My last post was all about subjectivity and bias, so today’s post is all about maths, truth and objective things that can be measured absolutely.

I’ve been told that YG’s CEO Yang Hyun Suk plans to debut four new groups in 2014.  Wow, yay for YG fans right?

As we often know with YG, their plans don’t always equate to reality, so maybe we shouldn’t break out the party streamers just yet.  Remember how we were supposed to get a new 2NE1 song every month from July 2013 through to October 2013?

Oh dear.  Something tells me this might not end well.

If you look at the timeframe of when 2NE1′s 2013 songs and videos came out, here’s what we actually get:

Some reggae bullshit that only I and three other 2NE1 fans liked: July

Lame tossed-off dancefloor-by-numbers with crappy handicam MV: August

Written-on-the-toilet-seat generic stadium power ballad #59264: November

Compared to a promised span of four videos over four months, we get two and a half videos over five months (“Do You Love Me” being such a cheap piece of shit that it only counts as half an MV).  This represents a performance level of 50% compared to what was promised:

Promised performance: 4/4 = 1 video per month

Actual performance: 2.5/5 = 0.5 videos per month

Given that YG’s grasp on maths clearly seems tenuous at best, I thought I’d help out him and everybody else by devising a mathematical formula to interpret the truth in any YG debut promise, using my incredibly mindblowing (or is that dickblowing) secondary-school level maths skills.

In my high school we learned the BODMAS rule for mathematical formulas (Brackets, Orders, Divide, Multiply, Add, Subtract).  I’m going to use a variation of my own design that I’ll call “BOMDMAS” (BOM Divide, Multiply All Scandals).  Here’s how it works:

Let’s start off with the number of groups publicised as debuting from YG in the next 12 months.  We’ll call this figure D.

Next, we have to look at the number of plastic surgeries that YG has funded for Bom over the last 12 months.  Let’s call the total number of plastic surgeries that Bom has over a year P.

Plastic surgery isn’t cheap, and draws from the pool of available funds needed to debut new artists – every time Bom goes trotting down Gangnam street with YHS’s credit card to get a chin touch-up, she’s reducing the overall ability of the label to debut new artists and music.   Bom’s surgery fetish creates a “divisive” effect not just with 2NE1 fans but also YG’s finances, so in our formula, we’re going to divide  D by P.

Now we have to factor in the effect of the last 12 months worth of scandals at YG.  We’ll give this numerical figure the name S.

Every time YG (or in fact any group) gets into a scandal, the following situations occur:

• More articles are generated by media to cover the scandal
• More people click on these articles and comment
• More people write on their own sites etc and comment further
• Advertisers see this activity and think “look at all that website traffic”
• YG’s attached ads on many of these portals generate more revenue
• Fans buy more product to support their artist now “in peril”
• The group under scandal stays fresher in the minds of existing consumers
• New consumers discover and investigate the artist for the first time

These factors both generate income and multiply the chances of a successful comeback, so we’re going to multiply our existing figure by the amount of scandals successfully generated.

Using the BOMDMAS formula, we can now convert “official numerical debut estimate from YG” into “correct numerical debut estimate from YG”, using this equation:

Let’s look at plastic surgeries first, because that’s first in our formula.  When pre-debut images of a 19-year old Bom surfaced in April 2013 and were contrasted with current promotional photos, many people concluded that plastic surgery was at work.  Then September’s “chin-slip” incident occured, which may have been the result of new surgery at that time, or perhaps just things moving around and not quite settling in properly after a previous operation.  In any event the problem, whatever it was, was definitely contained within reasonable limits by November where she looked great for 2NE1′s “Missing You” video and did her best to not move her mouth too much and upset the already topsy-turvy apple cart.

• April pre-debut bombshell vs 2013 pics = at least 1 plastic surgery 100% confirmed = 1 point
• September wherefore art thou chin =  may be because of surgery or may be because of the effects of ageing/that weird disease she has plus a lack of preventative surgery.  50% chance for surgery to be true = 0.5 points
• November Bom looking like a Realdoll again after a suspicious extended break = herbal tea and bed rest I don’t fucking think so, 1 plastic surgery 100% confirmed = 1 point

Value of P = 2.5

Now let’s look at the scandals for YG.  It was a quiet year for YG, but there was still another chapter of Seungri’s compulsive jizzing on Japanese titties,  G-Dragon boning some fan or whatever, Lizzy milking turning down G-D’s D for some more publicity, oh and the CEO is probably licking CL’s labia.  Not all of these are genuine scandals though:

• Half of Japan’s celebrity women drowning in Seungri’s spunk = probably Seungri’s fault = 1 point
• G-D gets his tip wet from some fangirl = nobody cares = 0.1 points
• Lizzy “I fapped to the G-D rumours but I’m sure he’s a shitty lay” = rumour probably bullshit but Lizzy fapping still worthy of recognition = 0.4 points
• YHS “Seungri can I borrow your towel I need to wipe CL’s vaginal juices off my chin” = red hot scandal but nobody noticed – 0.2 points

Value of S = 1.7

Now applying the BOMDMAS formula of (D/P)xS = T, here’s what we get:

(4/2.5)x1.7 = 2.72.

This leaves us with a performance guarantee of 2.72 groups as opposed to the promise of 4 groups.   This means that YG will debut at most three groups this year…. maybe two and a crappy solo artist if he gets lazy… but definitely not four.

Thank me for this information in December.

As previously mentioned on this site, 2013 hasn’t been a very good year overall for established groups.  However, the nugus were another story with several decent groups (as well as a lot of crap ones) stepping up to the plate, something which didn’t escape my attention or the attentions of other writers on Anti Kpop-Fangirl.  Of course there was criticism for this:

I’d spend some time dissecting this docile mouth-breathing argument but there’s no need as The Real CZ and Zaku both did a great job and I have nothing to add.  However, since covering shit nobody has heard of instead of stuff from the same old established labels seems to really hit a nerve with some folks, I thought it would be a good idea for me to embrace the nugus and make a regular thing of it.  So welcome to:

(For the boneheads – no, I’m not insinuating that T-ara are nugu – I just think that this image looks cool and customs officers fits the theme of being “on the alert” for stuff)

Nugu means “nobody” and is basically used to describe k-pop artists that nobody gives a fuck about.  Each Nugu Alert post will therefore highlight some k-pop MVs that few people have seen before, but which I think you should take a look at… it might be because I like the songs, but to be honest – that’s highly unlikely.   I’m probably highlighting it for some other reason and each “Nugu Alert” MV will have at least one notable quality which I believe deserves your attention.

Some rules:

• Must have less than 20,000 YouTube hits
• Can be new or old
• Might not be technically new or unknown but certainly will be something I haven’t seen other k-pop fans discuss or care about, so try to fucking control yourself if I link something that I don’t know about but that you’ve been following for the last 15 years and are breakthrough stars or whatever
• Each MV gets a “nugu alert rating” which is a measure of the total condensed nuguness in the MV’s running time – qualities that enhance nuguness are lack of YouTube hits, lack of money spent on the MV and song, and general “where are they now?” vibe even though the artist in question may still be very much active

Good or bad, I think it’s worth highlighting nugus for ideological reasons.  For every new group that debuts on a TV show that nobody gives a fuck about, there’s ten or fifty or a hundred other groups on tiny little labels that are so much smaller that they struggle to even get on the damn TV show.  Do you know how much competition there is for these things?  So much in fact, that label staff and artists grease and kiss ass all fucking day just to secure and maintain those 3 little minutes.  Combine that with the fact that there’s not exactly much of a live performance culture for pop music outside of TV shows and you realise that these crappy low budget MVs are the only chance that a lot of groups get to even exist in the public eye at all.  The least you can do is watch the fucking things and attempt to extract some semblance of entertainment value before they get consigned to the dustbin of popular culture.

But there’s thousands of these things!  Which ones to watch?  Ahhh… that’s where Kpopalypse comes in to help you out, so let’s get started with Episode One!

FRESH BOYZ – “KOALA”

I guess as an Australian I have to kick things off with a song about everyone’s favourite local marsupial.  Some little-known facts about koalas:

• They may look cute but they are smelly, unfriendly, untameable creatures that scratch and piss everywhere, plus they fucking hate you
• Although an endangered species on the mainland, on Kangaroo Island they’re in plague proportions and cause a lot of damage to plantlife, and no-one knows what to do about it because it’s illegal to kill them
• The word “koala” is pronounced with three syllables, e.g “ko-A-la”, not “KWA-la” like Fresh Boyz are doing it in this song

You won’t give a shit about any of that stuff though once the video starts.  The video director wisely keeps Fresh Boyz themselves mostly absent from the visual side of the proceedings, devoting the large majority of the screen time to some model who makes up for the obvious starvation-level MV budget with underboob-flashing to rival those FX Girl videos. I don’t know who she is but I’ve seen her in MVs before (and I’d really like to know her name by the way – surely some of you k-nerds know so don’t be shy and tell me and I’ll edit this post) – she’s never looked quite like this, though.  I can’t remember if it was Russ Meyer or Roger Corman who said “breasts are the best special effects” but whoever it was, the creative video which explores many different ways to almost show nipple certainly makes this ear-shredding reggaeton-inspired k-pop dance flatulence a lot more tolerable.  For a video with so much skin showing to get so few hits in an era when sexy concepts are raking in the cash and popularity is a remarkable achievement of nugudom.

YouTube hits at time of writing: 9459

Notable attribute: gratuitous underboob

Nugu alert rating: high

VALIANT – HIP HOP CAT

This kiddy hip-hop assault from 2012 is as cringeworthy and eardrum-raping as you’d expect, but for such an unpopular video it contains quite a few redeeming features that I didn’t expect:

• They can actually dance pretty good for their age
• They can rap better than CL
• No awkward sexualisation in the style of Little PSY, thank the lord

*shudders in horror* IT’S NOT CUTE, IT’S WRONG.  If you ever need evidence that males bear the brunt of creepy inappropriate sexualisation in k-pop, here it is – and thank fuck the MV creators didn’t make Valiant do something similar.  All you people whining about AOA and Gain and Hyuna and whoever else with the sexy concepts… get your priorities straight.  Getting Little PSY to put his fucking shirt back on is more important than your futile attempts to stifle healthy adult female sexuality.  But enough about you pretending to be a feminist while actually being completely misogynist, and more about Valiant’s awful-but-probably-not-the-most-awful-thing-ever kiddie raps.

Of course there’s nothing in the world more hip-hop in the entire universe than performing carefully choreographed dance routines in front of a graffiti mural background (just ask 2NE1), so that’s mainly what Valiant’s video consists of.  The main expenditure for this video seems to have been printing those t-shirts, the bus fare to the park and spending half a day putting little paper windmills in the ground… but that’s okay because that just makes it look even more ghetto and broke which means it’s more like hip-hop, right?

Okay, maybe not.

YouTube hits at time of writing: 3609

Notable attribute: has annoying kiddy rap and is basically rubbish but is still more listenable than Little PSY and CL’s solo plus the last few 2NE1 comebacks

Nugu alert rating: very high

CHERRY KIM ft. SNK – SECRET L.O.V.E.

(look at that still shot – they’ve copy-pasted the same actor because they couldn’t afford more than one machinegun or set of SWAT clothes)

You’d have to be living under a pop-culture rock not to notice that zombies have really advanced heavily in popularity lately, turning up in all sorts of places from movies to MVs and TV shows with increasing regularity.   You can barely move for zombie computer games over the last few years, and there’s plenty of TV shows and movies dedicated to our shuffling drooling friends (no, not Korean netizens, our OTHER shuffling drooling friends).  Long gone are the days when Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” was the only zombie-themed MV on the block, with plenty of zombie MVs from all sorts of genres and in k-pop T-ara and 4minute have both been getting in on the zombie act.

So what’s the reason for this sudden surge in zombie popularity?  Well, it all started with the classic zombie movies from the 60s, and the reason why zombies have been a popular choice ever since for someone wanting to make a horror film is simple – zombies are cost-effective.  Think about it:

Ghosts:  Need some crazy special effects shit and camera trickery to make that work

Witches and vampires:  Gotta make them fly somehow without looking ultra-stupid, in movies realistic flying costs money

Dracula: spiffy clothes budget plus renting a mansion required bare minimum

Zombies: your brother’s torn flannelette shirt, throwaway ripped jeans, some tomato sauce, some charcoal makeup and you’re done

Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the MV for Cherry Kim and SNK’s grating earsore “Secret L.O.V.E.”.  The budget here is so stretched that they couldn’t even afford shotgun blanks, and opt to use cheap-ass superimposed CGI to fire most of the shots… plus they even recycle one of the BarBarBar locations:

I guess it’s where all the nugus are allowed to go to shoot their stuff without paying much site rental (remember nobody gave a fuck about Crayon Pop besides me and three other people when BarBarBar was being filmed).  A thousand nugus have probably danced on those coloured tiles.

YouTube hits at time of writing: 2762

Notable attribute: ambitious post-apocalyptic concept on minimal budget

Nugu alert rating: extreme

This concludes Episode One of “Nugu Alert”.  There is no schedule for these, so another episode could appear at any time.  Be afraid.

Just interrupting the usual blog schedule to tell you regular readers about some things happening in the world of KPOPALYPSE!

Firstly, you’ll have noticed that I’ve changed the site format a bit.  As it happens some people were getting eyestrain from looking at white text on a black background, so I swapped the colours over so it’s a light page and black words now.  Let me know what you think.

Because of this change, I’ve also taken the opportunity to sex up other areas of the site.  I’ve made images and videos bigger and more fun, streamlined the sidebar a bit, and added headers and “more” tabs so you can now see more than one post per page, and as an extra added bonus the thing even loads a bit quicker.  This is more like how Asian Junkie/Anti Kpop-Fangirl works, so the changes should sit naturally with users of those sites.

What I won’t do is change the comments system.  I’m not a huge fan of the default system but implementing something like Dicksuck Disqus would cost money (WordPress blocks it unless I go to a paid format) and since nobody’s paying me for this shit, I can’t justify spending money so too bad.  You can always use Twitter or ask.fm to tell me what you think of blog posts if you don’t want the hassle of signing up here.

Speaking of those things, if you do decide to follow me on Twitter you’re going to get a shitload of ask.fm stuff come through there from me.  I don’t want to turn off the link because some people really like that kind of content, but I’m also aware that some people really hate it.  If all my ask.fm answers on Twitter piss you off, but you’d still like to follow me there, you can selectively block the ask.fm content only using Tweetdeck, or you can use a Firefox filter add-on or a Chrome extension to do it and just set the filter to block http://ask.fm – then your Twitter feed will be ask.fm-free – more info here if you’re confused.  Oh and if you’re using Internet Explorer to access SNS instead – you sad person, what are you doing with your life, get Chrome or Firefox you doofus.

Several people have been asking me about the next stream – the truth is that I don’t know when that will be yet.  I want to stream with an electric guitar next time just to mix things up a little, but my amplifier is in the repair shop after I blew it up recently.  When I get it back I’ll schedule a stream which will appear as a clickable link in the sidebar as always.

More blogs are in the works, you’ll find out what they are when they appear.  That’s it from me so bye for now and thanks for reading!

Fans of f(x) are always complaining about the group getting minimal comebacks and basically being neglected by SM in various ways compared to the label’s other flagship groups.  Is it true?  If so, what’s the reason for it?  Could things be changed for the better?  I thought it would be fun to explore the answers and possibilities in a fictional story about f(x) fans and their hopes and dreams.

You’re a thirteen year old Korean fangirl, and f(x) is your favourite group.  Krystal is your favourite member, because she’s so pretty like her sister Jessica in SNSD, but she seems more “real” somehow.  You don’t know how to explain it – she just is.  You also like Amber because she’s kinda different and tomboy but it’s seemingly not a barrier to anything so she makes you feel good about not being that pretty yourself – if SHE can be a success, surely there’s hope for someone like you to also do well in life.  You hate it when others bash her and call her ugly or a lesbian – she’s just different, like you.  The others seem okay… well, people reckon Sulli’s a bit of a bitchy princess (also way too pretty, it’s not fair) but you can let it slide.  You still love them.  All your friends are mainly into boy groups like EXO and you don’t mind them too, but something about f(x) just makes them special.

You’re a devoted fan.  Your bedroom is covered in f(x) posters and for the last few weeks you’ve been hanging out around the rear of the SM building after classes.  The EXO saseangs are always at the front waiting in cars or standing around the entrance-way smoking cigarettes, sometimes they also drink, you try and stay away from those girls, the rear is a bit quieter.  You haven’t seen any of f(x) yet, but it’s okay – just knowing that you’re close to them for a few hours is enough, somehow.   One day someone came out the back and you thought it was Luna because she had the same hair, and you got so excited and you screamed… she turned around and it was just some office lady or something, she was about 45 years old.  She looked at you with contempt – you were so embarrassed!  It’s usually not exciting like that though, in fact it can be really boring sitting around so you spend a lot of time playing games on your phone, and interacting via SNS with other members of the f(x) fandom who still don’t have an official name yet (god that burns).

One evening, you’re out the back of the SM building after school and it’s boring as usual, not much is happening.  The girls themselves are presumably in there somewhere… it’s hard to know, because they don’t have any schedules right now.  Why the hell not?  Damn SM.  Anyway, it’s getting late so you’ve given up hope of them appearing.  You look down the alleyway, and see some large rubbish skips by the rear wall.  You think to yourself… “wow, that’s probably SM’s rubbish… I wonder what they throw away?”.

The combination of curiosity plus sorely needing something extra to do to pass the time waiting makes the temptation irresistible.  You take out your house keys and puncture the side of a garbage bag gently.  Instantly, a rancid methane smell fills the air… food scraps, ugh.  You move over to the next skip and find a bag that feels a bit more solid.  One of them feels like it’s got cardboard in it or something.  You tear the side of it open with your keys, and a bunch of pink and white bits of cardboard fall out.   Hey, wait a second, you recognise these…

It’s copies of the “Pink Tape” album!  Why are SM throwing THESE out?  Wow, they really don’t seem to care about the group whatsoever… how typical.  You wish you could say you were surprised, but you’re not.  You haul the entire bag out of the skip, and empty the contents onto the ground.  There’s about 30 copies of “Pink Tape” there, you stack them up neatly and take a photo with your phone.  They’re all complete editions with the CD inside and everything, you could probably donate these to the fandom, there’s probably a few people who don’t have this great album yet.  There’s also a couple of large size posters here:

You’re upset that SM is throwing these out, but hey, at least they’ll look good in your bedroom, and posters are a big expense for you so some free ones are certainly welcome!  You also notice something else:

A promotional aluminium water bottle, back from SNSD’s “Genie” days.. you know, back when the group sounded decent.  Pretty pathetic that SNSD only get their junk thrown out years later, and it’s only one thing, whereas f(x) get dozens of copies of their album thrown out only a few months after it’s come out… pathetic SM and their typical preferential treatment, you think to yourself.  You could use a water bottle though, so you pick it up… it feels unusually heavy, like, really heavy, it slips through your fingers and falls on the ground, and then something magical happens:

In a puff of blue smoke, Yuri appears!  She ejects from the bottle with a loud hiss and falls on the ground.

