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

Dal Shabet

EXO-CBX – Hey Mama

Funk influences are really ruining a lot of k-pop songs with potential lately.

Kei & The Solutions – Beautiful

Kpopalypse nugu alerters The Solutions borrow not only Kei but also her group’s core synth-heavy sound.  Lots of flouncing around with “real” instruments here but in the actual audio mix they’re a distant shadow.  Probably just as well.

VIXX – The Closer

The war medals on their chest are all bravery awards for putting up with their songwriter’s R&B crooners.

Hyolyn ft. Dok2 – Love Like This

This is what I was talking about in the last QRIMOLE about duets.  I bet Hyolyn probably couldn’t even pick Dok2 out of a police lineup.

Miryo & Giantpink – Rock, Scissors, Paper

I expected the worst but this clone of GD&TOP’s “Knock Out” is surprisingly okayish and it’s nice to see Miryo wearing clothes again.

Block B Bastarz – Make It Rain

Seemingly aiming for a similar feel to the debut Bastarz song with the big brass riff but this one’s nowhere near as good.

Block B Bastarz – Selfish & Beautiful Girl

A young girl with expensive sleeve tattoos jumping around to k-pop on a widescreen TV in an inner-city apartment, none of which she can afford – this is why I never will have kids.  They’ll be having all the fun and I’ll be the one paying for it.

Hyungdon & Daejune – Sexy Side

K-pop parodies are all unfunny and redundant because k-pop is so comically exaggerated and hyper-real in the first place that when someone does a parody who can even fucking tell the difference.

N.CA – Next Station

I’ve probably been reading too many of my own fanfictions, but this looks like a porn casting reel to me, probably due to the singer’s chubby face resembling a Korean Cody Lane (a pretty NSFW Google search, but if you’re reading this at work you clearly want to be sacked anyway).  I keep expecting her to collapse after drinking that soju and wake up in a basement chained to a lime-green couch with transparent plastic over it next to three guys wearing chicken masks and speedos.

Yoon Do Hyun, Reddy, G2, Inlayer & Johnny – Nightmare

Prog rockers Inlayer try their hand at an actual song this time, where everyone is credited except that girl who dances at the start who looks like she weighs about as much as IU’s salad.

BONUS SONGS

Lay – Lose Control

Focuses mainly on the dancing and SM’s gorgeous box design, which is wise as there’s not much else of note here.

Crucial Star ft. Kim Na Young – Fall

Some k-pop videos you can tell are going to be shit just from looking at the thumbnail.

Sung Si Kyung & Jung Yumi – Andromeda

If someone could shoot this one over to Andromeda that’d be good.

Jay Park – Me Like Yuh

Imagine going up to some girl and saying “me like yuh”.  That’s a homeless-grade pickup line right there.  Mind you Jay Park probably is that desperate.

Jay Park & 1Million ft. Hoody, Loco – All I Wanna Do

When I watch Jay Park videos I sometimes briefly forget that there’s a whole different strata of society that is out there that considers this acceptable music.  I wonder if I’ll ever meet any of these people.

Band11 – Take The Memories

Warning sign: acoustic guitars + office shirts.

Flat Feet – Office Romance

Exhibit B.

Astronuts – Astronomy

Korean rock music is boring conservatism all the way.  You can see why their pop music exploded and their rock music didn’t.

Na Aram – Chill Hea

sorry cbf release something worth caring about this ones not even worth proper punctuation

Paloalto – Victories

What victories?  Not this song, obviously.

Grace – Trick Or Treat

You’d think that the entire political system of Korea being flushed down the toilet faster than jelly snacks during a police raid at YG would be enough for netizens to redirect their priorities from bitching about idols having fun doing harmless things that hurt nobody onto issues that are actually important, but no.  The latest hot topic for Korea’s legions of computer-savvy fucktards is complaining that people are celebrating Halloween like it’s some great affront to the country, which is ironic as the stupidity of the netizen hive-mind is far scarier and more damaging to their country’s psyche and reputation than any Halloween costume could ever be.  At least Grace doesn’t give a fuck so caonima points for her.  Just like T-ara’s “Jeon Won Diary“, the song is shit but I’m morally obliged to support it anyway because lyrically it’s the right song at the right fucking time.

That’s all for this week – more new songs next week!

The post that k-pop’s tits perverts have waited patiently for all year is finally here, it’s the return of the Kpopalypse big boobs guide!

Who can possibly keep up with the amount of big boobs in k-pop?  Kpopalypse, that’s who!  Read on as Kpopalypse brings you the joys of objectification and superficial fetishism once again!

Actually to be completely honest, I have trouble keeping up with new groups much the same as anybody, especially as I don’t tend to pay much attention to the individuals in very new groups, so that’s where the help of trusty caonimas came in.  I asked readers in a recent survey to nominate entrants for this list, and received several hundred responses which I will now distill in the following post.  Thanks to all those of you who helped me out here – but note that most of you picked girls who had in fact already been covered in previous episodes of this series, so make sure you visit the following links to double-check the trufax before complaining that I skipped out on your fave this year:

Bring the girls out – a friendly and informative guide to big boobs in k-pop

Big boobs in k-pop part 2 – the boobs that Kpopalypse forgot

Big boobs in k-pop part 3 – private parts investigations

The usual time-honoured categories for boob assessment shall apply:

Size: the amount of raw pearly volume.

E factor: enhancement via push-up, careful clothes selection, the right angles, etc.

PS factor: PS stands for plastic surgery, and it also stands for Photoshop.  Have boobs been enhanced using these methods?

Fanservice: if a boob falls out of a shirt in the forest and nobody is around to see it, does fapping to it make a sound?

Fapability: a combination of all of the above, plus a dash of completely unfair and biased subjectivity that comes naturally with being a blog author.

Of course, it is inevitable that I will skip out on certain people.  I had a lot of different suggestions so if I missed your fave it’s probably deliberate and done specifically to annoy you so be sure to complain ineffectually about it in the comments section below or via other social media.  Let’s get started!

CHENG XIAO (WJSN/Cosmic Girls)

Cheng Xiao has some pretty impressive volume when wearing this pentagram-straps thing that her entire group seems to wear on a regular basis, but any straps stuff can make just about anybody look well-endowed.  Apart from this she’s not really fanservicey enough yet to gather appropriate data.

There could be anything under there.  However, I don’t think she’s faking it, Cheng Xiao also has quite wide shoulders which is a good indicator of natural bustiness.

Hopefully WJSN do some racier concepts in the future and then a more accurate assessment can be made.  For now we’ll have to make do with pictures like the above.

Yooa (Oh My Girl)

I don’t think Yooa is all that busty, she just has great posture, which makes a real difference to boob perception.

She also wears clothes that enhance boob volume quite a lot.  Everything’s either very sheer with chunky bras, or very frilly.

I hope you appreciate the trauma I went through to bring you these Yooa images, as searching for Yooa invariably brings up lots of results for Girls’ Generation’s Yoona, and we all know how hazardous looking at pictures of Yoona can be.

Irene (Red Velvet)

Some people singled out Irene for inclusion in this list.  Not sure why?  She looks good in the above picture but everyone looks busty when they’re leaning over like that.

You can really tell in the above photo how small she really is.  Her bra is under that brightly-coloured top, and her boobs are underneath that.

In other circumstances such as this she’s almost certainly padding.  There’s a reason I didn’t cover Irene back when I listed Wendy.  If you suggested someone and they’re not on my list they were probably even less busty than Irene.

Jessi

Jessi’s boobs look fake and that’s because they are.  We know this because she helpfully admitted to it, thus saving the caonima detective squad lots of investigation time.  Thanks, Jessi!

Their size still varies like crazy in every shot she’s in though and I guess that’s out friend Photoshop at work.

Mind you they’re always some variation of “big”.  Fake breasts aren’t really my preference but it’s her body and I would feel mean if I didn’t appreciate the effort.

Ayeon (Bebop)

Bebop’s drummer and talented multi-instrumentalist Ayeon might be stuck in a boring band with no good songs but has nevertheless mastered the art of fanservice from the backline.

While she definitely has some boobs, and they’re definitely natural, I think they’re not as big as hyped – it’s sad but true that she often appears very, very pushed-up in videos.

It’s clear from this angle that there’s not that much there, her cleavage cuts a similar profile to the less-busty After School members when they wore similar ultra push-up gear for their song “Flashback“.  Still once again you can’t criticise the effort, good boob presentation goes a long way in these lists.

Yuna (AOA)

“How could you have missed Yuna?  Look at THIS photo!” screamed several AOA fans, all showing me the picture above.  Here’s why.

Her breasts went down a size here…

…and another size here.  Anybody can look busty when they’re bending over.  Also Yuna’s general glazed-over appearance means she doesn’t make an impression compared to the large amounts of competition in her group.

Hyejeong (AOA)

Hyejeong the other wax dummy in AOA fares slightly better, but she still has to compete with girls who have actual character in their faces and her boobage takes a hit as a result because even the biggest boobs perverts look at the face first and then scan down.

Nobody’s boobs sit like that either, large amounts of push-up are obviously in effect here.

When there’s less push-up in use Hyejeong doesn’t look that busty even with the added enhancement of stripes.  Now you can see why I didn’t cover her last episode.  Don’t even get me started on Mina, Chanmi or Yookyung, not even gonna go there.

Sujeong (Lovelyz)

In terms of raw boob volume, Sujeong is one of the best kept secrets in k-pop, at least relative to popular perception.  Her group’s image constantly downplays them, but they’re there.

Lovelyz will probably never get the kind of concepts that really show off boobs, so I guess we’ll have to make do with the odd ill-fitting shirt.

It’s okay, I think I can manage.

Mijoo (Lovelyz)

Mijoo also suffers from her group’s rack-unfriendly image and clearly has more boob than she’s allowed to show, however I don’t think she’s quite as busty as Sujeong.

Naysayers will point to evidence such as the above photo but I’m not so sure, that seems like a really easy angle to make anyone seem well-endowed.

Oh no, now she’s pouting because she’s read my list.  Hey it’s not my fault that your agency won’t give you any decent adult clothes to wear.

Haein (LaBoum)

Someone suggested Haein from LaBoum and then added “good luck finding decent pics”.  They were right – fuck, this girl gives no fanservice whatsoever.

She also accessorises crazily with tons of big frills, bows and other details in the chest area, which is a big volume-enhancer and one that I’m really into but they also tend to effectively hide the true girth of boobs.

We’ll probably never know how big the girls are though.  However Haein is fucking cute and how come I didn’t notice her before.  I might have to find an excuse to start posting more pics of her.

Yulhee (LaBoum)

Yulhee is slightly better than her groupmate at fanservice, at least she wears the odd clingy piece of clothing occasionally and doesn’t hide behind ten layers of frills and bows (although I do like frills and bows anyway for some reason, maybe it’s because they make perving an extra challenge).

Here’s Yulhee responding with excitement as an avid fan tells her that she’s just been nominated for this list.

Don’t look at me like that Yulhee, it’s not my fault that you didn’t get to top of the list.  Try not to feel bad and remember Kpopalypse loves all k-pop boobs no mater how they are rated.

Hayoung (Apink)

When Apink debuted, their agency probably didn’t count on the group’s youngest member Hayoung eventually growing massive fucking cans.  We know they’re real because as one of my survey-doers pointed out, why would their agency spend money on this.

No wonder they’re losing market share to the likes of  Gfriend these days, Hayoung has just gone and flushed Apink’s entire “eternally innocent” concept straight down the crapper with her incredible tits.

Apink will never make money again unless they switch it up and go the Stellar route, it’s either that or disband at this point, girls.  Pick one and hurry up about it (hint: not the disbanding).

Minah (Girl’s Day)

I didn’t bother to include Minah in previous lists because I didn’t think she was busty enough, but if Girl’s Day fans can actually vote for Sojin we might as well complete the set.

For my money Minah’s got the edge over Sojin these days anyway.  Not sure if her boobs just got prettier or maybe other reasons.

If only Minah was as good about showing boobs as she is about rocking extreme cameltoe, we may have the answers to these important questions.

Ash-B

When Unpretty Rapstar contestant Ash-B first appeared with the promo images in this post, people thought it was some kind of joke.  “Is she really going to be any good at rapping?” they asked.

The answer of course, is “who gives a fuck, look at those titties”.  Mind you it seems pretty obvious to me that the above photo has the benefit of the right angle and Photoshop.

I’m pretty sure I still haven’t bothered to listen to one of her raps all the way through yet.  However she definitely does make me feel like I need a shower, so I guess that makes her “real hip-hop”.

Min (miss A)

What the fuck am I doing with my life – how did I neglect to include Min in my boobs lists until now?  Shame, Kpopalypse, shame.

It’s not like I didn’t know she had great boobs either – I’ve been fully aware of this for years.  There’s really no excuse I can give which would be satisfactory.

It seems that I have acted thoughtlessly.  Therefore I have reflected and returned with this extra picture of Min, cynically glaring at my lack of inclusion of her in my previous posts.

I will think hard about my actions and work to return with a more mature image of myself as a k-pop fapper.

Ari (Tahiti)

Another girl who I’ve neglected but in this case maybe it’s a bit more understandable as Tahiti don’t exactly have the highest profile in k-pop.

This is a shame really as not only do they have good songs on average but the girls look great which for such a visual-centric style of music is important.

Ari has some very nice boobs and it should be acknowledged, lucky there’s Kpopalypse boobs posts as the great equaliser to put these nugus on the same playing field as the big stars, right?

Jihyo – Twice

As regular readers will know, I find all the girls in Twice to be a bit samey, so it was difficult to research Jihyo.  Hell, these pictures may not even be Jihyo for all I know.

Whoever she is, she has nice boobs anyway.  I think.  It’s not really possible to be sure under this industrial-strength clothing.

This is the problem with assessing girls in newer groups – there isn’t a lot of accumulated evidence available, plus girls in brand new groups tend to wear more clothes rather than less.  She’ll need a couple of years of solid study at least before we really know what’s going on.  But I’m fairly sure the above photo is about 30% bra, nobody’s boobs sit like that naturally.

Sana – Twice

As regular readers will know, I find all the girls in Twice tozzzzzzzzzzzzzzx]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]ssssssss be a bit samey, so it was difficult to research Sana.  Hell, these pictures may not even be Jihyo for all I know.

Whoever she is, she has nice boobs anyway.  I think.  It’s not really possible to be sure under this industrial-strength clothing.

This is the problem with assessing girls in newer groups – there isn’t a lot of accumulated evidence available, plus girls in brand new groups tend to wesssssssssar more clothes rather than less.  She’ll need a couple of years of solid study at least before we really know what’s going on.  But I’m fairly sure the above photo is about 30% bra, nobody’s boobs sit like that naturally.

Mina – Twice

As regular readers will know, I find all the girls in Twice to be a it samey, so it was difficult to research Dahyun.  Hell, these pictures may not even be Mina for all I know.

Whoever she is, she has nice boobs anyway.  I think.  It’s not really possibl            e to be sure under this industrial-strength clothing.

This is the problem with assessing girls in newer groups – there isn’t a lot of accumulated evidence available, plus girls in brand new groups tend to wear more clothes rather than less.  She’ll need a couple of years of solid study at least before we really know what’s going on.  But I’m fairly sure the above photo is about 30% bra, nobody’s boobs sit like that naturally.

Chaeyou ng – Twice

As regular readers will know,I find all the girls in Twice to be a bit samy, so it was difficult to research Chaeyoung.  Hell, these pictures may not even be Tzuyu for all I know.

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SAna – Twice

As regular readers will know,I find  to be a bit samy, all the girls in Twice so it was difficult to research Mina.  Hell, these pictures may not even be Momo for all I know.

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Chaeyoung – Twice

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NOTICE

THIS POST HAS BEEN CLOSED DUE TO HAZARDOUS BOREDOM LEVELS GENERATED BY ATTEMPTING TO ASSESS FAP VALUE OF TWICE MEMBERS

KPOPALYPSE WILL RETURN WITH MORE OH&S COMPLIANT POSTS SOON

Now that the novelty of having web traffic after posting about tits the other day has worn off, it’s time to scare off all of my readers again with another round of the statistically least popular Kpopalypse series ever, Kpopalypse Nugu Alert!  Let’s check out some more nugus!

Despite the focus on youth and beauty in k-pop as well as much of Korean media as a whole, rapid shifts in Korea’s birthrate means that the population is actually ageing very quickly, faster than anywhere else in the developed world.  These changes have brought with them their own unique social problems, but also a greater need for entertainment by and for the growing demographic of older people.  This episode of Kpopalypse Nugu Alert is therefore dedicated to performers who might be older than Kpopalypse, at least theoretically.  Of course none of them are actually older than Kpopalypse because this is impossible, but in a parallel universe where the laws of Kpopalypse being older than everybody in the world ever strangely don’t apply, it could be a technical possibility.  Kpopalypse wishes to encourage these people by giving them the type of support and observational wisdom that only a fellow older person can provide.

I’m very sympathetic to the plight of older k-pop performers, because as someone who is known among the k-pop Internet community as probably the oldest person alive (and if you’re wondering exactly how old click here), take it from me that getting old is generally a fairly shitty deal.  You can’t eat ten bars of chocolate and not exercise and still stay the same weight, you need to go to sleep at a reasonable hour or you feel like shit the next day, you get weird pains in your body for no reason, and you can’t have k-pop biases or write boobs posts without people judging you.  Worst of all there’s that whole “statistically closer to death” thing which means I may miss out on T-ara’s 2097 comeback (who if current trends continue I expect to still be around by then and with their original lineup intact).  However there are also some cool benefits, like getting a free pass for being rude to young people for no reason, and being able to tell k-pop fans with authority that nobody ever cared about CSJH The Grace. Also, maybe my nugu detection skills have been honed slightly through the years, even if I mainly rely on my readers for suggestions these days because I’m a lazy caonima, but I sourced all of these videos from my own personal nugu stash so please enjoy – or not, as the case may be.

The usual Nugu Alert rules apply:

• Less than 20,000 YouTube views on official channels
• Nobody outside Korea cares, and maybe inside Korea they don’t care either
• Relevant to Kpopalyse’s interests

Yes Man – Yes Man

There’s definitely some kind of social message conveyed in both the song and video of “Yes Man” that I’m not grasping due to a lack of Korean language ability.  Our music video’s middle-aged protagonist (or maybe his skin is just that bad that he looks middle-aged) begins by trying what surely has to be the most crap suicide attempt ever seen in the history of k-pop music videos, threatening to fall not off a building or cliff but down a gently rolling soft snow-covered hill.  I might be an old man but I probably wouldn’t even break a limb doing that particular stunt.  Later he’s seen attempting to kiss a girl and she slaps him, but the kiss attempt is so tentative and weak that a slap is hardly called for, she could have easily dodged his lips approaching her face at 0.0001 kilometres per hour while gently imploring “but what I meant was that I love you… like a friend” over the beat.  Then later on the miserable guy in the video turns happy by the end of it for seemingly no apparent reason, so I guess the lyrics to the song are just that uplifting and fantastic that he was able to see the light.  It’s a pity that almost nobody has watched this, maybe if “Yes Man” got a bit more traction it could turn out to be the secret to solving South Korea’s suicide epidemic so make sure you share this video far and wide.  If just one life is saved, it was worth it, man.

YouTube views at time of writing: 81

Notable attribute: this video has been online since the middle of 2014!  That’s less than one view per fortnight!

Nugu Alert rating: extreme

Seo Hyun Lee – I’m Sick And Tired

Don’t let the thumbnail image fool you – it definitely does not prepare you for what lies ahead in this video once it starts rolling.  Make sure to brace yourself for a healthy serve of “what the fuck am I watching” as Seo Hyun Lee starts off this video with some weird Buddha meets Timothy Leary type shenanigans before heading out into the local marketplace to annoy her neighbours with weird dancing and being about as hyperactive as someone her age can get.  The confused looks of bystanders in most of the outdoor scenes show that the staging here was minimal if any and there were no filming permissions obtained, rather the cast and camera team just quickly ran through to quickly do their thing and then fucked off before the local council worked out what was going on (a time-honoured z-grade Australian film technique).  Unlike “Yes Man” with its brutally honest approach to middle-aged pudge, the camera is careful to keep a safe distance from Seo Hyun Lee’s face, applying lots of careful “just right” over/underexposure when needed in the studio scenes to smooth out any rough edges, but I definitely get the sense that she’s approaching Kpopalypse age.  There’s also some tasty erhu playing on the track where Seo Hyun Lee mimes it so badly that it looks like she has no idea how to play the erhu when in fact she does, but hey it looks cool when they duplicate her into a star formation or whatever the fuck is going on… speaking of which, what the fuck is going on?  Your guess is as good as mine.

