Just a quick intermission style blog to tell you lovely folks who read my blog about a few things:
Some of you might have noticed that an edited version of my blog about plagiarism and IU was reposted onto Asian Junkie. Yes, I’m writing for them now, as well as Anti Kpop-Fangirl, no doubt much to the horror of many! So you might see material from here crop up on both of those sites from time to time (although you’ll see a lot more of it on Anti Kpop-Fangirl). I don’t usually edit my blogs much for Anti Kpop-Fangirl apart from minor adjustments because of the differences between publishing templates, but Asian Junkie’s format is a bit different. I’ve basically said to them “if you like anything here, feel free to just copy and paste it over to there, edit it so it fits your format and stick my name on it”, which is what happened with the plagiarism article.
I’m really happy about this because I really like Asian Junkie, just like I like Anti Kpop-Fangirl. Back in August/September 2012 when everyone was being phenomenal dicks about T-ara, Asian Junkie was the first place I found that had some actual sane writing about the situation that wasn’t lame trendy bashing OR stupid fangirly counter-bashing, but that actually probed a bit deeper, while still being entertaining and down-to-earth rather than having politically-correct academic pretensions. I knew I had found a k-pop blog that didn’t suck. They have continued to not suck and even though I don’t always agree with everything I read on Asian Junkie, or Anti Kpop-Fangirl for that matter, it’s always an entertaining and thoughtful read and I support both blogs wholeheartedly.
In the meantime ask.fm has really exploded for me – anyone who follows it, or who follows my Twitter, will notice the influx of questions coming from ask.fm (and sorry to my Twitter followers for the wall of rapid-fire ask.fm content which is probably filling up your feed and pissing you right off – hey, at least I never post images). I do my best to answer as much as I can but it’s frankly become impossible to do everything, with multiple jobs I just don’t have the time. I get everything from praise to abuse (although some of the really abusive stuff gets automatically removed by ask.fm – they say they don’t do this, but I know that they do because some of the nastier questions I’ve received have mysteriously disappeared either just before or just after I’ve replied to them, and it’s not me deleting them) and I’m also getting quite a lot of material for new blog posts, so thanks to those asking good questions for giving me material, and thanks also those who are just sending me crap because I do definitely get a laugh out of that and sometimes you guys give me material too. So please feel free to continue to bombard me, I love it, but don’t be sad if I don’t reply. Just know that if you did write something interesting, I did read it.
There’s quite a few blogs in the works and you should see updates here weekly-ish depending on how busy I get. Some thoughts on upcoming content:
Yes, I will write a “favourite songs of 2013″ post like last year, but unlike every other k-pop blogger I’ll wait until the year ends before I publish it! There are so many “best of 2013″ lists already out there on blogs and YouTube, I feel like slapping them and saying “the year’s not over yet you dumb fucks”. I’m really looking forward to inflicting my music taste on you all, but I’ll wait until the year is over. I might also do a corresponding “worst of 2013″ if there’s enough demand for it.
I know a lot of people have been asking about the Primary plagiarism thing. I’ll cover the issue in a very broad sense, but not right away, I want to write a few other things first. I like to write about different things and I don’t want to just become “that guy” who turns up to tackle each new plagiarism allegation every time one appears, that would get boring for me fast, especially given the speed at which they appear in k-pop. Maybe if someone was going to pay me for it I might consider jumping on things sooner (oh look over at Raina on the sidebar isn’t she pretty hint hint), but if I’m blogging for free I’d rather just pace myself and write what pleases me. Regular readers will notice that there’s a cyclical pattern to my blog writing, and that’s because it keeps me entertained to not revisit the same type of blog too many times in a row.
Other than my year-end recap, I never plan to do “music reviews” in the traditional sense. Everyone else does them, and what’s just one more person’s opinion on something so subjective in the grand scheme? I really don’t see the point. If I’m blogging about a new release song or music video I’d rather put a different spin on my writing and take things in a direction that isn’t strictly a review. In the meantime once a year is probably enough for you to endure my music taste.
Livestreams will continue to happen every month or two and I’ll always post a blog up here a week before the stream begins so you know what to expect. Once again due to time limitations I can’t do them that often, I’d love to have free time every weekend to stream but with multiple jobs, a radio show, a relationship and other activities all competing for space it’s just not going to happen. I’m going to try and give future streams some kind of format so it’s more than just a Q&A session (after all ask.fm fulfills that role). Let me know what you’d like to see in the streams (within reason – my streaming host has a thing about everything being all-ages appropriate content).
That’s all I’ve got to write for now. Any feedback about the blog so far, please put it below. Stay safe on the Internet, kids.
It’s a good question, deserving of a detailed response, so I thought it would be interesting to answer it in blog form.
Korea doesn’t really have any anti-stalking laws – unless the sasaengs assault their idols, trespass on property or steal something, the law can’t really do much. The idols can’t do much either – any interaction with these people or even via their entourage and security just feeds the saesangs because it confirms that what they’re doing has a payoff – “EXO’s security guard slapped me – now I’m THAT MUCH CLOSER TO EXO” etc.
It doesn’t leave too many options… but I thought of a unique solution that just might actually work. Read on, and come with me on an anti-fanfiction trip into the universe of stalkers and sasaengs.
You a 14-year old girl living in Seoul, and EXO has always been your favourite group. How can they not be? They’re just so perfect, especially your bias, Luhan. You’ve got all the CDs, a lot of the merch, you are in the official fanclub, and you do your best to trend hashtags on Twitter and support EXO in those Internet polls for “most popular group”, “best group”, “most attractive group” etc where you’re allowed to vote as many times as you want. One time you stayed awake all night clicking that checkbox like a lab rat, but it was worth it because EXO nearly beat out SHINee for some “battle” thing or whatever. You had to stay up – it was so close! What if EXO lost and you weren’t there? At least you know that it wasn’t YOUR fault that EXO lost – you did all you could, you didn’t let the team down.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.Sometimes you wonder about other members of the EXO fandom though – do they really have any determination? They make excuses and say that the polls are just a measure of who can click the fastest, but taking the time to vote repeatedly shows commitment to your idols, and can anyone really call themselves EXOtics if they don’t support EXO with their whole heart? If you don’t care about your idols, are you really a fan or just a nobody?
There’s one girl in the fanclub who really pisses you off though. She’s one of those “sasaeng” fans. She annoys you because she’s always telling these stories, and acting like she’s so smart. A few weeks ago she talked about how she got to touch Luhan, like, actually got to touch him like OMG. That bitch. Sure, it was only his arm brushing against her for a brief second while the security guard shoved her to the floor, but you’re sure it was a precious moment that they shared, and more importantly, it happened to her and not you, which isn’t right. You don’t see what’s so special about her, that only she can do that. You make a pact – you will find out what she did to make it happen, and you too will also touch Luhan, one day.
Not long after, one of your friends from the fanclub comes to visit and swap some EXO photocards. You gently bring up the topic of saesang fans.
You: “How do they get so close to celebrities?”
Friend: “They use taxis. Really expensive ones that you find online, who are familiar with the routes and know where the stars go. They trail the stars all over the place in unmarked cars for the whole day. Why are you interested in this? You’re not considering…”
You: “Oh, gosh no. I’m not one of THOSE people.”
It’s better that she doesn’t know what you’re planning – you don’t want YET ANOTHER person touching Luhan instead of you, after all – he’s yours. But you’re not one of those sasaengs, I mean… they’re crazy. You just really love Luhan and want to meet him and touch him and will do anything to show that you care about him. Later, when your friend leaves, you look up “sasaeng taxi” online. Surprisingly, results are easy to find, with several taxis listed on blog sites along with their phone numbers. Narrowing down the search even more, you try “EXO sasaeng taxi”. The first hit from the search engine is amazing – a blogsite with taxis specifically dedicated to following EXO, they’ll even narrow their chase down to specific members of the group for you if they have to split up during their schedules! It sure is expensive – 200,000 won per day – but expensive as it is that’s actually pretty cheap compared to what some of the others are charging (up to 800,000 for some of them – omg), and surely one day of chasing should be all it takes to meet Luhan and touch his angelic body. You make a phonecall to a “Luhan driver” and make an appointment for bright and early the next morning.
The next day, the taxi pulls up in front of your house. You’re relieved to find out that the driver is an older female. It puts you at ease somewhat – you’ve heard horrible stories from your friend about sasaengs getting stuck with extra surprise charges and having to “pay with their bodies”, which fortunately doesn’t seem like much of a risk here (not that you wouldn’t do it if it came to that, you could just close your eyes and think of Luhan, but better not to have to worry about such things at all). Also her age means she’s probably a little too old for Luhan so that’s one less level of competition, one less pair of eyes ogling your baby. You get in, feeling good about what lies ahead.
“You pay by card?” she asks, waving an EFTPOS machine at you. You nod and swipe the machine.
“Also, please sign.” The cab driver thrusts a pen and a piece of paper on a clipboard into your lap.
“What’s this for?” Your eyes glaze over at the paper, full of incomprehensible legal jargon.
“Personal liability insurance waiver. If you see Luhan, and you rush out of the cab and trip on some concrete and break your knee, we are not responsible for your medical expenses. Please sign.” Faced with not much choice, you sign the paper.
“Okay, we drive now. First stop is SM dormitory, Luhan is practising for Music Core.” The driver pulls away and you feel a palpable sense of excitement. OMG YOU’RE GOING TO GET TO MEET LUHANSIFUIFAB WGFASF WFFS **** SPAZZ*****
Soon enough, you’re outside EXO’s dorms, in the back seat of the taxi. You recognise the dorm building from the EXO official fansite, it’s definitely the one. You’re so nervous and wired that your whole body is shaking. Your taxi driver gets out of the vehicle and walks around the corner in the other direction… where is she going? Never mind… you look back to the dorm building and concentrate hard, at any minute Luhan could emerge, and then you can rush him and meet him and say hi and tell him about how you’re his biggest fan and then he’ll give you a hug and he’ll feel the special connection that you have for him that nobody else does. Maybe he’ll fall in love. Soon enough the taxi driver comes back, with some snacks and drinks.
“We may be waiting a few hours, for him to come out. Music Core is not until later. You will need to eat and drink.”
You figure that it makes sense that catering is part of the service, after all it’s expensive enough as it is just to ride the taxi, throwing in a free meal is the least they could do. Food and drink is the last thing on your mind though, you’re not really hungry but then you realise that you haven’t drunk anything since yesterday afternoon and actually are a bit thirsty, must be all the fangirling and anticipation wearing you out and making you sweat. You’d better drink something. You take a few sips of the tea she bought you and get back to the business of waiting for Luhan.
With nothing to do except wait, you decide to make some small talk – about your favourite topic, of course. “Do you like EXO too?” you ask the taxi driver.
She turns around and looks you dead in the eye. “I like them a lot. They pay my wages, if you know what I mean.”
You nod and smile, heh – funny joke. She continues to stare at you – she’s not smiling at all. Have you misunderstood something?
Then something feels odd. You start to feel a bit light-headed. Must be all the excitement, but then it starts to get worse. Before you know it you can barely keep your eyes open. This isn’t right, how can you be so excited yet so drowsy? Your eyelids get heavier. Just before you pass out, you notice the driver picking up her taxi radio, she says something to someone about “reporting in” but you don’t quite hear it all before the side of your head lightly lands on the carseat…
You wake up. You look around, you’re in a small room, lying on a single bed. One wall is made completely of bars, with a barred and locked door. You also notice a toilet seat in the far corner. That’s odd, why is there a toilet in the bedroom… then it occurs to you that you’re actually in a cell of some kind. Why? There is a poster above your head, which looks like this:
You recognise the photograph… it’s SM Entertainment’s new park that they were building. Wasn’t that meant to be a tourist attraction? Is this really where you are? Looking through the bars, you see another set of bars, and a cell beyond. There is another girl in the other cell, who is about the same age as you. She is looking at you, having noticed your movement.
You call out to her. “What is this place?”
“It’s Project Luhan.” She shrugs and points to a poster on her wall, exactly the same as yours.
“Yes, but what…”
The sound of boots on a concrete floor starting ringing out in the distance, and then getting quickly closer. The other girl starts getting visibly nervous. “I’ll tell you later, okay? Just be quiet for now. I have to pass this! I have to get out of here! I’ve been here for too long!”
“How long?”
“Ssssshh! Just be quiet! Don’t say anything! Don’t fuck it up for me, I don’t want to wait another week!”
The sound of a metal door opening and closing is followed by a guard who appears and unlocks the other girl’s cell door. He then enters the cell and she stands up perfectly straight and salutes. You notice that the guard has military stripes that bear the SM Entertainment logo. The guard starts barking rapid fire questions at the girl.
“NAME?”
“1063, sir!”
“HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN AT PROJECT LUHAN?”
“Six weeks, sir!”
“DO YOU FEEL THAT YOU HAVE BEEN REHABILITATED?”
“Yes sir! Very much so, sir!”
“WHO IS YOUR FAVOURITE K-POP GROUP?”
“EXO, sir!”
“AND WHO IS YOUR FAVOURITE MEMBER, WITHIN THAT GROUP?”
“Luhan, sir!” Your heart feels a slight stab.
“WHAT IS LUHAN’S JOB WITHIN SM ENTERTAINMENT?”
“He is an idol, sir!”
“AND WHAT DOES BEING AN IDOL ENTAIL?”
“He learns to sing and dance songs that are written for him in EXO, and to entertain fans. It is his job to appear friendly and relateable to fans, so that they support the group’s activities, and to work hard as a product of SM Entertainment. He is just an ordinary person with a job to do. As he is very busy, he does not need interference in his personal or working life. Sir!” This answer sounds especially scripted and robotic, she’s obviously been trained to memorise and recite this.
“AND WHAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT HIS PERSONAL LIFE?”
“His personal life is none of my business, sir!”
“IS THAT RIGHT?”
“Yes, yes sir!”
“WHAT WOULD YOU SAY IF I TOLD YOU THAT LUHAN WAS IN A RELATIONSHIP WITH… WOOHEE FROM DAL SHABET?”
“I would be completely fine with that, sir! The personal affairs of idols are none of my business, sir!”
“THEY ARE TOGETHER, AND VERY MUCH IN LOVE!”
“That’s completely fine, sir!” The girl’s voice starts to falter a bit. You can sense that her resolve is cracking.
“IN FACT, I SAW THEM HOLDING HANDS ON THE WAY OVER HERE! WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THAT?”
“That’s fine sir! It’s none of my business!” She starts openly sobbing.
“I HEARD THAT THEY ARE GETTING MARRIED SOON!”
Girl 1063 bursts into tears. “No! He’s mine! She can’t have Luhan! He’s mine! I followed him everywhere! I even gave him my menstrual pad! I gave him the blood out of my body! How can he dare go out with that slut! It’s not fair! That fucking bitch! Can’t he see that I’m the one who cares the most!”
The guard walks away without a word, locking the cell door behind him. Girl 1063 collapses onto the bed, crying and mumbling incoherently, something about “pussy payment” but you can’t quite catch it. For the first time, you notice a metal tag on your wrist, with a number – 1064. It’s going to be a long stay.
Anybody who is anybody that follows k-pop will know that the website Allkpop has been the most popular news and information site for a while now. They also seem to be the most hated.
Of course, everybody likes to hate something that is really popular, but I personally find that there’s plenty of legitimate reasons to not be that fond of Allkpop. Let’s look at some of the reasons that may have caused people to dislike Allkpop, and then I’ll tell you why I personally dislike them. It’s not what you think.
Potential reasons to not like or visit Allkpop:
1. The whole Ailee nude photos thing, documented here and here, and of course here. This is still an ongoing situation of course, and I won’t comment about it in this post because it’s territory already covered by other people who know more about the issue and are doing a far better job of discussing it than I would. I’m starting to like Ailee a lot more lately thanks to all this though; as long as she doesn’t sing fucking “Grown Up Christmas Wish” again anytime this December she’s alright by me.
2. The fact that the service they provide is redundant.
3. Allkpop’s history as a really unfunny anti-kpop “humour” site. Veterans of k-pop media will know that Allkpop used to be a bit similar to Anti K-pop-Fangirl (except about one tenth as funny) but the focus was more on hating certain idols and being a douche rather than poking fun at insane fangirl culture.
4. The new website and forums format that appeared sometime in the middle of 2013, which caused myself and many others to quit using Allkpop’s forums completely and bail out to OneHallyu forums to keep in touch with what k-pop fans natter about. The website itself was confusing enough but most annoying of all was that Allkpop built in some new forum features and then disabled them for people who used adblockers. Gee, thanks, cunts. I really like my adblocker as YouTube is shitty without it, I’m not going to disable adblock just for some advertiser-dick-sucking k-pop website.
But no. None of those are the reason why I dislike the site and won’t visit again… I have my own special reason.
Back when I was growing up, good computer games were hard to come by, we didn’t have GTA 57 or Call Of Battlefield or League of Warcraft or whatever the fuck. I lived in a one-income household and we were always broke, so out of everyone I knew, I was always the last person to get anything cool, so I didn’t have shit. However, one day, much to my astonishment, myself and my brother were jointly gifted something we’d never had before – a video game console. Holy fuuuuuck life just got awesome. It looked like this:
This arcane device was called a Vectrex. The few games we had for it sucked major cock because they were basic as fuck, and we couldn’t buy more games because a. dad probably had to take out a fucking loan just to even get the console and b. the company that made games for this thing went out of business almost straight after we got it anyway, but the default game “Mine Storm” (pictured) was cool – a clone of the 1979 arcade hit “Asteroids”. I clocked many hours on that game when I should have been doing homework or whatever, and I got good enough at Mine Storm to beat all 64 almost-identical levels of mind-numbingly repetitive asteroid-blasting. Eventually my father got a little less poor, we acquired a Commodore 64 (which was better because games for it were easier and cheaper to get ahem) and the Vectrex swiftly gathered dust.
Fast forward to more recent times and what do I find on Allkpop but an “arcade” tab full of Flash games. For most people it was a “buried” feature, a lot of people didn’t even seem to know it was there. I talk to people these days about the old Allkpop site and they say “what games?” – but it was right in front of their faces the whole time:
Well, okay, “full of games” is an exaggeration. The games on this “arcade” were six in total, and they were:
Snake: a bullshit snake game that was completely unplayable because the Flash player lag would mean that you’d always steer into yourself and die fuck that shit
Chopper: I was hoping for a version of the early console classic Choplifter, but it was not to be; instead this was some kind of fucking stupid “dodge the fast-approaching walls in your laggy as shit sprite” thing that was even more unplayable than the snake game holy cunting fuck you needed to be ADHD and on crack to play this
Tetris: like any other Tetris game but without cool music, so useless really. You’d think they’d get one that played k-pop but gosh no that would be too logical for a k-pop site, we can’t have that. Also impossible to beat anyone’s high scores because there was some weird exploit to it that I hadn’t figured out, so fuck it
Space Invaders: this game was undeservedly a household name that was overrated in the arcades and on consoles back when it came out, and this was a fairly faithful conversion of the original because it also sucked dick
Bejeweled: the usual Candy Crush lame colour-matching bullshit, I guess it doesn’t help that I’m colour blind but I can’t play this bollocks. Also took the one cool feature of the original Bejeweled (the way the game sucks your dick for you and feeds your ego telling you that you’re a great player when you get good combos even if they’re purely by chance) and threw it away, nice one cockheads
Asteroids: yes it’s a faithful port of the 1979 original FUCK YES THIS IS MORE LIKE IT JOHNNY YOU CUNT
Reliving my 1983 Vectrex glory days, I played the ever-living fuck out of Asteroids, and beat everybody’s high scores, ousting the reigning champion on the saved high-score list and then doubling my lead. Then of course Allkpop said they were going to change their forum format, and to please given them feedback etc. I asked one of the moderators if they were going to keep Asteroids and they said they weren’t sure, but don’t count on it. Sure enough, they changed it and Asteroids was gone, along with my high score AND I DIDN’T EVEN GET A BADGE FOR IT OR WHATEVER FUCK YOU GUYS LIFETIME BOYCOTT MOTHERFUCKERS I’M NEVER VISITING YOUR WEBSITE AGAIN CUNT
Ailee and me now have something in common – we’ve both been burned by Allkpop’s disregard for the wishes of others.
Of course, because I’m such a nice person, I now will go one better than Allkpop and give all my blog readers the gift of Asteroids – I’ve added a picture of Eunji to the sidebar, click on that and it will take you to the most faithful Asteroids version I can find, play it and see if you can top my highscores. It’s not perfect – the collision detection is a bit ropey, but then the arcade version was full of bugs too so whatever. Johnny if you’re reading this, I’ll retract everything I said in this blog and even start spruiking your trashy website if you can get a score higher than mine on Asteroids and stay in the top position for one week. Bring it on if you think you can test it. It’ll also give you something to do while your legal team refills the coffee machine.
As someone who has actually performed on live stages of varying sizes hundreds of times, I’m uniquely qualified to address this issue, and along the way we’re going to crush one of the greatest myths that is (cleverly) perpetrated by the entire k-pop industry. Gosh.
The crowd did still cheer… somewhat. They didn’t throw anything or hurl abuse, which made them a lot more polite than certain other audiences. However, all except a tiny corner of SNSD fans (seen in the video at 2:09) turned their lightsticks off. How could SNSD even perform to that at all without crying or getting pissed off at the crowd? Are SNSD super-strong angels? Are they robots? Or do they just not give a fuck?
Well, to get the true answer to this question, in typical Kpopalypse style, we’re going to go on a massive tangent and talk about something completely different… yet in a way, very similar.
After hitting a creative peak in the early 90s and releasing a string of successful albums, Pantera broke up in 2003 when their lead singer Phil Anselmo decided for whatever reason that he wasn’t going to return to the group after a hiatus (obviously a bully victim because that’s the only reason why groups ever lose members isn’t that right k-netz). Having already achieved great respect in heavy metal and guitar aficionado circles, Dimebag then went and started again from scratch, forming a new group with his brother called Damageplan.
Then at one of their first ever shows, a crazy fan walked onstage with a gun and shot him dead. And you thought EXOtics were insane.
I remember when I first heard about the shooting, it was only a few minutes before I was about to go on a stage myself – not a good feeling. Dimebag’s fate was actually a really scary moment for almost everybody I knew working in the live music scene at the time, because it highlighted something that we all preferred not to think about – how vulnerable performers are on a live stage. We all knew that Dimebag was a sitting duck – anybody could easily do what happened to him or something like it to any one of us, at any time, and there is nothing any of us could do to stop it.
So why are performers so vulnerable on live stages, and what’s this got to do with black oceans and SNSD? The answer lies in this screencap of the Black Ocean concert:
What do you see in this picture, besides SNSD? That’s right – three big-ass spotlights pointed right at the faces of the girls. That’s so you can see the girls doing their thing on the stage even if you’re 10 or 50 or 100 or 200 metres away, and those spotlights are on almost the whole goddamn time. Oh and look, there’s two more spotlights off to the side. You can bet it’s a symmetrical layout and there’s even more spotlights on the other side too, so that makes seven spotlights covering the girls from multiple angles, and that’s assuming that we’re not missing some other extra spotlights that are out of frame.
Now guess what – when someone shines a big torch in your face, and you look right at it, you’re blinded. You can’t see a fucking thing in that direction. Now imagine that the torch isn’t just a torch but an uber-powerful spotlight like the ones that they use at concerts, that are several times more powerful than car headlights. Now multiply that brightness depending on the size of the venue and the amount of lights used. Then add the extra effect of any other lights in the lighting rig such as dimmer “floodlights” which are often used by the dozens at big events. At a daylight concert it’s different, but any big gig during the nighttime and the performers can’t see past the first few rows thanks to all that shit shining in their face. I can’t remember a single smaller concert I ever played at night with proper lighting where I could see more than three rows into the audience from the stage, and on very large stages where the very front row of fans isn’t even anywhere near the fucking stage… well, you can’t see ANYONE. Look at the photo again, and how fucking far back from the stage the first row of fans is. You could park a small aircraft in that fucking gap. Think they can even see that far from that position, think again.
Those bright lights are a big part of the reason why that gunman was easily able to walk right up to Dimebag and shoot him, no problem at all. Poor old Dime wouldn’t have even seen the guy approaching the stage, he would have been blind as a bat looking out into the audience (and yes he did come from the side but he still would have had to approach from the front to get there). Performers can’t see a goddamn out there, even if the crowd are all holding one of these bad boys.
