Kpopalypse roundup is back, it’s time to take a look at this week’s new releases!

K-Tigers

Red Velvet – Russian Roulette

Wow, a Red Velvet song that doesn’t sound like their two typical flavours – “Aretha Franklin is stuck in a tumble dryer’s spin cycle and won’t fucking shut up” or “some shit S.E.S song from 15 years ago“.  Nor is it the 592nd song from SM this year that sounds exactly like “4 Walls“.  What are SM trying to do, write decent music or something.

Gain – Carnival

Get the music score for IU’s “The Red Shoes“, shove it into a paper shredder and then flatten it all out and try to reassemble it into a brand new song from the now-disjointed bits and pieces and you’ve basically got this.

Crayon Pop – Vroom Vroom

Crayon Pop’s new agency are no fools, they’re not giving this song a full music video and promotions because they know most Koreans hate good music and it would be wasted money.  Watch them release some nu-school bullshit in a week’s time as the feature track instead which will be nowhere near as good as this.

Yezi & Babylon – Chase

The usual crappy R&B style rap everyone does now, Yezi looks great wearing her boyfriend’s shirts and pretending to hate everything but she can’t save this.

Iron – Rock Bottom

Slightly more tolerable than when Limp Bizkit does it, but maybe that’s just because I can’t understand the words so I don’t know how cringey he’s being.

SM & Bana – Pit A Pat

Here’s an electronica thing from 20 years ago rebadged with the SM logo and given a very slight pop makeover so it doesn’t alienate the “I’m a boring person” demographic too much.

Bobby – Holup!

I know he’s trying to be all tough and shit but when I watch this I just keep thinking about him loading boxes into the car in that Hi Suhyun song and feel like telling him that there’s still room and he should get back to it.

Mino – Body

One of the best looking MVs ever in my opinion, like Hyomin’s “Sketch” but with better colour-matching, pity about the song.

Mobb ft. Kush – Hit Me

Unfortunate name that is inevitably going to draw comparisons to Mobb Deep, but then maybe it fits because neither of them are any good when doing stupid pop rap.

BONUS SONGS

Mobb – Full House

Of course I’m being unfair, Mobb Deep were never anywhere near this bad, even at their worst.

Min Chae – What Can I Do

Mazzy Star on too much valium, not that they weren’t already on too much valium.

Ksuke & Amber – Breathe Again

Wow, Ksuke and Amber are practically dopplegangers, which is kind of cool, you can play “where’s Ksuke” as you watch.  Pity this song is also a doppleganger of just about every “yolo synth line” k-pop song out there right now.

I.O.I – Liiv

Some bullshit advertising song for some phone or maybe it’s something that you access on the phone fuck I dunno.

Silla – Leave You

Ridiculously blatant pornography doesn’t help a mediocre song.

Nell – Vain Hope

Sorry Nell, “ok look we added a synth line to our usual boring Coldplay rock” does not equal “music I actually give a shit about”.

Zizo – Coming Home

The sort of beat that in 1994 would have been cast into the “elevator music” bin straight away by anyone with common sense and a love of hip-hop.

K-Tigers – Arirang

K-Tigers continue to be the better version of JJCC, which isn’t saying much but the effort to realise JJCC’s concept correctly is appreciated.

Huh Gak, Plan A Boys – Begin Again

More porn.  Do you like Asian guys with dimples?  Chubby guys?  Guys why read love notes and don’t just throw them in the fireplace straight away?  Boy do I have a video for you.

Jukebox – Hate U

The low-budget version of Mamamoo isn’t any better, unfortunately.

Jukebox – Dad 69

Oh COME ON.  You’re making this way too easy for me.

Sugardonut – Changed

They’re never going to do another good song ever again, are they.

Wel.C – I Will Like When Do

I will like when do not.

SOME EXTRA SHIT THAT I FORGOT WAS EVEN RELEASED BECAUSE IT WAS SO FUCKING CRAP, THAT YOU PEOPLE REALLY WANTED ME TO REVIEW FOR SOME UNKNOWN REASON

Keith Ape ft. Jedi P – Diamonds

If you think you’ve got problems or low self-esteem, just imagine waking up every morning and saying to yourself “I’m Keith Ape”.  Trust me, life is better than you think.

Moran Lee – I’m Not Okay

I’m all for a bit of feminist influence in a country that could probably use some, but at least get the soundtrack right.  If you want to make people more sympathetic to the plight of women I suggest “try not boring them to fucking death” would be step 1.

Microdot ft. Jessi – Talkin ‘Bout

Have you guys seen that clip yet where Jessi tells some guys on a variety show that she has fake boobs and they’re all too polite to say “yeah, no shit” so they all just pretend that they had no idea?  Then she’s like “what… you thought these were real?”  Sorry but there’s no punchline to this story I just thought it was more interesting than the shitty song that I’m sure nobody cares about.

That’s all for another Kpopalypse roundup – more next week!  In the meantime, there’s still a few days left to do the latest Kpopalypse survey if you haven’t!

I’ll post full results of the latest Kpopalypse survey later, but one of the big requests that is emerging is that people really want me to write a post about song structures in k-pop.  So, here it is!

Pop music is called pop music because it’s designed to be popular, it’s there to capture the hearts, minds and genitals of listeners who hopefully throw their money, time and adulation at the people involved.  Whether a given piece of pop music succeeds in the practical application of this design or fails is another matter, but regardless of the outcome it’s the desire of every person writing pop music to write something that at least has the potential to be as popular as possible.  Thousands of pieces of popular music have been written over the last few hundreds of years, and in the interests of commercial and sexual success the better songs that struck a chord with the populace were duplicated with minor variations while the shittier songs were consigned to history’s dustbin.  Through this evolutionary process of trial and error, certain pop songwriting conventions emerged, which can be summed up as follows:

• For a piece of music to be popular it must have a catchy bit that sticks in your head, this should probably be repeated a fair bit so it has ample opportunity to lodge itself in there
• There should be at least one other main section with a different kind of bit so listeners don’t get too bored of hearing the same shit over and over
• The longer the piece is, the more extra sections are needed to maintain interest

Since most people who write songs want more people to listen to them rather than less people, these conventions are quite common across many genres. Classical music even had special funky names for them:

Binary form – A-B

Where A is the main theme, and B is an alternate theme.

Ternary form – A-B-A

Where A is the main theme, and B is an alternate theme, but then it goes back to A at the end.  Most nursery rhymes follow either binary or ternary form, or a similar variation A-A-B-A.

Rondo form – A-B-A-C-A

Where A is the main theme and the other letters are alternate sections.  Each time after an alternate section finishes, the song returns to the main theme of A.  There can be any amount of extra sections, so A-B-A-C-A-D-A is a possibility, repetition of alternate sections is okay too so you can have A-B-A-C-A-B-A etc.  A popular form for waltz dancing, where A was usually the catchy upbeat section with the big melody and rhythm that you’d dance to the most vigorously and the other sections were usually a bit lighter in tone so you could have a break and not wear yourself out.

Sonata form – A-A’-A

Where A is the “exposition” where the theme is established, A’ is the “development” where the theme is altered heavily, often with the use of modulation (key change) and the final A is the “recapitulation” where the original theme returns, sometimes beefed up a bit with extra instruments or whatever but essentially sounding much like it did at the start of the piece.  A popular long-form classical-period structure.  Think of it as “jumbo ternary form” and each section within it would often also be subdivided into A-B-A ternary forms or similar.  So the final result might be something like A-B-A-A’-B’-A’-A-B-A (an oversimplification, but you get the idea).

Theme and variations – A-A’-A”-A”‘-A”” etc

Like the sonata except the theme never returns in its original form, instead it just keeps getting changed in different ways throughout the duration of the piece.

All of the above structures have one thing in common, they all have a “catchy section” (A) and the other stuff that isn’t the catchy section (A’, B, etc) is there to progress the song in different ways, essentially telling a musical story of sorts (whether actual lyrics are present or not).

Pop music uses similar ideas, but differently:

Chorus – the catchy bit, roughly analogous to A in the above classical examples.  The bit with the big melody that you remember, that gets played a lot during the piece.  If the pop song is a good one, this is the bit that gets stuck in your head later.  This “stuck in your head” bit is also known as the “hook”, because it’s the part that hooks you into the piece.

Verse – the other main section, that in a pop song tends to have different lyrics each time.  If in a song with lyrics, the verse is used to “tell the story” of the song, while the chorus drives home the “main point”.

Pre-chorus – sometimes the chorus has a little section that builds anticipation before it starts.  Essentially the pre-chorus is the second part of the verse, it’s not catchy like a chorus but it lets you know that something catchy is on the way.

Intro – a short section to introduce the piece before anything else happens.  Usually not repeated.

Outro – a section tacked onto the end that has nothing much to do with the rest of the piece.  Sometimes the intro reappears as the outro.

Bridge – an extra section, usually quite different to everything else.  Sometimes includes a rap, an instrumental solo, etc.  Tends to only happen once per song.

Breakdown – same as the bridge, the term “breakdown” is commonly used when the bridge also has a tempo or rhythm change (a drop to half-speed is common).

Refrain – some songs don’t have choruses but just repeat the verse a lot.  The refrain is the final part of each verse, which essentially has a chorus-like function because it provides each verse’s “punchline”.  This is common in blues songs where the final four bars of each group of twelve bars in a twelve bar blues pattern becomes the refrain, but k-pop doesn’t tend to bother with this even when the songs are blues-based – instead they’ll just go through the whole 12 bars again with a different melody and call it a chorus.

Riff – a mainly instrumental section that breaks up other sections, basically a bookend to a verse or chorus to space things out so it’s not just fucking vocals vocals vocals all the time with no gap.  Singers need a rest sometimes, as do your ears.

Chorus+, Riff+, etc – there’s no official name for it but this refers to a part where an important element has been changed to push it to a climactic level, yet the passage is still identifiable as the chorus or the riff or whatever it is.  This usually happens right at the end of the piece.  A key shift, a change in the vocal part or a slightly altering to the instrumentation are common ways of achieving this effect.

Let’s now look at some k-pop songs and examine some of the most common structures, so we can see how multiple songs treat the same structural ideas.

STRUCTURE 1: V-C-V-C-B-C (standard three chorus)

Intro – 0:12
Riff – 0:28
Verse 1 – 0:42
Pre-chorus 1 – 0:57
Chorus – 1:12
Riff – 1:27
Verse 2 – 1:43
Pre-chorus 2 – 1:57
Chorus – 2:13
Riff – 2:28
Bridge/breakdown (rhythm change, rap) – 2:42
Chorus – 2:57
Chorus+ (melodic change) – 3:12
Riff – 3:28

T-ara’s “Roly Poly” has a common structure with most of the elements that you would see in any k-pop song.  You can summarise this structure as verse-chorus-verse-chorus-something else-chorus, and this is by far the most common type of structure in k-pop.  Let’s look at a few more examples.

Intro – 0:14
Verse 1 – 0:32
Pre-chorus 1 – 0:49
Chorus – 1:06
Riff – 1:23
Verse 2 – 1:32
Pre-chorus 2 – 1:49
Chorus – 2:06
Riff – 2:23
Breakdown (new section, rhythm/tempo changes) – 2:49
Bridge (guitar solo) – 3:06
Chorus – 3:15
Chorus+ (another rhythm/tempo change but this time over the chorus melody) – 3:32
Riff – 3:49
Outro (video version only) – 4:03

GFriend’s “Rough” is a newer song but as you can see the structure is very similar to “Roly Poly” – two verses, three choruses and some different stuff after the second chorus.  Most k-pop songs follow this structure or something very close to it.

Intro – 0:03
Verse 1 – 0:11
Pre-chorus 1 – 0:26
Chorus – 0:42
Riff – 1:11
Verse 2 – 1:19
Pre-chorus 2 – 1:33
Chorus – 1:49
Breakdown (rhythm change, rap) – 2:18
Riff – 2:33
Bridge (new melody) – 2:40
Chorus – 2:57
Outro (video version only) – 3:31

Fiestar’s “Apple Pie” also doesn’t break the rules to any large degree.  It’s a song very sonically similar to mid-period Girls’ Generation and the structure takes no chances.

Intro – 0:03
Verse 1 – 0:21
Pre-chorus 1 – 0:36
Chorus – 0:54
Verse 2 – 1:27
Pre-chorus 2 – 1:42
Chorus – 2:00
Breakdown (rhythm change, new melody) – 2:31
Chorus+ – (key change and semi-“acapella” section) – 2:57
Outro – 2:58

Lovelyz’ “Ah-Choo” also plays by the book with the same strict structure.  As you may be noticing, if anything different happens at all, it’s between the second and third chorus.

STRUCTURE 2: V-C-V-C (two chorus)

Riff/intro – 0:07
Verse 1 – 0:30
Pre-chorus 1 – 0:49
Chorus – 1:08
Verse 2 – 1:27
Pre-chorus 2 – 1:47
Chorus – 2:06
Riff/outro – 2:26

EvoL’s “Get Up” has a cut-down two-chorus structure, the third chorus (and thus the need for a bridge/breakdown to connect them to everything else) are absent.  This is a structure commonly seen in k-pop where brevity is important – verse-chorus-verse-chorus.

Intro – 0:00
Verse 1 – 0:15
Pre-chorus 1 – 0:44
Chorus – 1:08
Verse 2 – 1:38
Pre-chorus 2 – 2:07
Chorus – 2:46

Badkiz’ “Ear Attack” has an identical structure.  Note that the second verse is longer than the first verse, this is common in “two verse two chorus” songs.  As there’s no third chorus at all, the second verse is elongated, and sometimes the second chorus is elongated as well.

Intro – 0:24
Verse 1 – 0:39
Pre-chorus 1 – 1:08
Chorus – 1:30
Verse 2 – 2:00
Breakdown – 2:30
Pre-chorus 2 – 2:46
Chorus – 3:08

Pocket Girls’ “Bbang Bbang” is similar although the songwriter here made the choice to stick a breakdown in the middle of the second verse to extend it out rather than just repeat the same material for longer.

STRUCTURE 3: C-stuff-C (bookend chorus)

Chorus (intro) – 0:24
Verse 1 – 0:43
Chorus – 1:01
Verse 2 – 1:29
Chorus – 1:47
Breakdown (acapella) – 2:13
Chorus – 2:43
Bridge (rap) – 3:02
Chorus (outro) – 3:26

Oh My Girl’s “Closer” has a shortened form of the chorus functioning also as the intro and outro.  This was a popular convention of pop music in the 1960s, however it’s noticeably rarer in pop these days, however k-pop’s ongoing fascination with all things retro means that it still gets used quite a bit.  Also in k-pop the chorus is really important and the “bookend chorus” structure highlights the chorus by leading with it, so it’s seen in a lot of the really sugary end of popular k-pop idol songs.

Chorus (instrumental) – 0:19
Verse 1 – 0:33
Pre-chorus 1 – 0:48
Chorus – 1:01
Chorus (instrumental) – 1:30
Verse 2 – 1:44
Pre-chorus 2 – 1:58
Chorus – 2:12
Bridge – 2:41 (new section)
Chorus+ (acapella section) – 2:54
Chorus+ (key change) – 3:08

Orange Caramel’s “Magic Girl” has the backing instruments playing the chorus melody right at the start of the song, establishing exactly what the chorus is before the singers even get to sing it.  This was a common technique that was employed by 80s songwriters Stock Aitken and Waterman, so it’s fitting that it also winds up in Orange Caramel’s SAW tribute.

Intro – 0:18
Chorus – 0:33
Verse 1 – 0:48
Pre-chorus 1 – 1:18
Bridge (rap) – 1:48
Verse 2 – 2:03
Pre-chorus 2 – 2:19
Breakdown – 2:49
Chorus – 3:05

Sistar’s “How Dare You” is an exceptionally unusual song for k-pop and in fact all pop music in general because it showcases the chorus at the start and end of the song – and nowhere else.

Riff (intro) – 0:00
Chorus – 0:14
Verse 1 – 0:29
Pre-chorus 1 – 0:44
Chorus – 0:59
Riff – 1:14
Verse 2 – 1:29
Pre-chorus 2 – 1:44
Chorus – 1:58
Riff – 2:13
Breakdown – 2:28
Verse 3 – 2:43
Pre-chorus 3 – 2:57
Chorus – 3:12
Riff (outro) – 3:27

In Super Junior’s “Sorry Sorry” the riff is as iconic and catchy as the actual chorus, and both are established before anything else happens.  Note that “Sorry Sorry” also has three full verses, this is common in western pop but less common in k-pop where songwriters usually try to keep song length down.

Riff – 0:07
Verse 1 – 0:24
Pre-chorus 1 – 0:39
Chorus – 0:54
Riff – 1:09
Verse 2 – 1:23
Pre-chorus 2 – 1:38
Chorus – 1:53
Riff – 2:08
Breakdown/bridge – 2:23
Chorus+ (slightly changed melody) – 2:43
Riff – 2:57
Riff+ (extra sound layer) – 3:12

Another riff-oriented song, in Orange Caramel’s “My Copycat” the saxophone riff effectively is the chorus, it’s far more catchy and interesting than the song’s actual chorus vocals.  Therefore, the riff is established before anything else and is used more often, giving this song the feel of a “bookend chorus” structure even though it technically isn’t.

ADVANCED POP STRUCTURES

Okay, so that’s the basics.  Let’s tackle some more eclectic choices and see how they fit into typical song structure conventions (or not).

Drum riff (verse 1) – 0:00
Drum and sitar riff (pre-chorus 1) – 0:14
Chorus – 0:36
Sitar riff – 1:03
Sitar riff+ (added effects) – 1:17
Drum riff (verse 2) – 1:31
Drum and sitar riff (pre-chorus 2) – 1:45
Chorus – 2:07
Chorus and sitar riff combined (chorus+) – 2:34

What happens when a song is instrumental, or quasi-instrumental, i.e driven by vocal samples and effects?  Instrumental songs still have structure, and they often still have a chorus too.  Hitchhiker’s “$10” doesn’t sound like typical pop fare but still has identifiable verse and chorus sections.  This is essentially a “two chorus” structure, and it might sound weird but the building blocks of the song aren’t any different to anything else in this post.

Intro – 0:00
Riff – 0:13
Verse 1 – 0:48
Pre-chorus 1 – 1:05
Riff – 1:23
Verse 2 – 1:56
Pre-chorus 2 – 2:13
Chorus+riff – 2:31
Riff+ (extra melodic elements) – 3:05

The “deferred chorus” structure teases the chorus by either going straight to verse 2 after verse 1, or making the first chorus a “mini-chorus” or a chorus that’s missing something significant.  In the ultra-glossy end of k-pop the chorus is everything, so a deferred chorus is very rare for idol groups because they want you to hear that hook as soon as possible.  Delaying the chorus is more common in slightly less commercial genres where the chorus has less importance and/or the audience has more patience to wait before hearing a chorus.  Sugardonut’s “Imagine, Close Your Eyes” has a big anthemic keyboard riff but adds the chorus melody to it only once in the entire song, after we’ve already heard two full verses.

Intro – 0:36
Verse A – 0:51
Pre-chorus – 1:07
Bridge A (rap) – 1:27
Chorus – 1:41
Verse B 1 (same harmony, completely different melody to Verse A) – 1:57
Pre-chorus – 2:27
Riff – 2:48
Chorus – 3:02
Verse B 2 – 3:17
Breakdown (tempo change, new melody/harmony) – 3:33
Bridge B (“why you hating”) – 3:51
Chorus – 4:05

Delaying the chorus payoff in a more commercial idol song is rarely done mainly because it doesn’t always work quite so well.  T-ara N4’s “Countryside Diary” has its moments but overall sounds extremely awkward to my ear and it’s probably because the pre-chours never leads directly to the chorus but always builds up to something else instead.

Intro – 0:32
Chorus A – 0:54
Verse A – 1:13
Chorus A – 1:43
Riff – 2:05
Chorus B – 2:11 (new chorus, “I Got A Boy”)
Verse B (new melody, different from verse A) – 2:25
Chorus A+ (faster version of Chorus A at 0:54) – 2:53
Verse C (new melody, different from verse A and B) – 3:07
Chorus A+ – 3:20
Breakdown (new section, tempo change) – 3:35
Chorus B – 4:04
Bridge (new melody/harmony) – 4:19
Chorus B – 4:32
Chorus B+ (Chorus A+ and Chorus B together) – 4:46

Girls’ Generation’s “I Got A Boy” is certainly a different structure for k-pop as well (and a fucking irritating listen overall, if you’re me) but it’s not the completely random beast that it appears to be, either.  The sections at the start of the song and the sections right at the end all have a specific musical relationship to each other, which is proven at the last chorus where the first chorus is overlaid onto the second “I Got A Boy” chorus and it fits perfectly.  This type of twin chorus doesn’t really have much of a precedent in k-pop.

Intro – 0:10
Chorus B – 0:12
Verse 1 – 0:27
Pre-chorus 1 – 0:39
Chorus A – 0:53
Chorus B – 1:12
Verse 2 – 1:26
Pre-chorus 2 – 1:39
Chorus A – 1:53
Chorus B – 2:13
Bridge – 2:26
Chorus A+ (first part only)- 2:30
Chorus B+ (last part only) – 2:43
Chorus A+ – 2:50
Outro – 3:10

However believe it or not, Girls’ Generation have done it before.  Who would have thought there was a connection between “I Got A Boy” and “Oh”?  The structural connection is the use of two different choruses that are established separately and then come together as the piece progresses.  In the song’s climax, the catchiest part of Chorus A is tacked onto the finale of Chorus B.

Intro – 0:00
Verse 1 – 0:09
Pre-chorus 1 – 0:25
Chorus – 0:42
Riff – 0:58
Verse 2 – 1:09
Pre-chorus 2 – 1:25
Chorus – 1:42
Breakdown – 1:58
Chorus B – 2:26
Chorus A+ – 2:42

Stellar’s “Vibrato” follows a fairly standard structure at first, until it lets the cat out of the vagina-bag with a completely different second chorus after the breakdown.  Then the first chorus returns, but adding elements from the second chorus.

Chorus A – 0:18
Verse 1 – 0:33
Pre-chorus – 1:00
Chorus A – 1:14
Chorus B – 1:29
Verse 2 – 1:41
Pre-chorus – 2:08
Chorus A – 2:22
Chorus B – 2:36
Bridge (new instrumentation and vocals) – 2:49
Bridge+ (new vocal elements) – 3:17
Bridge++ (more new vocal elements) – 3:30

CL’s “The Baddest Female” also brings in completely different elements after the initial run through two verses and two choruses, but apart from the use of the word “Unnie” never makes any musical link between where the song starts and where it ends.

These are only some examples among many, there’s lots of other examples I could find and pull apart, but the important thing to remember is this…

Just because a song has a certain structure, doesn’t inherently make it a good or bad song.  Whether simple or more complicated structures are “better” is really just a matter of subjective opinion and what you as a listener prefer to listen to, plus song structure may not be the full story of why you like or hate a song anyway.  Songwriters try to make all song structures “work” with the material but whether they succeed depends largely on the individual who is listening.  Please don’t use this post to be an insufferable cuntface on forums and websites, it is not supposed to be a “proof that your faves are best” post, it’s merely a tool to enable those not-so-musically-trained to be conscious of structural elements as they listen to their favourite (or not-so-favourite) songs, which might then help them to understand why they personally like or dislike something, or what kind of musical preferences they have.  Although I have my own well-documented opinions on all of the songs in this post, yours may vary for whatever reason and this is fine.  Enjoy listening to k-pop and not being a stupid bitch.  Kpopalypse will return with more posts soon!

Read on for all the results of the Kpopalypse 2016 survey of caonima action!

A total of exactly 700 caonimas filled out the Kpopalypse survey!  Without further ado, here’s all the answers!

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

For some reason half of you freak out when I ask this, I have no idea why as I ask it every single survey, I thought you guys might be used to it by now, but I guess not.  I’m good, for those who asked!  Here’s some other questions and comments that people had, and my answers.

I’m always surprised at how seriously you actually answer those. I’m fine i guess. I’ve started being in a new University extremely far from my parents place. Everything is still a bit scary and I want to be healthy and shit, but i feel like i will keep eating junkfood and… please tell me to eat like a decent human being.

Eat like a decent human being.  There, that was easy.

I fill out this survey every year and I can never come up with an answer that’s funny or unique enough that will get featured because my life is boring af. Why do you think I would ever sit down to do these surveys if my life wasn’t? Send help!!

Hopefully having your answer here helps.  I also plan to entertain you with more posts for the future!

studying for my upcoming uni exam pls wish me luck oppar

Good luck!

Hi. I’m sad. My crush thinks I’m ugly. She’s probably right.

Sounds like just the reason you need to move on.

I don’t really know. I have been reading your blog since I was a wee freshman in high school and now I am a freshman in university… Yesterday, I blacked out from stress during a timed quiz and basically have been sick for the past couple days due to fatigue. I haven’t been able to read your articles in a while, but coming back makes me feel better now

Success!

How much is too much and how little is too little. Aren’t these the questions that drive us in life? Should we continue to ponder upon the enigma that surrounds our existence? Why am I writing this instead of my essay? I didn’t even write anything funny or intellectual. It might look that I am not getting my degree. Sorry mom and dad.

Boram.

I’m from Norway and thus just doing this survey to distract myself from the hungry polar bear in my backyard, surely you must have experienced something similar as an Australian.

Not quite but I nearly trod on a brown snake once.  Fun times.

Why isn’t Kpopalypse called Kpopcalypse instead? Isn’t that a more natural pronunciation?

Not for me, at least!  “Kpopcalypse” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, you’re adding an extra hard consonant in there for no reason.  Much easier to say “Kpopalypse” on radio without having to stumble across that extra C.  “Kpopalypse” is supposed to be analogous with “apocalypse” but although “apocalypse” has a “c”, it’s not worth replicating because in terms of syllable meter it lines up with the second “p” in “Kpopalypse” so to also throw the c in there too is really adding something completely superfluous, it’s awkward and jarring and that’s why I don’t do it.

fuck you

no u

I’m a bit sad: My bf thinks I’m an otaku because I listen to K-Pop and when I say that anime and K-Pop aren’t related, he says that I’m so immature and goes on raving about Muse/Vance Joy/Janis Joplin. He used to make fun of my weight, too… I think I’ll get used to it in time. Anyway, how are you oppar?