YouTube views at time of writing: 824

Notable attribute: proof that the same tacky sportwear that looks like shit on young hip-hoppers looks just as shit when their mums wear it

Nugu Alert rating: extreme

Ryu Man Hyun – I’ll Give You My Everything

Some people are just old as fuck and there’s no hiding it.  Kpopalypse is of course one of those people, and another such person is Ryu Man Hyun, who spends most of the running time of “I’ll Give You My Everything” pining after a lady young enough to be his daughter (when he’s not catching his breath on a rocking chair or under a tree), or maybe she just has better TV makeup than him.  She doesn’t seem like she returns his affections however, either in real life or in the narrative of the video, as she maintains careful distance at all times and looks amazingly stilted whenever they are in the same scene together.  Indeed, the one view of her walking past him while he turns his head and ogles her is truly disturbing and is recycled multiple times because obviously the director liked the shot but the actress was mortified by the entire idea and couldn’t be talked into doing that shit more than once.

As shown above, they even recycle the scene a third time with the image flipped back to front horizontally to try and stop people from catching on.  Still, we can’t blame Ryu Man Hyun for this bullshit any more than we can blame male idols for their endless corny scenes of borderline street harrassment like chasing around completely unwilling girls is the latest hot romance trend, some director obviously just thought that it would look cool and made them do it.  Don’t let a few bad creative video choices ruin the fantastic music video for you, will you?

YouTube views at time of writing: 46

Notable attribute: tree branch used for physical support nearly broken during exuberant exclamation at 1:41

Nugu Alert rating: extreme

That’s all for this episode of Kpopalypse Nugu Alert!  There’ll probably be just one more of these episodes before the end of 2016, so expect it fondly, in the meantime Kpopalypse will return with more posts soon!

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

The Legend

Blackpink – Stay

All that fucking hype and drama just for some shitty acoustic la-la harmonica bullshit song, fml.

Blackpink – Playing With Fire

This other song’s somewhat better but “Playing With Fire” is no “Fire“, that’s for damn sure, so let’s all calm down everyone.

Taeyeon – 11:11

Berry Good – Don’t Believe

I was all ready to shit on this when I heard the intro but then the beat started and it became decent.  Not sure if I’m happy because I got a good song or sad because my fun at mud-slinging amother potential awful ballad was ruined.

Mamamoo – Décalcomanie

Wow, a Mamamoo song that isn’t a complete piece of dogshit like their last 27 since “Piano Man”. 2016 really is a year of surprises, first Sistar releasing something listenable and now this.

BTOB – I’ll Be Your Man

Basically a T-ara ballad but with more muscle-flexing and burnt-out cars.

B.A.P – Skydive

Now that B.A.P are back with their old label their agency is splurging on massively expensive videos in the hope that none of the money trickles down to the actual members.  Someone in the boardroom is just going “fuck ’em”.

MC Mong ft. Eunji – Visual Gangster

If by “visual gangster” he means he’s committing crimes against my retinas with the painful fashions in this video, then no argument from me.

Block B Bastarz – It’s Yours

That surgery must be taking a long time to heal for the other members of Block B to be out of action for this long.

Hello Venus – Runway

Poor Hello Venus probably can’t afford an MV right now so here’s a fanmade one.

BONUS SONGS

Loco ft. Crush – Still

About as un-loco as a song can get.

Thomas Cook – Goodbye

Okay, seeya.

Lim Seul Ong & Joy – Always In My Heart

Shit song but very watchable bitchstare-packed video.

Jenyer – I Do

I don’t.

Hyolyn ft. Jay Park – One Step

One step closer to my imminent death from Shit Music Disease.

Seventeen – Healing

This has been out for a while, how did I miss it?  Oh, by it not being any good, makes sense.

Mamamoo – Tears

Luckily Mamamoo also released this bucket of crap this week so we can feel normal again and not like we’re living in a parallel universe where they don’t generally suck.

Skull & Haha ft. M.Tyson – Buzzer Beater

Skull and Haha are trying to modernise their sound a bit which is appreciated but the biggest problem with any Skull & Haha release is always going to be Skull & Haha.

LiVii – Beautiful Creature

Rambling electronic mess.

Jay Park & Workmanship – Stay With Me

I was all getting ready to compliment him on using the mic correctly but then he twisted it around 180 degrees the wrong way at 2:08.  “Live version” my ass.

Day Day ft. Hash Swan – Piggy Bank

This isn’t a beat, fuck off.

Young Jun – Moon Night

It’s a brown eye alright.

Seventeen SVT – Check In

The guy at 1:36 looks like he’s rapping inside a shower cubicle – that’s not hip-hop.

Kate – I Don’t Wanna Go

BigBang should do a version of this and it can be about draft dodging.

Ramda – If You

Well, this is boring.

Wax – You Are You Are You Are

You are not.

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

While I work on several other posts that are only half-formed in my head and will probably take a while to appear, here’s another piece of music worked out, explained and played by Kpopalypse for all the musical caonimas out there!

Taeyang – Eyes, Nose, Lips

Some readers may be surprised to see “Eyes, Nose, Lips” make the cut for Kpopalypse tabs, as it’s well-documented that I hate this fucking song, if you ask me it really sucks a camel’s poody hole.  However, because quite a few people asked me very nicely to do this song, and it’s honestly a pretty simple song to do that wasn’t too much trouble, I worked it out for you all anyway.  I’m not one to let my personal subjective music taste get in the way of a little bit of education and fun times for my musical readers, so hopefully the below is useful to you!

Structure and timestamps

Intro – 0:24
Verse – 0:31
Chorus – 1:23
Verse – 1:54
Chorus – 2:47
Bridge – 3:14
Chorus+ – 3:42

Key and time signatures

C Major – 4/4

Each verse is two passes through the following eight bars:

| C – – – | Em/B – – – | Am – – – | E7/G# – – – | F – – – | C – – – | E – – – | F – Fm –

Each chorus is two passes through the following four bars:

| C – – – | E – – – | Am – Am/G – | F – Fm –

The bridge is three times through:

| C – C/Bb – | Am7 – Am7/G# –

And then:

| C – C/Bb – | F – Fm –

After that it goes to “Chorus+” which is what I call a “Eurovision key change” – the chorus is repeated but transposed up one semitone.  This makes the final chorus two passes through the following chords:

| C# – – – | F – – – | Bb – Bb/Ab – | F# – F#m

Note as usual that when two chords have a slash between them, the one on the left is the chord and the one on the right is actually the bassnote, so Em/B is “E minor with B as the bassnote”.

Just like with the “Day By Day” tab, I’ve taken a little creative license with the chords to suit my preferences.  For instance I’m pretty sure in the verses it’s E/G# not E7/G# but E7/G# works a lot nicer on guitar so that’s why I used it.  Don’t expect these tabs to be 100%, I’m more interested in capturing the feel of the song in a way that makes musical sense rather than recreating every single note the way it is on the original.

Here’s my scribble notes for the song, plus a video of myself playing it with Taeyang singing.  Taeyang’s a little out of the camera shot but he was okay with not being filmed, he was having a bad hair day and knew that he couldn’t compete with the pure sexiness of Kpopalypse.  I make a couple of fuckups (most notably I forget the change at the end of the bridge) but the video isn’t so I can be all perfect and shit, it’s only to give you an idea of how the chords fit with the vocals in practice, and also so guitarists can take a look at the chord shapes in action.

Although most of this is easy-peasy on guitar, there’s a couple of tricky chords, and I still managed to fuck up a few notes as you’ll hear in the video, mind you I only gave it about ten minutes of practice after I learned how to play it.  To help you out so you can do a slightly better job than me, here’s all the unique chords in the song and the frettings that I’m using.  The numbers show the frets from sixth string to first, where 0 is an open string and x is a string that is muted or isn’t played:

C – x32010
Em/B – x22000
Am – x02210
E7/G# – 420210
F – 133211
C – x32010
E – 022100
Fm – 133111
Am/G – 3×2210
C/Bb – x12010
Am7 – x02010
Am7/G# – I don’t bother with this chord, I just play the G# bassnote and pick out the melody shown in the scribble notes
C# – x4666x
Bb – x1333x
Bb/Ab – 4x333x
F# – 244322
F#m – 244222

I played this one fingerstyle because a few people expressed disappointment that I didn’t attempt fingerstyle for “Day By Day”, and I wanted to give you guys something different to see.  The picking pattern I’m using is slightly improvised but is 99% thumb-index-middle-ring-middle-index-thumb-index, however I just use fingernail strumming in the choruses for dynamics.  For the guitar fans, note that this song is played on a Gretsch Americana G4530 “Sweethearts” acoustic, which is a nice 3/4 size steel string guitar which sounds amazingly good for such a cut-size instrument.  I’ve also used a better microphone for this recording so you get a good sense of what the guitar sounds like.

Anyway that’s all from this post, let me know what you’d like to see next!  Also don’t worry if I haven’t responded to your tab request – it may be coming in a future episode!

Lately k-pop fans have been noticing this neat little Russian criminal-inspired tattoo that Jongup was wearing in B.A.P’s “Skydive” promotional imagery, and getting a bit upset over the acronym used:

Drawing and text from “Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia Volume II“

I’m not sure why this generated so much concern – he’s playing a bad guy, so obviously him having “bad person tattoos” is entirely appropriate and in-character.  It says a lot about the weak pussyness of our PC Internet culture when we can’t allow our fictional evildoers to be truly evil.  However, I do agree that the folks behind B.A.P’s image did miss an opportunity to customise the symbolism so it was more effective and relevant to Korea, after all it’s not Russia that needs saving, it’s T-ara who need saving from netizen bullies… and it’s not jews that need beating, but Korean netizens!  Let Kpopalypse show you how to be the kind of Internet bad-meaning-good guy on Korean portal sites that will make the likes of B.A.P’s artistic director go weak at the knees!

It’s been noticed by many that T-ara’s fanclub have been co-ordinating carefully and are active in swamping Korean portal articles with positive comments.  Of course this is hilarious and a great tool to render Korean netizens and their evil craft of being salty bullying bitches powerless, but how to get in on the fun?  Part of it would be to sign up to T-ara fan communities like Tiara Diadem, but then there’s the site navigation stuff which can be trickier.  Navigating Korean online portals can be intimidating and confusing for non-Korean speakers, so hopefully this guide will help you through Nate and Naver, the two main online Korean news portals.  Of course T-ara has been used as an example here for their continued relevance and incredible ability to giving Korean netizens the shits, but there’s no reason why you can’t employ these same techniques below to thwart netizen bullies who are cyberbullying any other entertainers or people you care about.

USING NAVER TO LEAVE COMMENTS

Naver will be discussed first, because it’s easier to use.  Here’s the top of a Naver article about how T-ara are excellent and won’t disband any time soon and if you don’t like it you can basically just suck it up and deal with it.  Obviously this type of article is fertile ground for irritating Korean netizens.  The stuff in the boxes above the article heading is font type and size selection, and also a button for printing (why?), so you can ignore it, it’s not an up/downvoting tool.  Instead, look for these buttons at the bottom of the article.

Here you can share the article, which is the button on the right.  The left button is to like the article and you need a Naver username for this (more on that below), but you don’t need a Naver username to share or leave comments, you can do that through Twitter or Facebook.

If you get this message, it’s saying that you need to have popups enabled on Naver to do article sharing.  You’ll probably get your browser’s popup blocker notification showing up at the same time, from here you should be able to find an option to enable popups on Naver.

Clicking “share” gives you a choice of social networks to share to.  You’ll need to be logged into these social networks to complete the sharing process.

Below the demographic information and some other messages are the article comments.  The below comments are in English and Chinese and have been left by fans who have followed this process, so Kpopalypse readers need not submit themselves to the disgusting sight of actual Korean netizen comments which we’ve all seen far too much of in our lives.

You can upvote and downvote comments with the thumbs up and thumbs down icons under each comment.  Be sure to upvote anything pro T-ara as it will cause maximum annoyance to Korean netizens as well as any netizen comment translating sites.  Also don’t forget to downvote any nasty Korean comments because nobody needs to see those.  You will need to be logged in to do this.

If you’d like to leave your own comments, do so in the below box.

Comments have a 300 character limit.  The text in the box, which can be typed over, is a statement asking you to not defame others, break copyright or say anything nasty so as to generate “a healthy discussion culture and a high quality commentary culture”.  Make sure you abide by these rules (unlike hypocritical Korean netizens, who never do) and only post positive uplifting comments about T-ara.  Clicking the purple box will bring up a popup asking you to log in if you haven’t.  You can start a Naver account if you want, but it’s a lot easier to login through Facebook or Twitter, below is the popup that allows you to do this.

That’s all you should need to know to get started, it’s fairly easy.  Very successful upvoting campaigns will both annoy netizens as well as generate a pleasing “I’m taking my bat and ball and going home” result like this from translating sites:

USING NAVER FOR ARTICLE VOTING

Of course, if you’d like to go that extra step and upvote positive T-ara articles to combat human-garbage Korean netizens who might try to bury them completely, here’s how to do it.

Clicking the upvote button will generate the above prompt which is asking you if it’s okay to go to the login page, so click OK for this.

From here, just sign in through a Facebook account.  A prompt will come up where Facebook asks you to share data with Naver, click okay to that.

Then Naver will take you to this page, where you have to pick a username for yourself on Naver.  Don’t use a capital at the start of your username like I did in this screenshot!  Lower case only.  Once this is done, you’re good to upvote T-ara articles so nasty Korean netizens don’t bury them!

USING NATE TO LEAVE COMMENTS

Nate is the other main Korean news portal site and it has a slightly higher difficulty level for non-Koreans because the layout is a bit messier and more confusing, and there’s also a little less English on the site generally.

Here’s the top of a Nate article about how the ever-relevant Jiyeon from T-ara wears sunglasses at night.  Once again the little boxes on the right hand side just above the image are only font size control so ignore them.  Also ignore Nate’s super-distracting sidebar which is even more annoying and pointless than my own, and look for these buttons below the article:

In the middle are your upvote and downvote buttons, you’ll need a Nate account to use them.  The other buttons on the left allow you to share the article via Facebook or Twitter.  Once again you’ll need to enable popups on your browser for Nate to allow sharing to Twitter, but Nate isn’t as user-friendly as Naver won’t tell you that you need popus turned on, it’ll just sit there and refuse to do anything when you click the Twitter button until you figure out what’s wrong.  Once you’ve switched your popups on for Nate, you can share away:

The comments box for Nate looks like this, and has a generous 1000-character limit:

The three login icons for Nate, Facebook and Twitter are above the comment area, so log in through here.  Clicking anywhere in the comment area or the submit button on the right will also invite you to log in via Nate, Twitter or Facebook, or sign up at Nate.

Once again you’re better off using Facebook or Twitter to sign in unless you’re very good at navigating Korean-only pages.

Here is what a comment looks like on Nate.  At the right are the upvote/downvote buttons so be sure to upvote anything that is positive about T-ara to cause maximum irritation.  Underneath the comment is where you can leave a reply to someone else’s comment.  The reply then appears like this, at the bottom.

Easy – now you can troll Korean netizens to your heart’s content.

MAKING A NATE ACCOUNT FOR ARTICLE VOTING

Sometimes leaving comments isn’t enough.  Korean netizens are crafty and like to bury articles they disagree with, using sneaky downvoting.  Of course we can rectify this with righteous upvotes, but to upvote the article itself, you’ll need to make a Nate account, Nate won’t allow logging in through other social media for this.  If you attempt an upvote without having a Nate account you’ll get the following prompt:

The message is asking you if it’s okay to direct you to the login page, so click OK for this.

From left to right:

• “stay signed in” check box
• find a Nate ID
• I forgot my password because I’m a trashy netizen who can’t retain simple thoughts
• sign up to Nate (in bold)
• some IP security bullshit

Click on the bold “sign up” text and we’re good to start making an account on Nate.

This message says that you must use your real name when using Nate, so be sure to do this so the Nate thought police don’t scrub away your hard work.  Click the red box in the middle of the three boxes to continue.

This page is your typical “sign your life away” bullshit legal page.  I won’t bother to translate it all in detail, because it all basically means “our way or the highway”, so you have no choice but to follow the steps if you want to make a Nate account so it really doesn’t matter what it says.  Tick the first three checkboxes, and the fourth if you want.

• The first box says you agree to Nate collecting and using your personal information for whatever the fuck they want
• The second box says you agree to the Terms Of Use (i.e EULA-type shit nobody reads)
• The third box is you again giving permission for Nate to fuck you up the ass any way they choose later by using your personal info
• The fourth box says that Nate will send you email, and you can opt out of this, but they’ll send it to you anyway regardless if they feel like it because fuck you

Then you have to fill out a really intrusive page where they ask you everything:

From top to bottom:

• The user ID you want to use on Nate, between 6-40 characters (you can check ID availability with the red box)
• password
• confirm your password
• your name (no spaces!)
• email
• phone number
• gender (male or female, because there are only two genders)
• birthdate
• some security bullshit

If you fill it all out and get a message like this:

…it probably means your user ID already exists, so pick another.  However, this message sometimes comes up in error because Nate is a phenomenally buggy piece of shit, so I don’t know, just try to change something and see how you go.  Eventually with luck you’ll reach the following screen:

This step is authentication of your account through your mobile phone.  I didn’t go through with this final step because fucked if I’m going to give some overseas shitcunts my mobile phone number, I’ll probably start getting unsolicited SMS from some wacky Korean religious cult leader who controls the government, fuck that.  However if that sort of shit doesn’t bother you, go right ahead.  Anyway if you made it this far you should be fine.

Thanks for reading everyone!  Have fun being a thorn in the side of the Internet’s worst cyberbullies, feel free to point out any errors or refinements that could be made to this article, as well as report to anyone who might find it useful.  I’ll leave you with a better version of Jongup’s hand tattoo!

So far all of the Kpopalypse tabs posts have been beginner to intermediate level.  Not so for this post!  This time it’s IU’s “Love Of B” under the microscope!  Read on and enjoy!

Warning: this post is going to get mad-ass technical.  Hang onto your nuts.

Some background, before we begin:

IU’s “Love Of B” is the opening track from the great “Modern Times” album which is really one of the only listenable full-length albums in all of k-pop.  The reason why “Modern Times” hits such a high quality bar is that the songs on it clearly haven’t been designed as filler.  Most k-pop albums are:

• The feature track, which is usually the only good song, if there is even one
• A couple other songs that got rejected for feature track status but shoved on the album anyway to fill up space, sometimes one of these is accidentally better than the feature, but usually not
• A bunch of shitty cookie-cutter ballads – ballads usually have longer song length so they’re good space fillers
• Some instrumentals, remixes or different versions of the aforementioned tracks to pad out the length a bit more

“Modern Times” works much better than your average k-pop album because it’s not randomly thrown together like the above with whatever tracks were lying around, instead it’s a “concept album”.  The concept that unifies “Modern Times” is various genres of jazz, and which I don’t particularly like much jazz, the jazz-lite on the album still has enough pop songwriting discipline in it that it doesn’t spiral off into super-wanky jazz faggot land.

“Love Of B” is a song that is loosely in a style popular in the 1930s known as “swing jazz”, “gypsy jazz” or “hot club jazz”.  All of the guitar playing in IU’s “Love Of B” is by Park Juwon, who has made a conscious attempt to emulate the guitar style of swing-jazz guitar pioneer Django Rinehardt.

Django was the first guitar player to ever become well known from playing truly fast, fluid guitar leads, and even more astoundingly he only had two working fingers on his left hand, yet his old recordings from back then still outpace a lot of guitarists today.  Park Juwon successfully nails Django’s smooth feel on the track, but also increases the speed due to having a fully functioning left hand.  So I guess what I’m trying to say is – we’re about to learn some fairly advanced-level lead guitar, so good luck playing this shit.

IU – Love Of B

Structure and timestamps

Intro – 0:04
Verse 1 – 0:25
Solo – 0:43
Verse 2 – 0:53
Bridge – 1:13
Verse 3 – 1:32
Solo – 1:50
Bridge – 2:10
Verse 4 – 2:30
Outro – 2:54

Key and time signatures

C Minor – 4/4 swing

The structure of this song is different to most k-pop in that the vocal sections are a verse with a refrain, and there’s no real chorus, which gives away the song’s jazz/blues heritage.

I’m not going to work out chords for this.  Fuck the chords for this song, because that’s not where the action is.  You can probably find them somewhere else if you really want them, but jazz chords in this context all sound much the same anyway, you can pretty much play any old bullshit 7th chords and get by as it’s the bassline that carries the harmony in “Love Of B”, not the guitar.  Instead, from me you’re getting all the lead guitar, because that’s the part that is the most fun and challenging.  Ignore the chords on the below page, they’re not quite right.  The lead on the other hand is correct.