“Oh my god, Yuri!” you scream. (Okay, it would be better if it was an f(x) member, but this is still pretty exciting for you.)

Yuri looks up at you with complete disdain, bordering on hatred.  “Oh fuck, not another fangirl – please kill me.”

You look puzzled:  “…Yuri?”

Yuri rolls her eyes and sighs heavily.  “I’m NOT Yuri, okay?  I’m just a genie.  SM thought it would be a cool marketing gimmick if I looked like one of the SNSD girls, so that’s what THEY wished for.  Can you believe I’m actually a guy?  Do you know how annoying it is to be trapped inside a woman’s body…. AND trapped in a bottle?”

“I thought genies were supposed to live in lamps?”

“Give me a break, it’s the 21st century, bitch.  Can we get to the wishes part already?  I’m already sick of looking at your ugly face, you gross fangirls make me want to get to the vanishing part real quick.”

You think to yourself… wishes?  So, this is a real genie?  Does that mean you get three wishes, like in the fairytales?  “Do I get three wishes?” you ask.

“Two.  One was already taken by the CEO before they corked me in that fucking thing.”  Yur… the genie is still lying on the ground, she moves her body around a bit to get comfortable.  She seems to have no intention of standing up.

Thinking about genie stories that you used to read when you were younger, you start to feel cautious.  Those stories always turned out terribly!  There’s always something that the wisher never considers, or some horrible twist to each one.  “There’s no catch, is there?”

The Yuri-lookalike genie sighs again.  “You get what you wish for.  The wish will last for your whole life if it’s a wish for some kind of ‘situation’, like world peace or whatever, or if it’s a ‘thing’ or ‘event’ you wish for, you WILL get that thing or event.  It’s that simple.  Just be careful what you wish for, because it WILL happen, exactly as you say it, and then you have to deal with it.  You’ve only got two wishes, don’t waste them on some bullshit that you didn’t think through.”

You instantly reply: “My first wish – I want to meet Krystal from f(x)!”

The genie screams.  “Oh FUCK YOU.  You could have wished for anything and changed the world, and you pick meeting some fucking stupid bitch in a k-pop group?  You’re pathetic!  You fucking fangirls are hopeless!”

“B-but I’ve wanted to meet her like forever!  What if I never get to meet her?”

“Hey no need to argue with me about it.  It’s not up to me, I don’t exactly have a fucking choice.  It’s granted.  What’s the other wish?  I’m sure it’s also some f(x) crap and I haven’t got all night for talking to ugly teenagers so just fucking get on with it.”  The genie looks thoroughly bored.

“Okay, I want SM to prioritize f(x) more; I want f(x) to get more comebacks, a big concert, a proper fanclub name, and not get overshadowed by the other groups on SM all the time, so they can realise their true potential.”

Another heavy sigh from the genie: “Well, okay… technically that’s quite a few wishes squeezed into one you selfish cunt, but I’ll let it slide because nitpicking about it might mean I have to look at your phenomenally ugly face for a few more seconds.  Granted.  Give me until the end of the year.  It’ll all happen.”

“I don’t get my wishes straight away?”

“For fuck’s sake!  Look you ugly bitch – a comeback and a concert tour takes some time to organise.  The girls gotta practice the new songs and the new dance routines for the comebacks too.  Don’t worry, you’ll get your wish.”  The Yuri-genie gives a faint smile as she vanishes into a puff of smoke, leaving behind the empty bottle, now light as a feather, which you pick up and stash in your backpack.  The genie is gone.

——

Over the next few months, the genie is remarkably true to her word.  Later in the year f(x) do come back with a new mini-album, and a new song, which is their best one yet – but this time, they do two full months of promotions, and during this time SM temporarily push back all their other groups’ activities!  Not only that, but as soon as the TV promotions are finished, SM announce the first three-hour long f(x) concert in Seoul, a Asian showcase tour, another follow-up comeback MV, and that live on stage they will be announcing their official fanclub name!  You’re so excited – it couldn’t have worked out better, apart from a few minor downsides: the new song and mini album oddly wasn’t the smash hit you were expecting, and the girls had a bit of trouble performing the routines on some of the stages, leading to the usual “lazy performers” controversy.  You’re used to that though – it happens every single time they come back, and it’s just jealous Sones, you figure.  It’s no big deal, nothing you and the newly solidified f(x) fanbase can’t handle.  The only thing truly missing from the equation is that despite waiting diligently outside of the SM building every day after school you still haven’t met Krystal yet… but you’re sure that’s coming – it MUST be.  Everything else came true, so it’s surely only a matter of time!

You decide to put pen to paper and write to Krystal.  Maybe you have to take the initiative, after all how is she going to find you if she doesn’t know where you are?

Etc.  You spend a good few pages spilling your guts about how horrible SM were before and how much preferential treatment other groups used to get in one massive run-on sentence.  At the end you sign it with your name and address, then you post it and you cross your fingers.

You don’t have to wait long.  A few days later, an envelope arrives from SM Entertainment.  With trembling hands, you hastily open it and unfold the letter within – could this be it?

You spend a few minutes running around your room spazzing like the fangirl that you are.  When you calm down, you quickly write back and get the ball rolling.  It’s not long before you’re contacted on the phone by a male representative for SM Entertainment, who confirms that you are “that fan”.  You offer to meet out the back of SM Entertainment offices, a location that by now you’re very familiar with, but instead they organise for a limousine to pick you up from your house.

You protest: “Is that really needed?  I know my way there…”

“Krystal insists.  She’s very grateful and she wants it to be a special occasion for you.  But one thing…”

“Yes?”

“Don’t tell anyone.  We need you to keep what is happening a secret, otherwise your house will get mobbed by fans and we’ll have to call it off.  You must understand this, it’s very important.  No telling anybody, not even your parents are allowed to know who is in the limousine.  If the limousine arrives and anybody else besides you is there waiting for it, it will just drive away.  Oh, and bring the bottle with you, you still have it, yes?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Good.  Bring it with you.  SM recycling initiative.  We’ll be in touch later with a time.”

You say goodbye, hang up the phone and spazz some more.

——

A few days later, there you are, around the corner from your house, waiting on a quiet street.  You decided it was best not for the limo to pick you up right outside your front door.  You monitor the time with your phone, and sure enough, right when the clock ticks over, a white limousine with tinted windows rounds the corner and parks on the other side of the street.

You walk over, and a man dressed in a suit opens the rear door and gets out.  He beckons for you to come in.  You poke your head inside, and freak out.  There is Krystal… and Sulli, sitting on the seat opposite!

“Come on, get in!  Don’t be shy!”  Krystal beckons and smiles at you.  Oh my god, she looks just like on TV.  You get in nervously, and the man who opened the door for you gets in behind you.  He is sitting next to you, Krystal and Sulli are on the opposite side.  You’re speechless, you don’t know what to say.  You become conscious of your jaw hanging open, so you shut it.  You feel the limousine driving off.

Krystal yells to the driver in the front “central locking please!”.

Krystal and Sulli both start doing aegyo-style smiling faces at you, like this:

You hear a “click, click” throughout the whole vehicle.  Central locking.  Upon hearing this noise, the smiles vanish from Krystal and Sulli’s faces instantly.

Sulli takes a deep breath and looks at Krystal.  “Thank fuck for that.  I don’t know, aegyo just makes me want to bash a cunt in the face.  How about you?”

You are shocked.  Does she really talk like this?  You go to open your mouth, Sulli stares you down immediately.

“Not you, cunt – don’t you even open your mouth if you know what’s good for you.  I was talking to Krystal.  You just shut the fuck up and say nothing.”  She turns back to Krystal.  “Well?”

Krystal thinks, and then replies: “Sulli, you have definitely always gotten the brunt of it, I must say.  They don’t really expect as much of it from me.  At least, not until recently.”  Krystal turns her gaze to directly meet yours.  “Lately things have changed a little around here, and not for the better.“

You look at Krystal and start to become really scared.  She’s obviously very angry at you.  In the meantime you just notice that the bag that contains your personal belongings has been taken by the guy sitting next to you.  He takes out your mobile phone and the bottle that you brought with you and hands them to Krystal.  Krystal instantly rolls down the tinted window on her side and flings your phone outside.  You hear it shatter against something hard, then just as quickly Krystal rolls the window straight back up.

You protest: “Hey, that’s m….”

That’s the last thing you say as Krystal takes the bottle from the bag and thrusts the blunt end at you in a stabbing motion, dislocating your nose, while yelling at you: “Fucking shut up, bitch!”

Krystal turns to Sulli.  “Sulli, I believe you were going to ask me something?”

Sulli responds with a question in an insincere fake-preppy voice.  “Oh yes.  Krystal, please tell – how have things changed for f(x) in the past few months?”

“Well Sulli, we used to have the good life, didn’t we.  Only one video a year, only a week or two of performances, no annoying touring, no big shows… just lots of advertising and modelling work to pay the bills and bank up some money.  And that was more or less it, wasn’t it?  We’d actually get to sleep for 8 hours most nights.”

“You can thank me for that, Krystal.  I’d always make sure I performed in a lazy manner so SM would shelve our live stages quickly out of embarrassment.  I hate standing around all fucking day on those stupid TV shows waiting to shake hands with some cockhead, my back hurts after a while and my knees get sore.”

“Now it’s all fucking different.  Thanks to this bitch.”  Krystal glares at you, then reaches into her bag and pulls something out.  It’s the letter you wrote to her.  “Listen to this hilarity: ‘I want f(x) to have more videos for their songs, there should be more than one MV per album, and they should perform on shows longer’ – oh fuck I can barely go on… ‘why don’t you have an official fanclub name yet, or a concert, why is SM treating you so mean’ ….”  Krystal looks up at you occasionally while reading this with a cold expression, seemingly completely unmoved by the fact that blood is now streaming down your face.

Sulli laughs while looking out the window at passing traffic, equally disinterested in your predicament.  “Treating us mean?  Christ, this bitch is so dumb.  We were treated like queens before SM actually started making us work for a living.  Don’t tell me all our fans are this fucking stupid.”

Krystal drops the letter on the floor and steps on it.  Then she looks at you.  “You know how long it takes to shoot a fucking music video?  We work on that shit 24 hours around the clock until it’s done, no sleep.  Then there’s the dance practice which takes months to get right and we’re up late at night, every night, working on that.  We get two or three hours of sleep, every night, from when we start practicing a routine months before it comes out, right up until after it’s released and all the promotions are done.  And you and your fucking genie multiplied that so we’re now doing this shit back to back, all the fucking time like motherfucking slaves, and not even making any extra money out of it, and you actually think you’re doing us a favour?  We were one of the only big groups who actually got regular breaks between work!  Now it’s just like being in fucking SNSD!  Do you know how jealous Jessica was of me?”

You go to say something, but you don’t know what to say.  You never thought about it like this.

Krystal continues.  “Don’t even fucking get me started about that fucking concert we have to do.  How long is it going to be like this for?  Did the genie say to you anything about that?”

Scared, you don’t say anything.  Krystal raises the metal bottle as if she’s about to attack you again.  Frightened, you stammer out “the wish will last for m…my whole life.  That’s what she said.”

Krystal puts the bottle down.  She looks over at Sulli.

Sulli stares nonchalantly out the window at the traffic.  “We have to kill her.  It’s the only way.”

Krystal repeats “we have to kill her”, seemingly making it definite in her mind.  You try to struggle but there’s nowhere to go; the man sitting next to you pins your arms to your sides as soon as you make a move.

Sulli looks over at Krystal.  “I’m not putting up with any of this shit for the rest of this little cunt’s life if she’s going to live beyond next week, that’s for sure.  I told our CEO that the genie was a fucking bad idea and it would cause some shit.  I told him.  But does he ever listen to me?”

Krystal laughs.  “Hey, at least it wasn’t one of those EXO kids who found it.  Can you imagine?  Speaking of which, let’s go and pick Kai up.”

Sulli nods.  “Good thinking, I’ll let him know”.

Tears start running down your cheeks as you realise that your short life as a f(x) fangirl is about to come to a swift end.  Maybe it’s fitting that this is happening at the hands of f(x) themselves, after all you did say on forums not long ago that you would die for f(x).  Sulli takes a photo of you with her phone and then starts texting.  You start crying.

Minutes go by of sobbing and tears and then the limo pulls up somewhere.  Sulli gets out, Kai from EXO gets in, then Sulli re-enters and the limo starts driving again.  Kai looks you over, seemingly paying close attention to every inch of your bruised, bloodied face.

Krystal asks “what do you think?  Bom?”

Kai replies.  “No.  Bom’s done for now, she won’t need anything for another 6 months at least.  Boram might want the cheeks though, I know she’s been looking.  You didn’t bust her in the cheekbone, did you?”

“No.  I just hit her in the nose.”

“You need to be careful.  We could have used that.”

“Trust me, if you saw the ugly nose on this one you’d realise it wouldn’t have been useful.”

Kai shrugs: “I guess I have to believe you, don’t I.”

You wonder how much longer you have left.  You figure if there’s anything you want to know before you die, now’s probably a good time to ask.  You speak quietly: “Can I ask something?”

Sulli reaches into her purse, and takes out a small handgun with a silencer attached.  She stares at you – “what is it, cao ni ma?”

“Since I probably don’t have much longer left to live… can I ask… why f(x) never had an official fanclub name?”

Sulli, then Krystal, then Kai, all start laughing together.

“What… what’s so funny?” you ask.

“You’re a dumb bitch, and you’re about to die soon – that’s what’s funny.” Sulli retorts, chuckling while aiming the gun at your head.

Krystal takes a deep breath and looks at you.  “Do you know what “f(x)” means?  It’s a mathematical formula; variable function, depending on input – ‘f’ is function, ‘x’ is the unknown, symbolizing that each member, with our unique and valuable talents, brings something different to the group.    Without this input, x has no meaning, it’s just empty.  So if the group name is an unknown function because it’s subject to variation depending on input from the group, wouldn’t the fanclub name also be subject to variation on the same principle, but from fan input?  So why should the company decide the name?”

Sulli takes a deep breath, pushing the silencer barrel hard against your temple.  “She’ll be gone in five seconds.  Why are you even telling her this?”

Krystal smiles and stares at you.  “I like to see the light go on behind their eyes just before they die.”

I hesitate to write on the topic of sexy concepts at all, because it seems like such incredibly obvious territory.  However, I keep getting asked about Stellar’s “Marionette” video and sexy concepts in general every day about 10 times, so I thought I’d better tackle it.  You don’t mind, do you?

Concern-trolling about sexy concepts in k-pop has reached a new high point thanks to the release of Stellar’s ass-clenching, stocking-wearing, substitute-jizz-dribbling “Marionette” video.  You’ve mostly already seen it, but here it is again anyway.

I won’t bother to explore all the facets of this song and video or do a traditional review, as there’s already plenty of excellent writing about this MV here, here and here.

I’m sure that I also don’t need to explain too much about the marketing wisdom behind it, as much of this is also covered in the linked articles.  A quick recap: Stellar have been around since 2011, and have released several unpopular songs, and sustaining a flop group that makes no money for two years isn’t cheap.  With nothing left to lose, naturally the label went all-out on the sexy concept a last-ditch attempt to make this group viable and interesting to the public, and thus profitable.  Who can blame them?  The marketing move has paid off, at least for now – Stellar has been giddily surfing the wave of conservative moral outrage and their new video has raked in more web traffic than all of their other videos combined.  Who knows what the long-term effects will be, but it’s still a far preferable situation to the ass-end of k-pop that they were in up until now.

I thought it would be more interesting and effective to talk about some of the objections that people have to “sexy concepts” and sexiness in k-pop in general, because even though all of this stuff is supposedly “obvious”, it can’t be all that fucking obvious because the same old arguments keep coming up EVERY SINGLE FUCKING TIME somebody does a sexy concept.  Since the frequency of this is now approaching several times per month, I figure I can save myself a lot of typing down the track if I cover off the key objections to sexy concepts in one blog post.  Then I can just link you whiny pricks to it in a few months time when some nobody group releases their new song “tits out for the CEO” or whatever.

Let’s split our sexy-concept objectors into a few broad categories:

The religious argument

In the early days of Christianity before the printing press appeared and made bibles cheaply available to the masses, the contents of the bible were closely guarded and regulated.  Part of the reason for the church wishing to keep the bible under wraps was probably because all those monks didn’t want to share what was actually their porn stash.

“As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.” – Song Of Solomon 2:3

I don’t think it takes a religious scholar to figure that metaphor out.  Or what about this:

“Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father.“And they made their father drink wine that night: and the firstborn went in, and lay with her father; and he perceived not when she lay down, nor when she arose.  And it came to pass on the morrow, that the firstborn said unto the younger, “Behold, I lay yesternight with my father: let us make him drink wine this night also; and go thou in, and lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father.” – Genesis 19:32-34

And you thought the Japanese had the monopoly on father-daughter incest porn.  There is fucking, fucking and more fucking all throughout the bible, making it the world’s first mass-produced media item to use a sexy concept.

And don’t even get me started on other religions – the ones that don’t teach you how to fuck will dangle the carrot of virgin-fucking as a reward for following the rules.  How low can orthodox religions go in the pursuit of sexy concepts?  Lower than the girls in Stellar, I suspect.

The feminist argument

A little anecdote from personal experience, in “Entertainment Radar” format to protect the innocent/guilty:

Model Q is a female burlesque dancer in her 20s and a self-described feminist.  She performs a burlesque strip show that tours around various venues, generally these are music venues rather than actual strip clubs, where she’s often the “half-time entertainment” between music acts.  The dance routines she choreographs herself, to music which she also selects, she reveals exactly as much/little skin as she wants to, and she gets paid for it.  She manages herself and keeps 100% of her earnings (after taxes).  Offstage, she’s quite shy and sexually conservative, not a “slutty” type at all, and describes her act partly as a way to challenge and overcome her own naturally shy personality by forcing herself temporarily into a more bold, brash stage persona.  Q also used to be quite unhealthy and overweight in her teens but through careful dieting and exercise has attained a much more toned body, something that she is proud of.

(note: not a picture of Q – Sistar’s Bora is here purely for illustrative/fap purposes)

One day model Q is getting ready to perform at a venue.  She is approached by someone backstage, another female who we’ll call K.  Q has never met K before and has no idea why K is there.

K asks Q who she is and what’s she’s doing backstage.  Q explains what her act entails.

K: “I can’t let you do that.”

Q: “Why not?”

K: “I’m a feminist and this is exploitation!”

Q:  “What?  I’m a feminist too – and it’s my own body, I’m proud of it and I can do what I want with it!  It’s not up to you!  Who the fuck are you anyway?”

K:  “You’re not going onstage with that act, and that’s all there is to it.”

Sure enough, K complained to management and got Q’s show shut down – only a few minutes before she was due to go onstage.

Who is the real feminist in this situation – the person who thinks female bodies should be shamefully covered up, or the person who thinks they should be proudly exposed?  The person who wants to earn money for herself or the person who wants to stop other women from earning money for themselves? If K’s hypocrisy was a chocolate mud cake, how sharp would the knife need to be for you to cut it and give a slice to your grandmother?  Do arguments about “exploitation” even apply when it’s you exploiting yourself?  Isn’t exploitation supposed to be wrong precisely because the person supposedly experiencing it is not the one in the driver’s seat?