Kpopalypse pro tip: you can do better.

Omigosh hi! This is like really nice of you to ask me! I don’t even know how I was before but you like totally lifted up my mood! I’m so happy to be here!

Hi Tiffany, glad you could make it.

Hi, fucking great, cheers from Costa Rica! This has become my favorite site to read at work to get back at my bosses for not wanting to raise my salary and hire useless idiots, and also to learn about the timeless arts of Rainaism and best practices of Caonima code of conduct. In all seriousness, you have opened my eyes to how the Kpop industry works and knowing how shady and shitty it is, has made me appreciate the genre more.

Hey boss, if you’re reading over this employee’s shoulder, studies show that workers who are given higher financial incentives are more productive.  Also consider this employee for a role in the HR department.

I am very seriously contemplating suicide.

Don’t do it!  You can’t caonima when you’re dead.  I will try to help keep you alive by giving you entertaining postings to anticipate.

Family falling apart. I feel like it’s my fault although my mom insists that it’s not my fault. Not a great day. Having a panic attack. Doing this survey to calm myself down. It probably won’t work. But I can try. Wow my dad is such a fucking cuntrag, that little bitch. Why the fuck does he have to upset my mom? She’s such a wonderful person. Fucking cuntrag, he is. Wow, that felt good.

Feel good now.

Although I’m pretty sure that you’ve stated before that you’re half Asian, for some reason I imagine you to be a Steve Aoki look-alike. Not meant to be an insult at all, it’s just what I imagine reading through your articles.

I don’t look Asian at all!  Actually when a friend of mine watched “Triumph Of The Will” he said that a lot of the soldiers looked like me, which is probably accurate.

It’s not a matter of how, but why – why am I? Why do I exist? What has happened in the universe that enabled human beings to exist?

Boram.

Reading a shitty ass book for school. I hate it but my cat seems to love it, considering he’s been chewing on the cover for the past hour. How’s your cat doing? And you too, I guess.

I’m fine i guess. (My grandma died and i’m not as sad as i thought i would be. But I’m sure other people would thing that I’m awful human being for not showing remorse by crying. So idk…I’M probably an awful human being) You can ignore this, sorry. I just wanted to answer your question, but i have nothing worthy of mentioning happening in my life besides this.

One of the reasons I wrote my “Who Killed EunB” post is to demonstrate that different people grieve in different ways and that this is okay.

I’m wrestling my way through a “k-pop 2016” playlist right now, so even though I’m blissfully immune to the sound of Fender Rhodes, the high density of ballads and trap, and the sheer volume of comments calling things “underrated”, or praising “the high note”, are slowly killing me.

Stay strong.  I’ll help at the end of the year with a list of not-shit songs.

What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little cao ni ma? I’ll have you know I graduated top of my class in the SM trainee academy, and I’ve been involved in numerous secret raids on YG, and I have over 300 confirmed plagiarisms. I am trained in guerilla breakdance and I’m the top winner in all the music awards shows. You are nothing to me but just another fangirl. I will wipe you the fuck out with sexy concepts the likes of which have never been seen before on this Mcountdown stage, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me in the v-live? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of PD-nims across South Korea and your fanbase username is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your dedication. You’re fucking dead, cao ni ma. I can be anywhere, anytime(thanks to my caffeine-crazed driver), and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that’s just with my abs. Not only am I extensively trained in bad singing, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the JYP wardrobe and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little “supportive” comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn’t, you didn’t, and now you’re paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You’re fucking dead, cao ni ma.

Come at me, bro.

I am struggling. My boyfriend of 7 years has depression. Last year he attempted suicide which I was unfortunate enough to witness, but I guess was also fortunate enough to, because I was able to save him. He still has depression and ever day I’m scared he will try again. My sister is dealing with an undiagnosed mental illness and has attempted suicide twice in the last month. I’m trying to help, and it’s really scary knowing that what I say and do can have really bad effects i I’m not careful. I just want them to be happy. I can’t tell anyone in real life about my struggles because it gets back to my sister and boyfriend, and it just upsets them. So, I hope you don’t mind being slightly vented to.

Depression makes people do strange things.  I know because I had it for a long time before my doctor recognised a B12 deficiency and then I was about 90% cured by vitamin supplements.  Life is good now, but for a long time it wasn’t.  All you can really do is be there, you can support people but they ultimately have to find their own way and you’re not responsible if they don’t.

I’m good oppar, but I’m just a bit sad that I keep dislocating my shoulder when I play badminton. I really have to stop playing but that means giving up something I have enjoyed playing for a year and stop meeting the people and friends I see (and like) every time I play, it really sucks, but I can’t keep on playing and fuck up my shoulder even more which will eventually affect by bodybuilding too, sucks so bad. I’ve tried playing it mildly, but I kept popping out my shoulders, I am still in denial that I must stop playing right now, but I think I will eventually quit :((. I salute you if you actually read this whole thing.

I totally read it.  Also, see a sport physio if you can, there might be a compromise solution.

Please help me wih my theses!! I am lost T_T

Hopefully this helps.

Not great, actually. This is my second attempt at filling in this survey. Originally I said that I was doing great. Then I got to question 25 and I had to go and read Dara+ to be able to answer that question since there was no ‘idk’ option. By the time I got back, I had to change this answer because I wasn’t doing so great. Yeah I like your fanfics, but I don’t like feeling like I’m forced to read them, you cunt. At least I’d already read the others, I guess.

You could have just ticked “meh” or “shit” like everyone else who didn’t read them did.  Silly.

Better as soon as I saw Qri’s picture. Did she get implants?

Investigated here.

I am troubled. I got into kpop around 2010 when snsd was flying high. I stanned them very hard and even found myself enjoying other groups.(t-ara, shinee, ect.) I frequented mainstream garbage sites like allkpop and koreaboo, unaware of the trash news I was consuming as frequently as meals. It took me nearly four years just to find asianjunkie.com and boy was I excited at actual opinions. Asianjunkie.com then lead me to antikpopfangirl and I really felt like the veil had been pulled off and I was seeing real news and people were actually making valid points. I jumped off the snsd hype train after j-day(Jessica’s departure). I was confused and didn’t know where to turn to stan groups. I found comfort in AOA and Exid as they were both gaining widespread acceptance. What I’m actually troubled about is that I just jump from fandom to fandom determined by popularity. Is this how this should work? I feel like I understand the underworkings of this music industry better thanks to the work you guys do. But I still feel like I am controlled by the masses opinion.(Twice Fandom..but I actually like their songs). So for someone with more experience in music is this what happens you just jump on hypetrains and move on when they lose steam. (side note I like antikpopfangirl and your blog more than asianjunkie).

Fandoms aren’t even necessary.  Just listen to music, don’t worry about fans and fandoms.  Stop reading comments sections.  Stop reading gossip articles and netizen sites.  Perhaps unplug yourself completely from the social media circus about groups for a while and just watch YouTubes (going through my roundup posts might help, but ignore my comments).  Try to form an opinion that has everything to do with what you see and hear and nothing to do with anything you read about what you see and hear.  You might find some cool stuff this way.

Question 2: The Kpopalypse bi-yearly survey is my best friend, is the Kpopalypse bi-yearly survey your best friend?

Most people felt that the Kpopalypse bi-yearly survey was their best friend.  Sorry that I don’t have an oblong red arrow statue to give you all to fawn over.

Question 3: Quick demographic information question: your gender?

Did you know that more females than males read Kpopalypse blog?  Well, now you do!  47% of readers who completed the survey were female, and 41% were male.  The remaining 12% were pansexual otherkin fairies from SHINee World or whatever the fuck, hopefully you gender-fluid types got some smug satisfaction from filling out this question.

Question 4: Your relationship status?

Most Kpopalypse readers are single!  Feel free to introduce yourselves in the comments section below!

Question 5: This is a picture of Korean singer Puer Kim.  Why is this picture here?

Hopefully you all found a later use for the picture of Puer Kim.

Question 6: Which idol that has NOT been covered in any of the three boobs posts should be covered in “big boobs in k-pop part 4”? This question can be skipped if you can’t think of any, or just cbf.

I actually wanted to include a list of all the women covered in posts 1, 2 and 3 to make it easier for you all to nominate choices, however I couldn’t find a way to make such a list display neatly in the survey itself.  It seems that many of you needed it because the vast majority of people who filled out this question selected someone who has already been covered.  Here’s the list anyway for future reference.

Those who did have good suggestions that weren’t in this list, look forward to having them covered soon – probably!

Question 7: Kpopalypse is in the middle of conceptualising two fanfics for Halloween. Which fanfiction idea should Kpopalypse go with for 2016?

Most people actually didn’t care because they’re smart enough to realise that all my shit is the same.

Question 8: As a show of solidarity and also to raise awareness for people suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder, please leave the below text box blank. Thank you.

Many people didn’t appreciate me making this question a mandatory question, thus forcing respondents to fill the box with something.  This was a deliberate act on my part with the function of raising awareness, I really wanted you all to feel the suffering of intense OCD so you could understand just what these people go through in their daily lives.  Please be more tolerant and understanding of your OCD-suffering brothers, sisters and pansexual otherkin from SHINee World, thank you.

Question 9: Would you watch a Kpopalypse v-log?

Even though I don’t like v-logs much in general, many people would watch a Kpopalypse v-log.  However almost as many people would happily settle for more cat videos.

Question 10: A neighbour who just moved in next to me is never home. At the front of his dwelling are security cameras that he installed himself, and the curtains are always shut, but there’s some odd blue light inside the building every night. It’s almost certain that he has a hydroponics lab in there, but is he a fan of Oh My Girl’s comeback?

Opinion was divided evenly over whether he is a fully-fledged Oh My Girl fan with all the albums, or if he just likes Skull & Haha.  Not as many people thought he was a Cypress Hill fan only, probably because most people listen to a completely weak, watered-down bullshit version of hip-hop these days and would poo their pants if they heard anything as good as Cypress Hill’s first two albums.

Question 11: Did you know that there is some sort of lame controversy about Oh My Girl’s Yooa at the moment?

Everybody was in agreement on this one, which was great to see.  Glad to see that my continued campaign to make people stop giving a shit about stupid netizen-manufactured pop idol scandals and the utter shit that gets spread around on crappy k-pop “news” sites that overinflate the importance of netizen opinion for clicks is working as intended.  Of course, I only gave one possible answer to this question for you to select from, but if you felt the urge to respond in a different way then perhaps this question irritated you to the point where you experienced some kind of positive epiphany and woke up to yourself about how you were wasting your life.  Here’s hoping.

Question 12: Has the Kpopalypse website not having ads any more changed your life for the better?

I recently removed advertising from my site completely and I wanted to know how you all felt about that.  Most of you actually didn’t give a shit but I’ll keep adverts gone anyway because it’s ideologically important to me to not have them.

Question 13: Why can’t all other k-pop websites be cool like Kpopalypse and remove their advertising?

A fairly even split in the responses to this question.  Maybe all options have a grain of truth to them.

Question 14: What technical thing about the world of music in k-pop would you like Kpopalypse to cover, that he hasn’t covered yet? You can skip this question if you can’t think of anything.

Thanks for all your suggestions!  I won’t repeat any of them here, but I’ll use the good ones for future blog posts!

Question 15: What do you think CL thinks “Shorty” means?

Many people felt that CL may have been hopeful about short contract terms.  I guess at this point she doesn’t want a 2NE1 comeback any more than anybody else does.

Question 16: Please enter how many fucks you give (as a numerical value between 0 and 100) about translated netizen comments.

The average number of fucks given by a Kpopalypse reader was 26.  Most people selected zero fucks, and a few even worked out that you could give negative fucks, but this was mitigated by the high number of people who chose 69 fucks.

Question 17: Did you enjoy QRIMOLE? Do you want more QRIMOLE?

Most readers wanted more QRIMOLE, although a surprisingly high amount of readers also didn’t know what QRIMOLE was.  If you were one of those readers who was confused, you can read all about QRIMOLE at this link, and for the rest of you, know that there will definitely be more QRIMOLE!

Question 18: Word association: “Blackpink”

Just over half of you associated YG’s new girl group with the word “blackpink”.  Go go, YG brand power!

Question 19: This is a picture of Seoyul from Berry Good, it’s taken from their latest Makestar project page.  What’s the most important quality in becoming an “aegyo expert”?

Kpopalypse readers are well-versed in the power of high determination levels!  This outweighed other factors in determining aegyo expertise.

Question 20: I’ve used ranked questions in previous surveys and they got an overwhelmingly negative reaction from mobile phone users. This test question is just filled with random text bars so if you want, you can test the survey’s “rank” questions on your mobile phone to see if it’s gotten any better or if it’s still a pain in the ass to use. Click and hold the text bars to slide them around and place them in whatever order you like. Or don’t, if it’s too much hassle.

Most of you whined about not being able to slide the slidey bars on mobile phones again, but a few of you worked out that instead of sliding you could click the rank numbers and overtype them with new numbers, thus changing the order, which was the sort of discovery that I hoped someone would make so I could use this type of question format for future surveys.  Good work, caonimas!

Question 21: Word association: “Red Velvet”

Incredibly, readers were able to associate “red velvet” most strongly with the SM girl group, and not the last time they paid for sex.

Question 22: We all know that Zico famously says it in “Tough Cookie”, but what is the most likely real meaning of “faggot bitch”?

Some of you were upset by the content of this question, but many of you realised that “faggot bitch” is a term that Zico meant in a musical sense and is totally fine to use because it is used loosely and commonly in America and just means loser or idiot.  It’s just as well Netizenbuzz explained that clearly so you wouldn’t hate on Zico, isn’t it nice that she editorialises her articles with helpful context, debunking misconceptions equally for all celebrities of any type Block B members who are undergoing unfair controversy.

Question 23: Observe the following video.  Just reminding you that this group existed, once.  How do you feel?

Kpopalypse never trolls his readers, but when he does, he uses After School videos.  Hey at least about 15% of you appreciated the joke.

Question 24: This is a picture of Eunjung from T-ara.  Eunjung appears to be waiting for something. What could it be?

Poor Eunjung.  I hope she’s comfortable in that chair because it looks like she might be waiting a while.

Question 25: Rate your enjoyment of the following Kpopalypse fanfictions.

“Hyuna and The Good Fan” was the clear winner here.  Many people just clicked “meh” or “shit” for all five fanfics because they don’t even read them, which is fine – appreciating Kpopalypse’s anti-fanfiction fanfiction is an activity reserved only for the caonima elite!  Some people complained about feeling forced to read the fanfics before filling in this question but this complaint seemed weird to me, as many of you obviously lied on a bunch of the other questions so I’m not sure why you had a problem with lying on this one.

Question 26: Who would be most likely to truthfully complete a Kpopalypse interview?

Most of the options came off as equally unlikely, which from my experience seems accurate!

Question 27: Here is a picture of Clara and a horse to say thank you for doing this survey.  If you have any feedback about Kpopalypse posts or anything you’d like to tell Kpopalypse, you can do so here.  Thanks for your participation!

Here’s some selected feedback and my responses.

Since your readership seems very interested in your personal tastes (especially if yours match theirs), would you consider to do in the future something similar to your weekly roundup but with girl groups and boy groups? Like a general impressions overview of a group. That way your readers can finally read your considerations on their biases and die of joy/sadness. Or spend the rest of their days perpetually annoyed.

No because part of the point of why I write is to show people that caring about specific groups is reasonably pointless as the groups are fairly interchangeable for the most part.  It makes more sense for me to care about the songs in isolation, hence the roundup is song-focused, not group focused.

I had really bad diarrhea this morning and I thought it was because I had a flashback to CL’s new song but it’s actually because of the fucking caramel frappucino starbucks concocted me with milk. I just found out I’m lactose intolerant and I fear my life is over. I know this might seem funny to you but I truly feel like shit.

Soy milk is potentially great and gets a bad rap, but you just have to find the right brand.  They all taste wildly different.

Your surveys should be longer. At least 50 questions long. I wouldn’t even mind 100 questions, honestly.

I would do this, but these results posts take hours and would take even longer with more questions.  I think it would test the patience of both myself and readers!

I’ve always had trouble ignoring other people’s opinions and thoughts about me since I was young. Somehow words just stick inside my head and bring me down despite rationally knowing that it’s best for me to just ignore them. This lead me to become very unconfident with myself and often lead to very mild anxiety and/or depression. Following your blog for the past year and a half or so, I’ve slowly begun to buy in your fuck-everyone-else’s-opinions attitude. Ironically, I bought into that idea by initially caring about your opinion. Anyway, I just wanted to say thanks, because seeing your don’t-care attitude has helped inspire me to become more like that. Hopefully this leads to me becoming a more confident person in the future. To close it up, I just wanna wish you all the best in life and thanks again for entertaining us with your content!

Cheers!

Yeah i’d love for a collab between you and Asian Junkie to rip Johnny a new asshole and then record whether or not he tries to ddos your site like he did w/ entasia and onehallyu!!

I’d like this too, I pitched this to Asian Junkie but no response yet.  I assume he’s consulting his legal team.

I’ve been reading your content both on AKF and your own site since early 2012 and still love it. I don’t participate in the comments as much since I’ve gotten busier, but I don’t plan on leaving. Your fanfics and educational posts (and memes) are definitely the more reliable sources of enjoyment in my life. Thanks!

Thank you!

I like u oppar do u like me oppar notice me oppar

I like all my readers – even the ones who hate me!

nobody cares about your ex-girlfriends

Nobody cares about you not caring about my ex-girlfriends.

You should know that OH&S is now WHS (Workplace Health and Safety) as OH&S unfairly discriminated against those who were present at a workplace but lacked the determination to be occupied. It’s imperative to the safety of Hwayoung and her kind that you use the correct acronym.

Sorry but I really cbf going back and editing all 57 posts where I use that term.

Why did you remove google+ login for comments? I would like to post some comments from time to time, but now I have to create a fake FB account.

I didn’t.  This is happening at the WordPress end and is something I have no control over.

Idk what you can do about either of these things but
1) This survey looks fucked up on mobile
2) Are there actual videos or is my computer just shitty

1. Not much
2. yes there are videos your computer just sucks, sorry

You are my favorite blogger❤ Thanks for keeping up the blog~

Thank you!

thanks for removing the ads and the .wordpress extension! i remember donating money a while back, and i would’ve been cool if you just bought yourself like. a burger or smth. but this is nice too! thanks!

No adverts or silly extensions is more nutritious and healthier than burgers.

Thanks for shattering my delusions about kpop being pure and noble and my idols being TRUE ARTISTS and full of talent. Thanks for letting me know how I contribute nothing with buying my oppas’ albums, how the kpop industry is shit and how I should stop wasting my time writing all of this.

In all honesty, thanks to your articles uncovering the truth and shitting on the kpop industry, I now can enjoy kpop 6969% more than before. May Raina continue to bless you and really, have a nice day!! You deserve it!!! (^7^)//

Buuuuuuuut I’m giving this survey a 5/10, not enough abs to hold my attention keke

I’m sorry.  Here, have some chocolate.

Now that you’ve been doing this site for awhile, how long does it take to write an article? If you didn’t have this site, and us caonima’s, in your life; what would you do with all the free time?

Depends on the article.  Most take about half a day but some are a lot quicker, depends on the idea.  Really big posts take multiple days, and some articles are written in stages over many months.  If I had more free time I’d probably find some other crazy shit to get involved in where people would ask me the exact same question.

Not enough pictures please reflect and return with a more mature image

This survey SUCKED get a wife you shit

no u

Shoutout to your bootlegger because I work 8-5 weekdays and can never listen live

He’s doing the Lord’s work.

is it bad to want to fuck an idol? like I’m not saying actually believing that I’m going to fuck that person, but i want to fuck them? asking because hoya from infinite.

It’s totally fine.  I’m sure we’ve almost all felt that way about someone.

How come the comments sign in options have changed? It’s now just twitter, wordpress and fb. I’m certain I used to use disqus or google to comment?

I’ve never had Disqus on this site.  Some people say they used to be able to comment with Google+ here but I don’t remember that either.  Perhaps you’re thinking of another site where an article of mine got reposted, such as Asian Junkie (which has Disqus) or Anti Kpop-Fangirl (where you can comment with Google+).

I’m a girl who likes the word cunt now and it’s all your fault. I don’t say it out loud though because I don’t want to seem extremely ratchet. Maybe it’s different in Australia but in the US, it’s considered a very offensive word. Plus I would only use it against a guy because fuck guys thinking being called anything related to a woman is offensive, they’re a bunch of cunts.

It’s offensive in Australia too but depends on context and the company involved etc. – think about how some “offensive” words in America are considered neutral or positive depending on who uses them and how, “cunt” is a little like that.

Okay so I’m here for advice and hopefully this gets posted so a bunch of other people can give advice: there’s a guy I like and he probs likes me too but honestly idk. We snuggle and we’ve kissed but I’m too shy to tell him how I feel and I think he’s the same. Should I just shut the fuck up now and tell him or get my wimp ass off the net and stop entrusting my life to some cunts on the internet? This probs won’t make it but kay.

Just go with the flow.  You don’t need to make an “official statement”, just enjoy the ride and where it takes you.  Just don’t get pregnant or STDs.

I told you a while back on your ask.fm that I had a dream involving you and that I’d tell you about it on your next survey. Well, here goes.

—

The dream was about “Mask of King Singer” or whatever that show is called where people wearing masks compete in vocalfag duels or some shit. Well there were two guys on stage, one with a tiger mask and the other with a chipmunk one. They were both apparently really good, as the judges seemed to be very impressed through their overly expressive reactions.

Then the tiger mask singer let out one big high note, then took his mask off. It was MR JKpop, the vlogger. He smirked and looked towards the judges as if to say “I win”.

Then the chipmunk mask guy started doing IU’s famous ‘three octave’ part, to which Mr JKpop raised his eyebrows and nodded like in his reaction vlogs, seemingly acknowledging the other competitor’s vocal talents. But the chipmunk dude didn’t stop there: he carried on doing more and more notes, going higher and higher until he probably did actually go three octaves higher, but without losing any stability or power in his voice.

Mr JKpop’s and all the judges’ jaws dropped to the floor. “How did you manage to beat me? I practise every day for five hours,” JKpop asked.

“Well kid,” started the chipmunk singer, “I’ve performed more times than you’ve had hot dinners. And secondly,” he continued as he started to remove his mask, “unlike you I don’t get caught up in petty technique, I actually focus on what sounds good.” His mask dropped to the floor, revealing the face of none other than Kpopalypse!

“For all your vocalfagging, all your obsessing over vocal pedagogy of Autotuned voices, you weren’t able to beat some crappy punk rocker,” Kpopalypse finished as he turned his back on the audience and walked towards the back of the stage, producing his signature hat from nowhere and placing it on top of his bald head.

This dream MRS.

PS: I guess you might not care but I just wanted to say it anyway: as someone who has been harrassed quite severely for being a “faggot” it feels a little uncomfortable to read the term so often in your posts… I’m quite sure/hope you don’t mean it in a derogatory way. I just thought I wanted to let you know and ask if maybe you could consider avoiding it/use it less frequently…?

I’ve probably been called a faggot in my life more times than you.  Don’t worry, faggot only means “loser” or “idiot”, it’s used loosely and commonly.  Don’t ask me how I know this.  But I’m not anti-gay though, in fact I think all men should be gay except me – eliminates the competition.

Kpopalypse oppar I love your posts and will always enjoy them so make them more (not fanfic bullshit I hate them, but posts that teach me something)
Love you, your caonima

All the fanfics have a lesson in them too, somewhere.

Great work on your blog! It’s the only place I feel comfortable following the Kpop scene with, as other websites (not to mention the subreddit, wugghh) just don’t have the same determination levels.

Thanks!

Your bias list is weird. Are you a closet hipster who intentionally goes after the least popular girls in a group or is it just a coincidence?

I just like what I like.

I hope you never stop doing Nugu Alerts, because I’m one of the five people who really enjoy them!

Rest assured that Kpopalypse Nugu Alert will continue, precisely because of how unpopular it is!

claraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
more
claraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
pleaseeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Thanks to all the caonimas who did the survey!  A new large one like this will appear every six months, with occasional mini-surveys for certain specific topics at random times as needed.  Kpopalypse will return with more caonima action!

It’s time again for Kpopalypse roundup!  Let’s take a look at this week’s new releases!

Rainbow

SPECIAL GUEST REVIEWER: BETSY

Betsy, enjoying a catch-up with friends on the phone, something she has the time to do now that she doesn’t have a punishing Asian Junkie blogger’s schedule

Asian Junkie writer Betsy has taken refuge in Kpopalypse blog, a safe haven for authors who have been stretched to breaking point by the site’s tough schedules, harsh dietary requirements and relentless pursuit of journalistic integrity.  She’s going to accompany me on this Roundup, where I’ve asked her to review each song “as quickly and thoughtlessly as possible, in time-honoured roundup tradition”.  Don’t worry folks, you’ll still get my “thoughts” as well!  Neither of us looked at each other’s reviews before posting and both are presented here raw and unedited, because I don’t censor my authors’ content, ahem.

Infinite – The Eye

KPOPALYPSE:

Actually pretty decent, as good as “Bad” but not amazing.  So I guess it’s “not bad meaning good”?

BETSY:

One of the most underwhelming hyped songs of the year. The song isn’t even that complicated, sounds like all their other songs, but stripped/maybe even unfinished. Mixed with that, some scenes look like they’ve been filmed on an iPotato 7 – it just makes one of the most disappointing releases of 2016.

2PM – Promise (I’ll Be)

KPOPALYPSE:

Seems to be stuck halfway between big-band brass and dubstep if you can imagine that.  Sonically not similar to “A.D.T.O.Y” at all, if they weren’t by the same group nobody would be comparing them.

