” which could stop all society from functioning.  There is something we can do to avert this fate, and that is why we have brought you here.   Thank you.

Jimin leaves the stage to polite but confused applause.  “I don’t get it.  What was that all about?” you ask.

Amy shrugs.  “I don’t know either, I honestly wasn’t really listening.  I hear that squeaky voice and I just tune out every time.  Why is she even here?”

Ailee re-enters the stage.  “Go and grab some food from the buffet, and then go back to your dorms, everyone.  You questions are waiting for you there!”

Everyone walks to the buffet and picks up a plate of food, except Leanne, who once again is not catered for.

“I’ve had enough of this!  I wrote ‘vegan’ when I applied for the ticket and they said they would cater for me, I want something to eat!  I paid good money for this!”  Leanne storms off in the direction of the kitchen.  You follow and watch what she’s doing, you can’t hear her over the kitchen noise but she’s obviously talking to the chefs about getting them to make her something that complies with her diet.  Leanne comes back two minutes later with some kind of sandwich roll in her hands.  “About time!” she says as she begins eating.

About halfway through eating the roll, Leanne starts making strange gestures with her tongue.

“What’s wrong, is everything okay?” you ask.

“Yeah, fine – I think I swallowed a hair though.  I can feel it stuck to my throat, it’s gross!  There’s not much hygiene in that kitchen!”

Leanne eventually locates and spits out the hair, and you both look at it.

“Ewww, I should report them to the health department” says Leanne.

You examine the hair.  “That hair is blonde – and long.  That’s weird.  Did any of those chefs have long, blonde hair?”

“No.  None of us do either.”

“Oh wait, except…”

“…Sarah.”

You both look at each other not knowing what to think.

After dinner you go back to the dorms, where you immediately notice everyone else is looking a bit odd.  You’re about to ask what’s wrong, but you don’t need to.  Mark shows you the question form.

“This isn’t what I expected”, says Amy.

“This is just hypothetical, right?” asks David.

Nobody knows how to fill out the form.  What do the questions have to do with vocal analysis anyway?  Nobody can figure it out, so everyone leaves it blank.

—–

No-one in the vocal camp group gets much sleep.

At 8am Moonbyul appears, wheeling in a breakfast cart and offering everyone a choice of various cereals or raisin toast.  Everyone orders except Leanne who doesn’t eat, she’s out of self-brought food.  You’re still the only one who recognises Moonbyul.

“Cereal or toast?” Moonbyul asks you.

“Moonbyul, what the hell is going on?  Please help us understand!”

Moonbyul backs away from you.  “Don’t you FUCKING ask me for shit!  And don’t use my name!  Cereal or toast?” she whispers.

You sigh.  “Toast, please.”

Moonbyul is angry, she almost throws you the toast on a plate, serves the rest of the room and then leaves.

At 9am on the dot Ailee walks into the dormitory, carrying a laptop.

“How are we all?” she says, smiling.

“Good!” everyone responds, half-heartedly.

“Did you all complete your questions?” asks Ailee.

Everybody looks at each other in nervous silence.  Ailee picks up the question forms, none of which have been filled out.

“Oh wow, none of you did any of these.  How can we continue to do the k-pop vocal camp if you guys won’t participate?”

“We didn’t know what to write”, says Amy.

Ailee sighs and approaches Amy, furious.  “Amy, are you not a vocalpedagogist or whatever the FUCK it is you people call yourself?”

Amy nods.  “But these questions are not about vocal…”

“What does it say on the top of the form?  READ IT!”

“It says vocal analysis questions, but…”

“So are you telling me that you’re willing to get up on your high horse and be a fucking expert in vocals on the Internet, but you can’t answer three SIMPLE FUCKING QUESTIONS about your life?  Is that what you’re telling me?”

Amy is silent.

“Fine, say nothing.  Here’s the laptop, there’s two more songs on it.  Get to work.  More questions tonight, plus I expect the other forms filled out completely tomorrow, by everyone!”  Ailee dumps the laptop on the dresser and storms out of the room.

After Ailee leaves, Amy says “fuck this.  Ailee is a psycho bitch!  I’m out of here right now!  Goodbye everyone!”  Amy packs her bags and rushes out the door.  Everyone else opts to fill in the form instead with just anything, hoping to pacify Ailee with results.

The next laptop is opened and David searches for the songs.  Now that he knows what he’s doing, they’re easy to find and he gets the results in under a minute.  Everyone remaining gathers around to watch.

Once again, not exactly ripe vocal analysis material, although you could probably write a small thesis on how Bom strains her notes and doesn’t connect them properly if you had to.  The other camp members listen to the songs over and over to try to figure out what Ailee might want, but you’ve given up.  You go out to the exercise yard and shoot hoops for a while, and spend some time texting your parents.  You don’t want them to worry and pull you out of the camp, you’re also trying not to worry yourself about Ailee’s tantrum so you tell them everything’s going fine.

—–

That night, there’s nothing happening at the meeting hall, so the vocal group all go to the buffet.  It’s very quiet, there are no chefs on duty this time, or anyone else around, but the buffet is full –  all the food has been prepared earlier and left waiting for you.  Everybody except Leanne grabs a plate, Leanne instead goes straight into the kitchen.

New question forms have been left on the dining table this time, you pick one up and take a look.

“Um… guys… come and take a look at this…” you say.

Your words are interrupted by Leanne screaming.  Leanne comes rushing out of the kitchen.  “It’s Amy!  She got Amy!  And Sarah!”

You look in the kitchen, Amy and Sarah’s severed heads are both sitting on the kitchen benchtop, with a large butcher’s knife sticking out of Amy’s forehead.  Some of the flesh from Sarah’s skull has been cut away into thin strips, that look a lot like the thin strips in the buffet pork tray, which all of you except Leanne have been eating daily.  It’s impossible to look at the kitchen scene or the buffet further.  Everyone except Leanne starts feeling instantly violently ill and vomiting, Leanne instead starts running in circles and panicking.  “Let’s get out of here!” she screams over and over.

You try to compose yourself while wiping away the chunks of vomit from your mouth.  “That’s what Amy tried, look how she ended up.”

“We can’t run, we have to defend ourselves!” exclaims Mark, between regurgitations.

Everybody rushes into the kitchen and raids the kitchen drawers to grab knives.  Nobody wants to touch the big butcher’s knife embedded in Amy’s skull, but the kitchen is well-stocked with knives so soon everyone has a weapon.

“There’s only one of her, there’s five of us.” says Sally.  “I think we can take her on.”

All of a sudden a loud banging noise is heard, and you are blinded and knocked back onto the floor of the kitchen.  Something has landed on your face.  You wipe your eyes, to find Sally is now with you on the ground, except that she has only half her head left.  You realise that what you just got knocked back by was possibly her exploding brains.

“Four”, says Ailee, holding a shotgun and pointing it at all of you.  “Don’t try any fancy shit.  Everyone drop the knives and let’s go, back up to the dorms.”

Ailee marches you all into the dorms, closes the door and locks you all inside.

—–

No-one in the vocal camp group gets any sleep at all, the night is spent planning how to escape.  The plan is to rush Moonbyul when she appears at 8am and make a run for it.

At 8am Moonbyul appears like clockwork, wheeling in a breakfast cart, at which point everyone makes a rush for the door.  Prepared, Moonbyul has a pistol already drawn and shoots Mark in the stomach as he’s the first person to nearly reach her.   Mark doubles up on the floor, bleeding and in pain.  You’re still the only one who recognises Moonbyul.

“Cereal or toast?” Moonbyul asks Mark.  “Don’t make me wait!”  Mark is unable to say anything and just groans in pain, so after a few seconds Moonbyul gets bored of waiting and shoots him a second time in the chest, killing him instantly.

“Cereal or toast?” Moonbyul then asks you.

“Toast please”, you reply as quickly as possible.

Moonbyul hands you a plate of raisin toast, with double the slices this time.  She serves the others, leaves and locks the door behind her.

David starts crying.  “Well that idea was shit!  What are we going to do now?”

Leanne says “Ailee arrives in an hour.  We’re probably doomed.”

However Ailee doesn’t turn up at the usual time.  The hours pass uneventfully.

—–

At 6pm Ailee unlocks the dormitory door and enters.  She’s brandishing a laptop, plus the same shotgun that she used to remove Sally’s cranium.

“Final exam.”  Ailee places the laptop on the dresser.

“…Ailee?” Leanne says.

“Yes, what is it?” Ailee replies.  You wince – you can’t see this ending well.

“Why are you doing this?”

“Do you know how much I fucking hate you vocal fans?  You’re so pathetic.  I can’t sing a note without it appearing on ten different sites with people talking about how I could have sung it better.  People with NO talent, MINIMAL AT BEST singing ability, NO understanding of the technical aspect, and ZERO creativity to do anything else besides piss about on the Internet stroking themselves off acting like they’re FUCKING EXPERTS about shit that they don’t even know the first thing about and picking apart everything.  You people are the reason why I have to overdub my voice fucking ten times on everything.  I fucking hate you all so much, you disgust me.  I wish I could kill each and every one of you, but there’s too many of you pieces of shit.”

“But… I just like voices that are resonant, what’s wrong with that?”