Now, if some dude can just stroll up onto a stage with a drawn pistol and shoot someone without anyone really registering what’s happening until it’s too late because they’re all blinded like a deer in headlights, do you actually think that someone’s going to notice a bunch of people a hundred metres away waving (or not waving) lightsticks? They’d be just as likely to hear your mobile phone ringing in your pocket over the sound of the PA system. Of course, they might notice your lightstick if it’s a gig where there’s gangways and they get to walk out into the audience a bit, or if they suddenly bring the house lights up, but not if it’s a standard stage setup with you doing your two songs in a home gym sized stage area that’s completely floodlit and spotlit and them fucking off. Between being completely blinded as soon as they look forward, plus having to sing and remember all the dance routines in such a compressed timeframe… SNSD probably didn’t even know that they were being “black oceaned” at all, and likely found out what happened after they got offstage and their backstage handlers told them.
On a related note, yes this means that the notorious “waving and smiling at a random audience member” is kinda bullshit too. If you’ve ever had that happen to you at a k-pop concert, and it was at night or indoors, and you weren’t in the first three rows, guess what? The performer didn’t even fucking see you, she just waved in a random direction and gave a friendly smile, because that’s what she’s trained to do and she knows there’s probably some fans in that direction who all thought “OMG SHE SAW ME!!!!!1!1!”. These girls and guys in k-pop groups are probably even told to try and evenly distribute their fanservicey gazing across the whole venue, so that it doesn’t matter where you’re standing, your favourite guy or girl is going to look kinda in your direction eventually, and confirmation bias will do the rest.
Bright lights in your face affect things like distance judgement, as well as molester judgement. Good thing about those helmets. Stay safe like Crayon Pop, kids.
Yeah well how about we look at how music awards are regarded in other parts of the world to get some perspective on this.
In the west the Grammys are supposedly the most important music award going, and nobody in the business with any brains really gives a fuck about that, either. Maybe it’s because the Grammys have a reputation for having no fucking idea about anything regarding music, which one would think might be kind of important for a music award, but even more so it’s because it’s very obviously an industry circle-jerk.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
I think the Grammys are nothing more than some gigantic promotional machine for the music industry. They cater to a low intellect and they feed the masses. They don’t honor the arts or the artist for what he created. It’s the music business celebrating itself. That’s basically what it’s all about. -Maynard Keenan (Tool), NY Rock Interview
Corpo-wisdom dictates that if any one guy sells thirty million records, when the kids come into the store to buy The Big Hit, they’ll also pick up something else. This is called a “traffic-builder”. Ever wonder why every year at the Grammys one guy sweeps up all the awards? – Frank Zappa, from The Real Frank Zappa Book
The awards aren’t about you, the music fan, or about what music is the best. They’re about the industry patting themselves on the back and going “gosh, didn’t we do well this year?”. Check out Eddie Vedder’s complete IDGAF attitude when his group Pearl Jam won a Grammy here:
Public Enemy even saw the irrelevance of the Grammys before they were nominated for it three times in a row and lost out to the likes of one-hit wonders Young MC and Fresh Prince. They knew that the Grammys would be listening to “It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back” (how could they not – arguably the most musically important album of the 1980s) but wouldn’t dare give them an award for something so musically left-field so they took the time to tell them to get fucked in advance:
Relevant part at 1:03 – there’s nothing like foresight.
“Oh, but there are other awards – what about the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame, that’s important, right?”
If half the people who are actually winning these awards can’t even bring themselves to give a fuck, why do you?
Of course, I realise that’s not what it looks like to a k-pop fan. K-pop awards are always full of polite acceptance speeches and extreme gratefulness because these young men and women who perform are company employees trained in PR and non-boat-rocking behaviour, but behind it all, it’s just another day with a dozen things to do and two hours of sleep. It doesn’t mean a lot except to the exceptionallystupid.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
By all means watch the MAMAs or whatever other award shows you want for the drunken frolics and (often lip-synced) performances… but caring about who wins is some serious over-investment of your emotions. You could be using that time and effort for something meaningful, like acquiring illegal drugs, or getting into car accidents, or changing the world with mindblowing insights into gender politics. Don’t waste your energy, kids.
I’ve been reluctant to dive into answering this question, simply because I don’t want to be “that guy” who people run to whenever there’s a new plagiarism case to ask what I think. The whole point of my last blog was to hopefully get people to realise that similarity in music is a completely normal thing across all music styles and genres and to stop fucking obsessing over it, and of course plenty of people completely missed that point and instead used the post as a tool to obsess about the issue and picked things apart even more – which was exactly the opposite to what I intended. Yay me.
It’s really amusing to me that any of this comes up as a hot issue for k-pop fans at all, given that the entire genre of k-pop itself is a complete carbon copy of western pop. If there’s one bunch of music fans who should be completely fine about hearing things sounding like other things, you’d think k-pop fans should be it. Yet the questions persist, so as usual I’m not going to just answer this question specifically, but I’m going to take a look at the much broader issue of what constitutes a musical theft, in the (probably vain) hope that you never feel the need to ask me or anybody else about this shit ever again, because you will totally understand it. So here we go.
At first listen, they don’t sound much like each other at all. Different genres for a start. Then you realise when the backing starts to kick in that it’s the same chords and the rhythm kind of sounds the same once you remove that heavy beat that Primary has added. Hmmm… plagiarism? Well, if we’re going to decide if something is plagiarism, first we need to know what that is, legally speaking. I did talk about this before in the other blog post about IU and Nekta but I only really focused on the melodic plagiarism aspect that was relevant to that specific case, and not some of the other aspects. I’ll try to keep this simple and free of jargon so an 8-year old Super Junior fan can follow it… and remember, I’m only writing this shit because y’all begged me to. Be careful what you wish for, hey kids.
Okay so: all musical works are copyright to the person who wrote them, by default (although to prove your copyright in a court of law, you need your musical work to be in some kind of physical form such as sheet music or a recording). Copyrights can be sold or transferred, they can be borrowed or donated, and they can also be stolen. Plagiarism therefore refers to someone “stealing your copyright” and passing off your work as their own, and/or using your work without your permission. Key points:
* It’s not plagiarism if the person using your work actually has permission, or has purchased the rights to the song from whoever owns those rights.
…in fact it’s exactly the same song, with different words, but it doesn’t fucking matter because SM credited the original and also got permission so it’s all good. To be honest, that’s a hell of a lot more trouble than most people go to when they cover other people’s material – more obscure artists will still usually credit the original but not bother to actually seek permission, instead they’ll just do their own version of the song anyway and hope nobody notices. Know that the original rights holder can actually shut them down legally and prevent this if they choose, it’s rare but it does happen, because an original songwriter would receive royalties if the cover becomes a hit and they are credited, so they’re usually happy to let things slide – but not always. Obviously a group as high profile as Girls’ Generation can’t get away with that shit so they go the ultra-legal route and cross their t’s and dot their i’s before releasing anything – and that’s the reason why Girls’ Generation’s version of this song took five years to come out.
* It’s not plagiarism if you don’t even own the fucking original in the first place.
Ke$ha was pitched this song originally by songwriters/producers Alex James, Busbee, and Kalle Engström, she recorded a demo of it (linked) but decided that it didn’t suit her style and not to go ahead with an official release. Later, this song was sold to SM Entertainment who obviously felt that it suited Girls’ Generation just fine.
* It’s not plagiarism if the work isn’t actually your own work, but is a “soundalike”.
A few examples off the top of my head – this list could easy be ten times as long if I’d bothered to put actual effort in:
(I threw Thicke in that list even thought it’s not k-pop because people have been asking me a ton about that issue, too (not sure why, I mean, I’m “Kpopalypse” not “Funk/Soulpocalypse” but hey whatever). Marvin Gaye’s family has hilariously taken Thicke to court over the similarities between the two songs, which just tell me that they also could use a read of this blog.)
All of these above examples fall into the spectrum of what we call “genre-based similarity”. Songs of the same genre have a tendency to sound the same, simply because similarities between genres are what defines those genres in the first instance. Some genres have such a regimented form that it’s impossible NOT to create soundalikes – doo-wop is an example of a genre where literally EVERY SINGLE SONG is a soundalike of something else.
Are some of the examples in the list above perhaps a bit cheeky and borderline? Hell yeah. IU & Fiestar not only cop the same chord progression as a-ha, but they even use the same song structure and keyboard patch! It’s obviously more than chance – the producers clearly listened to “Take On Me” and said “okay guys – let’s do something that sounds like that”. However, it’s not illegal to do that, as long as you don’t exactly copy melodies. The keyboard riff in “Sea Of Moonlight”, while certainly close to a-ha’s song, isn’t exactly the same, and the vocal melodies aren’t the same either… so therefore they’re not the same song, even though they sure do sound similar. You need, at the very least, exactly (and I mean exactly) the same melody for a reasonable portion of the song, we’re talking at least four bars worth of vocals or lead instrument here as a general rule. K-pop producers mostly aren’t stupid (a notable exception later) – they know exactly how far they can push it before they’ve crossed a line, and you can get as upset about it as you want – it’s not plagiarism if they know exactly where that line is drawn and you don’t.
Another way you can get pinged for plagiarism is the fine art of sampling – taking snatches of other people’s songs and incorporating them into your own songs. Sampling is to music a bit like what collage is to visual art. But samples are in everything these days, right? So how do people get away with it?
For a sample to be legally actionable by the original owner of the work, it has to be a “recognisable portion”, which is essentially another way of saying “don’t get caught”. A single guitar strum or a drum is not going to be legally actionable. Chain a few drum hits and guitar strums and the likelihood of legal action increases exponentially. Sampling a snatch of a famous piece of music is the most extreme form of sampling and is a bit like cutting out a picture of a can of a well known soft drink and sticking it in a collage work. Your result may still arguably be creative and original if you’re used the existing sample in a new way, like shoving the soft drink bottle up Taeyang’s ass in your collage work, but the beverage company is probably still going to try and sue your butt off if your art piece becomes famous and noticeable enough for it to draw the soft drink CEO’s attention. It’s a “recognisable portion” of their brand and they may not approve of you profiting from their name, or even if you’re not making money they still may not approve of the association between their drink and Taeyang’s ass.
(There are limited exceptions to the rule on the grounds of “fair use through education and satire” though, so I’m totally allowed to show you this image to illustrate the concept for educational purposes. Gosh, just as well.)
The same kinds of rules that apply to traditional songwriting plagiarism also apply to sampling:
* It’s not plagiarism if the person using the sample got permission and credited you
* It’s not plagiarism if you don’t own the original, because you signed/gave it away or whatever
* It’s not plagiarism if it’s not actually your original being sampled but just something that sounds like it
Now that we know what music plagiarism is and is not, let’s talk about Primary.
Firstly, the songs don’t sound anything like each other, they’re not even the same genre. The melodies in Primary’s song in the rare cases when they appear aren’t even in the same ballpark. The chords are the same – sometimes, but the beat mostly isn’t even close and then there’s all that ‘rap’ stuff. So “melodic plagiarism” in the IU/Nekta sense is definitely out of the question.
What about sampling? Did Primary sample and loop Caro Emerald’s riff? Well… no. If you listen close it’s not the same sound. What Primary has done instead is get someone to play something kind of similar and sample that instead. The differences are obvious if you listen for them. Primary’s version has much “brassier” horn parts, presumably a production choice to make the horn riff stand out over the heavy drum-machine beat, whereas Caro Emerald has a much smoother sound to her backing that suits the more mellow rhythm.
This is “soundalike sampling” and it’s a common practice in sample-based music that allows people who like working with samples to reappropriate ideas while conveniently side-stepping those icky legal problems. It’s not coincidence – Primary would have done this on purpose. It’s also not illegal. It’s not even all that uncreative – he’s definitely reinterpreted Caro’s song in a new way. Getting someone else’s riff, copying it and then using it in a whole other genre effectively is not something that just anybody can do and get good results with. I mean, listen to how it sounds when people fail:
You can sample the best song in the world but if you suck, the result will still suck.
And I know you people will mention it if I don’t bring it up so here’s a quick run-through of some of the other allegations re: Primary:
Both clearly a case of “inspired by” and similar rhythms but the melodies aren’t really the same so fuck off.
You can’t copyright “a bunch of people standing in a room with a curtain looking all retro with washed out colour and fonts and shit” as a concept for fucks’ sake. Whoever made this comparison video is a fucking idiot. Metallica might as well copyright the headbang and sue every other metal group with headbanging into their video (in fact I wouldn’t put something like that completely past litigation-happy Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich). The first rapper who ever wore gold chains in a video while bikini-clad girls danced in the background could sue every other one too, etc.
Also, there’s the ever-so-slightly-important fact that Caro Emerald’s producers are actually not all that bothered by any of this. If the person who wrote the original doesn’t even have a major problem with it, why should YOU? It’s not plagiarism if the other party approves.
So if Primary didn’t plagiarise, who did?
La Materialista:
This is what melodic plagiarism actually sounds like. Good luck finding a decent quality version of her initially-uncredited rip-off of 2NE1′s “I Am The Best” anywhere on YouTube or anywhere else for that matter because YG shut down this dumb woman’s shit faster than you can say “Minzy plagiarised Soyeon’s nose idea”.
Bahnus (for Lee Hyori):
Same chorus melody, not soundalike, but literally the same – a key point. It also helps that the lyrics are the same – you’d be amazed how much weight lyrical similarity carries in a plagiarism case. Clearly showing legal balls of steel, Lee Hyori’s producer Bahnus stole a ton of stuff from various places for the H-Logic album, which suggests that maybe H-Logic is not best logic.
You’ve been a resident of Project Luhan, a sasaeng rehabilitation camp, for about four weeks now. While detained, you’ve had time to familiarise yourself with the camp rules:
Several times a day, all the inmates (referred to as “clients” by staff, but you know better) gather at specific times for therapeutic scheduled activities. Some of these include:
* Group listening and discussion of new music, with a different musical genre chosen each day by staff. Commercial pop music (Korean or international) is never a chosen genre.
* Two hours of mandatory outdoor yard time during which access to any electronic devices at all (including television and radio) is prohibited. Outdoor facilities in the spacious yard area include a sports oval, gym equipment, asphalt sports court, tables and chairs, a swimming pool, constructions to provide sun shade and a picnic area, all lovingly surrounded with SM Entertainment’s carefully curated flower gardens and barbed wire fences.
* Art and creative writing classes, where students learn to draw and write about things other than k-pop idols.
All inmates are also fed the “Project Luhan Diet”, a healthy yet filling regime of three generous protein/carbohydrate-rich meals per day, which SM Entertainment assures you is “nothing like what idols eat” and “designed to make sure that idols do not consider you dateable material”. Finishing of all portions is mandatory.
Needless to say, you’re in hell, and you can’t wait to get out of here, but you don’t see a way out soon. Every week the guards visit your cell for your “exam”. This was the interrogation you saw when you first got here – it involves answering a series of questions to show that you have “a rational view of a fan’s place in idol life” – if you can pass the exam, they say that you are free to go. You’ve failed your first three exams so far, the last one you flunked when the guard taunted you with:
“LUHAN DATING A FAN – HA! THE ODDS ARE ONE IN A MILLION!”
and your response was:
“…but there’s 50 million people in Korea, so that means there are 50 chances! What if one of them is mine?”
A bad slip-up – next time you’ll have to be more careful and hide your true feelings, but you’re not sure if you can. The exams are difficult and the questions change every week, so it’s more than mere memorisation, you actually have to think like a normal person. Oh god. You could be here for months learning how to do that! There must be a quicker way!
———————
Once day during yard time, you’re sitting with your friend, #1063, at the picnic tables. She beckons you to come closer, so she can whisper in your ear. You slide along the bench and tilt your head towards her.
“There’s got to be a way to escape this place. It’s only a rehab camp, it’s not like a prison. It can’t be that secure!”
You’re apprehensive. “I don’t want to think about what happens if we get caught.”
“But we’ll be here forever! We need an escape plan!”
A guard wandering the yard stars getting closer to your position so you stop whispering to each other and start acting more casual. You nod your head to her in understanding and she nods in return. You understand each other, and for the rest of yard time, both of you spend your time scoping out the area for potential escape routes. There’s no way known that you can get through the barbed wire fences, and all the buildings are solid concrete and practically airtight. It seems pointless to contemplate it, but then, near the netball court you notice something on the ground that gives you hope:
You motion to #1063 and she comes over to take a look. She smiles. Yard time is fast ending so you make a pact – the next day, you will meet her and see if you can find an escape through the sewers.
———————
The next day, you meet #1063 by the netball courts. You practice some netball for a while until the guards wander over to the oval on the other side of the yard, then you both gradually lift the manhole cover off (it’s heavy), climb down the hole and carefully seal it over yourselves, trying to make as little clanging metal noise as possible. You’re now on a ladder and it’s pitch black. You didn’t think of that.
“Don’t worry, I’ve got something to help.” – girl #1063 produces a mobile phone.
“A friend smuggled this in. She’s got all types of EXO contraband, I managed to buy this off her. We’ll be able to light the way with the screen.”
You’re immediately jealous. You didn’t know about this EXO contraband business! “How did you get her to sell you that? We don’t have money…”
Girl #1063 doesn’t answer, but you consider it trivial at this point and you’ll hopefully both be free soon anyway. Luhan’s face on the phone is gorgeous – he has never looked prettier to you than at this moment. How fitting, that a phone with his image is lighting the way and aiding your escape and maybe even eventual unification!
You try to focus on the task at hand for now. You both climb down a ladder and move along a narrow sloping passage that also contains running water in its center. Even with the phone’s light you can only see a foot in front of you at best so you both have to move slow. After a while, you hear something unusual… voices coming from up ahead, and even a dim light. It doesn’t sound like guards, or does it? You both remain as quiet as possible and inch slowly forward, eventually reaching a small gap high in the wall.
It’s just big enough for you to climb through, however the voices are up there and who knows what they are. Maybe it’s freedom, or maybe it’s another part of the facility. You’ve kind of lost your sense of direction down here, so you don’t really know.
“Give me a boost! I’ll poke my head up and take a look.”
Girl #1063 puts her phone down, bends over and provides a knee support. You climb up on her knee and poke your head up through the hole to take a look. What you see astonishes you. A basement room with several guards, a line up of young teenage girls from the camp on one side of the wall behind a pane of glass in a separate room, and looking them over is…
…Park Bom from 2NE1. What the hell is SHE doing here? Isn’t this an SM Entertainment facility? You keep your head down as low as you can while still being able to observe what’s going on. Damn she sure looks different in person without the makeup, a lot rougher around the edges, you’ve never really followed 2NE1 but you’ve only ever seen her in videos before. She’s looking the girls behind the glass over, one by one, and talking to the guards, but you’re not close enough to hear what she’s saying to them. After she looks over each girl, guards go behind the glass, take the girl out of the room behind the glass, and off somewhere that you can’t see. The girls in the other room show no reaction while Bom looks them over and they don’t seem to make eye c0ntact with her or even register that she is there. What the hell is that all about. It’s too much for you to process.
All of a sudden, you hear a tinny noise coming from somewhere below you. “ULF NEGA ULF, AWWWOOOOOOO”.
Oh fuck. It’s the mobile phone’s ringtone.
Instantly, guards turn around. “There, that hole!” one of them points, staring directly at you. “Let me down!” you scream to #1063 who has also realised that you’ve been spotted and quickly helps you down. She grabs the phone and you both start running, but it’s dark and you can’t see well enough in front of you to run at this speed. It doesn’t help that she has the phone, not you.
Pissed off, you start telling off #1063 while you’re scampering away through the darkness – “Why didn’t you put the fucking phone on sil…”
That’s the last thing you say, as your face slams straight into a concrete wall and you knock yourself out cold.
———————
You wake up. You’re feeling groggy and your whole head and neck really hurts. You’re sitting in a chair. You’re being slapped in the face, gently, a little wake-up slap, which stings unbelievably as the tension pulls on your sore neck muscles. You look up – a guard is in front of you. He sees that you’re awakening and he stops hitting you. You look around. You’re in a room with a door behind you and a pane of mirrored glass in front of you. You recognise the room instantly, it’s the room that Park Bom was looking at before. Now you know why those girls weren’t registering Bom’s presence – the glass separating the two rooms is a one-way mirror. She can see in, but you can only see your reflection. You wonder if Bom is looking at you right now, or somebody else. Looking to the side, you can see #1063 who is already awake, and looking at you.
“I’m so sorry.” she says to you, with tears in her eyes. “You look like shit. Are you okay?”
You mumble out the words. “No, my face really fucking hurts.” It hurts to talk, it feels like you have some kind of jaw damage.
The guard interrupts. “BE QUIET! STARE STRAIGHT AHEAD!”
You do your best, although you’re still feeling dizzy and it’s difficult to keep your head still even while sitting. Girl #1063 looks fine, not injured at all. You figure that she navigated through the tunnel okay but the guards caught up to her some other way. After a minute of staring, the guard’s belt makes a noise. The guard picks up a radio on his belt and puts it to his ear.
“#1064, YOU WILL BE ESCORTED BACK TO YOUR CELL. YOU’RE LUCKY YOU HIT THAT WALL! #1063, YOU ARE COMING WITH US!”
Suddenly, girl #1063 starts screaming. “You can’t do this! You can’t! It can’t end like this!” Over and over again. Over and over. Why so upset. You mumble to her “We tried to escape and failed, what’s the big deal?” She just keeps screaming, the same thing, non-stop. You start feeling dizzier, and soon you pass out again and slump back in your chair.
———————
Three weeks later, you’re back in your cell, killing some downtime before lights out, and eating some SM-approved salt and vinegar flavoured potato chips. Your face is feeling better, the pain and swelling has gone down, but there’s still a bit of scarring. The doctors told you it will heal in a month so you’re not too worried. They told you a while back that you were lucky not to snap your neck down there, and that people have died in those sewers before.
You haven’t seen #1063 since the escape attempt. You’re watching TV in your bed. EXO is of course banned here, so you’re watching a YG Entertainment special. You’re not really into YG artists, especially the overrated BigBang who are nowhere near as good as your faves EXO, but any port in a storm, you figure. All of a sudden, footsteps and a now-familiar clank of bars as a new inmate is admitted into the cell opposite you, where #1063 who tried to help you escape used to live. This happens all the time, there have been five or six inmates through since she left. You look over at the new arrival. She has bandages all over her face, she is almost completely 100% bandaged, she looks positively mummified. She stares back at you, tears of recognition well in her eyes. Then you realise… it’s #1063.
“What happened to you?” you ask.
She opens her mouth as if to say something, but just starts sobbing instead, like she can’t get the words out. She then starts pointing at you, and not just sobbing, but positively howling in tears. Like someone just died, or something. You give her a look as if to say “why are you pointing to me?” She motions to your side. Then you realise… she’s not actually pointing at you… but something next to you, really close. It’s the TV screen you were just watching. You turn to look at it, it’s 2NE1′s latest MV, “Missing You”.
You look at the screen – “Gosh, Bom sure looks pretty there. Much better than when I saw her in that basement, hey – damn she looked ragged then. She’s got a nose like yours in that video, actually. How much of that look do you think is surgery?”
Girl #1063′s howling tears raise another pitch and become a scream. “THAT FUCKING BIIIIITCH, FUCKING BIIIIIITCH SLUUUUT” over and over again. Guards alerted to the noise quickly come in and administer a sedative, or something – it takes two of them to hold her in place while a third guard operates a syringe filled with god knows what. Meanwhile, the penny drops. You’ll be on your best behaviour from now on.
After reading several astoundinglyinformativearticles on Anti Kpop-Fangirl lately, I thought I’d better step up my game and not lose pace in the blogging information war. So here it is – the k-pop boobs post you’ve all been waiting for/dreading. I will perhaps never again deliver a post containing this much raw knowledge. You are now about to benefit from my exhaustive research into the topic of female boob-appreciation, so I hope you appreciate it.
And before any of you politically correct types start about “objectification” and “depersonalisation” keep in mind these things:
* Boobs ARE objects. Scientific FACT.
* What’sgoodforthegooseisgoodforthegander. If anything, men are objectified far more than women in k-pop so consider this “affirmative action” to redress the balance somewhat. Or don’t – I don’t care.