BETSY:

One disappointment to an other – 2PM always seem to be updating themselves, or trying to? When really they should part ways. Coupled with the fact they are looking for drama, example, bringing up Dickhkun’s past drink-driving scandal via SNL Korea, and also parodying Seolhyun/Zico dating news – just shows how pathetic they are, and their bitter as fuck asses need to disband right now. Plus, if there’s no behind the scenes of this MV with Jun.K’s yaoi chin playing the piano, it would just add to the disappointment.

Yu Jae Seok & EXO – Dancing King

KPOPALYPSE:

Nothing special but at least it has some pace to it, the way this year’s been going that’s almost honourable mention status just on its own.

BETSY:

Can Yu Jae Suk just join EXO pls? Just to spice it up a little. Lay and potato-face lizard Kai look ready to leave (I’m literally betting on them). And no one will notice him being there considering Chanyeol is balding, aka he can age gracefully now.

DIA – Mr. Potter

KPOPALYPSE:

This is Red Velvet’s “Ice Cream Cake” rewritten by a better songwriter and the only reason why none of you trashbags like it is because it’s DIA and not some group that’s trendy.

BETSY:

I don’t think it’s as problematic as “Cheer Up” as some people may think. There’s no low-key autotune, or any type of bad singing. But still, I don’t praise it as the best. The video reminds me of those early 90’s BBC adaptions of children novels, that give you nightmares throughout your childhood but on acid.

BTOB Blue – Stand By Me

KPOPALYPSE:

If you were one of those weak specimens on Reddit/kpop who had a big old cry together about how I don’t like most k-pop ballads and virtue-signalled until you were blue in the face about how you don’t like my writing style, get your lighters up because this song’s for you.

BETSY:

It’s a ballad. A ballad that doesn’t sound like a Coldplay song or a refined Disney song.

Yoon Mirae – JamCome On Baby

KPOPALYPSE:

“Jam Come On Baby” is exactly what I want to shout at Yoon Mirae while she mumbles her way through this somnambulant fucking shit.  Also learn correct character spacing, fuck.  At least the bass frequencies are nice, but this song is wasted if you’re not listening on something that can reproduce them.

BETSY:

I can’t believe no one realised the pun yet? I am very anti-pun and I still got it. Yoon Mirae is advanced, but somehow she’s always 10-20 steps behind.

Clazziquai Project – I Wonder

KPOPALYPSE:

Jamiroquai always seemed like such a hypocrite to me, singing about “emergencies on planet earth” while making enough CDs of worthless z-grade funk-lite to create a bigger carbon footprint than Linfen and wearing about five endangered species of fur on his head.  I kind of hate Clazziquai Project just by sonic association.  It’s not really fair but fuck it.

BETSY:

The guy with the glasses is cute. That’s all I have to say.

BONUS SONGS

WJSN (Cosmic Girls) – Robot

KPOPALYPSE:

Take away all the interesting harmony in DIA’s song and you basically are left with something like this, or the last few I.O.I songs.

BETSY:

Easily the best song on the list this week, and probably (most likely) WJSN’s best song in general. Giriboy should stick to producing/keep on producing for WJSN/Monsta X. If you’re a mild “Starship fan” like myself, you know that b-sides are are always better than the actual released song. Thank fuck they do special MVs.

DIA – The Love

KPOPALYPSE:

People say I’m biased for DIA because they’re on T-ara’s label but they’re wrong.  Proof: the other song from them this week is a colossal bucket of dogshit.

BETSY:

This sounds like a charity song. I don’t want to deal with this right now.

Wings Of The Isang – Stream Of Consciousness

KPOPALYPSE:

It’s a Korean version of Sigur Ros at their peak.  Not as good though, needs more gay people with one eye.

BETSY:

As the name of the song suggests, it really does stream your consciousness. It made me think how hungry I am, or should I sneak another 15 mins of sleep in. How I need to pee but I’m half naked and my housemate is right outside my door making breakfast. Should I wash my hair before going to the gym?

Oddity – Mothernature

KPOPALYPSE:

Have you noticed that there’s a very specific horribly gaudy visual palette that seems to be used by every “It G Ma” clone ever?  It’s like the music being shit isn’t enough.

BETSY:

This should be deleted off the internet. I don’t want this to be an internet fossil for future dinosaur/human hybrids to discover in a billion years time. Delete it.

YunB ft Paloalto – Runaway pt.1

KPOPALYPSE:

Even the awful trap songs have Fender Rhodes intros in Korea, that’s how much they love that shit.

BETSY:

How many K-Hip & Hop/K-Rap songs sound exactly like this? Keep that electric piano and organ to yourself, no one wants to hear it.

Kwon Jin Ah – The End

KPOPALYPSE:

Not as much as this song though.  Actually the BTOB Blue track this week actually sounds pretty good compared to this.

BETSY:

DELETE THIS TOO. I FELL ASLEEP FOR 15 SECONDS, MY SLEEPING PATTERN IS RUINED NOW.

That’s all for this week’s roundup – more next week!

You said that you wanted more QRIMOLE, so here it is!  Kpopalypse is back with more QRIMOLE!

Maybe this is a silly question, but does recording a song take long for a vocalist?  I mean, I hear idols complain quite frequently about losing their turn count with rock-paper-scissors, being very upset when they’re last.  A mini-album has 6 tracks (1 is usually an intro).  Even if they’d have to sing a song in its entirety, the total wouldn’t go over 30 mins.  Even if they had to re-sing everything 5 times to get some magically great take, it would still be 2 and 1/2 hours.  The singer provides the vocals, and the rest of the staff does every other work, right?  So why are some idols saying stuff like “I had a poor recording, my members are upset” to “It was so difficult for me to record my turns for this album, I started drinking and I lost myself”?

Here’s a typical process of recording vocals for a solo performer, for one song, from an engineer’s perspective.  Let’s assume all the actual backing music is already written and mixed nicely.

1. Arrive at the studio, switch everything on.
2. Find the backing tracks, load them into ProTools (or similar digital audio workstation (DAW)).
3. Get coffee.
4. Set up a vocal mic and headphones for the vocalist, and a music stand is also polite.
5. Meet the vocalist, brief her on the process, show her around a bit of she’s never been to the studio before.
6. Get the vocalist to test the mic, can she hear herself?  Can she hear feedback or anything else that shouldn’t be heard?  Adjust as required.
7. Is the vocalist happy with the mix of the backing track in the headphones?  She might say “can I have less keyboards and more drums please” or something.  Adjust accordingly.
8. Make sure you save this new “vocal recording guide setting” separately somehow because it’s now different to the one on the actual intended final mix.
9. If the vocalist is allowed actual creativity (highly unlikely for k-pop solo performers but possible in rare isolated cases) they may also have creative input about your backing track, maybe they want something removed or added, boosted or cut in the final mix too.  Make these changes if required, be sure to save them but keep the original settings too just in case their creative ideas are utter dogshit/shot down by the agency later.
10. Check that the vocal is coming through okay to the DAW with a short level check.
11. Make sure the vocalist is comfortable and ready to go.  Do they have everything they need (coffee/water/drugs/etc).
12. Do a test recording of the vocals for the song. Tell the vocalist that it won’t be kept.
13. Quickly save the test recording anyway – sometimes the spontaneous first shot where the vocalist isn’t feeling all nervous and pressured about “oh my god it has to be perfect” ends up sounding better than any of the official takes!
14. Record an “official take”.  This might take a few tries and some patience if the vocalist keeps fucking up or whatever.
15. Assess the quality as you record – is it good enough?  Are there mistakes, and if so are they easily fixable, or is it too much effort and better to just get the vocalist to do it again?  Give whatever feedback to the vocalist that their ego and soul can handle.
16. Play the recording back to yourself as well as to the singer, either through her headphones or in the control room with you.  You can skip this step if you both already know the take was particularly good or bad.
17. Discuss with the vocalist – how did she feel about that take?  Does she feel that she could do a better one?
18. Go back to step 14 and repeat.  Record as many more takes as required until both you and the singer are satisfied, or until the singer or their agency runs out of money to pay you to do this shit.

Now let’s imagine this scenario again, this time for a large idol group.

1. Arrive at the studio, switch everything on.
2. Find the backing tracks, load them into ProTools.
3. Get coffee.
4. Set up a vocal mic and headphones for a vocalist, and a music stand is also polite.
5. Meet the vocalists and their handlers, brief them all on the process, establish who is doing “crowd control” of this mob.  Show at least one important person around a bit if they’ve never been to the studio before so they can tell the girls where the toilets are etc.
6. Bring the vocalist into the studio recording room.  Show the other girls to the studio waiting room, let them wait there with their handlers.  If very obedient, you could bring them into the control room but this isn’t recommended.
7. Get the vocalist to test the mic, can she hear herself?  Can she hear feedback or anything else that shouldn’t be heard?  Adjust as required.
8. Is the vocalist happy with the mix of the backing track in the headphones?  She might say “can I have less keyboards and more drums please” or something.  Adjust accordingly.
9. Make sure you save this new “vocal recording guide setting” separately somehow because it’s now different to the one on the actual intended final mix.
10. No need to worry about creativity here, these girls’ agency won’t be having any of that nonsense.  If you were stupid enough to bring any of the waiting girls into the control room, now is a good time to tell them to either get the fuck out out or they can sit there and watch as long as they shut the fuck up and don’t say anything annoying while you’re working.
11. Check that the vocal is coming through okay to the DAW with a short level check.
12. Make sure the vocalist is comfortable and ready to go.  Do they have everything they need (coffee/water/drugs/etc).  Make sure the person about to cut their vocals is not distracted by anyone else.  Hopefully by now some catering has arrived but probably not.
13. Do a test recording of the vocals for the song. Tell the vocalist that it won’t be kept.
14. Quickly save the test recording anyway – sometimes the spontaneous first shot where the vocalist isn’t feeling all nervous and pressured about “oh my god it has to be perfect” ends up sounding better than any of the official takes!
15. Record an “official take”.  This might take a few tries and some patience if the vocalist keeps fucking up or whatever.
16. Assess the quality as you record – is it good enough?  Are there mistakes, and if so are they easily fixable, or is it too much effort and better to just get the vocalist to do it again?  Give whatever feedback to the vocalist that their ego and soul can handle.
17. Play the recording back to yourself as well as to the singer, either through her headphones or in the control room with you.  You can skip this step if you both already know the take was particularly good or bad.
18. Discuss with the vocalist – how did she feel about that take?  Does she feel that she could do a better one?
19. Go back to step 15 and repeat.  Record as many more takes as required until both you and the singer are satisfied, although if she’s a complaining sort or extreme prima donna and time is short just boot her ass out after a few takes and tell her she did great even if she was fucking shit – you can stitch together a passable version of her vocals just by copy-pasting the best bits of each take together if you really have to, or failing that, get one of the other girls to sing her part, they all sound more or less the same anyway.
20. Usher the vocalist out of the room, into the waiting room where hopefully there is now food and beverages for her to enjoy and her groupmates and handlers present who will probably give encouraging words to her face and talk behind her back about how she was awful later.
21. Repeat the entire process again from step 6, for however many vocalists there are in the group.

As you might be now starting to get a feel for, this is NOT a quick process for you as an engineer.  A very quick, very dirty “let’s not get too fussy about things” vocal session for ONE song with ONE singer might take 30 minutes if they were really, really easy-going about the results – and singers rarely are easy-going, after all it’s their reputation that is riding on the final product the most.  A more realistic timeframe for a large group recording a mini-album worth of tracks is something like an entire full work day, and that’s if the engineer is hurrying and being conscious of “time = money”.  If the group is not nugu but has money to burn in the studio getting it “perfect” the mini-album could take a week, or longer.

The other thing you may have noticed is that in the second scenario, only one girl is brought in to sing at a time, and everyone else has to wait.  So in an 8-member group each girl is doing about 12.5% “being involved in the process” and 87.5% “waiting around for some shit to happen that actually involves me”.  There’s lots and lots of time for the girls to sit around in the waiting lounge, get nervous as fuck while they wait their turns to sing, have petty fights with each other, drink, share jelly snacks, generally get bored as shit, etc.  One of the reasons why substance abuse is so common in the music business is simply because during downtime when working there’s not a lot else to do.  Also, now you know why nobody wants to go last.

While watching a fancam, I noticed one of the lead vocalists fiddle around with her ear-piece a lot. Even though she was smiling at all the right times, whenever it wasn’t her turn, her face would seem panicked and she’d keep pointing at her ears.  She even stopped mouthing her parts correctly even though every single live performance of this song I’ve seen only had her singing live just 50% of the time over backtrack. Was she not hearing herself or something? If she knows the song by heart and when her turn comes (she still did her choreography with robot-like reflexes), can’t she sing the same way she always does even without hearing herself?  Why stop miming?  I remember this happened to a Eurovision representative of ours a few years ago too, where she blamed her lackluster vocal performance on “my in-ear was dead”.  No one, not even she, explained what that meant.  So the press all shat on her and then blamed her for the penultimate position the country got.  So what gives?  Can a malfunctioning ear-piece turn your vocals to shit to the point where you even stop lipsynching at your own concert?

Yes it can!  In-ear monitors are there so you can hear the backing track nice and clearly while you sing (or pretend to sing) your (or someone else’s) vocal part.  If your in-ear monitors go quiet, then that’s a problem, you can’t hear the backing track properly and you can lose track of where you are.  Depending on what other ambient sounds are around the venue, this might mean that you start singing woefully out of time.  An even bigger problem is if the in-ear monitors have some other kind of issue, so that rather than going silent they start emitting a high-pitched squeal or a low hum, or static, or distortion, or some other weird noise.  This isn’t unheard of – the mix that goes into the in-ear monitors is controlled by the live sound engineer and that person may decide to dial something into your monitors that you don’t want or didn’t request, or they may just not be paying enough attention, or perhaps they spilled some coffee into their console.

Are pictorials as good of a sign of money flowing to a group as CF deals? I noticed after Stellar had a comeback they had several pictorials with a bunch of magazines. Also how would you gauge the success of a comeback in terms of exposure?

Depends, and this can be answered with one simple question – is the pictorial selling something?  If it’s just a simple “let’s take pictures of these girls” then they might see little or no money.  If it’s “let’s take pictures of these girls wearing a specific fashion brand label” or “let’s take pictures of these girls holding specific designer handbags” or “here’s a girl holding a product”, then significant money would have changed hands.

Modelling such as this would have netted Sulli some decent cash because this picture is from a set where she’s promoting a specific fashion label collection for a fashion magazine.

This photo of two of the Stellar girls is also from a fashion magazine, but are the girls promoting specific clothes here, or just promoting themselves?  I don’t know the answer in this case, but this is the difference between a photoshoot that makes a lot of money and one that does not.

If the whole industry is pretty much based on mass exploitation (unlike many other industries), is there any way to support the idol/artist rather the company lording over them? Or do I accept the fact that they’re a product made and packaged by many other industry employees?

The latter.  The idol is a “front end” for a fairly large machine in the background.  It’s silly to say “I want to support the idol but not the company” because it’s the company itself that supports the idol the most, because to the company, each idol is an investment, and they want to see returns off that investment so the companies go all out trying to give their idols the biggest boost possible, even in the face of snarky, cynical fans who don’t understand.  I see this mentality most commonly with fans of MBK groups – “I don’t like the company but I love my idols”.  Everyone hated MBK during the T-ara scandal and many still do, but who solidly stuck by T-ara when everyone claimed to hate them?  Who kept giving them comebacks and high-budget videos?  Who pushed them into overseas markets and cut deals with foreign agencies so T-ara would maintain a high international profile and always be viable?  MBK did, and the reason why they did it is not out of the goodness of their heart, but because T-ara is an investment to MBK and it’s MBK’s responsiblity to make returns on that investment.  If MBK failed with T-ara, it wouldn’t just be the T-ara girls who would be out of a job – several employees at MBK from stylists to choreographers to wardrobe to technicians and many others would have to be downsized, people would lose jobs and livelihoods.  Right now MBK is pushing DIA over T-ara, and that approach makes complete sense.  T-ara already have a core audience and shitloads of fans around the world, they will be fine no matter what and don’t need that huge push anymore, however MBK’s smaller groups have a lower profile and need that boost to get them started.  What do you think “Produce 101” was really all about?  When I interviewed Sarah Wolfgang who was in Tahiti, her parting comments were that people behind the scenes don’t get enough credit for their hard work, and it’s true – instead they’re constantly undercut by fans who think they know what’s best just from looking at things from the outside, which is ludicrous.

That’s standard for YG and probably the case because YG don’t need to promote a lot on shows, so they don’t. From what I know about behind the scenes at those shows, promoting on them is a royal pain in the ass so YG are doing all their artists a massive favour here.

Then why do other Korean household names (in the music industry, like SM) have to promote their artists in different music shows in a single week if it’s tiring as well as expensive for the artist and company, respectively? Sorry, I’m just really curious.

Check out this uncharacteristically insightful Netizenbuzz article where a lot of legit information is revealed about what it’s really like behind the scenes at music shows.  It’s a pretty fucked situation, and YG are honestly just being a bit nicer to their artists than other labels, because they can get away with it due to their brand power being a big drawcard, they don’t bother to appear on shows that they’re not directly plugged into the infrastructure of.  Other labels could take the same approach if they wanted, but the reality is that the k-pop idol scene is so hotly competitive that nobody wants to lose even the smallest advantage, so there’s enormous pressure to “keep up with the Joneses” and be seen as just as nice, just as polite, just as conciliatory as everyone else.

There’s a lot of complaining about YG’s inability to stick to schedules or managing their artists. However, out of the Big Three they have the highest profit.Are they just “lucky”? Is there a valid strategy behind the “mis-management”? (Like creating a “shortage” of comebacks, so people will be more hyped?) I just find it hard to believe that a successful business like YG would be so “unprofessional” and still be able to compete in the music market…

YG are in a very good position financially and have been for a long time, and people don’t get into positions like that through mismanagement.  Luck can get you part of the way, but while a lucky person may come across a fortune, a smart person will know how to retain and build upon that fortune, which is what YG have done in Korea.  What people need to realise every time they see an article about YG’s shenanigans and a whole bunch of reactions to it, is that everyone who is reacting is being strung along.  YG work with a pretty specific schedule template (12-36 month breaks and then multiple simultaneous or closely sequential releases) to build up anticipation and make each new comeback feel like a big event, and a lot of money and planning is poured into the “machine” each time this happens.  If YG were a shitty company with no idea how to promote their artists, nobody would be reacting to anything they did, there would be no “controversy”, there would be no “scandals”, nobody would be complaining about a lack of comebacks etc.  They’ve got the Korean market pretty well sewn up through clever marketing and they know how to make their artists stand out and have currency among the competition, and boy do so many of their fans not even appreciate it.  The average YG fan wouldn’t know a single thing about what managing an artist actually entails, that’s abundantly clear from the kind of comments that these people leave on news articles and social media, and it’s fine to not know something, but it’s also fine to just admit it!

You explained in a very plausible way that the music isn’t really the “main focus” of companies like SM, but that they create idols to more or less make money with advertisement contracts. How do you think the concept of SM Station fits into this logic? What are they trying to do with it? It cant really be for the money, since digital songs dont make all that much… And do you think that SM is succeeding with whatever they planned with SM station?

I see it as a “showcase” type of thing, but instead of showcasing “idols” specifically, thei’re showcasing “brand value” i.e: “look, here’s all the different things we can do, no need to go to anyone else but SM for your entertainment needs”.  It’s a way for SM to say “we’re the top of the tree, look how much we encompass”.  To the advertisers the message is “look, we have the biggest brand power, we are the most prolific, we can release new product every week, look how active we are, look at all our different music styles and visual styles, we’re very flexible to your needs, now wouldn’t you love to do some business deals with us?”.  Is it working – well, I couldn’t say without looking at the accounting – and when I say “accounting” I don’t mean “music sales” but rather “what was the expenses vs the uptake on new clients dealing with SM product and new income sources before and after SM Station” which is the sort of thing nobody in my position (an outsider) can answer.

With all of these “reality” shows featuring trainees trying to make it into debuting groups lately, I’ve been wondering about trainee debts. If your company decides to drop you, do you still owe them anything? Or do you get to walk away with free training and plastic surgery?

Depends on the contract.  Someone with a label contract in Korea going through the whole trainee process, my understanding is that they still owe their trainee debt after contract termination in most cases.  The exception would be a “termination with no conditions” but this is rare in Korea to my knowledge.  However in the case of something like a low-tier Produce 101 contestant who didn’t make it into the final 30 or whatever because they weren’t part of the “arrangement”, there would be no debt to pay because they barely had any training in the first place… but no income, either.  However I’m yet to hear of a k-pop agency actually paying for any idol’s plastic surgery, all the reports I’ve heard are that the idols pay for that and get it done themselves… sometimes even against the label’s wishes!

why there are 5-6 producers for one fucking song

Because many k-pop songs are written by “committee”.  A bunch of people sit around a table months in advance and plan the next comeback for a big group and discuss every angle – “What do we want it to sound like?  What look do we want the video to have in it?  What theme do we want?  Who should write the music?  What audience demographic are we targeting the most?  What will have the biggest impact compared to what’s out there right now?  Do we want to fit in with current styles to milk a hot trend or stand out as different to get noticed?  Who will do our choreography and what should it look like?  What are the performers going to wear?” and so forth.  Then they either go shopping for a song that suits, or hire someone to write one, but anyone who is effectively controlling the musical direction of a production is a “producer”… and damn straight they want an album credit!

Not really about music but why would idols debut under some no name small agency, do they actually think they’ll get lucky and make it big.

People who debut under NUGU ENT don’t do so because it’s their dream of being unknown and one day getting featured in Kpopalypse Nugu Alert, but because that’s probably all the options they had left.  I guarantee you that at least 90% of idols who debut under tiny no-name agencies all went to SM/YG/JYP auditions first to see if they could get in.  (The other 10% would be people in groups like Bambino, PPL, Pocket Girls etc where the girls are specifically aspiring to be “race queens” rather than “pop idols”, these aren’t really idol groups in the true sense but adult club dancers with an idol group front-end.)  However if all the big agencies say “no and don’t come back”, but you’ve invested your entire life trying to realise your dream of being an idol, what are you going to do – give up on your life goals?  Some might be happy to start afresh with something else, but others will fight on and keep auditioning their way down the tree until they can find an agency who will take them.  They’re running for their dream.

That’s it for another episode of QRIMOLE!  Hopefully you enjoyed this and have even more questions in future!  Also, the first two QRIMOLEs have been very business-oriented and that’s fine with me but you’re allowed to ask other things too, anything that might require a long-form answer from me is certainly potentially eligible!  Let’s see who can come up with the most interesting topics for the future!

Recently, a producer of the idol TV show “Produce 101” came out and openly admitted what I’d already known and had been telling people for years – that the show (and by implication, all idol groups with a similar theme) is basically jack-off material, or “healthy porn for men” as he describes it.  Several people were shocked – could this be true?  How come they hadn’t noticed?  More importantly, how to identify this “healthy porn”?  Come on a journey with Kpopalypse into the world of dog-whistle concepts!

Here’s an activity that you can all do the next time you’re feeling adventurous and like a bit of social shaming.  Or you can just imagine yourself doing this, if you’re a pussy but enjoy living life vicariously through other people’s snarky blogging.

Step 1: go to a place that meets the following criteria:

• Somewhere in public
• Has a computer with Internet access and a big screen in full view that people can easily watch over your shoulder
• Plenty of people of all ages milling about doing stuff but no people very familiar with k-pop anywhere around

Step 2: pick a YouTube video to watch.  If you’re male, pick this video, or something with a very similar visual presentation, something that you believe is completely innocent.

If you’re female, instead you can pick something along the lines of this:

Step 3: as you watch, occasionally look around at all the people watching YOU.  What do you think people will say?  How do you think they will react?

I do the above process fairly often at the radio station where I work, not as some kind of social experiment but just because it’s part of my weekly routine to check out new k-pop.  If I put on something like pretty much anything with a group of girls dancing in it, regardless of the levels of flesh shown or where the video sits on the “cute/sexy” scale, over-the-shoulder commenters (of both genders) will always say stuff like “okay, I know why you like this group” with a wink-wink-nudge-nudge-say-no-more kind of tone.  People who are new to k-pop and slightly older/wiser than the average k-pop fan (demographically) haven’t been desensitised to the constant sugar-rush of young men and women releasing cheesy videos every week and therefore they can detect what you can’t – the dog-whistle.

I’ve discussed the power of the dog-whistle concept before, but a brief recap: a dog-whistle can only be heard by dogs, not by humans.  Likewise, the dog-whistle concept is one that has a certain meaning on the surface, but a completely different meaning just for a specific audience.  Let’s quickly look at a western example before we get into the k-pop.

If you’re a fan of classic Hollywood movies you’ll know that women in them are getting spanked all the time.  Why?  Was there a massive sexual preference for spanking that swept through Hollywood at this time, that then mysteriously vanished a few decades later?  Doubtful, rates of people enjoying BDSM have never changed much.  Was it some sort of anti-female conspiracy to promote domestic violence and keep women in their place?  Maybe misogynistic scriptwriters were the reason in some cases, but it wasn’t a very effective Hollywood conspiracy if Mae West was also allowed a long, active career in the very same system.  A much more likely reason for the proliferation of spanking is that you couldn’t show sex on screen in Hollywood due to the Hollywood Code that regulated film production, but spanking was permissible because you could dress it up with moral values in the script.  Make the woman naughty, and later in the script punish her for misbehaving, then you can have a scene where she gets bent over by a man which is the closest thing to fucking that you could show on screen back then, but because according to the script the woman deserved it you could say “but we’re just promoting good moral values” if anyone called you out on it.  The people who put these scenes in the films knew that the audience members were actually imagining the people on screen having sex instead.  Not many people get spanked in movies anymore, and it’s because the sexual activities that people really want to see in films are more permissible now, so the need for a substitute is no longer required.