The first four lines of the above page are the intro solo.  If you can play this solo well, you’ll find that most of the rest of it falls under your fingers to some extent because the intro solo establishes most of the main lead guitar shapes used in the song.  Note that the fingering at the end of the second line is a little different to the one in the video.  I’m personally quite comfortable with leaping up to the 15th fret after playing quite low down, but if you’re not so keen on doing large leaps, the fingering in the above scan gives you a smoother transition from the low phrases to the part of the song at 0:15 where the lead guitar goes up high.  The tradeoff is that it’s a little less natural to play.  In the video I’m using 5-4-7-5 all on the G string as the last 4 notes of that line, which is easier but means a bigger leap later.  Decisions.

The most important thing to remember about executing the guitar parts is that they’re not strictly alternate picking (each downstroke always followed by an up and vice versa).  Django got his speed and fluency back in the day by sweep-picking his arpeggios (chaining downstrokes and upstrokes together to make changing between strings easier).  It’s certainly possible to play all of it with strict alternate picking but it won’t have the right feel, you’ll sound more like a 1980s shredder than a 1930s jazz player.  Whenever string changes occur in this song try to sweep them to maintain the smoothness.

The last two lines of the above pages are the mini solo at 0:43.  This is really just a cut down version of the intro solo, so if you can play one you can basically play the other.

This page shows all the “call and response” lead sections that commence from the second verse at 0:53 and then continue on for the rest of the song in some form.  The part in square brackets on the second half of the second line is the beginning of the bridge at 1:13 (and the song also goes back to here at 2:10).  Note that when I play this part of the bridge in the video, I’m adding a note 2 frets above what is written on the E string, and alternating between it and the note on the sheet, this extra note gives the effect of a minor 9th chord.

The arrows on the fourth line are string bends, and the wiggly line on the fourth line is a tremolo pick because I couldn’t be bothered writing out the exact number of times that note was played.  The fifth line also has a “1/2 bend”.  The bottom line has a double-stop (two lead notes at once) harmony part which I didn’t play in the video but if you feel like doing some double-stops, those are the notes, it’s not too tricky.

Here’s the crazy solo that begins at 1:50.  The hardest part is easily the fourth line, which I didn’t play that well in the final video either at full speed OR slowed down, although I think I actually got it more correct at full speed.  My playing on the third line isn’t exactly the same as the recording either, I’m playing a little lower, probably one inversion removed.

Note that once this solo finishes, the song then goes back to the square bracketed chords on the second line of the second page and continues from there.  After that, I didn’t write the rest out but it’s all just essentially repeats of what has happened earlier in the piece so you won’t have any problems if you’ve gotten this far.  The ending is just “whatever in C minor”.

The video starts with the intro solo, short solo and main solo all played at about half-speed (so you can see what’s going on), and then I tackle everything at once at full speed.  As usual, I don’t play it exactly right because 1. I fucked up a few bits and couldn’t be fucked re-recording or editing myself enough times to get it 100% right and 2. there’s certain sections where I prefer to “play it my own way” to some extent, (and interestingly, IU’s guitarists aren’t all that good at it live either, Park Juwon probably had quite a few cracks at it in the studio so don’t feel too bad if you sound a bit rusty like I do).  As usual, the video isn’t for me to show off how well (or not) I can play anyway, it’s to help YOU play, because the tabs are a bit hard to follow without some visuals as well.  You’ll need some good economy of motion to be able to get the speed up – try to minimise both your left-hand and right-hand movements as much as you can while playing the faster material.  The song is motherfucking hard as fuck so if you can play this any better than I did in this video, rest assured that you’re good – hopefully this video will help you get there!

For the guitar-spotters, the electric guitar used here is an Epiphone Wildkat, which is a “fake hollowbody” – it has hollow f-holes but they’re just for show as it’s also wood-blocked underneath the pickups, the guitar therefore has no acoustic sound and is essentially an electric guitar only.  The Wildkat is slightly bigger than a Gibson Les Paul but not as big as your usual Gibson and Epiphone hollowbody guitars like the ES-335, Casino, Sheraton etc.  It’s a great guitar for clean playing but it really sounds like garbage when distorted heavily, if you’re a jazz/blues/50s rock player I’d recommend it, just don’t try to use it with saturated distortion because the instrument will just make the most horrible feedback imaginable, and not the good kind.

Anyway, that’s all for this post – have fun attempting this piece if you’re up for the challenge, but if not I promise the next Kpopalypse tab will be something easier!

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

Blackpink

T-ara – Tiamo

There are unopened Christmas presents in the background in some scenes.  That makes “Tiamo” k-pop’s first Christmas song for 2016 and therefore it and all other Christmas songs that come to my attention as feature tracks between now and when Santa sticks his dick in a reindeer’s anus will be reviewed in the upcoming 2016 Christmas list instead of here.  This list will be published on December 25th or thereabouts, in the meantime enjoy asking me again and again what I think of “Tiamo” and not getting a response, lolz.

Imfact – Feel So Good

Up until 0:16 it sounded like it was building into something cool, and then… oh dear.

Toppdogg – Rainy Day

Why do they have the group’s name 50 metres down the alleyway where you barely even notice it’s there?

Hyolyn – Paradise

Enough with the fast buildup to half-time choruses with boring sax riffs in them already.  At least Jay Park isn’t on this one.

MOMOLAND – JJan! Koong! Kwang!

Like a few people I thought this had something to do with Twice’s Momo so I ignored it.  Then I realised it was an actual song by an unrelated group so I listened to it, only to realise that I made the right decision the first time around.

BOYS24 – E

I don’t know if you’ve been following the male version of Produce 101 but I sure haven’t.

Victon – I’m Fine

So much music from boy groups lately seems to be either yolo or Rhodes.    There are other flavours, guys!

Bolbbalgan4 – Hard To Love

It’s hard to love this song when there are so many like it in Korea right now, even if it is one of the slightly better ones.

Astro – Confession

This video is fantastic because it features a crushingly realistic depiction of the life of a k-pop fan-art maker.

Bizniz ft Basick & Microdot – Dead Great Names Society

Flute is one of those instruments that was useless until sampling and loops were invented.  Who wants to hear a flute that isn’t on a rap track, besides Jethro Tull fans?

BONUS SONGS

Kim Hyoeun – Picture Me Rolling

Damn I had my “actually I can’t picture that” response all prepared and then the backings turned out to be decent.

Hyun Jin Joo – Break The Mirror

Those ultra-long dissolves are really annoying, because Hyun Jin Joo seems quite attractive but I can’t see her because Hyun Jin Joo is in the way.

Sunday and Kim Taehyun – Still

Nobody cares about CSJH The Grace.

Jiyoon – Magnet

Nobody cares about 4Minute members called “Yoon” either but this isn’t bad.  Pity nobody will listen to it because it isn’t Hyuna.

Jiyoon – I Do

This other song can go and get fucked though.  When she walks tentatively into the ocean I just want to push her right in there.

D.I.P – Fizz

It breaks my heart when I actually can tell how much money was poured into a video for some nugu group but it still looks “cheap” anyway.

Kyuhyun – Blah Blah

A Korean ballad like every other.  At least they got the title right.

Kyuhyun – Still

And this one’s almost exactly the same!  Fuck, come on SM mix it up a little for the poor guy.  Make him do “Hammer Smashed Face” or something, I would pay to hear that.

J’kyun ft. Ken – Ponytail

The “Rappers Delight” style beat is okay but the R&B chorus plopped over the top just ruins any fun that could be had.

Kris Wu – July

Another boring yoloish song that hardly even has any beat.  Remember when pop music had upbeat rhythms?  T-ara’s “ballad” is faster tempo than this.

BLVN – All I Want

It’s almost semi-okay, at least it starts off alright before 57 layers of Nickelback ruin it.

Eyedi – Not Lonely

Holding a decoration light up to your face while you sing makes you look like a bitch.

Min Chae – Day

More boring shit, some lame wah-wah guitar isn’t enough to save this.

Phonebooth – Home

Primary should sue them over those cardboard box heads.

Yu Seung Woo & Yoo Yeon Jung – I’ll Be On Your Side

Wow I just wasted 10 seconds of my life writing this review.  If there’s a god, when I die I’m demanding this time back.

We Hate JH – Divert

Sounds like every shit group that ever lived in Melbourne (or wanted to live in Melbourne) during the 90s.  I think I hate JH too, if he’s responsible for writing this.

Jvcki Wai ft. PNSB – Exposure

Don’t worry girl, exposure isn’t likely to happen to you.

Rude Paper – Blue

This is the shitty weed-smoking life-wasting Bob Marley type reggae and not the cool reggae that people actually like.

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

So Donald Trump won the US elections, and predictably everyone is freaking out.  However, as usual nobody’s asking the really big question, the kind of question that in this day and age you can only see answered properly on Kpopalypse blog – what does a Trump victory really mean for k-pop?  Read on to find out!

I wasn’t 100% sure that Trump would win, but I knew right from the start that a Hillary vs Trump battle would be close as fuck and that it could easily go either way, and however you Americans voted, I can’t blame you as it wasn’t an easy choice.  On one side you’ve got the moronic circus clown who really doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing, and on the other side you’ve got the crazy warmongering hawk who knows what she’s doing just a little too well for comfort.  For anyone who wants a pretty good breakdown of why Trump’s victory happened, I recommend the explanations offered by Blaire White and Jonathan Pie who both have fairly contrasting political views yet came to very similar conclusions.  Clicking the links will certainly save me from explaining it all to anyone curious, which is great, because I don’t really want to write about it, it’s been done to death all over the Internet.

This blog instead will cover something far more interesting, which is Trump’s policy positions and the possible effects on the world of k-pop.  What does Donald Trump’s stances on popular issues mean for you as a k-pop fan?  Will you be affected positively or negatively, or not at all?  Time to speculate pointlessly about it and waste your life worrying about something you can’t change… sorry, I mean, time to find out and have lots of fun reading this post!  Yay!

Note that this is NOT a list of what I think about Trump’s policies (because nobody cares), but how these policies (if enacted) might affect k-pop and k-pop fans.  So we’re going to leave boring-as-fuck moralising and “are these policies right or wrong” completely out of the equation, because you can decide that stuff for yourself.  Instead we’ll just focus on the policies themselves and possible outcomes of nine different facets of the proposed Trump platform.

TRADE

Donald Trump wants to impose steep tariffs on Chinese imports, a “protectionist” policy which is unusual for a Republican candidate.  Chinese tariffs is an interesting concept when you consider the sheer volume of shit that the USA imports from China and how that will all now increase in price as the cost of the Chinese tarriff is passed onto the consumer.  Assuming that this goes through as Trump intends, people in the USA who like their k-pop as a physical product will find that the cost increases depending on where they buy it.  Those crazily flamboyant k-pop album sleeves that we all love are mostly made in China, however the products are then usually shipped to Korea first.  Assuming that the tariff applies to online sales which is how most people buy their physical k-pop, if you’re buying from a Korean online retailer you’ll now get a better price than if you buy from a Chinese online retailer.  That is, if you can even afford to buy k-pop stuff at all after having to pay for tariffs on your clothing, stationery, shoes, phones, whitegoods, computer peripherals, TVs, and all the other pointless shit you’ve become addicted to buying cheaply over the years thanks to the Chinese whipping their workers to make it all for you on the cheap.  Of course k-pop fans in countries other than the USA won’t be affected by this and will laugh it up while buying all the cheap Chinese shit instead.  To confuse things even more, Donald Trump also plans to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal specifically set up to create global trade competition with China, which means that the cheap labour-exploiting shit in China probably isn’t going to be replaced by cheap labour-exploiting shit from some other country anytime soon.

USA fans buying physical product – worse off

BUILDING A WALL

Speaking of Chinese, they’re have lots of experience in wall-building so rather than hiking their import tariffs, perhaps Trump should consider hiring their workers for his planned wall on the USA/Mexico border.  Nobody knows yet what Trump’s wall is actually going to look like, but the Chinese probably have a few ideas and could help.  Imagine a long line of sexy stone pillars stretching across the American continent, decked out with huge murals of T-ara, China’s favourite k-pop girl group.  Large paintings of Jiyeon’s cyclopean beams that stretch kilometres may be the first k-pop-related artwork to be visible from planetary orbit.  This could actually improve Mexico/USA relations as more Mexicans become thankful to the USA for helping them discover T-ara, which would also then increase the flow of income back into Korea and T-ara’s pockets, improving the health of k-pop overall.

Mexican k-pop fans – health improvement

T-ara/MBK Entertainment artists – health improvement

MUSLIM IMMIGRATION

Donald Trump wants to stop all Muslim immigration to the USA, or so he says, although I can’t think of a more easy-to-circumvent immigration control, after all how is anyone going to prove that you didn’t convert from Islam to some other religion a week before applying for your US visa.  Be that as it may, a lot of Muslims however are k-pop fans, as k-pop’s less-risque approach to pop music visuals is a little bit friendlier to the values of conservative religions than Miley Cyrus swinging nude on a wrecking ball or Nicki Minaj twerking, etc.  This has been one of k-pop’s strengths globally – the hiding of most of the sexuality in k-pop behind coyness and dog-whistle messages gives it the ability to be exported to highly religious countries, providing much-needed fap material for cultures that face a fap-deficit (at least on the surface).  Trump’s planned barring of the USA from new Muslims entering means that (presuming it works as intended) the concentration of k-pop fans in the USA isn’t likely to increase in numbers through immigration large enough to allow k-pop to break through into the commercial pop sphere in a big way.  East Asian immigration to the USA is still quite small and won’t bring in the numbers alone to crack open the world’s biggest music market for k-pop.  This might frustrate attempts by hopefuls such as CL to crack the USA market who already has an uphill battle with some of the k-pop fandom’s more psychotic religious bullies (who in a unique twist of behaviour for religious types actually want people to stop using shithouse religious songs in their music).  It won’t affect the overall number of people consuming the music globally however, Muslims will just continue to access k-pop wherever they happen to be just like anybody.  This change is therefore ultimately only likely to affect YG.

CL/YG Entertainment artists – worse off

CLIMATE CHANGE

Donald Trump is a climate change skeptic, who has even said (supposedly in jest) that’s it’s all a Chinese conspiracy to stop US economic development, despite the fact that the first government that took climate change seriously as a political issue was not some hippies or Chinese communists but actually the conservative republican Reagan and Bush administrations of the 1980 and 1990s.  However with weather predicted almost universally by climate scientists to get both hotter and wetter over the coming decades, k-pop fappers are a clear winner as idol groups both male and female will also get hotter and wetter, stripping down to minimal clothing to beat the hot, muggy global conditions.  Trump’s policies are highly unlikely to change this predicted course and may in fact exacerbate it if he stays true to his campaign rhetoric, meaning that there will be many more fancams and faps to be had.  The only question remaining will be whether rising sea levels will be able to drown k-pop fans faster than their own genital discharges.

K-pop fappers – health improvement

FREEDOM OF SPEECH

There’s no doubt that a lot of Trump’s supporters hoped that he would be an advocate of freedom of speech and someone who would stand strongly against PC language-policing, and it’s easy to see how someone would form that impression from watching his campaign rallies.  However this “freedom” appears to only manifest so far as freedom of speech for Donald Trump himself, and anyone who agrees with Donald Trump’s platforms and positions.  Trump has mentioned that he believes censorship would help fight domestic terrorism and would even like to punish journalists who say nasty things about him – who knew that he was so sensitive?  This is hardly the behaviour of a free speech advocate and actually means that in practice he has more in common with the PC language police than he or his followers would like to admit.  Trump’s own brand of language policing is probably just going to see Trump’s fans and haters play a tit-for-tat language/culture war where behind the rhetoric they police each other about equally.  This heightened language/cultural-tension means that the next time your favourite k-pop idol sings along to some American rap record where every second word is something supposedly offensive, expect them to get even more crucified than ever.  The silver lining might be that perhaps the outrage will gradually filter back to Korea and idols may become scared to cornily recreate the stupidity of American slang for fear of offending sensitive Americans who think that the entire world revolves around their crappy culture, finally killing Korean pop’s “yolo fever”.

Idols who enjoy sounding like Americans – worse off

Music fans who don’t enjoy idols who enjoy sounding like Americans – health improvement

LGBTIQXYZ

Donald Trump has surprised many pundits who misunderstood his intentions and come out strongly in favour of LGBTIQXYZ rights, even advising that legal same-sex marriage is a “done deal” that he has no plans to attempt to change.  (Even his VP Pence isn’t as anti-gay as hyped.)  K-pop idols who are oppressed for their sexuality in their home country such as Super Junior’s Siwon may therefore seek refuge in the United States as a safe haven of acceptance and tolerance of their LGBTIQXYZ lifestyles.  This will give American fangirls greater access to their gay idols and increase the likeihood of them getting their dreams crushed as they realise after the 256th menstrual pad slid under the dormitory door has no effect that oppa will not “turn straight” for them.

Cray-cray fangirls – health improvement (eventually)

ABORTION

Donald Trump is “pro-life” which really is just a virtue-signalling reconfiguration of the term “anti-abortion”, and plans to make it more difficult for people to get legal abortions.  This of course won’t decrease the amount of abortions, just the amount of legal abortions, as underground DIY home abortion doctors as a black-market cottage industry in the USA see a resurgence to their pre-1970s levels and shares in metal coat hangers skyrocket.  Those wanting to terminate pregnancies may attempt to move to states where abortion is legal, however fangirls attempting to get pregnant via oppa’s DNA-infused merchandise may attempt to move to states where abortion is illegal as an extra defence against parental pressure once mum and dad realise what they did with that U-Kiss necklace.  There’s a fanfiction in this somewhere.

Nugu-forever groups selling their DNA for a fast buck – health improvement

Parents of cray-cray fangirls – worse off

GUNS

Donald Trump is pro-gun so don’t expect any gun control attempts in America anytime soon.  Mind you, even Americans who are anti-gun are still pro-gun compared to pro-gun people in most other countries, and that includes nervous k-pop idols on international tours who may cancel events if they hear that someone somewhere near the gig might have access to a gun at some point.  If there’s one thing scarier than a BTS fan, it’s a BTS fan who takes their fandom name “A.R.M.Y.” a little too literally, and it’s only a matter of time before an incident like the one that killed Christina Grimmie happens at a k-pop fansigning.

K-pop artists touring the USA and expecting to come out alive – worse off

GLOBAL DEFENCE

Although he isn’t as openly bloodthirsty on the world stage as Hillary Clinton (which admittedly would be extremely fucking difficult), Donald Trump has promised to increase the USA’s military spending.  However he also seems interested in pursuing a policy which is less focused on global policing and more entrepreneurial, which I guess is to be expected from someone with a business rather than a political background.  Trump is reluctant to support the European NATO alliance if the other parties don’t cough up their required chunk of military spending, and also wishes to withdraw forces from other countries that aren’t paying a premium to keep US forces around, including South Korea.  The withdrawing of South Korea’s “defence welfare” might mean that South Korea may have to recruit even more idols into military service to bolster their defence ranks against the North, and maybe even expand the time period of mandatory military service.  Expect oppa to be away for longer, catch more bullets, and generally look sexier in military gear, but produce less music and maybe also be dead.  If I’m really lucky, mandatory conscription will also start being applied to female idols who will also get to look hot in uniform in more contexts than just reality TV shows – or if not, they’ll at least probably perform for the troops more.

Fans who wish oppa would come home sooner – worse off

Fans who want to fap to idols doing military stuff – health improvement

Now you all know exactly how fucked you and your favourite idols might be for the next four years!  More Kpopalypse posts coming soon, and don’t forget to have fun and listen to k-pop while you still can!

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

Victon

SPECIAL GUEST REVIEWER: BETSY

Sometimes Kpopalypse blog needs the kind of searing insight that only a female blogger well-endowed with extreme writing talents who is harassed constantly by Asian Junkie to write about baseball can provide.  Guest writer Betsy has therefore returned to co-write reviews on Kpopalypse roundup!  If you’d like to reach Betsy you can do so through Twitter or Curious Cat, but she’s probably not going to consent to your sick, crazy demands so why not instead just read the below reviews and cry yourself into a deep depression because you will never be this cool?

SHINee – Tell Me What To Do

KPOPALYPSE: I was about to write “how about you fuck off” but the song’s not too bad, SHINee have done worse.

BETSY: Seems a lovely filler song. Like, anyone from SM could do this song? Quite surprised it wasn’t a Station song. Maybe next time leave Minho’s rap out.

Snuper – It’s Raining

KPOPALYPSE: The chorus might bother people who only ever listen to singing and don’t have the ability to perceive harmonic movement behind a static melody, but that’s their problem.

BETSY: My first thought was “what the flying fuck is this shit”, but now it’s love. Anyway, who doesn’t like a good neck rub?