* The entire music industry is depersonalising. We don’t know anything about idols and their private lives really, or if they’re good or bad people. However, we CAN see boobs. By appreciating the things we can perceive as fans and disregarding the things we can’t truly ever hope to perceive without personal experience, we’re just working sensibly and rationally with the information that we’re given.
* Just because we’re appreciating boobs as objects for their aesthetics and treasured fap-value doesn’t mean we’re depreciating the worth of our beloved k-pop idols as human beings. It’s both technically possible and biologically inevitable for most people to be both a fully-rounded person AND a sexual object at the same time and if YOU think that’s shameful or not right or impossible then that says a hell of a lot more about YOUR sexism, slut-shaming, virgin/whore complex and wanting to bend the will of others to your own narcissistic way of thinking than it does about anything that I believe. Tsk tsk you fucking pseudo-feminist social-concern-trolling hypocrite.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Now that the annoying disclaimers are out of the way and all the hypocritical armchair wannabe-feminists have realised that they’ve wasted their lives on a bullshit ideology that is completely self-referential and pointless, let it be known that we’re going to be assessing boob quality in these key areas:
1. Apparent size: How big do her boobs appear to be, across a wide range of media? Know that there is no maximum size, and those not meeting the minimum size are not eligible for assessment here anyway and have not been listed. Someone else who fetishises small boobs instead (and yeah they’re out there and actually quite common among k-pop fans) can write another blog about those girls.
2. External enhancement: Have any boob-lifting/supporting mechanisms been used specifically to enhance apparent volume vs actual volume? We’ll file all this stuff under “E factor”. A low score means a high achievement, but high scores still get full marks for effort, and effort is always appreciated.
3. Internal enhancement: Has boob-enhancing surgery been used? We’ll call this the “PS factor”. Since we can never be 100% sure of anything when it comes to idols, boobs will be ranked with a low, medium or high probability of surgery.
4. Fan-friendly attire/behaviour: Does she provide fanservice for boob aficionados through revealing attire or appealing movements?
5. Fapability: The final score – a combination of all of the above, plus a dash of completely unfair and biased subjectivity that comes naturally with being a blog author.
Also note – this is about k-pop idols and people in the world of k-pop only. Therefore, excluded are the likes of:
Clara (hasn’t made music)
Hwayoung (not in the world of k-pop anymore is she, OOPS)
Anyone who I forgot to write about because I couldn’t be bothered.
We might as well start off with a quality benchmark, and the lady that I always think of first whenever I think of k-pop and quality boobs.
Even better is that her boob size appears to have been achieved with little or no “outside help”. Sure, there are a few photos out there like this one, where one could reasonably suspect some padding:
…but most photos show a fairly consistent size across the board so we know that she’s probably not faking it. Sunny’s boobs also move like real boobs, so surgery seems unlikely:
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
While not super-fanservicey, Sunny also isn’t adverse to rocking tight and/or revealing outfits occasionally:
You can just smell the fangirls who wishes SNSD would tank in 2008 burning their toast in 2013. Sunny’s final scorecard measures up impressively, hitting all the key areas:
A worthy benchmark indeed. Can anyone beat this score?
Well, when writing about important topics, it’s important to do research first, so as I often do when I wish to research popular opinion, I dropped a forum thread to collect data:
Now I’m going to run through a list of names I collected, plus a few others that I added into the mix, to see if we can come up with a worthy contender.
…but loses points on the authenticity scale. Her boobs certainly don’t look surgically enhanced to me, however they sure do always look pushed-up and squished around a lot.
I reckon she’s rocking some big bra pads in all of these shots except maybe the top one, where the volume and colour of what she’s wearing (stiff white fabric = illusion of extra size) makes them unnecessary. If any of you get to bed G.na please let me know if my suspicions are correct, in the meantime:
While the above pictures are impressive and match the profile of a genuinely busty woman, they’re the exception rather than the rule with Hyosung’s “body of work”. It’s actually difficult to truly assess the quality of Hyosung’s rack, due to the following factors:
* She’s lost a bit of weight recently, some of which has come off appealing areas
* She’s not very fanservicey, even when the situation calls for it
For example, when she’s doing bra-modelling you don’t even get to see half of the bra:
A lot of people wondered about why these shots were so coy when they were first released, but I knew what was up straight away – as anyone experienced in boob appreciation will know, the left boob is usually bigger than the right boob. Conclusion – she’s not quite as busty as is hyped. However in worst case scenario she’s still streets ahead of most idols so I won’t mark her down too much on size, just on fanservice.
But are they real or surgically enhanced? Well, netizens seem to think that surgery was involved, which probably means that it wasn’t, because when it comes to female idols netizens always pick the wrong side out of jealousy, and of course they’re going to hate on someone with a body like this. What’s far more likely is just a shitload of padding and support. She’s always looking very “pushed up”, making her true size very difficult to ascertain (and hence fap over).
I can only assume that the “I love Victoria’s Secret” shirt is a reference to the notorious Victoria’s Secret “Bombshell Bra” which can enhance a bustline by two cup sizes and if it can actually make an A-cup look busty then just imagine what it does to someone already well-endowed. Don’t doubt that k-pop idols have the latest in push-up technology at their disposal, and then there’s the pads…
I’m convinced that Hyolyn never does any kind of shoot or public appearance without some serious padding. This knowledge brings what would otherwise be an impressive score down somewhat.
Let’s not forget that Hyolyn isn’t the only contender in Sistar worthy of a mention here.
Soyu doesn’t quite have Hyolyn’s volume even with the push-up, but makes up for it by using said push-up a lot less and her boobs therefore are often displayed more naturally allowing for easier boob volume and bounce perception.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Although she’s not one for flashing huge amounts of cleave like her groupmate, many of her more modest garments still highlight boob appreciation through clever use of colour and form, such as the horizontal stripes above (a proven volume-definer) and the great black/white combo in the below video which bolsters the emotional impact of the song with raw tits-perving power:
It’s hard not to rank Soyou highly. Or rather, it’s hard and that’s why I do rank Soyou highly.
Raina only really gets in this list at all because as my #1 k-pop bias I’d be doing a disservice not to include her, and also if I don’t include her I know a lot of you are going to ask what I think about her boobs so I might as well spill the beans here and now to save myself having to do it anyway on blog comments or ask.fm later. She doesn’t really have much in the way of volume but has a good line in appealing presentation without fakery:
Unfortunately she’s not very fanservicey at all and it’s difficult to find quality Raina pictures or footage that really show off her assets in their best light. The above two pictures were about the best I could find and yes I have searched extensively as I’m sure you can imagine.
She looks great here but notice how she even puts her hand up to her chest when bowing to block the cleavage-view. What a heartbreaker.
She’s still my #1 k-pop idol bias though which just goes to show that big boobs and the willingness to show them aren’t everything. See, wound-up hateful feminists, SEE?
The bustiest Stepford-Wives style automaton yet to walk into a YG Entertainment office and collect a paycheck is a testament to advances in the cutting edge of faptech and has been rocking more and more cleavage and big boobs lately, which is always appreciated, even if it may be partly due to insecurity. However, authenticity of boobage is heavily in doubt and size variances are common even with pictures taken at around the same timeframe. Sometimes it’s obviously push-up at work…
…or maybe it’s just the sheer power of her dual Milktron 5000′s overheating and causing heat haze which is bending the light rays in this photo. In any event it’s hard to fap to Bom, because it seems like she would be high maintenance – literally. As soon as I work up a good rhythm, I find my mind wandering and asking unanswerable questions: Has Bom been keeping up with scheduled servicing and maintenance? Are breakdowns covered by insurance? Will the addition of certain fluids not specified as approved in the owner’s manual void the corrosion/perforation warranty? All this interferes with the fantasy somewhat, but in any event she still collects marks for effort and I would still park in Bom.
Note that “PS factor” here covers boobs only, just like it does with everyone else listed in this post. Obviously Bom would score higher if other moving parts were also taken into consideration.
Jiyeon (T-ara)
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
As k-pop’s other confirmed cyberlady, Jiyeon deserves a mention, and not just to annoy people who don’t like her being mentioned (although that is also a good secondary reason). The Core Cyclopean Matriarch has recently come of age and so too has her rack which although not up to the lofty heights of others in this post has shown exponential improvement over recent T-ara material. Fanservice is also gradually improving, with a combination of diligent white-shirted pool visits…
…all adding to her overall fapability score, showing that it’s possible to do quite a lot with not much if wardrobe designers are willing to think outside the Realdoll box.
Eunjung honestly has bigger boobs than Jiyeon, the biggest in T-ara now that k-pop’s Ozzy Osborne KKS has diligently purged T-ara of all their extraneous do-nothing spoilsport crybaby can’t-hack-the-industry members. Eunjung achieves the same volume as Jiyeon but without the push-up help, however CCM can’t seem to make up their minds whether they want to market her appeal like this:
…but to be honest she’s a natural so she rocks it all three ways and it doesn’t matter much. She should keep the hair short though, KEEP IT OUT OF THE WAY.
As witnessed in just about every 4minute or Hyuna video ever, Hyuna certainly has fanservice down to a fine art. She’s also got some sizeable boobies, however I haven’t seen them jiggle at all since that scene at 0:19 in the Bubble Pop video where the damn trees get in the way:
Fuck those trees.
Also when I saw 4minute live earlier this year I didn’t notice any jiggle whatsoever and I was definitely watching for it. Could it be breast augmentation making them firmer, or just recent weight loss reducing the movement factor? Either way it’s going to cost Hyuna precious fapability points, but there’s no denying that even in current less-than-ideal conditions the girl is still a go-to for many boob appreciators.
While Hyuna’s high visibility and copious fanservice has straightforward appeal to nugus of k-pop fapdom, experienced boob-seekers will know that it’s actually Jihyun who carries the cans in 4minute. Witness her do Jiyeon’s “Sexy Love” outfit even better than Jiyeon:
Spica are an underrated group in several respects and not least of these is the impressive upper-body credentials of some of the members. Leading the charge is Jiwon:
But then she’s hunched over in this photo a bit so it’s not the best angle for boob appreciation anyway – she’s one arched back away from selca boob domination, she’s just being modest. In fact what is that photo even doing here…
Ahhh… that’s better. And to think this girl was in the T-ara pre-debut lineup. Easy to see why she didn’t make it through, she would have out-boobed all the other members easily, creating an unfair imbalance. She’s better off in Spica where the entire concept of the group seems to be “ridiculously stacked boobies in your face”.
Korea’s #1 Beyonce clone doesn’t just do a pale imitation of Beyonce’s music, her rack is also nowhere near as good as the nude pictures proved. Still, who’s gonna complain? Let’s take a closer look.
And then there’s that “other” fanservice she did for the modelling agency or her dickhead ex or whoever. When I brought home a report card and I had a C or a D for achievement, my father wouldn’t crack the shits as long as I also got an A for effort because his rationale was “you tried your best, that’s more important”. With this mindset, Ailee certainly gets an A for effort from me, if not a double-D for achievement… but I’m still gonna rate her right up there.
I bet many of you haven’t even heard of Sunny Days. How about you watch this video first and tell me if you don’t notice anything in particular.
* The song is called “Don’t Touch Me”, designed so they can sing it to the cray-cray male fans this group will attract like flies if they get big, like the ones they are apparently already attracting
* Notice how all the group dance shots are against murky backdrops and obscuring lights so you can’t see the outline of Soojung’s boobs so she doesn’t completely dominate visually
* That bedroom scene at the start OMFG *jizzzzzzz*
* The plot of the video, come on now HOW COULD HE CHEAT ON THOSE BOOBS
I don’t know much about her apart from her infamous Dual Life cameltoe action and that she has mediocre songs but has anyone ever seen this girl’s boobs jiggle? Given that jiggle GIFs are routinely created by k-pop fans and there are none for Sori that I could find, I’m calling out her boobs as the first definitely surgically enhanced boobs in this list. Still, if she can rock a look like this…
Another one I know nothing about, I’ll be honest and tell you that I didn’t even know who this chick was until I mentioned I was doing this blog and then her name started popping up in suggestion posts. Always eager to take a suggestion on board, I did a bit of hunting around, and… well, gosh…
I think I could really get to like this girl. Always wearing tight clothes, I like.
One of the most fappable women in k-pop, let’s be honest nobody would buy fucking Davichi albums without the lure of Minkyung in the photobook. She also starred in the best TV commercial in the entire history of k-pop idols starring in these things:
Clearly POV-porn inspired yet still so “innocent” ahem, a work of genius.
Not a k-pop artist but still actually making money from “the world of k-pop” (which puts them in a position above the large majority of k-pop idols by the way) Martina is one half of Simon & Martina, much loved/loathed blogging/v-logging duo Eat Your Kimchi.
There are three things I dislike about Eat Your Kimchi:
1. The way they use humour in their videos (getting a joke good for about 3 seconds of laugh value and stretching it out over a minute on occasion, much like the horrid k-dramas that you all watch).
I used to hate Simon though. I mean – fuck that guy, firstly, he’s married to Martina, taking her off the market for the likes of me (sob, sniff) and secondly… well, actually I don’t have a second reason but I think my first one is good enough.
OR – SO I THOUGHT.
THEN, THIS HAPPENED:
Simon makes Martina use the “boob roller” on Eat Your Kimchi.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
At first, she didn’t want to do it, but HE INSISTED and so he’s in my good book now for providing EYK with the fanservice that it has sorely lacked up until this point. I’m so sorry I dissed you guys. Keep up the good work etc. Damn it’s hard to blog with one hand.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Martina is not only generously proportioned but the boob motion clearly shows naturalness, no push-up apart from the pushing that Martina is visibly doing, and now fanservice aplenty.
For those of you who find yourself agreeing with this anonymous commenter above, you’ll probably not be surprised to know that this is not a recent development and I’ve actually always been an annoying cuntfaced asshole that people hate. One of the things that used to annoy others a lot about me when I was younger is that I actually knew how to use English properly from a really young age. However, I might be a cunt, but I’m not a fuckin’ cunt, so it’s time to help k-pop fandoms everywhere and give something back, by highlighting some of the ways in which people who write and discuss k-pop use words incorrectly.
I’d talk more about BigBang and how underrated they are but I wouldn’t want to appear hipster and alienate everyone who hasn’t heard of this shockingly underrated group…
WELL THEY CAN’T DO A VIDEO AND PROMOTIONS FOR EVERY FUCKING SONG THEY HAVE, YOU DUMBASS.
Anyway, you get the idea. If the few people at the very top of the k-pop tree earning millions can be underrated, then so can anybody. Actually I think my blogging is underrated, after all at the start of 2013 I broke out my motherfuckin’ crystal ball and called out Crayon Pop as the most underrated group in k-pop before BarBarBar hit, so I think you should all show me more love, preferably in monetary form. I think that prediction is worth $3. If everybody reading this donated $3, I would be less underrated within an hour.
Of course, don’t give me too much money, or I might become “overrated”, like… you know, the members of SNSD:
Overrated/underrated by WHO, anyway? Is there some kind of official “ratings body” that is rating all these people? How are they being rated? Does someone keep track of all this? Or is it possible that they’re both overrated and underrated at the same time, by the same people?
THANKS FOR FUCKING UP ALL THESE “RATINGS” I WAS TRYING TO KEEP TRACK OF. It’s all too fucking confusing for me. Why not just say “I like this” or “I think this is shit” instead or worrying about “ratings” that don’t even fucking exist and that nobody except you cares about.
Why not just say “I don’t like [insert group here]” instead? It’s okay, you’re allowed to not like a group for whatever petty reason you think is important.
Of course there’s also “cheap” in the sense of “looking like a $2 stripper” but then I don’t understand how that’s a bad thing in these sexually enlightened times. Some people like “cheap whore sexy” like just some others like “classy sexy” and there’s nothing wrong with that because everyone has different sexual tastes. I’m sure forward-thinking k-pop fans would agree that one isn’t intrinsically better than the other and to say otherwise is judging people based on sexual preference and is therefore wrong and bad. Isn’t that right?
Anyone with a brain can already see a problem here. Who gets to decide what “the matter at hand” is? Obviously Group A is relevant if you’re a fan of Group A because Group A is the “matter at hand”, whereas if you’re a fan of Group B, Group A is suddenly “irrelevant”.
Therefore the biggest group in the world can easily be “irrelevant” if you not a fan of them:
The word “relevant” however doesn’t mean anything on its own. Something can only be relevant TO something else, it can’t be “relevant” in and of itself. A banana is relevant if you’re hungry. It’s also potentially relevant if there isn’t a dildo handy nearby, or you ran out of weed and want to try something new. However a banana is not universally relevant because relevance is not a property that can be universally bestowed, but requires context.
Everyone has a use in k-pop as the reply deftly demonstrates, although he evaded talking about Hwayoung because he didn’t want to be rude and just say “she’s good for her rack and nothing else whatsoever”…
How k-pop fans use it – to refer to anything they disagree with.
Of course there IS a lot of well-documented delusion going on with many k-pop fans. Anyone who follows Anti Kpop-Fangirl should surely know this. However the word “delusional” has sadly been co-opted by the delusional to refer to anything which doesn’t match their delusions, and thus has lost almost all of its usefulness and relevancy, this extremely cheap usage of this flop word has made it irrelevant.
The other day, my website flashed up a little reminder that told me it’s been exactly one year since I started blogging! Wow! So I thought I’d collect some fun stuff for your entertainment, to say thank you for bothering to visit.
As it happens, blogging sites do quite a bit of data-mining. WordPress where I host my own site as it happens really data-mines out the ass, so I’m going to let you into my brightly-coloured data-mining cave which doesn’t look anything like a vagina and show you some of what’s inside.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
The Kpopalypse website collects all the search terms it can from people who find the site via search engines. Not every search is collected from every engine, but it does collect quite a few. Here are the most popular search terms for 2013, with the most popular at the top:
kpopalypse kpop porn hitomi tanaka kpop drinking game allkpop forums hang mioku k pop porn kpop fap material korean netizen k-pop porn korean idol porn
A theme seems to be developing.
Digging deeper into the list are hundreds of search terms people have used, and reading through the list I began to feel empathy towards the poor people searching for valued knowledge which may have not been something that I’ve addressed in a blog. So I thought I’d take a moment to address those unanswered queries in the hope that those people are still searching, find this website again and this time stumble upon the answer.
(Note: some links might be not safe for work. I’ll let you guess which ones. Have fun clicking.)
how to fap when all school blocked porn
A great question. Internet access to the best porn sites at school is often restricted, and even sites likes this one can sometimes come up in school blocking filters. While porn magazines can be a useful substitute they are not ideal as they are tricky to conceal, embarrassing if your friends stumble across them and easily found with a quick bag search. However, what your teacher is unlikely to do is sift through the file folders on your study laptop. Create a folder on your laptop called something mundane like “system” and bury it a few folders deep, and load it up with fap material in advance. For extra security you can make the folder hidden, and also go to your control panel’s file/folder options and make sure “recently opened documents” isn’t something that your computer stores for any length of time and that it doesn’t default to the last documents opened. This should be enough to get past all but the most tech-savvy teachers should you get your laptop confiscated. The ultimate in temporary security – pack all your porn into one big .zip archive file, then rename the file as studynotes.doc or something, then hide it, and rename it back to whatever.zip when you want to extract the files for fapping pleasure. After you’re done, delete the individual files but keep the archive. Just remember where the archive is and not to accidentally overwrite it with real study notes or delete it when the semester ends.
girl dress up as kylie minogue can’t get you out of my head sucks cock
This is a tricky search to perform, at least with these criteria. Incredibly, if you type this into Google, a blog post that I wrote does indeed come up as the first hit.
The result only get more and more unrelated after this. Simplifying the search to “kylie minogue cosplay” mainly generates images from when she played Cammy in the horrid 1994 Street Fighter movie.
This doesn’t look much like the “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head” video though.
The video reminded me a little bit of not only 2NE1′s style but also the kinds of clothes ladies wear in a lot of German pee-fetish porn, so maybe you should search some of that stuff up if you’re into that kind of thing. Hey, I wonder if there’s a connection between those three things…
kpop idols who eat pussy
I found this. I hope it meets required standards. Don’t thank me all at once, female readers.
It’s unlikely that Hitomi does escort work. My research revealed that only the lower end of Japanese AV stars tend to fall into that kind of work and only once their AV careers are over, whereas a more famous AV actress would be more likely to work in hostess clubs if anything. Hitomi being one of the most active and sought after Japanese AV stars probably earns plenty just from AV and modelling alone and I doubt she’d feel the need to diversify her income stream to this extent, at least for now.
I’ll let you know if I get a response, however I’m sure she gets dozens of tweets like this so you may have to be patient.
that, what does he have that i don’t why can’t i have you g dragon
It’s true that “opposites attract” but only in terms of personality, for instance someone who talks a lot is usually more attracted to the “silent type” etc. When it comes to relationships, it’s important to have common ground, otherwise what the fuck are you going to talk about once you’ve finished jizzing on each other. That’s why famous people are usually only ever getting it on with other famous people. Case like Liz Taylor and that handyman or whatever are straospherically rare (and that relationship failed anyway), they’re meteor-hitting-your-house unlikely. When you’re in the public eye, you’re never quite sure if a random stranger who wants to get to know you is genuine or is just doing it so they can show off to their friends about it, or because they have some weird idealised version of what you are like inside their head (pretty much guaranteed in a k-pop fan’s case) or for career advancement reasons or media blackmail or whatever. Therefore, if you really want to date a k-pop star, the best way is to get in the k-entertainment industry yourself and then get yourself on a similar level of stardom and THEN bump into them at a party or something, or failing that just pass your contact details to Shinsadong Tiger who will do the rest. Good luck with that.
how does kpop deal with menstrual
…cramps? With dances that soothe those cramps away.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
number+of+people+who+go+on+allkpop+per+day
Here’s my Allkpop web traffic simulator.
do you know any gay clubs around here? seungri asked how did ou know i was
There’s only one gay nightclub in my city which is the Mars Bar. I don’t know if Seungri has been to this establishment.
different styles that a woman can av sex with herself?
why do some kpop singer have microphones and some doesnt
Because some of them are singing and some of them are not!
However if you look close you’ll often see a very small flesh-coloured headset mic on them. If an idol has one of these mics but others have a big serious-looking mic, it’s usually because the person with the headset mic isn’t doing singing parts which are as important. Headset mics never sound as good as handheld mics, so in a situation where there aren’t enough good mics to go around, you give the good mics to the good singers and the headset mics to the people who look pretty so a big fugly grey stick isn’t getting in the way of fancams. Other reasoning could be that people need both hands free to do certain dance moves and sometimes the entire group will use headset mics for this reason.
…and another of her in a school uniform with some guy from CNBlue. You’ll have to let your imagination join the dots.
juniel armpit
What the fuck. No.
jiyeon strip video download
It took a bit of hunting around, but I found it at this link.
office assistant blowjob gif
Try this link. Okay, not an office, or a blowjob, but close enough. I’m trying to keep my blog PG-rated here, stop fucking it up for me.
haunted tunnel in russia kpop manager
This one’s so delightfully random. I searched around for this, trying to find out what this person was fishing for, but I came up with nothing. Does anyone know? Post in the comments below.
Last one…
why sulli so sexy
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
I don’t know either. Good fucking question, but she certainly is. Sorry I couldn’t help you with this. Some things are just beyond my level of expertise.
I hope this blog was educational anyway! Look forward to another search term roundup at the end of 2014!
The k-pop industry releases lots of Christmas songs every year, ensuring that song quality in the world of k-pop goes straight to hell every December. Braving the shitstorm of rapid-fire crimes against music perpetrated by nearly every Korean label large and small, it’s time for your resident k-pop grinch to round up all the Christmas songs for 2013. I’ll be listing all the efforts in chronological order that the music videos were released, giving each one a score and showing you the incredibly scientific methods used to calculate each score that I gave.
Wasting no time getting their Christmas shit together nice and early (probably for contractual reasons to do with Nicole leaving), KARA bring us this outstandingly dull song which is presumably their last hurrah as a five-piece. Everyone shed a tear for those crazy KARA fans who spam k-pop forums.