What about in other situations where a company is involved?  Do you think the girls from Stellar were cruelly forced into their latest promotions?  We’ll never know for sure, but I think the smart money is on the idea that they were at least complicit, if probably not actively suggesting it.  Park your pathetic high-horse “gender studies college student”-grade moralising in the handicapped zone of your brain for a moment and actually think about it for a few seconds; if you were some girl in a group and have wasted a few years of your life in training and then another two years being active in a total flop group, you’d be well and truly sick of that shit by now, and you’d see the clock ticking on your own viability as a future idol.  If you weren’t completely demoralised by that point you’d probably be thinking “fuck it, what the hell can we do to get some attention and success – it’s time to go hard or go home”.  Maybe Stellar hated their sexy concept and were dragged kicking and screaming onto the stage in those high heels and stockings.  Or maybe they begged their CEO to give them a sexy grown-up concept for a change, so they could be successful like all those other groups and finally get paid.  Chances of both are slim though – the label probably just said “this is your next concept” and they said “okay then” because they understood the importance of being a solid team.  Whenever you see a sexy concept and cry “exploitation”, it pays to check in with the people who are actually supposedly being exploited, because you never know, maybe they’re cool with it.

If you actually do some research on groups and their most/least liked concepts, the ones that the artists themselves tend to dislike the most are usually not the sexy ones, but the ones where they look like fucking dorks.  If you’re any kind of celebrity or in the public eye in any form people are inevitably going to rub one out to your picture anyway whether you look cute, sexy, feminine, masculine, sleazy, take-charge, slutty, princess-like, submissive, tough, dominating, scungy or whatever because sexual preferences come in all different flavours.  Every female concept is a “sexy” concept to somebody… as is every male concept.  Most of the people complaining about Minah not looking like a bookworm anymore probably just have a sexual fetish for bookworms.

The concerned music fan argument

“Oh but I’m not some crazy feminist prude or religious nutter…” I hear you say to yourself “…I’m just sick of all the sexy concepts.  There’s so many of them, it’s getting so old!”

It’s true that there’s a lot of them.  Hell, even the male groups are doing sexy female concepts now:

Why do you think that is?  Well, it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure this out.  If you remember the Bloomberg documentary I posted a while back about the k-pop business, you’ll remember the following quote about k-pop in general:

“…it gets people talking – in an age where chatter is the main currency, that’s what you’ve got to do.”

If you live in the Middle Ages in a fucking village and you want something to go away, you chase it out of the town with torches and pitchforks.  That doesn’t work in the age of the Internet where everyone’s villages are connected with fiber-optics – all the nearby super-connected villages will just tune into your village to see what the digital black smoke plumes and screaming is all about and now suddenly your town pariah collects a whole ton of new fans.  This is exactly how Rebecca Black became a millionaire, it’s why the Westbro Baptist Church won’t ever fucking go away either unless the people running it die in a freak vibrator-in-the-communal-spa accident and it’s why no amount of hatred could kill T-ara off (if anything the humungous amounts of web traffic generated from their controversy assisted their popularity spread throughout other Asian countries).  Having experienced probably the maximum amount of hatred it’s possible for a bunch of singing dancing non-political polite-in-public girls to get, other companies have probably seen the T-ara situation and thought “okay… in a worst-case scenario we could still be as successful as T-ara, and they’re still making top ten hits in Korean and playing showcases internationally… boy, we’d like to be able to do that… hmmm, how much could something that gets people talking like a sexy concept really hurt us?”.  Girl’s Day, Sistar, Dal Shabet and AOA all recently found out the answer to that question was “not a fucking bit”.

These days, if you truly want something to go away, here’s a tip: rather than linking it everywhere and talking about it everywhere and saying “look at this, isn’t this horrid” (when all you’re really doing with that action is effectively saying “look at this, look at this, look at this”) try shutting the fuck up about it.  Completely.   Don’t mention it, ever.  I don’t particularly like [censored] so I don’t talk about it, and I definitely won’t ever talk about [censored] who is a complete [censored].  Of course, with anything sex-related people can’t bring themselves to close their gaping maws, because they’re secretly so fascinated.  How much web traffic did this scene alone generate?

All attempts to stamp out porn, smut or sexiness in media will always be futile, because biology is always a stronger force than sociology or morality and as soon as you type the word “sex” thousands of people with aching libidos will swarm around like angry bees.  If you want proof – more people find my own website by searching for k-pop porn than they do by searching my name:

My blogging seems to doing well because of its sexy concept.  If you clicked this blog post hoping to read the details about Girls’ Generation’s breaking sex controversy, you just proved me correct.  For those who just skim read my blogs I’m now going to insert a few random images of Girls’ Generation members and some text, just so those people don’t see a lack of them and get wise to the point of this blog without actually reading a few sentences first, so excuse me while I go off on a bit of a tangent now just for those people.  It’s the least I can do.  I’m also going to put a heading up so those people know when to start reading.

GIRLS’ GENERATION’S BREAKING SEX CONTROVERSY

Look, here’s a picture of someone in SNSD.

Nice outfit.  What’s that in her hand.  Is it a translucent tissue?  Could she be wiping the jizz from her face after a quickie?  Oh wait, what’s that machine and that cord… oh fuck it’s a motherfucking oxygen mask holy fucking shit.

This picture here is also very pretty and has some cupcakes on a tray.  They look really yummy and don’t remind me of anything in particular.  What’s that on her left?  Some dude standing above her, struggling to contain his boner no doubt.  Why would she be on the floor like that?  A pink mat has been laid out and it looks really soft and comfortable so I can only assume she’s going to be spending some time down there, doing whatever she’s doing.  Gosh.  I don’t know about you but the vibe here is reminding me a little of Blue Velvet:

Blue Velvet is a really good film and you should check it out, although I think Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive are the best of David Lynch’s films.  Sorry, that’s irrelevant, isn’t it.  This paragraph doesn’t actually exist for any reason other than to pad out this section so SNSD fans who skipped straight here can see a block of text on first glance and they’ll think that there are some juicy sex controversy details here when in fact this isn’t the case and I’m just adding this section on the end to prove my point earlier about people not being able to resist the lure of sexual content especially when it concerns pop idols.  No wonder companies repeatedly use these tactics.  Notice how I’m using the word “sex” a lot, both in this paragraph and in the blog title, that will probably make it trend higher on some search engines.  If this website had attached ads, I could make more money off them this way.

Mind you Blue Velvet was a pretty kinky film (plus it had sex in it) so maybe I’m not trolling and we’re going to get a kinky sex controversy out of this after all.  Hell, if The Human Centipede is fair game for k-pop, so is anything!  Bring on the SNSD Blue Velvet sexy concept!  Sex!

It’s hard to think up any music fandom with an insecurity complex bigger than any given k-pop fandom.  People who are into k-pop (regardless of which group is their fave) can’t just seem to say “I like this bubblegum shit, because it sounds good to me, and that’s that, and if you don’t like it fuck you” – they have to constantly justify everything both to themselves and others, so they can confirm that “yes it’s socially acceptable for me to like this group”.  That’s the real motivation behind a lot of the excessive caring about vocal technique (“See?  My favourite group are talented, see? SEE?”) chart success (“Look, everyone likes them in Korea, they MUST be good!”) and awards (“They won something!  They’re so special!”) that many fans engage in.  It’s also why fans’ eyes light up with delight like twinkly little snowglobes whenever they are alerted to the rare eventuality of a cog in their favourite sculpted corporate pop music delivery machine getting a songwriting credit somewhere, and also why they then go and trot out these song credits tirelessly on forums and websites in some pathetic cyber-dick-measuring contest.

I thought it would be useful to demystify the meaning of technical terms in album credits, as well as how these terms are allocated to different people and also what it means when people co-write, so when the next media hype article comes along about artist X co-arranging song Y with producer Z, you don’t get the wrong idea about what’s really going on and you at least have some idea about what you’re stroking your e-peen about.  Because I love you guys.

Let’s get started with some basic terminology:

Composer – (or “composed by”) – writes the music.  If a separate lyricist, writer or arranger is not specified, the composer did these things too.

Songwriter – (or “written by”) – same thing as the composer.

Lyricist (or “lyrics by”, “words by”) – writes the words.  Unless the lyricist is also the composer or the co-composer, the lyricist did not decide how those lyrics are sung (or rapped, or screamed, or whatever), only what the words are.  Essentially, a lyricist who only writes lyrics is the same thing as a poet (although don’t ever tell a poet that – those guys are even more insecure than the average k-pop fan and will froth at the mouth and scream obscenities at you until you take it back and promise never to speak of such vile heresy again).

Arranger (or “arranged by”) – the person who decides what parts go where (“we’ll do the verse melody twice before going into the chorus” etc) and/or which singers and instruments do what parts (“let’s have the guitar do the melody with the synth in section C, and then in section D the vocals will pick it up and we’ll increase the bass”etc).

Recording engineer (or “recorded by”, “tracked by”) – the person who works the big desk in the studio, (hopefully) knows what all the knobs do, and records the performers.  Performers used to be recorded onto large reel-to-reel tapes, these days it’s all done with computers.

Mixing engineer (or “mixed by”) – the person who works the big desk in the studio, (hopefully) knows what all the knobs do, and gets the recordings from the recording engineer and adjust levels so the loudness and softness of each instrument is just right, adds effects and special stuff (I’ll go into the special stuff in another blog, later) so it sounds “nice”, then “mixes down” the result into a standard 2-track (stereo) file.  Except on very big high-budget projects, the recording and mixing engineer are typically the same person – if a separate mixing engineer is not specified, the recording engineer did this job.

Audio engineer (or “engineered by”) – another word for someone who is both the recording and the mixing engineer.  An audio engineer is also what you call a person who mixes a live band, but we’re talking about studio album credits here so we’ll ignore this bit.

Producer (or “produced by”, “production by”) – the person who decides the sonic result of the mix – how much bass and treble, how thick or thin instruments sound, how loud and soft everything is, what effects would go best where, etc.  If this seems like there’s a bit of crossover between “producer” and “mixing engineer”… not quite.  If it’s confusing think of it like this – the producer sits back in his lounge chair smoking a cigar and saying “hmmmmm… needs more bass”, and the audio engineer says “yes boss, anything you say, boss!” and twiddles the knobs on the desk to make it happen.  Sometimes the producer and the audio engineer are the same person, sometimes they are separate and sometimes the producer has no knowledge of how to use the equipment or the technical side of mixing at all, but just has a good ear!  Some very hands-on producers will also re-arrange the songs so they are also arrangers.  In k-pop, it’s common for the “producer” to actually be the composer/lyricist, arranger, producer and audio engineer, all in one.  Most of the more well-known hitmaker style producers in k-pop (Brave Brothers, Shinsadong Tiger, JYP, Sweetune, etc) fit this category.

Executive producer – fronts up money for the project, effectively a sponsor.  This person is usually not involved in any other way.  An example of an executive producer who also gets involved in actual production and other areas would be JYP, but he’s a rare exception.

Mastering engineer (or “mastered by”) – this person gets the final 2-track mix and tweaks/optimises it in subtle ways (that I won’t go into here because it would take too long) for maximum fidelity/impact on radio or in downloaded formats.  Think about the mastering engineer as equivalent to someone who gives a brand new car a buff, shine and polish once it leaves the assembly line, before it goes to sit in some car yard somewhere, so you’re more likely to buy the thing.  The mastering engineer is almost always a separate person to everybody else, and sometimes they go uncredited.   Only very very cheap productions, and/or productions in extremely non-commercial genres with absolutely zero aspirations to mass popularity would release a recording without mastering it first.

There are other terms, but these are the main ones you’ll come across… but let’s not forget:

Performer – plays/sings the music.  May or may not have had fuck-all to do with any of the above.  In the case of k-pop, generally not.

There are however, exceptions – exceptions that the average k-pop fan will treasure like a jewel-encrusted dildo encoded with their bias’ DNA.  Let’s look at some exceptional situations and how they are likely to apply to k-pop.

Co-writing – apparently CL helped compose three songs for the new 2NE1 album when she was bored.  No shit she was bored, the fucking thing was meant to come out two motherfuckin’ years ago, she was probably trying to hurry the process along a bit because nobody else over at YG gave a shit.  But what does “helped compose” actually mean?  Well, according to the article:

The leader of 2NE1 composed the lyrics and co-wrote the music for the songs “If I Were You,” “Baby I Miss You” and the title track off of “Crush.” She also co-wrote the lyrics for the song “MTBD” with YG producer-in-residence Teddy.

If she’s the only one who composed those lyrics for those three songs, then she’s the sole writer of the words which means we’re probably going to get filler-standard lyrics like the Korean equivalent of “alone” rhymed with “phone” and “Saturday night” rhymed with “feelin’ alright”.  But what about “co-wrote lyrics” and “co-wrote music”, what does that really mean?  Well, maybe CL sat down with Teddy in the studio and had a chat like this:

CL: *strides into the studio in a means-business kind of way* “You know, since I’m a strong independent woman and a role model for women globally, I think I should help you write the song, because I think a female presence is important to preserve the artistic and creative integrity of what 2NE1 is doing.”

Teddy: “Okay then, what do you want?”

CL:  “well, in that bit in our new song where it goes “eh eh eh eh”, can we make the first “eh” a bit lower than the other ones?  I think that this female creative input that I’m giving now will show the world that 2NE1 are strong independent women.”

Teddy:  “Rightio… anything else?”

CL: “Nope!… Oh, WAIT!  In that MDTB song, I want to say “2NE1, bitches!” at some point… like, really LOUD.  Because we’re got to show the world how we’re redefining the pop music scene in Korea for women and I think that will send a positive message that we’re not afraid to light it up and let it burn like we don’t care!”

Teddy:  “… okay, is that it?”

CL: “Yep!  Can we do it?”

Teddy:  “Sure.”

CL:  “Great!  Let ‘em know how it feels damn good to be bad!” *walks out holding her head high triumphantly in the knowledge that she has taken a positive stand for creative women everywhere*

Teddy:  *sigh*…

Believe it or not, the above hypothetical scenario (assuming Teddy came through on his end of the deal and let her do that, I guess we’ll find out soon eventually) would be enough for CL to get one co-writing vocal credit and one co-writing musical credit on an album sleeve.  Of course, perhaps she’s actually done a whole lot more than that, but my point is that to get her name on the album credits, she doesn’t need to do much at all.

Co-arranging is another equally curly piece of terminology – remember when Eunjung “participated in the arrangement” of “I Know The Feeling“?  As we’re covered, “arranging” just means “deciding what goes where”.  She didn’t actually play anything, or even decide what notes get played, she just helped put the already-existing musical jigsaw pieces together.  She might have gone up to composer Baek Deoksang while he was busy recording and had a conversation like this:

Eunjung *bounces into the studio happily* “I’d like to help arrange this song!”

Deoksang “Okay then, what’s on your mind?”

Eunjung “Can we have an acoustic guitar intro instead of a keys intro?  That’d be just swell!”

Deoksang “Sure.”

Eunjung “Also, can Boram and Hyomin get the rap parts instead of me?  I hate getting saddled with the fucking rap parts all the time now that Hwabum isn’t around to polish her nails in time to the beat.”

Deoksang “Why not, Boram’s always whining about how she doesn’t get rap parts anyway, if I throw her a bone it’ll shut her up for once.”

Eunjung “Great, thanks!”  *skips off merrily*

Deoksang “Oh fuck… now I’ve got to give her co-arranging credit… oh well, if I tell CCM HQ there’s probably a media play article in this…”

Of course, it could have been a lot more involved than that.  The point is, you don’t really know – nobody does except the people involved.  Just like with co-writing, the most minimal of changes is enough to qualify as “co-arranging”.

Now here’s the best bit: we’re assuming in these cases that songwriters are accurately reporting their songwriting splits.  Nobody says that they have to do that.

When composed works are reported with royalty collection agencies, each person who was involved in writing the work is apportioned a percentage of the royalties.  In the case of one person writing everything, they get 100%.  In the case of one person writing the words and another writing the music, they each get 50%.  In the case of two people writing the music it’s not split 25% each by default, for the reasons outlined in the above hypotheticals – maybe one person had very minimal input.  It’s instead up to the composers to work it out between themselves how to split the royalties, they’ve just got to agree on whatever the split is and both sign on it (and until they do, nobody gets anything).

When signing to a major label, songwriting royalties form part of the contract agreement, so you actually have to hash this stuff out with the label themselves (or in the case of k-pop, they offer you a deal and you take it, or you don’t take it and another trainee takes it instead and you don’t get to have a music career at all).  So when CL suddenly decides “right, I’m going to help write a song” that 5% or 25% of whatever part is apportioned to her is already spoken for, because the royalty split sheets are submitted by the label, who will usually collect royalty on behalf of the artist.  Gosh, where could this potentially go wrong?

Well, if the label has control over royalty collection they can do all sorts of fun stuff including but certainly not limited to:

• Make songwriting royalties automatically go toward paying of production debts instead of going into the artist’s pocket
• Allow performers to purchase songwriting credit by paying a fee for inclusion on the royalty split (so they only make a profit if the song does well enough to recoup the fee), or allowing them to be part of the royalty split for free if they sacrifice something else (like a weekly wage)
• Decide to not credit the songwriters at all by having a clause in the contract that states that any creative work made while under contract is legal property of the label

…and that’s just scratching the surface, these aren’t the only possibilities, just a few fairly typical ones.  Yes, success stories and people making bucketloads of money off big hits does exist, but for every G-Dragon who makes a packet off royalties there’s a bunch of people like [name deleted for legal reasons] who probably put in the same amount of creative energy and got utterly shafted.

This post is just a little something to think about the next time you hear about your bias co-writing a song, before you go spazzing like a headless chicken about how awesome everything is for them and how they’re so creative and genius.  You’re welcome.

When 2012 finished and I said that Rania’s “Style” was the song of the year, I had to deal with a lot of butthurt from k-pop fans who disagreed with my opinion.  Mercifully, the whining at that time was restricted only to people that I personally knew, and those that listen to my radio show (as I also played my favourites list on-air) – my blogging wasn’t very popular at that time because I had only just started writing.   Twelve months later when at the end of 2013 I said that Crayon Pop’s “1,2,3,4″ was the song of the year, it was a different story; the butthurt was far more extreme as now it had also manifested online.

For those who haven’t heard this amazing song yet, here it is again:

Many people didn’t understand this selection, or thought I was stupid/on drugs, or just making it up to be cool/uncool/trendy/non-trendy/whatever, so I thought I’d explain it more deeply.

So what do I think is so great about 1,2,3,4?