Ailee quickly shoots Leanne in the stomach.  “DID YOU HEAR THAT?  My shotgun barrel is 26 INCHES LONG, that’s a RESONATING FREQUENCY WAVELENGTH of 454.2 Hz! YOU FUCKING DUMB BITCH!  RESONATING FREQUENCIES ARE IN EVERYTHING!”   Leanne is already dead but Ailee keeps screaming at her.  “YOU FUCKING STUPID CUNT VOCAL FAGGOTS OBSESSING ABOUT POINTLESS SHIT!”  Ailee shoots Leanne a second time for good measure.  “LISTEN AGAIN!  THAT’S BETWEEN A4 and A#4, I SUPPOSE YOU GIVE A FUCK ABOUT THAT TOO YOU FUCKING WASTE OF SPACE!”  Ailee then storms out of the room, slamming it and locking it behind her.  You and David, now the only two left alive, both breathe a small sigh of relief that she didn’t go gun-crazy and kill you both as well.

David opens up the laptop and searches for songs.  Only one this time.

The intro seems bitterly ironic.

—–

At 8am Moonbyul appears, wheeling in a breakfast cart and brandishing a pistol.  However neither you nor David intend to try anything after yesterday.

“Cereal or toast?” Moonbyul asks.

You and David both choose toast and are given double portions each.  Moonbyul then lumps the bodies of Leanne and Mark onto the breakfast cart and wheels them away.  She also leaves behind a couple new question forms.

Both you and David fill out “yes” for all three questions without hesitation.

—–

Ailee arrives at 6pm, unlocking the door and opening it slowly.  She’s still carrying the same shotgun.

“Forms”, she says.  You hand the forms that you and David have filled out over to her.  Ailee looks them over.

Ailee sits down on the edge of the bed.  “Okay, quiz time.  I need to know that I can trust you both to do this correctly.  Anybody can fill out a form, it’s another thing to actually have a brain.   Let’s start with you”.  She points the shotgun toward David.  “I just released two new songs – what are they?”

“‘Mind Your Own Business’ and ‘Insane’“, David replies.

“Correct!  Now – which song do you like more, and why?”

David thinks for a moment.  “Well, I thought ‘Insane’ had the better vocal performance in terms of overall feel, but then I really liked the high notes in ‘Mind Your Own…”

Ailee shoots David in the face killing him instantly and spraying blood and brains all over the rear wall of the dormitory.  “Gosh, I’m so terribly sorry, that’s the WRONG FUCKING ANSWER”, she yells as David’s corpse falls to the floor, leaking blood.  Ailee then turns the shotgun towards you.  “I trust you have a more satisfactory answer?” she asks.

You think for a moment, but you’re really not sure.  “‘Insane’ was okay but I liked ‘Mind Your Own Business’ more, but I’m not sure why.  It was just a better song, I guess?”

Ailee releases her grip on the shotgun.  She smiles at you.  “Congratulations.  You are cured.”

—–

It’s the next morning and you’re on the plane back home.  You never told your parents about any of the events at the K-pop vocal camp, even though you could have texted them at any time – if they found out, they’d never let you have any freedom ever again!  Also, what could they do from another country away?  Nothing, obviously – you were trapped.  It was traumatising seeing so many people die in front of you, and not knowing from one moment to the next if you were going to live or die yourself… but there’s one thing you can’t deny, you learned a lot… and perhaps also unlearned some things.  It’s probably better that way.

You’re on your phone making a post about how you’re putting your k-pop vocal blogging on indefinite hiatus, when the passenger next to you taps you on the shoulder, to alert you to the arrival of the airplane food trolley.

“Cereal or toast?” asks the air hostess.

It’s a clear day on the beach, with just you and Qri, there’s not too many people around, the sun is shining brightly and Qri looks great in her correctly-proportioned striped top.  However, behind her sunglasses you can sense that all is not right with Qri.  You’ve been talking about the world of Korean entertainment all afternoon and as you speak, her attention wanders.  Something seems to be increasingly on her mind, and you get the feeling that Qri seems to want to tell you something profound to shake your preconceptions… but what could it be?

You have no idea if what Qri is telling you is true or not.  As long as she keeps wearing clothes like that, you figure that she can continue to believe whatever she wants to believe.

K-pop albums.  I get so many fucking questions about k-pop and albums it’s ridiculous, and I couldn’t be fucked answering any of them really, but it seems that you all really want to know everything about albums so here I go with a post about albums where I try to compile all of your questions about albums into one big thing.  I hope you all people who want to know about albums appreciate this post and I never have to answer any more questions about this shit again.

Yes, I’m aware that this post will probably backfire and I’ll now get more questions about this shit than ever before, plus a side-helping of a bunch of smartass cunts picking apart this post and telling me that I’m wrong about this or that, pointing out meaningless exceptions, snobbily telling me I’m condescending because I dare to make educational posts about things they already know, etc.  Oh well, read on and hopefully the people who strangely like my posts will be more entertained about this bullshit than I was when I wrote it and the rest of you haters will be able to restrain your natural urge to be a snobby elitist cuntosaurus.

So, what technically constitutes an album?

A collection of songs.  The very first albums were sheet music sold in a book or folder format, then when audio recording formats finally became cheap enough to able to be purchased by ordinary folk (around 1900), albums became collections of shellac discs that were usually 10″ wide (but not always) and designed to be played at 78 revolutions per minute (RPM).  78 RPM shellac was a really crap format though because they only had a playing time of a few minutes per side so you needed multiple discs to constitute an album, plus the weight of the discs was heavy and the audio quality mostly wasn’t great.  When the lighter 12″ 33 RPM vinyl format was adopted by the industry after World War II that could store nearly half an hour of music per side with generally better audio fidelity, people transitioned to this “long-playing” format, hence the term “LP” being used interchangeably with “album” from the 1940s until the late 1980s when compact discs (CDs) finally overtook vinyl as the most popular physical album format.  Albums have been issued in several formats since (including cassettes, Minidisc, laser disc and several others) but the most common physical format currently is still the CD.

10″ 78 RPM shellac records, annoyingly heavy, shit-sounding and impractical, only hipsters and your great grandparents own these

How is an album different to a mini-album, a single, or an EP? 

A mini-album is just an album with a shorter running length.  There’s no completely set-in-stone global consensus on where that line is drawn, although some countries have rules for determining if a collection of recordings is long enough to qualify as an album for chart purposes and also if mini-albums qualify or not.  Korean mini-albums average at about 6 tracks whereas a full album is usually about 12 tracks.

A physical “single” paradoxically has two tracks, the A-side (the song you bought the single for, also called the “feature track”) and the B-side, another song.  The extra song is there because vinyl has two sides and it was not much extra expense to cut something on the other side of the vinyl and give the consumer an extra track.  Singles later transitioned to CDs and are now almost exclusively digital in most markets, however this practice of giving out a free “B-side” track is still common even now as a way to showcase the artist’s less commercial material when you also buy their hit.  CD singles often have more than one B-side track.

An EP is an “Extended Play” single. The most common format for an EP is four tracks, or two tracks per side of vinyl.  Extended Play format was used for artists who released very long singles mainly in the 60s and 70s, that wouldn’t fit over the running length of one side of 7″ vinyl.  It was never the dominant format.

There’s also 12″ vinyl singles which usually have extended mixes, these are still a popular format for club DJs, plus there’s quite a few other terms like “maxi-single” etc which are mainly just record companies making things up as they go along.

What are the main differences between k-pop albums and western albums?

K-pop albums have:

• Much more lavish packaging (usually)
• Big photobooklets with lots of pages (usually)
• As many pervy and slightly creepy photos of your biases that will fit into the space (usually)
• Horrible liner notes where the performers thank God over and over insipidly (usually)
• Photocards and souvenir items (sometimes)

Oh and they come with a CD mostly, but nobody uses that bit, so just throw it away or use it as a fancy reflective drink coaster.

The closest equivalent to Korean albums in terms of physical presentation is the western “box set”, except in the west the “box set” isn’t the regular edition of the album but a special version.

Tiffany’s god-bothering thank-you notes aren’t unusually extreme by k-pop album standards – this emphatic bubblegum-pink religious tract is from the “Oh!” album

Why are Korean albums so insanely packaged?

K-pop companies have worked out over the last few years that it’s only die-hard fans who buy physical albums these days, so they’re meant to be something special for the fans.  Insane packaging of k-pop albums really kicked into high gear as a standard practice at the start of the Golden Age (2008-2011), before this CDs were usually in standard jewel cases.  Companies now realise that most fans actually already have electronic copies of the music and are buying the physical product chiefly for the photobook, for the same reason that many people who buy vinyl albums these days never play the vinyl and often don’t even own a record player – people like to fetishise the package, and fans like to feel like they’re supporting the artist by buying something extra.

I have a Korean single and it’s called a “single album” but has only two tracks on it, huh?

Korean singles tend to use the word “album” to refer to the book that comes with the CD rather than the CD itself which harks back to the original pre-shellac 19th century definition of an album as a collection of pages, in the same sense as a stamp collector’s album.  Given the substantial amount of content in a k-pop single’s booklet vs what you average western CD booklet has, this kind of makes sense.

After School Blue’s “Wonder Boy” is a “single album” with only two tracks on the CD, but the photobook is just as big and filled with pages of pervy/weird/creepy photos as any full k-pop album.