In k-pop however, not much is usually permissible.  EXID’s “L.I.E” is a nice basic example to look at, to get started.  The video is overtly sexy by k-pop standards but also full of innuendo that’s reasonably obvious:

• At the start of the video, a couple pull up to a hotel.  The receptionist gives them the key and smiles.  The date then changes from 6/8 to 6/9.  The insinuation is that the couple are checking into a love hotel.
• The key to the room is also “690”.
• The lift control is phallic and gets “fingered”.
• The two bells on the desk clearly represent boobs.
• The receptionist “beats her meat” in time to the song, presumably while thinking about the couple in the hotel room.

And that’s not even a complete list, just the first one and a half minutes.  Before any of you accuse me of “reaching”, we know that this is all deliberate because in a rare case of industry candour the director freely admitted to it.  The song has the girls looking hot and so he’s given them a hot, sexually suggestive video to match, but he’s also upped the ante with the extra messages which might slip under the radar of the very naive but make perfect sense to anyone with a bit of wisdom about sexual matters.  In k-pop idol territory showing too much flesh or sexual activity is a risk to their brand (will teenage girls want to buy beauty products that a female idol endorses if she acts slutty?) but moving these messages just under the radar of the very naive is enough to get the intended message over the line on the surface without dulling the intention for the dog-whistle’s target audience.

This is a pretty basic example, because the overt message of the video and the underlying message are more or less in sync, the dog-whistle is just a slightly more extreme version of the same thing, implying actual sexual activity rather than just “sexiness”.  However, many k-pop MVs are a lot more subtle than this, and the really advanced dog-whistle deployment comes when the overt message and the underlying message of the video are more contradictory.  Let’s now look at such an advanced example.  Be warned – this is completely disturbing and may make you hate me, yourself, k-pop and/or life in general.

There’s nothing overtly sexual about April’s “Dream Candy” whatsoever, right?  On the surface it’s just an everyday little-girl fantasy about gardens and unicorns or some stupid bullshit, and if that’s all you saw when you looked at this, congratulations, your mind has been unsullied by the wicked ways of the world, and you would be well advised to retain your precious naivety and stop reading this post right now.

Actually, “Dream Candy” is under the surface as creepy as fucking shit, absolutely the worst of the worst of pedophile-pandering in k-pop.  It’s also a perfect example of the kind of “healthy porn for men” that Produce 101’s director was talking about.

Let’s break it down.  Get that bucket handy.

• For a start, the girls might be wearing some baby-doll style dresses but boy did they get the 18+ makeup applied to their faces.  There’s nothing innocent about that particular shade of ultra-glossy pink lipstick which whether you like it or not is straight out of porn where matching lip tone to labia tone is used to heighten sexual suggestion.
• From the second verse, the girls are wearing dirndls during their dance routines.  Dirndls are colloquially known as “German milkmaid outfits”.  These are also standard porn attire (what – don’t believe me?  Google search “dirndl porn” with Safesearch off if you dare!), especially in the modified form they appear in here, because unlike April’s dresses a traditional dirndl doesn’t rise above the kneecap.
• The rest of the time the girls are in either bed clothes or baby-doll dresses, creepily exaggerating their extreme youth (but still with adult makeup on!)  They also spend a fair bit of time in the video in bed, which I suppose should be expected for a song called “Dream Candy”, but if that name alone doesn’t ring alarm bells, your parents haven’t taught you well enough about “stranger danger“.  Don’t accept “dream candy” from strangers, kids!
• Lots of blowing kisses and lovey-dovey eyes straight to camera all throughout the video, which would be fine and could easily be written off as platonic, if not for…
• …how in one scene they’re sneaking out of their bedroom via a fucking bedsheet-rope, which is what you do when you’re a kid and you want to do something ill-advised late at night without your parents’ permission, like meet some creepy uncle stalker fan.
• To top it all off there’s the song’s lyrics.  “Why not?  I want to know!” sing the April girls.  “Isn’t this fun?  Can you believe it?”  Don’t forget to “bring your heart, pounding with excitement”.  Even if those translations are only half-right – ewwwwwwwww.

To someone as young and naive as the girls themselves probably are, none of this would register as an issue, and that’s how stuff like this gets over the line with k-pop fans.  The reason why the average k-pop fan wouldn’t even think to bat an eyelid at this video is because just like a dog whistle the true message isn’t actually for them, so they can’t detect it.  It also gets over the line with censors, the MV director can very easily claim “innocence” in the face of any arguments that something’s not quite right with their video.  However anyone reasonably knowledgeable about the fucked up ways of the world can see the truth – this is a dog-whistle concept specifically targeting the kind of people that Chris Hansen likes to provide furniture for.  It’s not as far-fetched as it seems – remember that the vast majority of k-pop girl group songs are written by older men in boardrooms.  Of course, there’s nothing wrong with ignoring all that and just enjoying “Dream Candy” on a “it’s a nice song with an attractive video” level, just like there’s nothing wrong with enjoying the EXID video, and just to be clear I’m not saying that it’s wrong to watch these videos or accusing anyone of liking either song of being dishonest or dirty or whatever.  I’m just saying that an underlying message exists specifically targeted towards a certain audience, and that while you might be enjoying the video in one way, there’s a whole bunch of other people out there who are enjoying it in a completely different way.

This type of dog-whistle message is very common in k-pop, I could put up here several more examples of exactly this type of thing in k-pop but you can also probably go and find your own.  Many groups and solo performers have been through a concept like this, or something similar to it.

IU certainly knows all about it, having been at the coalface of dealing with creepy baby-doll concepts for years.  It’s helpful to finish off this post by looking at “Twenty-three”, because here IU does a fair bit of deconstruction of her own.  People think I exaggerate IU’s disdain for her old career path, but I don’t – in reality, we know that she’s sick of it and she hates it, because she told us.  IU with the help of her video director recently did something completely unprecedented in all of k-pop, and exposed k-pop’s dishonest pedophile-pandering dog-whistle approach, turning it completely on its head.  Unfortunately, she did it in a way that k-pop’s legions of dummies were largely too stupid to understand.

Do I really actually need to explain the meaning of IU’s “Twenty-three”?  I would have hoped not, but since the song and the entire “Chat-shire” album was misunderstood by so many, and so many continue to bang on incorrectly about IU’s “lolita concepts” or whatever, it’s probably worth briefly highlighting a few key scenes, so you can understand how IU’s deployment of the dog-whistle works in reverse.

• Before the song starts, IU reveals a birthday cake, with the name of the song “23” on it.  She blows out the candles, as it’s her 23rd birthday.  The cake is cute, and decorated with girly pastel colours, but IU isn’t happy, she doesn’t smile or act cute, she can’t bring herself to celebrate her career.  IU cautiously tastes the cake and then collapses into it, exhausted.
• At 1:00 IU is dancing with backup dancers, giving a huge, fake grin, then quickly becomes annoyed with the facade and shoves the microphone away.  The microphone transforms into “spilled milk”, i.e something that there’s “no use in crying over” because it’s the path she’s chosen, she’s trapped.  The next time we see her singing, she’s smiling less.
• Chasing the rabbit is a reference to the book Alice In Wonderland (written by Lewis Carroll, also a target of pedophile accusations) and as the video progresses IU goes deeper into a succession of “rabbit holes”, implying again that her situation is one like Alice’s in the book, something that she’s trapped in until resolution.
• At 1:47 IU emerges from one such hole into a birthday party room, but the decor and table arrangement suggests a child’s birthday party, not an adult’s.  Instead of celebrating politely, she rips the party treats off the table and trashes everything, destroying the childlike image.  It’s the only time she genuinely smiles in the entire video.
• The famous “baby” scene at 2:04 is exactly the opposite of what netizens idiotically pretended it was.  IU is on a high stool, and pet food bowls on the floor symbolise her servitude, that her position has been forced on her.  IU glares at the camera and does not smile.  She starts off sucking the bottle and holding the doll, playing the game of the infantilised pop star as she’s told to, then gets quickly bored, trashing her doll and then eventually collapsing in her seat, exhausted once again, so “absolutely over it” that she can’t keep up the facade for more than a few seconds.

On top of all that there’s the lyrics.

I want to be a child forever,
No, I want to be a moist woman
Yes, I will live silently as death
No, I will turn everything inside out
Try to guess – which one?

IU’s image historically through the early portion of her career has been that of a “child forever” (forced into baby-doll dresses and pandering to pedophiles) who “lives silently as death” (was not allowed to speak up about it).  However now she’s the “moist woman turning everything inside out”.  She then asks the listener sarcastically and rhetorically “am I still the child or am I an adult now?  Guess which one!” – the answer’s obvious enough as it’s the title of the song.

you cannot tell by my face
making a facial expression opposite to the heart is really simple

IU would know all about that.  Remember that the image IU was made to carry through her early career got so creepy that she was even disgustingly called the “Nation’s Little Sister” at one point by Korean media and fans alike, a title she has since openly spoken out against.  In “Twenty-three” IU is rallying against the kind of attitude of the Produce 101 producer (and several other similar producers) who wants to create “healthy porn” with underage or dressed-underage girls, deconstructing the dog-whistle concepts so you can see them for what they really are.  I bet she can’t watch April’s “Dream Candy” without shuddering.  You don’t have to go very deep to see the critique, and the fact that most netizens were completely incapable of doing even this tiny amount of thinking for themselves and accused IU of pedophilia (or whatever) instead shows just how incredibly stupid the average consumer of Korean pop culture can be.

Now you know everything you need to for “health improvement”!  Fortunately only smart people read Kpopalypse blog, so we definitely won’t see any misrepresentation of my aims or intentions with this post on any forums or popular k-pop focused websites.  Isn’t that a relief?

Kpopalypse round / up is back!  Let’s check out this / week’s new releases!

H.O.T

This is a special / Haiku roundup for those who / liked Haiku reviews

Kpopalypse round / up is my best friend, but is / roundup your best friend?

Apink – Only One

The queens of the dog / whistle concept are back to / show you how its done

Crayon Pop – DooDoomChit

The real meme here is / the makeup level which is / over 9000

Mamamoo – New York

Oh wow it’s a new / song by Mamamoo and it’s / dull like all the rest

KittiB & Jace ft. Kanto & DJ Juice – So Easy

Worthless R&B / and even worse, the fashions / hurt my retinas

Song Jieun – Bobby Doll

She meant “Barbie Doll”? / Don’t worry, Mattell won’t sue / over this dull song

Kim Juna – Summer Dream

My summer dream is / for shitty songs like this to / finish existing

Baba & Ryeowook – Cosmic

There’s nothing cosmic / about this boring slow dirge / with too much vocals

Stellar Moments – Dark S

Not to be confused / with Stellar the idol group / some electro thing

Hyungdon & Daejune ft. IU – Decision

Hyundon and Daejune / should have recorded “Park You” / with IU instead

BONUS SONGS

Fromm ft. Giriboy – Pieces Of You & Me

Instrumentals are / okay but whenever they / sing it turns to shit

Anda – Like Family

If I was a sheik / I’d marry her just to end / her music career

Sistar – Don’t Leave Me

It’s just an advert / but that is no excuse for / this fucking garbage

Project Ccok – Determined To Love

Here’s this week’s entry / in “let’s help Kpopalypse / make some roundup puns”

Jung Jinwoo – B Side U

So generic that / I can’t think up anything / witty to write here

Evan – The Trace

They play this MV / off as “art” but it’s really / just about perving

Crystal Tea – Express Boyfriend

I don’t know what this / is, but it’s not very good / so whatever man

That is all for this / week’s Kpopalypse roundup / more new songs next week!

Hi caonimas!  As many of you may know, SS501 singer Kim Hyun Joong was recently found innocent of all those nasty domestic violence charges!  Courts can never be wrong, so this means that Kim Hyun Joong must be the great person that Kpopalypse always knew he was!  It’s time for a celebration post!

Kpopalypse encourages you to celebrate Kim Hyun Joong’s innocence and strength of character today by sharing these Kim Hyun Joong greeting cards with friends, lovers, family and everybody else!  Each card has a wonderful picture and a positive inspiring message straight from the SNS of Kim Hyun Joong!

However, maybe you’re not the sentimental type, but instead the type of person who likes FUN!  Instead, unwind with this great board game!  Click for a larger version that you can print out and play with friends!

And if that’s not enough FUN for you, who doesn’t love a nice relaxing game of bingo?

That’s all for Kpopalypse for this post!  Hopefully you had lots of fun and celebration, Kpopalypse will return with more posts soon!

Some of you have been clicking on Gfriend’s Umji for no reason… but have you missed anything?  Here’s a list of all the websites that were featured on the clickable sidebar Umji over the past year, just in case you missed any of the fun.  Enjoy!

DICE SIMULATOR

EPIC GOOGLE

WHITNEY MUSIC BOX

CAMERON’S WORLD

WAVELENGTH FREQUENCY CALCULATOR

AKINATOR

WHERE IS CAT

PATATAP

WORLD’S WORST WEBSITE

MEOWMANIA

PURPLE

WRITETUBE

SAD TROMBONE

THE WUB MACHINE

BALL ON A STRING

D.BOT

PET THE DOG

NEW AGE BULLSHIT GENERATOR

FUBBS

INTERACTIVE TRIANGULATION

ROLAND TR-808 EMULATOR

OTOMATA

WISDOM OF CHOPRA

DMITRI’S AIR GUITARS

WHITE NOISE MACHINE

ASCII STAR WARS

I MADE THIS, YOU PLAY THIS, WE ARE ENEMIES

PIN NUMBERS REVEALED

LIBRARY OF BABEL

ECHO

PIRATE

TRUMP DONALD

PONYSPIN

CREEPY GIRL

RAVIOLI

DEEP SADNESS

CREEPY HORSE MASK

RABBITS

KITTEN WAR

SLITHER.IO

ENGLISH TO ENGLISH LANGUAGE TRANSLATOR

EVERY DAY THE SAME DREAM

NUMBER

STOP ALIEN ABDUCTIONS

THE FRAGILE CIRCUS

NEON FLAMES

PRINCE OF PERSIA

STRING SPIN

CURSOR 10

BOOK A MINUTE

R2D2 TRANSLATOR

LITTLE ALCHEMY

WOBBULATOR

CUBICLE FREAKOUT

YOU ARE LISTENING TO

DIAL UP SOUND

SPEED OF LIGHT

SCREAMING GOAT PIANO

DOUGHNUT KITTEN

ARBITRARY AWARDS

THE WOODYS

PLINK

PIXEL FADE

POKEDRAW

DON’T POP IT

TACOSPIN

WEBDRIVER TORSO

EARTH TEMPERATURE

SPIDER CALCULATOR

GENETIC CARS 2

THE BAFFLEMENT FIRES

*

Previous Kpopalypse “no reason” sidebar girls:

2015: Suhyun (Akdong Musician)

2014: Eunkyo (F-ve Dolls)

Sidebar Umji has now been replaced by a new “no reason” sidebar girl, Sorn of CLC, who will carry the torch of pointless clicking into the next 12 months!  Thanks for visiting!

It’s time for another Kpopalypse roundup!  Let’s take a look at this week’s new releases!

PPL (Perfect Performance Ladies)

International listeners: timezones for the radio show changed this week, starting from this week and for the next six months the broadcast time changes from GMT+9:30 to GMT+10:30.  Forgot to mention that last week when I should have but oh well.

GOT7 – Hard Carry

I can’t lane with these clowns.  Less cliched synth lines or I’m feeding.

Dal Shabet – Fri, Sat, Sun

It’s Friday, Friday, everybody get down with Dal Shabet, tomorrow is trap beats, and stupid R&B vocals comes afterwards.

Kanto ft. Eddy Kim – Lonely

It’s not too bad until he starts the horrid R&B vocalising.

Junggigo – Nocturne

This would be alright without the falsetto.  Why does every Korean male singer have to sound like a castrated nonce every other comeback.

High4 20 ft. Hwasa – Hookga

Probably the best subunit name in the history of k-pop, pity about the usual rubbish beats ruining everything.  Oh and don’t get too excited about Hwasa, she may as well have stayed home for this one.  On the live broadcast I accidentally cut Hwasa’s bit off with the Junggigo track and honestly it was no great loss to the world.

Amber & Luna ft. Ferry Corsten, Kago Pengchi – Heartbeat

Luna looks normal again for some reason.  I guess her face surgery has finally settled in.

Park Hyo Shin – Beautiful Tomorrow

Wow, listen to that beautiful piano and those swelling strings and… oh fuck it, I’m not fooling anyone.  This is typical maudlin Korean wrist-slashing slow-piano-ballad-by-numbers and it’s a bit better than the average but nothing great.

BONUS SONGS

Lee Sejoon ft. Kim Kyung Ho – Fly High

Sorry but that smile on your mask isn’t fucking cute and just makes you look like a serial killer.

Masta Wu ft. RedRoc, Okasian – Yamaha

First it was Kawasaki, now it’s Yamaha, soon the shitty trap disease will make its way around all the motorcycle brands I guess.

Yu Seungwoo ft. Heize – Only U

Heize is like AOA’s Jimin if she was into shit ballads and starving herself (even more).

December – Mother

There’s something creepy as fuck about this guy singing about her mother when she’s represented by some girl about 2 years older than him swanning through the long grass with dreamy eyes like she’s his cougar girlfriend.  Who thinks up this shit.

101 – Don’t Give Up

Unusually poor production on this track, less dicking around in the studio with cameras filming the girls being “spontaneous” (ahem cough) and more tidying up the screechy mix might’ve been an idea.

2Bic – This Road With You

Oh great it’s an acoustic ballad, because we don’t have five of those in every Korean drama OST ever, we needed a few more, thanks cunts.

Singil Station Romance – An Autumn Night

And here’s the “indie” version of the same bullshit.  Don’t kid yourselves, the only difference between “indie” and “pop” is where you file it in the music store.

Long.D, Seenroot – Yolo

I refuse to even review this one due to its title.  Harsh maybe, but if we don’t teach them, they won’t learn.

Keith Ape ft. Bryan Chase – Let Us Prey

Keith Ape is really trying hard to repeat his performance from last year, which probably deserves some kind of recognition.

Tim – Drawing

It must be a hard life being this boring.  Think of the psychological burden.

Umji – The Way

I usually ignore cookie-cutter OST garbage like this, but I’m just putting this here as a fond farewell to sidebar Umji.  Hopefully you enjoy clicking new official Kpopalypse sidebar girl Sorn over the next 12 months just as much!

That’s it for this week’s Roundup – more next week!

Welcome to another episode of Kpopalypse Nugu Alert!  Let’s once again check out some more nugus!

Obviously there is some subjectivity here (I have to put this disclaimer here or a thousand thundering dipshits over on the k-pop Reddit who don’t understand hyperbole and subjectivity in blog writing will gather together and form a “crybaby singularity” and make the Earth’s sea levels rise with their own tears, flooding coastal cities) but some languages just seem to suit some types of music better than others.  Italian for instance is widely known as the “language of opera” and in my opinion, for good reason.  Have you ever sat down and listened to an opera where the singers aren’t singing in Italian?  It sounds fucking awkward as a motherfuck listening to opera singers wrangle their way around all those hard German consonants instead of smooth flowing Italian words with lovely floating vowel sounds at the end of every word.   However change the musical context from opera to heavy metal and suddenly German sounds great and Italian sounds so fucking stupid that 99% of the Italian metal bands just sing in English instead.  In a similar way, and no doubt due to western pop-cultural expansion, English has sort of become by defacto the “language of pop music”.   Whether it’s the optimal choice could be debated but there’s no doubt that it’s the language that much of the world has gotten used to hearing commercial pop music sung in.  Korean pop’s music producers know the power of connecting to global audiences through commonly-heard English phrase and the hooks of many of the iconic k-pop songs over the last few years are at least 50% English for this reason.

Artists who are really going for broke trying to grab that overseas audience will sometimes do an entire song in English, if they can.  CL’s last few songs are (bad meaning) good examples, Puer Kim had an awkward stab at an all-English song recently and ex-Kara Jiyoung’s latest Japanese-market songs are also in English.  Now I can’t link Jiyoung’s songs here because I can’t find the links anywhere, and that’s because Jiyoung’s Japanese label are so very cunty about not letting anyone outside of Japan hear her music… so why would they go to the trouble of doing a song in English rather than Japanese if they’re only going to release it in Japan and lock it off from English-speaking countries?  The answer is that it’s testament to how powerful people’s sense of “English as the language of pop music” is, that in non-English speaking countries that’s still what people are used to hearing and want to hear more of, and pop music is nothing if not a music style that gives people only slight variations on what they’ve already heard and like.  English in pop music is “understood” in a musical sense globally, in the same way that non-Italian listeners “understand” Italian opera musically, even if we have only a hazy-at-best understanding of the actual words.

This episode of Kpopalypse Nugu Alert is devoted to nugus who also decided that it would be a good idea to release songs entirely in English.  Whether it’s an artistic or commercial choice I have no idea, and whether it’s enough to grab them a CL-sized overseas audience (put your hands up, yes I see you in the back there) remains to be seen, but I certainly don’t mind helping them out a little.  Usual rules apply:

• Less than 20,000 views on official channels
• Not well known to your average 11 year old BTS fan
• Kpopalypse thinks you should listen, just because

So without further ado let’s take a look at some nugu videos!

Post Panic – Tokyo

Post Panic’s MV is so incredibly western-sounding and looking that I had to double and triple-check that this actually was a Korean group and not a western act that just somehow snuck a video onto a Korean YouTube channel (which happens sometimes, routinely confusing the fuck out of Korean nugu-lovers everywhere).  The song has the big millennial-whoop style backing vocals (an American/English melodic pop cliche right now that oddly hasn’t made significant inroads into Korea), low visual production values (a trademark of the “fuck it” end of western music video making), at least three identifiably caucasian-looking people in the music video and most of all, the entirety of the lyrics are in English.  Of course, don’t ask me what any of those lyrics actually are – the singer’s accent combined with a pretty crusty dollop of vocal processing are enough combined to disguise intelligibility to the point where you might as well be listening to it in Korean anyway.  Post Panic aren’t quite as nugu as they appear – the more popular version of this video was posted up elsewhere on YouTube and had about 5000 views before it was presumably taken down for copyright infringement or whatever, this official one’s sitting relatively low so hopefully we can click their videos a few times and make them enough money to afford some pronunciation lessons, or at least a milk refill for their water pistol.

YouTube views at time or writing: 217

Notable attribute: first exposed clothing tag on a bra in official k-pop MV history visible at 2:02

Nugu Alert rating: very high

Stellarjet – Right Before A Storm

Stellarjet kick off their song with some boring slow bullshit and I thought that the entire thing was going to be like that until it suddenly perked up just under a minute in and turned into some synth-driven funk I-don’t-know-what-but-it’s-okay-I-guess thing.  Of course there’s the English lyrics which tie all these videos together and actually sound pretty good here, but what really stuck out to me on this video is the singer’s incredibly outstanding Krystal-grade bitchstare during the upbeat chorus sections.

Everyone else is there grooving away happily on their overpriced instruments (how does every poverty-stricken Korean nugu group ever own a Nord) and she looks like she just wants to walk over to the other side of the rooftop and deck some cunt.  She smiles for about the first ten seconds of the first chorus only, before reverting to a resolute stony Krystal-stare.  No wonder the cameraman was afraid to even point the camera properly at her body and spends most of the chorus length focusing on the buildings in the background.  She probably went all DeNiro in Taxi Driver on him and he was all like “I’m not perving at you, I’m just trying to get a nice vista going, please don’t bash my face in”.

YouTube views at time or writing: 6239

Notable attribute: most frighteningly atrocious half-assed dubstep breakdowns ever attempted by a Korean rock band with non-programmed instruments

Nugu Alert rating: very high

Club505 – In Your Eyes

Of course if you don’t know much English, don’t worry – you can still have an “entirely English” single and music video, it’s easy.  Just get one English phrase that you know is basically correct and not too awkward (or at least better than “if you wanna pretty, every wanna pretty“)  and repeat the fuck out of it, and… well, that’s it really, there’s no step two after that.  Less is more as they say, especially with this type of electronica-based dance track, and the overall effect of Club505’s song is a bit like Madonna’s “Vogue” if you removed all the parts where she craps on about some shit nobody cares about (i.e basically all of it).  It’s also hard not to be reminded of f(x)’s “4 Walls” when listening to and watching this, both songs are pretty similar with lots of mellow programmed synth and a similar pacing, and both music videos have their protagonists spending an inordinate amount of time fucking around in the forest doing some surreal bullshit that is never really explained beyond “the girl is staring at some weird shit and now she’s running around a bit like she’s actually going somewhere and then she interacts with a thing”.  Maybe this is what Sulli would have done if she was also in the “4 Walls” MV and perhaps someone can edit this all together, shop Sulli in there somehow over this Club505 woman so it all fits together seamlessly and the planets will perfectly align and the true caonima energy will be released and erase all war, famine and poverty and neither Hillary nor Trump will win the US election and all will be right in the unive… yeah never mind, it ain’t gonna happen.

YouTube views at time or writing: 2735

Notable attribute: this video has been out for five years which so far works out to about one and a half views per day, HELP THEM SOMEONE

Nugu Alert rating: extreme

Thanks for reading another Kpopalypse Nugu Alert!  Did you know that the Kpopalypse Nugu Alert series is by far the most profoundly unpopular series out of all the different ones on Kpopalypse blog?  That makes YOU special for actually giving enough of a fuck to read down this far!  Yay!  Kpopalypse Nugu Alert will return at an unspecified date in the future with more nugus for your entertainment, until then stay safe!

The bite-size fanfiction series nobody asked for, Kpopalypse dreams returns again for episode four!  Read on and give yourself  “a new hope”, knowing that your dreams aren’t as fucked up as the ones in this post!

WARNING: if you’re actually the kind of person who requires warnings before blog posts, you’re a dickhead.