VIXX – Milky Way

KPOPALYPSE: Check out this video for a fascinating close-up look at the Zerg in their natural habitat.

BETSY: Probably my favourite release from them this year, ironic because the video looked it had no effort.

Up10tion – White Knight

KPOPALYPSE: Too many vocals, just like all of these songs, but there’s an acceptable tune hidden in here somewhere struggling to get out.

BETSY: Wooshin is gonna steal all the hearts of young women. They be could be greatest thing to happen to Teen Top’s company (I dunno the name), but seriously.

Hyunjin – Around You

KPOPALYPSE: My cat just got fucking plagiarised for this video.

BETSY: Easily one of my favourites. I am so hyped this girl group. SM Station could never!!

Heejin & Hyunjin – I’ll Be There

KPOPALYPSE: Imagine the video editor having to cut and recut the backyard scenes over and over because some ugly prick kept staring out the windows.

BETSY: I was low-key worried this future girl group wouldn’t be able to dance, considering giving me IU/Lim Kim and mild Marina and the Diamonds vibes (Heejin’s song), but I was pleasantly surprised. Like I said before, I’m hyped for these girls.

KNK – U

KPOPALYPSE: Apparently KNK shelved their original video for this song because it was too shit, someone should have told them it was the song that was the problem.

BETSY: I love them forever. I would hold hands with Youjin for many many hours.

No Brain – You’re My Everything

KPOPALYPSE: This is only about average by global punk rock standards, which means it’s in about the top 1% of Korean punk, because Koreans are shit at this.

BETSY: Needs more punk.

BONUS SONGS

Chancellor ft. Dok2 – Murda

KPOPALYPSE: Is the upside-down cross an accident or are these guys really Deicide-loving satanists?  Probably an accident, because the devil always has the best tunes and this isn’t one of them.

BETSY: This is shot incredibly well, and the song is a chill as fuck UNTIL DOK2 COMES IN AND RUINS IT. Ugh.

Joosuc ft. Sanchez – I Know

KPOPALYPSE: It’s got a lot going against it: beaches and hummers and hard Autotune and stupid raps and even a shitty trap breakdown, but the backings get it over the line.

BETSY: We get it, you like drones. The song is whatever.

Cando ft. Louise of Geeks – Good Night

KPOPALYPSE: More of those great synth pads at the start and far less of every single other element would have made this song a lot better.  Should have just made it a keyboard instrumental.

BETSY: I would recommend listening to this before sleeping.

Kebee – Ya

KPOPALYPSE: Someone linked me to Pauline Hanson’s twitter account while I was listening to this and it kind of fit perfectly, which was scary.

BETSY: I don’t like what he is wearing, but other than that the overall product is decent.

Voisper – Learn To Love

KPOPALYPSE: Why not learn to not be shit first.

BETSY: I just want them to stop. They scare me. I literally can’t listen to the whole song.

Ashmute – Heaven

KPOPALYPSE: Another song that would sound way better without any singing at all.

BETSY: Holy shit, this is my aesthetic. I may have to do a longer review for a certain overlord. Holy fuck balls.

Vibe – A Lonely Guy

KPOPALYPSE: Where’s a motorcyclist riding illegally on the footpath when you really need one.

BETSY: 10 seconds in, I stopped. I don’t really care if you’re a lonely guy.

Sugardonut – Piece Of Yellow

KPOPALYPSE: At least it has some distortion, but that’s kind of counterbalanced by the most boring video ever.

BETSY: This type of song/possibly their album would be in the background whilst I clean my apartment. It reminds me of being 16 – that can be a good and bad thing.

Jungigo ft. Paloalto – Hew Bae

KPOPALYPSE: I though they were showing the video through a TV in someone’s lounge room so some could drunkely stagger into it and break the thing halfway through, now that would have been more fun than this song.

BETSY: Mediocre.

Car, The Garden – Gimme Love

KPOPALYPSE: This week’s Rhodes entry is slightly faster-paced than most of them but not any less boring.

BETSY: Another video that’s up my alley for aesthetics. Song isn’t that amazing, but something I would happily listen to whilst painting or editing.

Take – Lost

KPOPALYPSE: Her reaction to hearing this bullshit song is exactly the same as mine.

BETSY: I fucking hate watching people cry because it makes me cry, and I hate crying. First 5 seconds of the song sounds like every other Korean ballad.

Tei – Only You Only You Only You

KPOPALYPSE: Anime, like k-pop ballads, is only good for porn.  Any time someone tries to tell a story with either, it’s a gigantic fail.

BETSY: Whatever.

Park Won – Try

KPOPALYPSE: Notice how this song is called “try”, not “succeed”.

BETSY: Another whatever song, and he has an ugly af neck tattoo. I hate Jay Park for making ugly neck tattoos a thing. If you’re gonna have a neck tattoo or hand tattoos, please choose something nicer.

Oddity – Next Dimension

KPOPALYPSE: Horrid It G Ma clones always go for that same shitty washed-out green and purple colour scheme in the video.  This is good because as soon as you see those colours it saves you time wondering how the song is going to turn out.

BETSY: I think the whole point of glitch art/collage art/clip art or “vaper wave” is not have a shit trap song with it. Keith Ape has a lot of explaining to do. The song doesn’t even amount to anything.

Wings Of The Isang – Lost

KPOPALYPSE: Some songs are just too fucking long.

BETSY: Not today, Satan. I’m pretty sure we’ve all go down this super emo 16 year old music project road. Even the band name, jesus christ.

Choyoung – Mmm

KPOPALYPSE: Whoever programmed this wasn’t sure whether to use swing or sixteenth-beat quantisation for the backing track, so they used both at once.  The result is one of the most awkward non-smooth “smooth” songs in k-pop.

BETSY: I know there’s gonna be a lot of people who would like this, but this isn’t my cuppa. Her voice is easily cable for an EDM/garage song.

FINAL THOUGHTS FROM BETSY

In my K-pop stan heart, Hyunjin and KNK are definite standouts this week. Pleasant surprises are Ashmute and Car, The Garden. Now I want to shove my head into the sand. How on earth do you have the patience to do this every week.

That’s all for this week – Kpopalypse roundup will return next week!

Kpopalypse is back with episode four of QRIMOLE!  Let’s get stuck into some more questions from Kpopalypse readers!

In the T-ARA articles with statistics, most of the people leaving comments are men in their 20s and 30s (this is also the case for other girl groups). So why is there a misconception that fangirls are the most hateful ones? And why do grown men feel the need to hate on girl idols?

Spheres of attention in the pop realm can change very quickly.  Your average crazy fangirl these days actually doesn’t give much of a fuck about T-ara either positively or negatively, they’re too busy stanning BTS or Seventeen or whoever is new, hot and male enough to draw their attention.  Four years after the second-most relevant scandal in k-pop (Tablo built the coffin for the relevance of netizens, T-ara just nailed it shut), the haters who are still clinging onto the false rumours are all ex-fans who were so emotionally invested in T-ara that when some articles came along that suggested that their angels were anything less than perfection, they got swept up in the emotional tide and bought right into it.  The extreme emotional investment that k-pop encourages also generates extreme reactions on both sides, and once someone is heavily emotionally invested in an untruth, they cling to it much more readily, even in the face of conflicting evidence.  KKS got it oh-so-right (like he always does) when he said once that “I consider T-ara antis to also be T-ara fans”, I can’t find the link for that quote at the moment but it was said by him at the height of the T-ara feeding frenzy and it’s out there if you search.  Every T-ara hater is a T-ara fan, so the haters fit the same demographic as the fans.

Would companies save money by putting trainees in music videos? Would they say that it’s a part of their ‘training’ so they could skimp on actual extras?

Apparently it’s quite rare, and this was addressed by the SM trainee that I interviewed.  Remember that trainees are still in training, so unless they’re astonishingly exceptional it would be silly to put them in a video.  The extras you see in k-pop music videos are more likely to be trainers than trainees – professional dancers, instructors and choreographers.  Remember that these people are also on the payroll of the company!

KNK was gonna release an MV for “U” but at the last minute they said the MV wasn’t “up to quality standards”. Which I think is bs. Any ideas what happened? I was thinking it might have been that they endorsed a product in the MV but the company that owns the product pulled out.

It’s probably not anything to do with endorsements, because it’s easy enough to edit out brands, logos and so forth, and you see this happening in videos all the time in cases where companies haven’t paid big money to be featured in a music video.  Based on my experiences in this end of the industry I’m going to take an educated guess and say that “not up to quality standards” is true, but also doesn’t mean quite what you think it means.

What k-pop fans probably think of when they hear “not up to quality standards”: the video team and the idol group slaved away all day making a video, then got down together with the CEO of the agency and all had a look at the video.  They all mutually decided “hmmm… okay, this isn’t really good enough for our screaming fans who only deserve the best possible comeback, we want to BLOW THEM AWAY with the awesomeness of KNK and this doesn’t cut it, let’s just scrap this video and try again next comeback for something visually special”.

What I think of when I hear “not up to quality standards”: the agency contracts out a video director to make a kick-ass video.  The director says “yep I’ll make you that video for $X”.  $X is spent, but something happens – shooting goes over-budget due to some weirdness or disorganisation and the director wants more money to polish the product but the label says no.  Or maybe something else, perhaps the agency isn’t able to front up with the money and stiffs the director.  Either way, there’s a dispute about who is paying what within what timeframe for what kind of product and eventually the parties can’t agree so the video doesn’t get released.  Anything can happen when the people making a product aren’t being paid.

I’m especially curious about the soundtracks to Ghibli movies since they seem so uniquely melodic. I would think that these melodies would be distracting… is it the subdued arrangement that makes it work?

Most movie soundtrack music is actually designed to not be all that noticeable.  It’s there to match and complement the action on screen rather than dominate over it to the point where you remember the music rather than what scene the music was for.  However music can also change your perception of what a scene means, or heighten certain details over others.

I think the music that is the most effective for film is the music where the musical message and the visual message are the most in-sync.  It’s good to watch Quentin Tarantino films for both very very good and very very bad examples of this.  Kill Bill gets it right, with music that fits the action always.  Django Unchained and Inglorious Basterds both have scenes where music is shoehorned in in ways that don’t match the action at all, like the former where (don’t click if you hate spoilers) Django starts shooting people and then fourth-wall-destroying rap music starts playing, or the latter where a David Bowie song is stuck in because the lyrics kind of match the (forthcoming) action even though the music itself definitely does not.

Why some online Kpop stores make big events for some idols? To this specific boygroup they even gave away tickets for a trip to korea to meet them, had several massive discounts and daily deals. Idk I found that a lil bit too ‘supportive’ and far from the normal buy 2 and get a free postcard deal.

It’s all promotions, paid for by the companies.  In the sense that the online retailer will help facilitate it, if the agency uses them a lot, or makes use of certain partner services, or whatever.  Sometimes you can get a really good deal with one company if you spent a lot of money at another company.  Say just for example that a big online retailer and a travel agent are two branches of the same parent company.  If you use the travel agent consistently to book your group’s tours, you get a discount rate when selling your product through their online retail stores, or perhaps the other way around, the parent company springs for travel events for your craziest fans if you agree to consign a certain amount of stock through the e-shop.  The web of media companies and infrastructure is all quite interconnected so big events are probably subsidised “loyalty credit”.

How do contracts for shows such as Unpretty Rapstar work? For members of companies (idols/trainees) I see how it would work but what about underground artists? Some seem to be big names but others seem to be no one. Would they be included just to be fillers and knocked out eventually?

I’ve discussed this before, but anyone who followed Produce 101 would have noticed that every single girl that got anywhere near the final was already contracted to an agency, the rest of the girls were just “filler” to make up the numbers.  All those fillers would have got a simple “no mosh, no core, no money, no fun” contract which is the same type of contract that anybody who signs up to any reality TV show gets:

• everything you say and do on camera is legal property of the show
• the show can use your image in any way they see fit, to tell any narrative they want
• you get paid either 4/5ths or 5/5ths of fuck all
• the show accepts no liability for any bad shit that happens to you
• fuck you

Unpretty Rapstar would be similar for anyone who didn’t already have a deal of some kind.  Competition TV show contracts are utter crap, worldwide.

Companies try to keep as tight of a grip over an idol’s image as possible, so when netizens get salty over shit like idols posting pictures of them dressed up on Halloween and say “s/he needs to be more aware of his/her surroundings..Korea is ending…don’t post on SNS when you should be mourning” then isn’t it highly possible that it wasn’t the idols decision to post said thing on SNS, but rather someone told them to post something… or just that the idol doesn’t manage their SNS account themselves at all?

I think it would vary, but then how possible really is it to keep a tight grip on such things in this day and age?  I’m sure that the companies have an “SNS strategy” and would want the members of the groups to post in line with that strategy, but what’s to stop someone from making another account etc or also posting other things… ask any parent with a teenage son or daughter how easy it is to control their SNS behaviour.

The Obama administration’s TPPA legislation that Australia is a part of might be over-turned by Trump. In NZ it has been heavily criticised since it makes corporations safe from govt regulation supposedly. How do you feel about it?

The link’s claims are completely correct.  The TPPA’s real function is to make sure that a whole bunch of countries who are in the Pacific area and that don’t get along that well with China won’t be completely fucked over if China one day decides to pull economic trade sanctions or gets into some kind of other biffo with the United States.  However the real issue for most people is that the TPPA also gives a ton of power to corporate interests, to the point where corporations can actually override a nation’s laws and regulations.  I always felt that the TPPA was shady as fuck so I’m glad that Trump is killing it, although what politicians say and what they actually do don’t always coincide…

Hahahaha, sounds to me like you’d be better off asking him a few more questions!  Maybe he’d like to do a Kpopalypse Interview?  He should probably get in touch with me if he’s got the nuts.  Whenever I reach out to people like this it’s always the usual pissweak deal where everyone clams up as soon as they realise my interviews aren’t “what’s your favourite colour?” type questions and they become way too scared of k-pop’s vast organised crime network to actually reveal anything of insight.

You mentioned before you’re more inclined to like “purist” raps that are hard-hitting and profane, rather than the mixed ones with political shit or whatever, what are you’re favorite rap songs with these particular characteristics?

The first rapper that I really liked was Ice-T.  Sure he had political content, but it wasn’t soft, weak “everyone let’s all love each other” crap.  Politics doesn’t have to be boring and stupid, because everything is political really, and Ice-T’s lyrics always had political subtext because he’d always put his talk about gangs and violence into a larger social context.  Also the beats were HARD, no soft shitty R&B crap with crappy warbly vocals, as a metalhead I could appreciate his approach as both the heavier end of metal and the heavier end of rap music had a similar focus on hard rhythm as the primary element.

One of the most amazing things that happened in the course of pop music history is that for a brief period in the late 80s Public Enemy became the biggest rap group on the planet.  Fuck knows how the fuck that happened, but the result mutated all other pop music forever – Public Enemy changed what was possible with commercial music backing tracks as surely as Jimi Hendrix changed what was possible on the electric guitar.  Another great example of making politics not-boring-pussy-shit, Public Enemy at their peak had the most extreme music AND politics of any rap group to this day.  They were actually far more political than Ice-T but even when I didn’t agree with their message their huge almost-industrial walls of noise redeemed their lyrics every time… at least until about 1994 when they lost their form musically.  Rap music globally has been on a downward spiral in terms of “harshness” ever since.  Listen to the below song and scratch your head in bewilderment as you realise that this was actually a chart hit by a massively popular group that were being discussed on TV sitcoms and had New Kids On The Block wearing their T-shirts.

The best rap album of all time for me is Mobb Deep’s “Hell On Earth” from 1997.  To me, “Hell On Earth” is to rap music what Slayer’s “Reign In Blood” is to metal – although the two albums sound very different, the similarity is one of focus: every track is completely uncompromising and musically complementary to the package with no let-up in the suffocating atmosphere anywhere.  The music of “Hell On Earth” marries various classical-era backing instruments (strings, piano, organ, etc) with constant deep bass and booming ambient rhythm tracks, I don’t even know half of what the fuck they’re saying and they don’t even seem to rhyme half the time either (often lazily just rhyming a word with itself because fuck it) but I don’t care.  The track below is not only a savage diss of 2pac that they released about a week AFTER he was shot (basically saying to him “lucky for you you’re dead now because we would have killed you eventually” – what caonimas!), but it’s also actually musically and lyrically the softest thing on the whole album.  Such a shame that Mobb Deep never recorded anything this good ever again, and also such a shame that most of their fans prefer their “The Infamous” album from a couple years prior to this one, which is also excellent but slightly inferior due to a less consistent sound and the odd addition of limp R&B elements.

These days my favourite rapper is Necro because he’s just a complete cunt, but with good enough music to back it up.  I interviewed him over the phone for my radio station once and he was great, he did the entire interview while he was in a barn in Wisconsin or somewhere taking a shit.  His golden personality isn’t the only reason to love him – he makes beats that are self-consciously a bit retro and harking back to the peak Mobb Deep mid-90s era when rap music was pretty keen to go hard musically with actual beats and also trigger your safe spaces lyrically.  Also his heavy metal heritage and general caonima cuntiness means that we’re kind of on the same page culturally, and being able to relate to someone always helps the appreciation along.

Recently some friends of mine told me that in KPop there is differentiation between a singer and an idol, for example even though Taeyeon has a good voice technique and stuff (I don’t really know what they mean, just in general they said she sings better than others) but she is still idol. I don’t really get the logic since they sings songs anyway. probably some of them like IU did participate in creating the song like writing the lyrics (even some 1 or 2 words) but why did they differentiate that? Did it also happens in other music industry as well? As my friends said “the singer focus on making music, releasing album, while idols focus more on being visually attractive”. But in the end, don’t both of them have to rely on endorsement? Especially in K-Pop where selling music cannot make you a fortune.

The reason why you don’t get the logic to this is that the logic is severely lacking.  All singers in the pop realm focus on being attractive, simply because they’re in the public eye.  It doesn’t matter if they’re in idol groups or singing opera, even Susan Boyle puts on makeup before a performance for what it’s worth.  All singers also focus on delivering the song to the best of their ability, and sometimes that ability might be a bit wanting but a lack of singing ability is not something that is universal to idol groups.  These days endorsements are king because there’s fuck-all other money to be made in the business for the really commercial artists, the artists who get anywhere are the ones who can find a niche to work that can connect to brands, this may or may not include being able to sing, look pretty, or whatever, but looking pretty is probably more useful to advertisers.

Some fans are complaining about those kiss scenes in Mamamoo’s MV, saying that they should be considered as sexual assaults and it’s all because of K-dramas/Korean culture. Do you think that they are right?

If you want to point to specific media that promotes the idea of men forcing themselves on women, the #1 culprit is easily Hollywood films.  Watch the following clip which is from 1939, before modern Korea culture even existed, let alone k-drama:

Was it a sign of those backward times?  This clip from post-sensible-feminism but pre-stupid-feminism 1982 doesn’t play out very much different:

There’s thousands of other scenes just like these in Hollywood films of all eras… but why?  The unpalatable fact that triggers many people is that a lot of folks of all genders and sexualities just enjoy watching this sort of thing.  That doesn’t mean that people actually want to be raped (as rape is by definition something that you do not want to have happen to you) or to be rapists (we don’t really have a “rape culture” in western society, if you don’t believe me try telling people you’re a rapist and then seeing how many friends you still have) but what it does mean is that there are people who fantasise about either exerting or losing control in a sexual context.  If people have these fantasties and can’t fulfill them with a roleplay buddy or whatever, at least there are other people who will always show up with material that caters to those fantasies.  There’s obviously a demand for this type of material and that’s why Gain keeps making it.

Hi hyung. I got my first part time job 3 months ago and I’ve been saving money little by little since. I am still unsure what to choose, but my intention is to invest the money I’m saving up in either a sound system or high quality headphones; my laptop’s built-in speakers and my phone’s ear-buds are no longer doing it for me. I feel like I’m missing out on the actual quality of my favorite songs. If I’m gonna spend money, I might as well get something good, right? But I can’t trust random people’s comments on amazon (especially when the rating is relatively high but the reviews themselves are polarizing)As a sound engineer and music lover, I trust your qualified opinion, so whether it’s here or in a post in the future, could you please recommend a sound system and/or pair of headphones that you believe are worth purchasing in order to get the best auditory experience out of my daily playlist? And if you don’t want to name any brands, then maybe share what specs I should look for that would translate into better quality? Whatever you deem fit. I’m sure you’re working on other articles right now. Thanks!