What’s a repackaged album?

Sometimes after an album is released, a k-pop agency will decide to release a follow-up song to promote the album again.  The catch is that the follow-up song isn’t actually on the album, so they release the same album again a second time, with a different booklet, a different name and with the extra song included.  The plan is to make hardcore fans buy the same album twice.  SM, Woollim and MBK are all notorious for doing this, but they’re not the only ones!

The “repackaging the same stuff with different extra content to grab a second sale” practice actually started in the American market, with CD singles – a company would release a feature track with a couple B-side tracks, then release another single with the same name and the same A-side but slightly different artwork (usually just a different colour) and different B-side tracks.  Diehard fans would want ALL the different B-side tracks so they would buy the single twice, and because both singles had the same name it counted in the music charts as purchases against the one item, increasing theoretical likelihood of good chart positioning.

In k-pop, because the photobook is a large reason why people buy physical albums, a repackaged album isn’t as much of a rip-off as it might seem, as usually (but not always!) the photobook content completely changes in the repackage.

What are photocards?

K-pop albums for groups often come packaged with a special photocard of a random group member (two at most).  Not all agencies do this for every album, but many do.  Sometimes the photocards are small laminated things with rounded edges, like miniature playing card size, sometimes they are bigger.  The idea is that die-hard fans will want all the photocards, or at least more of them than one purchase will give them, so they will buy the album multiple times.  Alternatively, they might want to trade their album photocards with friends, so a conversation like this may transpire:

You: “Have you bought the new Lovelyz album yet?”

Friend: “No, should I?”

You: “Yes!  I want a Seo Jisoo photocard but I didn’t get one in mine… but you might get one, and then I can trade you for yours!  She’s the best ever cum in my life!”

Friend: “But isn’t she a puppy-kicking rapist?”

You: “No, she’s a symbol of freedom from the oppression of rumour-mongers and netizens who’ll believe any old shit they read on a gossip site, laying bare the stupidity of the electronic hive-mind and serving as a shining beacon leading the way for society to ascend into a bright future.”

Friend: “Okay, I’ll buy it just to shut you up and also so I don’t ever have to hear that ‘best ever cum in my life’ joke again.”

The net result is the same – somebody buys the album a second time.

Just to confuse the issue, some k-pop albums have the actual booklet divided up into separate cards rather than bound pages.

The best ever photocard in your life.

What’s a “limited edition” album?

“Limited edition” is ultimately sketchy press release jargon that means nothing, because while it may seem legit, all that “limited edition” in practice means is “limited to however many we can sell”.  For instance, T-ara’s “Paris & Swiss” photobook and CD set had an initial run of 7000 copies, a “limited edtion” – however initial orders for the package worldwide exceeded 7000, so the company just said “fuck it” and printed more of them.  They could sell more, so they did, and why wouldn’t they?

How many k-pop albums do you own?

The amount of k-pop albums I own is usually holding steady at about 100 at any given time.  I buy a lot but I also give away a lot of them for radio competitions.

My k-pop bookcase at home. There’s another shelf that didn’t fit on this picture, and a few others that are so big that they don’t fit in the bookcase at all.  Have fun squinting heavily and spotting your faves!

Are k-pop albums worth buying?

It depends!  They’re worth it for me because they’re great items for prizes.  As for whether it’s worth it for you, be aware that the most sensible outlook is to buy it for the photobook.

What about the music on k-pop albums?

What about it?

Well, is it any good?

Generally the feature tracks are always the best tracks and you’re wasting your fucking time buying the entire album for the actual music because the rest of it is all bullshit.  There are some notable exceptions to this, but usually this is the case.

Are there any other reasons why I should be wary of buying k-pop albums specifically for the music?

Yes, those of you foolishly planning on this would do well to be aware of the following sneaky cao ni ma record company tactics:

• Padding albums with instrumental mixes – sure, aspiring singers or players might want an instrumental mix to practice over, but most people don’t.
• Remixes that aren’t – watch out for the “remix” which isn’t any different to the original apart from a slightly different intro or middle eight bars.  MBK love doing this one.
• Foreign language versions – do you really need a song in two different languages you can’t understand instead of just one when the songs are otherwise identical?
• Autographed albums – while it’s nice to get the scribble of your bias on your album, if he or she signed a thousand albums like this, the value of yours hasn’t actually increased that much but the value to the label for them to do this is huge.  Say an album sells for $5 more with a signature and your bias spent an hour doing 1000 signatures, that means for one hour’s pen-work he or she just made the label $5000.

Copies of T-ara’s AND&END album during 1000-album signing before being shipped to retailers.

Tracklist for Stellar’s “Marionette” mini album. First track is a really short intro. Track 6 is an instrumental of track 2, track 7 is a not-very-different remix of track 5. At first glance it looks like you’re getting seven songs here but you’re actually getting only four.

Why do k-pop albums mostly suck so much?

The problem isn’t with k-pop albums, it’s with pop albums in general.  Most pop albums around the world suck just as much.  To understand why, we have to look at the methodology that creates a pop album.

In the early days of contemporary pop album making, the album constituted the hit group’s A-side, their B-side, and just enough extra “filler” material to get the album over the line so it technically constituted an album for contractual and chart purposes.  These extra “filler” songs would usually be ballads, for the simple reason that ballads have a slower tempo, which means that you can stretch the same amount of song material over a greater length, increasing the chance that you’ll need less of these songs before the total running length of the entire album meets contractual requirements to be called an album.  If you go to any albums that you own you’ll notice that this is true and that the slow songs usually have a greater running length.

Another common variation is the “rejected singles” album, which consists of the A-side, B-side, and the other songs are all tracks that were submitted by songwriters and producers for feature track material but which didn’t make the cut.  It’s easy to spot an album like this, every track is by a different producer!  When a pop album is being made these days it’s quite common for the executive producers to spread the word that they’re hunting for feature-track material through song solicitation services.  The best one gets used, the “almost but not quite” ones get album filler status.

It wasn’t really until the 1960s when companies started to think of an album as a cohesive whole with different tracks that complement each other or at the very least which are meant to sound as good as the feature track in their own right.  However this isn’t always the objective that’s wanted, it’s usually “corporate wisdom” which dictates whether pop albums go down this path of not.

It’s worth telling the story of singer K to understand how market pressures may not be always conducive to creating a decent pop album.  Singer K was a newly debuted female singer who had a massive, MASSIVE hit about two decades ago with a hugely iconic first single that was everywhere, and I mean everywhere, globally, a #1 hit in several countries, if you’re between the age of 25 and 55 and have listened to radio at least once in your life I guarantee you that you’ve heard of this song even if you don’t remember who sung it.  We’ll call this iconic global pop hit song “Smoking Cock“.  Once “Smoking Cock” was released, the singer and her mastermind producer J got a big pat on the back by the record label execs who said “rightio, good job team, now get to work on making an album that is just as good”, so for the next few months singer K and her shit-hot producer J who co-wrote “Smoking Cock” with her slaved away making a fantastic album.  The result was great – each track was a little bit different.  Nothing sounded quite like “Smoking Cock” (which while a good song was certainly very one-dimensional), instead each track on the album fit together nicely as a whole and showcased a different unique side of singer K, essentially setting her up for a fate as a critical darling with a long-term career (think Tori Amos, Bjork, etc).  Producer J was immensely proud of what he had achieved with singer K and presented the final product to the label:

Label: “Nope, I’m sorry, we don’t want it.”

J: “What?”

Label: “There’s no Smoking Cock part 2 here.  What are we going to release as a follow-up single?  It’s too intellectual and fancy, please start again and give us some hits.”

J: “But we put our heart and soul into this and it’s great!  This album will set her up for the long term!”

Label: “We need another Smoking Cock.  This album doesn’t have it, don’t waste our time and money.  We gave you clear instructions!  This is a business!”

J: “Nope, I’m not doing it.”

Label: “Then we’ll hire someone else if you don’t want to do what you’re told.”

J: “Fine, fine… I’ll get you your fucking hit…”

Producer J reluctantly scraps the album and starts again from scratch at the insistence of the label, this time working with the clear instruction “we need another Smoking Cock or GTFO”.  Singer K is also unhappy as she also loved the initial album, but she cooperates in the hope that it will all work out in the end and maybe if she maintains her high profile they’ll get the leverage to do what they want at some point down the track.  With both the singer and producer having lost their creative focus, the resulting album is a weak patchy mess, a collection of songs that all sound more or less the same, similar but slightly inferior versions of “Smoking Cock”.  The album is released and does poorly critically, landing singer K with an undeserved reputation as a one-hit wonder who got lucky with “Smoking Cock” and doesn’t know how to do anything else, which of course only pours salt on singer K’s and producer J’s wounds as they know this isn’t true in reality.  The album does well commercially, but disappoints the music-buying public who were getting a little worn out from overexposure to “Smoking Cock” and was hoping for something a little different from her album.  As quickly as her success came, the public stopped listening.

Producer J goes back to the label and says “I told you so!”  The label says “okay, well the first album was a hit so for the second album you can do what you want”… but by this time it was too late.  K and J are now given free reign, and the second album was the departure that they always wanted to make, but by this time singer K had gone dead in the marketplace, nobody was listening and the album completely flopped.  The label then cut their losses and removed singer K from the roster.  The label simply had no thought about grooming singer K as a long-term artist in the first place, they just got addicted to those quick “Smoking Cock” bucks.