* Great melodies that anybody can enjoy – CHECK

* Melodic keyboard riffs worthy of Sammy Hagar-era 80s Van Halen – CHECK

* Goofiness and FUN pushed to the forefront in a scene where so many people take everything idols sing, say and do way, way, WAY too fucking seriously – MOTHER FUCKING CHECK, YOU CUNTING BITCH CUNT FUCK WHORES

* Another great punk song from Crayon Pop, the first punk group in the ultra-commercial end of k-pop – CHE…

Okay, that last point might require a little more clarification, so here we go with:

HOW CRAYON POP IS (KIND OF) LIKE A PUNK GROUP

Musically

Music fashion comes in waves.  Styles and techniques come into fashion, and then go out of fashion.  Whenever music in popular culture veers heavily in one direction, you can bet it’s going to come crashing through the other way later on down the track.  An example: look at all the Autotune that was all over almost every k-pop song four or five years ago… how many new k-pop releases have (obvious or “hard”) Autotune in them in 2014?  A few but not many – that robot-voice sound defines the “naughties” (2000-2010), it’s simply yesterday’s sound and you won’t hear much of it over the next few years compared to previously for this reason.

When the first wave of punk music initially rose to popularity in 1976, it was a similar shift in music fashion – a reaction to 1970s progressive rock, which was getting more and more musically complicated and technical at the time.  The original punk groups had simple, stripped-back songs that anybody could sing and play… because the original performers could barely sing and play the songs themselves.  A bunch of people found this incredibly inspiring – 70s prog rock with all its complex twists and turns seemed impossible to even memorise let alone perform without years of practice, but here was some music anybody could do.  The punk scene spread like wildfire in a few short months because people watching the initial shows thought “hey, these guys have cool songs but their playing and singing sucks fucking monkey cock all night long… if these talentless losers can do cool music, why can’t I?” - and promptly started up groups of their own.

It’s no secret that Korean pop music is succumbing to obsession about technique more and more – as competition between groups heats up,  everyone is trying to outsing, outdance, and outwank everyone else.  In the meantime, the songs themselves are being somewhat forgotten.  Although far from Crayon Pop’s best song, it’s clear in this context why so many people latched onto BarBarBar:

Basic singing, basic dancing, it sounds FUN and anybody can do this.  Look at all the people in the background dancing.  Now imagine if it was Exo’s “Wolf” playing, there might be two people dancing in the background at the most because who else besides Exo themselves and the most extreme of cray-cray fans can actually dance to that fucking shit?  Crayon Pop makes music that is enjoyable for everybody, not just those belonging to the snobby elite k-pop sing-and-dance “OMG they’re not doing it correctly” club.  Notice how at 1:52 Choa fucks up an arm movement?  Nobody gives a fuck, and nobody should.  Obsessing about correct dance moves and vocal technique would only serve to alienate the audience who has come to have a good time, so think before you pick it apart, you party-pooping cunt.

DIY (do it yourself) ethos

DIY ethos is part of what defines punk.  Many of the early groups couldn’t get record deals because nobody would touch them because their singing/playing was so shit, so the groups said “fuck all these people saying we can’t do this or that, nobody will ever give us a break, let’s just figure out how to do this shit ourselves” and started making their own records, booking their own shows, and touring whole countries by sleeping on people’s floors.   Plenty of people didn’t want to touch Crayon Pop either, and they couldn’t get on music shows, so they performed outdoors with portable ghetto-blasters in all types of weather to find another way to bring their music to the people.

“But wait a second”, I hear you say, “it’s not really Crayon Pop themselves doing it, I mean… they’re just puppets of their label, right?  This has nothing to do with punk, it’s totally manufactured popular music!”

Well, newsflash motherfuckers: so is just about every punk group that you’ve ever heard of that reached any level of fame or notoriety.  Let’s look at the big three of the first wave of punk: The Sex Pistols were very much Svengali’ed by manager Malcolm McLaren (although the exact extent of which is disputed and remains controversial to this day, but given Malcolm’s track record his influence would have not been minimal).  The Clash were a completely manufactured group that were put together by CBS to rival The Sex Pistols and their music and image was carefully crafted to this end.  The Ramones didn’t give a shit about punk music (which hadn’t been invented yet) and really wanted to be as pop as possible, the group idolised 60′s pop Motown artists to the extent that they even hired notoriously unhinged Motown producer Phil Spector to produce an album in an attempt to secure pop stardom.  The term “punk” used to refer to a homosexual, its first reference to music comes from The Ramones’ song “Judy Is A Punk” and the group only fell into the punk rock niche because they weren’t self-aware enough to realise that their leather-jacket image, wall-of-noise guitar sound and general ugliness was complete anathema to pop music fans.

And don’t even get me started on the more modern big punk groups.  Things only got more corporate-friendly from here, as the music industry machine moved swiftly to sterilise punk music’s safety pins and make it just another arm of its standard operations.  Those groups that look so rebellious onstage – in the record company office, they are all “yes, sir, no sir, three bags full sir”.  Believe it.

Ideology

Punk isn’t just a musical form, all punk music also has a central idea.  Contrary to popular belief, it’s not necessarily an idea about politics or social rebellion or whatever (as punk music actually covers the entire spectrum of political thought).  The central idea that permeates each and every piece of punk music worth listening to can basically be summed up like this:

In music, the idea is always king – everything else flows from it.  Punk gave voice to people who had ideas, and the drive to execute them, but not necessarily the talent to execute them to the kind of technical standard that the pop music world traditionally expects.  The ideology of punk told them “your lack of ability doesn’t matter – if you can convey your idea, and it’s a good idea, the end result might be a bit rough around the edges but it will still be worthwhile”.  This is why often artists who sound nothing like a traditional punk group are still sometimes given the punk label anyway – it’s a way for people to say “this person isn’t technically inclined or doesn’t care for technique, but their concept is great and they’re doing things in a different way which is still cool and worth your time”.

Crayon Pop are nothing if not an ideas group.  Whether it’s the members themselves with the ideas or their management doesn’t matter in the end, because the result is the same – you get to see a group do a fucking cool Bruce Lee concept in a genre where everyone else is either the cute girlfriend or the sexy girlfriend (not that there’s anything wrong with those things, but viva la difference).

And you’re going to pick on them because their songs don’t have vocal wank in them, or they might miss a note or a dance move?  Fuck off.  You should be grateful for Crayon Pop’s existence, because ideas is what keeps a music genre afloat, not technique, and we all know what music with no ideas sounds like.

People are always / asking me for all my “thoughts” / about k-pop songs

I normally do / not review songs, I find it / boring as batshit

But due to demand / I will make an exception / and review some songs

Please now enjoy these / Korean pop songs reviews / in Haiku format

These are all for songs / that I have been asked for my / “thoughts” on recently

Girls’ Generation – Mr. Mr.

Just because it is / better than I Got A Boy / does not say a lot

2NE1 – Crush

They love me cos I’m / using cringeworthy English / where is my rifle

BESTie – Thank You Very Much

That cheesy chorus / cripples a good song, oh well / at least they look good

TVXQ – Something

IU’s “Modern Times” / has made jazz big bands trendy / now we pay the price

K.will & Mamamoo – Peppermint Chocolate

Ride on K.will’s fame / smart publicity move, girls / pity the song sucks

AOA – Miniskirt

No-one gave a shit / about this group until now / sexy concepts work

Dal Shabet – Big Baby Baby

A really good song / hope The Eurythmics don’t sue / good luck with that, girls

Stellar – Marionette

Once I stopped fapping / I noticed the song was good / nobody else cared

T-ara – First Love

This sounds a lot like / all their other fucking songs / that’s not a bad thing

Rain – 30Sexy

Go back to the front / shatter North Korean shells / with that falsetto

GP Basic – Pika-Burnjuck

Dubstep please fuck off / out of Korean pop songs / you have no place here

Hyorin – Let It Go

Are you kidding me / I’m over eight years old cunt / fuck this Disney trash

MBLAQ – Smoky Girl

Smoky girl smoky / girl smoky girl smoky girl / too repetitive

Girl’s Day – Nothing Lasts Forever

This is really good / where did this songwriter go / hire him back, you whores

T-ara N4 – Jeon Won Diary

It didn’t need all / those extra sections in it /  it’s really too long, and the structure is / all over / the place, it could have / used some trimming down, like, seriously edit that fucker – remove / all the pointless sections /and we don’t need Taewoon rapping in every CCM song these days do we / other than that I guess it was okay / they have worse songs I suppose

*

The next list is all / fan video submissions / from my ask fm

I told followers / to submit videos that /  they wanted “thoughts” on

And that I would then / put my answers in a blog / for them to visit

They were not told that / I would use haiku format / for the reviewing

I received over / 100 song submissions / these are the best ones

*

Infinite – Be Mine

This song is decent / wow a good Infinite song / sometimes pigs do fly

Kahi ft. Dumbfoundead – It’s Me

What a boring song / I guess Kahi’s time is up / unemployable

Clazziquai Project – Sweetest Name

Jamiroquai sucks / so do any Koreans / ripping off his trash

Clazziquai Project – Love Recipe

Haiku verses are / not sufficient to describe / how boring this is

Wonder Girls ft. Akon – Like Money

Great Shodan concept / but Sohee’s hair is horrid / time to shoot myself

Lyn ft. Junhyung – Breakable Heart

Worthless ballad trash / why k-pop fans like this shit / I have no idea

Lyn – I Like This Song

Raping my eardrums / stop making music right now / my ears will thank you

Spica – Painkiller

Called “Painkiller” but / not a Judas Priest cover / I am disappoint

Bumkey ft. Dynamic Duo – Attraction

Why is most k-rap / wimpy soft R&B shite / Ellin is hot though

Gain – Bloom

Boring disco funk / but it’s okay because I / don’t need sound to fap

Girls’ Generation – Genie

League of Legends skins / is the only worthwhile thing / that this song produced

U-KISS – Neverland

I have this album /  I tried to give it away / no-one wanted it

Shinhwa – Throw My Fist

If I was that girl / I would have picked the guy with / no greasy mullet

Rain – Love Song

Singing in her ear / take your shit ballad elsewhere / she just wants some sleep

4minute – Is It Poppin?

What’s Your Name was crap / this is slightly better but / so is lung cancer

TVXQ – Rising Sun

The only good song / TVXQ ever had / as a five piece group

K.will  – Please Don’t

K-pop fans are dumb / I saw the plot twist coming / 40 seconds in

2NE1 – Come Back Home

Song starts off okay / why does it go all stupid / trendy fucking shit

Puer Kim – Manyo Maash

What is “manyo maash”? / maybe she means her cleavage / I’m not complaining

Nine Muses – News

The most consistent / nine member k-pop girl group / in the world today

T-ara – Falling U

I forgot this group / had a ballad this awful / unlistenable

B.A.P – Power

Great early concept / why they also do soft songs / I don’t fucking know

Gain ft. Bumkey – Fuck U

Why did the label / x over the naughty word / when she still sings it?

B2ST – Shadow

Shinsadong Tiger / must take them on Bangbus trips / book them now, ladies

NS Yoon-G ft. Jay Park – If You Love Me

Watched the whole MV / saw almost zero boobies / what a waste of time

APink – My My

Apink: a request / please do a sexy concept / just to troll k-netz

Lee Ji Hye – Rocket Power

This sounds a lot like / T-ara’s Apple Is A / except not as good

Girls’ Generation – Galaxy Supernova

Why such a low res / what good is SNSD / without the perving

Tasty – Day And Night

Who builds a sports court / with concrete posts in the way / how fucking stupid

Nell – Four Times Around The Sun

Nell is fucking shit / why get excited by this / third-rate Coldplay clone

TVXQ – Mirotic

Sounds a bit EXO / I guess these days EXO get / SM’s reject songs

Infinite – BTD

 Guard tower unmanned / hey sniper get back up there / your work not finished

CNBlue – Love Girl

Tip for single men: / breaking into her bedroom / not a good idea

Sistar19 – Ma Boy

Bora and CL / should release a rap project / called “bad meaning bad”

Davichi – Turtle

Hyoyoung crawls into / her sister’s gaping cunthole / and finds a rodent

Bohemian – There Is No Sun

They blocked out the sun / burning junk to make MVs / for shit k-ballads

Shinhwa – Venus

This veteran group / should have enough business clout / to refuse dubstep

Itaewon Freedom ft. J. Y. Park

JYP should have / given this song to miss A / not that Hush garbage

KARA – Lupin

DSP hate them / fixing aspect ratio / low priority

Girl’s Day – Kyawooddung

Wow Girl’s Day sure had / some complete fucking stinkers / in the early days

VIXX – On And On

Nazi fetish look / without swastika armbands? / cake without icing

Tae Jin Ah – I Love You, Darling

The best song ever / my purpose in life complete / I can die happy

The other night was a rough night.

There I was, trying to get to sleep, with little success.  Having lived in Australia my whole life, I’m accustomed to days in a row of 40+ degrees desert heat in summer; it doesn’t bother me too much as long as it’s cool overnight.  What I struggle with more is when it only gets down to about 30 degrees at night, then it’s hard to sleep because there’s no real break in the heat.  We’re getting more and more nights like that lately, probably from all you kids overseas burning all your carbons fapping to Girl’s Day videos.

Anyway I was starting to get a headache from the heat and the tiredness, so I reached for my familiar painkillers.  Fumbling for the packet in the pitch black, I popped two pills out of the foil and hastily chugged them down with some water.  The texture of the pills felt a little different to normal but to be honest I didn’t really check them closely, I’m sure it was just the heat making it seem that way.  I then lay back on the bed and waited for the codeine to take effect.

Normally my preferred brand of painkillers take between 60 and 90 minutes to kick in, so I was pleasantly surprised to note that I started to feel incredibly drowsy after less than five minutes.  Staring up at the ceiling, I noticed that I was having trouble focusing on a single point, it was as if the room started to swirl around me.  Then I started to notice that the ceiling concealed a figure of a person, which gradually became clearer and clearer:

It was Raina, from After School/Orange Caramel!  Immediately I thought to myself “could this be real?”.  This brief pondering was soon substituted with another more pressing, more urgent question – “will she be offended if I fap right now?” – I reached down to assume optimal fapping position but Raina put her hand up to stop me immediately.

“No… not yet.  I have an important message for you.” spoke Raina calmly, in perfect English.

Stunned, I lay in silence and watched as Raina, now clearly visible and floating directly above my head, gave a speech.

“I, Raina, declare that I am the one true deity.  I hereby also declare the following as trufax:

1. You shall have no other gods before Raina.
2. You shall not create false idols, the idol industry is saturated enough.
3. You shall not take the name of Raina in vain.
4. Remember the Orange Caramel comeback day, to keep it holy.
5. Honor your father and your mother for without them you would not be born and thus not be aware of Raina.
6. You shall not murder on the dancefloor, you’d better not kill the groove.
7. You shall not commit adultery, but fapping to my pics is okay.
8. You shall not steal, please acquire all Raina content from legal sources.
9. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor using Photoshop, rumour mills and out-of-context video editing.
10. You shall not covet your neighbour’s ass, only the asses on fancams and GIFs.”

Raina dropped a piece of paper at my feet, containing her speech.

“That’s it.  I’m going.  You can fap now.  Do you want me to do some poses before I leave?”

I nodded enthusiastically.  Why waste the opportunity?

-

Since I have been the recipient of this divine visitation, I decided after I cleaned myself off to form a new religion called “Rainaism” (not to be confused to “Rainism“).  As the divine connection between the one true god Raina and the rest of the world, I’ve also written a “divinely inspired” holy book, because every religion needs one of those.

There’s a whole bunch of rules and shit in this book I wrote but since people only ever read the bits of holy books that they want to read and ignore the parts that don’t sit with their preconceived worldview, I’ll just give you a few edited highlights catechism-style I can save you some of the trouble of picking and choosing what annoyingly outdated and unrealistic rules to follow:

*  Rainaism is a religion of peace, which means no wars with other countries, religions or k-pop fandoms are allowed under any circumstances (yes I’m a bit more strict about adhering to this than every other organised religion is ahem).  This means you’re not allowed to downvote anything on k-pop forums or articles, and in fact Raina in her divine wisdom recently disabled the ability to have visible downvotes on the Disqus commenting platform to get you all started.  Also no keyboard warrioring where you abuse others and so forth because that’s nasty and we’re all about being kind.

*  Anyone saying negative things about Raina or things that could be potentially construed as negative should edit and/or modify their comments so they are no longer potentially negative, or remove the comments.  I’m not asking them to follow the doctrine of Rainaism, they should just follow this particular rule as a sign of respect to the religious beliefs of Rainaists.  If they don’t do this, then the first point no longer applies and it’s basically open season so feel free to be a cunt, like, whatever.

*  All adherents to Rainaism should practice universal love and tolerance of other people’s belief systems.  All adherents to other religious beliefs should be welcomed with open arms by Rainaists, unless those other people don’t also love Raina, in which case they are obviously objectively wrong so feel free to educate them that they are wrong using whatever method works.

*  Although it’s certainly not mandatory, it’s totally okay and strongly encouraged to give money to the founder of the religion (me) in order to help strengthen the Rainaism movement worldwide, and failure to do this as a follower means that you might feel appropriately guilty.

*  Fapping over Raina should take place at least weekly for those in relationships, or daily for those who are single and thus have no excuse to not adhere to a rigorous fap schedule.  It is okay to be in a straight, gay or other relationship, marry or don’t marry, have sex or don’t have sex etc as long as you still worship Raina and fap over her regularly.

I think that covers off the main points.  I realise that some of these points are completely contradictory but hey, it’s an organised religion, that’s how they all roll.  Here’s some material to help you on your way to becoming a Rainaist.

Welcome to the first Kpopalypse interview!

In this post I’m going to be interviewing Jacques Peterson, the owner/writer of pop website Arcadey and writer for pop-culture website Popdust.   Jacques’ own website used to be called The Prophet Blog and he’s been writing about K-pop as well as pop from other countries for a long time, much to the pleasure/displeasure of many.  Love him or hate him, if you’ve followed western K-pop blogging over the last few years you’ve probably seen some of his posts and have an opinion about them.  He attracted my attention when the T-ara scandal broke in 2012, where his lucid writing style and refusal to blindly follow the trendy popular opinion of the time shone out to me like a jewel-encrusted beacon in a lake of shit.  In this interview we cover off his views on a wide range of k-pop and blogging-related topics.  Enjoy!

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

I’m good, thanks. Am about to start writing a post about Boys Republic, but got distracted by some ridiculously suggestive photo on the band’s Facebook page. Now I finally know how straight fanboys feel when watching Girl’s Day perform.

Please show the photo, and describe the specific qualities of it that you find distracting.

I can’t now. I’m too ashamed. I thought that it was the fucking oppa of the group who’s only a year younger than me, then I did a Google Image search and found out it was actually the barely legal maknae. I feel like Tony Ahn if he’d hooked up with Hyeri a month after her 18th birthday.

Boys Republic. Note: this is not the photo he’s referring to.

You’ve always been very “out”, in fact you’re probably about as “out” as it’s possible for a gay k-pop blogger to be, because not only are you open about your sexuality, you’re open about your real name.  I imagine you get even more hate than I do!  What’s the most ridiculous hate mail you’ve ever received?