-7 wind chimes and sleigh bells used in rhythm track, fuck off with that cheesy shit
+5 all girls look outstandingly good
+2 the bicycle featured at 1:25 visibly has brakes and multiple gears and is therefore not a trendy hipster fixed-gear brakeless piece of useless shit, thank you KARA for promoting responsible cycling
Final score – Zero.
December 1st – Crayon Pop:
Crayon Pop’s “Lonely Christmas” is charming and cool not to mention funny as fuck which is just about unheard of for any Christmas song, anywhere. Sadly it’s also almost completely redundant thanks to the inclusion of bits of their other songs.
+5 it’s a song…
+2 …that actually sounds good…
-10 …but has far too much key content stolen from BarBarBar to be worth paying attention to in its own right
+1 dance is hilariously daft
+3 chant-happy song structure will annoy vocalfags
+1 Soyul shooting the HK53Daewoo K1 submachinegun for seemingly no reason is delightfully random and resonates with Christmas shopping frustration
-1 Choa in drag is cool but still a boner-killer
-1 making a Flash animation version was a great idea but the end result just looks fucking creepy
Final score – Zero.
December 2nd – Bikiny:
This nugu group can’t really play the big-boobs card that they’ve been using up until now and keep the family-friendly Christmas vibe going as well, so they have to make a choice. Which choice do they make? Sadly, the wrong one.
-1 singing into highly-sensitive studio condensor microphones using the wrong angle and without pop shielding
+2 one girl has bucked teeth so her face kind of looks like a bunny which is cute
+3 the song is called “white love” which makes me think of jizzing on aforementioned bunny girl’s exposed teeth
-4 boobs not as big as hyped in previous Bikiny videos, proving that it was all a lie *sob, sniff*
Final score – Zero.
December 2nd – Seul Gi (rookie of SM Entertainment):
What is this amateur-ass crap cluttering up my subscription feed. Do rookies really have nothing better to do than wander the streets in a drug-haze singing randomly and posting the results on YouTube? I suppose they’d better enjoy the freedom to wander outdoors that they soon won’t have once they debut and the crazy EXO fans accuse them of being oppa-stealing whores and start hissing at them everywhere they go.
-1 it’s not even a new Christmas song but a cover, lazy ass fucks
+2 mercifully short
+1 cars driving by make a pleasant noise somewhat superior to the song itself
-2 the girl walks backwards unsafely through the entire MV but doesn’t fall over
Final score – Zero.
December 3rd – United Cube (collaboration of Cube label artists):
I like it how the guys are singing while holding wine bottles, tacitly acknowledging that the only way to tolerate Christmas without suiciding is by getting drunk, falling over, puking on yourself and forgetting that you exist while mentally blocking out everything else around you. All the overacted Christmas cheer is really hard to watch though, how can you call your group “Beast” and then look really happy about giving gifts and standing in a line swaying and wearing fuzzy caps, we all know they’re a bunch of domestic-violence-loving motherfuckers after all fanfiction never lies.
+2 apocalyptic snowscapes look great and conjure up fantasies of stranding the songwriters on a floating iceberg and letting global warming do the rest
+1 one of the EXO members actually gets to use one of their much-hyped superpowers
-2 relentlessly sappy and emotionally manipulative video story
-1 puppy is cute but the only charismatic actor in the video and mostly hidden from view
Final score – Zero.
December 5th – 2Bic:
I don’t even know much about this duo group really, and chances are thanks to this video I’m probably not going to investigate them a whole lot further.
-3 wind chimes used in the backing track at key intervals
+1 the girl isn’t ugly
+2 I suppose it could be worse I could be in a war getting my legs blown off or something
Final score – Zero.
December 9th – Jelly Christmas (collaboration of Jellyfish label artists):
I’ve never even heard of Jellyfish Entertainment, which just goes to show that after years of listening to k-pop I’m still a nugu. Still, from the sound of this I don’t think I’ve been missing much.
-3 some of the sand art is actually CGI cheating though, plus there’s tons of edits, both of which dilute the point of even having a sand art video in the first place which really should be one take with no edits so you can marvel at the creativity of it properly
This video is so budget-stretched that even the SM rookie walking the street with a handicam looks like it had more money spent on it. Makes sense I guess because if you’re a smaller label why throw your money away on a video for a garbage song that will be forgotten as soon as it comes out.
+2 video shows correct microphone placement and pop shielding suggesting that the song was actually recorded during the video shoot, rather than just being a pretend session for the cameras, which is kind of cool even if it betrays the incredible lack of budget for this thing
+1 video so cheap as fuck that they can’t even afford Christmas decorations which is good because I get sick of seeing that shit everywhere around this time of year
-3 that “la, la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la, la-la” vocal line, where’s Soyul and her submachinegun when you really need it
Final score – Zero.
December 11th – Mystic Holiday (collaboration of Mystic89 label artists):
Mystic89 stands up to represent smaller labels and proudly shows that they can release worthless Christmas collaborations of a slightly higher quality than the average.
+5 it’s a song…
+2 …which is actually not too bad…
-7 …if you can ignore the sleigh bells and wind chimes
-2 not to mention the gratuitous “ho ho ho”-ing etc
+4 the artists actually do pull off the appearance of genuinely having fun with the concept, probably due to not all of them looking like they’ve walked straight out of a Gangnam clinic
-1 disturbing furry cosplay could cause emotional scarring
-1 stupid Korean-variety-show-worthy humour in general
Final score – Zero.
December 12th – Starship Planet (collaboration of Starship label artists):
In some countries where they use the electric chair for executions, instead of one switch to turn on the chair and fry the person, there are three, or five. Several people each have a switch and they all pull it together, and the chair only goes on when they all do it at the same time. This way, no one person can say “I was definitely the one who killed that guy in the chair” and therefore they feel less guilt and are psychologically more able to cope with their job. I think that getting together all the big artists on your label to participate in one big shithouse Christmas song reflects the same philosophy; nobody can say “I was the one directly responsible for propagating this trash” and therefore idols are able to retain their self-esteem and sleep at night even after hamming it up in these shitty music videos.
+3 the name “snow candy” makes me imagine all these people sitting around doing lines of cocaine and methamphetamine before shooting the video, which is kind of funny and seems appropriate somehow because if I were an idol I’d sure need a shitload of drugs inside me to cope with having to make music like this
+2 Hyolyn has something written on her chest that’s hard to read so you can freeze frame it and zoom into her boobs really close for a good perv and if anyone gives you any grief about it you can just say “I’m trying to read what it says, okay?” and they can’t really say shit
-1 Soyou has a superior rack but doesn’t really get to show it whatsoever, I’m not asking for acres of cleavage (although I won’t say no to it) but they could have at least made that top a bit more skin-tight or something
Final score – Zero.
December 13th – T-ara:
Never a group to miss an opportunity to release something just because they can, T-ara’s Christmas effort is musically a bit better than most of what’s on offer here but still a long way from something that would actually come out as a T-ara single under normal circumstances, or that any self-respecting person would listen to more than they absolutely had to.
+5 it’s a song…
+1 …and it’s listenable I suppose…
-7 …but fuck off with the bells and chimes already
+2 T-ara are hot
+1 Christmas is all about giving and T-ara are giving netizens something to hate this Christmas, how kind of them, I guess Friday 13th was unlucky for some
+1 cardigan/jumper porn
-1 why is Eunjung wearing one of Kurt Cobain’s leftover shirts
-1 the crease in the top of Qri’s red garment is bigger than the bulge of her boobs and it bothers me, I see it and I want to jump into the scene and iron it flat
-1 they can sex Boram up all they want but she still looks like my mother, sorry but I can’t fap to that
Final score – Zero.
December 15th – D-Unit:
D-Unit drop a horrid Christmas cover song onto their YouTube channel for seemingly no good reason. But then is there a good reason for any of this?
-1 oops there goes that “independent homegirlz yo” image they were carefully cultivating, straight out the window, now they just look like any other generic group doing a shitty Christmas song, wearing a beanie in the studio isn’t gonna get you out of that one, girl
+2 two members of this four-member group were smart enough not to even participate in this trash, cheers to them
Final score – Zero.
December 16th – BESTie:
One of 2013′s better nugus delivers their Christmas salvo and wouldn’t you know it, true to form it’s by far one of the better songs of this type for 2013. Given the competition, that’s not saying much though.
+5 it’s a song…
+3 …and it’s actually a pretty decent throwback to 50s/60s girl group style…
-7 …but they had to fuck it up with generic bells and chimes production didn’t they
-3 that low voice that cuts in on the way to the chorus sounds creepy as shit
+2 BESTie are hot
-2 guys standing in the background in some scenes disrupt my fap rhythm
Final score – Zero.
December 20th – SHINee:
Now that EXO have distracted most of SM’s truly crazy fangirl contingent, SHINee can chillax a bit and just pop out a Christmas song whenever they want and nobody really cares. Least of all me because this song is dull as fuck.
+3 one of the guys poses with a pony while wearing a jacket that looks like it was made out of bits of dead pony skin taped together, this is just freaky and cool and that pony must be on acid
-2 horrible fangirl-friendly mugging at the camera
-3 wind chimes used liberally
+1 but at least there’s no sleigh bells
+1 dull as this song is, it’s still better than anything else SHINee have recorded in 2013
Final score – Zero.
December 20th – Park Bom & Lee Hi:
Late as always, YG finally deliver their Christmas collaboration song right around the time when everyone is sick of the damn holiday already and just wants it to be over, which is kind of appropriate as that’s how a lot of people are feeling about a whole lot of things YG-related these days.
+2 Bom can’t seem to move her face much these days, so Lee Hi doesn’t move her face much either just to make sure Bom doesn’t look any weirder in comparison than she has to, which is very thoughtful of her and shows the true Christmas spirit of giving far more than whatever bullshit failure of a present you’re going to get this year
+2 the mouse is cute…
-4 …and easily the most attractive thing in this video
+1 Bom and Lee Hi standing in the doorway together remind me of that scene with the two girls in The Shining
Final score – Zero.
December 22nd – HISTORY
Too lazy to make a proper video for this crap, Loen just stuck HISTORY in a room with a microphone because fuck it, why even try, only losers like this shit anyway.
-1 they couldn’t even be fucked writing their own song for it but just did some lame cover, slack bitches
-1 excessive vocal wank
-1 slow as shit
+2 cough at 0:51 is funny
+1 male member of the group smart enough to know nobody wants to see his face and thus conspicuously absent
Final score – Zero.
December 23rd – Pol And Friends
What is this shit. Really. Don’t give me that “oh they’re ‘indie’ so you wouldn’t understand” bullshit, I know what non-mainstream music sounds like because I’ve played in non-mainstream groups for decades and this is just fucking craptacular by anyone’s standards. This is so fucking trash it would get rejected from a Weezer album.
+3 bass guitar opening riff is kind of cool and the only time I’ve ever seen bass tapping in k-pop, pity it’s all downhill from there
-1 Geeky English teachers GTFO of sleepytime Korean guitar pop, thanks for nothing Busker Busker for starting a shit trend
-1 total pussying out by using “happy holidays” instead of “merry Christmas” because according to the YouTube description “it’s an expression everyone can use without offending specific religions.” How about specific religions learn a bit of fucking tolerance for other cultures instead, now there’s a fucking radical thought. The band have already got a Christmas tree in the background so just come out and say what you really mean you pussies.
-1 lame meandering guitar solo
Final score – Zero.
December 24th – Son Dambi
Clever, clever – Son Dambi’s new song isn’t actually a Christmas song in any way whatsoever, but by calling it “Red Candle” and releasing it on Christmas Eve it sorts of sneaks over the line because people associate red candles with Christmas for some reason, probably to do with the Coca Cola company and might pick up a few extra sales for this reason. Those sneaky whores at Pledis.
+5 it’s a song…
+1 …and I guess it’s okay
+1 was written by Jonghyun from SHINee who is obviously feeling more than one girl’s boobies lately, and while it’s no great shakes it’s still better than anything SHINee have done lately
+1 Son Dambi wears a nice outfit that shows her upper body proportions in a pleasing manner
+1 weird David Lynch style video direction
+9000 contains the best quality a Chrstimas songs can have – it’s not actually a Christmas song at all
Final score – OVER 9000
We have a winner at the last minute! Sure there may be some other stuff that comes out tomorrow but that’s just too fucking bad isn’t it. They shouldn’t have left it so late. Anyway, Merry Christmas everyone!
Here’s the one you’ve been waiting for – KPOPALYPSE’s worst k-pop songs of 2013 list!
Some things to keep in mind:
1. This list is from January 1st 2013 to December 31st 2013. It was published on January 1st 2014 but may appear earlier to some people due to timezone differences.
2. Christmas songs are exempt, they have their own special blog post devoted just to them.
3. Feature tracks only, anything else is exempt otherwise shithouse filler ballads on every single k-pop album ever would have scooped almost all the list spots and this post would be very boring.
4. Songs for OSTs also exempt for the same reason – they’re all awful mushy ballads without exception.
5. These are my opinions, nothing more. Just because I’m a qualified music industry person with a complete understanding of music theory and production doesn’t mean that my opinions are any better than yours or anyone else’s. Music is like ice-cream flavours, there’s no explaining why some people like molasses-and-onion flavoured ice-cream, some folks are just into that, and good on ‘em. Weirdos.
If this post is too mean and nasty for you and you’d wish that I would write something positive and happy instead, my best k-pop songs of 2013 list also exists so why not go and read that, you whiny fucking bitch. Anyway, that’s enough of the preamble, let’s get started.
30. Girls’ Generation – I Got A Boy
Here it is, folks: the #1 reason why 2013 was such a bad year overall. Girls’ Generation, I’m blaming you. When the most popular, most influential idol girl group in Korea releases a song like this, it has an impact, and the impact of “I‘ve Got A Boy” was a whole bunch of other songwriters seeing the success that this song had, going “hmmm… five songs in one, great idea, and it’s so popular, why didn’t I think of that” and trying it themselves. Little did they know that making such decisions based on this song’s popularity was a huge mistake – Girls’ Generation’s 2013 Korean comeback was so highly anticipated that the girls could have recorded 5 minutes of their own diarrhoea into a cup and it would have been popular anyway. The hype that this song was a “k-pop Bohemian Rhapsody” wasn’t a complete lie as the songs are more or less structurally identical, although for a more accurate influence I’d pick “Summer Nights” from the musical “Grease” at least lyrically – a key cultural reference point that the hordes of overanalytical SNSD fans all completely missed. In any event the song has some listenable moments, and there are even certain sections I really enjoy but it’s a pity they only go for four bars before some other shit cuts in and ruins it. Worst of all is the horrid “diva” section two thirds of the way through the song that completely puts the brakes on everything and kills any momentum gained up until that point. It says a lot that the original demo for this song “Shiner On You” doesn’t have a lot of the extra sections, is much shorter and sounds much better for it.
And yes, the next 29 songs in this blog are all songs that I felt WERE WORSE THAN “I GOT A BOY”. Continue reading at your peril.
29. Davichi – Just The Two Of Us
CCM are usually a company that gets the ballads absolutely spot-on, but not this time. Watching the MV while listening makes this tolerable as the story is kind of interesting-ish and relevant to the lyrics but without the visual accompaniment this is incredibly mushy, sappy and so utterly boring and dull that I can’t even think of anything else to write about it… oh that’s right, Minkyung is not in the video so her cute face and pert boobies are absent which is another point against it. What were they thinking, tsk tsk. Mind you, even they probably couldn’t have saved this.
28. KARA – Bye Bye Happy Days!
Never before has a k-pop song title so completely encapsulated how I feel about a song. Continuing the tradition of KARA’s Japanese comebacks all being complete rubbish, “Bye Bye Happy Days!” is incredibly shrill and irritating in true j-pop style and… oh god, that title. Let’s be honest, with a title like that I should have known what to expect, why did I even click that video link in the first place. When I go to heaven and ask God for those four minutes of my life back he’s going to slap me and say “hey, they warned you with the fucking song title, and you knew KARA’s Japanese stuff was crap anyway, you’ve only got yourself to blame, now get back down to hell you little bitch”. Sigh.
27. Lee Hi – It’s Over
I didn’t like Lee Hi’s “1,2,3,4” when it came out, but I did warm to it eventually. I didn’t warm to “It’s Over” though, which both looks and sounds like it belongs on a children’s TV show although fuck knows what the kids would be learning by watching this shit other than how to dress up as a gangster furry so they can molest girls in public and get away with it. Even worse, this song is a 12-bar blues which means that it’s an express ticket to boredom central. I’m glad that Lee Hi’s career hasn’t taken off to the point where it’s started a blues trend in k-pop because that would be boring and I might have to start writing about Brazilian thrash metal instead and give this whole k-pop thing the flick, and I really don’t want to have to do that (but if I do in the future, now you know who to blame).
26. Teen Top – Date
When a male k-pop group’s MV starts off with wind chimes, take it as a warning sign and close the window that’s playing the video, that’s my advice to you all. Of course, I should have heeded this sage counsel myself but did not, and therefore I was forced to listen to all three minutes and nine seconds of Teen Top awkwardly mugging at the camera and pretending to be my best buddy while sappy, dreary R&B-influenced k-pop played in the background. Then I read the lyrics which are truly fucking terrifying and realised that Teen Top actually wanted to be “more than friends”. They seem really keen – how do I tell them no without offending them? Hopefully they’ll see their name come up on this list and their next song will be called “Just going out with a good friend, nothing to see here folks.”
25. M.I.B – Men In Black
This MV has to get the award for the most bored-looking female backing dancers of all time. Maybe they’re just trying not to look too into it so fangirls don’t try to get backstage at Music Core and knife them while yelling “get the hell away from my oppars you sluts”. Or maybe it’s the sunglasses combined with the woeful dance routine creating the illusion of unenthusiasm, the former clearly chosen to protect these girls’ identities so the poor dears don’t get stalked while going in and out of studios, kidnapped and stuffed into garbage bags. While it’s quite a bold move to have female backing dancers for a male group, it’s a pity similarly bold moves weren’t made by the company in charge of this such as writing a song with an actual melody or any kind of catchy element to negate the awful cringeworthy cornball nature of the concept. Also, has anyone told them that the Men In Black films are all a complete bucket of shit? This song both looks and sounds terrible in 2013, imagine what it will look and sound like in 2023.
24. G-Dragon – Michigo
Listen G-Dragon, I know you want to be all “cutting edge” and “nu-school” and “ahead of the game”, yes I understand this, but you also need to understand something: YOU CAN’T WRITE A POP SONG WITH JUST SOUND EFFECTS AND LITERALLY NOTHING ELSE AT ALL. Getting the pitch bender thing on your synth and going “widdle-widdle-widdle” with it in vaguely approximate time to the beat does not sound “futuristic” and “cool”, it sounds like you need to take the thing back to the music store to get it serviced. I’m all for experimental music but there’s a time and a place. Why don’t you just give up on pop music and go join the new Ministry line-up if you’re into this sort of thing, they could probably use the help these days.
23. B.A.P – Coffee Shop
If there’s a single B.A.P fan out there who actually prefers their “just chillaxin’ being cool dudes singing about how nice life is, baby I love you oh yeah” songs and concepts to the “heavy metal/rap cyber warrior of death” routine that they debuted with, I’m yet to meet them. Plus they certainly are some sad, sad motherfuckers. I can hear music like this in a REAL coffee shop, or riding an elevator, or the next time I’m on hold to the phone company because they fucked up my bill again, I don’t need to listen to k-pop for this. I guess “boring as fucking shit” as an actual concept is something new so props to B.A.P and TS Entertainment for trying something different I guess, but I don’t think it’s really working out for them. Get back to wearing silly bandanas and dancing to chunky distorted guitar riffs kthx.
22. Apink – Secret Gadren
Obviously seeing the B.A.P video above and rising defiantly to the challenge, Apink decided to throw down the gauntlet in the name of gender equality and prove that girls can be boring as batshit too. This song and MV is kind of like F-ve Dolls’ “Can You Love Me?” if you:
* Remove all the great melody and harmony and replace it with some really generic major-scale climbing thing that nobody over the age of 6 wants to hear
* Use all the wrong rhythm track instrumentation so it sounds stodgy and leaden like an 80s power ballad instead of light and breezy to match the theme
* Make sure you slow down the tempo a bit so it doesn’t excite or interest anyone too much
* Throw away your MV stylist and set designer, raid the bin at the back of the local bridal gown shop for leftovers, then shoot the video at the town botanic gardens
The result is generic girly-girl k-pop song #5926. Even SNSD’s “Echo” was better than this shit.
21. Girl’s Day – Female President
Never mind the dopey “feminist” pretensions in the lyrics and how relevant to the concerns of women in Korea they really are, the real question here is that out of all the songs in the history of western pop music to make a soundalike song from, why the fuck would anybody choose the awful “Wings” by Little Mix? We’re not that close to the bottom of the barrel of western pop culture yet, are we? Not only that, but “Female President” is not even as good as “Wings”. Getting a song that bad and actually making it even more shit has to earn some kind of merit badge for uncharted achievement in the field of k-pop. “Female President” strips the only good parts of “Wings” away and replaces it with an incredibly shithouse, non-catchy chorus and a whole bunch of empty space in the frequency field where at least there were some reasonable sonics before. Talk about redundant. Then just to add insult to injury, Little Mix went and made a Korean version of “Wings”, thus robbing “Female President” of the only function as a song that it arguably even had in the first place. Oops.
20. Ailee – U&I
Shinsadong Tiger must have been feeling lazy on the day that he decided to pick up the Ailee contract, or perhaps she wasn’t a very cooperative bangbus rider and skitzed out and ran away when Shindong wanted a handjob and so Tiger got pissed at her and said “fuck it why even try with this hoe”, because damned if he’s forgotten all about his usual production smarts and just delivered another paint-by-numbers Beyonce “Crazy In Love” clone. Well, fuck. K-pop really didn’t need another one of these given that it’s such well-wornterritory already in the genre but I guess some people will buy any old bullshit tossed-off song as long as it’s got Ailee’s voice on it. To be fair unlike “Female President”, “U&I” is actually marginally better than “Crazy In Love” because it actually features a proper chorus, but it’s a double-edged sword because it’s existence just gives Ailee more chance to jerk off in our faces with extra needless vocal overdubs. Her vocal explorations are as technically well-executed as you’d expect but they don’t serve the song in any way whatsoever and are just about soulless, passionless showing off, just like a guitar player who uses every guitar solo break and gap in the music as an opportunity to dominate the mix and cram in as many notes as possible to show how good they are, whether it fits the song or not. (Whether Ailee insisted on their insertion or her producer, we don’t know, but my money’s on the latter.) This kind of obsession with showiness at the expense of musicality needs to stop in k-pop, and it will, if k-pop as a genre is to have any hope of longevity.
19. SHINee – Why So Serious?
This song nearly didn’t make it into this list at all simply because I completely forgot that it even existed, which will give you some idea of how heavily it’s impacted my k-pop playlist rotation. To think that I wrote an entire blog post about Jonghyun not being in this video because he was too busy feeling Hitomi Tanaka’s boobies, and I forgot about the song itself. How could that happen? Oh that’s right, because this song is a fucking forgettable piece of shit. Ahhh, it all makes sense now. The guitars sound great but they’re mixed too low to have an impact and there’s too much other pointless stuff cluttering up the mix, the result is just a gigantic fucking mess of shit, and it may be SHINee but as they say you can’t polish a turd. Even SHINee fangirls themselves were divided over whether this song was even any good or not, which should tell you something about how everyone else felt.
18. Turan – Bang Bang Bang
Although 2013 has definitely been a good year for nugu groups, that doesn’t mean that there weren’t some stinkers too. One of the worst was Turan, whose Mission Impossible-inspired “Bang Bang Bang” was a devastatingly awful pseudo-bhangra train wreck. The comically mispronounced English even by low, low k-pop standards doesn’t help matters, and the bargain-basement MV also leaves a lot to be desired (the group would have been better off just using their live stages as an MV as they look substantially better), but the music is trashy enough just on its own to make you want to tie a piece of dental floss to an icepick, stab yourself in the ear and floss your brain.