But there are exceptions in k-pop, yes?

Yes.  The better albums in k-pop usually happen when one artist gets to work with one producer, or a small group of producers consistently AND those producers show the ability to write decent songs or have a consistent vision driving all the songs.  Another exception is when the album has a really good concept that unifies all the songs.  The worst albums are usually a different producer on each track, or just a ton of shit ballads clogging up the second half of the album for reasons previously mentioned.

Name some good albums, please.

Oh god.  If I must.  I do this with extreme hesitation because I don’t want people to use this post as a lightning rod on forums to champion their biases and I also think people give my opinions on music way too much unwarranted importance.  It’s only one person’s opinion, calm the fuck down.  However if I don’t answer this, cunts will keep on asking me until I do so let’s just get it out of the way.  Just a few examples of k-pop’s rare decent albums (pictures not to scale):

T-ara – Absolute First Album – very good album, most tracks are great and the same producers worked with most of them.  “Breaking Heart” repackage also exists with two extra songs but inferior packaging.

IU – Modern Times – retro 1930s/40s concept unifies the collection.  I think there are two different repackages for this album that you can get, but the extra tracks suck.  Not sure how the actual package differs.

Wonder Girls – Reboot – retro 80s concept unifies the collection, the best tracks are great, oddly the feature track is actually one of the worst tracks on it.

f(x) – Pink Tape and Red Light – f(x) get a bit more scope for unusual content than other groups on SM due to their different marketing flavour, therefore less generic ballads and more unique pop songs that can stand on their own.  Fans will notice how when f(x) perform on shows they often do non-feature tracks.

2NE1 – To Anyone – same producers for most of it once again, plus they were actually on-form back then and could write things that didn’t go SWAGSWAGYOLOYOLO.

That will do, it’s enough.  You can discover your own good and bad k-pop albums (mostly bad).  And let’s not forget the one mini-album review that I did and will hopefully never do another of.

What about if I’m a rational person who is buying the k-pop album only for the pretty packaging?

It’s worth nothing that different labels tend to package albums slightly differently.  Here’s what I’ve noticed from the copious amounts of physical product buying that I do:

SM – always top quality packaging in terms of appearance but frequently impractical as fuck.  Good luck working out how to get the CD out without damaging everything around it.  You will always get a photocard.

Girls’ Generation – “The Boys” album.

YG – weird boxy packaging and other inconvenient gimmicky shapes that make filing a pain but at least you can always find the CD quickly.  YG love metallic and weird looks.  In a earthquake that destroys your bedroom your k-pop CDs will probably emerge from the rubble unscathed.

2NE1 – “second mini album”.

JYP – not as insane as YG or as annoying as SM, size/scale of the packaging seemingly directly related to how much money the group is making!

miss A – “Touch” mini album.

MBK – consistently amazing and generously chunky photobooks for T-ara, smaller packaging for everyone else.  They know which side their bread is buttered on.  Expect hilarious Engrish usage.  You will not get a photocard unless it’s a Japanese edition.

Lots of T-ara albums.  Note the size of the bookcase needed to display them!

Woollim – neat-looking but a pain in the ass to actually do anything with other than look at, similar to SM.

Lovelyz – “Girls Invasion” album.

CUBE – random as fuck, no discernable pattern to anything, complete lottery pick as to what you get.  If you’re really lucky there might be a CD in there, have fun getting it out once you find it.

4Minute – “Volume Up” and “4Minute World” mini albums.

Starship – big pages, so you can fap or cut it out and pin it up to your locker.  Thoughtful.

Inside Sistar’s “Touch N Move” album.

Pledis – singles are in crap jewel cases, albums are in whatever their visual designer thought up after he rolled out of the wrong side of the bed that morning.

Orange Caramel “Lipstick” album and photocard.

Smaller labels will sometimes go for DVD-size cardboard cases and the really stingy ones will use an actual plastic DVD case or a CD jewel case, but you’d be surprised how many smaller labels actually have quality packaging that’s just as good as the more well-known labels.  Japanese editions are almost always in standard (western) sized jewel or cardboard cases, probably because Japan still has a heavier emphasis on physical product that actually sells in reasonable quantities and Japanese retailers don’t want to deal with finnicky-shaped boxes.

Is k-pop album packaging expensive or tricky to make?

Depends on what’s used.  It’s a complex area that I could devote a whole separate post to (but won’t).  Some basic rules:

• Colour printing is up to three times as expensive as black and white printing.  Black and white is rarely a purely aesthetic choice, it’s usually used to cut costs.  Note that pure black and white is not the same as grayscale (shades of grey), there’s an expense difference there also.
• Standard CD and DVD sized cardboard and jewel cases are cheap because they are a standard format that most people use, economies of scale at factories making such items means less costs.
• Economies of scale also mean that companies which move many physical units such as SM pay little per unit for their custom EXO packages for example.
• Graphic design and printing of packages is time-consuming and the number one cause of delayed album releases worldwide.

Three examples of innovative English usage from the booklet of Gangkiz’ “Mama” mini album.

Why do k-pop albums have so much English use in them?

For the same reason that English crops up in the songs themselves, English is trendy in Korea.  The more an album is being pitched to young trend-followers, the more English use you can expect in both songs and album art (so for instance, trot and ballad albums aimed at older audiences within Korea often have relatively little English compared to the latest boy-band release).  Also some English helps the albums to sell internationally and it’s easier for filing and sorting when dealing with multi-regional shippers who are used to dealing with English-labelled product.

The rear covers of Big Bang’s “Still Alive” album, and trot performer Tae Jin-Ah’s “I Love You Darling/LA Song” album. Note the differing quantities of English usage.

Where can I buy kpop albums?

Kpopalypse recommends YesAsia who are reasonably cheap (comparable to western album cost) and so far have never fucked up any of my shipments, they also give free shipping to my country if I buy over a certain amount.  I’ve heard KTown4U (previously known as DVD Heaven) is also good with reasonable costs although I’ve never tried to buy from there.  I don’t recommend Amazon, I find their shipping times to be crazy and often things arrive damaged, but people from the Americas might have a better experience.  I also recommend staying away from EBay and secondhand sellers.  Do you really want a package someone else has already fapped to?

–

That’s it for this post!  Hopefully you’ve enjoyed this excursion into k-pop albums and never feel the need to ask another question about them again ever!  Yay!

Some of you Americans out there have stopped shooting each other long enough to notice that certain k-pop videos are blocked on YouTube.  So, what’s going on?  Why is this happening?  Is there justice in this world?  How will you survive?

I’ve never made a post especially catering to my American readers, but they represent a sizeable minority of Kpopalypse readers so here’s a little post just for them!  Yay!

Here’s a video of Lovelyz’ “Ah-Choo”.

What a great song.  Pity you can’t watch it if you’re American, as Woollim channel is blocked at the moment in the USA (although it may be fixed by the time you read this, see below), and they’re not the only ones.  So why is this happening?

Until recently, all YouTube content was free to watch, but anyone who was uploading content and agreed to have paid advertising randomly inserted before or during their videos could earn a small sum of that advertising revenue from YouTube themselves.  The amount of money possible to earn isn’t that large – Psy earned about US$2m from two billion YouTube views, so assuming that’s the normal kind of rate, 1 million views would get you $1000, but even that’s an optimistic figure to base other people’s earnings around because an ad attached to a Psy video is probably “worth more” than an ad attached to Spica or Mamamoo or your friend’s shitty self-consciously forced, overacted v-logging.  However a little bit of money is better than no money, so most content providers who get decent web traffic signed on for this enterprise.

Despite all this advertising everywhere, YouTube actually doesn’t make any net profit and never has, so some bright sparks at YouTube thought it would be a good idea to launch a new subscription-based model called YouTube Red to help change this.  For $9.95 per month, YouTube Red subscribers get the following:

• No advertising (because they hope like hell that you haven’t heard of AdBlock Plus)
• The ability to watch YouTube in the background on a mobile device (because watching a video while not watching a video is important)
• Exclusive video content (which at the time of writing hasn’t yet been created but it involves shit v-loggers overacting again)
• New Hitomi Tanaka webcams each week EDIT: sorry I was thinking of RedTube.

Of course you’re an intelligent, streetwise k-pop fan and so you’re not going to want to pay for any of this fucking crap, you just want to watch Lovelyz and Infinite videos, but you can’t.  However YouTube says that their video experience shouldn’t change for people who watch for free.  So… why has it changed?  Here’s where it gets a little complicated and hopefully I can explain this in a way that isn’t as confusing as Kei’s headwear choices:

The problem is that content creators who have already signed up to the existing ad-carrying deal mentioned above now have to resign to a new deal so that anyone who is subscribed to YouTube Red can have ad-free status and is legally exempt from having to carry their advertising that it was previously agreed all users (without AdBlock Plus ahem) would see.  Most content creators have signed this agreement happily, but not all of them.