Gee, it’s hard to even remember because I’ve been blogging for years, and before I even crossed over into the K-pop field I had a really popular urban-pop blog. I’ve definitely had a lot of crazy shit said to me over the years, primarily from fans of urban artists. A lot of Rihanna and Beyonce stans call me faggot and tell me to go die of AIDS and whatnot. Lots of anal sex barbs, too. And a couple of years ago my house burned down and I lost everything, and Rihanna stans told me that it was payback for telling my readers to boycott Rihanna after she reunited with Chris Brown for that “Birthday Cake” remix. They all flocked to my Twitter sharing the photos of my fire and laughing and everything! I think they told me to die in the fire, too. None of that stuff has ever actually hurt my feelings in the slightest though. I just chalk it down to crazy hoodrattery. I’d only be hurt if somebody said something that was true about me personally, which is hard to do if you only know the online persona and not the real person.

When did you start blogging, and what drew you towards it initially?  Do the same things still motivate you now, or has that changed?

I moved out of home pretty early, when I was 16, and was supporting myself with crappy call centre and admin jobs for years. Eventually I got sick of it and went to TAFE to study Music Industry Business, just for a break from full time work and to pursue something I was actually interested in for a while. As I went through my studies I realized how hard it was going to be to get any kind of job in the music industry, so I started a music blog just so I’d have a music-related hobby on my resume. It kind of just took off unexpectedly and started getting really popular, but I could never really stick to one thing because my taste in music is too broad and I couldn’t box myself in with just one genre, like urban or pop music. Plus I’m kind of shy and not particularly ambitious, so I never bothered trying to take things to the next level like other people in my position would have. By the end of last year I absolutely hated doing it, and it was becoming too difficult to balance it with my main job as a writer for Popdust, so I shut it down and took a break. Now I’m updating it again and enjoying it so much more. I just put on the K-pop and J-pop stuff that I like, which is so much more fun than having to give people my shady opinions on boring trash like Katy Perry and Beyonce. Since I technically stopped actively doing the blog, I now feel like I can update it in my own sweet time rather than feeling like I HAVE to do it like I did before. It’s no longer a chore.

Do you still get contact from Katy Perry and Beyonce fans from the earlier days upset that you’ve switched over to the “dark side” of Asian pop?

I did right up until I officially closed the blog. Now that I’m back part-time doing virtually all Asian content I don’t, but occasionally I’ll see some old faces pop up in the comments of my very few non-Asian posts. I’m glad they’re gone now and that I’m only writing for like-minded people. I’ve never cared about hits or traffic, I just want to enjoy what I do and be around other people that feel the same as I do. Dragging the likes of Katy and Beyonce was definitely fun at times, but I feel so much better now that I don’t have to pay attention to a single thing they do any longer. Like that new Beyonce album everybody is raving about, I haven’t even heard it properly. They play some of it in the cafe I get my lunch from though, and it sounds like trash. I did try to listen to the Katy album, but I just couldn’t get through it.

What appeals to you specifically about K-pop?  What does K-pop have that you don’t perceive in someone like Katy Perry, Beyonce or other artists of their ilk?  Alternately, what do you perceive in Katy or Beyonce that K-pop hasn’t got and that perhaps shouldn’t be there?

Well, for one, I love the transparency. Pop is such a phony manufactured industry, and I love how open K-pop is about that. They don’t try to sell themselves as “real” artists, which I find so refreshing. I love that a K-pop star will come out and basically admit that their agency chose their songs and concept and put the whole thing together. At the end of the day a pop star is a product and their job is to entertain us. For the most part, they are not what I would consider “artists.”

I also respect how hard K-pop stars work, both during training and then post-debut with promotions and whatnot. They devote absolutely everything to being idols in the same way that an athlete or ballerina would in their respective careers.

Then there’s the whole choreography aspect. My favourite pop stars have always been the ones that dance and really perform, like Janet Jackson, Prince, Paula Abdul, Justin Timberlake, and pre-meltdown Britney Spears. K-pop really embodies that aspect of the entertainment industry well.

K-pop is also so conceptual and visual. It’s more than just a song. I absolutely love the drastic image changes and the fact that you get a fully-realized concept, from the music to the choreography to the style and everything. It’s so tight and concise, and because you know they’re just playing dress ups, it doesn’t feel as phony as some American pop star passing off their latest messy image change as some deep personal reflection of their life.

With this said, I still think the West trumps Korea for indie and alternative music any day of the week. No competition. But as far as the commercial, top ten of the Billboard charts thing goes, K-pop wins hands down.

Tell me about some groups that you like and why.  Also, some that you don’t like, and why not.

This is difficult because I love so many groups! But my main bias is Brown Eyed Girls. I love their creativity, talent, originality – everything! I seriously rate them one of the greatest girl groups of all time, alongside the likes of The Supremes and TLC. Outside of BEG, it’s T-ara and Girls’ Generation. Somebody once told me that T-ara is simultaneously the best girl group and the worst girl group all at once, which is so true. They can deliver the best K-pop concepts and songs around, yet they can also be the sloppiest group around with their cheap Japanese singles and lethargic mimed stages, but somehow they make it all work, the good and the bad. They’re either legitimately or ironically amazing, but either way, they’re amazing.

While I love T-ara because of their many imperfections, I love Girls’ Generation for the opposite reason. They’re so perfect it’s almost unbelievable. They really embody the glossy, fantasy aspect of pop music better than anyone else.

As for the boys, my absolute favourite is TVXQ. I first started properly getting into K-pop in 2010, but 2011 was when I really became a dedicated K-popper. TVXQ were promoting “Keep Your Head Down” at the time, and I just remember being completely blown away by their live performances and charisma. It’s the same aura and power as some of pop’s biggest stars, like Michael Jackson and Madonna. Separately, Yunho and Max have areas in which they’re lacking, but together they’re the best pop act on the planet today. I truly believe that they’re the closest thing we have to Michael Jackson right now in terms of being entertainers.

TVXQ

I notice you sneakily evaded the “don’t like” part of the question, tsk tsk!

Look at this picture:

Mysterious concept, or hiding plastic surgery scars?

Sorry, I missed that bit! Let me add my answer. (Btw, hope CL didn’t do surgery coz I love her and she vowed she never would many times).

Honestly, there aren’t really any K-pop artists I dislike. There’s a bunch of generic boy bands out there that release awful electro-pop songs that all sound the same, but they’re all so anonymous that it’s difficult to dislike any of them. I’m anti-EXO, but it’s more of a tongue-in-cheek hating rather than legitimate. I mean, I love most of their music outside of the overrated “Growl,” I just don’t like the group’s structure and find them to be unoriginal and boring, despite the good tunes. And people think I hate 2NE1, but I actually don’t. I mostly trash 2NE1 as a joke because their fanbase is so awful. The way 2NE1′s marketed as being more authentic than their contemporaries is what makes me dislike them, because it reminds me of the phony American music industry. Their fans act similar to Beyonce stans, too, so I don’t like that. But I actually love a tonne of 2NE1 songs, and CL is one of my main K-pop biases. But Dara and Bom are absolutely useless, and 2NE1 has the most unimaginative uninteresting concepts. But I still don’t hate the group, mostly due to my CL stanning and the fact that 2NE1 actually has some really great music. Primarily their early stuff, but they can still deliver a good tune here and there, like “Missing You.”

What do you think is the cause of Blackjacks being so bad?  And are they “bad meaning bad” or “bad meaning good”?

Haha! Bad meaning bad. They’re just stupid kids, which I totally get because everyone is a stupid kid at some point. They think 2NE1 are real artists who broke out of the manufactured K-pop industry and make really left-field music solely for artistic value and nothing else. It’s hilarious, but I get it. I felt the same about many pop artists when I was 14, like Christina Aguilera with her Stripped album. Although, in my defence, at least Christina could SING and co-wrote her songs. I don’t know what 2NE1 does… CL and Minzy are the only talented ones and they can’t even perform to their full potential because Bom and Dara hold them back.

2NE1. From left: Dara, Bom, Minzy, CL

I actually like Bom.  There’s something sexy about an animated Realdoll that can clean herself up afterward as long as you throw her a towel Seungri-style, there’s something to be said for that level of technology.  Do you think plastic surgery is good, bad or indifferent?  Also do you feel differently if it’s idols getting it as opposed to the general populace?

I can see that appeal, actually. I’d like to see her in a bikini with her big fake titties.

As for plastic surgery, rather than chastise those who get it, it’s better to try and work on creating a society in which people don’t feel the pressure to have to get it in the first place. Overall I think it’s better that people don’t do it, but I get a kick out of Korea’s Gangnam unnies. I love people like Qri and Sunhwa who are just so beyond sucked and tucked that it’s hilarious.

Hey wait a second… you care about half of 2NE1 not being talented, yet you’re a T-ara fan?  Surely T-ara are the ultimate “talent doesn’t matter a goddamn if you’ve got the songs” proof group?

Yes, but people don’t promote T-ara like they’re the most talented artists under the sun. 2NE1′s talent is highly exaggerated by their fans and their agency, which is my main problem with them. People think they’re one of the top in terms of talent, if not THE top, but they’re actually one of the worst.

Speaking of T-ara, your writing first attracted my attention when you and Asian Junkie were two of the only high-profile bloggers not joining in the lame T-ara witch-hunt of late 2012.  It was nice to read some writing about it that wasn’t just going uncritically along with the netizen tide of cyberbullying stupidity.  There were so few of us with a working brain cell at that time that people started to think you and I were the same person.  Let’s clear this up right now – are we the same person?

Haha! I think with that whole situation I just couldn’t believe what was happening. Not because I’m a T-ara fan, but that things could change so drastically for someone literally overnight, based on so little. T-ara were well on their way to replacing 2NE1 as the second biggest girl group in K-pop, and within an instant they became the most hated K-pop act on the planet. It was the first time I’d witnessed anything like that since the whole “Korea is gay” Jay Park scandal happened before I got into K-pop, so I was just really stunned. And to see that journalists in the media were reporting anonymous fan accounts on forums and doctored photos as facts was insane. The Australian media is really lowbrow, right wing, and outrageously biased, so it’s not like I haven’t seen similar stuff to this before, but never on this level. It really made me view the entire K-pop fandom in a different light.

T-ara

And it isn’t just T-ara, either. Never have I seen a scandal as ridiculous as Hyosung’s. She misused a word in a sentence and suddenly she’s a right-wing-puppy-raping-North-Korea-supporting Ilbe bug? I’ve never seen anything like it and even today the very thought shocks me. If the entire world was like this I’d actually kill myself, no joke.

The T-ara scandal couldn’t have happened without the Internet and SNS.  Do you think that the modern Internet age and subsequent ease of information/opinion sharing actually leads people to an overall decrease in understanding?

You worded that nicely, but what you really meant was “Are people getting fucking dumber?” and the answer is yes. But people have always been stupid. It was sad to see that nobody really bothered to question the T-ara ‘evidence’. They just believed it straight away, which is crazy in itself because 90% of it was so absurd. Like, a photo of Hwayoung with a slightly crooked umbrella suddenly becomes “BORAM DESTROYED HWAYOUNG’S UMBRELLA!” It was all just so stupid. Even thinking about it makes me feel like an idiot.

The most connected societies also seem to be the most hive-minded.  Other than taking away people’s toys, do you see a solution?

Mass genocide?

OMG BREAKING KPOP CONTROVERSY ARCADEY SUPPORTS MASS MURDER OF ENTIRE INTERNET USERS LOLZ!!!1!1

I think we should get Crayon Pop to sort them out.  What do you think?

Crayon Pop need not bother themselves with idiotic netizens. Their concept is to spread joy and happiness, which these netizens don’t deserve. Plus, Crayon Pop’s concept is too subversive and punk rock for those simpletons anyway.

Crayon Pop

Do you find interest in punk generally speaking, either musically or as an ideological concept?

Ideologically yes, but musically not so much. Which is funny because I love so many kinds of music, but punk has never done it for me unless it’s more like post-punk mish-mash genre stuff like Siouxsie and the Banshees, or big crossover stuff like The Ramones. But the real deal headbanger stuff doesn’t do it for me. Nor does Aussie punk, which I despise.

I’m writing a blog about Crayon Pop being a punk group.  It’ll probably get published before this interview does, but I’m interested in what you think the influence of Crayon Pop might be.  Do you think their street performances and unique presentation have influenced the likes of Pungdeng-E and TREN-D?  Do you see any effects, positive or negative, from Crayon Pop influence in K-pop overall?

YES at you doing a Crayon Pop as punk article. They are the definition of punk, but you should be prepared for 95% of K-pop fans to think you’re just being a delusional idiot. “That’s not punk! This is fucking stupid!” they’ll all scream, despite the fact that none of them will actually know what punk music is, both as music and as an ideology! 4% will be Crayon Pop fans agreeing with you just because they stan Crayon Pop, and then you’ll be left with the 1% that actually get your point and agree.

As for Crayon Pop influencing those flops you mentioned, they definitely did, but that happens any time someone gets popular. If you hit daebak everyone will copy you to get successful. I just hope that more people will continue to ‘get’ Crayon Pop, and their core fanbase of people like us who are in on the joke and understand the movement continues to grow. Crayon Pop is like the Abba-meets-Sex-Pistols of our generation!

Here’s the article if you’re interested.

Is there any other K-pop blogging that you enjoy… or don’t enjoy?  Also any specific examples of individual posts that changed how you feel about K-pop blogging or influenced you in any way?

Love the article, and from now on I’m officially going to start referring to them as Crayon Punk!

You mean blogging outside of K-pop, or just other kinds of K-pop blogging? I like what I do now, which is a nice mixture of legitimate K-pop music viewing, hyperbolic stanning, and sardonic commentary. My K-pop commentary is definitely more on the positive side than others, but that’s because I like to celebrate K-pop and have fun with it. It’s such a niche thing that I don’t really understand the point of going out of your way to follow it if all you’re going to do is be negative and trash everything. That’s what my non-K-pop pop music content turned into on Arcadey because I had to give my opinion on stuff like Katy Perry or Britney Spears or whoever because people requested it, but there wasn’t really much good to say from my point, so a lot of stuff became negative.

The post that changed the way I feel about K-pop blogging was my “I Got a Boy” review. The overwhelmingly negative response that song received instantly really showed me how ignorant a lot of K-pop fans are when it comes to music, and the hate I received for daring to praise it was just mind boggling to me. I’m not someone that only listens to pop music that’s on the radio, and I’m not someone who only listens to K-pop. I listen to all kinds of music, and as sarcastic and hyperbolic as my writing often is, there’s still a respect for the music there underneath it all and I can still serve up a serious review whenever I want to. I think I was the only one of all the K-pop bloggers that stood up for “I Got a Boy.” Of course the song grew on everyone eventually, as I knew it would (and told everyone it would), but at first I was the only one defending it. I told the netizens the song wasn’t for your average K-pop fan that doesn’t listen to anything outside of your YG productions and formulaic hook songs. It was to buy Girls’ Generation some more cred with legitimate music fans and critics. I told everyone the kind of left-field artists “I Got a Boy” was drawing from, and that it was going to end up getting a great reception from the Western music media, which it did. But I just got so much hate for that song, even though I was 100% right about everything at the end of the day, which I knew I would be. The whole experience really drove home for me that the majority of K-pop listeners are nothing like me, and are primarily just teenage simpletons with limited musical knowledge who are drawn in by the more generic aspects of the genre and the celebrity culture of K-pop, rather than the actual music or art of it.

Girls’ Generation/SNSD

I thought it made sense from a marketing perspective for SNSD to experiment even though I wasn’t personally keen on the result.

Yeah, but there’s a difference between simply not liking the song and just being plain ignorant and not understanding it. The majority of haters had no idea what the musical influences behind “I Got a Boy” were, and criticised it for being “schizophrenic” when that was the entire point of the song. They thought that the producer had made it that way by accident or something without realising. And they couldn’t accept that there’s a large portion of people who enjoy music that breaks the formula. Many people just wanted “I Got a Boy” to follow standard radio-friendly pop formulas. Then when Girls’ Generation did that recently with “Mr.Mr,” they criticise it for being too “generic.”

SNSD have been dominating the girl group market for a while now.  Do you think it’s possible for a female group in K-pop to have Madonna/Cher levels of pop-culture lastability?

That’s difficult to say. The West is ageist enough, but in Korea it’s even worse, and K-pop as a genre is still so young. Yes, it’s been around for decades, but it really morphed into something different with the debut of stars like TVXQ, BigBang, and Wonder Girls, and the birth of YouTube. There’s still so much to go, and it’s too early to call if we’re going to have people with a Madonna type relevance in Korea. Maybe Uhm Jung Hwa, but she hasn’t been active in years. She gave up on being a pop star at 40.

As for SNSD, I don’t think they’ll reach that level. After seeing the “Mr.Mr.” comeback stages, in which SNSD lacked confidence and appeared to be ill-prepared as if they hadn’t rehearsed nearly enough, I’m thinking that SM Entertainment is having some issues transitioning them into a fiercer, more mature act – and they’re still so young. It’s easy to look at them now and feel like SNSD domination will never end, but who knows where they’ll be in 10 years? I think they need to be training harder so they’re still improving in the way that TVXQ is, rather than stagnating (despite their great music, which I think has remained consistently fantastic since they debuted).

What do you think is musically influencing K-pop right now, and where do you see the influence heading in the future?

K-pop is a melting pop of American pop, Europop, and J-pop, so it can go anywhere. I just think that K-pop will continue making songs that can be enjoyed by hallyu fans across the world since K-pop is such a global genre, rather than pandering to Koreans all the time. Whether that means that K-pop will get more generic or more creative remains to be seen, because it could go either way.

Can you list your K-pop biases?  No interview would be complete without this.  Inquiring minds wish to know.

Sure!

Male: 1. Yunho 2. Bang Yongguk 3. Jonghyun

Female: 1. Narsha 2. Hyosung 3. IU 4. Eunjung/Soyeon 5. Goo Hara 6. CL

I have to stop there because I have so many female biases it will never end.

Brown Eyed Girls

More female than male biases?  I’m surprised.  What’s the reason for it?

I just like girl groups more because the music and concepts are more creative, hence me having more female biases.

Most boy bands just rely on fangirl support so their music is more generic and formulaic on average, and conceptually there isn’t a whole lot they do. The girl groups are far more interesting overall.

Last question: How would you like your blogging legacy to be remembered?

Legacy is far too grand of a word! I’m not a journalist and I fell into this whole thing by mistake. I’m not trying to get attention or be popular. At the end of the day I’m just making myself happy, and if anybody else happens to enjoy it then that’s great.

—–

Hopefully you’ve all enjoyed the first Kpopalypse interview!  I’d like to do some more of these, but finding interesting folks who are actually willing to conduct an interview with me might be a challenge.

Any interview suggestions and offers, please comment below or use my Twitter!  Thanks for reading!

I woke up today and notice that my viewcount had passed the 100,000 mark, so just dropping a quick note to say thanks to all my readers for the views!  When I started this blog I had no idea it would be this popular.  Sure, 100,000 is nothing in the grand scheme of k-pop blogs (to put it in perspective, Anti Kpop-Fangirl hit 10 million views recently and other more mainstream k-pop sites would have many times more than this) but it’s still a hell of a lot more than I thought would ever look at my writing!  So thanks for your patronage – keep visiting and I’ll keep adding content!  That’s all for now!