17. 2ne1 – Missing You
As I mentioned when discussing Girls’ Generation, structural arrangement problems in songs have plagued a lot of the bigger groups this year. T-ara N4′s “Countryside Life” and miss A’s “Hush” both narrowly escaped inclusion on this list only by virtue of having some worthwhile redeeming features despite arrangement problems nearly sinking both ships, however there’s no saving 2NE1′s “Missing You” which is basically just driftwood. The song starts promisingly enough with a slow build that sounds like it’s actually going somewhere interesting, it builds and builds and then right when the song should be exploding with awesomeness the big piano kicks in at 1.03 and lets you know loud and clear that all you’re going to get out of 2NE1 this time around is another shithouse stadium ballad that’s not even as good as their last few. Jesus fucking christ what is this bullshit. By the time you see CL naked in the bathtub you’ll be too depressed to even notice as yet another chance for YG at a decent comeback for one of their artists is noisily sucked away like dirty water down CL’s plughole.
16. Donghae & Eunhyuk – Still You
There’s a reason why I left my list until the end of the year and didn’t do this early – I wanted to make sure I caught everything and I’m glad I did because this song only came out the other week and it’s such a stinking turd that it deserves inclusion. This is the kind of generic filler which is usually left as just that – an extra song nobody gives a shit about sitting towards the end of an album’s tracklist to bulk up the album length and make you the consumer feel like you’re getting something for your money. Of course what you’re usually getting is musical herpes but that’s another story. What this song is doing as a feature track with an MV I don’t know, just like I don’t know why these people are in London, assuming that they even are and it’s not just them in front of a green-screen, just like I also don’t know why I spent time listening to this trash. Oh, so I could tell you how shit it is, that’s right. I hope you appreciate me jumping in front of this bullet for you.
15. Odd Eye – Catch Me If You Can
A new group with classical music and k-pop combined, they said. I wasn’t expecting much as I hear hype like this all the time and “classical” does not definitely always equal “good” but I honestly wasn’t expecting something quite this bad. This is really absolutely fucking shamefully terrible and unlistenable due to the stringed instruments being mixed front and center and constantly fighting for space with the vocals, both often playing contradictory melodies and just generally sounding like two completely different songs rubbing up against each other awkwardly like a bus scene in a Japanese AV. The song can’t even be appreciated from a purely technical violin-playing standpoint as the classical instruments are all loops instead of live performance, and the tinny drum machine over the top of it all adds yet another layer of needless bullshit. A good producer might’ve been able to salvage this into something tolerable, but as it stands this is just a waste of everybody’s time.
14. Exo – Wolf
You knew it was going to be on this list, and it’ll be on everybody else’s “worst songs” list for 2013 too. This song was so astoundingly and indisputably bad that when a rough studio mix of it leaked months ahead of schedule a lot of Exo fans didn’t want it to be real and some even questioned whether what they were listening to was Exo at all. SM then quickly slapped copyright claims on all the leaked versions at the time, thus confirming fans’ worst fears (because if it wasn’t their song obviously they wouldn’t legally be able to do that). The whole song is disastrous of course – random rapid-fire rapping straight to nowheresville, ridiculous nursery rhyme melodies suddenly appearing for no reason, enough dubstep elements to sound trendy and stupid but not enough to give the thing any actual proper dubstep groove and worst of all THAT chorus hook – this is a song that you have to be a Exo fan to like, because there’s really no other reason to listen to this except to laugh at how bad it is (which admittedly, does carry some entertainment value on its own).
You might be surprised to see “Wolf” in the middle of this list – it didn’t take the #1 spot or even get anywhere in my top ten worst songs. Yes, it’s been that kind of a year. This list only gets worse.
13. T-ara & Davichi & Skull – Bikini
This should shut up all those fuckheads who think that I’m a “delusional T-ara stan”. The fact is that T-ara are my favourite group because they consistently come out with absolutely great songs, however I was briefly worried when this particular Bondi cigar surfaced that it was going to signal a serious downfall. Of course I need not have worried as T-ara returned with the goods later in the year but that doesn’t stop this song from being a pile of shit anyway. Clearly a Z-grade attempt to rush out something like Sistar’s “Loving U” for summertime, it’s had about as much effort put into the songwriting as the video director put into the video, which doesn’t even have anybody from T-ara, Davich (sic) or Skull in the damn thing. When I first heard this I thought that maybe CCM had uploaded a really low bitrate version of this by mistake over the top of a random karaoke video, then I kept listening and realised that Skull just sounds like that and that one of the girls in bikinis was Haein from GangKiz and that this was indeed the legit final product. I guess maybe CCM realised the song was shit and didn’t have much time to do any better and knew it would fail anyway so just rushed out the cheapest thing possible which is kind of the subtext of what I was driving at with my blog about Haein a while back.
12. Kim Sori – Bikini
It seems like songs with the name “Bikini” are somehow cursed to be shitty. This song sounds like it comes straight out of a first-year college assignment for how to write k-pop:
1. Start the drum machine, press the ‘fill’ button at regular intervals
2. Add two (2) baselines, one for the verse, one for the chorus
3. Make at least two (2) different synth riffs that go “brrt bbztt bzzzt” and “woop woo woo-oooo” respectively
4. Add vocals. Feel free to borrow from other songs if you can’t think of anything specific.
Whoever wrote this song probably got at least a B on their report card purely because they checked all the boxes which is all most teachers look for, but what’s of an acceptable standard for a learning assignment doesn’t necessarily translate to an acceptable standard in the real world. If I was running that class I would have at least added more criteria like “must not have vocal lines that grate on the nerves like your neighbour starting up a jackhammer at 5 in the morning”, “synth riffs must not sound like a masturbating walrus”, etc. but then most of the students would have failed my class and I would have lost my job. That’s why there’s no fucking standards in the education industry anymore. Trufax.
11. Orange Caramel – Milk, Cookies & Cream
Now in the name of fairness and musical equity I regrettably have to twist the knife into one of my other favourite groups. When Orange Caramel ventured into the Japanese market with “My Sweet Devil” I was disappointed that the song was a fairly average cover of a 70s pop song, so I was keen to see what Orange Caramel’s songwriters could achieve doing their own thing. “Orange Caramel’s Korean songs and concepts are already perfectly suited to the Japanese market anyway, there’s no possible way that they could fuck this up”, I thought to myself. Oh how wrong I was. Rather than just put out something similar to the group’s fantastic Korean hits, the songwriters have decided “oh we can’t just do that, we’ve got to make them more j-pop sounding for the Japanese market” and tossed off a wayward mess that sounds like Perfume’s “One Room Disco” if it was rewritten by a drunk meth addict. The whole thing is as soulless and tasteless as the CGI cookie that appears at the start of the video, and while I’ve only got one of Avex’s annoying “short versions” here for this blog, trust me you’re doing well if you can even get through the 1:22 that’s on offer here. I’ve heard the full version, and trust me, it doesn’t improve.
10. Heart Rabbit Girls – Round & Round
It’s always the music business cliche that obscure groups have the great songs while fantastically popular artists ride on the back of their existing fame and just release shit and people lap it up like fresh milk. While there’s definitely occasionally some truth to this point of view (especially this year) more often than not it’s the other way around and groups you’ve never heard of are being ignored for a good reason, such as because their songs completely suck dick. Exhibit #5826: Heart Rabbit Girls. This song sounds fantastic with the moody bassline intro like it could be an awesome New Order style synthbopper, then it hits 0:08 and the cheesy “ooh ooh ooh, ha ha ha” line comes in completely changing the mood from “moody EDM awesomeness” to “cheesy bullshit”, then at 0:16 all hope is destroyed as the big chorus kicks in and your ears suddenly feel like they’re being given an elephant sperm enema. 2013 has practically been the year of the nugu so for a new group to fail hard enough to reach the top 10 worst songs given the stiff competition they’re up against this year is a real achievement. I think most of the budget of this went into making those shirts, and I know they’re supposed to be “heart rabbits” or whatever the fuck but it looks for all the world to me like a single smiling elephant sperm is adorning each one. Confirmation bias in action.
9. G-Dragon – Coup D’etat
Unlike a lot of people, I’ve never thought that G-Dragon was in any way untalented, it’s quite clear to me that he knows exactly what he’s doing. This of course doesn’t let him off the hook, in fact the reverse is true – it makes his crimes against music even more unforgivable than they would otherwise be. If someone like Kim Sori releases a song and it’s an absolute piece of shit, I can kind of forgive her because I know that she’s not really in the driver’s seat of her own music. It’s silly to blame idols for their songs when the idols have no choice in what they sing or even how they look, how they dance, even what they say on TV or to the media 99% of the time. Anybody blaming an idol for anything they sing, dance, say or do needs to realise that someone else probably told them to say or do whatever it is you’re hating them for and they were just following orders. However G-Dragon is in that exceptional 1% who actually DOES get a choice about what he puts out there, and the fact that someone who was supposedly influenced by Wu-Tang’s best album to pursue a rap career continually puts out music that is so terrible that it would get rejected from a Li’l Wayne session for making hip-hop look bad is something that mystifies me. Clearly it’s not a lack of talent but a lack of taste that is the problem and G-Dragon’s aspirations in rap are seemingly to sound like complete nu-school bullshit that encapsulates everything that is wrong with the commercial end of rap music today – slow-as-shit beats, no groove whatsoever, horrible sound effects that amplify the complete absence of interesting rhythm and even with my total lack of Korean speaking knowledge I can tell that there is no acceptable rap flow going on here whatsoever. When you release a rap song and then Miley fucking Cyrus releases a very similar song a few weeks later and it’s actually better, you know it’s time to rethink where you’re going with the whole rap portion of your career.
8. 2NE1 – Do You Love Me
I’m convinced that at this point in 2NE1′s career, YG’s strategy is to release shit song after shit song so they can sink the group and concentrate on their new groups instead. They’ve already realised that 2NE1 are well past their performance peak and will need some fresh blood soon, so they’re annoying fans as much as possible so those fans become extra-keen to move onto the next thing that YG eventually debuts. After fucking with fans for ages and releasing worthless tangenital comebacks that nobody wanted to hear (foreshadowing alert!) the best they can do for 2NE1 in 2013 is:
1. Reggae. Sure, I like reggae and I didn’t mind this song at all, but put a bunch of 2NE1 fans in a room and say “hands up all the people who really wanted a reggae song as 2NE1′s lead single this year” and you’ll see less extended limbs than at a quadraplegic’s convention.
3. “Do You Love Me”. Let me get back to you on that, YG. Don’t call me, I’ll call you.
At least the song is fast-paced but that’s about the only thing going for it. It seems that whoever wrote this has just forgotten how to write catchy and interesting melodies, or maybe just couldn’t be bothered and is saving them for whatever those boy groups YG are about to debut will be called. The cheap handicam MV also betrays YG’s total IDGAFA2NE1 attitude; after all why waste resources on a group clearly near the end of its lifespan with established fans who will buy anything they release anyway when you’ve got two new groups just about to blow up who really need to impress with their debut singles? Watch those new groups debut soon with shit songs that prove my theory completely incorrect, but you can’t blame me for being optimistic.
7. EXO – Growl
As bad as “Wolf” was, “Growl” was actually even worse. Exo fans breathed a sigh of relief that “Growl” didn’t have the awkward experimentation of “Wolf”, but it’s that very same experimentation that contained the only redeeming value that “Wolf” offered. Like a Uwe Boll film, you might not enjoy it in the manner the creators intended but you could at least listen to “Wolf” and shake your head while laughing at the incredibly poor melodic, lyrical and production choices and have a nice chuckle to yourself. By being equally as shit yet replacing the comical badness of “Wolf” with bland repetition and dullness “Growl” doesn’t even offer that much entertainment. If “Wolf” is an Uwe Boll film, “Growl” is a Michael Bay film – certainly not good enough for a reasonably intelligent and discerning person to enjoy but also offering zero entertainment value even on any sort of meta-level by simply being one of the most boring and generic songs ever written in k-pop. It doesn’t help that the song’s entire hook is carried through about 75% of the arrangement by either vocals or instruments, meaning that by the time you’ve finally hit the first chorus you’ve already heard it 13 times (I counted). Even the one-take video is completely unimpressive given that all k-pop acts perform their dance routines on stages in one hit anyway, and the grey suits and grey room only serve as a neat metaphor to highlight the lack of colour in the song’s melody, harmony and structure. There were definitely worse songs this year for sheer unlistenability, but scientifically it would be hard to produce a more simply boring song than “Growl”.
6. 4minute – What’s Your Name?
Did someone say “unlistenability”? My blog software’s auto-spell checker thinks that “unlistenability” isn’t even a word, but I think 4minute have shown that necessity is the mother of inventing new ways to describe shit music. 4minute’s “What’s Your Name?” is basically just Hyuna’s “Ice Cream” with everything good about that song removed and replaced with awful grating synthesiser noises that wouldn’t even sound good on a Whitehouse album and pointlessly meandering blues-scale melodies that go straight to nothing in particular. The bridge break section isn’t too bad but that only happens twice and 16 bars of listenable if unspectacular music buried in between 3 minutes of complete dogshit really isn’t enough. Even the video is useless, using exactly the same concept as T-ara’s “Lovey Dovey” zombie video, but with far less effectiveness due to shoehorning the zombie stuff in there rather than letting the narrative slowly build, an obviously inferior copy that k-pop’s dopey legions of “OMG PLAGIARISM” obsessed fans oddly let 4minute off the hook for. The song did surprisingly well in Korea anyway though, which lead a lot of people to speculate on CUBE’s much-rumoured chart manipulation, but personally I’d believe the chart positioning was legit, after all we’re talking about a country that willingly listens to and enjoys shit like…
5. Busker Busker – Love, At First
In the European classical tradition, operatic “castrato” singers were men who hit incredible high notes and were also supposedly revered celebrities with great fame and active sex lives with groupies galore. They also had no testicles, these having been removed as children so their larynx would not suffer the deepening in pitch that happens to almost all men during the natural stages of puberty. I say “almost all” because Busker Busker’s singer sounds for all the world like a castrato when he leaps for those high notes in the chorus of “Love, At First”, and it’s impossible for me to listen to this without thinking about that scene in the film Fairnelli with the bathtub and the blood, or this video right here (viewer discretion advised ahem). But let’s not get sidetracked too much. Just like every other pop song in the entire history of the form, vocal quality doesn’t matter and never has, because if the song was decent the strained-nutsack-voice would be forgivable. Yes that’s right, I’m telling you to ignore the fact that the singer sounds like his bag is in a vice because that’s not even the real problem with this. The real problem with “Love, At First” is just terminal ultra-conservative “gosh we’d better take absolutely no chances with our music and offend absolutely nobody” blandness. The reason why k-pop has exploded globally whereas pop from so many other countries have not is because much of the pop from those other countries sounds a lot like Busker Busker and therefore doesn’t translate to global audiences of music fans looking for something that doesn’t sound as boring as five minutes of staring at grass grow. Every single international Busker Busker fan only discovered the group after discovering a whole ton of other groups first, and there’s a reason for that – if Busker Busker was your very first introduction song to k-pop, you wouldn’t listen to k-pop at all and you wouldn’t even be reading this. Think about that for a while, before commenting, Busker Busker fans. Take as long as you need.
4. Jay Park – Welcome
I’ve talked a lot about the reasons why male groups tend to appeal to female fans, and female groups to male fans, and I’ve mentioned before that it’s not just image and marketing – music by male artists is actually musically geared towards female listeners. Jay Park’s “Welcome” is a perfect example of this – a woman could simply not sing a song like this and make it work. Try to find a decent sounding cover of this song by a woman – you won’t. Likewise, if you like this song, you are female or gay and that’s all there is to it. Of course there’s nothing wrong with being either female or gay, but as someone who is not female or gay it’s a bit too much to expect me to actually listen to this fucking tragic R&B slop for hormonal beefcake-cravers and react in any other way other than include it in a “worst songs of the year” thread. There should be some kind of gender filter on YouTube’s k-pop videos like on porn flash video sites where you select whether you are male or female and whether you are into guys or girls and the site sorts and blocks videos based on your preferences, so that if you pick “male” and “into girls” this song doesn’t come up at all and you can live your life in blissful ignorance of something like this even existing. This awful R&B slop isn’t incompetently made or badly performed or anything like that, it’s just so clearly and concisely marketed exclusively along gender lines that Jay just lost almost exactly half of his audience.
3. SHINee – Everybody
I actually didn’t mind Maxstep too much and thought it showed a way forward for k-pop to incorporate dubstep sensibly e.g either do a song that is all dubstep, or no dubstep – you know, just like what people do with every other music genre ever; either work with the genre, or don’t. SHINee’s songwriters obviously see things differently. Not content to make the whole song dubstep or even just shoehorn a dubstep drop in the song’s solo section after the second chorus like every other boring k-pop songwriter running out of ideas, whoever wrote this trash decided that they would oscillate between dubstep and pop constantly throughout the whole fucking thing to the point where you didn’t even know what you were listening to anymore. Sometimes the dubstep is front-and-center, and sometimes it’s completely absent. Sometimes it’s sitting back in the mix, sounding murky and ready to pounce, and sometimes the song is oscillating between dubstep and electro pop and the rate of once per four beats. If we absolutely must have trendy fucking bullshit dubstep in the song then fine, but figure out where to put it for fuck’s sake. Add to that probably the most repetitive chorus in the entire history of k-pop and the result is one stinker of a song that sounds simultaneously mind-numbingly samey and completely musically confused, a combination that I didn’t even think was possible.
2. CL – The Baddest Female
CL’s “The Baddest Female” isn’t the best k-pop song ever. It’s also not the worst k-pop song ever. However, that’s only because of the song that got to #1 on this list, and CL, YG and Blackjacks everywhere should all be grateful for the fact that the last song on this list exists at all, because if it didn’t, this write-up would have started with “CL’s The Baddest Female is the worst k-pop song ever”. The low, low quality of this song is so notorious that it scarcely needs pointing out. You already know that CL can’t rap even as good as Soulja Boy, which is painfully obvious as much as it is obviously painful, even to a non-Korean speaker. You already know that this song is some nu-school rap trash that wastes the first three minutes of its running length in total shitsville before marginally improving somewhere around the last quarter (but who wants to wait that long in a pop song to hear something listenable). You probably also know that G-Dragon was really in love with this song and wanted to do his own male version of it, but reconsidered when it bombed on the charts, something which seemingly surprised only him. Given his disastrous music taste (covered above) it figures. Here’s something you didn’t know: I introduced one of my friends to k-pop as a whole a while ago and he really fell in love with the style. He really likes Girls’ Generation, T-ara, 4minute and many other groups including 2NE1, and out of all the girls in 2NE1 CL was his favourite, both on a “bias level” and musically, he had lots of admiration for CL’s voice, rapping ability (stay with me on this) and especially stage presence. When he heard about CL doing a solo comeback, he was excited. When it came out, he listened to it… and then stopped listening to not just “The Baddest Female” but ALL k-pop for months and I’m pretty sure he hasn’t bought anything else k-pop related since this song came out. That’s right, this song is such a piece of shit that it made him give up on k-pop completely, and we’re talking about a CL fan here! For what it’s worth I think I hate the song a little less then him – if nothing else I can admit that the production is certainly very good. However, the rest of the song is just BAD, and I mean VERY BAD, as in BAD MEANING BAD, not BAD MEANING GOOD. Just to be clear.
But surely there wasn’t a song in 2013 that was worse than “The Baddest Female”? Oh, yes there was. You’re forgetting something. To be fair you’ve probably subconsciously blocked it out of your memory completely, and who can blame you. Allow me to remind you now, so when it comes back to haunt you in a bad LSD trip or post-traumatic stress disorder incident later in your life you’ll have time to be fully prepared.
Hwang Minwoo’s “Show Time” is the worst k-pop song ever. Not just for 2013 – but ever. Yes, that’s right, even A-Force’s infamous “Wonder Woman” is a superior song to “Show Time” by a reasonably distinct margin. Hwang Minwoo, also known as “Little PSY” is that kid who appears briefly on the beach in PSY’s “Gangnam Style” video, and I guess somebody thought that it might be an idea to extend his 4 seconds of fame into a few more minutes and take a stab at the k-pop market. Not necessarily a bad thought in itself, I mean, you never know if you’ve got it if you don’t try, right? The result is something else though. The sexualisation of Hwang Minwoo himself both in the lyrics and the video is frankly disturbing and creepy as shit, whoever thought that it was a good idea to have him ogling seemingly mature-age girls needs to have their house inspected by the police for a basement rape dungeon full of prisoners, stat. (If you don’t see the problem, imagine the outcry if the genders were swapped and it was a girl of that age ogling older guys like that. See the problem now? I thought so.) I only can feel sorry for the mystery blonde woman who appears at 2:10 to do a little four-bar rap which is the only listenable part of the song, how the hell did she get dragged into this (unless she’s his older sister and masterminded the whole thing in which case all I can say is “oops”). Then there’s the constant Gangnam Style references deployed constantly to maximise riding on PSY’s fame and of course there’s a token dubstep drop that doesn’t suit the rest of the song but is just lazily shoehorned in there, just like every second comeback by anybody these days. All of this pales into insignificance however compared to the dreadful melodies which would honestly sound like complete shit even if [insert your favourite vocalist here] was singing them. I’m not mad at Little PSY, it’s not his fault, and even if it is he’s too young to really know right from wrong… but what I’d like to know is how the hell this shit got past the gate at the record label. I guess if some people see enough potential dollar signs they’ll do anything.
Well, k-pop’s 2013 certainly sucked a huge amount of dick in terms of music quality, definitely a downgrade on 2012, with most established groups releasing songs of incredible suckiness. However, there were also some jewels amongst the turds for those who cared to wade through the manure, and here’s my roundup of the jewels for 2013.
1. Only feature songs with an accompanying MV are on this list, just to make it interesting, otherwise I’d just link all the songs from f(x)’s “Pink Tape” and IU’s “Modern Times” albums and then call it a day, which would be accurate, but boring.
2. Christmas songs are ineligible for consideration (because they have their own separate blog).
3. Unlike everyothergoddamnbest/worstof2013listgoing, this list is for the full year from January 1st 2013 to December 31st 2013 inclusive (although you may see it come up a few hours before schedule due to timezone differences). Yes I actually waited until the end of the year to publish my list, to give every song fair consideration, imagine that.
4. Obviously this is just my subjective opinion on these matters, and I’ve never met a single person in my lifetime who shared more than about 35% of my overall music taste and opinions, so if you’re violently opposed to anything you’re about to read, don’t worry, so are plenty of other people no doubt. Just because I’m musically educated doesn’t mean that my music taste is any better than yours. Not many people think like I do about this shit so try not to lose your faith in humanity and go on a shooting spree at your local school, or anything like that.
So now that we know you’re (probably) mentally fit to cope with this let’s get started.
30. Sunmi – 24 Hours
Part of the problem with k-pop in 2013 is that so many songs didn’t know what they wanted to be, mixing and matching styles like your drunk aunt at a clothing sale. A mixture of styles isn’t a problem in itself, unless you start blending and mixing styles that don’t really fit together just because they happen to be trendy right now, like the light feel of electro-pop with the heavy feel of dubstep (see: every second k-pop comeback in the last 12 months). JYP being a bit more retro-minded actually got it right though, by going the non-trendy route and inserting a tango breakdown instead and it fucking works, complementing the song beautifully. WUB WUB WUB WUB would have been too much for this beautiful, breathy 80s electro-pop anthem. There’s a lesson here, [every other producer in k-pop ever]!
29. Wassup – Wa$$up
Plenty of people hated this song and probably are wondering right now what the hell it’s doing in my “best” list instead of riding high on the “worst” list… but the reasons why people hate this song mostly have nothing to do with the song itself anyway, which I’m pretty sure most people didn’t even listen to. If you go through the list of objections that people have to “Wa$$up” you get:
1. They promoted their debut song as a “twerking concept“, but there’s no twerking in the MV
2. The MV looks cheaply made
3. The dance moves, fashions and fake tans look ridiculous
4. Some feminist bullshit about the girls being exploited or whatever
5. The video/girls look “trashy”
6. The girls can’t/don’t rap or sing that well
1, 2 and 3 are all true but have nothing to do with the actual song, 4 is just crap because everybody of both genders is exploited in the music business so if you care about that sort of thing just stop listening to music completely you dumb whore, 5 is just you being a cunt because other people are looking hotter and having more fun than you in life and 6 doesn’t matter because it’s not the kind of song that requires proper rapping or singing anyway. Every k-pop song is a soundalike of something, and “Wa$$up” is a soundalike of 80s breakdancing music where the chanted vocals and sub-par rapping was never anything more than just a bit of audio decoration. (Promoting as a “twerk group” was an unfortunate misstep as twerking music is actually a lot more languid and sounds nothing like Wassup’s song.) If you close your eyes while listening to “Wa$$up” and forget about the way it was promoted and the incredible ugliness of the whole thing, what you’ve got is the best 80s-breakdance-movie-inspired k-pop song ever written which actually surpasses a great deal of music from the early 80s breakdancing popularity explosion. If you don’t believe me, go and search some of that original music up and you’ll see what I mean – most of it hasn’t stood the test of time whatsoever, but “Wa$$up” has the same retro feel while also sporting modern updated production – something k-pop is very good at doing.