Well, decent headphones will be cheaper, although if you can afford it a sound system will probably give you less hearing damage over time.  I get asked this question constantly and the main thing I can say about it is that there’s a lot of bullshit marketing about this stuff.  Completely ignore stupid claims by companies that say that you’re only hearing “half the music” if you don’t use their headphones or whatever, that’s crap.  All you need is a modest sized system that’s better than laptop speakers, or a decent set of headphones that can reproduce enough bass, and you’re fine.  My radio station uses the AKG K-55 and K-77 headphones and they’re decent and pretty cheap, they’ll do just fine for listening.  Most stores also will let you try out headphones and sound systems of you ask them, so you can try before you buy, but you don’t need the “best” – like with most products, there’s a curve where for the more extra money you spend you receive exponentially smaller amounts of improvement.  Once you go over $100 in Australian dollars for listening headphones you’re really just paying for “bling”, a status brand name and marketing bullshit.

Why are there designations like “main/lead dancer”, “leader”, “visual” and especially “maknae” in a kpop group when they seem to be mostly meaningless &/ interchangeable? Are those roles even given by the companies through stuff like profiles or are they self classified by fans?

I really like how honest k-pop is with these things.  For instance “visual” sort of means “the pretty member who gets no lines in the actual song but is there to pick up the modelling work”, that’s kind of a cool thing to just be open about and freely admit.  It beats tiresome western pop marketing where they’re always trying to sell everyone as amazing talents or whatever.  Obviously “maknae” is fairly objective (the youngest member doesn’t change unless the group itself changes members) whereas the other categories can float around a bit depending on perception but my understanding is that the companies do designate these roles, if not officially to the fans, then at least to the point through “practical application” where fans can tell who is who anyway.

Are groups like Sechskies and SES having comebacks for some extra $$$ or is there some other reason?

Imagine being in their shoes, seeing the exploding “hallyu wave” (or whatever) and thinking “fuck – we were 15 years too early”.  Arguably those early groups really didn’t get their due the first time around, what with the crappy backing tracks and bad productions around back then.

If charts don’t matter, then why would a company do “sajaegi” or whatever? What would that do to help their group? Or is the negative attention something that could somehow be beneficial?

Korea has a real “keeping up with the Joneses” culture and I think that people really like the “appearance of doing well” over there.  It’s not something that I can really relate to, I’m Australian where failure is seen as a higher cultural value than success and people battle for the “underdog” but whatever floats their boat I guess.  Of course these people don’t plan on getting caught, so it’s silly to assess their reasoning in terms of the negative attention they might receive because they weren’t planning to receive any.  They just wanted to put “chart-topping artist” as words on a resume and have it not be a lie.

From an idol’s view, since singing can be corrected with auto tune and such, songwriting can have a have a whole team of ghost writers with few credited, someone will always make them look pretty one way or the other, and they can just read a script to look good at variety, is dancing the only thing an idol has to put actual effort into?

It’s certainly what most of them put the most effort into, that and physical appearance which is all-important.  Sarah Wolfgang talked about constant gym every single day, she didn’t talk about constant singing lessons.  Unless they were specifically training you to be a solo singer or whatever, they wouldn’t be ramming singing lessons down your throat.

That’s it for this episode of QRIMOLE!  Note that I’ve picked a lot of recent questions out for future blog material too, so if your question was really good but isn’t here, it may be being saved as blog inspiration!  Kpopalypse will return with more stuff and things!

Kpopalypse Interview returns, and this time Kpopalypse speaks to Chris P. from the website Korean Indie!

Korean Indie is a website site that highlights independent music from Korea, providing a valuable public service for a scene that is much under-reported and under-appreciated.  I’ve known about the website for quite some years, as Korean Indie articles get reposted to Asian Junkie sometimes, as do articles of my own.  However an incident where Chris P. the editor of Korean Indie spoke off-the-record candidly after K-CON to one of the elite caonima detective squad about the treatment of independent musicians at the hands of Korean TV drama companies got me and my readers all thinking that perhaps he’d make a good interview subject.  At the request of caonimas, I sat down with Chris over Skype for about an hour and he swiftly proved all of us right and pulled few punches in this profanity-laden, soju-and-cider-drenched interview – read on!

How long has the Korean Indie website been going?

Korean Indie started in 2011, and there were at the time three people doing it.  I started writing about Japanese and Korean music in 2008 and I had my own site.  I then met some people and they had an idea to start their own site, a Korean indie-focused site and asked if I wanted to join, so I said “sure it’d be fun, it’d be interesting”.  Most of 2011 was setting the site up, I pooled all the social stuff and we spent three months just trying to figure out what kind of design we wanted, which is a fuckin’ pain in the ass.  The site launched and then over the next two years the other two just kind of stopped.  One bowed out kind of early on, the other one sent me a resignation letter.  I understand – we’re all older, we’re not little bloggers doing fansites, it’s a big thing and people have lives so they move on.

So in 2013 is when I did it by myself, and asked if people wanted to write.  I got some volunteer writers who wrote for a little while and then disappeared from the Internet, or just stopped responding to email.  I was like “I don’t mind if you want to quit, just tell me!” I’m was like “what’s going on with this person” and then I found out that they moved, or they’re working for a company now.  I was like “That’s cool, I never paid you so I can’t say that you were an asshole because you left… but just telling me would have been nice!”  So it’s gone through iterations of volunteer writers, right now there are two who are more prolific, and there’s a few others who kind of have shit in their lives so I don’t bother them.

What sort of reaction has the site got?  Compared to what you were expecting, when you started it, do you think you’ve turned a lot of people onto Korean independent music?

The majority of our readers are from the USA and South Korea.  At a time we did have a lot of readers from France which I was surprised about, but everyone from Europe usually speaks English of some sort, so they can actually read it.  To me it was never “I’m gonna be fucking famous, I’m gonna be this awesome motherfucker who knows everything and is going to tell people what to think” and all this shit.  I started writing because being Korean and born in America, there’s not many things to connect with, with your culture.  I wasn’t a church person because church is weird, I still don’t even know that much Korean – I can survive in Korea and live, but I can’t “have a life” there yet, if I wanted to go.  I’d really have to learn a lot more vocabulary and a lot more cultural things because all the people I hang out with don’t follow it that much, it’s not a big thing.  So it’s always been mainly for me a feeling of “I’ve found this awesome band, I want to write about them because they’re fucking cool.”  As time goes on, other people were like “oh, this music is pretty fucking cool.”  I did it for me, and every band I found was more for me, and if other people liked them then that’s great, but it’s not important for me like “oh, if I don’t get 100 views on this one review then I feel like shit”, it’s like “I like this music – if you like it’s too that’s awesome, support the artist, reach out to them and say you love their music” because the artists love it when people outside of Korea say “your music is so awesome”.  That’s all I want to do – help other people connect through music the way I connected through it by being Korean.

Korean Indie badges and stickers, from Korean Indie instagram.

It’s interesting that you touched on the cultural aspect and how you feel that you couldn’t live a life in Korea.  What do you think the main cultural difference point is?

It’s very patriarchal, which is not a problem for me because I’m male, but I just don’t follow all the cultural cues.  They’re kind of ingrained in me from growing up with Korean parents, but there’s some things I just miss.  In the music scene it’s not a problem, but if I had a job, I would probably fuck up a lot.  Also because I’m Korean, I don’t have the white card, where people might think “he’s white, he doesn’t know”, people instead would be like “oh he’s Korean, he should know“.

Could you give an example?

In corporate culture you have respect for your boss and you show them a lot of respect which you obviously have to do regardless.  However there’s a thing in Korea which I’ve heard from friends, where if the CEO or boss is working late, you’re expected to work late.  I need to have a life outside of work, work is not my life.  I actually had an old boss tell me he works to live, he doesn’t live to work – and that’s how I like living.  I do what I need to do when it’s required but I’m not going to sit there just because the boss is sitting there, because he probably has to do more work than I have to do, so why do I have to wait for him?  I don’t give a shit.

Apparently Koreans work the longest hours of employees in any developed country, but they also have the lowest productivity per hour.  It might have a lot to do with people sitting around to keep up appearances.

I think they’re actually afraid.

Do you think that those cultural cues also exist to the same extent in the actual music business or not so much?

I think in the more popular culture like k-pop it’s really different, it’s based on who’s been in the company first, they treat whoever’s been there longer with a bit more respect.  In the indie scene whenever I go there I see that too, people who have been in the industry a long time, there’s a lot of respect because they’ve been doing it for a while but it’s not to the point where they’re telling people to do something: “oh, go get me this” or “you’re gonna do this thing because I said so”.  It’s much more that like if you’re new, you see someone who’s been in the scene for a while so you say hi, you give him your CD, and say “please listen to this”.  There might be some dark sides to it, I don’t know, but from what I’ve seen it’s never been like big brother on your case, like “this is me, I know everything, you don’t know shit so don’t come up to me”, everyone is very welcoming from what I’ve seen.

How much of a crossover do think there is between people who follow the more commercial k-pop and people who are avidly following your site?

For people who just want Korean indie I’d say it’s pretty small compared to the people who come to the site just because they like k-pop.  I think a lot of it is there’s some musicians who work with k-pop artists here and there, and there’s some people who watch Korean dramas and might see an indie artist get played and might get interested in them.  There’s certain genres that attract the k-pop people and Korean Indie comes up because the search engine optimisation is really good.

When you talk about “Korean Indie” do you define “indie” in terms of the company structure (as in “independent”) or are you also referring to indie as a musical style as some people tend to do?  After all there are styles that are not very popular in Korea that people might be doing on an underground level, but people wouldn’t necessarily call them “indie” – Korean black metal, for instance.

I think it’s kind of both.  On one side there’s unknown genres, obviously they’re “indie”, also on the other side it’s bands that are not on the corporate labels.  But a friend of mine who is really involved with the music scene told me that “you know, when you think about it YG and JYP are actually indie labels”.

This is true, globally there’s really only three major labels (Universal, Sony, Warner) and anything not within that is an independent label.  Majors will however have “imprints” where majors will swallow up a smaller label and that small label will become a “brand” within the major label.

An example would be HIGHGRND and YG.

It’s true that SM, YG, JYP etc are independent in terms of business structure, they’re not part of the extremely large western system.  They’re promoting their own artists, they have their own separate distribution networks, and in terms of the amount of money made from music it correlates as they don’t actually make a lot from that.  The big money at the commercial end of k-pop doesn’t come from music sales.

It’s always the other deals and stuff.

What are some of your favourite independent artists right now?

Lately I took a bit of a break from Korean music, every few months I take a week off because I miss a lot of the stuff I used to listen to when I was a little younger,so I go back and see if they’ve had anything new.  I got back into Korean music because there’s an electronic duo called 75A, it’s an electronic artist named Grey and a girl called Fuckushi Oyo, and they’re a duo and they released their third album, so I got this email from them out of the blue.  They said “this is our third album, take a listen!” and I listened to it and it’s fucking great.  It’s just so different.  HEO‘s new album called Actress is coming out in a few days and he sent that to me today so I’ve been listening to that all day.  I listen to whatever is out, Billy Carter had their new album just come out so I’m listening to that too.

With independent Korean artists, just like independent artists anywhere in the world, I’d imagine that they’re not making a lot of money, would that be correct?

Yes.

Who does make money within the Korean independent scene, and if so, how do they do it?

Right now the only two that I know that are consistently making decent money are Crying Nut and No Brain.  No Brain actually has their own label Roxta Music, so they’re making some money off of that.  There’s a band on Roxta Music called Rose Motel who have been on TV a lot so they might be making some money there.  Crying Nut also just because they have been around so long, although I think the members do their own thing on the side, so they’re not just musicians.  One of them opened a cafe in Korea recently, in the past few months.  Otherwise, Love X Stereo have a recording studio now and recently released music from Rock’N’Roll Radio, and MAAN.  It’s so expensive to record in Korea, especially if you’re not an electronic artist who can do it from home.  Love X Stereo have a studio where you can record really cheaply and they have a whole set-up there, plus a really good engineer and some other people who work for them who do really good mixing.

I did an interview with Sarah Wolfgang who used to be in k-pop group Tahiti, and she spent the whole interview telling me how difficult it was being an idol in training.  At the end of the interview I asked “what you would recommend for people who want to go down the commercial idol route” and her response was “don’t do it, if you really love music go the independent route instead, because it’s more difficult so you’ll really work out whether you really want to do music or not, as it’s actually harder to be an independent artist”.  So it must be pretty fucking hard!  What do you think are some of the main challenges that independent artists face in Korea?

You can say the majority, probably 95% don’t even know that it exists.  If you walk down Hongdae, all you hear from all the fucking stores is the newest single from some fucking k-pop group blaring as loud as possible, which fucking sucks.  So they don’t know, but there is a really strong small community that do amazing things, they go to a lot of shows, they support bands live.  If you look at official music storefronts like Melon or Bugs or Naver, the way they set music up is that you buy music passes, so you can download or buy a pass, you have a number of plays or downloads.  So artists are not getting money like in the USA through iTunes or Google Play, or Bandcamp, it’s more kind of like Spotify where they get paid a shitty amount of a cent that doesn’t even correlate to anything.  So you’ve got a population who have no idea who the fuck they are, and then you’ve got a music service that fucks them again, and then at the end of the day you make no money.  The problem is Korea in itself is a much more digital world so buying CDs is a big thing.  Compared to the USA they’re about the same price, $11-$14, but it’s a difficult thing, a lot of the music stores that had CDs have shut down because no-one’s buying them anymore, and when I go to shows if a band has a CD I’ll usually pick it up (to support the artist).  I’ll buy the physical thing, even though I love digital because I listen to it when I drive or at home.

There was an artist who is in a band now called Juck Juck Grunzie, I was in Korea one year and I went to go and see them live, she was the guitarist.  I saw their show and afterward I went up to say hi, and they asked “oh, do you want to go and eat with us?” and I was like “why not, it’s 11pm and I have nothing else to do”.  During that conversation I asked “so what do you guys do apart from music?” and she said “oh, I’m a nurse”.  I was like “What?  You’re a fucking nurse?” and she said “yeah, that’s my day job”.  I said “fuck, that sucks!”, and she was like “yeah it does!” [laughs]  The majority of people in bands, they do it because they love music, they love playing, they go through that shitty job for the weekend to perform in front of either a packed house or like ten fucking people.  That’s what I love, it feels more pure.  In the USA it’s harder to go and see shows because they’re so spread out but when you’re in Hongdae, you can kind of find shows really easily over the weekend.  Even now places are playing acoustic sets throughout the week.

I had a friend who went to Korea a few years ago and she’s a big fan of independent music in the west, and she became very frustrated because she searched and searched and could not find any hint of a Korean independent music scene whatsoever.  Now that’s not saying that it wasn’t there, just that she didn’t know how to find it.  What advice would you give to someone who said to you “I want to go to Korea and while I’m there I want to see some independent music”?

There are some good resources now, there’s DoIndie, they have a events list of upcoming shows.  Facebook is a good place, but I don’t know how much people use Facebook to find shows.

You have to know what to subscribe to first, I guess.

Yeah, that’s the hardest thing, when I go it’s Facebook or ask friends, but if I’m going to go there for a week I’ll use DoIndie so I can see what’s coming up and then usually a show might pop up here and there.

HEO, WYM, and Love X Stereo plus session musicians during CAAM Fest 2015.

In terms of “indie” as a style of music, what styles of music go down better in Korea generally speaking?

For indie music?

Yeah.  When I search YouTube channels dedicated to indie music I find about 80%-90% ballads, it’s really frustrating.

Yeah, that coffee-shop shit is really popular, partly because it’s the easiest crossover.

Yeah, coffee-shop ballads sound much the same when a mainstream artist does them as when an indie artist does them!

10cm is like the premier coffee-shop stuff.  I listened to their stuff in the beginning and by about the third album I was like “wow, this is fucking boring”.  It’s like the same… they’re good, but…

It took you three albums to work that out?  [laughs]

Well I was expecting them to expand a little bit, I didn’t expect them to do the same thing.  But yeah the coffee shop stuff does really well.  The electronic rock stuff does really well… a lot of the time it depends on the line-up of a show, the easiest indicator is who’s playing.  There’s some independent bands with good-looking guys, I’m not saying they’re idols or anything, but there are bands who have the fangirls and good for them!

In Australia where I live, there’s a quite a strong trend of cover acts who play live, because it’s very difficult to get people to come out to see original music anymore.  Is original music more popular in Korea or do they have a strong cover band presence?

I don’t really know of any, I know of bands who play covers during a show, but not strictly dedicated cover bands.  I think there might be one for The Beatles, but that’s it.  I don’t even know what they’re called, I think I came across their video once and thought “this is kind of funny” and then I moved on.

What sort of touring options do groups have?

In Korea it’s five cities, it sucks.  Korea is so small, there’s only a few big cities, Daegu and Busan, Seoul, obviously Hongdae, I think there’s a couple of other clubs outside the Hongdae neighbourhood… but when people now say it’s like a nationwide tour I kind of laugh, but I also feel sad.  For a US band it would be like going up and down California and that’s it.

Well, it’s probably better than Australia where you’ve got a land mass about the size of the USA but almost no-one lives there!  Our bands would probably like to be able to travel 200 meters and play to a whole new audience!

True!

HEO, with Korean Indie T-shirt, from Korean Indie instagram.

What about breaking into overseas markets, I imagine that’s a fairly challenging thing, has anyone really broken through from the Korean independent scene in a meaningful way?

There are a lot of bands that can do it.  Love X Stereo is one of the biggest ones, I think, and I’ve talked about that a lot here and there.  Annie lived in the US, their sound is like electronic pop-rock-ish, so it can mix well with what’s popular now.  A lot of the issues are with licensing, they’re on Spotify and that’s cool but for me for a band to be breaking through they need to be able to tour, they need to be able to do that grungy-ass west-coast tour or east-coast tour.

Galaxy Express did a full 30 date tour of 35 shows a few years ago.  It was really funny because I saw them when they first got here, they did a show in San Francisco area and they were all bright-eyed and happy and excited.  One of their last shows was in Oakland, I went to that as well and I was talking to the tour manager (who unfortunately passed away this year), and I was like “how’s it going?” and he was like “oh, we fucking hate each other”!  They were in one of those Winnebago-type campervans and were driving all over the country and he was like “America’s so fucking huge, what the fuck is this?”  They’re trapped together, they have to play shows, they can’t get drunk like in Korea, they have to stay sober so they can drive the next day for tons of hours.  One of the issues I also see is there’s a visa problem for musicians now, it’s much harder to get a visa for a musician.

Yes, it is!

It’s fucked over a lot of bands, which is kind of sad.  Whatever That Means and Full Garage did a tour a few months ago, and I don’t know if they got the artist visa or not, but they did a real west-coast tour because Jeff who is the guitarist in Whatever That Means is from the Pacific north-west I think? He’ll probably get pissed off if I don’t know this, but I don’t know!  But he put on that whole tour.  Then there’s Soulsonic which is a really good tour and I know the guy who puts it on, and I talked to him about expanding it but he’s also said he wants to do more shows.   He doesn’t want to do only five or six shows, but there’s no market to go outside of San Francisco, L.A., Austin, New York , Toronto… he has to go where there’s a Korean Asian population that will come to the show, which is sad, so it all boils down to money, as always!  You need to be able to at least recoup costs, but I don’t think it ever works out that way.

Chris’ tattoos: Big Phony.

Do independent artists in Korea chase endorsements as a funding source, in the way that commercial k-pop does?

I don’t think they’re against it, the problem with things like that is that they just get fucked.  This is a story I was told: a big company approached a friend of mine, their band and they were like “we want to put your original song in a drama, for the ending theme”.  The band said “okay yeah, that’s cool” so the company submitted this contract.  I asked “was it like a standard contract, where you get paid a residual or anything” and they said “oh, fuck no.  We get paid $200 and they get all rights to everything, they get to play it as much as they want, they can do whatever they want with it and we can’t say shit.”  I asked them what they did and they said “well we signed it, because what else can we do?  This is a chance to get our music in front of other people on a big TV show that people are going to watch”, so you have the checks and balances of it – do you take the small money for the exposure or do you say “fuck you” and possibly get blacklisted?

Or just have them not pick the deal up and get some k-pop band or whatever?

They wouldn’t get a k-pop band, it’s too expensive!  They’ll find another indie band who will do it for $200.

Are indie artists in Korea against the whole commercial k-pop thing?  Is there an “us and them” mentality, or do they get along, or somewhere in between?

I don’t think it’s like “us and them”.  There are some people who believe that corporates shouldn’t touch the music scene, but I think overall they just want to make music and want to expose their music to as many people as possible, and want to get fans.  Not like to be hugely insanely popular although they probably wouldn’t mind it, but they just want to be able to make music for a living, which unfortunately is just not feasible.

Chris’ tattoos: Love X Stereo.

Do independent music fans in Korea have the same sort of obsession with vocal technique?  When I see comments about commercial k-pop from the fans everyone’s always talking about their favourites being great singers, and there’s always so many arguments about who can sing better than who, does that also apply to the fanbases in the independent scene?