Bear witness to the undeniable beauty that is After School/Orange Caramel’s Lizzy.

One of the most attractive women in k-pop, this resource of precious fap material is under threat.

Data collected by independent research shows that at current rates of discovery of new fappable Lizzy pictures, k-pop fans may be past “Peak Lizzy” period.

The cause of this scarcity in quality is clear – “Lizzy duckface”.

Duckface is of course perfectly acceptable and attractive when actually kissing:

However, in increasing quantities the unwelcome presence of duckface poses is ruining otherwise fappable Lizzy selcas.

It’s not just self-taken photos – even official promotional Lizzy photos are not safe from the scourge of duckface.

Behind-the-scenes video footage has also fallen victim to this insidious threat:

Who will protect the impressionable youth of today from the duckfaces of tomorrow?

It must stop.

Just like anyone else looking to bring about any sort of social change in today’s armchair-happy point-and-click age where people are happy to tick a box on a website but couldn’t be bothered to actually do anything away from their computer screen, I’ve made a petition on change.org:

http://www.change.org/petitions/k-pop-fans-everywhere-stop-the-lizzy-duckface

Please sign and share, so we can have more Lizzy pictures like this:

And less like this:

Let’s change the world, k-pop fans – one Lizzy selca at a time.

I’ve recently been alerted to the fact that some people think my k-pop blogging is “negative” and that I’m just hating on everything I can for cheap jokes and generally getting off on being a rude and unpleasant person.  Gosh, what a strange perception.  This is obviously untrue as clearly someone who genuinely hated k-pop wouldn’t spend so much time writing about it, so why are some people so easily confused about this?

I think part of the confusion is cultural: Australians tend to have a highly irreverent sense of humour and communicate with insults a lot, even to people that they like, and I’m certainly no exception to this.  If you watch the following Australian viral video, and you’re from another country, you’ll probably laugh, but if you’re also Australian, you’ll cringe in equal measure, because you will know people personally who are just like this – and you’ll know that it’s not even an exaggeration.

Like our friend Darren, I tend to take the piss out of what I like just as much as what I don’t like (although I’d like to think I’m slightly less of a cunt about it than Darren is) so I can definitely understand how that could be a bit baffling to the casual observer from overseas, and why someone might read my writing and incorrectly believe that I just hate everything under the sun – it is definitely not the case!

Nevertheless, I know many people don’t ever believe anything I write here (even when I’m proven right) so now it’s time for me to deliver some proof.  So it’s with a big-time POSITIVE attitude that I now present to you the following list, for your entertainment:

3 PEOPLE WHO I LIKE IN K-POP RIGHT NOW

1. Suzy (miss A)

Unlike a lot of people, I don’t really get a boner over Suzy – in fact she’s definitely my least favourite member of miss A in that aspect.  However, Suzy really got into my POSITIVE books lately in a more general non-sexual “you’re fucking cool” sense over her recent appearance at some awards ceremony nobody gives a fuck about.

When receiving this shitty award for some bullshit dickwank, she did some supposedly horrible things like:

• thanked her dog
• moved her head from side to side a bit
• laughed
• seemed nervous
• wasn’t that well prepared

Doesn’t sound to me like someone who intended disrespect – sounds more to me like someone who really didn’t think they had a hope in hell of getting a fucking award in the first place, and given the way people criticise her acting, who could blame her for thinking that way?  Either she’s too shit at acting to deserve an award, or she’s a great actress who should have expected to win and should have had a speech prepared – you can’t have it both ways, guys.  In fact if she went up and DID have a careful speech prepared netizens probably would have turned the tables and torn her to shreds, saying “how dare that talentless bitch presume that she’d win the award over those veteran actors and even have the sheer arrogance to prepare a speech in advance as if she was a shoe-in”.

Of course everyone took a great big smelly cyber-dump on this nervous teenager anyway, because younger people are easier to cyberbully, and international netizens in their usual mad scurry to think and act as much like Korean netizens as possible, echoed the thoughts.  All the people hating on Suzy probably wouldn’t even dare to criticise Alex Lifeson from 70s rock group Rush for this speech (which I’ve linked before but here it is again because it’s so great), which is for a far more high-profile award than what Suzy is getting:

…so why the double-standard?  If someone wins an award, surely they’ve also earned the right to do their own speech, their own way.  Suzy was probably nervous as shit and trying to liven up the event because award ceremonies are so fucking completely boring.  I’ve been to a few, and let me tell you firsthand; on TV you only get the edited highlights of the awards people care about the most.  The award for “best combined ukelele tap-dance performance in a TV drama that aired between the hours of 3am and 4am”, they don’t televise that shit, but if you’re at the event, you still gotta sit through it.  These events drag on for fucking hours and listening to hours after hours after hours of different people going up to get awards and all deliver the same boring generic speeches where they thank all their employers and their family in professional grammatically correct inoffensive language is like trying to cut down a tree with a nail file while simultaneously doing the “Cherry Blossom Ending Challenge“.  There’s a reason why they have free food and alcohol at these things.

Also, if I ever win one of these fucking awards (presumably for “most rambling pointless blog post”, “most unpopular opinions” or “biggest arrogant cuntfaced douchebag”), you bet your fucking life I’m thanking my cats, and I’ll make a point to thank them before anyone else.  So Suzy’s alright by me.

2. SULLI (f(x))

I’ve discussed Sulli a lot in various posts in reference to her sexy catchphrases as well as general hotness, but this post isn’t directly about either of those things.  Instead, I’m going to shift focus to Sulli’s behaviour, which I must say is exemplary and definitely a POSITIVE force in the world of k-pop.

Those of you who have ever held down a job at some point in any kind of industry involving constant contact with the general public will know that there’s a thing called emotional labour.  A very underrated aspect of work, emotional labour can be very taxing depending on your personality and requires that you basically show warm pleasant emotions to people who you may in reality perceive as worthless wastes of oxygen and carbon and that you would prefer to stab a thousand times in the face rather than talk to for more than ten seconds at a time.

Western pop stars are generally not expected to perform any emotional labour – getting through the song in a functional fashion is considered the only key requirement, and anything else is really a bonus.  Korean pop stars, on the other hand, are definitely expected to perform emotional labour – and not just while on stage!  Any time that they are in front of the camera or in front of the general public, your bias has to maintain the resolute fake-happy facade of an airline stewardess.  Grandmother just died?  Smile for the camera.  On your period?  Smile for the camera.  Just gave a blowjob to the production manager backstage and he obviously hadn’t showered in a week?  Smile for the camera.  Etc.

Unless you’re Sulli, in which case – fuck it.

• Photoshoot with EXO and SHINee?  Sulli does photoshoots every other week, she’s over it.  Don’t even ask her shit – idol or no idol, there are no fucks given.
• Dancing on stage?  Fuck dancing on stage.  Fuck your stage in the ass.
• Time for Sulli to work on an advert?  “That’s nice, what about it“, says Sulli.
• TV interview?  Just get it over with, asshole.
• Some shitty contest show or whatever?  Cao ni ma.

I don’t know about you, but I think idols work hard enough and pander to the whims of childlike fans and judgemental couch-potato assholes enough as it is.  It wouldn’t hurt the average spoiled Korean entertainment connoisseur to get used to the concept of not having their genitals sucked through the computer screen every three minutes.  What we need is more idols like Sulli not giving a fuck, and eventually we can progress to the beautiful place the west is in where singers can be their beautiful selves on stage and life just goes on.

3. Kim Kwang Soo (CEO/ex-CEO, Core Contents Media)

We all hate this dude – something all k-pop fans can agree on, right?  But wait.  I can’t think of any k-pop CEO (or ex-CEO, whatever) more never-endingly helpful or willing to go out of his way to please a bunch of whiny spoiled cunts.  Sure, he’s certainly got his dark side, like any other k-pop CEO (the rest are just better at not getting caught out) but we’re being POSITIVE here so let’s look at some of the nice, POSITIVE things KKS has done for T-ara and their fans over the last couple of years.

*  Fans were noticing the lack of boobies in T-ara, so KKS dutifully responded to the call and added an extra bonus well-endowed member to T-ara for your perving pleasure.  Well played, sir.  What a nice man, looking out for the fans first.  Response: all you ungrateful shits fucking complained.

*  Fans were noticing that T-ara was a bit shit sometimes on live stages, and this was holding them back from being a top-tier group, so KKS heard your complaints and added more members, and also told existing members to lift their fucking game or they’re out.  Response: all you ungrateful shits fucking complained.

*  Fans kept complaining about Hwayoung being basically crap and useless, so KKS, noticing that you were all correct, removed her.  Response: all you ungrateful shits fucking complained and decided you wanted the rude bitch and her shithouse rapping back in the group after all.

*  Fans also kept complaining about how KKS wasn’t clearing up the bullying rumours and wouldn’t apologise so KKS offered to meet the T-ara haters, not over the Internet but in person and reveal everything.  If you’re not immediately blown away by that fucking fact, then you’re obviously new to how big companies like this work, so let’s put this in perspective for a fucking second.  Imagine the boss of Endangered-Fish-Meats-R-Us contacting the head of Greenpeace and saying “hey, I know you don’t like my marine-life-slaughtering ass very much, after I’ve clubbed this baby seal to death, made the blood into a nice seal smoothie and put it on my online store for sale how about we go and get a coffee somewhere and talk calmly and rationally about our disagreements?”  That’s the kind of scale we’re talking about here.  Response: the pathetic haters complained and ludicrously declined the meeting because he wouldn’t let them also meet T-ara thus giving themselves away as secret T-ara fans, something KKS was smart enough to realise and acknowledge in his…

*  ….motherfucking hand-written letter of apology.   Holy cunting fuck – what CEO of any company anywhere does something like that, ever?  Sure, it’s one thing for the group to do it, but the CEO?  Getting a CEO of any company anywhere even just to admit “yeah, okay we fucked up a little, kinda” is almost unheard of but apologising formally for an entire scandal – accepting blame and not weaseling out of anything – in a handwritten fucking letter?  Mind fucking blown.  Here’s an exercise, go to Google right now and type “CEO handwritten letter of apology” into the search bar and see what comes up.  You’ll notice that KKS is there on the first page of the search… why?  Because he’s the only CEO who’s ever written an apology letter which is actually even remotely sincere and worth a damn.  That’s how fucking unprecedented this is, you k-pop fans are getting the gold star treatment from this dude and you don’t even fucking realise it.  And best believe he wrote the fucking thing too (not that it matters who writes it) – his 18 year old hot secretary who is blowing him doesn’t have handwriting anywhere near that good, we all know kids can’t write these days, it’s all about computers now.  Response: as usual, all you ungrateful shits fucking complained.

*  Let’s not forget Dani.  Everyone on the planet with an Internet connection and the slightest interest in k-pop made sure to cyberbully the fuck out of poor underage Dani and said “please don’t debut Dani in T-ara“.  So KKS didn’t debut Dani in T-ara (and still won’t). Response: all you ungrateful shits fucking complained (oh, and cyberbullied her some more for good measure).

*  During all of this, people kept asking KKS to step down as CEO…. so he fucking did.  Response: all you ungrateful shits fucking complained okay you actually mostly liked that one… even though it may not even be true because recent press releases still refer to him as the CEO, and even if it is true, he’s probably just been moved to a lower-profile position, with more power.  Oops.

All I ever read about KKS is constant hate, but the poor old guy has been struggling to do the best for the sake of his groups and their fans all this time.  Don’t like his decisions?  Maybe your unqualified, inexperienced ass should stop fucking telling him what to do then, because perhaps the problem isn’t that he doesn’t care about your opinion but that he cares too much about it.  Maybe if he just did his own thing instead of listening to the whining of every crybaby with a keyboard and an Internet connection perhaps he wouldn’t have second-guessed himself enough to fuck things up so badly in the first place.  Just maybe.

—–

So that’s the end of this POSITIVE post.  I’m hoping that you all got the extremely POSITIVE vibes from my writing and you’re ready to look at some of k-pop’s bigger scandals and issues in a whole new POSITIVE way.  Or maybe you hated this post and you still think I’m a negative cynical asshole who shouldn’t be writing blogs in which case you can POSITIVEly go and get fucked.

Yes, it’s the return of….

Once again I’m back to make you watch music videos of Korean groups that nobody outside of Korea (and maybe inside of Korea too) really gives a fuck about.  Yay!  You already know the rules, so without further ado let’s get started.

If there’s something that is almost guaranteed to provoke a “meh” reaction out of the average k-pop fan, it’s some new female-fronted instrument-holding group (actual or mimed).  Example: people only started giving a shit about AOA once they dumped their “we can play instruments, no really” concept.   This episode is therefore all about highlighting some recent instrument-wielding nugus for your entertainment, because there’s a good chance you glazed over them completely when they first appeared, if you even saw them at all.

Stay Foolish – Kiss Kiss

It was initially difficult for me to work out why “Kiss Kiss” was rated 19+ as visually it’s actually pretty tame – I thought maybe in Korea you had to be 19 years old to legally pillow-fight while listening to limp disco-funk with instrumentation so cheap and ordinary that even Daft Punk wouldn’t sample it.  Then I got to about 2:49 in the video and worked out that she’s not singing about being kissed on the lips…. or not the lips on her face, anyway.

It might be the best cunnilingus anthem from Korea since Gain’s “Bloom” but that’s probably because it’s the only cunnilingus anthem from Korea since “Bloom”.  This song only just came out, and raking in less than 5000 hits in a few days with a 19+ rated k-pop video that has scenes like this in it is quite an achievement in nugudom.

The most interesting thing about this video for me though was not the 19+ feather pillow stuffing flying everywhere (maybe the MOGEF person who assessed this MV had really bad eyesight and thought he was watching a bukkake video), but the camera work and editing.  If you’re any sort of musician you can instantly tell when watching a music video whether the people who worked on the video behind the scenes had any clue about music or not. In this case, it’s obvious that the editors didn’t know anything about playing instruments at all.  If you look carefully you’ll see that the musicians’ hand actions don’t synchronise with the parts that they’re actually playing on the recording, unless the vocalist is also in the same frame to guide the editor as to what piece of footage goes in what time frame.  A vocalist singing the wrong section is obvious to absolutely anyone because the lips don’t match up to the words, but a musician playing the wrong part… not so much, so for the sections where they zoom up on a solitary instrumentalist, they’ve just spliced in footage that kind of looks sorta-ish like they’re playing the same thing to the untrained eye, instead of bothering to find the exact footage where they’re playing the right part.  Also the zooming up on the guitarist during the guitar solo highlights the mundane-looking picking/strumming hand, not the fingering hand where all the action actually happens – a really common habit with camera operators who aren’t interested in music and have cut their teeth on more straightforward camerawork like following a bouncing ball at a sports game.  Overall it’s rare to see editing this bad in the Korean music scene where everyone is so obsessed with perfection, to the point where it’s actually almost kind of refreshing.

YouTube hits at time of writing: 4364

Notable attribute: editing so atrocious you have to be over 18 years old to legally be allowed to watch it

Nugu Alert rating: very high

Amor Fati – Say The Word

After a promisingly moody intro, Amor Fati swiftly throw musical risk-taking to the wind and kick in with the kind of ultra-conservative Nickelbackesque stadium rock that only a nuclear family with 2.5 children, a white picket fence and an SUV parked in the driveway could love.  The band themselves look at least mildly passionate about the proceedings, as far as I can tell through the hazy filtered mush molesting the footage.  They’re certainly more enthusiastic than whoever was controlling those camera shots, who seemed more interested in shooting the sepia-toned walls:

You can almost hear the director say “just move back a little further dear, you’re photobombing the shadow underneath the stairwell”.

If you look really carefully at these shots, you can actually see band members in them.

I guess they were so damn impressed with the location that they found to shoot this in, that the group themselves became kind of an afterthought; most camera pans and shots throughout the whole video are at least 50% walls and light fittings.  It’s a shame because that singer looks pretty with a cute chubby face like Bom pre-10th round of surgery and it’d be nice to get some clearer shots of her, plus the Eunjung-lookalike drummer.  Also at 1:08 I can’t get over how she sounds like she’s singing “you treat me like a lobster”.  Maybe she had a pet lobster once and she accidentally forgot to feed it and left to be ignored and die inside an architecturally-imposing sepia-toned water tank while her mobile phone filmed the wall next to it.

YouTube hits at time of writing: 2677

Notable attribute: wall decorations get more camera time than band members

Nugu Alert rating: extreme

Funny Collection – Little Witch

Although the frontwoman’s cheese-grater-across-the-ears voice is definitely an acquired taste that takes some getting used to, the song itself certainly is reasonable.  In fact this video warms the heart for one simple reason – all the band members here are not exactly good looking or photogenic, which just goes to show that looking incredibly ordinary is certainly no barrier to fame and fortune in the supposedly fickle superficial world of the Korean music business, hell, if they can do it maybe even you and me can be k-pop stars, how inspiring, right… oh wait, nobody watched this video?  Er, okay… well, back to the drawing board on that front I guess.

(Hey, maybe if all you social-concern bloggers whining about the politics of the latest sexy comebacks in k-pop got all that time you devoted to discussing Hyuna’s tits for web traffic and used it to highlight something like this video instead, the Korean industry would be different and less superficial, but you obviously couldn’t be bothered and that’s part of why things are the way they are.  In the meantime, who’s highlighting it?  ME, that’s who, the big bad supposedly ignorant and sexist Kpopalypse, while all you so-called “feminists” can’t stop yourselves from feeding hits straight to Stella’s “Marionette” and other such things.  Tsk tsk, cao ni mas.)

Anyway since looks obviously drives the industry whether you like it or not the video director has sensibly decided to not let the group carry too much visual weight, substituting a cutesy cartoon in place of traditional band footage for the majority of the video.  Notice how they cop out with the kiss at the end, cutting the footage just before the lips meet in true Korean MV “gosh we’d better not offend anybody” wimp-out style.  It seems that you can’t even show a screen kiss in a Korean music video even if it’s between two crappily-drawn heterosexual cartoon characters.  So much for all this “progress” we’re supposedly making.

YouTube hits at time of writing: 3589

Notable attribute: none, because you’re a hypocrite

Nugu Alert rating: off the chart

FINAL SCORES

That concludes Episode 2 of Kpopalypse Nugu Alert!  If you’ve got more fresh (or stale) nugu videos feel free to submit them publicly or privately, and who knows, they may be part of an upcoming feature!  Or maybe they won’t be!  But there’s only one way to find out… in the meantime keep listening to nugus!

There have been some small changes to the blog, so here’s a “patch notes” style maintenance report for you to peruse while waiting for me to make my next proper post.

A lot of bloggers tend to not worry about their posts once they’re made and are happy to let things fall apart, but I like to keep things tidy and fresh so here’s the changes list:

• People who like to browse through older posts may have noticed that some images were recently broken.  The “Shure Super 55 Microphone Test” post and some of the other early posts had pictures which mysteriously vanished for no apparent reason, these have now been reinstated.  Also the “JongTomi” post and a few other posts have had images reverted to their correct size since the recent blog redesign where they mysteriously shrunk.
• Working video links have been reinstated to the “favourite live performances” post, the “T-ara boyfriend” post and a few others.  Let’s see how long they last this time.
• The “best songs of 2012″ post finally has a link to the audio for “Scream”… only 15 months later!  Thanks, YG!  Reliable as usual…
• All images for all posts have now been correctly centered.
• Other minor tweaks and secret stuff.