28. Girl’s Day – Expectation
“Expectation” isn’t Girls Day’s best song, but it’s definitely their best song of 2013 and also one of the best songs that any k-pop group two years old or more has managed to pull out of the hat over the last 12 months. Lots of fuss was made over the sexy video but the well-written melodies, great arrangement (something k-pop really lacked in spades in 2013 thanks to the influence of a certain other song) and Girls Day’s typically synth-heavy audio production were the real stars. I don’t have much else to say about this one either so here’s a picture of Girls Day’s Yura.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
They’re worth 1000 words, don’t you know. Pictures, I mean.
27. Im Chang Jung – Open The Door
A cover of last year’s song “Open The Door” by Wonderboyz, Im Chang Jung’s version improves on the original drastically by keeping more or less the same backing but replacing the standard k-pop idol rapping with actual melodies that are worth listening to, giving the song the extra depth it needs to stand out from the crowd. The MV is funny but also a bit unfortunate as it’s going to draw “Gangnam Style” comparisons – I showed it to a few people who don’t follow k-pop at all and their reactions were all the same: “is this the only type of video Koreans know how to do?”. PSY did k-pop no favours at all when it comes to being taken seriously on the world stage, but then perhaps it’s best that people don’t take this kind of thing too seriously anyway as taking way too much shit way too seriously seems to be a road to mental illness for a lot of k-pop fans. Cheers, Im Chang Jung.
26. Henry – Trap
Believe it or not, a lot of Super Junior fans don’t like Henry, the Canadian/Asian addition to Super Junior’s Chinese/Korean subgroup Super Junior-M. I’m not sure why this is. Maybe it’s just simple-minded racism, or maybe it’s extremely complex and twisted fangirl insanity, or maybe, just maybe, it’s got something to do with Henry debuting with a song better than anything Super Junior themselves have managed to churn out since 2009. A great piano intro and an equally great chorus help this song through some of the duller verse sections, overall it meshes together nicely and the result is the best song SM has given to a male artist this year, by a fairly wide margin.
25. Seungri – Gotta Talk To You
Every member of BigBang released solo stuff in 2013 and most of it was completefuckingcrap. Someone actually asked me not long ago which comeback I preferred: G-Dragon, Taeyang or T.O.P to which my reaction was along the lines of “Seungri shat all over them”. How could someone forget about Seungri’s great song? The whole thing both looks and sounds smooth-as-silk, the addition of a snippet from the “Hard Remix” version at the end of the MV is inspired, and the odd bit of sneakily-included fanservice for those keen to relive Seungri’s recent sadomasochistic sexual escapades was surely appreciated by his target audience.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Not a dry vagina in the house, I’m sure. It’s all really very fucking good and why YG can’t deliver songs of this quality all the time instead of the devastatingly poor nu-school crap they’ve been churning out for the most part lately I’ll never know. I guess they all want to be “cutting edge” and shit. I wonder how that’s working out for them.
24. After School – Heaven
This song for the Japanese market is what After School’s mundane Korean comeback song “First Love” should have been. The video even includes an intro with the backing track from “First Love”, which shows that the aforementioned song works just fine as an intro to something better but not as an entire standalone song in itself. At the one minute mark the song “Heaven” starts proper and it’s about three times the speed not to mention three times as interesting as anything on After School’s entire “First Love” mini album. I guess After School are saving their decent material for the Japanese yen these days and given the currency exchange rate who can blame them. The song is so good that it almost makes up for the lack of anything worthwhile from Orange Caramel this year. Also it’s great to see my #1 k-pop bias Raina looking good in a sexy concept for a change.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Usually when After School goes sexy it suits Raina like an elephant suits a motorcycle so I’m glad they got closer to the mark this time, although she still looks best in Orange Caramel’s preppy school/air hostess/maid jerkoff salon outfits or whatever.
That’s her smiling at you, while you fap. Do it, do it for Raina.
23. Ladies Code – Hate You
I’ll tell you that one song that you won’t find anywhere on this list is Lee Hi’s “Rose”. When it came out I thought “Rose” was decent enough to be a contender for this list, but then nugus Ladies Code released “Hate You” and that was the end of that for Lee Hi. I’m all for soundalikes if they improve on the original (and that’s honestly what idol k-pop is all about and has been ever since its inception) and “Hate You” is basically “Rose 2.0″ so Lee Hi can go suck a fat cock (when she’s old enough ahem). Where “Rose” kills the momentum “Hate You” builds it. Where “Rose” drifts off into insipid vocal wank territory “Hate You” sticks to straightforward melodic catchiness. Add a decent (and decently creepy) MV and some girls that are actually of fappable age and it suddenly becomes very hard to justify clicking on that Lee Hi link. Don’t do it. “Hate You” is better. Those of you who do it anyway just to spite me will soon be back, clicking on “Hate You” to wash your ears out with something that actually sounds decent.
22. Lee Jung Hyun – V
I didn’t even know who this fucking woman was so I had to look her up on Wikipedia because I suck. Turns out she’s some actress or whatever and has starred in a bunch of cool stuff, but I don’t really follow actresses so I didn’t know any of that. All I know is that this song fucking rocks. The guitar is an inspired addition and the whole arrangement has a nice economy to it that’s lacking in a lot of pop music lately – it doesn’t fuck around and gets straight down to the business of shaking your ass. Try to listen to this and not move some part of your body along to the beat, good luck. Then tell me that someone who isn’t even on this list at all had a better song this year with a straight face.
21. HISTORY – Dreamer
Another nugu group with a shitty name (and not the last one you’ll see on this list), HISTORY’s debut song was actually great and seemed to me like the sort of thing JYP was trying to do with 2pm’s latest songs but didn’t quite manage to pull off. The ambitious Queen-esque vocal harmonies really made this song stand out, and it’s a shame that HISTORY weren’t able to recreate them live, but then neither could Queen, which just goes to show that these sort of things are essentially a studio-only creation anyway. Add to this some genuinely different backings and a building song structure that actually goes somewhere cool instead of hinting at awesomeness and then flatlininghalfwaythrough, this was one of the only “structurally experimental” tracks in kpop this year where the experiment actually paid off. Or at least it paid off in terms of the song quality if not sales or whatever, but then I don’t really give a fuck about sales, this list is “favourite k-pop songs” not “most money-felching-from-your-anus k-pop songs”.
20. Nine Muses – Wild
I never followed Nine Muses much, I always thought their songs were kind of failures at least to my ear (whether they were commercial failures or not, I don’t care about, as previously mentioned). Then “Wild” came out and I had to reassess that opinion. I can’t recall exactly what new romantic 80s pop song “Wild” is ripping off, and I don’t really care, because I’m almost certain they’ve done a far superior job than whatever the original is. If I’ve got a choice between a bunch of 80s dudes with permed mullet hairdos, bad eyeliner and denim jeans dancing awkwardly to some pop song with a shithouse over-reverbed 80s mix, or nine ridiculously hot girls singing and dancing in super-coordinated fashion to a soundalike version with more streamlined melodies and arrangements plus sleeker production, that’s an easy choice for me to make. One of the things I like about k-pop that initially made me a fan was that it seemed to take what was good from pop music in the 80s (the focus on melody and harmony carrying the song structure, something that western producers have largely been ignoring since about 1990) and combined it with the things that are good about pop music making in 2013 (better production technology and production fashion). “Wild” is a great example of this. If I completely lost you there, don’t worry – just know that this song is good and that if you missed out on it this year, you should click the video and check it out.
19. f(x) – Rum Pum Pum Pum
Definitely NOT the best song on f(x)’s fantastic “Pink Tape” album, but still one of the best feature tracks of the year, f(x) would have fared even better on this list had SM decided to hand the MV torch over to “Airplane” or “Step“. As it stands “Rum Pum Pum Pum” is still great and something genuinely different for k-pop – a song with oddball modal melodic riffs and no chord progressions at all, yet featuring tons of singing, vocal harmonies everywhere and hardly any rapping. Even more astonishingly, Amber’s token four bars of rapping actually sounds good this time around, or at the very least it’s in Korean this time so as a non-Korean speaker I’m not aware of how cornball and cringeworthy it might be to a native Korean speaker (tru dat, you know she got it). SM’s oddball marketing/song allocation strategy for f(x) seems to be paying off in spades, and I sure as hell breathed a sigh of relief when this song came out and it was actually decent, given how many incredibly disappointing k-pop comebacks it was surrounded by. I then started breathing sighs of a different kind when I saw Sulli in those suspenders and black “geek” shirt.
As if there wasn’t enough reasons to watch the damn video over and over. I didn’t get a lot else done the day that this came out, and it made me feel nostalgic for the days not so long ago where I’d feel this way about a new k-pop song every other week.
18. BESTie – Love Options
This year my “Love Options” increased by one, as another terribly-named nugu group BESTie released one of the best pop songs this year. Oddly enough it came from the pen of Bravesound, the AC-DC/Cannibal Corpse of k-pop producers (in terms of releasing basically the same song over and over and just sticking a new name on it) getting back to their hi-NRG roots and surprising everybody, including their critics and maybe even including themselves. More proof that anyone worrying about their bias and not paying attention to the nugus this year was missing out on where a lot of the quality songs were hiding.
17. Hong Jin Young – Boogie Man
Hong Jin Young is certainly no nugu though, and while this song isn’t quite as good as “Love’s Battery” (especially when the godlike Orange Caramel do it, hnnnnng) it’s definitely a notch up in terms of production and still a pretty fucking good modern-day trot excursion. Also correct me if I’m wrong but is Hong Jin Young not completely sexy as fuck? Look at the age rating on this video in the top right:
She’s so nice that you have to be twelve years old just to look at her in Korea even when she’s fully clothed. My god what does she have to do when she picks her sister’s kids up from school, wear a fucking burqa to stop rivulets of jizz plugging up the school sewer system? Of course this has no bearing on the song quality but I just wanted to mention this.
In other news it says a lot about the sorry state of idol k-pop in 2013 when trot performers are getting so high on this list. THEY’RE CATCHING UP, FOLKS. LIFT YOUR GAME.
16. Rania – Just Go
I imagine by now that the people behind Rania have chalked them up as some kind of failed east/west k-pop hybrid experiment, but there’s no denying that they at least had the songs to succeed. Rania took out the #1 spot on my best-of list for 2012 and while “Just Go” isn’t quite up to that lofty standard it’s still pretty fucking decent and worthy of your time a lot more than whatever other bullshit you were probably highly anticipating this year that fucking sucked. Listen to it and tell me I’m wrong. I was playing this on my radio show the other day and dudes who fucking think k-pop is ridiculous were singing along to the chorus of this shit because they just couldn’t help themselves. If that’s not the sign of a great k-pop song I don’t know what is.
15. SPEED – That’s My Fault
Forget your B.A.Ps, your G-Ds and your Block B’s, CCM’s resident boy group SPEED had the ultimate “midpaced k-pop idol track with a shitload of posey fake-ass tough-guy rapping in it” song this year. Being a non-Korean speaker I’m in no position to talk about rap quality, but I can tell you that this song works for me for these reasons:
1. Producer Dublekick’s typically old-school quirks (clearly chosen to match the song’s historical theme) give the song a nice anthemic quality and help soften the rap pose which would be far too grating with an ultra-modern electropop style production
2. The songwriters sensibly hand chorus duties over to Davichi’s Minkyung, providing much-needed melodic lilt and fapability
3. Did I mention Minkyung is hot
Of course being a CCM release it has a ridiculously high-budget long-ass drama versionin two parts that is really good and you should check it out if you haven’t already and you’ve got a free hour or whatever, and some tissues. It’s essentially just a tarted-up rap song, but my god, what a sexy, funky, melody-rich tarting-up it’s gone through. Also Minkyung is hot. Not sure if I mentioned that before or what but it can’t hurt to restate this important point.
14. Delight – Mega Yak
“Mega Yak” from nugus Delight (wtf with these names but whatev) is an aggressive synth-driven face-masher of a song that has a modern sound (maybe a little too modern, I could have done without those “stop” bits and the dubstep drop but hey at least it actually fits for once), vocal excursions that aren’t wanky enough to sink the ship, tons of variety in a short timeframe, and most importantly it sounds…
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…FUN, goddammit. I consider that cap the k-pop equivalent of Public Enemy wearing clocks all the fucking time, because just like rap fans needed to be reminded “what mo’fuckin’ time it is”, K-pop fans need to get seriously reacquainted with the concept of fun. FUN is something that so many k-pop fans have forgotten how to have, what with their endless whining about “where’s my comeback” when their favourite group comes back every 18 months bare minimum, “why is she wearing that” when she’ll wear something completely different tomorrow, “my bias didn’t get enough singing parts” when they all sound the fucking same anyway, “I can’t listen to that group anymore because they’re so fake” when the entire fucking music industry worldwide is based on illusion, etc etc. Pop music is supposed to be about fun, so have some and stop being a cunt about everything. Listening to this song will help, or maybe it’ll just make your ears bleed, but that’s a win/win as far as I’m concerned.
13. Tiny-G – Miss You
When Tiny-G first appeared at the end of last year, I thought to myself that surely “short” isn’t a great concept for a k-pop group. To get a picture of how short they are, here’s Tiny-G standing next to Nine Muses. Given this selection, would YOU pick one of the girls in the front?
…but then I realised how many insanely devoted Boram fans there are and thought “hmmm… I guess this could work – but they’ll definitely need better songs in the future”. “Miss You” is one of those better songs, and has one of the most insanely catchy choruses of 2013. You’ll be singing this fucker in your head long after the song is over. Even more astonishingly, the girls look hot in the video, but I guess that’s due to the same size differential effect that the AV industry exploits – male pornstars tend to be short because average penis size doesn’t decrease with height, so people who look resoundingly “meh” in real life can often look great on camera as long as you don’t stand them next to incredibly tall people. Fuck it – all aboard the Boram Express.
12. Global Icon – Beatles
2NE1, you’ve officially reached your use-by date, go home. Some nugu group nobody even gives a fuck about just out-2NE1′ed your last two years worth of back catalogue. Not to be outdone by Delight in the “hey our group name is stupid and our debut song name is ever stupider” stakes, 2013 newbies Global Icon (commonly and wisely shortened to just “GI”) committed marketing double-suicide straight out of the gate with both a “tomboy” concept and a band and song name designed to be as Google search-unfriendly as possible. People can argue all day about the gender politics and fapability of this group’s image but at the end of the day “Beatles” was a great moody little dance song (those sonar ping and wind noises plus a rare example of intelligent use of hard Autotune all doing wonders to enhance the ambience and therefore the mood) and that’s what matters for this list. It’s a pity GI didn’t follow it up with anything worth a damn.
11. T-ara – Number Nine
Having now accepted their true calling as the Howard Stern of k-pop, T-ara’s “Number Nine” MV shows the group engaged in various esoteric magic rituals designed to curse netizens with the fate of never having any power over the group ever again or amounting to anything worthwhile in life… who am I kidding, netizens already have that destiny clearly mapped out for them. But more importantly, “Number Nine” is a typical Shinsadong Tiger dancefloor stomper as good as last year’s “Sexy Love” and while the pop-cultural reference and true meaning of the song sailed right over most people’s heads, this song undisputably rocked and that was all that mattered.
10. Nine Muses – Gun
Another song from Nine Muses which sneakily borrows from an 80s pop song that I can’t recall, but once again who gives a fuck when the result is this good. It’s nice to hear a pop production where the songwriter isn’t scared of the guitar carrying a bit of melodic riffing, and with quality songs like these Nine Muses are going to easily eclipse a certain other nine-member girl group, who certainly didn’t put out anything even close to this standard in 2013.
9. SPEED – It’s Over
It’s rare for a song from a guy group to climb this high in my favourite songs list, but a quick bit of research showed that Shinsadong Tiger wrote the thing so I guess I shouldn’t be shocked. I think that maybe he uses that time while his car is parked for two idols to fuck in as extra practice time to hone his songwriting and production craft. He’s probably got a portable keyboard under the dash and when Xiumin rails Chorong up the butthole in the back seat he’s there in the driver’s cabin trying to ascertain the pitch of her screams and making melodies out of the result. It’s possible, but however he’s doing it, it certainly works and definitely explains the phrase “it’s over, it’s over tonight” which is probably what Chorong said when Xiumin came and accidentally got some jizz up her nose. I’m really not into guy groups at all but I’ll make an exception for a great song no matter what, and “It’s Over” won me with an infectious chorus, a cool Tron-esque music video, great driving rhythms, a breakdown that actually makes sense, and Minkyung from Davichi being hot (again). This is basically 2PM’s “Again And Again” except punchy and tough instead of limp-wristed and boring.
8. T-ara – Do You Know Me?
Let’s start off by getting one thing straight that confused a lot of people when this came out; the MV above is actually for two completely separate (but related) songs. The song “Do You Know Me?” starts at 3:25, and the slow track that begins at 0:05 is actually “Again 1977″, which is essentially the “ballad remix”. I can confirm that these are intended as separate songs as I have the “Again 1977″ mini-album and that’s how they appear there, as two separate tracks which are not segued. I don’t really care for slow-ass ballads so “Again 1977″ can go jump in a lake for all I care, but “Do You Know Me?” is classic T-ara of Wae Ireoni standard and if that’s not good enough for you then I guess it must suck to be you.
7. Tren-D – Candy Boy
Here’s one I bet you didn’t expect and mostly didn’t even know about. When I first clicked on this I didn’t expect such an awesome song either, but then that’s why I trawl the nugu videos, to find shit like this. This would have been a massive hit if an established group did it instead of some girls who are so unknown that they can roller-blade and dance outdoors with cameras around and everybody just gets the hell out of their way and clears right the fuck out in an orderly fashion. The actual song starts at 1:41 if you want to skip all the preamble bullshit, which I’d certainly advise as the sooner you hear this amazingly cool song the better. This song would have sat very nicely on a Crayon Pop album, and while I don’t want to be one of those annoying “this song that I like should have gotten more attention wah wah wah” cunts, this song that I like should have gotten more attention. Wah wah wah.
6. IU – The Red Shoes
If the opening track from IU’s great “Modern Times” album “Love Of B” was the feature track with the MV it may have nearly snaffled the number #1 spot for best song, but whoever makes the decisions at Loen HQ went with “The Red Shoes” instead and it’s certainly not a bad second choice. Of course, lots of ludicrous plagiarism controversies then ensued, which were all fucking retarded because IT’S SUPPOSED TO BE A RETRO ALBUM THAT SOUNDS LIKE 30s AND 40s MUSIC, THAT’S THE WHOLE POINT YOU DUMB SHITS. Music back then was actually a lot more derivative than it is now, how do you think it even developed into what we have today, by people copying and adding minor variations, not in massive huge leaps. Pop music evolves slowly. Anyway those people with a working brain cell didn’t worry about any of that crap and just listened to “The Red Shoes” and enjoyed it, and what a great song it is – the verses are a little dull but that chorus makes up for it and has got to be just about the chorus of the fucking year and way better than anything else IU has done… ever, really. Except some of the other tracks on “Modern Times”.
CCM are scooping up a lot of the “best” category this year and it’s because their favoured songwriters still largely seem to know how to write music and aren’t suckling at the withered teats of “dubstep drop 101″, “pointless structural fuckery”, “let’s add this fucking annoying synth noise for no reason” and other ridiculous trendy bullshit like everybody else was in 2013. In this collaboration song, they demonstrate how to do a ballad right – by speeding the fucker up until it’s not really a ballad anymore. Ahhh, clever. Not to mention the vocals are economical – if someone like Whitney Houston or Mariah Carey got hold of a song like this it’d probably go at about 35 BPM, be full of semi-improvisational wank and would make you want to bash yourself to death with a shovel. Just sing the melodies the way the composer wrote them you fucking twits. Masturbation is nothing to be ashamed of but it’s also nothing to be particularly proud of, and just because you can do it doesn’t mean the whole world wants to watch and hear. In this song the CCM boys and girls show all those diva vocalists how music as opposed to vocal masturbation is actually made and the net result is a quasi-ballad that is not only listenable but one of the songs of the year.
4. EvoL – Get Up
I could be just a little biased here because EvoL have a Australian member in the group (Hayana, who sings at 0:49), but then I really wasn’t impressed at all with this relatively nugu group’s 2012 debut song “We Are A Bit Different“, so maybe not. “Get Up” is a vast improvement though, it has just about everything a girl group song needs:
1. Hot girls
2. Implied castration
3. Some chick who sounds like Zelo from B.A.P’s sister
4. Punchy sounds
5. Less than 3 minutes in length
The last one is important. Better to cut it a little short and leave people wanting more, than to drag on and make every fucker sick of it. Something a lot of other pop songwriters could learn. One of the main reason I hate on ballads so much besides vocal masturbation is song length. If you cram the same amount of lyrics into a slower song, the song goes longer and gets more boring. This song is rocking and EvoL keep it short, sharp and shiny so the punchy but repetitive rhythms and melodies don’t overstay their welcome. It’s a perfect length for a song like this.
3. F-ve Dolls – Can You Love Me?
Formerly 5Dolls, they’re now called F-ve Dolls because there’s now six of them, so they can’t use the number five anymore, so they’ve censored out a letter to make it more accurate, get it? Haphazard k-pop naming logic prevails, nevertheless the outstanding quality of the recently reconfigured F-ve Dolls “First Love” mini album is one of the best kept secrets of k-pop. Apart from the screechy and unlistenable Roly Poly clone “Soulmate #1“, every song on it is gold. With the second feature track “Can You Love Me?” F-ve Dolls made redundant about 50% of all girl group’s entire back-catalogues with the kind of ultra-light and breezy suspended harmony floating groove that Apink and Secret always threatened to do but never quite managed. Then just when you think the song can’t get any more awesome, underage whipping-post and cyberbullying target of every k-pop fan ever T-ara N4′s Dani appears and drops a fast yet silky-smooth vocal melody (which isn’t a rap – the notes are pitched) that FLOATS OVER THE TOP OF THAT SHIT LIKE A FUCKING DOVE FROM THE HEAVENS. By the time the second chorus kicks in this song has scored so many goals that all that’s left to do is masturbate over new member Seunghee who has boosted the average attractiveness rating of this group by something like 1500%.
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KKS, all is forgiven: keep adding extra members to your groups all you fucking want.
2. GLAM – In Front Of The Mirror
Since modern idol k-pop is sucking incredible amounts of horse rectum lately to the point where trot performers can actually realistically compete and release better material, it’s only logical that some bright k-pop composer out there try and incorporate a bit of the trot sound into idol k-pop itself. Good thinking as it happens, and nugus GLAM are the ones to benefit. Their debut song “I Like That” was nothing special (although it did contain some outstanding choreography which is something that girl groups typically lack compared to their male counterparts), but “In Front Of The Mirror” is just fucking outstanding and packed full of great melody and harmony, not to mention lyrics which are actually smart and touching rather than just sappy – a true rarity. Also the first k-pop MV I’ve seen to be honest about bra pads, Sistar take note.
1. Crayon Pop – 1,2,3,4
You, right now: “Oh of course, Kpopalypse, I knew you were finally going to mention Crayon Pop, and yes, BarBa… wait, THIS ISN’T BARBARBAR! WHERE’S BARBARBAR YOU CUNT? WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SONG? WHAT KIND OF PRANK IS THIS?”