If a content creator doesn’t agree to the new terms, this means that YouTube can’t legally make their video available to ad-free YouTube Red subscribers, which means that anyone on the new subscription deal paying $9.95 actually gets less content than free users do, rather than more!  This obviously makes YouTube look like a bunch of fucking morons, and since YouTube probably doesn’t like looking like a bunch of fucking morons, they have decided to level the playing field for their userbase by setting the videos to private of anyone who doesn’t agree to the new terms, therefore YouTube Red subscribers and normal viewers both get the same (crippled) access to existing content rather than YouTube Red subscribers getting slightly less.  So your access to certain k-pop videos has been revoked because YouTube have backed themselves into a corner with existing agreements and now need to legally weasel their way forward.

However, don’t lose hope!  Three things to keep in mind:

The situation is probably temporary as fuck

The main reason why labels such as Woolim, Brave Brothers, J-Tune Camp and others haven’t signed onto the new deal is probably language barrier, they likely just didn’t know what the fuck it all meant.  Let’s be honest, do YOU read carefully and respond to every piece of bullshit that Microsoft, Google or whoever throws into your inbox?  Expect most if not all of them to sign onto the new YouTube Red deal over the next few days once they realise that there’s an impact to their viewer base going on.  K-pop companies like having international fans and they won’t want to jeopardise that, and once they agree to the new deal their videos will be unprivated and you can recommence fapping.

There are ways around this shit

Ask the Germans who have had pretty much all of YouTube’s music content blocked since day one.  The YouTube Red blocking only affects USA viewers right now so a proxy server can make it look like your computer is from another country (just don’t pick Germany).  There are plenty of proxy services to choose from, just don’t use Hola which is a piece of shit that allows you to be held legally liable for other people downloading illegal stuff.  Lots of users recommend Tor browser but to be honest Kpopalypse is not an expert in this area, other sites may be more helpful however.

In a worst case scenario k-pop agencies will rise to the challenge

Unlike the Japanese market, Korean agencies value the newfound global reach that k-pop’s first Golden Age gave them and actually want you to watch their shit for free.  Most companies host their videos on more than one channel, and if YouTube tanks completely for their purposes by paywalling everything and the cat you can expect to see k-pop agencies take up a different streaming service in response like DailyMotion, Vimeo or something else.  You can also watch k-pop videos on Korean video portals, if you can navigate them.

Here’s Lovelyz’ “Ah-Choo” on the 1thek channel.  If the video link earlier didn’t work, this one might, because unlike Woollim, 1thek has agreed to the new YouTube Red terms.

See, not so bad after all!  Now you Americans can get back to the important things in life like eating apple pie and shooting things.  Yay!

Welcome to the first edition of a brand new series, Kpopalypse roundup!

A SHORT INTRODUCTION TO KPOPALYPSE ROUNDUP

One of the takeaways of my Caonima Activity Survey is that Kpopalypse readers would like more content and especially more reviews.  Waiting a whole year to find out what I think of new songs is certainly pissing some of you off.  However, Kpopalypse readers also don’t want to lose the unique flavour of what makes Kpopalypse blog what it is, have new content replace existing postings, or for me to copy or double-up on content that you can get on other blog sites without making it uniquely Kpopalypse somehow.

The solution I’ve come up with is to have a bonus weekly post that’s tied specifically to the Kpopalypse radio show, where I run through each of the new releases that I played on the show and what I think of them.  I used to post videos of most of the new songs I’d play each week on the Kpopalypse Facebook page, but instead I’ll post them here.  This way, the post won’t take up any more of my own time than the Facebook postings did so this new content means the total amount of Kpopalypse postings will increase, PLUS it’ll satisfy radio listeners who can have everything in one nice neat spot AND people who don’t give a shit about my radio show but just might like to know what I think of the new stuff that came out over the last week will be happy too.  It’s a win/win/win!

Some things:

• These posts will be short with very little thought put into them compared to my usual posts!
• Regular radio listeners will know that generally speaking I do NOT play to my own personal music taste but try and give a broad cross-section of everything, so expect a range of opinions, not just “I played this because I liked it” because how often I play songs I dislike might surprise you!
• These roundups are not meant to be complete, I won’t be focusing on EVERY new release, only the ones I played on the show.
• Requests will never feature in the Kpopalypse roundups unless they’re also new releases that I was going to play anyway.
• These posts will not feature anywhere else apart from Kpopalypse blog.  Also, as minor posts they also won’t feature in the Kpopalypse article index.

Let’s get started!

NEW RELEASES 26/10/2015

Twice – Ooh-Ahh

I’m not keen on this.  It’s Shannon Williams’ great “Why Why” ruined with too much random noise and cheerleading clutter.  Also how many times is k-pop going to re-do T-ara’s “Lovey Dovey” Zombie MV?

DIA – My Friend’s Boyfriend

To some extent this song suffers from the same problem as the Twice song, there’s just too much going on.  There’s a great song here but it’s lurking under 57 layers of noise so nobody can hear it.  I still liked this better than the Twice song, and it’s also the best DIA song so far by a wide margin, but listening to this wears my ears out.

SHINee – Sing Your Song

A pedestrian ballad for the Japanese market, I think it’s pretty safe to say that only SHINee fans will appreciate this.

IU – Twenty-three

IU seems to be heading towards Lim Kim territory with this one and I’m so not into it.  The snide video and lyrics poking fun at her public image are great and she looks better than ever but the song is the kind of unremarkable disco/funk boredom that Gain does every other week.

N.Flying – Lonely

The best ballad of tonight’s show, with nice enough instrumentation and raps that don’t drag on too long but certainly it’s nothing special.

Click-B – Reborn

Click-B are the veteran k-pop group who did “Love Letter” (covered last year by Berry Good), one of the only decent pre-Golden Age k-pop songs.  This new song is nowhere near as good unfortunately, generic tough-guy k-pop 101.

Andup ft Incredivle – It’s Me

This week’s best rap song out of the ones that I found.  Actually a decent beat, something that Korea knows how to do when it feels like it.  Very short but that just means it doesn’t overstay its welcome.

BONUS SONG

Pure Boy – Wedding Day

This inexplicably uncanny video would be worthy of Kpopalypse Nugu Alert if the group didn’t have another video with over 150,000 hits.  Simple pop fun, just don’t think about it too hard.

Kpopalypse will return next week with another Kpopalypse roundup!

Hello and welcome to another edition of the officially most unpopular and nugu Kpopalypse series ever, Kpopalypse Nugu Alert!

It’s time to scout out and reel in another fresh crop of nugus!  Read on and let’s get the nugu fun started!

Idols getting into acting is a topic that divides opinions among k-pop fans as well as fans of Korean TV series, dramas and movies.  Several people just love seeing their bias on the TV screen cutting their teeth in a dramatic role, while others feel that idols generally don’t do a good enough job for them to be worthy of taking the place of regular actors and worry about job losses and financial hardship among the regular acting crowd.  Of course the economic reality is that even if their acting is sub-par, the idol’s star power will usually provide a bit of extra interest in the audiovisual content for their legions of crazy fans to get excited about so their inclusion ultimately means more employment for everyone as a lot of shows probably wouldn’t even be very economically viable at all without their star power.  Like their inclusion or loathe it, the reality is that idol actors provide an important economic function and aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

However, what about when the shoe is on the other foot, and actors who are not musicians find their way into drama music videos?  This is a side of acting which pays the bills for many Korean actors and actresses, plus another way in which the Korean music industry helps feather the nest of starving thespians.  However you don’t often hear so much about actors getting MV work and it attracts far less controversy, probably because it’s less easy for cynical media and rabid anti-fans to twist this kind of activity into the usual trendy “look at these idol bitches ruining everything again” narrative inside their own heads.  The popularity of music videos with drama content means that the relationship between idols and actors is not adversarial at all and in fact quite symbiotic, and as a result nowhere does the actor/idol debate seem more stupid than within the entertainment industry itself.

The following Korean music videos demonstrate this important and vital symbiosis by featuring outstanding acting skills, showing idols (okay, would-be idols) and actors working together, flexing their professional thespian abilities to breaking point, all in the name of entertaining you, the viewer.  Please now appreciate the following nugu videos so the efforts of these individuals are not wasted.

Blast – Git It Girl

Let’s kick things off with an outstanding reader submission.  K-pop boy group Blast invite you with their catchy slogan to “Be The Blast”, and remain true to their moniker by spending most of the required singing and dancing quota of “Git It Girl” in what looks like the inside of a nuclear reactor undergoing some routine maintenance.  They’ve also got the moves, with lots of only-slightly-awkward shuffling, a hot jacket-slide-off routine at 2:19 and an outstanding finishing-the-song move of a calibre rarely seen in k-pop nugudom.  The real star of the show here however is of course the acting, as the boys of Blast sleaze, creep and sexually harrass their way through various interactions with a lady who has seemingly had a gutful of their shit and is holding out for a more popular k-idol to throw in her chips with.  You can almost hear them say “I want you to be my blast, baby” or some other horrid pick-up line as the girl rolls her eyes and laughs at their mop-tops.  The various eyebrow-raising and bitchface expressions all throughout the video are pure gold, and the creepy dudes getting consistently rejected and never getting what they want is an unusual plot-twist for k-pop MVs where constant advances from pushy douchebag guys usually ends in a generous dose of classy-sexiness – but Blast are modern reconstructed 21st century men who get it into their thick skulls that no means no – eventually.