Also, as an extra perk to ease site navigation, tags have been added.  If you look far enough down on the sidebar on your right, you’ll see the tag list, and each post also has its tag listed at the bottom.  Unlike Anti Kpop-Fangirl where I have lots of fun with thinking up tags for entertainment value, the tags on this site are strictly functional and for site navigation and sorting only.  There are only nine tags, and they are:

1. Fap – posts with a large perving element
2. Technical – posts that get technical
3. Trufax – posts that explain a particular mysterious or misunderstood thing
4. Lies – posts containing fictional content or general esotericism
5. Nugu Alert – episodes in the Nugu Alert series
6. Interview – interviews of others, or maybe others interviewing me if that ever occurs
7. Kpopalypse – general stuff relating to my own activities (such as this post)
8. Reviews – best/worst lists, roundups, things like that
9. Cao Ni Ma – cao ni ma

There will probably only ever be 9 tags unless I get another idea for a new “series”.  I don’t have any new “series” posts planned at this stage, but you never know.

On another note you may be interested to note that Anti Kpop-Fangirl is looking for new authors.  If you’ve ever had aspirations about blogging, or have read my posts and thought to yourself “wow this writing is really lame, I could do this shit way better than that Kpopalypse asshole”, you could do a lot worse than apply to them and see how you go.  Why not head on over to their hiring post and find out more information?

It wouldn’t be fair to not also mention the other blog that I write for – I’m pretty sure that Asian Junkie also wouldn’t say no to a really good writer or two so if your writing is more their speed than AKFs, applying to them is something worth thinking about.  I don’t know if they’re actively looking at this stage but on the other hand I don’t see why they would say no if your writing was appropriately awesome.

That’s all for now… more posts on the way, when I get around to them!

K-pop excels at remaking entertainment from the west – some of the best k-pop songs are direct copies of western songs, and all k-pop is at the very least extremely western-influenced.  So please enjoy this reconfiguration of a classic western tale, Kpopalypse style.

—–

You’re 25 years old, female, and a massive Koreaboo.  It’s obvious to anyone at this point – you’re at least rational enough to admit it.  When you graduated from college in the USA you jumped at the opportunity to teach English in Korean adult education classes, and you’ve been living in Seoul for the last few years, much to the concern of your parents who constantly worry about your proximity to “the North”.  When you come home to the States every six months in school break to see them all they want to talk about is North Korea and how dangerous everything supposedly is, but all you want to talk about is k-pop.  You like lots of different k-pop groups, mainly the female ones.  Your favourite group is T-ara but there are also plenty of others.  K-pop isn’t sexual for you at all – it’s about the music and the concepts.  You’re not one of those crazy fans, you’re too old for that, you probably wouldn’t even spazz out if you saw your faves or anything – but you might ask for an autograph, or maybe try and get a picture standing next to one of the girls… now that would be cool.  You follow Korean T-ara fan forums (not only do you like the group but it’s a good way to practice the language, which you’re getting quite good at, something you’ve oddly had to hide from your employer because they don’t like it if you are fluent in Korean) but you’re not an official fan or anything like that.  You just like to know what’s going on, and with T-ara, there’s always lots going on.

There’s a downside, though – times have been tough lately, financially.  Due to a disagreement about human excrement in the hallways (it wasn’t you, but of course everyone blames the American), you were kicked out of the teacher’s dorms and you’ve been sharing houses with different students ever since.  It seemed okay at first but an irritating pattern keeps forming – as time goes on, realising how vulnerable you are, the sneaky students start charging extra rent or money for this or that, or just getting really creepy and weird.  Your latest supposedly sympathetic student has just hiked your rent by 150% because of “expenses”, saying that you spend so much time on the computer, but you know that’s bullshit – you don’t even do anything except look at news sites and play music.  Still, you don’t have anywhere else to go at this point (except back to the States which is not an option, because you’re a Koreaboo so Korea is where you belong, damnit) so for now you’re stuck with living with this fuckstick and paying extortionate rent until another student who is a bit more reasonable takes pity on you.

One day you’re on the Internet, venting on the “off-topic” section of a T-ara forum, about your finances.  You’re not sure if you can even make rent this week, and you’re scared of being kicked out onto the street.  You would have no idea how to survive in that kind of situation.  You make a new topic asking for advice.

Your landlord/housemate isn’t home so you leave the computer on, go out to get some food and return to the thread in an hour.  Scrolling down the replies, most of them suggest bar work, prostitution or a combination of bar work AND prostitution – neither of which you feel comfortable with.  The thread then got locked by a moderator who warns everybody about trolling people asking for help, and also warning YOU against using the forums to solicit income which is against some site rule or something.  Sigh.

Closing down your forum window, you take a quick look at your email.  Something has just been sent to you in the last minute, with a blank subject line, from an address that you don’t recognise.  Suspecting junk that bypassed the filter, you open it up anyway:

You did specify that you didn’t want a charity or a handout.  Why don’t people read forum posts properly anymore?  Also, it’s Crayon Pop fans…. not a group you’re into.  Still, it’s the only lead going and you might not have much other option, it’s not like anything else promising is presenting itself.  You reply straight away:

You figure it probably will pay to be honest and upfront, you’ve got nothing against Crayon Pop fans but at the same time you wouldn’t want to feel pressured into pretending to be into something that you’re not really into, just to get some money.  A reply comes quickly:

Well, that’s somewhat reassuring, you suppose.  Maybe it’s worth considering.  But wait a second…

You wait for a while.  No reply comes.  And now you’ve got T-ara’s “Do You Know Me?” stuck in your head.

You spend the afternoon thinking about the anonymous email tip.  Is it worthy of following up?  You drift off into thought, half-asleep.  Just when you’re about to nod off, you’re awoken by your mobile phone’s familiar vibration – it’s your landlord, reminding you that rent is due tomorrow and “you’d better not mess me around like last time because there are other tenants who want your room”.  With a heavy sigh you return to your computer:

It’s not quite as easy a thing to search as you thought, but eventually you find the right page.  You click the “about” link to find out more.

You’re not in need of food or counselling, so it must have been the “wealth redistribution service” that the emailer was referring to.  You could certainly use some “wealth redistribution” – to yourself.  You investigate further:

Crayon Pop fans don’t get priority?  That’s all you needed to know.  5% of savings being forfeited doesn’t bother you – that’d be about the price of a can of soda in your case, your next of kin won’t miss that, small price to pay for some assistance right now.  The other rules seem logical enough.  You fill out the online form on the website, giving all the requested details.  The form asks you about your biases but stresses that it’s for statistical purposes only, so you write about T-ara.  For the “why are you a person in need?” question, you mention your urgent rental situation.

As soon as you submit the form, you receive an email in your inbox.  It’s a confirmation email that asks you to click a link to verify your email address.  You click the link and another email appears immediately.

This seems really odd to you – you only just submitted your application… how did they decide so quickly?  Would they have even had time to read it fully?  Still, they say they’re going to pay you… but that anonymous emailer was right – you do feel weird about this.  Even though you’ve never heard of @seohyunfap333, the thought of you getting money when they pass away doesn’t feel right.

You search @seohyunfap333 on Twitter:

There are a whole bunch of tweets similar to this, all dated from over the past month.  He or she was already dead.  You get a strange feeling in your stomach – but the feeling soon subsides as you think of something else… does this mean you’re going to get a redistribution, or not?  You check your online bank balance: it hasn’t changed.  Maybe you’ve been scammed somehow?  Perhaps the site is just a scam site to coerce you into giving up bank account details and personal information?  Your heart sinks.  The instant notifications, the too-good-to-be-true promises, all the warning sings were there.  How could you have been so blind?

Later on that day, your fuckhead housemate/landlord comes home.  Being an asshole, the first thing he starts talking about is rent money.  You don’t tell him anything other than that you’ll have the money tomorrow.  You don’t know what you’ll do at this point but you’ll figure out something.

—–

The next day you wake up and go about your daily routine.  You make some breakfast cereal, sit down in front of the TV to eat it, and check your email on the laptop.  One new message.

You quickly check your online banking again.  It shows a figure of 149725 won which you’re pretty sure is exactly 143650 won more than was in there last time you looked.  It seems about right, anyway.  Way’s Girls came through for you!  You shout “yes!”.

Your asshole housemate, also having breakfast at the dining table, look over at your obvious joy, and asks “what are you so happy about, deadbeat?”.

“Rent money, motherfucker.” you reply.

“Mind if I ask how?”

“Not your business.”

It’s not a long-term solution but it’s enough to get you out of the woods at least for the next week or two.

—–

A few weeks go by.  You finances have stabilised a little, you’re no longer as desperate for money as you were the other week, but it’s still pretty precarious living and you’re having to scrimp and save.  Every now and then, your thoughts drift over to Way’s Girls, and what they did for you.  It would be great to find a way to repay them.  You think about going back to the website and clicking the “get involved” tab and seeing what you can do.  Surely there are other people in your situation who are in need of help.  Maybe when you’re financially a little more on your feet, you’ll look into it.  For now it just remains an idle thought.  It certainly makes you see Crayon Pop differently – you’re certainly still not a “fan” but you’re definitely starting to appreciate them more.

One day after work, you are at home browsing the Internet.  You’re reading about some EXO fan in China who got stabbed by her father when he told her that idols don’t really love her and she replied saying that she loved EXO more than her parents.  Obviously a psycho father pushed to the edge by a fangirl’s insanity – you’re grateful that the fans you know are nothing like that.  Your tabbed browsing pops up with an email notification – one new message.

Your eyes widen – that’s a lot of money to just be giving away.  You’re not that desperate anymore, so you write up an email reply thanking Way’s Girls for their charity and that you don’t need their services anymore.  Before you click send, you decide to check the Twitter of @shithoryo3456 just to see – just like the last person, it’s someone you’ve never heard of.  It takes a bit of searching to find him – the email had a typing mistake in the Twitter username, but when you see this messeage, you become certain that you’ve hit the right person’s Twitter account.

ShitHYOryo, not shitHOryo.  You see a lot of tweets like this.  Looking into it further, it seems that @shithyoryo3456, once a young k-pop loving man with a fetish for 4minute’s Hyuna and the world at his feet is struggling through the final stages of terminal ass cancer.  You feel saddened.  If you must profit from his death, surely there’s something you can do to make the last stages of his life better?  Feeling a surging sense of duty, you forget about sending the email and instead go to visit @shithyoryo3456 at the hospital, all the details you need to find him are on Twitter.  You make haste to the bus stop with a bunch of flowers in tow.  They’re just from your vase at home, but it’s the thought that counts.

—–

After 45 minutes of bus travel and a bit of running around being generally lost in a maze of annoying corridors, you eventually find the right ward and waiting room.   You tell the nurse on duty who you’re here to see, and she directs you to some couches in the waiting room, occupied by two girls.  “Those girls… do you know them?  They’re here to see him too.”

“Thanks”, you reply.  You take a seat and get the shock of your life when you realise that the two girls are…

Boram and Jiyeon from T-ara!  It takes you a little while to be sure that it’s really them – they’re both dressed down and look extremely sleep-deprived.  Boram is reading a fashion magazine and looks bored, she makes eye contact with you briefly, pokes Jiyeon’s side to alert her to your presence and then carries on reading and flipping pages.  Jiyeon wears large sunglasses even though it’s indoors and although you can’t see her eyes properly through the orange and brown lens tint she still manages to seem especially grumpy.  They’ve obviously been waiting for a while.  You figure now isn’t a good time to ask about getting an autograph or selca with them.  Jiyeon looks directly at you as you sit down opposite them both.

“Are you from Way’s Girls?” Jiyeon asks.

You’re taken aback by both the content and the directness of the question.  “Well, um… I’m not really from there but I…”

“Never mind, doesn’t matter.”  Jiyeon cuts you off, as if the answer to her question isn’t really that important.  “We’re waiting for someone.”

You’re still struggling with the concept of what she said.  Jiyeon knows about Way’s Girls?  Why is she here?  Boram turns a page of her magazine and starts laughing out loud.  She holds up the magazine page to Jiyeon, laughing.

“Wow, look at those cans – I don’t remember these in our group!”, Boram exclaims.

Jiyeon smirks.  “That volume is at least 50% clothing.  Anyone can look like they have tits if they wear two push-up bras.”

“She needs them because her boobs are very determined to break loose!”

Jiyeon chuckles.  “Soyeon’s been trying for that look for years… but let me tell you, it’s a difference in determination levels!”

Boram and Jiyeon both smile at each other and then start laughing together and rolling back on the couch.  After a few seconds of mirth, they compose themselves and Jiyeon looks back at you.

“Look, you’re obviously here to see fucking whatshisface, you can go right in, it’s okay.  We have to wait for someone.”  Jiyeon seems to have lightened up a bit but she’s still quite curt.

“But, maybe I’m the per….”

Jiyeon cuts you off.  “Just GO, do it now.  You probably don’t have long.”  She waves you in the direction of the correct ward.  You walk over to the entranceway.

“Mind the smell!” Boram yells after you.

You enter the ward, and instinct dictates that you put your hand up to your nose and block it.  Boram wasn’t fucking kidding.  On the hospital bed is an incredibly obese man, reeking of fat-fold fungus and stale feces.   You look at the flowers that you’ve been absent-mindedly holding all this time, they seem to have wilted a little.  The man is not conscious.  He has tubes coming from his nose connected to a breathing apparatus, and breathes heavily, with each sharply drawn breath generating a sucking noise from the machine.  As you stare at this creature, his whole body encrusted with bed sores, you can feel the empathy gradually drain out of you.  You start to wonder why you came at all.  You decide to not leave the flowers in the room because they will surely die quickly in this toxic environment, and you make your way back out into the foyer, feeling somewhat shellshocked.

Jiyeon sees you emerge.  “Is it still alive?” she asks.  You nod slowly, feeling somewhat ill.

“Not for long…” hums Boram.

You’ve seen enough.  It’s obvious that @shithyoryo3456 isn’t long for this world, ass cancer will kill him soon enough and there’s nothing you can do to help him.  He wasn’t even conscious that you were in the room with him.  As you walk down the corridor back to the hospital entrance, still clutching the flowers, you can hear Jiyeon and Boram singing “Roly Poly, Roly Roly Poly…“

—–

After an especially tedious wait for public transport where you threw up in the bushes next to the bus stop a couple times, you eventually arrive home nearly two hours later.  There’s an email waiting for you.

You check your bank balance.  It’s all there.  He must have died while you were on the bus, or maybe while you were behind the bus shelter puking.  Feeling conflicted, exhausted and slightly sick, yet also strangely elated, you crawl into bed and go straight to sleep.  The message to Way’s Girls asking them to opt you out of their redistribution is still sitting on your laptop, unsent.

—–

It’s nice having money – a feeling you’re not used to.  For the next two weeks, you live comfortably.  Sure, two people died, but it’s not like they weren’t going to die anyway.  You know you can’t really blame yourself for that.  You figure that the recently deceased Twitter users also signed up to Way’s Girls and you’re getting the 5% of their savings that was stipulated in the joining rules if someone dies – now that would make sense.  So it takes you by surprise a few weeks later when you get home from work one day and find that you’ve received another email:

You never did get around to sending that opt-out email, and now you’re glad you didn’t.  That’s a massive sum of money, enough for a house deposit!  You can get out from under your stupid landlord forever!  This is simply a permanently life-changing amount of money and you can’t pass this up.

You quickly search up @CrapPlague.  They spelled his name right this time, and results are easy to find.  It seems he spends a lot of his time at Internet cafes.

You find several messages like this.  Nothing about being ill or close to dying though.  You investigate further and are able to locate the Internet cafe that @CrapPlague frequents.  It’s walking distance from where you live!  It’s obvious that he spends a lot of time there, from the pattern of the tweets he seems to be there every day.   You figure chances are good that he’s there right now.

In ten minutes you’re at the Internet cafe, which is on the second floor of a building in your neighbourhood’s market district.  It’s a cafe that is specifically devoted to computer gaming, with widescreen monitors and fancy computers much more impressive than your shitbox at home, which you will totally upgrade after @CrapPlague dies.  At peak periods this place is filled with bored schoolkids, but as it’s nighttime on a weeknight, there’s only a few people in here.  You wander around the aisles as inconspicuously as you can manage and it doesn’t take you long to find @CrapPlague who is logged into some shooter computer game with CrapPlague as his online handle.  Absorbed in the computer game and wearing closed headphones, he doesn’t notice you.  You take a seat in the row behind his and observe.

At first sight, @CrapPlague seems to be a weedy-looking greasy malnourished teenager, but on further inspection he looks like he’s in his twenties, about your age.  He has crutches with him, they are resting by the side of his cubicle, but he doesn’t seem to be especially sick or unwell apart from this.  You watch him play for a while, cursing at his screen as his online persona is shot, over and over.  Do people really do this for kicks?  Are they really having fun?  At one point he bangs his keyboard on the tabletop in frustration, and the cafe owner walks over to him and gives him a warning to take better care of the equipment or risk being banned from the cafe completely.  The exchange is amusing – the sting of being told what to do and having no choice but to comply on top of losing the game brings forth emotions he struggles to conceal.

After a while he gives up on the computer game and starts looking through some news websites.  You glaze over as he sifts through articles, commenting and upvoting, but pay greater attention swiftly when an article about your faves T-ara comes up – @CrapPlague leaves some comment about “T-trash” and upvotes all the other existing “T-trash”-style comments.  He then goes back to the computer game.  You watch for the next hour as this cycle repeats itself a few times.  He then eventually gets up on his crutches and you can see that his right leg is in a cast.  He moves slowly off in the direction of the toilet cubicles, and you notice that he didn’t lock his screen.

Quickly, you sit in front of his cubicle, making sure that nobody is watching.  @CrapPlague has left all his social networking and news sites up on his computer.  You start looking at his private messages, for any indication that his life may be due to end soon.  Nothing really… just a bunch of well-wishing about his leg, which is improving, not getting worse.  You take a look at his news article comments… all stuff about wanting T-ara to disband, kill themselves, how they’re all sluts and bullies, etc – all heavily upvoted by the online community, of course.  You’re disgusted but not surprised. Maybe if this person’s life ended soon it wouldn’t be such a bad thing, he’s clearly just another asshole.

You hear a toilet flush and dash back to your cubicle – @CrapPlague hobbles back from the toilet, sits down and resumes gaming.  Suddenly, a buzzing noise is heard, and the room’s fluorescent lights flicker and go out, then all the computers flick off.  Power outage.  A collective sigh can be heard from all the Internet cafe customers and staff simultaneously.  @CrapPlague gets up slowly and goes to the front desk.

“I’m done anyway.  Here’s my card.”