I don’t think as much.  Put it this way, does it matter if a hardcore singer can actually sing, or can he just growl really well?

Of course.

There are a lot of melodic rock bands who have good singers, there’s other genres like Jambinai, their vocals go from two really amazing female vocalists to a guy who basically drones, but if it fits the music…. I don’t think necessarily people care so much that someone can hit a two-octave high note.  I don’t know who does that, but…

Neither do I!

I don’t think there’s a big focus on that.  I think people who listen are like “is the music good?  Do the vocals fit the music?”  There are some people who can’t sing that well, but it fits the music, so who cares.

One thing that I’ve never really seen much of from Korean independent artists that I’ve found so far, that I really thought I would have found by now but I never have, is a Korean punk band with really extreme political content or something like that.

Oh dear – you’re missing out!

Can you fill me in?

I went to Korea in 2013, there’s a punk club called Club Spot which was unfortunately closing down, so I went to one of the last shows, it was going to close in a month.  There’s a band called Dead Gakkahs, “gakkah” is “president” in Korean.  It’s two girls, probably 5’2″ to 5’4″ and they were dressed in schoolgirl outfits, and I’d heard them a litte bit, I’d heard of them, and I was like “oh yeah they’re pretty hardcore punk, okay, that’s cool” so I went there and I was standing there drinking a shitty Budweiser, and they start and the songs were a minute long, maybe 40 seconds each and they just start screaming.  I was like “holy shit, what the fuck is this?  This is amazing!”  After that I actually interviewed them, through email, and I don’t know all of the content of their songs but I do think they are a bit of a political band even though they haven’t made music in a while.  I do think there are bands who are political, but because I don’t speak Korean fluently, I don’t necessarily know unless they sing in English.  Especially now – I’m sure more songs are coming out that are very political.

Usually with the western groups you can tell just by looking at the video even if you don’t know the language, they’ve got some sort of political content in the visuals, but I’ve never really seen it from Korea.

I think they’re very careful, just because if it gets out, a lot of things can happen, especially in the current regime.

Do you think they would actively clamp down on independent music if that was the case, shut down clubs or arrest people?

I don’t think so.

…or more subversive kind of pressure, like a blacklist?

Probably a blacklist, but I don’t even think that the government is concerned.  It would be different from a k-pop artist saying something really dumb, that would hit all the headlines, if a Korean indie band did that it probably wouldn’t even get noticed, because no-one cares what that person thinks.

Are the fans who are into Korean independent music a bit more rational than your k-pop fans?  Do you get people sliding menstrual pads under the doors of the dwellings or things like that?

I feel bad saying this, but I watched a band called 24Hours play a few times, and there are a lot of girls in that crowd always.  The lead singer, he’s charismatic onstage, but to the point where they get offstage everyone says “that was such a good show, I really like the show” but I’ve never heard of anyone getting a crazed fan.  They’re more, I don’t know if they’re subdued, but I’ve never heard of it, no-one’s ever told me, I wish they would, if something like that happened, because I would just laugh my ass off!

How much drug-taking is there in the Korean independent scene, and what are the favourite drugs?

[laughs]  Umm… well, I don’t think drug use is widespread, because of the laws, and how difficult it is to acquire them, though it is possible.  When they come to the USA one of the first questions I get asked is “can you get something of this?”.  It’s never hard drugs either, it’s all really light stuff.  It’s there, I would imagine it’s there, it’s not open ever, and it’s not like the US where someone smoked something and he said “I smoked something” and the law can’t get him at that time because he admitted something without proof.  They smoke a little… a lot… of weed, I’ll say weed, but it’s not like they’re going crazy.  In Korea you go to jail if you have weed, which I think is stupid as fuck.

Every time I talk to someone about how much drugs there is in the Korean music scene they say “oh there’s not that much drugs” but then every other week someone’s going to jail for marijuana, so obviously there is some!

It’s basically just marijuana, I’ve never heard of any group with anything else.

Is Korean independent music big enough to be plugged into the organised crime network in the way that the bigger k-pop labels are?

I don’t think a lot of bands would be, if it was there – I don’t know if it’s there or not – I couldn’t with certainty say that it is, but if it did exist it would be with some of the older people in the scene.  I don’t think any of the newer bands have anything to do with anything like that, or they’d be living much better lives!  I don’t know.  I’m sure there’s some influence here and there, but I don’t think it’s like the way it’s come out with the bigger groups where they needed funding for something, because if that was the case the Korean independent music scene would be so different!

[laughs] Yeah, they’d actually have money!

Yeah, clubs wouldn’t close every fuckin’ year!

Chris P. being headlocked by Good Night, Patrasche.

What advice would you have for someone starting a group in Korea?

Korean or ex-pat?

You can answer for both if you want!

For Korean groups: play some good fucking music.  It doesn’t matter if you’re not technically savvy on your instrument, it’s more about the emotion that you put forward.  It doesn’t even matter if you have an album or not, most bands don’t have an album for a while, and time between albums could be years.  But play music that people can enjoy, connect with your audience, play as much as possible, and continue to get better.  When I was in bands when I was younger, we sucked in the beginning, because you don’t know everyone’s certain cues, you don’t know how they necessarily play in the beginning, and as you get more comfortable as musicians together you end up improving because you’re piggy-backing on each other.  I’ve seen the evolution of some bands and some of them just kind of stay where they are because they don’t play live that much, and some every weekend they’re playing at a club and they get really fucking good really fast.  Within 3 to 6 months they’re leap-frogging themselves from where they’ve started.

For an ex-pat band: you know, good on you, oh wait I just used the Australian term didn’t I?

You have to add “mate” at the end!  “Good on ya mate!“

Oh yeah, sorry!  I’m drinking soju and cider so I figure that would make a better conversation as I tell dumber stories when I get drunk.

Cool!

With an ex-pat band: I have no problem with ex-pat bands at all, I just don’t give a shit about them.  That’s not why I started writing about Korean or Japanese music, it’s not why I decided to do Korean Indie, and I know there’s a lot of bands.  I know they work hard, I get emails from them a lot saying “oh we want to be covered in Korean Indie” but it’s like “alright, there’s the first thing – you usually speak English, and if you want to…” – oh man I’m going to get so many people who will be fucking angry at me about this….

[laughs]

With my friends in Korea I’m pretty vocal about my opinions about ex-pat bands, because my experience has never been hugely positive compared to Korean bands.  People who go to Korea aren’t necessarily there to learn the culture, they’re there to make a quick buck teaching English, I feel like if you want to make music as an ex-pat band, that’s fine, and if you’re making music that’s different from what everyone else is playing that’s fine also, you should do the same thing, you should play a lot of shows, you should find your audience, you should have fun.  But never think just because you’re playing in a show or at a venue or whatever that your music is somehow better than where you are, to say that you know more bands and you’re more influenced by the other people.  When we talk about people’s influences in Korea, they’re pretty knowledgeable about worldwide music.  There are some times where I’ve seen one ex-pat band on a line-up and I think “alright, I’ll watch this” and I’ll watch them play and they act like they’re so fucking cool, and I’m like “who gives a shit?  We’re not here for you!  No-one gives a shit about you!”  You know – play because you’re having fun, I’m tired of this western style where “you have to have this attitude, and you have to have this showmanship about how you’re so fucking awesome” and who gives a shit man, who gives a shit about you, like in the long term?  You’re making music, you might leave in another year, what impact do you have on this scene?  Are you doing it for you, or are you doing it because you want to be a part of the scene…

“So I can put “I played in Korea” on my resume…”

Jeff from Whatever That Means, he’s in Korea, he’s a professor at a college, he is like my gold standard of someone who went to Korea and fell in love with it and is doing really good things.  He’s so involved in the punk scene there, he also works at a studio doing mixing called Thunderhorse, I don’t know where it is.  There’s a club outside Hongdae called Club Sharp, where he’s helping putting on punk shows and he was at Club Spot as one of the organisers.  Whenever I talk to him, which isn’t often, it’s just good to talk to him, because I have so much respect for him and for what he’s been doing there helping Korean punk bands come out and do a tour here.  But overall, I don’t give two fucks about ex-pat bands!  [laughs]

Chris’ tattoos: Yellow Monsters, Apollo 18.

What would you like to see change the most in the independent scene in Korea?

I would like to see them make some money!  They’re making good music.  Regardless of how much money they’re making now, they’re working hard and making great music, but it would be nice to see them get some return on their investment – being able to do real tours in the US.  They go to Europe a lot and do really well there, the visa restrictions are much lighter, but it would be cool to see some bands who go to Europe come here.  There’s a lot of bands that I would like to see.  I would love to put on a tour for Korean bands in the US where I could pick the lineup of all different styles and just have them show up.

What do you think people would be the most shocked if they knew about Korean independent music?

The most shocking thing is that it exists!  A lot of the first comments I get on Facebook or Twitter are like “I didn’t know there was Korean indie music” and it’s like “what the fuck, man”.  I understand where they’re coming from, because what is promoted and what the Korean government is putting so much money in is exports to make money, so dramas and movies and k-pop.  When I first started listening to Korean music, I started with Japanese pop music and went to Japanese indie and rock and math-rock, and I was listening to k-pop and I thought “if Japan has this, then Korea must have this too” and I started listening to Korean indie bands really early on, and that’s why I have seven Korean band tattoos!

If there’s anything that you’d like to add that we haven’t discussed, then go right ahead!

If you like the music, buy it!  Stop using Spotify, it doesn’t pay them.  If you read a review on the website and you see that there’s a Bandcamp or you see that there’s an iTunes, buy it.  Apple music and their streaming shit, that’s good for promotion and exposure, but these bands need some fuckin’ money.  Stop being so stingy and saying “I love this band!” “Well did you buy the album?  You didn’t buy the album because it was nine dollars?”  What the fuck!  Support the band when you can, if they come to your city and you find out about the show, go to the show, buy their merch, give them a reason to really enjoy their visit here.  Show them some love, and stop saying that you’re going to do something and do it.  If you love a band, tell your friends about them, the only way Korean independent music is going to escape South Korea is if more people talk about it.  South Korea isn’t going to put more money into what they are doing unless there is a bigger return on their investment and that’s not going to happen unless people are talking about it, just like they’re talking about k-pop.

Chris’ tattoos: From The Airport, Idiotape.

KOREAN INDIE WEBSITE

TWITTER

FACEBOOK

YOUTUBE

INSTAGRAM

PINTEREST

GOOGLE+

EMAIL (ENQUIRIES OR TO BUY MERCHANDISE)

BONUS EXTRA-DRUNK K-CON SECTION

Tell me a bit more about K-CON and how you didn’t like it, because that would go very nicely with the interview I think.

You want to hear about K-CON?

Yeah sure!

So I got invited, this is my third time getting invited and my second time going.  I got invited one year, I didn’t go because I asked if they would pay for a hotel and a flight and they said no, so I said “alright, peace out, not interested”.  The second year I was asked by a writer who writes for Maryland k-pop , but she does do some Korean indie stuff.  She asked me to come out and I said “I was asked last year and are you going to pay for anything?”  Mnet put it on, and they got money, so like what the fuck, they have to pay for something, I’m not going to come out there for nothing.  I understand that some smaller bloggers would be like “I get to speak at K-CON, that’s so awesome!”  I’m too old for that shit man, I don’t care – it’s cool to speak about it but I’ve got bills to pay, and taking time off work and all that stuff costs a lot of money.  So that was 2015 and that was a good panel that I really enjoyed, there were people there that knew about Korean indie music, they were really well-spoken, they had bands they liked.

This past year, it was kind of a clusterfuck because I was asked not by a writer who was a moderator, but by K-CON themselves, and the girl who asked me – no disrespect to her, she was very accommodating and welcoming, I think she watched some of it or read some of it or something so she thought it would be really good to do it again, and me being the person behind Korean Indie which is the easiest thing to associate with a Korean indie panel, and asked “oh do you want to come out again?”.  So I asked the same thing “are you going to pay for a hotel or a flight?  Last year you guys paid for the hotel.” and she said “we can do the hotel” so I said “cool, I’ll come out”, but I didn’t know who was going to be on the panel with me.  That’s what was worrying me, because it was getting close to K-CON, so we had the panel time and location but no actual panelists, so I got really worried “oh fuck, what kind of panel is this going to be?”, and then I saw the other people.  We had a pair who are like producers for k-pop so I thought “alright that’s weird”, there was a girl who was on the panel last year so I thought “that’s cool, at least I’ll know someone”, there was a blogger who when I went onto her social network stuff I was expecting a couple thousand likes on her Facebook page and a few thousand followers on Twitter, but it was like in the double digits so I thought that was kinda weird.  I have no disrespect for these people, I just feel like they were kind of latched onto it because there weren’t enough panelists.  The moderator was a guy who was from somewhere east coast, and he helped some Korean-American independent artists so I thought “that’s cool”.  The main issue I had with the panel was that a lot of people were basically trying to sell themselves and not the music.  We’re not here to be like “I do this, and this is what I love”, in my head I was like “I don’t give a shit what you do and why you love what you do, we’re not here to talk about you, we’re here to talk about indie bands”.  Another thing was people made playlists of videos which is fine but I don’t see the point of putting up a playlist and playing clips of bands, it doesn’t really teach someone anything, it just shows “oh you might want to know about this band and/or this band”, that’s cool, but what information are you gleaning from that?  You have to quickly write down this band’s name and then you have to physically go out and try to find them on YouTube or iTunes or whatever.  Also one of them was like “I love this band called Dirty Buttons” and I was like “who the fuck are Dirty Buttons?  Does this guy know more than I do?  I’ve been listening to this music for a long time, who the fuck are Dirty Buttons?”  It was funny because my brother was in the audience, he was like “I want to see what kind of bullshit you do on stage” so he came out to visit and come to this with me, I said “alright, if you want to see me be awkward as fuck that’s fine”.  So throughout the whole panel he kept saying “Dirty Buttons” and someone asked “what type of music do they play?” and they were like “garage rock” and I thought “this motherfucker, their name is not Dirty Buttons, it’s Dead Buttons, you say you love this band and their style of music and you can’t even get their fuckin’ name right?  And even saying this for the whole hour of the panel?  What the fuck?  Come on, you’re a professional, you can’t do shit like that.”

So after the panel, someone asked me a question like what was one of the biggest issues with Korean music if they get offered dramas.  You asked me that question too, and at the time I wasn’t comfortable saying it to a group like that, because I don’t know if they’re little bloggers or from Mnet or not, so I told them “I’ll tell you off the record, if you want to know just find me afterwards, I’ll tell you the real reason”, and I told them they get shitty deals.  Afterwards my brother asked “what did you think of the panel?” and I was like “at least I got a free hotel room”.  I was actually talking to another one of the panelists, the one I’d met the year before and I asked her what she thought and she said “ahh, it was alright, what did you think?” and I said ” it was a fuckin’ waste of time, man, the panel we did last year was much better and much more informative” so if Mnet ever invites me out again – which I don’t know will happen if they ever read this! – I probably figure I’ll demand to be the moderator and get like-minded people who love indie music and just do a quick intro to who we are, what we do, and just have a Q&A.  I feel like you get more information by asking someone’s opinion or their experiences, than by me playing a fucking YouTube video, because you just don’t get enough information.  People ask me “what’s your greatest experience in Korea?” and I said “fucking drinking all night until the sun came up and I started at 8 o’clock”.  They asked “hul, you can do that?” and I’m like “yeah, you know why?  Because Korea doesn’t fucking close.”  So I sound like an alcoholic saying that to someone, but I was like “your experiences going to shows in the US compared to going to shows in Korea is much different, musicians generally have smaller shows.  If you go and see Crying Nut or No Brain it’s really difficult to talk to them afterwards because they’re really busy, but at a smaller show you can actually talk to the bands and on occasion go out and have a drink with them, and just shoot the shit.”

A lot of the stories I can’t tell, which is bad, because I’ve been told a lot of stuff off the record, but that’s what I like about the panels, because there are young kids who have no idea, and you can teach them a lot of things and they’re very receptive, you just need to have a good group around it, which unfortunately last year there wasn’t, even though I have respect for all the people who were on the panel, it was the wrong group of people.

Chris with Julia Dream, from Korean Indie instagram.

That’s all for this edition of Kpopalypse Interview!  Are you or do you know someone who would make a great interview subject and would be willing to traverse the minefield of Kpopalypse’s interview questions?  If so, get in touch!

It’s time for Kpopalypse roundup!  Let’s check out this week’s new releases!

Gugudan

The flow of new k-pop is starting to slow down in preparation for the Christmas bullshit music season, so this was a very quiet week.  Just like last year, Roundup will probably cease for a few weeks in December, but don’t worry because you’ll have lots of other Kpopalypse posts to fill the gap!  Anyway here’s the new stuff:

Badkiz – Ear Attack 2

An inferior version of the original with too much fluff, less abrasiveness and the inclusion of a weak blues-style I-I-IV-I progression.  Not ear-attacky enough.

Sistar & Giorgio Moroder – One More Day

Similar to but not as good as Sakura Dungeon.

Sejeong – Jelly Bean Flower Way

Zico really is a faggot bitch for producing this one.

Zico ft. Crush, Dean – Bermuda Triangle

In the meantime Zico’s own song is really good when it’s not R&B-wanking.  Pity about the waste-of-time guests, Crush and Dean consistently bring nothing to k-pop and should be forgotten about as soon as possible.

Madclown ft. Haeri – Lie

Haeri is on a tight leash here and doesn’t warble all over the track, thank fuck.  It’s still not very good though.

S.E.S – Love Story

This group sucked in the 90s and they still suck now, except now that k-pop overall has gotten better they don’t have an excuse to be this shit.

Luna & Jambinai – From The Place To Be Erased

Jambinai are a one-trick pony for sure, but it’s a great trick.  Luna on the other hand can do anything, I’m expecting her to partake in a duet with Obituary next week at this rate.

BONUS SONGS

Stereotype – Falling

Extremely unspectacular but gosh the girl is pretty, that’s got to be worth something.  Or maybe not.

Mamamoo – Memory

This is such a boring coffee-shop piece of shit that they even show you how to make a coffee in the video.  Talk about no shame.

Jo Jung Suk, D.O – Don’t Worry

Korea can even turn people kicking the shit out of each other into a boring ballad.

Bom-i – Girlish

The chorus is just a bit too grating to compete with the really good trot songs.

Kream – Good Morning

Who could possibly find this interesting in any way.

KCM ft. Lyn – Ordinary Love

Oh dear.

That’s all for this week, more new songs next week!

Last year I made a post predicting events in k-pop over the course of 2016.  It’s time for Kpopalypse to revisit this post to see how right/wrong I was, and also to predict what’s going to happen in k-pop in 2017!

If there’s one word that defined 2016 as a year it was certainly “unpredictable”.  So, how well did Kpopalypse’s super Boram ESP powers do?

RESULTS OF 2016 PREDICTIONS

Apink will begin their transition to a “more mature image” – INCORRECT.  K-pop’s creepiest dog-whistle team are still fucking around in pedo-friendly baby-doll dresses and shit.

IU keeps on chooglin’ – CORRECT.  IU activities since this prediction was made include:

• hosting for SBS
• performing her hit songs for SBS
• commercial film work
• endorsements up the ass as usual
• being cast in a drama
• being cast in a feature film
• making fap calendars

IU’s brand has remained all-powerful and shows no sign of slowing down.  So much for her “controversy” having any impact, in a post T-ara scandal world netizens now need to realise that their power is gone forever.

AOA replace Sistar as the group that more Korean men fap to, more of the time.  CORRECT.  Browse the archives of Reddit/kpopfap and could the amount of AOA threads vs Sistar threads.

Mamamoo replace Sistar as the Korean pop group that people endlessly bang on and on about the “talents” of, regardless of their musical quality or lack thereof.  CORRECT.  You don’t even need me to provide a link to prove this one, such is the fever pitch of annoying Mamamoo fans crowing about how their faves are the most talented ever at every opportunity.

Yolosweg for all – CORRECT.  We got yolo fucking bullshit music not just from the usual suspects like CL, Hyuna and Jay Park but also from places as unlikely as miss A’s Jia, proving that peak sweg has truly been reached.  The good news is that at least we’re already at the maximum so it can’t increase from here.

f(x) finally get that fucking fandom name – CORRECT.  And I was also correct about it being a shitty name that everyone complained about.  ME U?  Bet you wish they never bothered.

Korean netizens officially recognised as worthless human garbage by the Korean government – UNCONFIRMED.  I don’t think the Korean government realises much of anything right now, but who can tell.

Classy-sexy concepts come back – CORRECT.  Mamamoo came back with a video that was so classy-sexy (in the Kpopalypse meaning of the term, which is the only true meaning) that it actually needed to be edited to appease the lame international fans that k-pop usually doesn’t even give a shit about.  And that’s not even counting the classy-sexiness that happened in k-pop in cold harsh reality outside the harmless fantasy world of music videos.