YouTube views at time of writing: 11755

Notable attribute: incredible freeze-frame drink-throwing skills, where’s Seungri’s towel when you need it

Nugu Alert rating: high

Tina – Happy Day

At the start of this video an old woman (who actually looks like Tina herself with a grey wig) see a young couple and reminisces back 40 years ago to a time when she and her partner were young and hot and all the technology was exactly the same.  Her first fond memory of yesteryear is of them spending lots of time having an absolute laugh-riot at an airport terminal, because airports were such hilarious places back then.  Further exciting locations include a three-star hotel with a crappy water-feature in the courtyard, a generic shopping mall and boating on an only slightly polluted river, with our couple smiling a lot and generally being really thrilled to be out and about.  I guess their day jobs when not on holiday consisted of gold-farming shitty computer games in rotating 12-hour shifts if all it took to generate such an exuberant reaction was staring longingly at some wavy bits of water.  Eventually Tina wraps up her holiday reminiscing thinking about that time they all got rip-roaring drunk and danced and sung a much better song than “Happy Day” with a bunch of losers in front of some hut somewhere.  The acting performances are outstanding and by the end of this video you’ll be thoroughly convinced that Tina and her partner are just as insane and easily amused as the video is portraying them to be.

YouTube views at time of writing: 11119

Notable attribute: at least 80% of budget probably spent on CGI heart at 3:30

Nugu Alert rating: high

Blissday – My Pride

Many years ago, I was chatting with a (sadly now deceased) friend who was a Visual Kei DJ and who had quite a strong obsession with Japanese culture generally.  She told me about how she collects “lolita magazines”, and after some confusion on my part she clarified that these magazines were not what I was thinking but were in fact completely legal and dedicated to “lolita fashion“.   She then gave me a couple of these magazines to flip through, and I spent the next ten minutes looking at hundreds of pages of lolita fashion models, all wearing slight variations of seemingly the same Rococo-inspired outfit.  One particular lolita fashion model caught my eye due to her stunning appearance and uncanny smile in every single photo.

Me:  Who is this girl?  She’s kinda cute but also kinda weird looking.

Her:  Oh, that’s [can’t remember her name], she’s a well-known celebrity and one of Japan’s top lolita models.

Me:  Her smile is strange, there’s something about it.

Her:  Yeah, you’re not imagining that.  In order to have such a perfect smile, some lolita models get surgery on the sides of their mouth where a slight upward cut is made, so after it heals it looks like the model is smiling all the time.

Me:  No shit?  That’s fucked up!  What do they do if they’re sad?

Her:  They’re not paid to be sad.

I don’t remember who the girl in the lolita magazine is these days and I definitely couldn’t recognise her from a photo, but if you’re curious to know what that uncanny surgically-altered smile looked like, you can see the actress in Blissday’s “My Pride” video make almost exactly the same smile that I remember at 0:03, 0:08, 0:11, 0:15, 0:23, 0:32, 0:35, and so on.  Trust me, you’ll get to know it well by the time this song is over.  It’s a completely captivating and terrifying performance from the actress, with her glazed-over stares directly to camera completely convincing.  The whole experiences comes off like a Blair Witch Project/Cloverfield style POV horror film of balladeering hell where you’re trapped in an endless cyclical relationship where you court this creepy girl over and over again and your mouth is taped shut so you can’t just scream out “let’s just be friends”.  All the film is missing is for the camera to pan down at the end of the video to show the iron chains around your ankles that shackle you and her together… but then, you do end up marrying her at the end of the video which is kind of the same thing.  I couldn’t even write a horror fanfiction this disturbing.

YouTube views at time of writing: 76

Notable attribute: how good an actress is she to get so convincingly fucking fascinated by a few green leaves at 2:46

Nugu Alert rating: extreme

Thanks for reading!  Kpopalypse Nugu Alert will return again at a future date with more nugus!

Recently I did a post about some of the different music genres that are explored by k-pop.  Although it wasn’t supposed to be a complete list, people still complained anyway about me leaving out their favourite genres (along with their other usual complaints).  The smarter readers would have realised that I left certain genres out for a reason, but there were a few genuine oversights that I probably should have covered.  Also, I started getting questions like this:

I thought it would be fun (for me and people who enjoyed the previous post) and annoying (for everyone else) to revisit the topic of music genres and go through some genres that k-pop explores but which I didn’t cover before.  Let’s do it!

There were seven categories of genre/style in the original post, this supplementary post adds three more.  Let’s start with:

Tango – a South American dance music genre popularised in the late 19th century and designed for couples dancing, essentially waltz with more skin contact, a fusion of folk (accordion etc) and chamber (violin etc) instruments and four beats to the bar rather than three.  Often used in k-pop when a group is going for “sexy”.

Sunmi – 24 hours – very traditional style tango in the breakdown.

4Ladies – Move – tango instrumentation applied in a more modern pop way, but enough to give a slight tango feel.

Shoegaze/Dreampop – a pop music style that originated in the UK in the 1980s, it utilises layers of wall-of-noise distortion (usually from guitars – but not always) but with the intent of a more ethereal, introspective sound rather than punching you in the face.  The genre “shoegaze” is named after the shit stage presence of many of the groups in this style who would constantly stare at their own feet instead of at the audience.

K-Trance – Hey Hey – a k-pop interpretation of shoegaze.

Drum & Bass/Jungle – an electronic music style popular in the late 90s which has since sharply fallen out of vogue, characterised by fast breakbeats and heavy synthesised bass.  Not to be confused with a song that just has heavy drum and bass sounds in it, a common point of confusion for k-pop fans and in fact a lot of other people too.  The top voted comment on Reddit about the original article correctly picked up Drum & Bass as an omission from the first article, but then incorrectly singled out Sonamoo’s “Cushion” and Red Velvet’s “Ice Cream Cake” as examples of drum and bass.  In fact neither of these songs have breakbeats or the correct fast BPM, both of which are essential elements of the style, but I can’t blame anyone for getting it wrong – actual Drum & Bass in k-pop (as opposed to songs with heavy drums and bass that are in fact another genre completely) is almost impossible to find.  Back in the late 90s when Drum & Bass was huge, k-pop was significantly behind the times and never latched onto it, and now that k-pop has caught up to western trends D&B is a genre that kind of got skipped over and left behind in the rush to be current.  As a result it’s so incredibly rare in modern k-pop to find anything influenced even mildly by Drum & Bass that it seemed barely worth mentioning, which is why I skipped over it before, but I’m mentioning it here now to satisfy the curiosity of anal completists.

G-Dragon – Who You? (MKMR D&B remix) – you pretty much have to go to remixes to find Drum & Bass in any modern k-pop, as only remix DJs give a shit about this dead style anymore.

Lim Kim – Love Game – the closest an original modern k-pop has gotten to Drum & Bass in terms of feel and tempo to my knowledge, although this song doesn’t have the required breakbeats to qualify as actual Drum & Bass.

Gospel – the result of combining the three most boring things on the planet: blues music, going to church, and vocalfagging.  I didn’t cover gospel before because I wanted my post to be actually mildly interesting to a few people on the planet, or at least to myself later on when I read my own past back to myself and masturbated.  Yet the shocking truth is that occasionally there is a gospel-influenced k-pop song.

g.o.d – One Candle – a nice person on Reddit (some do exist!) correctly pointed out this song as gospel-influenced thus saving me the trouble of tracking down and listening to a bunch of shit songs.  Thank you sincerely from the bottom of my heart for saving my ears and sanity.

Visual Kei – a Japanese metal style that copied the glam style of 80s hair-metal bands but amped up both the musical contrast and the gender ambiguity.  The main musical difference between Visual Kei and the western glam rock that it drew from is dynamic contrast – the heavier songs are much faster and heavier, and the ballads are also much more soppy and ballady.  Visual Kei is basically X Japan and a whole ton of other bands who are nowhere near as good as X Japan.

Angel Heart – Scarlet Eyes – Korea has a ton of their own crap versions of X Japan just like the Japanese do!

EVE – Agape – here’s another shitty Korean group with some terrible Evanescence-style thing.

TRAX – Paradox – SM Entertainment also has their own wimpy, conservative Visual Kei-lite.

X Japan – Kurenai – how it’s done properly.  Note that this version showcases the metal and ballad styles of Visual Kei in the one song.

Metalcore – a style of metal popular globally that combines the drum rhythms and vocal approach of extreme metal styles with the back-to-basics riffing of hardcore punk.

Diablo – Sorrow – someone asked me about if Korea had any groups like this.  Yes, they do.

World Music – all music is obviously from somewhere in the world but “World” as a genre label really means “music from places that have people with skin that isn’t white and/or is sung in a language that rich caucasian music consumers from western countries who fetishise ‘difference’ can’t speak”.  Of course nobody wants to actually say that lest they be perceived as ethnocentric or racist, so “World Music” is a nice cozy feel-good politically correct dog-whistle term with a hidden borderline-racist origin in the same sense that “R&B” originally stood for “race records” and was all about racially segregating music (see the first post).