You, in five minutes: “HOW DID I NOT KNOW ABOUT THIS, THANK YOU KPOPALYPSE IT’S SO FUN AND SO BEAUTIFUL WITH THE PERFECT COMBINATION OF CHANTING FUN, GREAT MELODY AND HARMONY, I THINK I’M GOING TO CRY *SOB SNIFF* POP MUSIC WILL NEVER BE THIS GOOD EVER AGAIN, I’M GOING TO KILL MYSELF BECAUSE I CAN’T STAND TO LIVE IN A WORLD WHERE MUSIC WILL BE ALL DOWNHILL FROM THIS POINT RIGHT NOW, BUT FIRST I’LL LISTEN TO THIS SONG ANOTHER 39625 TIMES”
To be honest I didn’t know about “1, 2, 3, 4″ either until someone threw me a link on my ask.fm (one of the reasons I still have the thing) so thank you very much to whoever it was who did that, it was worth wading through 1000 questions to get to yours. As it happens this song has been around for a while but never released or promoted properly in Korea as far as I can tell, however it got a Japanese MV release earlier in 2013 just before the “BarBarBar” explosion hit. Avid Crayon Pop fans will know that “BarBarBar“, while decent, is actually Crayon Pop’s worst song and that all their other songs are better. None of them got onto my 2012 best-of list because of the stiff competition last year, but had “Bing Bing“, “Dancing Queen” or “Saturday Night” been initially released in 2013 they would have all hit the higher end of this chart with little effort, such has been the dip in quality across the board. Here’s hoping for a better 2014!
Anyway that’s it, thanks for supporting Kpopalypse over 2013 by reading my crap, don’t forget to leave me some hate mail, and also check out the worst songs list too if you haven’t already and you think you can handle it. Cheers!
2. How much fans and idols alike are being played like suckers by entertainment companies
This blog has the answer, in both short and long form.
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Answers in short form first:
1. Fuck all.
2. A lot.
Those of you who hate long blog posts, you can now stop reading because you already have your answers. The rest of this post is for those of you who like my usual rambling style, or for those people who don’t believe me and absolutely must insist that I back up my completely-obvious-anyway points with some sort of detail.
Let’s talk about k-pop idol contracts first. Firstly, how fair are they?
When a label agrees to take on an artist, a contract is usually signed between the two parties. The contract is basically a written agreement that decides how business is going to work between the artist and the label. It includes things like the profit share, which is how much money per sale the label keeps vs how much the artist gets. A very small independent label in the west that’s feeling generous might split the profits 50/50 with the artist. Larger western labels usually take about 90% of the profit for themselves and the artist gets 10%… or less. So why would anyone sign to the major label instead of the independent? You’d have to be crazy, right? Well, the major label has a lot more reach – they can get you on the radio, on TV stations, they can do more advertising, fund your expensive touring, etc. because they’ve got a larger capital base to work from, so even though you’re earning less per unit, you have the potential to sell a lot more units and thereby make a larger profit anyway.
However, until those sales are made, how is the artist going to live? The answer is the “record company advance”. The record company often gives the artist a stack of money upfront (usually a few thousand for a small label, can be up to millions for high-profile A-list western artists), and says “here you go, this is for you to record your album and tour”, but this money is not a gift, it’s a loan. The artist now has a debt – money that they owe the record company. All money that the artist makes from record sales, touring etc goes toward paying off the debt first, before the artist ever sees any profits – they are “in the red” until it’s all paid back. Whenever you hear about some artist getting given a ridiculous shitload of cash, and you wonder what the fuck possessed someone to just hand over a massive wad of money like that to someone who is already rich as fuck, it’s because whoever is giving them that money is expecting a return on their investment; they believe that the artist in question will be able to make all that money back, and then some.
What happens if the artist runs out of advance money, because recording their album costs more than they thought it would be, or took longer, or they just have “expensive habits”? The label won’t let them starve – they will generally give them a wage… and that wage is also added onto the loan, so the artist is expected to essentially pay their own wages out of record sales and tours. And guess what else is also typically added onto the loan? All the promotional costs. Those expensive TV ads, the ads on the radio, posters, expenses for an MV, cost of making merchandise, all of this stuff gets thrown on top of the debt, the artist has to make enough money to cover the costs of all that stuff. But what if the record label keeps doing advertising and MVs and spending money on promoting you at a faster rate than you can pay the money back? Well, er, um… welcome to how the majority of major label deals work. By continually keeping you in the promotional loop, a record label can keep you in debt as long as they want – as soon as you’re about to break even, “let’s do more ads and another MV!” and you’ve got a rising debt again, just like that.
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Now a smart artist when negotiating a contract will insist on a clause where they can veto promotional expenses and set limits on what their label can add onto their debt. However not many artists are that smart – most of them are young, naive and star-struck and will sign any old bullshit some guy in a suit from a major label telling them they will be a star throws in their face. So unless the naive artist has an absolute MONSTER hit, they’re going to be in debt for the duration of their record company contract, if the record company has their way. Record companies are very good at spending money, and consider it their duty to spend every last bit of cash on pushing their artist. The mentality of people who work in this “expenses allocation” side of the business is “if my artist is making a profit, I’m not doing my job”. The artists that get really rich are the small handful who either were savvy enough to negotiate better contract terms, run their own business side of things themselves and/or just made money a ton faster than their label could spend it. The other ones, the vast majority, are just on that survival wage and see about the same amount of money as they would in an entry-level retail job…. at best. At the end of the contract term any remaining debt is (usually) waived, but the artist usually didn’t see any payout either. They could have worked behind the counter at a supermarket checkout the whole time and seen similar income.
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So that’s a typical western scenario. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s go over to k-pop and factor in what k-pop does differently. I’ve never worked with a k-pop label myself, so I of course don’t know the exact details of any contract, but just from observing things from the outside, a few basic things are fairly obvious to me as someone with general experience in this area.
Firstly, k-pop entertainment companies don’t tend to give artists cash advances so those artists can go spend it on recording/transport/food/hookers/drugs – instead, they keep the artist closely under their wing and advance their artists goods and services instead – the company pays for all the artist’s living expenses, and spend years training them and making their product. They provide accommodation, food, equipment, training from several different tutors, pay utilities, provide clothes, etc etc. All of this isn’t cheap of course. If the whole “family”-type marketing some of the bigger k-pop labels do has any truth in it, it’s probably only in the sense that the label spends money on their in-house artists in a similar fashion to how your parents spend money on you while you’re growing up.
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(Oh, and in my town, known as Australia’s “murder capital“, the most notorious serial killers in the 70s and 80s were called “The Family“. Just putting that out there.)
So how much money is involved? If you’ve got parents in the close vicinity, go to them right now and ask them how much money they have spent, in total on bringing you up over the last three years. Then (if they haven’t gone into hysterics or post-traumatic stress just from thinking about it) ask them how much extra money they would have had to spend if you also needed specialist private tutors in language, dancing and singing during that time. Then multiply that total figure by the amount of girls or boys in a typical idol group. Gosh, suddenly we’ve got hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe even millions. And this is just pre-debut training expenses, we haven’t even talked about making any music or videos yet!
So where do you suppose the entertainment company is going to source the money for all this? You guessed it – the idols’ eventual money-making activity. Existing labels can use previous successful activity to fund it, whereas a new label starting from scratch probably either needs a rich sponsor or a bank loan, but at the end of the day the responsibility to make that money back rests on the members of the new idol group’s shoulders, or otherwise the whole business model isn’t sustainable.
So what would a k-pop artist’s contract look like, compared to a western artist? Is there any way they could negotiate a deal where they at least get some money?
Doubtful. Here’s why.
Say you’re a girl auditioning to be in some new five-member k-pop girl group, and the people running the auditions have trimmed down the selection from 100 girls to about a dozen, including you. You get called into the office.
The CEO puts some paper and a pen in front of you. He says “here’s a contract – sign this, and we’ll put you in our training program and debut you in 3 years time”.
You weren’t born yesterday, so you read the contract over. You notice that this contract insists on strict adherence to the label’s schedule, you’re not allowed to see or contact your family, you have to eat their food, you don’t even get a wage, basically it makes you their slave!
“But this contract is unfair!”, you protest.
What do you think their reaction will be:
1: “What would YOU like to see in this contract? Maybe we can come to an agreement that suits everyone?”
2:
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Selection processes for idol groups are extremely competitive, and when you first approach an agency, you’re a nobody, so you have no bargaining power. If there’s not much separating you and the other girls who auditioned with you, there’s no reason why they would negotiate with you. If you protest they’ll just send you out the door and ask you to hold it open for the next girl to walk through. Sure, you might be a bit more talented, but so what – that’s what the three year training program is for, to compensate for any talent shortfalls. Another girl might have to train a bit harder, but if they’re going to be more co-operative, from the label’s point of view it’s a better investment to go with someone not as capable but willing to work hard to address any weaknesses. Less potential problems down the track, and it means the label can sign them with any contract they want.
There’s an exception, however. Where k-pop artists sometimes probably DO get good contracts is once their initial contract expires, and they get to sign a second contract. If they did well up until this point, they are now a known name which means that they have bargaining power; they can say “okay, we’re a known name that can generate revenue, so if you want us to sign this, we insist on terms X, Y and Z” which might mean fairer profit-share, more free time, a better release schedule, or any number of other things. There’s a good chance that Davichi’s new contract with CCM doesn’t suck – for CCM to get the group away from the new agency and back under their wing, they would have no doubt had to dangle a few appealing carrots. KARA members have also been buying real estate recently, which suggests that they have disposable income – whatever agreement was made behind closed doors after the group’s notorious dispute with DSP was no doubt more in KARA’s favour than whatever was happening previously. You may now also understand why SM Entertainment’s ultra-long 13 year slave contracts were such a hot issue in the industry – by the time that 13 years is up, an artist’s time in the pop limelight may have been and gone, and perhaps they are not hot property anymore, and once again the power of negotiation is not in their favour.
These are the exceptions. VERY few k-pop artists would be rich, or even well-off. K-pop companies are good at giving their idols the appearance of affluence, but it’s not reality. That flashy car you see in the MV? It’s a rental, it goes back in the hire company’s garage after the MV shoot is over (and no pries for guessing where the money that pays for the hire fees eventually gets sourced). Do you really think CL owns a “black-on-black Lamborghini”?
If so, think again (but if she ever does get one I hope she doesn’t grip the steering wheel like that – incorrect steering wheel grip on a performance car is way more dangerous that dangling some fucking oranges, you know). Like any idol has even got time to go cruising around in a vehicle so impractical anyway. She might get to keep her “Gizibe” bling but that’d be about all, and even that’s a maybe. Even the more flashy clothes are often borrowed and unless you’re going the DIY route like T-ara’s Hyomin they go back to the warehouse once the MV and TV promotions are over. Every time you hear about some new MV that came out where crazy six-digit sums were spent on things like set design and clothing, that’s all debt that the artist has to pay off. Those MVs don’t look quite so impressive now, do they.
When Block B didn’t get paid for over a year, they took their label to court and lost, because they just weren’t making any profit after expenses so there simply wasn’t anything to pay them. They wouldn’t have been able to afford a cup of coffee, meanwhile their label was still spending megabucks on their promotions up until that point. This is a normal situation. is it illegal? Not if the group agreed to it in the initial contract. This should also put those “fan gifts” into context. The reason why some groups get so excited about their gifts is because it’s the only actual source of assets that many of them have! Remember when U-Kiss members tried to get fans to buy them copies of a computer game? Why wouldn’t they just buy the copies themselves? Perhaps they’re typical teenage douchebags, or perhaps they’re just fucking broke, and their contract is that shitty that shelling out $50 for a computer game is not something that they can even afford (and they’re typical teenage douchebags).
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So what about the product?
It might be helpful to talk about the supermarket industry. Yes, it’s GOING OFF ON A TANGENT TIME, folks. Would it even be a Kpopalypse blog without a twist like this in it?
I knew a person who was a PR representative for a large food company. Her job was to deal with supermarket chain owners and manage their display of her company’s product, making sure that it is placed in premium spaces where people buy more of it (stay with me – this becomes relevant). There’s several tricks that supermarkets use to get people to buy more stuff:
However, how is it decided who gets those premium spaces? The answer has several terms, such as “cliffing” or “slotting fees” but what it all basically amounts to is shelf space rental – the manufacturer pays the supermarket a fee to allow them to use the shelf space. How much are these fees? There’s no set figure, because it varies depending on what shelf space you want – obviously shelf space that more customers buy from will be worth more than the little bit right down the bottom nobody notices. The person I knew said her company spent “thousands”, but didn’t elaborate specifically. What she did say, was this: the supermarket chains she dealt with made more money off selling the shelf space to food manufacturers than they made from customers buying the product – a LOT more. This turns the consumer equation on its head. Here’s what someone would logically assume about a supermarket:
You = the customer
What’s on the shelf = the product
Supermarket = the retailer
But really, from the supermarket’s point of view, it’s more like this:
Supermarket = the retailer
Food manufacturer = the customer
You and the amount of attention you give to the shelf space = the product
Have you ever noticed when a supermarket stopped stocking your favourite item? Did you go and complain to a staff member and say “hey, I really like Thing A that you stocked, when are you guys going to bring it back?”, only to be met with lots of umming and ahhing and “er yeah, um… I dunno, I’ll ask management for you about Thing A and we’ll see what we can do”… and they seemed really noncommittal about it and nothing really changed and you still wonder why? You’d think that as a customer, your purchasing power would be important, right? Well, it’s not, and that’s because that as far as supermarket management is concerned, you are not the customer. You’re the product, your function is to look at shelves and buy Things, and it’s this function as a consumer that is being sold to the real customer – the manufacturers of Things. Thing A is however no longer stocked because the company that makes it decided they didn’t want to pay for the shelf space anymore, or they got outbid by another company who makes Thing B, so that’s all you can get for now. Just wave to the checkout girls and smile because you’re just a cog in a machine that isn’t really even for you.
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Now keeping this example in mind, let’s get back to k-pop.
It’s no secret that there’s no money in selling music to the public anymore, as most people are downloading, either illegally for free, or at best, for a fraction of the price that a full-length album used to cost. Most western groups make up for the fact that nobody’s buying albums by going on the road and making a shitload of money touring (which is why concert ticket prices have skyrocketed in the past 10 years) – but most k-pop groups don’t do this either. So where is the money made? How can these companies and groups even afford to exist? Let Bernie Cho of DFSB Kollective give you the answer:
From 7:07: “The cold hard reality right now is music is actually no longer the business – if anything, it’s become a business card. If it becomes popular, it leads to other opportunities, that is where they make money.”
These other opportunities are commercial films (CFs), endorsements and product placement. An idol’s MV is at heart an advert, but it’s not just an advert to you to buy the music. It’s also an advert to people who might like to use the young men and women in these things for advertising and product placement purposes. The Korean entertainment companies are saying to manufacturers of Things “Look at this group of guys, wouldn’t they look nice holding your product? They have lots of crazy rabid fans itching to buy anything associated with them.” – your idol is not even the product, he is living, breathing shelf space, just waiting for a product to be associated with him.
CFs are self-explanatory and idols get paid a ton of money for these. We’ve all seen product placement in MVs too, where people are showing using phones and so forth with the brand and sometimes even a specific applet shown clearly to the camera. If the company is willing to pay a premium some companies will just go “fuck it let’s just make it a CF instead and do a song ABOUT the damn phone”.
You’ve also perhaps seen the reverse end of the scale which is stuff like this:
When a brand shows up incidentally in k-pop, if the person who owns that brand hasn’t paid a hefty sum in product placement fees, they blur it out. This isn’t product placement, it’s the lack of product placement, it’s the entertainment company saying “your advert could go here if you were to pay us”. (This use of the blur in MVs is different to in some TV shows where they blur because it’s illegal to use product placement in that context, or has been until recently). The piss-poor looking retailer in the background sure as hell don’t look like they’ve got the money to pay for their logo to be displayed in a k-pop MV so what you’re looking at in the above picture is an empty supermarket shelf.
Endorsements are common too, and they work with crazy fangirls who will buy any old shit as long as their idols are on it. I simply can’t count the amount of people I personally know who have bought “B2ST Instant Noodles”.
These have got to taste terrible like all dried instant noodles do but I’m sure there are crazy fangirls out there buying hundreds of these packets so they can “live off B2ST” in an emergency and feel close to their oppars. Having a “B2ST Noodle” inside them is probably as close as they will ever get to their wet dreams and what’s in their favourite fanfics.
Just like in the supermarket situation, the amount of money that companies make selling you the music is positively dwarfed by the amount of money they make in selling idols’ marketing abilities to product manufacturers. So in this context:
You = the customer
K-pop group’s songs = the product
Entertainment company = the retailer
Has now become:
Entertainment company = the retailer
Advertisers = the customer
Idols = the shelf space
The amount of attention you give to the idols/shelf = the product
If people don’t pay attention to their idols and care about them, then those idols holding the latest mobile phone becomes worthless. It could just be any random person in that case. In this way the manipulation of fan insanity is actually the engine that drives the moneymaking side of the industry. If you’ve ever seen an idol use something and think “cool – I’ve got to get one of those”, you’ll know that this works, and exactly how powerful it is.
Yes, you are being manipulated (of course), along with the idols. If you’re thinking “well, this is shit” then I guess that’s another way you could interpret the lyrics of “Chocolate Love” isn’t it. Everyone sing along now.
It’s been too hot where I live to write blogs. The other day Adelaide became the official hottest capital city in the world – fuck that shit. It’s cooling down though so I’ll bring you something with words in it over the next few days. In the meantime, here’s a completely thoughtless blog post. Let’s sing along:
I’ve been running this website for over a year and it’s just occurred to me that it doesn’t have a FAQ. Gosh, that’s a bit of an oversight, especially given how many questions I get asked over at ask.fm – it seems like some of you guys could really use a collection of the most common questions and answers.
It’s a blog created by me, Kpopalypse, so I can write about k-pop related stuff.
What does the name “Kpopalypse” mean?
K-pop + apocalypse.
What sort of content can I expect here? What’s your angle?
There’s a lot of people writing about k-pop out there, so when I started blogging, I asked myself “why would anyone want to read MY blog, as opposed to any of the other hundreds of k-pop blogs out there”? The answer I came up with is that I would have to do things in a way that was sufficiently different. Therefore instead of speculating about rumours by reading gossip mill websites and using blind guesswork, I focus on what I actually know from personal experience working with music and in the music industry with other musicians and people behind the scenes, this is something I’m not seeing anybody else doing in k-pop writing. I’m also not interested in taking the moral high-ground and putting either myself or k-pop stars or Korean netizens or even k-pop in general on a pedestal and I’m quite comfortable with being hated (obviously I’d prefer to be liked, but if not, that’s okay). I’ll tackle ideas and opinions from a different angle, which might not necessarily be opposed to popular opinion, but will certainly not read much like what you’ve seen elsewhere. Then there’s the fiction writing – any fiction that I write won’t fit into standard fan-fiction idioms that are all about idolising someone, instead I use fiction as a tool to explore both facts and possibilities, although some of it’s also just for fun. Occasionally I also post silly stuff or pictures of hot girls, because I’m into those things too, and also sometimes stuff which is purely educational.
Yes I do! You will see articles from this website reposted to those sites from time to time, along with articles from all their other authors. Anti Kpop-Fangirl gets the most content, where the articles will appear pretty much the same as they are written here, with only minor formatting adjustments. Asian Junkie sometimes publish my writing too, but they edit the content more heavily to fit in with their format. I highly recommend both websites, and I was a fan of both of them before I was an author.
I can’t believe some of your opinions. Do you really take what you write seriously?
Obviously there’s a lot of humour in my posts, but I take what I write very seriously. What other people think about my writing, that’s the part I don’t take seriously. Rest assured that my opinions are genuinely my own, none of it is ‘clickbait’ or trolling for website hits. I make no money from blogging and I don’t run ads so I have nothing to gain from more visitors (and if you’re seeing default ads from the blog host get yourself an adblocker). If all I wanted was more visitors I’d probably just turn this into an Exo fansite or something.
What is your musical and music industry background?
I started playing piano at a very young age and switched to guitar in my teens. I first performed onstage at 14 and by the time I left school I had my own band and was playing venues. At 19 years of age I started my own record label, recorded and released music by myself and others. I’ve been on several tours mainly with punk groups and have also been a radio DJ since 1997. Later on after doing music for a few years I decided to get some qualifications so I went to University and passed a Bachelor of Music (honours), and also completed a separate audio engineering degree. These days I make most of my music industry income from music teaching.
Actually I don’t hate any k-pop idol, but I also don’t “idolise” any of them. I believe that the idolatry that fuels k-pop fandoms is a symptom of mental illness and I’m against that. I’m also against dumb hatred of people who I don’t even know personally and have no ability to morally judge. I’ll still make jokes though, because nothing is sacred, but none of it is “bashing” in the sense that rabid k-pop anti-fans will do in a deliberate attempt to try and influence popular opinion – that’s just dumb. The public persona of celebrities is almost never reality, and buying into the idea that you can tell someone’s true character (good OR bad) just by their TV appearances or seeing them on a stage is ridiculous.
Is that you on Twitter/OneHallyu/Kayoforum/ask.fm/Reddit/Justin.tv?
Yes, I maintain a presence on all these sites. The best way to get in touch with me is through Twitter or ask.fm, the others don’t get checked on a very regular basis.
Is that you on Pinterest/Instagram/Foursquare/League Of Legends?
No, that’s just someone else who had the same idea for a name as me. I do like computer games but I don’t play any of them with the handle “kpopalypse”, and I don’t use Instagram, etc.
Why are there pictures of T-ara’s Eunjung everywhere on this site and in your posts?
It’s not just attractiveness, although that is definitely part of it and if I thought she was ugly I probably wouldn’t use her – it’s also the fact that’s she somewhat of a pariah in certain trend-following circles. I deliberately use her image as part of what Frank Zappa calls “conceptual continuity”, it’s a unifying factor that ties several ideas in together which inform the blogging I do as a whole, the main idea being that whatever the trendy mode of thought is for people who don’t really think about issues deeply but just want to be popular, or accepted, or “go along to get along”, or react with the most basic moral high-ground stance on every issue that comes up so they can be more trendy and more liked – I’m against that. Eunjung is very symbolic.
I’m not anti netizen as such but rather I’m anti-blind popular opinion, and the idea that the majority is always right just because they’re the majority. When Hitler was in power millions of people thought he was right, too, as did the people running the Salem Witch Trials, which bear more than a passing similarity to how netizens behave when there’s a k-pop scandal, especially ones involving females. I fear that the Internet is actually contributing to the amount of stupidity in society globally by giving witch-hunting and trial-by-popular-opinion the possibility of going viral. I try to motivate people to think beyond just what is trendy and popular to believe and to look at things in a different way that is more analytical.
You seem to be anti-vocalfag. Why?
I’m not. However, I do think that caring overly about vocal technique in a genre of music where the benchmarks for success are Madonna, Elvis and The Spice Girls and everyone either uses generous helpings of electronic pitch-correction or sings to doubled backing tracks is a little ridiculous. K-pop is not opera. I understand that some people do like to hear good vocals and that’s fine (I can even relate, as I like to hear good guitar playing), but where I have an issue is when those people start to infiltrate popular taste and try to make everyone else hear music the way that they hear it and judge everyone on those terms. I come from a punk background where the drive to get up and give music a go and the strength of your idea is more important than the technicality of the end result. Technique should never be a barrier to performance or opportunity. I would never impose my technical guitar-playing knowledge on the general population’s taste as rule of law by saying “Kurt Cobain shouldn’t be successful because he can’t play guitar as well as Yngwie Malmsteen” because I think there’s a place for poor players with great ideas and/or a unique approach. Likewise I don’t want to hear anyone telling me that I shouldn’t listen to Bom just because there is also Ailee.
Are you into k-pop because you’re a creepy old man who likes young Asian girls?
All my biases are over legal age…. but if I were to list my 20 most attractive people in the world generally it would probably be dominated by my girlfriend, various AV stars both east and west, a western actress or two, a few exes and maybe Raina right down the bottom… don’t ask me to make that list by the way.
I think your blog is really sexist because you objectify women and support an industry that exploits women. What do you have to say for yourself? Huh?