Crayon Pop continue to not have another BarBarBar – CORRECT.  Nobody cared about DooDoomChit apart from Crayon Pop’s existing fans who stuck with them through the post-BarBarBar slump, plus anyone in debt to Way’s Girls who probably bought ten copies out of fear.

Way’s Girls takes a hit as operatives get caught – CORRECT.  Music video director, friend of Korean president Park Geun Hye and secret Way’s Girls operative Cha Eun Taek got caught for just about every fucking thing you can imagine, proving that the Crayon Pop crime empire extends right to the top of Korea’s political sphere.

Puer Kim gets the girls out – CORRECT.  In 2016 Puer Kim boosted her pearly volume like never before.

K-pop agencies and promoters will continue to fuck up tours left and right – CORRECT.  Just making a tour happen at all proved impossible for many as US visa restrictions continued to bite.

15&’s Park Jimin finds out about Kpopalypse’s lust for her, and freaks the fuck out – CORRECT.  Park Jimin privated her Instagram on 29/12/2015 to prevent Kpopalypse from fapping to her pictures.  She then tweeted that she had this whole Internet thing “under control”.

Plagiarism keeps being a huge obsession for k-pop following morons, but nobody in the industry cares, and nobody gets sued successfully – CORRECT.  Gfriend were accused of plagiarism and the accusers were shut down hilariously.

Eat Your Kimchi finally agrees to do Kpopalypse Interview – INCORRECT.  Simon and Martina became so disgusted with k-pop fans in general telling them how to run their shit that they fucked off to Japan instead… with all of their money, lol.  Kpopalypse is still cool with it though because Martina’s boobs look pretty good in a kimono.

Asian Junkie is outed as a Raina fapper – CORRECT.

It was only a matter of time before longstanding k-pop blogger and unconvincing Rainaism denialist Asian Junkie slipped up on SNS and revealed himself.

An Anti Kpop-Fangirl author gets pegged – PENDING.  However the most likely future peggee seems to be Anti Kpop-Fangirl himself who has a new cute girlfriend who may be eager to take the relationship to the next level.  Watch this space!

Kpopalypse continues to rep T-ara, IU, Lovelyz and other irrationally-hated idols for 2016 – CO–FUCKING–REKT.

Qri still doesn’t care – CORRECT.

She’s even adjusting her microdot in public these days.  Does Qri look like she gives any fucks to you?

As usual I got almost everything right, wow!  My super Boram ESP powers have come through for me yet again!  Now let’s put them to the test once more with some…

2017 PREDICTIONS

Yolo in k-pop decreases gradually – unfortunately it gets replaced with some other horrible bullshit.

A k-pop star gets AIDS – you might not hear about it in this coming year, but it will happen behind the scenes.  Like everything else in k-pop, it’ll get closeted up until they just can’t get away with hiding it anymore.

Every other shit group from 15 years ago that you wish would fuck off has a disgusting money-grubbing reunion – get the valium ready.

Sulli stays happy – forget all the concern-trolling and confirmation bias going on every time she posts a new photo, Sulli is doing just fine.  She has been very obviously happy as shit ever since she left f(x), and she will only get happier as she spends even more time doing what she wants and even less time caring what you think.  She might also finally marry Choiza.

After School come back – no, really!  It’ll totally happen soon.  Honest!  Okay, I’m not fooling any of you, am I.  After School are fucked now, Lizzy has taken to talking about them in the past tense so that should tell you something.  It’s over, kids.

T-ara release “Absolute Second Album” – except it might not be called that.  But expect a full-length from T-ara.  Eventually.

Allkpop goes bankrupt – putting it here in the hope that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, maybe I can use my super Boram powers for good.  Do your part by not visiting or linking the site, ever, for any reason, not even to criticise it.  How many times do they have to take a shit in your mouth before you stop eating it?

DIA, Gfriend and Mamamoo all get dragged into some stupid shit – netizens will do their usual “grab one thing out of context and attempt to crucify the group” business.  All three groups will have their popularity outside of Korea increase as a result.

More lovely readers grateful that Kpopalypse doesn’t have ads decide to donate to Kpopalypse’s Patreon – sorry just testing out those powers again.

The stupid MR Removed fad gradually starts dying out – no really, if I use these super Boram powers enough they will grow stronger and I can change the future of k-pop.

One of k-pop’s “adult dance” nugu groups gets popular – you know the groups I mean.  Bambino, Pocket Girls, PPL, Dimepiece, etc.  One of them will suddenly blow up big – but only temporarily.

An agency debuts a k-pop girl group where no member has had surgery – as a reaction to netizen complaints, an agency tries this bold move.  It of course backfires as the same netizens who complain about other idols getting plastic surgery all swiftly bully the new group into getting nose-jobs and double-eyelids.

Beast blow the lid off of some crazy dirt that went down at Cube – wait for it.

Another really fucked tragic accident happens – because nothing has really changed in k-pop in terms of how managers look after their artists.  The same market conditions and behind-the-scenes practices exist which makes more tragedy a certainty.

Asian Junkie and Anti Kpop-Fangirl have sexy online feuds – I’m personally really looking forward to seeing these two k-pop blogging titans step into the ring in 2017 and face off about all sorts of fun topics.

K-pop fans continue to be insufferable vocalfaggots – the pointless obsession with vocal technqiue in a genre where 100% of artists have an electronically-created voice continues to thrive, baffling all rational people who encounter it.

Kpopalypse continues to annoy the fuck out of everyone in 2017 – you can count on it.

That’s it for Kpopalypse predictions for the next 12 months – we’ll see what the future holds!  In the meantime, there will be more Kpopalypse posts, so expect them fondly!

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

K-Much

Hyoyeon – Mystery

Just sounds like generic unexciting “girl group member gone solo” stuff from about 15 years ago, but I will admit it was good to see Hyoyeon do a solo debut just to see everyone freak out about it.

Seventeen – Boom Boom

The “dog taking a piss” dance move is really cool.

Cosmic Girl – Don’t You Worry About Me

This is NOT Cosmic Girls (WJSN).  It’s also not any good.

An Ye Eun – Somehow

Someone commented that the strings sound like “Bittersweet Symphony” but unfortunately that’s drawing a long violin bow.

Shinhwa – Orange

Look at Shinhwa pretending that they’re having oh-so-much-fun recording in the studio for the 40 gazillionth time in their careers.  When you’re 20 you can get away with looking like everything in the world is fascinating because at that age things are genuinely still new, but at Shinhwa’s age you just look like you’re on the special needs spectrum.

AOA – Wow War Tonight

Just your average Japanese k-pop song about crappy sport or whatever bullshit and then HOLY FUCK IT GOES FUCKING EARLY ATARI TEENAGE RIOT FOR THE JIMIN PART FUK YEH JUST LOOP THOSE 20 SECONDS CUNT

BONUS SONGS

Heize – Star

The moon has no atmosphere so sound can’t travel, so I really like this video concept of making Korea’s shitty ballad singers record their songs there.

B1A4 – A Lie

Not Christmas-ish enough to warrant a separate review in the Christmas list, not interesting enough for me to review properly here either.

SHINee – Winter Wonderland

Another crappy “winter song” that falls just shy of Christmas qualification.

Halo – Mariya

This song is actually three months old and I missed it when it came out, so I thought I’d put it here now.  I wouldn’t read anything into that if I were you, I’m just a slackass.

5tion – My Valentine

Yeah it’s alright, I don’t hate it and can’t even think of anything snarky to say about it.  All my haters be happy for once.  Moving on.

H.Y.U.K – Achieve

Another boring rock song that shows how Korea is so far behind in this shit.

Chancellor ft. Lyn – Surrender

I was so glad that there were enough last-minute new releases and requests for the show this week that I didn’t have to resort to playing this boring R&B crap.

pH-1 – Perfect

They seem like nice guys and that’s exactly why they shouldn’t doing this – hip-hop isn’t supposed to be happy and joyful, come back and make some more music after you’ve shared needles with some crackwhores and borrowed money from a few people and not given it back.

Double K ft. Seo In Guk, Dok2 – OMG

Not as bad as I thought, but then that doesn’t say much as I thought it would be pretty bad.

Sechs Kies – Couple

This fucking dick is way too soft to be going into any pussy anytime soon.

Chaeyoung – Melody Project

Nope.

Monsta X – White Love

Another “not-Christmas” song, I’ve heard that Monsta X’s “white love” is popular with the ladies.

Zia – Have A Drink Today

Yeah I might, actually.  Fuck it, give me twenty, I think I need all the drinks after this song.

This roundup accompanied the last “general” Kpopalypse radio show for 2016 and therefore this may or may not be the last Kpopalypse roundup for 2016, depending on how “fully Christmas” the new releases start becoming.  However Kpopalypse postings will continue, including lots of different posts to wrap up the year in k-pop!  There will also soon be a quiz where you can guess the Kpopalypse lists!

Schedule for the next few radio shows is as follows:

Dec 12 – Guest programmer: Bianca Vo – HQ Complex

Dec 19 – Honourable mentions for 2016

Dec 26 – Kpopalypse favourite songs of 2016 30-16

Jan 2 – Kpopalypse favourite songs of 2016 15-1

Thanks to all those of you who have been reading roundup in 2016, I appreciate it!  Whether you like to see what I write about the songs, or even if you hate or disregard my writing but just like to know what is out each week, I definitely appreciate you coming, so thanks to all of you!

Here’s a short survey for those wanting to have a go at guessing the Kpopalypse end-of-year lists!  Enjoy!

I’ve written before about people wanting to become k-pop idols, and how realistic (or not) that is… but what about people who aim to be songwriters?  Is k-pop songwriting a realistic goal?  Can it make money?  How to best approach pitching your songs to the k-pop market?  Never fear as Kpopalypse has all the trufax!

This post has appeared by popular demand in response to questions from caonimas who are both k-pop fans and budding songwriters seeking assistance.  Even though I haven’t run a record label or worked in music management for quite a few years, I oddly still receive song submissions almost daily.  I also continue to work at a radio station where people send their songs in all the time for possible airplay.  I’d say without any exaggeration that excluding a few African and Asian countries and some pissy micro-states where about five people live I’ve received/seen music submissions from every country in the world, including South Korea (but sadly not North Korea).  I’m uniquely qualified to tell you how to get a song submission noticed, what to do and what to avoid, and you probably won’t read better (or ruder) advice than Kpopalypse’s advice about this topic – at least not for free and in English.

Firstly, let me talk you out of it

Before we begin, let’s make this clear.  The South Korean music industry is quite small, and it’s also really oversaturated, which means high competition.  That doesn’t mean that there aren’t opportunities, but it does mean that consistently finding opportunities is not something you can bank on, especially if you’re an outsider.  For any songwriter even within Korea to pursue Korean pop exclusively I think would be crazy, and most professional songwriters don’t tend to pursue anything exclusively, they get in where they can fit in.  If you’re writing songs for people to potentially use, and someone buys one, who gives a fuck if it’s for a k-pop group or a children’s TV show or an advertisement for some artery-hardening breakfast cereal or a corporation’s promotional video.  If you look at the resumes of any songwriter who has had their songs used in k-pop, you’ll find that the majority of them have shopped their songs all over the place to western artists and other places as well, so if I were you I wouldn’t get too fucking precious about this shit – the pros definitely don’t.

Okay, so you still really want to be a k-pop songwriter?

7 STEPS TO CERTAIN SUCCESS*

1. Make lots of friends

The boring cliche we’ve all heard – “it’s not what you know but who you know” is sadly true.  Obviously if you’re already a big name, if you send your shit to a label they’re going to sit up and take notice, but if you’re already a big name you’re probably not going to be wasting your time reading shitty blogs like this one.  Everyone else will need a little help, songwriting skills alone will only get you so far.  Laura Brian, the American girl who wrote “Closer” for Oh My Girl only got that opportunity because she knew and had worked with someone trusted with connections in the k-pop world.  Yes, she could have tried her luck and submitted her songs without that connection but there’s a good chance her great song would have been ignored.  Labels are getting song submissions all the time from everywhere, and they need a reason to listen to your submission specifically – “this came through a trusted person who has recommended it” is a really good reason that often trumps all others.  Have you ever noticed how people who are successful and famous in any field all seem to know each other, at least as acquaintances if not friends?  That’s because it’s that network that helps these people survive and thrive.

Having said that it’s not wise to go on some big “oh gosh I’m really networking” drive as that can be a turnoff, most music industry people hate cheesy overt “marketing-yourself” bullshit.  Don’t make up glossy business cards and thrust them in people’s faces, people in the music business hate that shit.  Just be open to people, make friends naturally and don’t turn down invites for social stuff, even if you’re a natural recluse (and most songwriters are) – force yourself to go to social functions where other people who work in your field are at, and talk to people a bit.  I feel funny writing this as I’m the most antisocial cunt ever, but then I’m not trying to break into songwriting so I don’t really give a fuck.  You can always split the party early after you’ve talked to a couple people, eaten all the free chicken wings and peed in the punchbowl.  Also while it’s important to be friends, you don’t have to be friends with everyone.  The music industry is big, so if getting some connections happening means sucking up to some insufferable dickhead, maybe don’t bother and try another route, because that dickhead is probably going to shaft you somehow down the track anyway, either literally or figuratively.

2. If you wanna submission, every wanna submission

If you find that valuable friend with “connections” then do work through them, but also try and get a direct contact with whoever they are connected to, so you can go directly to the source and follow up if necessary.  A well-connected friend should be able to get your foot in the door but be wary if they want to do ALL the dealings themselves, that’s a sign that they might be faking you out with the ulterior motive of getting into your pants, or for their own ego, or any other number of nefarious reasons – they may not even know who they claim to know so be careful.  Unfortunately if your friend is connected with k-pop and you’re not because he speaks Korean and you don’t then there’s an additional barrier here so you might have to make do and trust them.  A polite email saying “my friend sent you x, did you receive it?” a week later can work wonders for verification, but if you no know Korean you’ll need to luck out that someone at the agency speaks enough English to not misinterpret anything you send them.  It’s a lot easier to just be a good enough judge of character to find someone that you can trust in the first place however.

Apart from the above exception, it’s unwise to make follow-up contacts after you submit material.  You can safely bet that if you don’t hear back, they didn’t give a fuck.  The music business has some weird cultural aspects to it, and one of them is that nobody wants to be the person to formally reject you.  If pressed for a response, people will always prefer to say “I’ll listen to it later” or “it’s on my pile” or “we don’t know yet” or “I’ll call you back” and then never return your call, rather than “sorry your song is shit, not interested”.  So following up for a response is always a waste of time, don’t attempt it.  However if you’re sending something out of the blue it doesn’t hurt to send an email before you send the thing, asking if it would be okay to send something, agencies really appreciate this and if you get a positive response, the chances of whatever you send being actually listened to are much higher (but far from certain)… and if they say no or don’t reply, they were no doubt going to reject whatever you sent anyway, probably.

3. Submit the right type of musical content

Are you selling yourself as a songwriter, who is writing songs for other people to produce, or as a songwriter/producer, who is writing AND producing your own material?  Obviously if you’re selling yourself as a songwriter/producer with a song as a complete package you’ll want to give the song the best production possible, but if you’re selling the song as “the song only” for someone else to completely re-record and produce, then the production doesn’t matter quite as much – as long as all the important elements can be clearly heard, that’s all you need, it doesn’t even matter that much what instruments you use as they can always rework that stuff later when they go to make their k-pop group’s hit single out of it.  Lyrics don’t matter either if you’re aiming specifically at k-pop, they’re nice to have but whoever you sell the track to might be putting their own (probably shittier than yours) lyrics over it, however it IS vitally important to put vocals of some kind on it and you’ll ideally want something for that vocalist to sing.  There are two – and only two – situations where submitting a song without vocals is acceptable:

1. Submitting a rap beat to a rapper or rapper’s agency for someone to rap over
2. When the client specifically requests instrumental tracks with no vocal or guide melody

In any other circumstance, if you submit just a backing track or just a few beats or a bunch of riffs, they won’t care, they’ll just bin it.  Don’t ever send unfinished shit.  However you also want to avoid the other trap which is “musician’s procrastination” – don’t fuss forever and ever and ever making it absolutely perfect, if you spend a year writing and putting together one single fucking song, sorry but that’s way too long, if you can’t churn out a song in a few weeks absolute maximum you need to work on refining your creative process so it’s sustainable from a business perspective.  Ultimately tiny little details won’t matter in the final analysis of whether they want your song or not, because they can ask that you change those details anyway.

Other points to remember when submitting pop content:

• Don’t send anything too long.  Maximum four minutes for an upbeat song, five for a ballad, but less is better.
• Don’t send more than one track unless specifically asked to do so.
• The song should get straight into the good stuff – “bookend chorus” arrangement style is preferable, unless you have a killer first verse that’s better than the chorus (and if you do, what the fuck did you make it the verse for, consider rewriting the song so that killer first verse IS the chorus).  No long intros, if you’re not into the meat of the song by the ten-second mark your intro is too long, as most people listening to your submission will take about ten seconds to decide if they want to listen further or not.

4. Present well – and succinctly!

If you’re sending copies electronically yourself, attach it as a file and in the email itself write a short introduction, a few sentences will do.  A sentence for who you are, one for your resume (if you’ve worked with anyone impressive etc) and one for the “please listen to this awesome song I wrote because you guys are the best” part, then some contact details for how they can reach you if they’re keen – that’ll do.  Simple is best, don’t send a massive fucking essay or some bullshit.  A good guideline is that if it doesn’t fit onto one A4-sized piece of paper with medium-to-large font size, it’s too long.  Also don’t send photos of yourself, even if you present amazingly well and are thoroughly boneable – this can still backfire as it can give whoever you’re sending the shit to a reason to be prejudiced against you for whatever petty reason.  Maybe you’re black or white and they don’t like black or white people.  Maybe you’re incredibly fugly and they only want attractive people submitting songs.  Or maybe whoever is reading the mail sees that you look hot and has genitals as barren as the Sahara and hates you for all the sex they think you’re getting, they don’t know that you’re a lonely virgin too.  Don’t give them a reason to hate you, even a shitty reason.

When sending physical copies, the same rules apply.  Do not send big-ass biographies, or spend money on fancy folio-type shit, nobody cares.  Do not send photos.  Include a business card if you want, but the disc plus a one-pager is enough.  Make sure you label the disc itself as well as its case on the front, rear and spine, because that shit will get separated, filed, put into dusty cupboards, etc, you want it to be easily findable should they decide that they need it.  Don’t forget to add your contact details to the disc itself and the packaging.

If you’re really struggling to write a little about yourself, the short bios that come with YouTube videos of k-pop that we’re all familiar with are sometimes actually really good templates to work from, because these mini press releases follow much the same format that a good song-submission bio does: a quick bit about the artist, something that puts the song in context and some links to get in touch.  Let’s look at this one for Oh My Girl’s “Closer”:

OH MY GIRL is releasing the 2nd mini album [CLOSER] and coming back with a mysterious and dreamlike look
The title ‘CLOSER’ talks about a pure girl who doesn’t know anything. It is a song that talks about her desperate feeling towards someone with a dreamlike code and instrument structure, along with a touching melody. Sean Alexander, who made many hit songs in Japan and Korea such as Girls’ Generation’s Lion Heart, SHINee’s AMIGO, TAEYANG’s Sinner, SS501’s Love Like This, worked with the United State’s sentimental ballad top liner Laura Brian for three years to make EXO’s Growl FX’s Electric Shock. This time the special lyric writer Seo Ji eum joined to make the song even more perfect.

▶1theK FB : http://www.facebook.com/1theK
▶1theK TW : https://twitter.com/1theK
▶1theK G+ : https://plus.google.com/+1theK

Okay so some of the English is a little bit comical but it’s short and effective, which is what you want.