Girls’ Generation – I Got A Boy – this is musically the most western music ever yet it still topped Billboard’s “World” chart, which should tell you all you need to know about just how ethnocentrically-motivated the term “World” is when applied to music.

miss A – Breathe – sometimes k-pop will dare to venture to include subtle influences from the music of one of those countries where people have more melanin in their skin tone and sit around in circles being all tribal and stuff…

T-ara – Yayaya – …like the USA, for instance.  This is what people mean when they talk about “world music influences”.  Of course they could just say “folk music from [whatever country’s indigenous population]” but it’s funny to watch people squirm awkwardly as they use the term “World” and not try to appear ethnocentric at the same time, so don’t tell them about this option and just sit back and laugh.  Yes I’m a terrible person.

Urban Grooves – a dog-whistle term for rap music, this cringeworthy label is used in family-friendly record stores so they can stock Eminem and NWA in a special signed section so that teenagers will know where to find the stuff without their annoying conservative parents looking at a sign that says “rap” and saying “kids, you’re not allowed to go anywhere near that shelf, I’ve heard about that rap music, I don’t want you skipping school and turning into a yoloswaggot”.  R&B is also filed under “Urban Grooves” in these stores as a decoy in the hope that your parents will see a Rihanna album out of the corner of their eye instead of MC Buttrape if they decide to inspect the shelf more closely.

Yankie ft Dok2, Juvie Train, Double K, Rap Monster, Topbob, Don Mills – ProMeTheUs – this could be filed under “Urban Grooves”.

Ailee – Insane – this could also be filed under “Urban Grooves” for decoy purposes.

Roots – a fairly useless umbrella genre term favoured by marketing gurus and dullards which means “probably doesn’t have electronic instruments, except when it does”.  Blues, folk styles and reggae all get shoved under the “roots” banner frequently.  The term is mainly used to distinguish “music played by real people on real instruments” from “that machine-generated trash”, even though a real person also built and programmed the machine, so logic isn’t a high priority here.  The term is essentially a dog-whistle that says “if you think things made of wood are better than things made of metal you’ll probably like this” and is aimed at the type of music snobs who can talk your ear off about how vinyl sounds better than CDs and MP3s but don’t listen to any vinyl because they don’t own a record player.

2NE1 & Sungha Jung – Lonely – most k-pop mixes in their original form are too high-gloss to appeal to “roots” snobs but 2NE1’s versions of their songs with Korean virtuoso acoustic guitarist Sungha Jung are probably right up the alley of the kind of people who prefer their food served on breadboards and in pots and old shoes and other bullshit like that rather than on plates like normal folks.

Techno, House, Trance etc – I deliberately didn’t cover any of this, because fans of this type of music are the worst.  Start talking about any of this stuff and wide-eyed ecstasy-fuelled nerds with bad skin and too much unsupervised computer access will start rabbiting on about Afrika Bambaataa and the Detroit house scene and getting all anal about everything.  I deliberately lumped all this music under “electronica” in my previous post just to annoy these people’s OCD tendencies, which fortunately worked like a charm, and I’ll continue to not cover any of these genres properly now.  They’re not real genres anyway for the same reason that EDM doesn’t really mean shit, the difference between one of the 296 techno subgenres and the next is just a patch on a fucking synth.

Bambino – Oppa Oppa – maybe this song has influences of techno or house.  Or maybe it doesn’t.  Fortunately nobody cares, so I don’t feel particularly obliged to write about it.

Alternative/indie/independent – a genre term that literally means absolutely nothing whatsoever.  It has no musical meaning as it can be used to describe any genre at all regardless of sound.  It also has no meaning in a business sense especially in k-pop where the “big three” who dominate the idol scene commercially are actually all independent labels.

Busker Busker – Love, At First – you could describe this completely mainstream-sounding megahit pop ballad as “alternative” if you wanted, and most k-pop fans would probably not even bat an eyelid at that.

Post-[fill in the blank] – post-anything doesn’t really exist as a style in itself, although various styles may be considered post-something if they are a newer reaction to a now-dead musical movement, for instance 90s grunge was a reaction to 80s hair rock, 70s punk was a reaction to 70s progressive rock, industrial and new-wave both started as a reaction to the first wave of punk, etc.  However this type of labelling tends to get abused as a marketing term these days and applied as “post”-genres that the songs are still very much a part of.

Nell – Star Shine – Nell would get described as approaching post-rock by some but really it’s just rock.  There’s nothing in this song that a commercial pop-rock band like U2 didn’t do in the 1980s.

Adult Contemporary – sometimes also called AOR (Adult-Oriented Rock) or even occasionally throwing its cards on the table with MOR (Middle Of the Road).  Basically, boring music for boring people.  If you’re the kind of person who is scared to click on a new YouTube link from your favourite k-pop channel lest something might offend you, then “Adult Contemporary” is for you, however the problem is defining it.  Generally considered the opposite of “alternative”, the term becomes pretty useless when you consider that most groups these days who fit into “Adult Contemporary” fit into “Alternative” as well (U2, Nickelback and REM being good examples), proving that both terms are in fact equally useless.

K.will – You Don’t Know Love – since this term has no meaning it’s impossible to give a solid example, but K.will is boring so I feel like he fits here.

Children’s music – sometimes k-pop artists and agencies don’t just treat you like a child with their dumb press releases, but they even release music for you as if you’re a child!

J-Rabbit – Happy Things – Oh, J-Rabbit, aren’t they so fun and adora… oh wait, I’m an adult.  Never mind.

H.O.T – Candy – truly terrifying, SM must really think their fans are the mental age of 3 to release something like this.  They’re probably right of course, but that doesn’t make this any less scary.  Don’t take “Candy” from strangers with weird clown clothing, kids!

That’s it!  There’s probably a few more genres that I could have included but I’m too lazy and I didn’t even want to do the ones in this post, so fuck it!  Anyway hopefully you enjoyed this post, or it entertained you, or maybe it made you upset and you can post somewhere about how upset you are!  A winner is you!

It’s time for this week’s Kpopalypse roundup!

NEW RELEASES 2/11/2015

f(x) – 4 walls

Plot twist: Sulli’s limitations have been carrying f(x) musically all this time as their songwriters have been forced to experiment and genre-bend to write around her.  With Sulli absent, so is the necessity to be unique and f(x) are now free to be just as generic as any other girl group.  Watch the video where the remaining f(x) members are (literally) lost in the woods and it’s as good a metaphor for their musical direction right now as any.  We all know to expect the unexpected from f(x) each comeback but who expected SM to turf f(x)’s signature sound completely and replace it with a bland, pissweak version of SHINee’s “View“?

Beast – All Is In U

Not to be outdone for blandness, Beast’s new Japanese single is super-unremarkable and not likely to make any Kpopalypse lists except one called “Kpopalypse’s top 30 songs he’s least likely to make a list about”.

VAV – Under The Moonlight

The “gothic boy band” concept makes a return, and it’s a competent but ordinary debut with some nice background sonics unfortunately almost completely swallowed up by too much boy-band gang vocals.  I really wish One Direction would attempt this type of thing one day just so I could laugh at the result, can you imagine how tragic it would look on them?

Kisum ft. Hwasa – Love Talk

Kisum needs to stop wasting her time with this constant soft R&B nonsense – go hard or go home, homegirl.

HIGH4 – Dead Or Alive

Definitely the best song for this group by a mile, some nice synth riffs propel this one just a little way out from generic boy-band 101 territory into something more interesting.

Ugly Duck ft. Reddy, JJJ & DJ Scratch Nice – Asia

They couldn’t even be bothered with making a proper beat for this one and instead just chained random noises together and it’s STILL in the top 10% of rap these days, that’s how awful the genre overall has become lately.

MC Mong & Daishi Dance – Secretly

Another rap ballad, sure it’s one of the better ones but without Soyou to stare at what is even the point of these.  I apologise for making you aware that this exists.

DJ Chunja & Sam Hong – Yamma

This generic dance thing isn’t that great but I just played this so you know that it exists and Korea makes this type of music the same as any other country.  This might be useful knowledge if you’re an ecstasy user travelling to Korea and worried about supply.

BONUS SONG

Casker – The Smiler

Pleasant enough electronica that doesn’t really make much of an impression on me but it’s still more interesting than the new f(x).  Watch SM finally relent and give f(x) a fandom name and a live concert like every other group ever soon because now that they’ve scrapped the group’s musical uniqueness they might as well stop pretending and write f(x)’s “mainstream but not” aesthetic off as a failed experiment.  If you’ll excuse me I’ll just be off crying somewhere, sorry Casker for not even using this space to talk about you.

Kpopalypse will return next week with another Kpopalypse roundup!

A couple years ago I wrote this post and then this other post about plagiarism in k-pop, to help the people I encounter understand the basics of what plagiarism is and is not.  I still gets tons of questions every time a new k-pop plagiarism or song ownership dispute appears, which seems to be about once per week lately.  So in the spirit of “teach a man to fish rather than slap them across the face with a fish“, as well as the spirit of “please stop asking me these stupid fucking questions because nobody cares”, Kpopalypse now brings to you a nice, simple guide to finding plagiarism in your favourite k-pop songs!  Yay!

Step 1: do you have the right song?

When checking if a song is plagiarised, it’s important firstly to make sure that you have selected the right song to begin checking with.  This might seem basic, but you’d be amazed how easy it is to be tardy with important details like this.  Let’s look at IU’s recent “Twenty-three” controversy as a case study.