Firstly, you’re just a self-righteous cunt. Also, objectification and exploitation is kind of a normal thing in any entertainment industry. I perform on stage too, and as performers my groups are also objectified and we exploit ourselves musically, physically, sexually… any way we can get away with it! And we enjoy it! Entertainers ARE objects for exploitation – which of course doesn’t mean that they’re also not people, but the full depth of a person’s personality isn’t truly perceivable via popular culture media anyway, so entertainers go for what makes a memorable first impression. Welcome to how the world really works.
Why are you into this k-pop shit? You should be listening to [insert genre here], that’s REAL music.
I listen to what I want to listen to. The true spirit of punk rock is to break the rules, not to follow them. This includes the unwritten rules about what it’s “okay” for someone to like and dislike – including someone in a punk rock scene.
I have a question but it’s not here. Where can I ask it?
Use my ask.fm – it is checked daily and I will answer anything sensible.
This is not a question, but I like what you’re doing.
This is a music theory-related post. I wrote it initially as an ask.fm answer to someone who asked about how to learn relative pitch. I got halfway through and then thought to myself “fuck it – this information could be really useful so why not make a blog out of it so it’s not buried 269 pages deep in my ask.fm answers list and impossible to dig out in a month’s time. People who are not musicians or aspiring to be musicians may struggle to understand this post and may also be incredibly fucking bored by it, and for that I apologise, but there probably isn’t a way around this to be honest.
Relative pitch is the ability to hear two notes and determine their relationship.
For the purpose of simplification, I’m going to split the concept of relative pitch into two sub-concepts:
Basic relative pitch: you can hear two different notes, and you know straight away which note is the higher note and which note is the lower note.
Advanced relative pitch: you can hear two different notes, and you know straight away which note is the higher note and which note is the lower note AND the exact distance between these two notes.
Starting off with basic relative pitch, which is just listening to two notes and working out which one is higher and which is lower – you can practice this on any instrument just by moving up and down scales and listening to the changes in sound. People who are “tone deaf” are those who can’t hear the differences – they hear a sound and don’t know the pitch relationship between it and any other sound.
Once you’ve got identifying which sound is higher to the point where you can get it right every time without fail, then it’s time for relative pitch interval training. This is where it gets trickier.
Here’s all the musical intervals in pop music within a range of one octave:
There’s many different ways to learn what the distances between these intervals sound like. Here’s a common type of method that is taught – associating an emotional feeling or qualitative aspect with each sound (forgive the typos and incorrections, the following chart wasn’t created by me and I’ve left it as-is):
The problem with this method is that not everybody hears these intervals in exactly the same way, especially once you add cultural aspects and different people’s musical upbringing into the mix. Someone who listens to lots of heavy metal or punk won’t find a fifth to sound “empty” or a minor second to sound “irritating”. A blues afficionado probably won’t find a tritone all that harsh, either.
I’ve always found that the best way to learn relative pitch intervals is “relatively” – to listen to examples in popular music and memorise them, and then when they come up in other songs they will trigger your memory because you will be able to link them back to the songs you already are very familiar with. The more familiar you are with the songs, the better this works. For instance, a major seventh is a very hard interval to recognise straight off the bat, because the two notes are very far apart. However, it’s easy as piss if you remember that the major seventh interval forms a key component of the theme from the movie “Superman”, which is an interval that nearly everybody knows subconsciously because everybody went and saw a Superman film at one point in their lifetime. The interval of a major seventh happens at 0:51 where it goes really high:
Now, if you happen to hear two notes anywhere else, all you need to do is sing “Superman” to yourself while you’re listening (not necessarily out loud, just in your own head will do the job) and if the notes match up, you know you’re dealing with a major seventh. If not, then it’s some other interval.
If you’ve built up a list of tunes to memorise for all the different intervals, then you can just keep trying different intervals in your head until you get the correct one. Using this system of matching intervals to well known music, you can learn to recognise any interval when you hear it, but instead of using movie soundtracks, I’m going to give you k-pop singing examples of each interval that you can memorise. Most of the following examples have the low note as the starting note and the higher note as the second note in the sequence. Listen for the pitch change.
Starting with unison – in other words, no pitch change. I don’t have to give an example for that, do I? Good. Moving on.
The minor second: it’s the eh-eh-eh-eh-eh, wah-ah-ah-ah-oh bit in 4Minute’s Volume Up at 0:50:
Comparing k-pop melodic movement to thrash metal riffs, YES I WENT THERE.
The next interval on the list, the major second interval is the first two notes Minzy sings in 2NE1′s “Falling In Love” at 0:27. Listen to this, then listen to 4Minute’s bit and notice how the distance in 2NE1′s song is wider.
It’s also in Girls’ Generation’s “Paparazzi” at 2:10, listen close as it’s hard to tell apart from the minor second, but listen to this back to back with the f(x) example and you’ll eventually get used to the difference:
The minor third interval is common in k-pop. The first ten seconds of TVXQ’s “Mirotic” vocals from 0:23 just works one solitary minor third interval over and over.
Also the entire vocal line of BigBang’s “Monster” from 1:03 to 1:13 is ALL minor thirds. If this doesn’t get you used to the sound of it, nothing will.
The major third is also common, here it is in BEG’s “Abracadabra” verse singing line at 0:48:
A very clear perfect fourth is in the “kiss me baby” line of the chorus of T-ara’s “Day By Day” at 1:38:
The same interval starts off the verse melody of Day By Day at 1:06.
Everything Sunny sings in Girls’ Generation’s “I Got A Boy” from 1:33 to 1:37 is also working a perfect fourth interval:
Advanced examples: the chorus line after “Hey Boy” in Hyuna’s “Bubble Pop” at 0:47 goes up and down the major scale, from the starting note to a major second, major third, perfect fourth, and then back down to the start again. T-ara’s Day By Day chorus does a similar climbing movement (from the word “baby”) but it climbs up the minor scale instead, to a major second, minor third and perfect fourth, and doesn’t come back down quite so directly.
The tritone or flat 5th is quite an unusual-sounding interval that is rare outside of heavy metal so in the smooth style of k-pop it’s extraordinarily unusual and most songwriters go to great lengths to avoid using it ever. However, the tritone does also have a functional use in blues music, and so it also appears in blues-inspired k-pop such as Lee Hi’s “1, 2, 3, 4″ where she jumps up to it briefly at 0:38 with quite a raspy voice:
The chorus to Lim Kim’s “All Right” that begins at 0:08 is mostly just a sequence of descending perfect fifths.
Also a perfect fifth – the “oh oh” bit in Super Junior’s “Sorry Sorry” at 0:32:
The minor sixth is rarely used, but here it is in The Seeya’s “Be With You” at 1:17:
Major sixth: The first notes in the chorus of F-ve Dolls + Dani’s “Can You Love Me” at 0:51:
Also major sixth – the jump-ups in the slow section of Ailee’s “I’ll Show You” at 0:23 to 0:25:
Rare in k-pop, a minor seventh can still be found – it’s in the first chorus notes of F-ve Dolls’ “You Cheated” at 0:55. Actually the note starts from the starting point, moving up to a minor seventh and then steps down, resolving on a major sixth relative to the first note, an example of the type of sexy suspended melodic movement that is all over the F-ve Dolls mini-album and helped make it my favourite mini of 2013. Just on the off-chance that you actually give a fuck about that kind of thing.
The major seventh is as rare as hen’s teeth and in the small time I had to put this together I couldn’t find a single k-pop example of it, but I’m sure there’s one out there.
EDIT: thanks to BabySera for submitting Younha’s “Run”! The relevant note is at 0:46, and the melody line goes from the starting note to a major second, then back to the starting note and to a major seventh.
An octave is being worked back and forth in “Something” by Girl’s Day from 0:54 to 1:00.
There’s no point going beyond an octave as the musical scale wraps around at that point so you use the same cues to identify a ninth that you would use for a second.
Here’s a summary in a chart if you need a quick reference:
Memorise how those parts in those songs sound, and now you’ve got a working “pitch memory” that you can use in any situation where you might need to recognise pitch intervals, such as learning how to sing or play a song that you’re not familiar with, or knowing if you’ve hit a certain interval correctly.
Oh, and:
IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: this is not a post about which singer is better. Do NOT take this post over to your favourite vocal thread and go “look, my bias can hit interval x, she’s better than your bias”. Any singer can hit any interval if they learn how (especially if they use this method), even if their voice sucks. I can hit ALL of these intervals, and my own singing voice is fucking shit. This post is about you learning to identify pitches, it’s not about proving who is better than who or for others to identify what your bias is or how mentally ill you are.
I hope this has been helpful to those of you learning music, and not too annoying for the rest of you!
Almost everybody reading this will know that KARA, one of k-pop’s biggest groups, has had some line-up difficulties lately with two members Nicole and Jiyoung not renewing their contracts, leaving the group as a three-piece. I guess it must be a pretty shit group to be in if the girls are making enough money to buy real estate yet some of them can’t stand to be part of the KARA machine any longer, but then if I were an idol maybe I’d be sick of that bullshit by now and I’d bail too. In any event, the girls probably aren’t giving anything away.
So what does this mean for the future of KARA… and how can we help?
A lot of people are now predictably saying “well, Nicole and Jiyoung leaving is surely the death of the group” – but k-pop fans have an excellent way of being wrong about these kinds of things. Even the k-pop media continually gets it wrong. Remember at the start of 2013 when people speculated on which groups would disband in the coming year and Allkpop laughably picked T-ara and Block B? If you ever wanted any hard evidence that these people have no idea about anything, there it is. As much as I absolutely hate to direct my readers to click on a link to the Great Satan of k-pop websites, feel free to click the above link anyway just to take a look at their other insane predictions for 2013 to see what else didn’t come true. Then scrub your computer thoroughly for malware and tracking cookies and add the site to your browser’s permanent block list.
It’s easy to get distracted by the fact that 40% of KARA didn’t sign new contracts while ignoring what this ALSO obviously means – the other 60% of the group DID sign new contracts. We can only presume that DSP still intends to do something with KARA – and why wouldn’t they? KARA makes a shitload of money and even in Korea’s “keeping up appearances” industry, money still talks and netizen bullshit still walks – for the same reason that CCM were very obviously never going to disband T-ara, DSP will keep KARA going as long as they possibly can get away with it.
The other thing to keep in mind is that KARA has had line-up juggling this severe before, and not only survived it, but benefited from it.
Kara’s debut album “The First Blooooming” was an awful R&B piece of shit with only about two good songs on it, and while it didn’t do all that badly commercially, the group didn’t kick their career into high gear until Sunghee’s parents pulled her out of the group for some more daddy-time, they got two new members in and their producers finally found where the “soft-ass R&B shit nobody over the age of five wants to hear” knob was on the studio desk and turned that down a bit. So there’s no reason, at least theoretically, why KARA couldn’t also survive and benefit from this latest line-up juggle.
Three members isn’t a very good number for a k-pop group though. A group like KARA really needs at least four members, just so they can match the four letters of the group to them in photos and promotional material – it’s just good graphic design for an idol group. Even TVXQ do okay with just two members because you can place two letters over each member, but four over three is just a mess when you’re trying to make posters and CD covers. KARA really needs another member just so the girl over at DSP graphic design doesn’t pull a hernia over this shit.
This might all seem a bit trivial – but remember, graphic design is part of branding and it’s very important to people. Look at how excited people get about their favourite sports teams. Where I live, sports fans of team X won’t necessarily live anywhere near location X, it’s very common to find devout fans of a team way over on the other side of the country, and if you ask them “what initially got you into team X as your faves” they probably can’t even tell you. They’ll just say “they’re the best” over and over while drooling and scraping their knuckles lightly on the carpet, but the truth is that usually they got into the team when they were very very young because they were asked one day “what team is your favourite” in the schoolyard and they hadn’t really thought about it yet so they just picked the one that had the coolest looking logo. Sports fans at heart are really graphic design junkies. Who says it’s any different for k-pop groups? After all the groups are interchangeable in just about every other aspect.
I thought it would therefore be cool to help out DSP and try to find a fourth member for KARA, by scouting through various people in the world of k-pop that may be potentially looking for employment, to see if they’re doing much for the next few years, and if they would be a good fit for KARA.
Let’s look at the positives and negatives of some candidates:
It’s no secret that Kahi’s career has been on the downturn since leaving After School and she’s likely to be questioning her next career move. Could joining KARA be a mutually beneficial arrangement?
Positives:
Looks pretty
Can sing somewhat, dance and do PR
Relevant work experience
Existing sexually frustrated fanbase will appreciate her recreating KARA’s dance moves
Negatives:
Probably a little overqualified for the role
Potential ego/leadership problems given that she’s used to running shit
It’s a pretty safe bet to say that T-ara’s ex-nail polish application specialist has probably been looking for more things to do to fill her time lately.
Positives:
Looks hot
Nice boobs
Only a rapper, can’t sing whatsoever, great replacement for Nicole
Increased web traffic from netizens can be monetised if DSP attach ads to trashy rumour mill sites
Negatives:
Reliability is obviously an issue
Lack of determination, potential difference in determination levels
Poor at clarifying rumours
Recent cameo MV appearance in bath suggests leg may not be completely healed
Conclusion:
Does not play well with others. Should stick to wearing clingy white clothes and getting them wet, it’s a solitary activity and she seems to be very good at it.
Prank calls from JYP whispering his name and hanging up a possibility
Lamination of photocards and packaging an extra expense
If Sohee and Seungyeon look in opposite directions from the stage their eye-beams could intersect and create a “crossing the streams” incident resulting in many casualties
Conclusion:
The thought is appealing but this looks like another high-maintenance option, the restraining order necessary to keep JYP away alone may cost thousands.
CCM’s failed MILF concept group has left more than a few careers on pause.
Positives:
Looks hot
Nice boobs
Modelling experience
Not really good at anything much except the above, won’t cramp KARA’s style
Negatives:
As the oldest, could create ego/leadership issues
Group might flop-by-association
Future MV concepts involving bikinis may lead to post traumatic stress flashback of working on shitty CCM beach karaoke videos
Conclusion:
Seems high-risk somehow. Maybe search elsewhere, but DSP should keep her resume on file for when it’s time to make the official KARA karaoke beach DVD set.
General talent deficit in all areas won’t cause any group dischord or bruised egos
Ugly appearance will only serve to highlight the attractiveness of the other members
Negatives:
Mixed gender groups traditionally not popular
Basically unlistenable
We’ll probably have to watch him do the horse dance again
Performing of the “butt dance” from “Mister” could cause mass suicides across Asia as both fans and casual observers alike lose all hope in future generations of young people
Conclusion:
Although I feel for Little PSY’s dim career prospects, the greater good of humanity outweighs the needs of the individual so let’s decline this option.
While technically still a member of DMTN, maybe a fresh start is in order for Daniel’s career as his reputation has taken a hit lately. What better way to turn over a new leaf than to change groups before his career goes up in smoke?
Positives:
An eligible adult male presence might get more fangirls onboard with KARA
Nothing notable talent-wise, should fit right in
Overall happiness levels within the group bound to increase
DSP revenue streams may be bolstered even if the group doesn’t do well commercially
Negatives:
Mixed gender groups traditionally not popular
Seungyeon may become even more crosseyed and awkward
Conclusion:
Would probably be a good idea internally but may struggle to find mainstream acceptance. DSP employees should keep his business card for weekend use though.
Word on the street is that Korean actress/model Clara is trying to break into music lately. Could she have what it takes to make a positive contribution to KARA?
Today Anti Kpop-Fangirl’s affiliation with k-pop discussion forum site OneHallyu has gained my attention. This seems like a great move to me, because OneHallyu is a useful resource for k-pop fans. However, the affiliation has alerted me to a curious misconception that some OneHallyu users have about Anti Kpop-Fangirl (despite a FAQ existing to address exactly such misconceptions):
So it’s in the interests of “giving the people what they want”, that I now present to you my k-pop bias list. This should hopefully accomplish the following:
1. It will demonstrate that I as an Anti Kpop-Fangirl author do not hate k-pop idols by default, and in fact I don’t hate ANY k-pop idols – how can I hate someone I don’t even know? That’s just dumb.
2. Those of you whose biases align with mine may uncover fresh fap material.
3. Those of you whose biases do not align with mine might get incredibly butthurt about who I consider to be attractive and make some ridiculous posts (as if someone else is not allowed to have a different opinion to yours on the very personal matter of sexual preference), and I will find this amusing.
4. Some dopey person with feminist pretensions might comment about how I’m objectifying women which might give me some great material for a future blog where I rip your superficial argument to shreds in about three sentences (but probably more, knowing me).
I consider this a win/win/win/win. Let’s get started, starting from the hottest (according to me ahem) first because why keep you in suspense.
I’ll be honest – Raina rarely takes a good photo, especially in After School where she’s constantly shoehorned into concepts that don’t suit her look. She’s not overly photogenic even in ideal conditions and is best appreciated while moving, like in this super-cute CF for some festival or whatever bullshit:
And this interview:
And Orange Caramel’s fetish-friendly MVs:
This section on Raina took me about two hours to write, by the way – I kept getting distracted and replaying the videos over and over. I hope you appreciate the effort it took me to get this far through the blog post.
I’m going to keep using this photo of Raina too because it’s so great. What a cute and smug-looking little chipmunk. I want to make a hole in the tree outside my place and move her in there.
T-ara’s Eunjung on the other hand synergises perfectly with the camera lens and simply cannot take a bad photo. The only times she looks awkward is in the very few photos of her that exist with long hair (which just doesn’t suit her – Eunjung was born for short hair) or awkward and unnecessary waist Photoshop that overemphasises her already-broad shoulders. Other than that, she can do no wrong.
Even with her tongue half hanging out like in every second picture of her ever she still looks thoroughly boneable. The fact that a k-pop girl can have basically the same physique as f(x)’s Amber and still look this good and climb up to the #2 position on my bias list shows that she’s just got “it”, whatever “it” is. Maybe it’s that super cute smile. Maybe it’s that habitual tongue thing as I do have a bit of a thing for tongue things. Or maybe it’s the thought that she may have sexily bullied Hwayoung in CCM’s secret underground jelly arena, pulling her awkwardly through the translucent slime by her hair while frequently slipping and inadvertently tearing her own undergarments… it’s always the bad girls that are the sexiest.
Why do you think every other fucking k-pop song ever is called “Bad Girl” or “Bad Girls” or “Good Girl, Bad Girl” and none of them are called “Good Girl Who Stays Good?” Way to get yourself on my bias list, Eunjung you sexy (alleged with extremely weak strawman evidence that would last all of 30 seconds in a courtroom before being laughed out by any rational person ahem) bully, you. Even seriously de-glam she looks amazing.
Sulli, like a lot of girls on this list, also isn’t someone with a body type that I traditionally like, but shit like that doesn’t matter when you have a face cute enough to compensate for any such shortfalls, and then some. She’s also apparently a rude bitch who doesn’t give much of a fuck about anything which of course makes me like her even more, because I can certainly relate to that. Fuck all those stupid nice ladies in groups, nasty girls have way more personality and style, plus they’re better in bed. You’ll find that this is a recurring theme on this list.
Sulli also has a weird eye asymmetry thing going on, her left eye has a bit of a lazy eyelid (which has probably been shopped a bit in this photo, but it’s much more noticeable in the next photo down). This is hot; subtle imperfections are sexy and reinforce the idea that you’re fapping over a person and not a CGI creation. Not that there’s anything wrong with fapping over Hatsune Miku or whatever if that’s what floats your boat but k-pop fans should be able to do a bit better than that with the ample resources at their disposal.
Sulli is probably also the only person in the history of Korean idol pop since the genre’s inception to make a duckface in a selca and still look hot and shaggable and not like a complete fucking idiot who should be bashed in the face with a shovel. I think that’s an achievement worthy of some bias points all on its own.
It’s a good thing for me that CEO of Core Contents Media and loveable figure of fun KKS doesn’t listen to a fucking word any of you people say, or he would have hung himself from a bridge by now, and may not have lived long enough to keep tinkering with his groups like a mad scientist. This is good because the latest thing he’s done to F-ve Dolls besides fuck both their name and concept up by making them a six-piece is introduce to their lineup one of the most smoking hot ladies in all of k-pop.
Seunghee is so hot that she has to put her hand over her vag in this photo or you might see some inner thigh and have a heart attack from the fucking hotness.
You’ll have to forgive the somewhat shit quality of these scans – I couldn’t find many decent quality large size pictures of Seunghee for this blog given how nugu she is, so I just scanned in the photocards from my copy of the “First Love” mini-album – and my scanner isn’t exactly top of the range so it leaves shitty horizontal lines everywhere. If you’ve got better quality versions of the first two images, let me know.
Sunny is Girls’ Generation’s equivalent of 2NE1′s Dara in the sense that she’s probably been styled flatteringly in about 5% of all her MVs and public appearances, but unlike Dara she has a cute face and actual boobs and I would bring the boys out all over that cleavage. It’s enough to make someone thirsty.
Of course her short height is adding significantly to the impression of bustiness, but that’s okay. This is k-pop where true bustiness unaffected by padding is rare so I’ll take what I can get. Let’s not look a gift Sunny in the boob.
Possessing outstanding eyes and model-esque looks, Seunghee is basically Qri 2.0 – so this is obviously the type of thing that CCM shop for, and if I was running a k-pop label, so would I.
That dot on her nose has got to form part of her appeal too. It’s probably some kind of eyebeam focusing instrument, or maybe Qri is a double-agent for SM Entertainment and that nose dot is a microdot that captures and stores data from CCM HQ to send back to SM so they can work out sneaky strategies to keep the CCM acts with their superior songs from dominating over SM’s weaker new catalogue. Now you know why Qri never tweeted Hwayoung… ahhh, it all fits together now doesn’t it, just like any well-written conspiracy theory…
If it’s true I might have to jizz on that nose to sabotage the microdot and save T-ara’s careers from the sneaky control of SM. That’s the kind of selfless sacrifice I’d be willing to make for T-ara out of the goodness of my heart. How could anyone ever say that I’m anti-idol?
No posey promo photos for Way because Way is all about being gangster and that’s why she gets on this list. Lawbreaking gangster k-pop girls are hot as fuck and don’t pose for your fucking camera, you weak cunt. You’ll be lucky if you even get to take the photo at all before she rolls up on your ass with a whole crew and schools your bitch ass. Look at that face bandaid, this girl knows no fear.
She pushed that Sunny chick around just to show her who the new queens of k-pop really are, and SNSD fans retaliated with nasty messages. Then the next day, one of SM Entertainment’s sponsor’s buildings gets burned the fuck down. Coincidence – I THINK NOT. Got anything smart to say now, netizens? Don’t make her torch your parents’ house next, you little shitheads, because if you keep pushing it this girl is going to get Norwegian Black Metal on your ass.
Here she is in the Crayon Pop gang’s traditional ceremonial attire. The red mitten that only she wears is code that means she’s the designated killer, it’s symbolic that she has “blood on her hands”. How sexy as fuck is this. You are getting a boner right now.
Don’t fuck with Way or talk shit about her on the Internet with your lame rumours and crap because her group will show you the “way” to an ass-beating, you fucking clown. Also she’s cute, I would pop her crayons. Way if you’re reading this, it’s a compliment, please don’t send a posse around to stab me in my sleep thanks.
After School/Orange Caramel’s resident porn addict Lizzy gets on my bias list not just for being pretty and making a concerted effort to display her boobs in the best possible light, but also for generally giving off serious vibes of being a smut fiend who wants the D. Here’s Lizzy sneakily demonstrating minimum size requirement under the guise of the “Funny Hunny” dance:
Guys, you must measure up to at least this length before calling into Pledis HQ or phoning Shinsadong Tiger for a meetup (which is probably why G-Dragon didn’t make the cut).
She seems keen, always a positive. Pity she’s pulling a horrid duckface in about 95% of all her promotional material, but get her to stop doing that for ten seconds and she’s very pretty indeed.
Technically I’m told that Davichi aren’t really “idols” but I actually don’t really give a shit about designations like that because I idolise this girl’s pretty face and pert boobies so here’s some Minkyung pictures anyway. Minkyung is a born model and looks just as good in promotional and CF images as she does in paparazzi shots:
And best of all, she knows how to cook, isn’t that what you want in a woman, of course it is.* Hey, fuck it, the more humourless armchair feminist contingent out there probably already hate me for the entire concept of this blog post (despite the fact that themaleequivalentiseverywhere) so I might as well go the whole hog and trash my reputation with them completely.
Image may be NSFW.