I am Eunsol from Bambino.  I’m dressed in a long brown trenchcoat like the ones from 1950s detective movies.  I’m standing at the top of a large lighthouse, looking at the view out to the sea and also inland.  Then I notice several men in black suits moving towards the base of the tower.  I know that they’re here to kill me, although I’m not sure how I know this.  I quickly run down the stairwell to the ground floor, it’s easy to move down the stairs fast as they’re very steep, I can pretty much jump down them while holding onto the rail.  I don’t see anyone as I quickly descend, fortunately none of the men thought to check the stairwell, I figure they must all be using the elevator.  I reach the outside and run around the base of the tower, then try to conceal myself in a little concrete nook in the side.  I see two more men in black suits approaching, talking to each other about how she “must be here”, and think to myself that I’m a sitting duck, I have nowhere to hide.  However the two men walk right past me to the main lift entrance, not even noticing that I’m there.  Then I realise why they didn’t recognise me – it’s the detective coat, which completely covers my body.  I think to myself – without my cleavage on display, nobody knows who I am.

I’m in a swimming pool, as part of some sort of competition/game although I’m not sure exactly what it is.  All the members of Girls’ Generation are here.  Hyoyeon appears next to me in the pool, looking similar to how she does in the “Party” music video.  She tells me that I’ve won the game, and as a reward I get to vote on what dance Girls’ Generation should perform on YouTube soon.  I’m allowed three choices of any k-pop dances.  I vote:

1.  T-ara – “Roly Poly“
2. NOM – “Nature Of Man“
3. VAV – “Under The Moonlight“

I’m watching TV, some shitty k-drama is on.  Tiffany from Girls’ Generation is in it.  She’s wearing a grey suit-jacket and underneath, a green and blue zig-zag striped jumper which is very tight fitting around her chest.  She’s talking to a guy, and as she talks to him, she opens up her jacket and pushes her boobs into his side and pouts.  She seems to be trying to use her sex appeal to persuade him to do something, but I’m not sure what it is – there are no subtitles to the drama so I don’t know what she’s saying.

My mother/Boram is driving me through the city, she asks me if I want to see Dumbfounddead, because he’s playing in Adelaide soon.  I say no, I tell her that I’m not really into him.

Later that day I happen to be in the area anyway, so I figure I might as well go and see him because he might make a good interview subject.  I meet him near the sideshow alley at the Adelaide showground, a dense maze of amusement park stalls.  However it’s not showtime and all the stalls are rusty and deserted, in various states of disrepair.  Dumbfounddead smiles and shakes my hand as we meet.  He starts talking about his musical style, and how he likes to change things and do “yolo style” tracks as well as “proper songs” too.  He asks me what song I like the most on his new album, I tell him that I like a song called “Grind”.  We both listen to the song which echoes out from a nearby underground car park tunnel, it’s actually the music to Dynamic Duo’s “Jump Over The Slump” but with Dumbfounddead’s vocals on top.

We go around a corner and there’s a large chalkboard sign with flashing lights, listed on the sign are all the songs on Dumbfounddead’s new album in white chalk.  Next to each one is some numbers, Dumbfounddead explains to me that this shows the results of a poll where people voted for the best track on his album.  “Grind” is in the lead, but only marginally.  Next to this sign is a brick wall with graffiti on it.  Dumbfounddead tells me that people who listen to his album sign the wall to leave messages for him, and that I should write something because I’m a guest.  I pick up some charcoal and write on the wall “Kpopalypse was here”, “cao ni ma” and “maximum determination”.

I’m in a bookstore section of a large department store.  There’s a table of books, I pick one up which is about Netizenbuzz, it has the Netizenbuzz logo on the front.  The book has the dimensions of a children’s book – large and hardback, but also very thin with few pages.  I flip the book over and look at the back, the book talks about how Netizenbuzz was a small blog until it gained success by posting about T-ara’s scandal in 2012.  I figure that the book probably isn’t worth looking at, so I put it down and go on about my day.

I’m teaching guitar to Crayon Pop’s Way.  We’re in my teaching room at work.  Way is wearing a blue tracksuit.  She isn’t really interested in learning any songs, she just has the guitar sat on her lap and it pulling at the strings, like she’s trying to pull them apart.  I take a few photos of Way with my phone.  Way notices and asks me why I’m taking photos.  I tell her that it’s because I need evidence or people won’t believe that she’s trying to pull the strings off my guitar when I tell them the story.  She seems okay with this explanation and continues pulling at the strings.

I’m at SM Entertainment’s gym watching f(x) rehearse the dance to “Nu ABO“.  All of the f(x) girls are wearing tracksuits except Amber who is dressed in a white sleeveless top and denim jeans.  As I watch them dance, it seems that Amber is having some health issues – she loses her way at one point in the dance routine, and starts spinning around in a circle, while the other girls look at her confused.  A few seconds later Amber finds her place in the song and continues on, but during the rap section she loosens her belt as if she’s having stomach cramps.  The song ends and Amber suddenly bends over and vomits loudly onto the gym floor.  I go up to Krystal and ask how it went and if everything’s okay.  Krystal says nothing, instead she just stares at me.  Amber then vomits loudly some more, distracting both myself and Krystal who look over at her, there’s vomit stains all down the front of Amber’s clothes.  Krystal looks extremely unimpressed and doesn’t make further eye contact with me, seemingly deliberately.  She says to the other f(x) girls “we’re outta here” and they all leave.  An SM intern arrives with a mop and starts cleaning up the mess on the floor.

I let a bunch of k-pop girls stay in my house overnight while I’m out of town as they have nowhere to sleep for some reason.  The next day I get back and the place is trashed – there’s mess everywhere and a massive dent in the tiled kitchen floor, the size of a ten-pin bowling ball.  I round up all the k-pop girls (all members of various B-list groups – Stellar, Laboum, BESTie, etc etc) and ask who did it, but nobody can tell me.  I then say that since nobody can tell me they’re all evicted but at least someone here should let me have anal sex with them.  All of the girls say ‘no’ except for Stellar’s Gayoung, who enthusiastically agrees.  Gayoung immediately strips down to some black fishnet/lace clothing (similar to the header picture but more fishnet) and starts rubbing her ass against my crotch.  I start touching her body but all I can feel is the fishnet/lace material, I can’t actually feel Gayoung at all.

I hear Tymee is in Sydney so I catch a plane over there.

I meet a friend at Sydney airport who is involved in the Sydney hip hop scene, he says Tymee is staying in an apartment with him somewhere while she’s in town.  He tells me that there’s two Tymee shows happening today -a Korean language show in the afternoon for hip hop types at a university campus and an “idol-oriented” show (whatever that means) later in English language at a club.  We catch a train over to the university because I want to meet and interview her.

We arrive at the university campus.  My friend explains that he has to drop by one of the dorms to see his ex-girlfriend, and we can go and see Tymee after that.  We meet up with a few of his hip-hop crew and go to the dorm room where his ex-girlfriend lives.  She’s in the dorm common room and her new boyfriend is with him, also some random people from a rival hip-hop crew are there, just standing around, like they’re prepared for some kind of violent situation to happen.  My friend and his ex have about a minute of incredibly awkward conversation where nobody knows what to say, while everyone else stands around doing nothing except being “ready for something to go down”, which it doesn’t.  Soon the meeting is over and everyone leaves.

We all go to the university cafeteria and have lunch.  I remark about how awkward the conversation was and someone behind me overhears me and says something that I can’t quite hear but sounds like “I’ll fucking shoot you if you don’t shut up”.  I decide to not say anything further.  Two guys come and sit by our table, one of them introduces himself as “Sergey”, he has a Russian accent.  He gives me a handgun and says “for your protection, be careful”.  I say thanks and put the handgun in the belt of my pants.  I get out of there as soon as I’m finished eating and go back to the train.

I sit down on the train, Tymee just happens to be next to me on the seat.  She looks as she does in the “Cinderella” MV.  “Convenient that she’s here”, I think, as I get out my phone to record some audio and we start an interview.  I notice I don’t have much charge or storage space on my phone to record the interview but I start anyway.

“Hi Tymee, why are you in Australia?”

“I like this train, there’s lots of green in Sydney along the train track, I think it’s nice and I like the sky and the clouds here.  I don’t know if I could live here but I think that I might get bored but then I don’t know.  I think the train carriages are better here because they’re bigger.  Hey, there’s my flat, you can see it from the train track!  Isn’t that cool?”

Tymee points out the train window at the building where she’s staying and I take a photo of it, an ugly beige apartment block that sticks out above the train underpass.  We exit the train and go into the flat.  I don’t have much time left, so I try and quickly ask a few more relevant questions.

“Tymee, I think you have a very Australian attitude.  What do you think about that?”

“I just do what I want, you know?  There’s all these people who care about this and that, but I don’t care, I just want to come here and do things.  Excuse me but I really need to take a shit and do my hair.”

Tymee goes into the bathroom, and comes out shortly afterward with her hair completely different, dyed light blue in some places and randomly shaved off in others.  Some dancers appear, and Tymee goes with them into a large room at the rear of the flat that’s set up as a dance gym, they then start practicing dance choreography together.  I assume that this is preparation for the “idol-oritented” show.  I stop worrying about the interview as it’s clearly not going to be any good anyway as Tymee doesn’t really answer questions properly, I just sit back and watch the dance practice.

I’m playing guitar in a band, we’re playing some sort of blues music in a shopping mall.  There are several people standing around the band, dancing.  All of a sudden the band goes into a breakdown using the rhythm from the Wonder Girls song “Why So Lonely“, and all the band members transform into the Wonder Girls members.  The fans who are dancing straight away seem to forget how to dance, at first standing around awkwardly, and then very gradually dancing to the beat as if they have never heard a song like this before and don’t know how to keep time to the new mysterious rhythm.

I’m in an outdoor plaza area where there are shoppers and cars, it looks a bit like the plaza in Sydney’s Kings Cross.  Hitchhiker appears and starts dancing to “Eleven“.  He is brandishing a small silver blade.  He starts running around stabbing people while doing his usual dance moves.  Blood starts splashing on his reflective body as the music plays and he continues to dance.

I’m at the radio station, I’m not doing my own show but another show with other DJs.  I want to play the new Amber song that some people have been asking about but I don’t know where my suitcase with all the songs in it is.  I play a song by industrial/power electronics group Navicon Torture Technologies called “I Want To Commit A Crime Of Passion” instead.  I walk into the carpark and find the suitcase in the boot of my car.  When I get back in the song is still playing and the other DJs have hired someone to make me some kind of cherry chocolate dessert, which they give to me in a small takeaway container.

Later I’m driving home after the show and I get lost in some gated community where all the streets are dead ends.  Quite a few other cars are also driving around the same area, they’re seemingly lost too.  A police officer turns up and starts fining the other drivers for illegal turns but he ignores me.

Netizenbuzz leaves a series of three cryptic posts on her site, in poetry type format.  They all read the same:

Working all day
$33+
Nobody understands
People just want to hate

There are a few blurry photos on each post too, including one of NB in a wedding dress.  I consider writing something in reply but I decide not to.  I decide that I want to visit NB at her house instead to see if she’s okay.

I go to her house, an old-style white wooden cottage, and walk up to the front door.  I ponder whether this is really a good idea to visit her and think that maybe I should leave.  Suddenly, she opens the front door and she seems to recognise me straight away.  “Why are YOU here?” she asks.  NB is wearing a t-shirt and shorts, and along the exposed parts of her arms and legs are strange marks and bruises similar to those of Krokodil addicts.  I wonder to myself if she’s addicted to drugs, and if perhaps she needs the web traffic from translations of negative comments on gossip articles to feed her addiction.  I start to feel sad for her, but I don’t know how to help her.  “Just passing through, sorry to disturb you”, I say awkwardly as I leave.

I’m going to see a concert where After School’s Jungah is performing solo.  I’m waiting in line for tickets, in the foyer of the venue.  One of my guitar students is here, she’s in line for the first ticket.  She buys her ticket but then lets me take her spot in the queue to get her seat in the venue, she shrugs and tells me that she doesn’t really care where she sits because she’s not really into k-pop and she’s just here because of her friend but that I might enjoy a good seat.  I’m worried because all the tickets have our names on them, will I not be able to enter if the names don’t match?  I enter the venue, a theatrical style venue with sloped audience seats, and sit down, nobody stops me.  I see that a small competition is being held with some of the diehard Jungah fans in the first few rows of the venue, but I’m not quite following it – I’ve walked halfway in on it so I don’t really know what’s happening, but it seems to be a small mini-event to kill time before Jungah gets on stage.  I wait for the gig to start.

After a short wait, Jungah arrives, and everyone cheers.  She starts singing a song, some truly horrid and forgettable slow ballad.  It becomes quickly apparent to me that she’s lipsyncing the whole thing.  At one point she has the microphone really far away from her face when a note comes in, and the whole rest of the audience also work out at that point what I already knew – that she’s just miming to the backing track.  Mutters and booing start around the venue, and quite a few audience members start leaving.  Jungah seems upset by this, she finishes her song and then Jungah leaves the stage through a side exit and runs off down a street, into the night.  The diehard fans in the front who chose to stay run after, screaming “we love you Jungah!” “come back!” etc, but Jungah is too fast for them, and has given them the slip.  The fans who gave chase gradually return back to the venue, looking sad and exhausted.

One of the fans at the front is k-pop v-logger Kpopsteve.  He seems really upset with how the gig went, and says that he wishes Jungah wasn’t so bothered by the haters and that she should have continued.  I ask him if he’d like to do an interview with me, he says yes.  We go to his house, which is next door to the venue, and I begin the interview in his loungeroom.  I have a 1980s style portable cassette player that I’m using to record the interview.

I ask him “Hi!  How are you?  Answer in as much or as little detail as applicable.”

His eyes light up.  “I’m good!  Hey, you’re Kpopalypse, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I knew it because of that question.  You always use that fucking question at the start of your interviews, and your quizzes too!  Wow you’re older than I expected, like, you could be my dad or something.  Anyway I’m great yeah, just hanging about, doing v-logs, listening to k-pop, you know…”  Kpoopsteve seems reluctant to get too close to the cassette player when he’s answering questions, it’s as if he doesn’t want to be recorded.

“What’s your accent, which country are you from?” I ask.

Kpopsteve gets very quiet.  “Ummm… I don’t really want to answer that.”

All of a sudden, a demon appears.  Well, actually it’s After School’s Kahi wearing a red demon onesie.

“I’M THE CHAT ADMIN DEMON!  THIS INTERVIEW IS BEING MODERATED!  ANSWER THE QUESTION!” she says, demandingly.

“No, I don’t want to.” says Kpopsteve.

“I DO NOT TOLERATE TROLLING!  ANSWER THE QUESTION OR YOU WILL BE REMOVED FROM THE CHAT!”

Kpopsteve is polite but defiant.  “It’s my house, I can do what I want.”

“WE SHALL SEE.”

The demon vanishes.  A second later, Kpopsteve also vanishes, seemingly removed by the chat admin demon, and I’m alone in his house.  I notice that Kpopsteve owns four dogs, of different breeds, but I don’t know what the breeds are called because I don’t know anything about dogs.  I feel funny being alone in someone else’s house, so I open the front door of the house and wander outside onto a cobblestone area.

“Hey, I’m back!  Did you miss me?”  It’s Kpopsteve’s voice.

I turn around, Kpopsteve is behind me.  “Oh… hi!” I say as I wave.

“That demon can’t fool me!  It’s my house!” he says, smiling.  We go back inside and continue the interview.

I’m intrigued by his dogs, they all look completely different.  One of them is wearing a cardboard box around its torso.  “You have some very nice dogs, which one meets required standards the most?”

“Well, girls can’t go past a royal dog”, Kpopsteve says, patting a tiny long-haired dog that looks like a smaller version of an Afghan Hound.

I want to ask Kpopsteve some deeper questions about k-pop but he starts reading the newspaper.  He’s reading a negative review of the gig that we just saw.  He says “the people who write these reviews, they don’t seem to understand.  We’re just k-pop fans, it’s a competition and a get together, you know, it’s a social event.  It doesn’t have these high expectations, we just wanted to have some fun and watch Jungah, you know?”.

I’m in the cobblestone area outside Kpopsteve’s house from the previous dream.  It’s like a small courtyard with a slight slope.  My girlfriend’s dad is here, he’s selling cans of Dr Pepper under a bridge.  He starts chanting “Doctor Pepper, Doctor Doctor Pepper”.  All of a sudden the song “Doctor Pepper” starts up.  CL, OC Maco, Riff Raff and Diplo all appear, and they start dancing to the song.  They all look exactly like they do in the Doctor Pepper video.  I start dancing as well, and when Riff Raff’s rap part comes in, Riff Raff dances and I rap all of his lines.

After the song’s over I decide to walk home, along the way I see Riff Raff and CL on the front porch of a house, discussing music, League of Legends Oceania caster Froskurinn is also there.  They start talking about Die Antwoord.

“I hate, hate, hated them when I first heard it, but now I kinda like them” says Riff Raff.

“I agree.  They’re an acquired taste” says Froskurinn, nodding.

CL also nods, silently.

I’m in a shared student accommodation building.  There’s an Asian man next to me, we’re both students living together.  We’re watching a gif of Super Junior’s latest live performance.  In the image, Siwon’s face gets very close to another man’s genitals in tight green underwear, I’m not sure which other member of Super Junior it is as we can’t see his face.  The man next to me seems really embarrassed to be watching this.  To save him the embarrassment, instead I go to Anti Kpop-Fangirl to see what’s new there.  I can see that AKF has written a new article about some SNSD song that he doesn’t like very much and there’s 1159 comments on it, mostly complaining about his opinion.  I then look at my own site and the traffic there has also multiplied, also with hate comments even though I haven’t written about the new SNSD or even heard the song myself yet, I think to myself that I guess people are having trouble telling us apart again.  The guy next to me sees me scrolling through all the hate comments and says “you don’t really care about other people at all, do you”.  I reply “yes I do – I care by not caring”.

It’s time again for another Kpopalypse roundup!  Let’s take a look at this week’s new releases!

Mercury

Lots of songs this week, unfortunately most of them are shit, but never mind – let’s get down to it!

SHINee – 1 of 1

New Kids On The Block were a shit group with no songs that were carried to fame purely on the basis of their members’ looks and artificially constructed personalities.  Gosh that doesn’t sound familiar at all.

BTS – Blood, Sweat & Tears

Too overblown and warbly with far too crappy a chorus to be actually any good, but at least this ultra-dancehall-lite is a bit refreshing when most stuff from boy groups right now is yolo tard, dull funk or stupid ballads.

Pentagon – Gorilla

I love how the guy with the weedy voice does that silly thing at 2:23 and then the alarm comes on, it’s like he set off the Shit Music Alert.

Ailee ft. Yoon Mirae – Home

Ailee is the latest female k-pop singer to get struck down with yolo fever, and it really doesn’t suit her.  At least she looks great in all the shots where she’s not dancing like a twit.

Monsta X – Fighter

The guy punching that concrete wall at the start probably feels as futile as me whenever I check all the songs for the past week and try to find something interesting.

Gemma – Sugar Rush

Okay, so a few listenable songs did come out this week.  The MV is the Chinese version, but radio listeners got the Korean version, not sure why there’s no Korean MV yet but hey I’ll take what I can get.

Alesso & Chen – Years

SM Station doing “short versions”, kill me.  Mind you they probably did the world a favour with this one anyway, I didn’t want to hear the full thing either.

Sixth Sense – Feel Me

You can spot a real nugu video when they can’t afford a colorist to match brightness and contrast levels between frames.

Heejin – Vivid

Heejin is apparently from a girl group called Loona, and they’re going to introduce each one of the 12 members at a time with a full MV before debuting the group.  If they’re all of this production standard, the company must have money out the ass!  The plastic spider over the face thing was also a cool reenactment of what actually happens in Australia.

SF9 – Fanfare

Since when did 1990s black-metal style long-sleeved t-shirts with old English lettering on the side come into fashion in Korea?  Half my teenage wardrobe just became “trendy” and it feels weird.

Sechs Kies – Three Words

I guess they weren’t lying,  the dick really does go in the pussy.

BONUS SONGS

Lay – What U Need

Finding a playable version of this song to broadcast on air – not easy.  Finding a reason to care – also not easy.

Kixs ft. Uji – Regret

More smooth coffee-shop bullshit for today’s easily-triggered pussbag generation.

CSP ft. Kayla – Busan Girls

Why do k-pop videos have some guy always walking after a girl yelling shit in her ear while she just sort of grudgingly tolerates it?  Can’t she take out some mace and spray him in the eye or something?

Reddy – Blaze Of Glory

Not the Bon Jovi song.  Not sure if I’m grateful for that or not.

Sandeul – Stay As You Are

YEAH PUSH HIM INTO THE WATER, TAKE HIS EARBUDS, FUCK HIM HE DESERVES IT

Nu’est (MinHyun & JR) – Daybreak

About 20 songs like this come out in Korea each week and I’m not even exaggerating.  People think I try to cover everything in these roundups but that’s not true at all – actually I deliberately leave aside a ton of stuff that all sounds identical to this garbage because I figure nobody gives a shit.

Jero & Dok2 – Paradise

A real paradise would be one without Jero or Dok2.

Kim Seulong – Jack Pot

I was so happy when the funk-metal trend died in the west about 15 years ago, let’s not have Korea picking up on it thanks.

Ants – Pretty

Having caucasians in the MVs for boring k-pop coffee shop songs instead of Koreans really drives home to me just how fucking insipid these videos are, because it removes one barrier of cultural distance.

Lugoh ft Olltii, Xit Suh – With You

More boring smooth crap.  Apparently there some perving to be had here but I can’t make it through the video that far without dozing off.

MC The Max – You You And You

This guy is really called MC The Max?  With a name like that I at least expected some lame yolo-hop or whatever, not this hideous money-note-encrusted ballad wankfest.

Stella Jang – Transfer

This sounds like a smoother Juliana Hatfield or something, without the squeaky American college student accent.  Also without the ability to write songs or use a distortion pedal but oh well.

Huckleberry Finn – Namhae

It’s nice that there’s a bit of subtlety in the arrangement here but it’s still pretty weak and Coldplayish unfortunately.

Wolfizm & Lil Thug-E – Dope

“Lil Thug-E” sounds like a wind-up toy, I’m not sure that was the intended effect.

Skull – Never Cry

I’m actually quite fond of the cringey little guest spots Skull does on girl group songs, a whole song of Skull being Skull is not so good.

Scarlet Mojo-pin – I Feel The Swing

This ska-pop really woke me up after hearing all the other boring shit this week, and it’s not even that rocking relative to most stuff in that style, pity I couldn’t get the audio in time for the show.  There must be an undocumented valium epidemic in Korea or something, maybe Bom’s gotten into drug-pushing downers full time now that 2NE1 are over.

That’s all for this week – more new k-pop next week!

Delayed comebacks – don’t you hate them?  Why can’t your favourite group come back more often like all those other boring stupid annoying groups that you don’t care about?  Never fear, Kpopalypse has the answers!

There’s all sorts of reasons why your spoiled, entitled whiny ass isn’t getting the consistent comebacks that you want out of your favourite k-pop groups.  I’m now going to break down for you the main reasons, from my perspective, of why a comeback might get delayed.  I’ll be sure to use my usual hyperbolic annoying writing style for maximum fun times (for myself) and irritation (for you), so if you feel threatened by any of the information here you can complain about the way I write instead of focusing on the actual content and potentially learning something that might rustle your cozy worldview of k-pop.

Cynical readers like the ones that inhabit various reactionary circle-jerky holier-than-thou k-pop communities may reasonably ask why I would presume to know about this shit when I don’t live or work in Korea.  Of course I’ve worked in the western music business, not the Korean one, but while cultures, preferences and music styles do change, what doesn’t change that much from one country to the next in my personal experience is:

• People
• Business practices
• Controlling a bunch of mental children

As someone who has had the joyous fun thrill-ride of managing artists and their release schedules in the past, I can now share with you the things that might potentially hold up a comeback, how common they are, how fucked the chance of your comeback eventually happening is, and how likely I think these reasons are to apply cross-culturally.  Of course, this is still just my opinion so try to restrain yourself from being a complete faggot bitch about this post, if possible.

REASON FOR DELAYED COMEBACKS #1: MAKING STUPID BOXES TAKES TIME

It might seem mundane compared to “our lead singer shot up a bunch of heroin and spent the next six months in hospital” but in the west, the creation of the physical product has historically been by far the most common reason for comeback delays.  A big label producing a large pop act that is planned for global superstardom wants to ideally release their music on all formats simultaneously – digital, CD, vinyl etc, to give consumers the most choice and also just because it’s more befitting to the image of a large label to have their shit together in this regard.  It can take many months to get the physical side organised however, and this is in the west where packaging is relatively simple and standardised.  Korean pop doesn’t really have the love-affair with vinyl so they’re spared the lengthy pressing plant backlogs that currently exist with trying to get anything released in that format, but what Koreans do love dearly is endless fucking over-packaging of everything in “unique” packages, and anyone with a physical collection of k-pop CDs knows exactly just how ostentatious that packaging can get.

All those little details in the photobooks that you love have to be fabricated out of raw materials somehow, and often different parts of a very large package made out of different materials are fabricated in different factories, on different time scales, often even in different countries.  The more unique and unusual the packaging is, the more likely that this is true.  Factories tend to specialise in working with certain types of materials so the moment you combine different packaging ideas, the more likely you’ll have to source “part x” from somewhere else.  When creating a CD product in the west, you’re already working with a plastic process (the disc and jewel case) and a paper/cardboard process (the paper insert or box) and plants designed to cater to this will offer to do it all in one, but if you want to go “outside the process” and have some fancy bullshit like a special gold ribbon around your case or a reflecting metal crystal shard thingy that’s where delays can really start happening.  Even if you’re lucky enough to be able to do everything in one factory, your product then becomes an “order” and it has to wait its turn to be created.  High priority customers with big orders tend to get put at the front of the queue – if you’re from some nugu agency who wants to press 500 copies of some shit nobody is going to buy, you have to wait your turn behind the next EXO or BTS album, because large runs from repeat clients make the factory more money.  The same would probably apply if you’re some “old-gu” agency who haven’t had a comeback in two years, if you’re not a regular customer or you don’t have a “special relationship” with the factory you don’t get priority.