5. Become a riatch biatch (or not)

So your song got accepted – great!  Now how are you going to get paid for your song?  As a songwriter, there are three basic possibilities:

1. You receive a flat fee for the label purchasing your song and/or your work as producer
2. You receive ongoing royalty payment for the song’s continued use (aka a residual)
3. A combination of the above

Note that this is a massive oversimplification and a full discussion of royalties, payments and how this shit works is beyond the scope of this blog, I have people whining that my shit is tl;dr enough without tackling that crap head-on, there’s plenty of other resources available on the Internet anyway which break all this down.  However know that as a general rule, you will make more money from the royalty if a song is a big hit or is played often (especially on commercial TV and radio), and you will make more money from a flat fee if you’re submitting to some nugus who are never going to get anywhere.  As a result, naturally the big music power-brokers will try and talk you into the flat fee and the smaller ones will be more willing to do the royalty payment, and unless you’ve got a track record as a kick-ass songwriter or they really really have fallen in love with your specific song, you’re not going to have a lot of negotiating power here.  This is what Chris P. from Korean Indie was talking about in my interview about the Korean songwriters getting fucked over when they submitted songs to TV drama and only got $200 flat fee and no royalty, as a song repeatedly played on a TV show would generate significant royalty returns if the songwriters actually retained their rights to the material.  Obviously there’s an element of gambling here when dealing with nugus too because a nugu can turn into overnight stars very quickly, so even if you are lucky enough to get a choice you may be forced to weigh up whether you want a little bit of money now, or no money now but the very slim possibility of more money later.  If you’re a competent songwriter and have other streams of income besides music that you can comfortably live off, you’re almost always better off going with the royalty option when available, because the lack of $200 probably won’t break the bank for all time, but in the unlikely event that a song does become a huge money-spinning national hit you’ll be kicking yourself that you only got paid that initial $200 for it.

6. Protect yourself

Are you worried about a nasty k-pop label using your submission without paying?  Here’s how you can protect yourself.

For songwriter/producers: when sending audio out for someone else to buy, it’s a good idea to “audio watermark” your creation in some way.  Just put something in the sound that isn’t intended for the final mix and/or that clearly identifies you and send them that.  If you’ve ever wondered how some well-known k-pop producers got into the habit of saying their name at the start of their songs, now you know.  It doesn’t even have to be something audible though if you don’t want to be that cheesy or if you’re worried that they’ll sneakily edit it out, just something secret that shows up on an audio waveform or spectrograph will do.  Also don’t put it at the very start or end where they can easily chop the end or the tail off, have some song audio play first.  Most importantly of all – when you’re sending your submission to a label, don’t send them the final .wav file until they formally agree to buy it, and preferably after the money hits your bank account!  Submit a low/medium bitrate MP3 instead, something where the listening quality is acceptable enough but not amazing to the point where they would just run with it, and make sure you mention to them that you have the better quality .wav version if they want to make a deal.

For pure songwriters: if you struggle with the tech side, get an audio engineer to do the above for you.  As per above, absolutely definitely don’t submit your best files before you’ve seen money, and if stamping the audio is too much hassle or cheesiness remember that you ARE still protected by copyright.  Copyright applies automatically to work that you create yourself in most countries, you don’t usually need to buy “copyright kits” or any of that stuff.  If you ever feel that you may need to prove ownership of a song in a courtroom, the most reliable way to do this is to mail a copy of the song to yourself, and when you receive your own package in the post, don’t open it.  Now you have a postmarked, sealed copy that can be opened later with a judge and lawyer present if it has to come to that.

Of course, people in k-pop might use your shit anyway, and there may be little you can do about it.  Taking legal action against cunty k-pop agencies still costs a lot of money and time even if you win, so you also have to think about whether it’s worth pursuing your legal rights just to have some corrupt Korean court say “you’re probably technically in the right, but you’re not Korean so go away lol” or just cutting your losses.  However it’s good to know the possibilities and to be prepared for what might happen.

7. Keep trying

Just like Wiz Khalifa when he wasn’t pretty enough as a black person to share a stage with Taeyeon had some technical problems preventing him from performing a duet with Taeyeon, never accept rejection as a failure.  Do get a part-time job though, so you can afford to keep failing being rejected.

That’s all for this post!  Thanks for reading, and feel free to add any personal knowledges or helpful wisdoms below!  Kpopalypse will return soon!

* Note that according to Wiz rejection is not failure, therefore rejection is also success, therefore your success is certain!  Yay!

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

Dorothy

There are still lots of new songs being released and not a whole lot of Christmas crap this week, so have another roundup!  Mostly not very good songs, but then that’s just par for the course really.  This roundup has nothing to do with the radio show itself, which was guest programmed by Bianco Vo and MC TK from HQ Complex, you can check out the actual playlist here.

Jessica – Wonderland

I’m not sure if it has an official name yet but this particular sound with the high synth line in the chorus is getting really popular at the moment.  I think I liked it for about one week when it first came into k-pop but that shit is starting to get really old now.

SS301 – Remove

K-pop’s most OH&S compliant subunit return, pity about the song being kinda dull but look at that outstandingly careful driving.  You can trust these men, ladies.

Pentagon – Can You Feel It

Not that great but at least this has a few okay guitar riffs to it and isn’t super slow for the entire duration.

Sol T – X (Bad Girls)

I’m a bit Sol T about this being not upbeat enough.  ARE WE AFRAID OF BPM PEOPLE

BeatWin – Rising Sun

This is the kind of song that BigBang did a few of when the debuted, which means that it’s cringey and syrupy but not too bad actually.

Suran – Winter Bird

Now that everyone’s out protesting the Korean president in the centre of Seoul there’s tons of abandoned streets everywhere else to just dump pianos in.

Fear East Movement ft. Tiffany & King Chain – Don’t Speak

Not much of a song but Tiffany boob presentation is my best friend.

Humble – One Ocean

This song was so shit that it got removed from fucking YouTube before roundup even got published.  Viva quality control.

DTSQ – Mind Game

Cool video but boring droney song.

Glabingo – As Feel

I did a double take because I thought it was “ass feel” but sadly not.

Glabingo – Memories Latte

Now they’re fucking describing the shitty coffee shop drinks in the shitty coffee shop songs, kill me now and save me from Latteception.

Ele – Hey

Using a Rhodes patch on a Nord is like driving a Formula One car in “eco mode”.

Garlixx – One Love

One look at that guy bopping in the car seat and you know this is going to be terrible Bob Marley bullshit.

Villain – Rainy Night

The real villain is the one on the other side of the camera who wrote this trash.

Hoody ft. Jinbo – By Your Side

Why couldn’t we just leave them in those fucking fields and not invite them back into the recording studio.

Thunder ft. Goo Hara – Sign

If you wanna boring funk music, every wanna boring funk music.

Sleepy – Oh Yeah

Oh nah.

Band11 – Morning Ride

Like a Mumford & Sons song but where nothing interesting happens.  So in other words, like a Mumford & Sons song.

Romantic City, Piano Man – Missing You

Wow, he lets her into his private studio to watch him record, now that’s balls-out relationship style.  What’s he going to do when she starts suggesting he perk up his shitty songs.

Woody – Erased

This song certainly erased my woody.

Hi-D – Hello

Some yodeling irrit playing accordion actually released the best song this week, that’s when you know k-pop is really in the shitter.

That’s all for this week’s roundup!  Next week – Kpopalypse’s honourable and dishonourable mentions for 2016!

Welcome to the 2016 stats post for Kpopalypse blog!

Other k-pop websites suck because they keep their super-secret stats a secret for sneaky data-mining purposes, or on-sell the data to annoying advertisers for quick pocket change, but Kpopalypse, being someone who gives very little fucks about web traffic or being popular or liked, is willing to share all his secrets!  Let’s take a look at Kpopalypse data for 2016 and celebrate another year of Kpopalypse blog!

Firstly, which countries have the most caonimas?  Here the list of what countries in the world visited Kpopalyspe blog the most!

Country	Views
United States	401,628
Canada	75,123
Australia	74,224
United Kingdom	71,814
Singapore	63,901
Indonesia	53,477
Malaysia	51,735
Philippines	48,532
Brazil	35,447
Germany	22,706
France	16,741
Turkey	16,564
Poland	15,260
Netherlands	13,294
Sweden	12,308
Mexico	11,931
Hong Kong SAR China	10,975
Italy	10,904
Vietnam	10,836
South Korea	10,770
Spain	10,631
New Zealand	10,615
Thailand	9,765
Japan	9,628
India	8,238
Russia	8,201
Finland	8,192
Romania	7,425
Norway	6,934
Hungary	5,578
Taiwan	5,155
Ireland	4,732
Portugal	4,636
Denmark	4,259
Argentina	4,001
Chile	3,884
Greece	3,267
Belgium	2,919
Croatia	2,717
Brunei	2,580
European Union	2,509
Colombia	2,356
Switzerland	2,324
Saudi Arabia	2,138
Tunisia	2,138
Austria	2,077
Czech Republic	2,072
United Arab Emirates	2,000
Venezuela	1,959
Peru	1,796
Myanmar (Burma)	1,700
Pakistan	1,640
Bosnia & Herzegovina	1,566
South Africa	1,531
Estonia	1,363
China	1,345
Lithuania	1,261
Ukraine	1,247
Ecuador	1,231
Albania	1,194
Costa Rica	1,161
Nicaragua	1,134
Serbia	1,107
Algeria	1,080
Kazakhstan	1,065
Israel	1,064
Latvia	1,042
Egypt	1,037

The USA leads the pack, as to be expected from any English-language website, and home country Australia put in an unusually strong showing, however a lot of those views might actually be me proofreading my own work, or reading my own posts back to myself and masturbating.  1,345 sneaky caonima hackers from China impressively managed to circumvent their country’s firewall to view Kpopalypse posts, but this was dwarfed by the 5,155 Taiwanese attracted by pro-Tzuyu content.  Below are all the countries with only one view, these countries need to go reflect and return with more web traffic.

Marshall Islands	1
Tonga	1
Anguilla	1
Gabon	1
Congo – Kinshasa	1
Togo	1
Solomon Islands	1
Djibouti	1
Tajikistan	1

The following is the top 21 most popular posts on Kpopalypse blog (not including the homepage):

Boobs remain a popular theme, and part 2 of the boobs series continues to remain inexplicably way more popular than part 1 or 3.  Part 4 was released in November 2016 and as such is at a disadvantage as it has had only a month or two to rack up views, but I’m sure it will make a showing next year.

Here are all the search engines people used to find Kpopalypse posts and how many times they were used:

Google Search		301,933
Google Image Search		1,303
Google Mobile		1,212
Bing		486
Yahoo Search		476
duckduckgo.com		286
Ask.com		37
MSN		35
ixquick.com		31
live.com		30
Yandex		25
t-online.de		21
biglobe.ne.jp		11
earthlink.net		9
myway.com		9
sweetim.com		5
isearch.avg.com		4

Looks like 486 of you misclicked “make Bing my search engine” when you installed the latest Adobe Flash player or whatever and now don’t know how to get rid of it, I suggest you go here for instructions on how to remove this cancer on the Internet from your machine. Another 37 of you poor bastards have the ask.com toolbar on your browser, sorry but I have no idea how to remove that piece of shit, you might as well kick your computer down the stairs because it’s probably fucked.

Here’s the websites which referred the most readers to Kpopalypse:

Reddit		15,124
Twitter		13,226
asianjunkie.com		7,321
disqus.com		6,362
ask.fm		5,932
antikpopfangirl.blogspot.com		5,616
onehallyu.com		3,102
android-app		2,594
Facebook		2,453
youtube.com		2,364
WordPress.com Reader		945

Many Redditors got trolled into visiting Kpopalypse blog by sneaky caonimas who have been reposting articles over there (I don’t solicit this but I do appreciate it), and conceivably a few also visited willingly.  Hello to all my Reddit friends, hopefully you enjoyed your stay, or if not at least found a way to turn your visit to Kpopalypse blog into those precious Reddit points!  Several of you readers have also realised that the Kpopalypse Twitter contains a lot of relevant Kpopalypse activity including news of new postings, and sister sites Asian Junkie and Anti Kpop-Fangirl were also among the big traffickers of Kpopalypse content in 2016.

Here’s the most popular topics on Kpopalypse blog, by tag:

I’m not sure what the numbers mean, I assume they are views over a specific timeframe, but exactly what that timeframe is, I’m uncertain.  The missing categories are tabs and qrimole which are still too young to make a big impact on web traffic, and nugu alert which is always the most unpopular.

What did people search to bring them to Kpopalypse blog?  Here’s all the search terms which met or exceeded double digits in 2016:

Gosh I seem to notice a pattern forming!

Once people were on Kpopalyspe blog, where were they most likely to go next?

	Clicks
http://www.youtube.com	75,879
WordPress.com Media	47,265
http://www.asianjunkie.com	16,682
kpopalypse.wordpress.com	8,171
antikpopfangirl.blogspot.com.au	6,187
ask.fm	4,546
http://www.soompi.com	4,520
http://www.reddit.com	3,492
en.wikipedia.org	3,282
http://www.kpopstarz.com	2,584
kpopalypse.polldaddy.com	2,390
Twitter	2,051
http://www.koreaboo.com	1,934
popdust.com	1,832
onehallyu.com	1,314
omonatheydidnt.livejournal.com	1,302
antikpopfangirl.blogspot.com	1,098
kpopkfans.blogspot.com.au	871
arcadey.net	830

“WordPress.com Media” means that someone clicked closer to examine an image, either to take a closer look, reveal hidden content (trufax: many Kpopalypse posts have content hidden behind images) or right click and save for later use.  What were the most popular images?

The most popular images were all from quiz posts that asked the reader to click a link for an answer embedded in an image, such as the K-pop identity crisis post and the ever popular Red Velvet identification test post, however the real surprise was that Shannon’s iconic apology managed to outperform the Jiyeon webcam scandal.

Here’s the most popular YouTube video destinations.  Note that these are destinations from text links, not embedded images, so people don’t necessarily know what they were clicking:

It looks like Big B-B-B–BBOA_BAAAAAAM BAAAAAA BOING BO-BBOING BANG’s links were the most popular for 2016!  I won’t spoiler the links for you, have fun clicking!

Here’s the links to Asian Junkie that you guys followed the most:

…and Anti Kpop-Fangirl:

Also, some stats for the Kpopalypse radio show, firstly the most played artists:

…and here’s some general stats, showing the total amount of unique artists played as well as the amount of female artists relative to the total:

And that’s all the stats for this post!  Thank you all for reading Kpopalypse blog which now celebrates its 4th anniversary!  Have a T-ara performance:

…and AOA’s Jimin kicking your ass:

Thank you to all readers who support Kpopalypse blog!  An extra special tanks to the people who took up the plunge of Patreon donations in 2016, getting tiny amounts of moneys per month makes me feel extra-good about posting for you generous caonimas, so Kpopalypse loves you all!  Kpopalypse will continue the postings into 2017 and beyond!

Today I woke up to the news that Anti Kpop-Fangirl has now finished blogging.  So here’s a short tribute post to Anti Kpop-Fangirl!

I started Kpopalypse blog in 2012 with no intention of ever blogging for anyone else but my radio listeners.  The blog was only ever designed to be an add-on to the Kpopalypse radio show, because when I’m on air I would rather fill the space with as much music as possible rather than lots of myself waffling on, so that way I could expand and go deeper on certain topics I wanted to talk about in the blog rather than using up the fairly restrictive time on air (one hour per show).  I personally hate listening to DJs who talk for ages rather than play music, and I figure that anyone who is listening to the radio show probably would rather hear k-pop tunes than some guy’s opinion on this or that (for those curious: I likey both this and that).

I didn’t find out about k-pop through music videos, but looking at videos led me to wanting to find out more information on the artists, which then led me to k-pop websites.  The first ones that I encountered were completely fucking worthless, and still are – awful k-pop news sites where the “news” stories are very obviously mostly just reposted press releases, dumbed-down into kiddy language so as to be easily digestible by k-pop’s target audience of conservative pre-teens and general fuckwits.  The few legitimate “news” stories were even worse, pointless manufactured scandals of the type that fills up gossip magazines, the sort of thing you would only read in a laundromat to kill time while waiting for the dryer to finish because you forgot to bring your phone.  From here I discovered netizen translation sites, which were even more depressing, as they revealed that the majority of people commenting on articles both in Korea and overseas were too dim to see through even the most transparent, manufactured scandals.  The clincher was the T-ara scandal, when that broke in mid-2012 I was one of the few people who wasn’t fooled.  It’s difficult to overstate how much the k-pop online community were completely suckered into believing the T-ara scandal, but as both a music industry veteran and a past bullying victim I know exactly how bullying actually plays out behind the scenes at labels and in bands, and I could see immediately that the T-ara situation was very nuanced and two-sided.  Korean media rather than reporting on the facts, spread dumb speculation and trivialised the issue into “T-ara are bullying Hwayoung” when that was very obviously not what was happening, and to see over 99% of people on websites just blindly accept that point of view and start hating on a group with great songs purely based on the writings of the k-pop Internet equivalent of New Idea and Woman’s Day was laughable to me.  I personally didn’t give any fucks, after all I still listen to my favourite artists even if they murder each other or rape their own audience on stage, so to see people stop listening to great songs and lose their shit over something as minor as a little bit of unconfirmed group tension blew my mind.  Could people really be this stupid and fickle?  The answer seemed to be a definite yes, and this pushed me into reading third-party blog sites to get information about the world of k-pop instead.  The only place where any critical thought of any worth seemed to be happening about the T-ara issue or anything else in k-pop was in k-pop blogging, and through investigating k-pop blogs I discovered quality sites like Asian Junkie, Arcadey (back then it was called “The Prophet Blog”) and Anti Kpop-Fangirl.

I never thought about writing for any other sites apart from my own, I was just happy to occasionally read some articles that made sense and showed some deeper thought.  Whether I agreed with the thoughts presented or not didn’t really matter, it was still a breath of fresh air from the trashy “news” and “netizen” sites because people were at least thinking, something that they definitely weren’t doing on forums and in comments sections everywhere else.  Did I always agree with what I read on Anti Kpop-Fangirl?  No – but there was always a diversity of opinion and also the posts were occasionally amusing and interesting rather than just the upset-fangirl-ranting style of writing that I would read in fan blogs.  When Anti Kpop-Fangirl did one of his regular solicitations for new writers, I applied – I was already writing my own stuff anyway, and seeing the stupidity elsewhere in k-pop fandoms definitely made me want to write more myself, so why not?  I linked my blog over to AKF in a few emails and he agreed to take me on for a trial period, largely due to the “Angsty Korean Netizen” post.  This post was a distillation of all the ridiculous shit I had been reading in Korean article comments at the time as translated by trashy gossip site Netizenbuzz, a depressing site that had often good information buried in it but also did a great deal to harm the young and impressionable international k-pop community by overinflating the importance of the Korean equivalent of YouTube comments, sadly making Korean stupidity trendy among the international community.  Obviously the observations in the “Angsty Korean Netizen” post struck a chord with AKF which was a good reassurance that we were on a similar page ideologically, so I felt good about writing there.

It took a little while to find my feet though.  The first post that I drafted for AKF was actually something about Sistar’s Soyu that I can’t quite remember and is lost in time, AKF rejected it with the reasoning (if memory serves me correctly) that it wasn’t original enough and that I was trying a bit too hard to write like the other authors on AKF.  He was of course correct, and this was actually the biggest help that AKF ever game me as a writer, as it pushed me to find my own voice and a different way of writing.  This helped me immeasurably and I still firmly believe to this day that copying the style of other bloggers is not only a complete waste of time but actually actively harms people’s writing ability, because it promotes mental laziness which as discussed above is the exact opposite of what is good about the better blog writing in the world of k-pop.  Besides, who wants to read “AKF-lite” when they can have the real thing?  I reflected and returned with better, more original postings and the Kpopalypse style of blogging that now exists on this site (and will continue!) was eventually born.

Of course we can’t have the real thing anymore – Anti Kpop-Fangirl is now over.  Maybe one day a similar multi-author, multi-ideological satirical k-pop blog site will exist, although Kpopalypse won’t be it.  Nor will it be Asian Junkie – that’s a great site, but IATFB edits his authors far too carefully for it to become a true multi-faceted site like AKF.  Some readers didn’t like AKF because they felt that the site was somehow nasty or odiously right-wing (whatever that even means these days), but I actually found that underneath the troll articles it was a very open and mutually respectful environment with a great deal of freedom, far more so than any other large k-pop blog site I’ve seen.  AKF wouldn’t censor people’s opinions that were contrary to his own as long as the actual writing quality met required standards, and there were several posts that I wrote where I knew I had a different opinion to AKF on an issue but it never posed a problem because I would always try to respect the writing standards of the site and not just write a boring “I’m right, you’re wrong” rant that nobody wants to read.  When an article was rejected by AKF it was always for one reason only – the writing wasn’t good enough.  AKF would also openly specifically solicit female writers to try and get a fair gender balance, and even hired writers like Akisame, a British Pakistani female Muslim with a vocal pedagogy obsession, even allowing her to redesign the site (to great positive effect) after she lost interest in writing.  AKF was in practice a shining example of tolerance and accepting cultural diversity, who would give anyone a chance as long as they could prove that they had the required writing skills and could bring a constructive contribution to the site.  Myself and many others will be forever grateful for his all-inclusive, strictly quality-focused approach to running the site Anti Kpop-Fangirl!

AKF has now liberated himself from the constraints of k-pop blogging, and is now free to pursue his life in new and awesome directions.  Kpopalypse wishes him all the best!