Here’s a song by IU called “Twenty-three”.  IU wrote the lyrics and co-wrote the music (which could mean that she wrote most of it, or just one note, or even none of it but the producers felt like throwing her a songwriting credit anyway).  It does not contain samples of any other music.

Here’s another song by IU also called “Twenty-three”.  IU wrote the lyrics but did not write the music.  It has samples of Britney Spears in it, which has proven controversial, because although most people consider Britney Spears and her music a bit fucking basic, people will pretend that they care about whoever it’s convenient for them to pretend to care about whenever the opportunity to witch-hunt a k-pop idol comes up.

Let’s recap because I know this is probably confusing for some of you:

Now, you wouldn’t want to do something silly like say “that dirty IU bitch, she co-wrote this “Twenty-three” song and it’s got samples of Britney Spears in it, therefore it’s her fault, what a whorebag” because that would be confusing the song that she co-wrote (the first one) with the one that she did not but which has the Britney samples in it (the second one) marking yourself out as someone lacking in intelligence who confused the two different songs.  Nobody wants to be thought of on the Internet as a waste to society only good for pushing a broom in front of them, hence the importance of checking your song material before proceeding.

Step 2: do you know who owns the material?

Assuming that you’re not a mouth-breather and you’ve identified your song correctly, it’s time to figure out who actually has ownership of that song.  This is important because if we’re going to talk about plagiarism or unfair use of any kind, we need to work out who owns the property.  Watch out, this could be tricky!

Let’s look at a case study with Davichi in order to better understand the complexities involved.  Davichi are at the moment signed with CJE&M, but their old agency MBK wants to release an older Davichi song called “Moments” that Davichi recorded back when they were in MBK but which was never released at the time.  CJE&M would prefer that this didn’t happen because Davichi is now under contract with them and they want to control what gets released, but MBK are saying “too bad, so sad” and fully intend to release the song anyway.  Can MBK actually do that?

Well firstly, singing a song does not mean you own it.  Singing a song gives you precisely 0% ownership of that song.  Ownership of a song defaults to the songwriters, not the singers – so the Davichi girls can’t claim the song as theirs.  Songwriters in k-pop usually give ownership to the company however, in one of two ways:

1. As freelancers, selling their song to the company for a fee
2. As employees of the company under contract with a clause that states any creative works they make while employed by the company belong to the company

The second point is a common clause in any business, not just the music industry.  At a large corporation I used to work for many, many years ago, one of the employees I worked with made a small web-based software program to do some simple calculations for the staff.  When the supervisors saw this neat little program they told the managers about it, and the company quickly adopted the program as official procedure.  The use of this program saved the business an estimated $5 million per year, but the employee who wrote the program didn’t see any of this money at all.  All he got to show for it was an increase in reputation (“look there, that’s the guy who saved us $5m per year”).  He probably got invited to a few nice dinners at the company’s expense where the CEO spoke to him fondly but that’s probably about it.

Likewise, the Davichi song would have been sold to MBK, or created under contract and legally property of MBK.  Therefore MBK can actually do whatever the fuck they want with it, they have complete legal (and ethical/moral) rights to the song, it’s their property, fair and square.  Just because it’s a Davichi song doesn’t mean that Davichi OR their company own it.  Of course if you’re a dumb bitch with a hate-boner for MBK you may think MBK are being sketchy about it but in fact the reverse is true – MBK are playing strictly by the book and CJE&M are the ones being dodgy as fuck.  CJE&M know that MBK has a reputation as “super-thugs T-ara’s label oh my god watch out for their CEO he behaves like every other k-pop CEO ever” so they’re appealing to the public to try and put pressure on MBK to not release the song.  They have no legal way to stop MBK from releasing what’s rightfully property of MBK so they’re “asking” MBK to not release it in full view of the public, trying to sway the court of popular opinion in their favour as leverage to get what they want – ultimately it’s a con, a mild form of barely-legal extortion.

Going back to the IU situation, and IU doesn’t own the music to “Twenty-three” (the OST song) and she certainly doesn’t own those Britney samples on the track either… but, plot-twist – neither does Britney Spears.  Britney’s song “Gimme More” that IU’s songwriters sampled was actually a creation of four different songwriters, none of whom are Britney (who barely has any rights over her own fucking life let alone her songs) and it’s also entirely possible that those songwriters or Britney’s agency agreed to sell those snatches of Britney’s vocal to a sample CD company, making Loen’s clarification of where the songwriters got the samples from quite believable.  After all it’s not any actual melody that’s being sampled, just tiny snatches of talking.  It’s just as possible that the same sample CD company just lifted the Britney samples without permission of course, passing it off as their own in-house-created samples, and then sold it to various producers around the world… or it’s possible that IU’s producers just nicked the tiny vocal snatches thinking “it sounds cool and who will honestly give a fuck”.  This happens more often than you’d think.  Samples tend to end up in the public circulation if used enough, like Flavor Flav’s vocals from Public Enemy’s “Bring The Noise” which wound up on DIA’s “Somehow“.  MBK probably didn’t ask for permission to use that either… and neither did the 500 other artists who have used Public Enemy’s samples ever since Public Enemy have been making music, like Madonna’s producers, who sampled Public Enemy’s “Security Of The First World” beat for “Justify My Love“… but of course that beat wasn’t Public Enemy’s either but was originally sampled from James Brown’s “Funky Drummer“, and Public Enemy weren’t the only ones to do that.  You can find the “Funky Drummer” beat on every sample drum-loop CD ever nowadays, it’s pretty much considered public domain even though the original drummer is still trying to get royalties.  Britney’s vocal samples might yet occupy a similar “legal but not” space.

Step 3:  can you use your ears?

Netizenbuzz sadly did the stupids of the k-pop world an incredibly punishing disservice in her IU article by linking the YouTube channel of this fucking clueless idiot, some clown called “Copycat Hunter” with video after video that proves beyond doubt that neither him/her nor the legions of morons who take these type of videos seriously have any clue what plagiarism or even basic similarity actually is in practice (despite pretending to understand the theory).  I’ve covered before how “soundalikes” are not plagiarism and it’s perfectly legal to have a song that sounds very similar to another song as long as melody isn’t exactly copied, but most of the videos on this person’s channel don’t even qualify as sonic soundalikes, let alone plagiaristic ones.

f(x)’s “Rum Pum Pum Pum” supposedly sounds like Wu-Tang Clan’s “Careful (Click Click)“?  Really?  I find it hard to think of two songs more completely different in every single aspect.

Twice’s “Ooh-Ahh” and some shit Matchbox 20 song?  Shannon’s “Why Why” would have been a closer pick to the Twice song, and even that’s not plagiarism, just a soundalike… but nothing about the Twice and Matchbox 20 songs are the same apart from that they both have a chorus with some fast hi-hat in it.

It’s a pretty safe bet to say “Copycat Hunter” is completely tone deaf, because nothing else explains this person’s truly bizarre song matchups.  Of course it’s not this person’s fault if their ears don’t work but perhaps they shouldn’t be making videos as if they know something when they clearly do not.  Of course because it’s on Netizenbuzz now the stupidest of k-pop following morons all over the world will believe it anyway, so expect to see all of this person’s shit videos being bandied around as “plagiarism proof OMG!!!!!1111” for the forseeable future by every fuckwit k-pop fan who has only enough brain cells to rub together to figure out how to make a Disqus account and copy-paste GIFs.  I resisted linking the “Copycat Hunter” channel in my ask.fm because it’s so cancerous and full of shit but then I realised that Netizenbuzz had already let the contagious-disease-ridden cat out of the bag, so now I figure I’d better highlight it here as a community service so at least all of you nice readers are now armed with the tools you need to fight against this crime against reason when it appears in forums and on articles, which it will.

I know it seems crazy but for two songs to be considered the same, they actually have to… you know, sound the same.  Not just “oh gosh that seems a bit similar” or “that reminds me of that other song” or even “gee whoever wrote this new song was clearly inspired by that other song from before and are clearly trying to copy it a bit” but exactly the same for a reasonable length of time.  This means they have to fit one of the following criteria:

• Same melody for a reasonable portion of the song (at least eight bars), plus the same harmony underneath this melody
• Same words, not just similar but exactly the same, word-for-word for a reasonable length of time
• Actual samples lifted from the other song (a “reasonable portion” i.e easily identifiable as having come from the other song)

And then on top of that:

• No permission given for use, publicly or privately
• No aspect of the work given or sold to the “copyists” or the public domain by the legal owners
• Not uncopyrightable (certain drumbeats, harmony in isolation, production techniques etc cannot be copyrighted or all new music would be impossible to create without breaking copyright law)

If you can use your ears well enough to determine all of this, then your plagiarism suspicions might be valid – maybe.  On the other hand if you struggle with little details like “hearing stuff properly” and “knowing what a melody is”, maybe you shouldn’t be making a YouTube channel about it.  You fucking dumbass.

So that’s it!  Hopefully this has been an educational experience in the ins and outs of plagiarism, and a good lesson in why almost everybody that you read stuff from about this topic on the Internet is probably completely full of shit!  Now you can feel superior and smarter than them, just like Kpopalypse does!  Please look forward to more posts where I alienate myself further from the hive-mind and teach you how to do the same!  An exciting world of ostracision by the ultra-uptight cunty mainstream k-pop community awaits you!