The good news is that physical product issues won’t hold up a comeback forever.  Your faves will definitely come back eventually, they just have to wait for the label to be ready with everything because there was a flood in that factory in the third-world country where a bunch of underpaid workers gradually get cancer working with dangerous chemicals while making the little card that goes inside the booklet with the chip in it that you scan with your phone to release the tracking software that links you with your one true k-pop love and tells you via GPS coordinates how far away you are from your bias at all times, but once that’s all sorted out they should be good to go.

REASON FOR DELAYED COMEBACKS #2: NO PAY, NO PLAY

Another big delay-causer in the world of music is finances.  A k-pop comeback has several different components, each of which require renumeration.  People who do stuff related to enabling a comeback like to be paid for their time and efforts, and in the absence of payment, things often don’t get done.  An audio engineer can create the perfect mix but he might not want to hand over those nicely mixed and mastered audio files until he gets paid.  A photographer may take astounding photos of your new girl group but she’s not going to turn over the photos until you turn over money into her bank account.  There’s dozens of steps along the way to preparing a comeback, and all of those people need to be renumerated in some form, or a comeback can be indefinitely delayed until the people involved come to terms.

The absence of payment doesn’t mean that the person who is doing the paying is broke or unable to pay, although that’s one possibility.  Sometimes the payer feels like they shouldn’t have to pay.  Imagine that you’re paying someone to do something related to a k-pop comeback, and for whatever reason the comeback ends up being of substandard quality.  There’s countless things that could potentially go wrong if the people you’ve agreed to pay don’t do their job properly.  Maybe the tribal lycra spacesuits don’t zip up all the way properly and come undone during the vigorous dance routines, or maybe the dance routines that you asked the choreographer to design for your group look like A-Force’s “Wonder Woman”:

Would you pay for a comeback of this quality?  Maybe you would, or maybe you’d refuse to pay everybody involved, or maybe you’d just “forget” to pay them.  Sometimes people just aren’t that good at keeping track of finances and forget about things, music business people are great about “forgetting” money when they owe it.  I know a certain album that waited several years to be released because someone simply forgot to give someone else some money to hand over a taped recording – the amount in question was $50.

All sorts of k-pop related stuff dies in the ass all the time because people don’t pay in a timely manner for whatever reason – it’s definitely the main reason for k-pop concert cancellations.  Just one example close to home – an Australian k-pop concert “K-pop Heart” died swiftly when the deadbeat company aus2one who were organising it breached their contract with Pledis Entertainment (i.e probably didn’t front up with the performance fee and/or payment for flights and accommodation in the required timeframe) who then pulled their artists from the lineup.  The organiser Naureen Gana then declared bankruptcy and fled to Korea while her company was legally dissolved, leaving hundreds of fans with unrefunded tickets.  Shit like that happens constantly with exported k-pop projects all around the world, so you can imagine how much similar situations are happening inside Korea with regard to comebacks and various related activities, especially with queues of easily-fleeced fangirls and fanboys struggling to become idols.  As Sarah Wolfgang said, “I think the biggest misconception that a lot of people have when entering the industry might be that things will progress smoothly”.  She didn’t elaborate – but in my opinion she didn’t need to.

REASON FOR DELAYED COMEBACKS #3: MEMBER ISSUES

We all know about high-profile member issues like bully victim Kris fucking off to Canada and leaving SM in the lurch with EXO’s “Wolf” comeback for months, and Hwayoung’s comeback-delaying bullying of all the CCM staff behind the scenes, but versions of these sort of dramas exist in every group, it’s just not always public.  When T-ara’s scandal was hot, After School were one of the first groups in line to pipe up and say “gosh we never bully each other ever ever ever oh my gosh no“, then they proceeded to not have comebacks for years on end and then Kahi eventually admitted that they can’t fucking stand each other.  f(x) are notorious for their slow comeback schedule, and they’re also notorious for having a couple of caonimas in the group, Sulli and Krystal, neither of whom give very many fucks about anything so one comeback per year is probably all they can stand as a group (even post-Sulli notice how it’s really just Luna and Amber getting all the comebacks lately).

There’s definitely a correlation between comeback levels and “christ that member is a cuntfaced bitch” levels, because bitches who don’t give any fucks while greatly admired by Kpopalypse from the safety of professional distance are actually high-maintenance to work with closely, and dealing with them tends to slow everything else down as they gradually manage to make the entire universe revolve around them instead of the creative output.  However that doesn’t mean you can assume that any group not coming back is doing so because they have a caonima member in them, or that every leader in a k-pop group is the R. Lee Emery style drill sargeant that Kahi was.

The other common member issue in k-pop groups is the one that’s been making the news a lot lately with idols – health, particularly mental health.  Giving your entire life over to music for a number of years can be stressful no matter which part of the music industry globally you reside in, and many people who do this tend to have all their eggs in one basket – they don’t necessarily have much of a backup plan if things fail, so their entire hopes and dreams are hanging on “making it”, which will only happen for very few, less than 0.1%.  Kpop has an extra layer of pressure, on top of the general competitiveness of the music industry as a whole, you’re also competing with the people within your own agency and your own group, the same people you eat, sleep, dance, shit and fap with every single day.  Even though you’re constantly with other people, on a “relating to others” level you’re genuinely isolated because there’s nobody you can trust who is also on your level and going through the same experience – the mere fact that those around you are going through that experience means that you can’t trust them by default.  Just ask 4Minute about that one.  On top of that there’s all the judgement from outside, both positive and negative, on top of the pile.  It takes a very strong person to be able to survive all that with their sanity intact and many members of k-pop groups, being young teens and twenty-somethings with little life experience, are simply not that mentally strong, and that’s where health issues like anxiety, bulimia/anorexia, substance addiction and a whole host of others arise.  The choice for the company is then to either turf out the member who can’t hack it, or stick by them and delay the comeback until they get their shit together.  The second option is a gamble, as mental health issues can take many months or even years to deal with.  It’s little wonder that agencies running newer groups would rather give the weakest-link member the flick at least temporarily, before fans get too heavily emotionally invested in them, just so they can get on with things.  When your favourite member gets booted out of a group you should be happy because firstly they’re now not part of the soul-killing shit machine anymore and now have some slim hope of recovery, and secondly they’ve probably been removed to expedite the group’s next activities.

REASON FOR DELAYED COMEBACKS #4: MARKETING COMMON-SENSE

In the west, “normal” album release schedule for a fairly active group is an album every two years.  If you get any releases coming at you from western groups sooner than that, you’re being spoiled rotten.  In k-pop, if you’re an artist and you dare to wait two years between tweeting the colour of your urine everybody thinks you’ve died or your agency is bankrupt, which is odd because the release patterns of k-pop groups are quite reliable and predictable for the most part:

• Brand new groups get more frequent comebacks than older well-established groups, so the new group has more chance to build an audience.  A long-established favourite group doesn’t need constant comebacks, their audience and brand power will both stick with them.
• Groups that have long hiatuses are more likely to come back with multiple feature tracks at once or in very quick succession to make the return more memorable.
• Certain groups tend to have releases planned at certain times.  For instance Sistar coming back once per year, usually in summer.
• Idols who can sustain the agency financially through extracurricular activities don’t need comebacks at all.

I discussed this a bit more in QRIMOLE, but basically the more you see your favourite idol endorse products, the more money they make but also the less music they need to produce.  Not only do idols slow down their musical output when they are going really badly health-wise, they also slow down when they are being really successful.  If your idol is well known, generally happy and constantly in advertising work, expect that new comeback to take a while.  The most prolific idols tend to be the ones in the middle – the ones who haven’t quite made it yet and need to constantly push to get themselves out there over the competing groups, but also have enough stamina in them that they haven’t quite burned themselves out completely.  Once you’ve got some financial stability, you can “coast” a bit on your own collecting money and your agency can then devote more energy to its next up and coming project.  This is what people mean when they say that the idol business takes a few years before it actually gets glamorous – until you get to that “coasting” level you’re just working like fuck on comeback after comeback, each of which means many months of gruelling fitness and dance training and eating lots of crappy salads.

So in summary:

• in the music business organising shit takes a long time, so be patient, you spoiled little fuckhead
• plus everyone’s a deadbeat robber baron
• and a cunt in general
• but you should be grateful if your fave doesn’t come back much, it probably means they don’t have to
• also if your bias gets booted out of their group you should do the rational thing – celebrate their freedom from the soul-crushing idol machine instead of demanding that they strap themselves back into the torture chair some more

If nothing else, remember that if you’re an actual music fan first and can hold back your biased-fuckhead impulses there’s a good chance some other group will just get lumped with the same shitty song your bias was going to do.  Until next time, caonimas!

Here’s a new series purely for the benefit of those people who read Kpopalypse blog who are musicians and have been asking me for the chords to various k-pop songs!  For the rest of you, this post and in fact this entire series will probably be completely useless!  Yay!

Note that prior music theory knowledge of basic melody/rhythm/harmony will be presumed, but I’ll explain anything that I think is relevant which is beyond the basics.

LaBoum – Imagine More

Structure and timestamps

Riff x 2 – 0:04
Verse x 2 – 0:21
Pre-chorus – 0:38
Chorus pt. 1 – 0:58
Chorus pt. 2 – 1:14
Riff x 1 – 1:27
Verse x 2 – 1:35
Pre-chorus – 1:52
Chorus pt. 1 – 2:13
Chorus pt. 2 – 2:29
Bridge – 2:42
Chorus pt. 1 (quiet) – 3:00
Chorus pt. 1 – 3:17
Chorus pt. 2 – 3:33
Riff x 2 – 3:46

Key and time signatures

F Major – 4/4

The following is oversimplified both in terms of harmony and rhythm.  I’ve left out all the fiddly keyboard riffs and string layers in the song.  I’ve also “quantised” everything so it’s on the beat just for ease of readability, I figure I don’t need to get too specific with that as you can hear the song so you should know where everything goes rhythmically anyway.  The below is just to give you the bare bones of the harmony and from here you can play around with it and adapt to suit your preferences and playing style etc.

Riff

Six notes, with octaves on a synthesiser:

| F – A – | Bb – – – | D – C – | Bb – – –

If you want to do full chords instead of single notes, it’s:

| F – Am – | Bb – – – | Dm – C – | Bb – – –

Verse

| F – – – | Am – – – | Bb – – – | Bbm – – –

Pre-chorus

| Am – – – | Dm – – -| Bb – – – | Bbm – – –
| Am – – – | A – – – | Dm – C – | G – – –
| Bb – – – | C – – –

Half-time rhythm here but the chords happen at the same frequency except for the seventh bar.  I’m actually not entirely sure if the A major chord in the sixth bar is the correct chord but it sounds okay in context to my ear, maybe you can find a better chord.

Chorus pt. 1

| F – – – | C/E – – – | Dm – – – | Bb – – – | Am – – – | Dm – – – | Bb – – – | C – – –

C/E is my way of writing “C but with E as the bassnote”, or “C 1st inversion” for piano/keyboard players.  This is so there’s a smooth F > E > D bassline from the first bar to the third bar instead of F > C > D which is a lot jumpier and doesn’t sound as nice.

Chorus pt. 2

| F – – – | C/E – C#° – | Dm – – – | Bb – – – | G – Am – | Bb – C –

C#° is a C# diminished chord, which is C#-E-G, effectively it’s just C major with a C# instead of C as the bassnote, so you get that nice C > C# > D chromatic ascending sound from the second bar to the third bar.

Bridge

| Dm – – – | C – – – | Bb – – – | Am – – – | G – – – | Am – – – | Bb – – – | C – – –

That’s all for this post!  These “tabs” series of posts will be short bonus posts i.e they’re extra to the post schedule, as it’s a very quick process for me to make posts like this.  So don’t worry, non-musicians, these posts aren’t taking the place of other posts that you might be more interested in, it’s just another little extra bit of content for you to enjoy (or not).  More posts soon, and if you have a request for me to work out a specific song, drop it here or on my Twitter or ask.fm!  Have fun, everyone!

It’s time for another Kpopalypse roundup – let’s check out this week’s new releases!

Sixbomb

Lots of requests meant not many new songs got played this week and that was just fine!

Davichi – Beside Me

The best Davichi song in a while, probably because it clocks in at slightly over 2 BPM once it gets going.

I.O.I – Very Very Very

A song that is very very very much a soundalike of another k-pop song, I think you know which one.  It’s an inferior version for sure, but if k-pop is copying this it’s a positive sign for the genre.

Se7en – Give It To Me

Give them what, a song without falsetto?  We can hope.  The beat is good here though, it nearly rescues this one.

Ladies Code – The Rain

Ladies Code’s latest ode to animal cruelty is better than the turgid “Galaxy” but nowhere near as good as their better early songs.

Girls Girls – Juicy Secret

The same boring sax riff stuff everybody does these days.

100% – Better Day

100% continue to be better than most boy groups, on average.

BONUS SONGS

Crush – Fall

And the bonus material starts this week with this crappy piano ballad.  It’s a good thing there were lots of requests for this week’s show, it means I didn’t have to subject anyone to this crap over the airwaves.

Henry & Soyou – Runnin’

No Soyou in the video means this is robbed of the only use it arguably had.

Davichi – Love Is

AAARKAAAARKKAAAARK it’s the call of the shitbird

Lim Jeong Hee – I.O.U

A lighter-waving slow power-ballad thing.

YunB ft. Ugly Duck – Runaway Pt.2

This song is trying to annoy me and make me fall asleep at the same time.

Highteen – Boom Boom Clap

Another group going the Red Velvet route with the washing-machine rhythms and crappy “world music” influences.

OhBliss – Bunny Bunny

Another soundalike, this time AOA’s “Like A Cat” gets the retread treatment complete with Jimin-style squeals for no particular reason other than that song was popular so I guess they’d hope the success would transfer over.

Block B – My Zone

Surprisingly conservative for Block B, it would have made the cut for the show but I couldn’t play it because as a Japanese k-pop song I have to do secret deals with about 3 different drug lords just to get the audio for it, sorry about that.

Man’s Avenue – Missing You

Move along, no men to see here.

Aisle – Happy Magic Candy

Fucking shit.

I’m – Try

Before I clicked on this I thought to myself “what a shame it would be if the best song of the year had a really awkward and confusing title like this”.  I needn’t have worried.

Sugardonut – Piece Of A Lie

They keep refusing to be good.

Karacin Jr. – Rainbow Swamp

A “rainbow swamp” is probably what lives outside in the creek at the back of every k-pop HQ along Gangnam where they throw out all their raw materials after they use them in MVs.

The Black Underground – Coffee & Sandy

What is a group called “The Black Underground” doing not sounding like Burzum?  Fuck off.

El Camino & Yerin – some boring shit honestly I cbf even looking this up

Does Yerin even have a function except to not be Park Jimin.  Assuming it’s even that particular Yerin in this song but who cares if it isn’t, it fucking sucks regardless.

That’s it for another roundup – more next week!

Hi readers!  Just another tab to tide you over while I work on a very looooooong upcoming post, featuring the most relevant group in k-pop – T-ara, and the music for their Ennio Morricone-esque anthem, Day By Day!

T-ara – Day By Day

Unfortunately I’ve had to use the attractive but horribly seizure-inducing dance video for this post as it’s the one that has the song on it all the way through without interruption, unlike the far superior drama version.  Try to avert your eyes to the below text while playing the song so you don’t give yourself a fucking migraine.

Structure and timestamps

Intro x 2 – 0:53
Intro x 2 (rap) – 1:09
Verse x 2 – 1:26
Chorus x 2 – 1:58
Bridge – 2:14
Verse x 2 – 2:31
Chorus x 2 – 2:47
Bridge – 3:03
Breakdown – 3:20
Intro x 2 (rap) – 3:38
Chorus x 2 – 3:54
Outro x 1 – 4:10

Key and time signatures

F# Minor – 4/4

The following is the harmony only, in the original key.

Intro/Outro/Rap

| F#m – – – | B – – – | D – E – | F#m – – –

Verse

| F#m – – – | C#m – – – | E – – – | Bm – – – | F#m – – – | C#m – – – | E – – – | F#m – – –

Chorus

| F#m – – – | B – – – | D – E – | F#m – – –

Bridge

| F#m – – – | E – – – | – – – – | F#m – – – | – – – – | E – – – | – – – – | F#m – – –

The blank bars don’t mean silence, they mean that the chords continue on for two bars instead of one.

Breakdown

| D – – – | A – – – | C#7 – – – | F#m – – – | D – – – | A – – – | C#7 – – – | – – – –

So that’s the original key.  However, to be completely honest it’s stupid to play it in this key if you don’t have to.  The key of F# minor has obviously been selected to suit Soyeon’s voice so the high note in the breakdown is sitting right at the top of her range, because there’s no other reason why anyone would write a song in such a stupid key.  It’s a pain in the ass to play in F# minor on literally every single instrument in existence ever, so unless you’ve got or are working with someone who has the exact same vocal range as Soyeon, it makes a lot more sense to transpose the song into a sensible key.

The following is every chord written out again in the much more realistic key of A minor.

Intro/Outro/Rap

| Am – – – | D – – – | F – G – | Am – – –

Verse

| Am – – – | Em – – – | G – – – | Dm – – – | Am – – – | Em – – – | G – – – | Am – – –

Chorus

| Am – – – | D – – – | F – G – | Am – – –

Bridge

| Am – – – | G – – – | – – – – | Am – – – | – – – – | G – – – | – – – – | Am – – –

Breakdown

| F – – – | C – – – | E7 – – – | Am – – – | F – – – | C – – – | E7 – – – | – – – –

You can do other transpositions if you like, but this is the one that I find works the best for my main instrument which is guitar, it allows me to do an arrangement of the chords AND the melody in the one song, Sungha Jung-style.  My guitar tabs are below as well as a video of me demonstrating how I play it.

The song can be played with fingerstyle or a pick, I’ve used a pick here.  I’ve also cut the rap parts and the third chorus from the original arrangement, because on a solo instrument and with a slower tempo I just felt that the extra repetitions dragged on a bit too long.  This arrangement isn’t particularly easy for a beginner player because of some of the chord shapes and the fact that it combines harmony and melody on the one instrument.  The breakdown section is particularly tough, however it’s all certainly doable for an intermediate-level player with a bit of practice.

Hopefully you’ve enjoyed this post, but if not, below is another picture of T-ara that you can rest your eyes with after watching an Australian scumbag play guitar on a crusty webcam.  Let me know what songs you’d like to see figured out next!

It’s nearly Halloween, so that means scary Kpopalypse fanfiction fun times!  Read on for the long-awaited sequel to Five Nights At Ailee’s K-pop Vocal Fan Camp!

It’s not mandatory to read the original to enjoy this sequel, but it probably will help your appreciation of some of the finer points of the story.  If you haven’t read it you can do so here, otherwise read on!

“Well, it definitely was a positive life-changing experience.”

That’s all anyone ever seems to say about Ailee’s K-pop vocal fan camp, and it’s driving you insane.

You’re a police detective and you’ve been investigating the mysterious disappearances of several young men and women over the last year.  The pattern seems simple enough – a group of young people go on Ailee’s fan camp, several don’t return, and the few that do come back all say the exact same thing under questioning, almost word-for-word.  You’ve been trying to get people to open up about what really goes on there for months, to no avail.  It’s to the point where your colleagues at the police station are making jokes at your expense:

“You’re always on that Ailee case, you’re obsessed with her and her shitty music” they say.

“Fuck off!  I don’t even like her.” you retort.  It’s true – you don’t even listen to any k-pop, and if it were not for this case you probably wouldn’t even know who Ailee is.

They never believe you.  “You’re just fangirling on work time.”

The fact that you’re female and relatively young doesn’t help matters, it’s hard enough to get people at the station to take you seriously as it is sometimes.  However there’s one thing that you do take very seriously indeed and that’s your job as a detective, and your task of bringing the crooked to justice and protecting the lives of innocent people.  Of course, there’s selfish reasons too – you’re all too aware that blowing open a case this potentially big could have huge positive ramifications for your career, or at least help get yourself some more respect in the department – but ultimately, serving the people is its own reward.

Aside from questioning witnesses who won’t say much, you’ve done a fair bit of online research into Ailee and the fan camp.  Here’s what you know so far:

• Ailee is a k-pop singer, and technically one of the better ones in the Korean industry currently
• As such, she tends to attract fans who are specifically interested in singing technique and issues of vocal quality
• These fans will congregate on forums and blogsites that are concerned with k-pop and singing, to discuss singers
• It’s on these vocal-centric sites where recruitment for fan camp participants occurs, using anonymous accounts
• Fans are taken from Incheon Airport to an undisclosed location, a mansion where they meet Ailee and other celebrities
• About 10% of fans spend a week at the fan camp before returning home, the rest are never seen again
• Nobody who returns from the camp has anything even slightly negative to say about it

Of course, dozens of missing person reports don’t lie – something sinister is going on and you’re determined to find out what it is and bring whoever is responsible to justice.  But with no witnesses who are talking, how do you investigate these crimes?  The answer seems obvious – you’re going to have to go on the camp yourself.  Of course, this means that you’re going to have to pass for an Ailee fangirl, but that shouldn’t be too hard, after all the whole police department already thinks you’re the biggest Ailee fan ever and you didn’t even intend for that to happen.

That’s what’s brought you here, to the back of the van you’re currently in, winding its way up a hill on the semi-rural outskirts of Seoul.  The driver has been mercifully quiet (there’s nothing worse than overly familiar taxi drivers) since you met him at the airport holding a sign with your name on it, however you feel like you should ask him something.  If he’s the driver for this camp, perhaps he’s in on it too?  You should find out.

“So, driver… what’s the camp like?” you ask.

“Well… it’s certainly a positive life, changing experience!” he replies.

A chill goes up your spine.  You say nothing further, there’s no point continuing the conversation now that his collusion with whatever is going on is confirmed.  You eye him suspiciously from the rear-view mirror and try to make like you’re absent-mindedly playing with your phone as the van travels forward.  In reality you’re mentally checking off your luggage while being aware of your surroundings.  You’ve brought a travel bag with a week’s worth of clothes, toothbrushes and makeup, your phone and charger, headache pills (you might need them if you’re forced to listen to Ailee’s music for too long) some snack food, water bottles and some pepper spray, just in case.  You look outside and notice the suburbia thinning out into trees as the van continues to ascend.

As dusk settles in, the van finally approaches the large driveway of a large mansion.  The lights are on inside.

“We have arrived – Ailee’s vocal fan camp!” says the driver.

The van pulls over and you slide out with your travel bag behind you.  As soon as you open the van door you’re conscious of an odd screaming sound.  A horrible, truly ear-piercing wail, it appears to be coming from inside the mansion!  You thought there might be trouble here, but you didn’t expect the action to happen the moment you stepped out of the van!  You quickly find the pepper spray in your bag’s side pocket and run over but cautiously to the front door to take a closer look.  Your heart starts racing – surely it must be a murder scene or a killer on the loose, you don’t hear blood-curling screams like that every day.  You carefully open the door, hoping to not alert whatever’s inside.

You enter into the foyer of the mansion, there’s doors on every side of the room, and a reception desk.  There’s a lady here with long hair near the desk, dressed in a blue t-shirt and jeans.  She looks very unimpressed.  Around her are six other people, all young men and women, all visibly younger than you even though you’re only in your mid-twenties, the youngest are teenagers.  The source of the chilling scream is now obvious – one of the girls, a hyperactive individual with tacky dyed blonde curls and bright blue glitter nails, is screaming at the top of her lungs over and over.

“WE’RE GOING TO MEET AILEE IN A FEW MINUTES OHMIGOD THIS IS SO EXCITING I JUST CAN’T ANYTHING!  AILEEEEEEEEEEE!   AILEEEEEEEEEEEE I LOVE YOU!” she screams.

“Look, Ailee doesn’t like loud noises okay?  You need to calm down.” says the girl in the blue shirt.

“AILEEEEEEEEEEEEE!  OH MY GOD!  AILEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!”  The young girl shows no signs of stopping.  In the meantime, the girl in the blue shirt has noticed you enter the room.

“I’m so sorry about this.  There’s always one of these in every group.  Anyway my name’s Moonbyul and I’m going to be helping look after you guys during the camp.  You are here for the camp, aren’t you?  You look kind of… more mature than the usual guest.”

You nod while you fumble the pepper spray back into the bag, hoping nobody notices.  “Yes, I’m here for the camp.”

“Okay, that’s good, it means we can start.”  Moonbyul turns back to the young screaming girl and covers the girl’s mouth forcibly with her hand.  “Now, you know how Ailee is like the bestest singer in the world ever, right?”

Unable to speak with Moonbyul’s hand pressed against her mouth, the girl nods.

“Don’t we all.  Now, you know why she’s so good?  Because she has exceptional hearing.  Her ears are very finely tuned for listening and that’s part of why she’s such a good singer.  This means she can’t be around loud noises like loud screaming fans, okay?  You might cause damage to her hearing and then she’ll stop being the bestest vocalist ever and she wouldn’t win all those awards anymore, you wouldn’t want that now, would you?”

The girl shakes her head to indicate no.

“Now when I take my hand away, you have to promise to be good and keep your voice down, okay?  Otherwise we might have to eject you from the camp.  That would be a shame on your first night here.  You wouldn’t want that either, would you?”

The girl shakes her head again to indicate no.

Moonbyul smiles briefly, takes her hand away from the girl’s mouth slowly and says “Now, please wait quietly with the others, Ailee won’t be long.”  The young girl goes to say something but then Moonbyul raises her eyebrow in a “I dare you to start” kind of way and the young girl seemingly thinks better of it.  Moonbyul then leaves the room via a back door that you hear lock behind her.

Everyone else in the room turns to look at you, the new entrant.

“You’re an Ailee fan?” says the young girl.

“Well, I’m here for the camp, right?” you respond.

“YAAAAAA….  sorry I mean yay!  I’m so excited!” she whispers, seemingly quivering with anticipation.

Two large double doors open on another side of the room.  Moonbyul is behind them, and behind her is a circle of eight chairs.

“Come sit down in the circle!” says Moonbyul, who then retreats to a corner of the room where there is another seat.  She sits down and starts playing with her telephone while everyone else in the group finds a seat in the circle.  Ailee then walks through a door on the other side of the room.

The whole room has a collective gasp, except for Moonbyul who continues to play with her phone.

“Hi everyone!  How are we all tonight?”

“Hi Ailee!” says the whole room in reply.

Ailee sits down in the remaining seat in the circle.  “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?”

The entire room responds with various extremely overenthusiastic affirmations.

“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, who looks about eighteen or so.

“Hi, I’m Maria and… I love k-pop!”

Ailee pauses and looks at Maria.  “That’s it?  You can do better than that.  I know I said ‘a little’ but come on, make an effort.”

Maria is a little nervous.  “Sorry… so um… I also like Drake and…”

Ailee interrupts quickly.  “OKAY OKAY that’s enough, stop oversharing already.  Next!”  Ailee puts her hand up and then motions to the next person in the circle, a guy who couldn’t be more than sixteen.

“Hi there, I’m Mark.  I’m a huge fan of k-pop vocals, I run a site called kpopvocaldeconstructions.com where we grade k-pop singers and discuss their talents!”

“So you sing?” asks Ailee.

“Oh no… I just like vocal pedagogy, and I only want to stan true talent.”

Ailee stares at Mark for about ten seconds, not saying anything or making any expression.

“What?” says Mark.

“Oh, nothing.  Next!”  Ailee smiles briefly, then motions to the next girl – the screaming girl from before.

She immediately starts up.  “I’m Christie and OH MY GOD – O MY GOD!  YOU’RE REALLY AILEEEEEEEE!  AILEEEEEEEEE!”

Ailee looks over at Moonbyul in the corner.  Moonbyul looks up from her phone and gives Ailee a small nod.  Just then, everything goes pitch black.  The entire rooms gasps.

“Nothing to worry about” says Moonbyul from the corner.  “Just a power outage.  We get them in these hills all the time.  Everybody remain seated, I just have to go and reset the fuse box.”

You can hear Moonbyul walk off somewhere and some furniture move around but your eyes haven’t adjusted to the lack of light so you can’t see anything yet.

“Remain calm and seated everyone, please don’t move around because it’s dangerous to move in the dark.  These outages never last more than a minute.” says Ailee.  “MOONBYUL, IS THE POWER BACK ON YET?” yells Ailee to Moonbyul in a voice that can surely be heard a few rooms away.

“Ten seconds!” yells Moonbyul, from another location.  You start silently counting to ten and sure enough right when you finish, the lights come back on.  Everyone in the circle breathes a sigh of relief, and then they notice something – Christie isn’t in the circle any more.

“What happened to Christie?” asks Maria.

“Her chair’s gone too!” says David.

Ailee sighs.  “Moonbyul, have you seen Christie?”

Moonbyul re-enters the room.  “Which one’s Christie again?”

“The loud one.”

“Oh.  I don’t know.  Where was she?”

“Right here.”

Moonbyul shrugs.  “I don’t know.  I really wasn’t paying attention.  Maybe she went to the toilet?”

Ailee smiles.  “Yes, that seems like what happened.  Let’s carry on.  Who’s next?”

You’re next.  You look at Ailee and your mind races.  You start thinking about Christie.  What happened there, really?  Where is she?  You’re in shock how someone vanished so fast and nobody seems to even care.  You try to think of something to say.

Ailee doesn’t wait more than a few seconds before saying “Sorry too slow!   Next!”

Next is a young teenage girl wtih a black bob cut.

“Hi, I’m Angela, and I like lots of k-pop, my favourite groups are SHINee and BTS, but I also like 2AM and Davichi.”

“Said no woman of relevance, ever.  You just like the boys in the groups don’t you.” says Ailee.

“Well yes I like the boys but I also like the music!”

“You.  Like.  The.  Boys.  That’s it.  That’s all.  Nobody likes BTS for the songs.”

Angela looks at Ailee, visibly upset.  She looks like she’s about to cry.

“NEXT!” says Ailee.

A tall guy who looks like the oldest one in the group.

“I’m Michael, and I got into k-pop through H.O.T and Sechs Kies.  I’m so happy to be on the camp, it means I get to learn a lot about k-pop vocals!”

Ailee side-eyes Moonbyul, who has resumed her position in the corner playing with her phone.  Moonbyul gives a slight chuckle to herself.

“Next!” says Ailee.

“Hi!  I’m Lauren and I work for kpopvocala…”

“OKAY THAT’S ENOUGH!” says Ailee, cutting her off.  “Everyone 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.  Make sure you eat well because we don’t want any of that food to go to waste!  Once you’ve had your fill, Moonbyul will show you to your dorms.  We’ll start the activities tomorrow!  Goodbye everyone!”

Everyone waves goodbye to Ailee as she leaves the room.  Moonbyul motions everyone through the doors out through the foyer and into the dining room, where there’s an alarmingly large selection of all-meat dishes and nothing else.

Something about the rows of meat seems offputting and you’re not overly hungry anyway so you eat some of the snacks you brought with you instead.  Everyone else tucks into the meat buffet and then gets settled into the dormitory, one room with several beds and no windows.  Looking around the dormitory you notice that the windows are barred and there is only one exit door.  It would almost look like a prison dorm, but the beds have metal frames and are on wheels which give the room more of a hospital ward feel.

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

“She was rude.  I don’t like her.” says Angela.

“That’s just because you’re a chick” says Michael.

“No it’s not!  She was mean.  She didn’t have to have a go at me like that. I love SHINee and BTS, why did she have to pick on me?”

“Maybe she’s jealous of the boy groups, because they’re really successful?” ponders Maria.

“At least you got to say something” sighs Lauren.

You try to get to sleep, but you’re conscious of a humming nose.  It’s Maria, in her bed mumbling “Sorry sorry sorry sorry maega naega naega meonjeo…”

“I’m trying to sleep, can you stop that?  That song sucks anyway.” whines Mark, tossing and turning.

“Fuck you!  Super Junior is a great group!  Plus they have Kyukhun who is a true vocal talent!”, retorts Maria.

“Not on that song though, it’s all Autotune.  Sing something decent of theirs, from K.R.Y.”

“Oh come on, I can’t sing that stuff.  Sorry Sorry is catchier!”

“Some vocal camp participant you are.  The only thing you’ll catch is terminal ass cancer.”

“You should support talented vocalists no matter what they do, they need recognition!”

“You have no standards.  Low standards is the problem with everything in k-pop now!”

And on and on the argument goes, in the darkness.  It’s going to be a long night.

You wake up to the sound of a rattling breakfast cart.  Moonbyul is here, looking exceptionally bored.

“Cereal or toast?” Moonbyul asks around the room.  Everybody in the room has cereal except for you.

“Hi Moonbyul, how are you?  You know I love Mamamoo!  Such great vocalists!” says Angela.

Moonbyul stares at Angela, repulsed.  “Don’t talk to me.” she says, quickly serving everyone cereal with air-hostess efficiency (but minus the smiles) and then just as quickly exiting with the cart.

Everyone eats breakfast in their beds and starts chatting excitedly about k-pop vocals, arguing about who is the better vocalist in which group and so on.  You tune their irritating banter out as best you can – the endless insipid conversations about the most arbitrary of vocal details annoy you, you wouldn’t even think to listen to music with such a degree of pointless fussiness.  You just want to know what’s really going on at this camp.

After a while, Ailee arrives, looking happy, but it’s a strange kind of happy that doesn’t seem quite right.  You can’t quite place it, but it smells of insincerity.

“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 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.  Everybody huddles around the computer to look at the songs.  They seem to be having trouble finding them.  You feign interest for a while, but after a short amount of time you decide that there’s better things you could be doing.

“I’m going to go on a break, if you need me I’ll be outside!” you say to the group.

“Okay, see you when you get back!” says Michael.  The rest ignore you.

You think about the endless list of missing persons who were last seen leaving for the vocal fan camp.  If people are vanishing, where are they most likely going?  You spend a couple hours wandering around, making a mental map of everything and trying to determine how a disappearance might occur.  The first floor has the large dormitory room, some toilets and showers, a small laundry area with two washing machines, and two other doorways both marked with big “STAFF ONLY” signs.  You listen closely to your surroundings, and once you’re certain that Moonbyul is downstairs and not coming back up soon, you try to open one of the doors.  The door opens easily, and you walk through into a large and extremely well-stocked cleaning room, with a vast array of mops, buckets and detergents, plus a large bathtub.  Nothing looks odd however, although you wonder what they must be cleaning to justify a room of this size.  You walk back out and try the other door, but it’s locked and won’t open.  You decide to move to the ground floor.

On the ground floor is the reception area, meeting room and dining area, toilets, plus some other areas that are off-limits for guests such as the kitchens, meeting hall and some other rooms which are presumably offices or something.  All the restricted access rooms have the same “STAFF ONLY” sign on their doors, except the meeting hall which has a sign saying “OPENS AT 6PM”.  Moonbyul sits at the reception desk, looking at you as you wander around.  You can’t really sneak a peek into any of the restricted access areas without her seeing you do so, so instead you wander into the backyard.  The backyard is a large fenced-off area which contains a sloping grass hill, a basketball court, some exercise machines, and some trees right at the rear fence.  Certainly nothing seems sinister about it.  Satisfied that you’ve investigated all you can for now, you spend some time on the exercise machines and then return to the dorm.  Just as you open the door, you jump back as you hear a horrible blood-curdling scream!

“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaah!  You’re so full of shit!  Ailee IS SO better than Beyonce!”

“No she isn’t!  Her lower register is terrible, so unsupported!  She’s got no stability!”

“You’re just a filthy HATER!  Why are you even here?!  You don’t deserve to be on this camp!”

“She just sounds a bit whiny because she has poor vowel shaping!”

“She’s got tension problems above B5!  Also her resonance gets a little pushed up there!”

“No, she pushes her larynx down instead, it’s a bad habit!”

“I know more about vocals than you so shut up, your opinion isn’t even valid!”

“Idols all breathe too much, they don’t need that much breath up high!”

Not a stabbing or a shooting, but the Ailee fans arguing!  You do your best to ignore them all and tune out their wailing.  You take a quick look at the songs on the computer that they found while you were away.

Vocal analysis – with these songs?  “It doesn’t make much sense, but whatever keeps them off the streets and away from normal people”, you think to yourself.

At 6pm, everyone from the dorms is in the meeting hall sitting down on a row of chairs before a small stage – everyone except Christie, 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 performance from our good friend Umji from Gfriend!  Everybody give Umji a round of applause!”

Everyone applauds politely but unenthusiastically.  Lauren is sitting next to you and mutters “why Umji… of all the people they could have picked?”  Her rhetorical question goes unanswered as everybody focuses on Umji, who takes a microphone and approaches the front of the stage.

“Hi” says Umji, shyly.  Umji then gives a quick nod over to someone unseen at the side of the stage, and a backing track starts, a mess of badly recorded guitar and drums.  Umji starts singing over the top, and even to your not-that-musical ear she’s clearly not quite in tune or in time:

Oh, the rich people want what the poor people’s got
And the poor people want what the rich people’s got
And the skinny people want what the fat people’s got
And the fat people want what the skinny people’s got

You can never please anybody in this world

The short people want what the tall people’s got
And the tall people want what the short people’s got
The little kids want what the big kid’s got
And the big kids want what the little kid’s got

You can never please anybody in this world

Oh, the girls with short hair want long hair
And the girls with long hair want short hair
Oh, the boys with cars want motorcycles
And the boys with motorcycles want cars

You can never please anybody in this world

It doesn’t matter what you do
It doesn’t matter what you say
There will always be
One who wants things the opposite way

It doesn’t matter where you go
It doesn’t matter who you see
There will always be
Someone who disagrees

We do our best
We try to please
But we’re like the rest
We’re never at ease

Oh, the rich people want what the poor people’s got
And the poor people want what the rich people’s got
And the skinny people want what the fat people’s got
And the fat people want what the skinny people’s got

You can never please anybody in this world

The song ends, and Umji smiles briefly, before running off stage.  Everyone applauds, politely but hesitantly.

“What the fuck was that?” whispers Lauren, to the others.  Everyone in the vocal fan group looks at each other, seemingly for answers.  Nobody has any.

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 gets up and goes into the dining room, picking up plates and filling them up with meat dishes from the buffet.  You’re a lot hungrier than you were last night so it’s a lot harder to say no to the rows of meat trays.  You grab a porcelain plate, fill it with a few different random meat selections, and sit down to eat.  The food isn’t bad!  You all then head up to the dormitory.  There’s a piece of paper on the bed of each camp participant.

“What does this actually have to do with anything”, says Michael, scratching his head.

David sighs.  “When do we get to do the fun stuff?  And that song!  What were they thinking?  I think I want my money back.”

Everyone around the room groans.  Maria looks at you.  “You haven’t really said much.  What do you think of all this?”

Actually, you don’t even care.  Umji sings badly and the song is annoying, but not as annoying as the constant arguing and weird obsessions of these Ailee fans, who only seem to care about vocal technique, people getting recognition for vocal technique from others, and nothing else.  You’re convinced that if a nuclear bomb went off and killed millions they’d be okay with it as long as someone sung the news to them with perfect vocal technique.

You shrug.  “I’m not sure what I expected, but this wasn’t it.”

You wake up, and look at the time on your phone.  It’s 5:37 AM.  Way too early to actually be getting up.  You turn over in bed in an attempt to get back to sleep but instead become conscious of a sharp pain rising in your stomach and throat.  Suddenly you feel the urge to vomit, so you quickly sprint into the bathroom, and regurgitate most of last night’s dinner.  I guess all that meat didn’t agree with you.  The pain in your throat subsides almost immediately as you look into the toilet bowl and see a strange, dark object.  Grimacing, you fish the object out of the toilet water and take a closer look.

A bright blue fake fingernail.  You know you’ve seen this somewhere before, but you’re too tired to process it right now, and you feel kind of sickly.  You go back to the dorm room, put the nail on the dressing table next to your bed, crawl back under the covers and go to sleep.

You wake up.  You feel like you’ve been asleep for hours.  Looking up at the ceiling, you notice that it’s changed, it’s a lot darker with no light.  You sit up in bed, the room is different, you’re in a concrete cell with a door made of heavy iron bars, a TV, a small chair and a small toilet bowl.  The TV is on, it shows a continuous green-tinted feed of a room which is empty, you’re not sure which room it is but presumably it’s somewhere else in the same building, however it doesn’t look like one of the rooms you visited when you were scouting the mansion out yesterday.  You notice that on your chair, all the spare clothes that were in your travel bag have been placed there and folded up neatly.  You reach down for your travel bag – it’s not there, which means that all your toiletries and your phone are missing.  You feel under your pillow for your pepper spray, and surprisingly, it’s still there.  You figure that someone has wheeled you into this room while you were asleep, as the bed itself hasn’t changed.  On the other side of the cell door is a small stool and another doorway, that looks the same as all the other doorways in the mansion.  That’s slightly reassuring as it means you’re definitely still in the same building, and it also means that whatever sinister is happening is probably also in this building.  You get up and walk over to the cell door, pushing it in the unlikely event that it isn’t locked, but no such luck, the door is firm and doesn’t even rattle that much when you put all your weight on it.

There’s nothing much else to do in a cell with nothing in it, so you get back into bed and watch the TV.  The other room in the glow of the TV screen has a long bench and several chairs, it looks like a dressing room.  Perhaps it’s backstage at the meeting hall.  You stare at the monitor for a while, you think to yourself that it’s very boring being in a room with nothing in it, watching another room with nothing in it.  Your mind drifts off to thoughts about what could be happening in this place, how you’re going to escape, and where Ailee is.

You don’t have to wait long to find out the answer to the last question – after a while, Ailee appears in the dressing room monitor feed.  She sits down, opens up a makeup bag and starts applying her makeup in front of a mirror.  After about 30 minutes of makeup application she leaves, and you’re back to staring at a room where nothing is happening, being bored and more than slightly scared.  You examine the TV for a way to change channel or make it do something else besides show you a room but all it contains is an on/off switch.  You start to feel slightly sick again, so you turn the monitor off (the hazy green light from the screen is distracting) and go back to sleep.

You wake up to the familiar sound of Moonbyul’s rattling breakfast cart.

“Cereal or toast?” she asks you, through the bars.

“Why am I locked up?” you ask her.

“Hey, don’t ask me fucking shit, I just work here.  Cereal or toast?”  Moonbyul stares at you, impatiently.

You roll your eyes.  “You’re a liar.  You know what’s going on here.”

Moonbyul just stares at you for about ten seconds, saying nothing but looking very angry.  She then slides a plate with a couple slices of toast under a gap in the cell door and leaves with the breakfast cart, slamming the door behind her and then locking it.

You haven’t eaten anything since the meal the night before last, so you’re quite hungry and chow down on the toast quickly, which under the current conditions tastes like the best meal you’ve had in years.  Once you’ve eaten, you slide the empty plate back through the gap under the door, climb back into bed and turn on the TV.  The TV monitor takes about 20 seconds to properly come to life, but when it does, the image shocks you.  It’s an image of yourself, sitting in bed watching the TV!  You wave your hand, and the figure in bed in the monitor also waves hers in unison.  You look up from the TV to where the camera is, the other side of the cell door.

“Hello, how are you today?”  Ailee smiles at you, in her hand is a tiny portable camera.

“Why am I here?  What’s going on?” you ask.

“Forgive me, I had to separate you from the others.”  You notice that Ailee is playing with the blue sparkle fingernail over in her other hand.  A shiver goes up your spine – you’ve obviously been caught.

Ailee continues.  “You’re quite the curious cat.  I saw you checking everything out.  I also saw you not engaging with the group’s fucking irritating vocal-fan activities.  You’re obviously here for another reason that has nothing to do with why they are here, hell you probably don’t even like my music at all.  Can’t say I blame you for that one, getting people to write songs for me to sing that are any good sure isn’t easy.  Anyway, I’ll be back for you later, I’ve got to entertain our other guests.  Don’t go anywhere, will you?”

Ailee leaves the room and locks the door behind you.  You watch the TV feed, which now shows a first-person perspective view of what Ailee is seeing, as she holds the camera in her hand.  You discover that your cell is in the room on the first floor next to the cleaning room, as Ailee exits your room and goes straight into the cleaning room, picks up a mop, a bucket and some detergent, then walks down the stairs to the reception area.  Moonbyul is behind the reception desk, playing with her phone.  The entire foyer area, stairwell and especially the front door are all splattered in large quantities of blood.  Ailee hands the bucket and mop over to Moonbyul who starts mopping the floor and walls.  The camera feed then shuts off, presumably Ailee has turned off her camera.  You stare at the green screen for a while but nothing further happens.  You need to find a way out of here, but how?

At 6pm Moonbyul enters the room outside your bars and slides you a meal – some meat from the buffet.

“Dinner”, she says coldly, and turns to leave.

“What does Ailee want?” you ask her.

“I don’t know what Ailee wants, but what I want is for you to shut up!” says Moonbyul, leaving and slamming the door behind her.

You look at the food.  It’s a different dish to the one that made you sick.  You pick at the meat with a fork, contemplating whether you should have a bite.  It doesn’t seem worth the risk, so you slide the meal back under the door, uneaten.  A day without dinner isn’t going to kill you, but the dinner itself might.

You wake up to the familiar sound of Moonbyul’s rattling breakfast cart.

“Cereal or toast?” she asks you, through the bars.

“Toast”, you reply.  Moonbyul takes the uneaten dinner from last night away and slides you four slices of toast under the door.

You look at the plate.  “Why four slices?”

Moonbyul doesn’t answer, instead leaving and locking the door behind her.  You get the impression that she’s not giving you a double portion to be nice, however you’re grateful for the extra food and the toast hasn’t make you sick yet, so you grab the plate from under the door, crawl back into bed and eat up.  You turn on the TV monitor and wait for the screen to warm up.  The camera is back on, and back in the dressing room.  It looks the same as last time.  Ailee is sitting in one of the chairs, doing her makeup again.  You keep watching, as there’s nothing else to do in your cell.  You notice that there’s something strange on the dressing table, that wasn’t there before, a dark lump about the size of a basketball.  After a while, Ailee leaves the room, but the dark lump stays there.  You ponder it as you think about what your fate will be.

At 6pm the lock to the door outside your cell rattles.  “Here we go with Moonbyul again”, you think to yourself.  The door bursts open, it’s Maria!

“I’ve got the key!  I’ll get you out of here!” she says to you in a half-whisper half-shout as she fumbles a key in the lock to your cell.  Mark follows closely behind… and that’s it, just the two of them.

“How did you get a key?”

“We knocked Moonbyul out while she was serving dinner.  That salty bitch might not stay down long, we need to hurry!”

“What happened to the others?” you ask.

“All dead, or missing.  Lauren got her head cut off… somehow, I don’t know how.  David, we haven’t seen.  Angela and Michael both got shot.  Christie… I don’t think I can talk about Christie.”

“Just don’t eat the buffet.” adds Mark.

Maria finally gets the lock of your cell open.  You grab the pepper spray from under your pillow and run out the door.

“Why is Ailee doing this?” you ask.

“She hates us!  She hates vocal fans who analyse k-pop vocals!  This whole camp is a trap to exterminate us!”

You start to ask “why?” but the words stick in your throat.  You’re pretty sure you already know why.  Instead you follow Maria and Mark down the stairs and to the front door.  Maria opens it and rushes outside to the front driveway, where Ailee is waiting, with a shotgun.

“Stop right there, kids” says Ailee, aiming the shotgun at the three of you.

You and Maria both stop.  Mark yells “RUN!” and makes a break for the trees, but doesn’t get far – Ailee swings her shotgun around and shoots Mark in the kneecaps, sending him collapsing to the ground.

“You seem to be having a problem with support in your lower register, Mark.  Such a lack of stability!” quips Ailee.

“You’re crazy!  You’re a crazy bitch!” shouts Mark, angrily.

“Am I?  Am I really the one who is crazy. Mark?  You sound a bit strained to me.  Maybe you shouldn’t push your larynx down so much, Mark.  Here, let me help.”

Ailee gets the sole of her boot and stomps down on Mark’s neck, generating a sickening bone-cracking noise, killing him instantly.

“Another person vocally deconstructed.” sighs Ailee, happily.  Maria screams.  Ailee turns the shotgun to Maria’s face.

“You seem to be having tension problems above B5, Maria.  Can you please try to relax it a little?”

Maria stares, panicking but also speechless and slack-jawed, horrified at what’s happening.  Ailee puts the end of the shotgun into Maria’s mouth.

“What’s wrong, Maria?  Is your resonance feeling a little pushed?  Perhaps too much breath support?  I think I can fix that.”

Ailee discharges the shotgun and Maria’s head explodes all over the front wall of the mansion.

“No more breath control problems for you.” laughs Ailee, this time turning to point the gun at you.  “Okay, so what’s your story?  You’re obviously not one of them, that much is clear.  Why are you really here?”

You figure you might as well come clean, as surely the end of your life is only seconds away in any case.  You put your hands up, and drop your can of pepper-spray.  “I’m not a vocal fan, or even a fan of you, or anyone in pop music for that matter.  I’m a detective, investigating missing persons.”

“Oh.  So you’re a detective.  You must be good at detecting things.  When you were here, what did you detect the most strongly?  I mean, besides the dead people, which I guess are fairly obvious at this point.”

You stop and think for a moment.

It’s been three weeks and you’re enjoying your new job.  You resigned from detective work shortly after investigating the Ailee case, it was just too much stress with too little reward and nobody would ever take a young woman like you seriously in such a sexist line of work dominated by older men.  Things are much better now working for your new female boss, and there’s still a big sense of bringing people to justice in your new role, which for you is all-important.  Plus your new uniform is great!

You enter the room.  Several people turn to look at you, happy to see you as you wheel along your noisy breakfast cart.

“Cereal or toast?” you ask.

It’s that time of week again, time for another Kpopalypse roundup!  Let’s check out this week’s new releases!

Imfact

Twice – TT

I write these roundups for two main reasons:

1. It replaces the links to videos that I used to put on my Facebook page after each show
2. It stops the tidal wave of boring, repetitive questions asking for my opinion of songs on my ask.fm

Back before I did roundup, when a video like the one above came out, I’d get (literally) dozens of questions about what I thought of the song, which was really boring and prevented me from getting to questions that I actually wanted to answer.  Now that barely happens at all, which is great, instead of anywhere up to 50 questions I now get maybe six at most for a really popular song like this.

Oh and this song doesn’t really grab me much so far but I’ll admit it’s the best Twice song yet.  And no “TT” isn’t about titties, it’s about people crying, this is actually JYP not being a creepy uncle fan for a change.  Believe it or not.

24K – Bingo

There’s a bit in this song somewhere near the end where it gets good for about 10 seconds.  EDIT: since I know you will ask me it’s at 3:26.

Matilda – Bad

The constant tempo and time signature changes are pretty ill-advised but this is still a better YG girl group song than any YG girl group song since about 2012.

A.DE – Good Time

The old-school k-pop approach is appreciated, it’s not the greatest song ever but at least it’s not some yolosweg thing and keeps the same beat all the way through, something that’s become a rarity these days.

Beatburger ft. BoA – Music Is Wonderful

Don’t get too excited, this sounds like everything else SM does now with their older idols.

Hwang Minwoo  – Okey Dokey

Trufax – this song is better than “Show Time“.  Mind you, so is every other song ever written since cavemen worked out how to stretch a deer skin across a coconut.

Bulldok – Why Not/How’s This

This unfortunately sounds like a generic boy-group song, however the girl with short hair who raps is probably the best-looking new entrant I’ve seen in k-pop all year.  Could just be the styling though, I don’t think she stood out at all to me in her old group Scarlet.

Roydo ft. KittiB – About You

Everyone’s talking about the editing being terrible and half of KittiB’s verse being left out, but that’s only for the video (probably because they ran out of shooting budget), radio listeners got to hear the full track.  Nobody’s talking about the real issue here which is that R&B/rap hybrids are cancer.

The Barberettes – Fairy Tale

I don’t understand why k-pop’s vocalfaggots don’t get into retread 1950s doo wop stuff like this and instead continue to fag about some fucking idol boy group.  Anyway the version played on the actual radio show sounds a lot better than this stripped-back version here.

BONUS SONGS

Almeng – Cheers To Me

Looks like Almeng has been taking motivational courses.  You can do it, Almeng, you can write a good song one day!

Kim Na Young – I See

I’m kind of wasting my time writing something here, aren’t I.  You know what I think of this.

Gemma – Dengniai

The creation of the CJE&M logo at the start sounds better than the song.

Silla – True Color

Lol porn.

Sweden Laundry – Foggy

If Korean ballads weren’t such a plague on k-pop I might actually find this listenable but I’ve been so oversaturated with stuff like this over the last few years that Sweden Laundry can fuck right off.

The Barberettes ft. Stuart Zender – Love Shoes

Of course this group have to fuck up their entire concept and reason for existing by collaborating with one of the lowest forms of human life – a Jamiroquai member.  You can tell that they are legit independent singers though because they hold their Shure 55s the right way.

Jay Park ft. Gray – Drive

Did you know that the auto industry peaked in 2004 in both the developed and developing world and has been on the downturn consistently with less cars being sold every year globally ever since?  That’s because when everybody owns a car, nobody can get anywhere.  The “freedom” of automotive travel is just an illusion as most people spend their car-time gridlocked and in most built-up areas it’s actually quicker to cycle during peak times.  Jay Park isn’t helping, and next time I’m stuck in a traffic jam I’m going to blame him for glamourising sitting in a car driving at 10 miles per hour like a boring fuck.

That’s it for this week’s roundup – more next week!

Kpopalypse is back with the answers to more questions that don’t suck a pile of goat turds!  Yes, it’s QRIMOLE!

The first few questions here are just follow-ups from QRIMOLE part 2, then we’ll get onto some new stuff.

QRIMOLE pt2 came out so soon! You’re on a roll Oppar! I never understood the concept of ‘popularity’, and if I understand correctly,your blog isn’t exactly mainstream, but considering the extreme levels of delusion, malice and stupidity in the K-pop fandom in general, you have amassed quite a loyal and open-minded fandom. Both pt1 and pt2 have great questions, and you always answer them so rigorously.  30 mins for just 1 song for 1 singer is the quickest scenario? If that’s the case why bring all the group at once to have them stay idle for long time? Why not book 1 day per 1 singer?  Then there would be no need for KaiBaiBo or alcohol or drugs. Also, there are so many things you can do to kill time, why start/perpetuate an expensive and crippling addiction just for shits and giggles? And why would singers get nervous during recording? They’re not in front of of a crowd of fans or in front of the manager/staff. You said it’s just them and the sound engineer. Finally, from what you say, it seems like the sound engineer has to be a good psychologist in order to get the best results out of a singer, being careful with criticism and generous with praise even if it’s a lie. Why would the staff talk badly behind their own singer’s back? If they were to overhear, they’d be 10x more crushed than if they had said it to their face.

Firstly, I’m really digging the ego-stroking some of you guys are doing for me with some of these long-form questions.  Feel free to keep that up, it’s a nice change from the seven shades of “you’re condescending” and “you’re trying to be edgy” shit that I seem to get all the fucking time from people who don’t understand Australian humour.  Cheers.

“One day per singer” – to be honest, with really popular groups with high budgets, recording different singers in different sessions probably would be normal.  It’s quite common in the case of duet performances for the two people involved to have never even met each other at all, let alone recorded in the same session.  Think about how many duet songs or “person x featuring person y” songs there are in k-pop where only one of the two people are actually physically present in the MV.  However when we’re talking about a lesser known group that don’t have a high budget, you want to at least try to bang the recording out as quickly as possible so you drag everyone in at once and they tag-team it, because booking multiple sessions over multiple days means multiple amounts of money.  The studio costs the same amount of money to hire per hour whether you’ve got one person in there or ten.

Why would people get addicted?  I don’t know… because they’re young and stupid?  Why do people take up smoking?  Why do people get addicted to alcohol, or gambling, or headache pills, or whatever else?  It’s hard to convey exactly how boring being in a recording studio doing absolutely nothing is, time really drags and some people might be happy playing with their phones these days but some others maybe not so much.  Of course not everyone who tries drugs or whatever is going to get addicted.  Remove most people from the environment of boredom and mental torture that prompted their addiction in the first place, and most people actually clean up quite well.

Why do singers get nervous when recording?  Because that recording will last forever!  Well okay, not literally forever, and in the case of a nugu it’ll probably be consigned to the dustbin of history pretty quicksmart, but a performance on a recording is like a public resume that everybody can read, and they’re probably also thinking of it as their ticket to stardom, so the pressure is on for it to be top-notch.  There’s a lot of pressure to perform, and sure if you get it wrong you can have more tries at it, but in the studio time is money so if you need 50 tries to get it right the boss isn’t going to be happy.  It’s true that the sound engineer has to use some psychology to get good performances, singers who aren’t comfortable don’t tend to perform well.  Some singers are “clutch performers” who work well under pressure and are great to have in a studio, but in my experience most are not!

Why would staff be talking badly about singers?  You don’t need to be an industry insider to answer this one.  If you’ve ever been in an environment where you’re with a whole bunch of people who you might not necessarily get along with (like, say, a school classroom, or a workplace) you’ll know that people talk.  People form friendships, cliques, gossip about each other, sometimes there’s friction, etc.  It’s no different in the music business.  Also remember that most idol groups are artificially constructed from hand-picked high-achieving high-performing trainees, that’s not quite the same situation as something like a garage rock band where everyone has probably been friends for years and basically get along, and one person might be a bit of a shitty player but he’s tolerated and the other players don’t mind “carrying” him because he’s a good guy and always brings the beer.  The pop idol environment does very much more closely reflect a school or work environment where what people have in common is their ability to perform a task, not their ability to get along with each other.  It’s all smiles and bestest buddies for the cameras of course but behind the scenes you can bet there’s tensions galore and people talk shit about each other all the time.

So, according to your recent post, Krystal should be super rich? Every ad of Korean cosmetic and travel I see online seems to have Krystal’s face on it. Also, are models paid way less than idols for advertising?

Krystal – yes.

Idols get more money than models for advertising for the same reason that they get more money for dramas, voiceover work, etc etc – there’s a measurably higher engagement figure with a product when an idol endorses it.  Idiots complain about idols being in dramas and so forth, but the reality is that it’s the idol’s appearance that often makes the project viable in the first place, and that’s why they can sometimes charge a premium in the case of very popular idols, the cost is justified in the returns that are brought in, which means more money for everyone involved.  The idol isn’t putting other actors out of work, it’s actually the opposite – without the idol, there would actually be less work for everyone else across the board.

I don’t want to be rude, but even big idol groups have a maximum of 3 good vocalists, the others are given filler lines for 5 seconds so that the camera will focus on them too. If those 3 vocalists are indeed good (given previous live performances where they had sung well even while dancing), why would they have any trouble singing a song of the same difficulty level? Especially in a studio where there’s no dancing and you can be tweaked to perfection after. Even if they had a cold exactly during the weeks they were booked for recording, I don’t see why that would lead to drinking?

Well it’s actually boredom which is more likely to lead to drinking.  Although a small drink or two in the studio to calm the nerves before recording a big part is common.  I’ve never seen or worked in a studio without a fridge.  But anyway…

Electronic vocal processing in 2016 is really good, and I mean really, really good.  People have no idea how good it is.  Here’s a simple stomp box that tidies up vocal demonstrated:

And here’s some more advanced vocal post-processing, where about 10 different equalisation, compression and aural excitation plugins are demonstrated:

All the qualities that vocal fans obsess over like vibrato, resonance, sibilance and dozens of other things can be easily simulated with machines both live and in the studio (which makes the obsessions of vocal analysts all the more laughable).  However what can’t be readily simulated is the confidence present in a good initial performance, and there’s lots of things that can undermine confidence in a studio environment, such as pressure, boredom, substances, bitchy team members, all the things previously discussed and more.  Over-fastidiousness can also undermine a singer’s ability to perform, as there’s more to a good vocal performance than singing the notes “correctly” and with “good technique”.  A “perfect” recording can actually sound very sterile.  All those people who write vocal analysis blogs and so forth would probably struggle to get good results out of a singer in a real studio environment for this very reason.

I guess what singers hear while singing is not what we hear while watching on TV. But if in-ear monitors are so important for proper singing/miming, why do some singers take them out of their ears mid-song? Some do it very dramatically too *cough*famously pretentious lip-syncing Beyonce*cough*

Sometimes the mix being sent to their in-ear monitors (which is usually not under the singer’s direct control) is wrong and gets in the way of the performance.  If a singer is taking out their in-ears it usually means that the engineer feeding the mix into them is fucking up that badly that the singer is like “fuck this, I’m better off without these just trying to sing using the room reflections”.  Or sometimes the in-ears just fuck up and die – in-ears just like microphones, cables or any other audio equipment will sometimes break, especially if mistreated.  People tend to take them out dramatically because when in-ears don’t work it IS a drama!

Are you going to write more deconstruction of dog whistle in Kpop MVs? I really enjoy your articles about dog whistle where you deconstruct them as I’m naive/stupid/desensitized about these things. All I know is that I felt uncomfortable watching those ‘innocent’ concepts and need help to realize why.

When my most recent dog-whistle post was linked from places where people don’t usually read my writing, a lot of people got very defensive upon reading it.  There was of course lots of the usual complaints about my writing style (“Kpopalypse has great points but I don’t condone the way that he writes”, “oh yes I agree this article has something in it of interest, but I find it so hard to get past his tone” etc) but behind the facade of virtue-signalling, there was something more – I think a lot of people may have felt attacked by me for being April fans, or for being k-pop fans in general.  That wasn’t really my intention, rather my intention was to make people think about that “feeling of discomfort” that they might register upon seeing something like “Dream Candy” and say to them “hey, your brain isn’t making that up, there’s actually something real there that’s behind this feeling”.  People consider k-pop a “guilty pleasure” for a reason.  There will be more dog-whistle posts but only as they become relevant to situations that I might want to discuss in depth, I think most readers understand the basic idea of what I’m talking about at this point.  At the very least there will be another post that focuses in on the male groups as there’s a whole world of stuff there that I had planned to discuss initially but didn’t even really touch on.

You stated in QRIMOLE that ordinary folk don’t aspire to become idols for the sex and cited trust issues and thus the tendency to date only people within the industry who know what that environment is like; yet in your recent post you say that as an idol even the people you eat, shit and fap with – people who not only work in the same industry, but actually go through the exact schedules and pressures you go through since day one cannot be trusted by default”. So…which is it? You can’t trust non-industry ordinary people because they are outsiders who cannot begin begin to fathom the seedy underbelly of the music biz and thus won’t be able to understand you, and they probably only like you for your image and want you as a prize anyway. But you can’t trust your industry colleagues either, because they because they see you as competition, and they are most likely cut from the same cloth as the a-holes who made my life hell and would gladly step on my neck to get ahead. Or maybe I misread?

This question is great, and it also beautifully answers itself.  The answer is, as you’ve pointed out – both!  Forging friendships of any worth in such a highly competitive environment is nearly impossible, which is why truly close idol friendships are rare.  Of course they DO happen, but it’s not the norm.  It’s also why the world of idols is so isolating, why so many of them have issues with mental health etc.

I have a hard time hearing the difference between a IV chord and V chord. For example if I hear I-V sometimes I will mistake it for I-IV or vice versa. Please advise.

This is actually pretty common and the reason why is that the IV and V chords in popular music both serve a similar function, that’s why in classical theory the IV is called the “subdominant” and the V is  the “dominant”, the IV is like a “lite” version of V, the chord that is most often used to generate the big climax.  The I is always the point of least tension in a piece whereas the IV and V are the chords that have the strongest pull back to the I, and while V-I is more common as it has a stronger amount of tension that the I resolves, IV-I is almost equally common in popular music, especially with pop songs that use the well-known “four chords” progression of I-V-vi-IV.  Another thing to consider is that the V and the IV are both equal distance away from the I but in opposite directions.  So in other words, you’re normal.  Getting better at determining IV from V is just practice!

Why are some agency’s always reluctant to announce whether a group has disbanded or not? Eg Secret and After School probably haven’t existed for several years now.

You’re asking the wrong question.  The real question is “why should they?”.  What does an agency have to gain by announcing a group’s disbandment?  If the answer is “not a fucking lot” then the agency won’t bother (see CSJH The Grace, obviously disbanded since about 2011 but nobody has bothered to announce it).  If on the other hand the answer is something like “it’ll make people anticipate our new project” or “it’ll make fans empathise with the tough times our artists have been through” or any other number of other potential reasons, then there might be a case for making it official.

Imagine if there was no “Imagine” by John Lennon. It’s easy if you try.

Read up on John Lennon’s relationships. Like most people who profess values of peace, love and equality he was an amazing violent nasty cunthole in his private life and just doing a bit of moral compensating in public.

You say this as if you were stating the most obvious fact in the world.  Yet as far as mass consciousness is concerned, that positive image is what people believe.  Dear Kpopalypse oppar please share with us your asshole-detecting superpowers.  Especially for your female readers.  That Kim Hyun Joong post is not enough.  Although you did execute it flawlessly by highlighting the contrast between the innocent and charming appearance and the monster dirtbag core within.  Please share more of your people reading abilities with us!

I’m not perfect at it but I’m pretty good.  It’s harder when looking at a celebrity or someone in the public eye of course, because you don’t really know them, but as a general rule – the more someone tries to paint themselves in one way, the more they’re likely to be the opposite of that.  If a certain type of image seems like a conscious effort, the reality is often the reverse.  This isn’t coincidental, it’s part of “moral compensation” and it’s a very human trait!

From a business perspective why would a company have a boygroup or a girlgroup? Is there any difference between choosing one or the other? And if so, besides the endorsing factor, does the goal behind debuting one of those is any different?

Of course impossible for me or anyone to know the answer to this on a case by case basis.  However speaking broadly I’d say it’s all about endorsements once again, for instance it might depend on the strategy the agency has to connect with certain brands and so forth.  If there’s a specific demand for a specific type of boy or girl promoting a specific type of product and the label is smart enough to know this ahead of time then I guess they could cater to it, or create something with greater odds of being utilised in that way.  Who really knows though, maybe it’s all chance or just dependent on what gender of trainees in a particular agency are looking more promising to form a group with at any given time.  I remember my interview with the SM trainee where he said I think on his Reddit AMA that there wasn’t going to be any new girl groups from SM for a while because none of the girls looked very promising at that point in time.

What is Jine using here?

Each pair of girls is standing in front of a mini audio mixer, and each girl has headphones plugged into this mixer.  She’s probably adjusting her headphone level.  The microphones also seem to be plugged into a thing at the bottom of the mixer stand.  This is a neat little setup actually, it minimises the amount of cords going back and forth and cuts down the amount of setup required, the radio station in this case have probably set this stuff up because I bet they have tons of idol groups going in and out of there and it would have to be a pain in the rear to constantly set up all their equipment.  They just wheel out a few of those tower things, plug them in and away they go, I think it’s pretty fucking cool.

I saw some article saying YG was in the shithole because their stock price hit its lowest for the past two years. To me it seems retarded to think that YG is doing trash just based off of stock but is there truth to it? Here’s the link btw: http://bit.ly/2eFV4Pc It’s NB and I know they’re bad but…

The stock market these days is all about speculation.  It’s not a very good indicator of what is actually happening, it’s a much better indicator of what it is people think might happen.  Sometimes this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and the predicted event does occur (speculation of stocks potentially going down might inspire people to get rid of their existing stock while the price is still high, thus forcing the price to go down in reality whether it was previously about to or not) but sometimes it doesn’t, such as after 9/11 when there was a massive slump in stock prices only for it to recover shortly afterward.  Mass public opinion can sometimes be right but it can be wrong just as often – just look at what comments gets upvoted the most on the Korean news portal sites Netizenbuzz translates for a clear demonstration of the poor truth value of public sentiment.

If idols’ personalities are artificially-constructed, then when an idol speaks poorly of their company on TV or through SNS (given that they’re not leaving or suing the company or anything), is that also part of this?

Doubtful – they’re probably going ‘off-script’!  Imagine the temptation to do this when you’re not happy with your company and in the public eye every day, you could trash their reputation in the blink of an eye but business demands that you play the “everything is fine” game.  I bet they get reprimanded heavily later.

I don’t have a Twitter and I’m probably too late, {Kpopalypse note: this question is in response to a Twitter poll about whether I should do a business or a ballad post next} but Ballads is a nice pick too, although my #1 choice will always be business. You’re the only person honest and brave enough to call it like it is, no bull. I understand why people are curious about what your favorite ballads are. Usually ballads are used as [Look how sensitive I really am] or [Look what great pipes I have] filler, but there are probably many with poignant lyrics or strong social messages that never get popular. I know you dislike vocalfagging when it’s just showing off that ruins the song, but are you more into the emotive type of ballad (like Lara Fabian – Je suis malade) or the power ballad type (like Def Leppard – Bringin’ On the Heartbreak)? Thanks! Keep up the great posts! Take care.

I guess I did answer this in my ballad post to some degree, but generally I don’t like power ballads.  I think X Japan does some great power ballads, but they’re about the only ones!  I think that with ballads “less is more” and the whole “less is more” aesthetic is something that k-pop very rarely gets right.  Although it’s not a ballad, Rainbow’s “Black Swan” is a good song that demonstrates effective “less is more” and that song tanked heavily in Korea, because Koreans for some reason seem to like 10,000 layers of sound in all their songs, all the time.

What’s the “financial longevity” for a few hit songs in a smaller genre like k-pop, really? For the songwriter, I mean. Are Shinsadong Tiger, E-Tribe, and Sweetune not getting as much work as they used to because there are new hot producers? Or are they choosing to work less because they can?

It depends how much the songs get played, and where.  Assuming they didn’t just get paid a flat fee but got some sort of royalty retention as part of the songwriting deal, hit songs can generate quite a bit of income if they get played on radio and especially TV etc, someone who wrote absolute monster hits might be able to sit back and take it easy for a while, as long as those songs kept continuing to be played in places that generate large amounts of royalty revenue.  Of course if k-pop fashion changes and those songs stop getting played, things will change.  Sure there’s always new hot producers but keep in mind that songwriting (unlike idoling) isn’t an occupation where youth is important, more experienced composers actually have an advantage over the newbies because they have a longer resume, more connections and a track record that attracts new work.

What are the most important qualities that a K-Pop producer (including the foreigner ones) needs to require?

• Tolerance of people with different views or unusual, eclectic lifestyles and personalities
• Cool temperament, someone people can relax around
• The ability to give feedback diplomatically without upsetting someone, but also without being a “yes man”
• Ability to make connections with like-minded individuals
• Audio engineering and music theory knowledge also doesn’t hurt but isn’t essential as long as there is someone around who knows some of this stuff

what type of market is the kpop industry because in the past the industry looked like an oligopoly sm, jyp and yg, but now with artist using the same mv directors, writers etc. and the look of a kpop groups from minor companies are becoming popular so is it becoming more perfectly competitive.

“The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.” – Hunter S. Thompson

(Actually he didn’t really quite say this about the music business, but I wish he had.  It fits here in any case!)

what time period would you believe is the best to debut as a kpop idol, because during the golden days most of the income came from korea, their was less competition – a smaller amount of idol groups, nowadays kpop groups are known more around the world more quickly and the main income is foreign

I don’t know, doesn’t seem much point in a hypothetical like this anyway, after all it’s not like anyone debuting really has a choice.  Perhaps ask this again after time travel is invented.  However across the world the music industry is in a more difficult situation now than it has ever been since it started, due to technology.  It’s easier to distribute music than ever before but it’s also harder than ever to make people pay any money for any of it.  That’s why k-pop doesn’t really sell the actual music much anymore.

What are your biggest disappointments u had with artists you like? I mean, started releasing terrible music, collaborating with artists you hate or simply being cunts.

• Celtic Frost releasing “Cold Lake”
• Adriano Cintra leaving CSS
• Max Cavalera leaving Sepultura
• 2NE1 and Girls’ Generation releasing mostly crap post-2012
• Frank Zappa dying way too early (imagine the fun he’d have with the two stooges, Trump and Hillary)
• Andreas Ritter (Forseti) having a stroke and losing his musical ability
• Mobb Deep consistently sucking post-“Hell On Earth”
• Secret never properly capitalising on their “Shy Boy” doo-wop concept
• Atari Teenage Riot imploding, then reforming later without Hanin Elias
• Lolita Storm never matching or even coming close to “Girls Fucking Shit Up”
• Metallica’s awful “Black Album” softening their core sound with pop concessions, also influencing many other metal acts to do the same
• Dr Dre’s “The Chronic” having a similar softening, chilling effect on almost all rap music which continues to this day
• Kristin Hersh looking nothing in real life like she did in the “Hips & Makers” CD booklet, even back then

You’ll notice no “simply being cunts” incidences make this list, and that’s because being a cunt is never a disappointment.  I don’t care whether the musicians I like are “good people” or not, I find the fascination some people have with that stuff to be a little perverse.  I only care about their music.

Dear Kpopalypse,
As someone who has received bad advice from friends and acquaintances in the past (a.k.a. absolutely great ‘expert’ advice which I had heeded and suffered for as it turned out to be absolutely terrible advice), I reach out to you with this question. Say you have to do a 60-page thesis in a foreign language that you master at an upper-intermediate level, but the requirements for said thesis limit free choice, pushing you more in the direction of writing about history, geography, religion, slavery or other difficult topics that make little use of the language itself and instead force you into broaching a completely different subject altogether- one which was never part of your curriculum. Or at least, these were topics which were approved in the past (yet the failure rate was startlingly high)
I thought maybe focusing on literary analysis would be a safer bet, however, I was informed I must choose only canon pieces which had been analyzed in the past. Given the professors which constitute my jury, this will lead to stark differences in opinion between the professors regardless of my approach,  and that will result in a poor grade no matter what ‘side’ I aim to please.   No, there is no option for individuality and unique interpretation. You don’t get any points for that; you fail from the get-go.  So literature seems out of the question. Then my second idea was to try writing something about idioms. This topic was marked as ‘pending validation’. I had turned in 7 pages of writing only to be told the topic is not viable for analysis. What can I write about in order to give the jury what they want without leaving any openings that they can exploit to chew me out and fail me?  Since those professors are old hyper-conservative purely evil and vengeful pricks (I’ve had 6 of them as head teachers), what kind of topic could satisfy them? That is the question :
If you were a jaded cynical maleficent university professor who openly proclaims abhorring today’s youth while treating them like scum, someone known only for burying students in tests and never grading them more than a 6 (and failing two thirds of any class), what sort of thesis topic would you want to read about  and roughly what sort of issues should it explore in order for you to grade it an 8 and above?
I am open to anything you might suggest, as I’ve run previous topics through my head supervisor, and she shut them down. I had given a list of topics compiled from recommendations from friends, other students from both other faculties and mine, teachers from other universities, as well as other popular subject matters on the net – all of them were rejected. At this point, I am near my wits end. I am open to any ideas you might have. At this stage I have nothing to lose. One of your ideas might just be green-lit by my supervisor so that I can actually be allowed to start the thesis.
I am not emphasizing the cruel, unjust and overall poor character of my jury out of pettiness, but because pleasing the professors’ expectations is what makes the grade more-so than the quality of the thesis. And it’s all a mystery what they want to hear. It’s like hoping to pick the winning lottery ticket. The passing rate is 38%. Only 38%. At this point, I just want to be allowed to work on something and pass (minimum req is a 7, that is why the work has to be worth an 8 or 9 overall), and afterwards get out of this hellhole with what little remains of my sanity intact.
I deeply apologize for bothering you with this. I don’t want to burden you with my problems. But I’ve exhausted my other options, and I don’t know what else to try. What are the odds? Maybe one of your suggestions will be the right choice. So list any ideas that come to mind and what aspects of said ideas you would want to read about.
Once again, I apologize for any inconvenience I may have caused you by writing this long message. Thank you for your time.

Kindest Regards,
a desperate wretched soul

I’d suggest doing something relating to religion.  Religious topics appeal to conservative fuddy-duddy professors who love it when people take stupid tooth-fairy unicorn-waving religions (i.e all of them) ultra-seriously and validate that crap with ultra-long writings.  Just make sure you pick a religion that they’re not likely to be super-familiar with so they can’t pick your research to pieces without a little effort.  Also, researching religion is piss-easy because there’s so many texts available and since it’s all witch-doctor hokum anyway, whatever interpretation of events you want to put forward, you can guarantee someone somewhere has written something to support your argument.  Most importantly, keep all “moral” arguments (positive or negative) completely out of whatever it is you write, never reveal if you’re a believer or not or what it is that you actually think is good or bad about your topic.  You have to write dispassionately, so they can overlay their own moral perspective (whatever it is) over the top without feeling threatened.  If all this sounds a little risky (“what if my professor is a secret Scientologist” etc) then try history, they love that shit too.  Anything that values shit that happened thousands of years ago over whatever is happening now will definitely appeal to professors wth a malevolent superiority complex who think everything was better “back in the day” just because they were there and you weren’t.  More help on the specifics of essay writing here, but to be honest if they want to fail you they will, so the best advice I can give you is just to be the kind of student who they don’t want to fail.  Good luck!

That’s all for QRIMOLE episode 3, thanks to all the caonimas who sent in questions!  QRIMOLE will return!