The cashier charges @CrapPlague to his credit card, then he limps to the exit.  You follow him in the dark.  To exit the building it’s necessary for customers to navigate a stairway, which is now in close to pitch-black.

You think to yourself that it would be horrible if someone who was mobility-impaired were to have an accident on the dark stairs and trip over and break their neck.  It might also be difficult for you yourself to keep your own balance in the dark stairway, meaning that you might “accidentally” fall and push into someone else navigating the same stairway, interfering with their balance and sending them tumbling down the stairs, head first.  Most horrible of all would be if the person you tripped and ran into, toppling them over, found themselves at the bottom of the stairway, still alive, gasping for air and with their neck not completely broken, necessitating that someone else ram them in the face a few times with the blunt end of the crutch to put them out of their misery while nobody is looking before alerting everyone in the vicinity to the “terrible accident this man had”.  All of these thoughts occur to you, and yes it would be a horrible situation… unless of course, the person completely deserved it, and you were able to financially profit from such a situation greatly.

—–

After a lengthy police interview where you are visibly shaken and cry a lot (mainly from fear of being discovered), the detectives finally let you go home.  Foul play is ruled out – he was just unlucky.  They’re not convinced that you even touched him at all, but they say they’ll keep your details on file if further questioning is required.

When you get home, you open your email straight away.  One new message.

There’s an amazing shitstorm brewing about Hyoyeon and SNSD at the moment, which at this stage may or may not blow over, but I’m not going to write about it.  After all, I’ve already written a post about how confirmation bias works so you should all know what’s really going on, plus every second post I’ve ever made ever has probably got some little dig in it about how fucking stupid netizens were about T-ara and about how equally stupid a lot of international k-pop fans were for going along with the rumours at the time instead of using some intelligence.  So now it’s SNSD’s turn on the chopping block and I bet any Sones who vilified T-ara back then are now feeling appropriately stupid now that they get to experience the same situation from the other side.  Here’s hoping they’ll learn something from the experience about not believing any old bullshit on the Internet.  Probably not, though.

And that’s all I’ve got to say about that specific situation.  Others will probably say more.  However there’s something else at the root of this kind of thing which I believe is worth discussing – “cute” concepts.

The roots of the hatred towards girls groups in general (and thus the ability/will to believe any old bullshit) are fairly obvious.  Crazy fangirls with ovaries only for oppa don’t like sexy girl groups (because they perceive them as a threat to their male k-pop crushes, or the desires of men in general) and will use any means to take them down a peg to shorten the perceived distance between their fugliness and the pristine idol-image, and in the process will embrace massive amounts of sexual conservatism.  Only sexual conservatism for the girls in k-pop, of course – guys are still allowed to take off their clothes, be as sexy as they want to be and even have gay love affairs (real or fictionalised)… that’s just fine – as long as girls aren’t involved.  Some fangirls will be honest about their feelings and just say “they’re seducing men from the stage, I bet they’re also seducing my crush backstage”, whereas others will lie and adopt a pseudo-feminist pose and complain about the girls being “exploited” but it’s all the same thing underneath the surface.

It’s natural then that female fans will embrace “cute concepts” that they perceive as safe and non-threatening such as the new Apink song.

Here’s our predictable netizen reaction courtesy of Netizenbuzz:

1. [+1,282, -94] A Pink matches innocent more than sexy concepts

2. [+1,098, -101] The concept matches their age and it’s pretty~ I hated seeing girls spread their legs open. A Pink looks pretty. Do well~!!

3. [+871, -82] They’ve been going with the innocent concept for a while. It’s hard to stick to one concept like that but they know what we want ㅋ

4. [+738, -95] Love them ♥

5. [+714, -105] I really like the song. I also like Love Fairytale in the album as well. Mister Chu’s daebak…

6. [+144, -37] The timing for this is excellent with all of the sexy concepts and all ㅎㅎ Everyone’s tired of sexy concepts and they’re able to give people a fresh change of mind

7. [+132, -37] Proves that there are a lot of great concepts other than sexy still left… Chu daebak.

8. [+127, -40] Way better than kids forcing a sexy concept that clearly isn’t working for them

Oh snore.  How little do they know.

From a crazy fangirl’s perspective, there’s a sliding scale of concepts, from “cute/innocent” on one end, to “sexy/perverse/slutty” on the other end.  To them, things probably look something like this:

However, that’s not how the men that these fangirls are concerned about getting whisked away into k-pop fap delirium (or worse – actually falling in love with a k-pop idol) perceive things at all, so they needn’t worry too much about exactly which group is where on the sliding scale.  Here’s now a representation of the male mind when it comes to female k-pop groups and concepts in general which should clear things up and let fangirls know exactly how much concern is warranted:

Every guy has different tastes and is turned on by different things, and you can bet to every guy fapping over Stella’s “Marionette” there’s another one jerking it to the new Apink.  But there’s one constant – for every graduation on the sexy/cute scale someone is fapping.

Let’s now look at some concepts which may seem fairly acceptable, benign and innocent to a fangirl but which actually should raise the red flag of jism to these paranoid crazies.  Let’s start with the big one, which is:

SCHOOL UNIFORMS

Most guys and girls have hit puberty at about 12 or 13 years of age – just when they start high school.  Whether you’re a guy or a girl, if your sex drive is kicking in as strongly as it does for the majority of folks, from that age until when you graduate high school you are horny as a motherfucker but legally in most countries you are not allowed to fuck anybody.  Plus being young you’re possibly lacking in social skills required to get anything much happening anyway.  If you’re in any sort of co-ed situation (or gay/lesbian) you’re surrounded by things you want to fuck.  Most people graduate from this sexual prison into adulthood having achieved a slim minority of their sexual fantasies at most, hence the school uniform becomes representative of sexual fantasy and unfulfilled forbidden desire… and there’s no better way to make people want something than to wrap it in a package which says “you can’t have this”.

My comment on the Apink “Mr. Chu” article quoted above:

Nothing to do with pedophilia.  The sexiest female pop/rock lead singer that my country ever produced (Australia, not the US, ahem) would have to easily be Chrissie Amphlett of The Divinyls, who spent much of her early career bouncing around (literally) in a school uniform, had her biggest hit when she sung openly about masturbation and is considered a trailblazing national sex symbol – right up until when she died, at 53 years of age.  The school uniform being hot is universal, and Chrissie knew it, which is why she wore it.

K-pop companies know this too.  They’re run by men, and men are horny devils.  By using school uniforms in k-pop girl videos companies can keep the guys fapping AND the girls unoffended, keeping the gender ratio of fans fairly even and milking maximum sales from both genders.

F-ve Dolls’ “Can You Love Me?” video is very telling:

Notice how in every scene where the girls are wearing school uniforms, Dani is wearing something that looks a little bit less like a school uniform and more like some wacky kiddy circus costume?  That’s because you’re not supposed to fap to Dani, she’s too young… you creep.  The adult girls get the hot schoolgirl fetish wear and the only girl in the group who actually is a schoolgirl wears some weird clown shit instead so she doesn’t interfere with your fantasy and you can ignore her while you work up a rhythm to your fave.  It’s all part of the plan to keep you fapping consistently.  Yet another thing you can thank KKS for, along with all the other great things he’s done for you like removing Hwayoung, keeping T-ara going, giving Seunghee a career etc etc.

And let’s not forget SNSD;

Watch it all.  Try not to fap.

Let’s move on to:

DOCTORS AND NURSES

Picture this: you’re fapping furiously to Girl’s Day’s latest cumback when suddenly you hear a cracking sound, and then you can’t move your body at all without incredible pain.  You call the ambulance and they take you away to hospital where it’s discovered that you’ve broken a pelvic bone – every fapper’s worst nightmare.  You spend the next week completely immobile.  A nurse has to change your bedpans, change your clothes and sheets, wash your asshole and so forth – and you’re not allowed to move your body and definitely not allowed to fap until you’ve healed.  The presence of the nurse quickly becomes associated with the pleasant sensation of her washcloth cradling your testicles, which is the closest thing to a sexual experience that you’re going to be getting for a while.  Soon, the sound of her footsteps down the hall brings about involuntary boners as you anticipate the warm tinging feeling of another clean-up session.  Every now and then a doctor comes and assesses your pelvic area, poking, prodding and inspecting for signs of healing.  Then the nurse has to clean you up again.  Both the nurse and the doctor are female, too… your sexual frustration reaches new heights that you never thought possible.

This is how an attraction to doctors and nurses gets hard-wired into the human brain and why it’s such a common thing.  It’s also why every damn music video and movie ever always has “sexy nurse” outfits instead of the boring shit that they actually wear to work.  Check this video out at 2:56:

That ain’t no standard regulation nurse outfit, that getup is straight from Adult Superstore… and this is for what’s supposed to be a video for a touching ballad!  Rest assured that Girls’ Generation’s “Mr. Mr.” is clocking up some major jack-off hours thanks to its “doctors-and-nurses meets Frank from Blue Velvet” concept.  If you added together all the time that everyone in the world spent jerking it to The Nine’s latest, end to end it’d probably stretch back to the Triassic era and the first guy would be jerking it with the dinosaurs.  Maybe even earlier if the MV wasn’t also in Triassic-era screen resolution.

MILITARY SHIT

Soldiers and tanks and shit get people wet, and I’m not just talking about blood spilling out of the gaping wounds of women and children caught in the crossfire.  Everybody knows that army/navy/airforce shit is pure sex, otherwise nobody would ever want to even join up for that shit. Every military-themed concept ever is a sexy concept.

And of course just like with any “non-sexy concept that is really a sexy concept” SNSD are right there, at the front lines:

Concepts combining hot k-pop girl sexuality with military-inspired fashion and equipment have become so common that militaries around the world are taking notice and are using the power of sexy themselves.  Check out this great advert for the Ukranian military which lays it on the line.  No subtitles here but trust me, you won’t need them.

I think the whole horrible Ukranian situation is going to escalate and then culminate in a gigantic sexy-off between the soldier in the above video and Crimea’s new Attorney General:

Let’s hope the soldiers’ helmet-cams are working.  Maybe these drastic sexy measures are what is needed for Russia and the Ukraine to resolve their differences.  In the meantime just know that the military is all about sex, and has been ever since Hugo Boss designed those sexy Nazi uniforms, the gold standard for BDSM fetish-wear globally.

WEDDING DRESSES

Look at Apink being all cute and innocent, looking like brides all about to get married off.  Doesn’t it just warm the heart?  Isn’t this the most beautiful video ever?

Well, it also warms something slightly lower down than the heart, because in the ultra-conservative la-la-land many k-pop fans live in your wedding night is the night that you get some dick for the first time (at least in theory).  These girls are supposed to be dreaming about the cock that is going to be spunking on them later that evening.  What do you think the real reason for wedding dresses being white is?  Needless to say this is a sexy concept.

GENERIC CUTESY FUCKING CRAP

Sorry I have not much to say about this one except that I just wanted to link a decent quality Apink song to balance out all the bullshit failure Apink songs elsewhere in this blog.  Also, I’d fap to this video so it’s a sexy concept.  They’re doing exactly the same ass-shaking moves as Stella anyway, they’re just smiling more and their outfits have a bit more colour.  Sexy and cute are not opposites!

ANYTHING CRAYON POP DO

Way looks hot with black hair.  10/10 would pop her crayons.  Like I give a fuck about the dance and the silly clothes, planning to remove that shit ASAP anyway.

Anyway you get the idea by this point in the blog.  Fangirls think k-pop for guys is like this:

But guys really see k-pop more like this:

Thanks for your time, and remember the three important lessons that this blog contains:

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There’s plenty of people these days who know all about the voice and the physiology of singing.  I guess the obsession with vocal knowledge is the cancer that idol TV shows (east and west) have inflicted on the world by continually treating music as a competition with measureable objective standards that don’t exist in reality instead of as an entertainment art.  It’s one motherfucking boring topic that I couldn’t be fucked covering, but I know a lot of people love it and do cover it which is great because it saves me the trouble.  However, how many people know about what happens after the voice leaves the throat and before it gets on a recording that you listen to?  If you’ve ever wanted to know any of that shit, this post is for you (and if you didn’t, you can stop reading now and go fap to Girl’s Day videos, bye bye).

I wanted to do a big post about music production as a whole, but it would be too large, there’s just so much to cover, so I’m narrowing down the topic to what k-pop fans obsess about most – vocals.  I may post about backings or other instruments in a separate blog sometime in the future depending on what people are curious about, but in the meantime this blog should hopefully answer such questions as:

• What vocal technique is actually for
• Why you don’t sound like your favourite k-pop idols when you sing and record at home
• How many pictures of k-pop girls I can shoehorn into a post which isn’t specifically about any of them

Let’s get started with…

A BRIEF HISTORY OF VOCAL TECHNIQUE IN MUSIC AND WHY NOBODY CARES ANYMORE (EXCEPT YOU)

In Ye Olden Days, unlike today, vocal pedagogy was more than just personal taste, OCD and k-pop fans having a wank over who’s bias is the best – it actually did matter for practical reasons.  There was no way to electronically enhance vocals, so if someone wanted a person’s voice to be heard over a distance, that person either had to have either very good vocal technique (as in opera singers, trained in vocal projection techniques so they can be heard by everyone in a 1000-seat hall without amplification and not trash their vocal cords in the process) or there had to be a LOT of vocalists all singing together (such as in a church choir).  That’s why when you go into any church or opera house built before the days of modern speaker systems, the whole room is reflective and echoey as fuck – that’s to help the singers move their voices along a bit.  In the old days, the performance venue’s floors, walls and furnishing was the sound system, and these rooms were designed accordingly to reinforce and spread sound.  Even the trained opera singer is useless without this reinforcement – they don’t have a hope in hell of being heard by a large audience if they’re singing outdoors if there’s a bit of a wind happening, so the resonance and echo of the room is important.  The opera singer’s voice as we know it is actually a combination of their raw voice and the acoustic environment.

This all changed over the last hundred years or so.  Nowadays, shit like vocal projection and technique doesn’t matter at all, because of the wonderful invention of the modern sound system which is specifically designed to project your voice for you.  Your singing can be complete donkey-ass and you can still be heard just fine all the way to the back of the biggest auditorium as long as the size and power of your speaker system can cut it.  Lucky audience, hey?  This is why singing technique changed in the 20th century and why nobody sings like opera singers anymore (except opera singers, because opera fans are obsessive purists who like things done old-school).  Opera singers had to project because the resonance in their voice comprised part of the sound system – the invention of modern electronic sound systems has meant that projection is no longer important, and because singers now don’t need to worry about volume/projection/technique so much this has allowed much more subtle, varied and personalised styles of vocal delivery to emerge.  Nowadays once-useful echoey rooms are a bad phenomenon – when you’ve got a loud sound system pumping, the very last thing you want is the singer’s voice bouncing around the walls of the venue and being reinforced, because sure enough it will bounce right back into the microphone and create what’s known as a feedback loop – that’s that squealing noise you sometimes hear on live stages when the sound person doesn’t know what they’re doing.

This is why modern rock concerts are never held inside 200 year old churches (unless the promoter is an idiot – which does happen).  Modern venues that use sound systems will usually have less resonant rooms, with sound-absorbing materials like lots of carpet, soft furniture and big curtains, instead of shiny reflective surfaces that bounce singer’s voices around.

So now that we’ve established that traditional vocal technique is really just one component of a sound system which is now obsolete by at least a century, let’s explore what actually happens in a modern sound system like the ones that k-pop performers actually use.  We’ll look at the kinds of things that happen to a person’s vocal between some idol singing it on a recording or a stage, and that sound then being heard by you, the listener.

MICROPHONES

There’s lots of different types of microphones, but only three different types matter for the average k-pop idol group.  The first is the studio condensor mic as shown by designated Kpopalypse microphone model Lizzy.

This type of microphone is the optimal choice for studio recording.  These give the most accurate reproduction of the human voice possible (which isn’t a 100% perfect recreation but is reasonably close) – and have a price tag to match.  They are also extremely sensitive, pick up lots of sound and thus are almost never used on live stages (because of the feedback problem shown earlier).  Lizzy is very obviously miming into this particular microphone as you would never sing this close to a condensor unless you were doing a whisper-vocal or something, and you would also normally use a “pop shield” between your mouth and the microphone:

Here’s Jiyeon in an actual recording situation as opposed to miming to show us how it’s done properly – note the black disc just to the left of the microphone, that’s the pop shield, it takes the harsh wind noise when people pronounce the letter “p” out of the vocal.  It’s made of very light material.  (If you are recording vocals at home and find that your “p” is excessively loud, and you don’t have the money to buy a pop shield you can make your own by bending a wire coat hangar into a circle and stretching an old stocking over it, then sticking it upside down hook-end first into a microphone stand.  A lot uglier, but the same effect.)  Also note that Jiyeon’s mic is upside down, this doesn’t matter as the thing picks up sound from the sides, they probably suspended it that way so it’s not so much in the way of her music stand.  Just telling you this because if I don’t, I know someone will fucking ask me.  Also, she’s kind of far away from the microphone – that’s okay.  They work best if you don’t get too close to them, a foot distance is about ideal.

Because you can’t take a big condensor microphone onto a live stage in most situations, because it’s big, cumbersome and will howl the shit out of itself with feedback from picking up every single sound in the room, most vocalists will use one of these, instead:

This is a wireless “dynamic” microphone and it’s your optimal choice for vocals on a live stage.  Dynamic microphones are less sensitive than condensors, easy to hold, and they’re also directional – they only tend to pick up the sounds that they’re pointed at, so if you point it at your face, it’ll pick up your singing, but not so much of the sound of the sound system (therefore less chance of a feedback loop).  However, dynamic microphones tend to give less accurate response – they don’t pick up your voice exactly as-is, they tend to “colour” the result a little.  Better microphones will colour your voice less, but all of them do this to some extent.  It’s “get the job done” tech that is designed to be versatile and durable rather than perfect.

Here’s a comparison of frequency response between a condensor microphone (red) and a dynamic microphone (blue), so you can get a feel for the difference.

From left to right is from bass to treble, and the vertical axis is volume.  These are both frequency response readings from professional industry-standard microphones.  Note that the dynamic microphone doesn’t perform at all well in the bass register (below 150Hz) and also has a lump of around +8dB at 5KHz.  The condensor microphone while also not perfect has a much “flatter” response curve overall.

Finally, there’s headset microphones, as worn again by designated Kpopalypse microphone model Lizzy in the following picture:

These are favoured by any artists with complex dance routines to perform (that means k-poppers) due to the obvious advantage of having both hands free and maximum mobility, however the sound from these is usually not ideal – always “less flat” than the dynamic microphone.  There’s one other massive problem with headset microphones – because it’s attached to your head, you can’t change the distance between your mouth and the microphone while you sing.  Professional singers will use “microphone technique” which means that they “gain-ride” their microphones – they’ll bring their lips closer to the microphone for quiet singing and draw them further away from each other when doing extremely loud notes, this has the effect of evening out the natural volume changes in a singer’s voice (and you thought Ailee was doing all that head-swinging bullshit on stage because the choreographer told her that Johnny Noh would get a boner and write nicer things if she waved her hair around a bit – no, there’s actually a legit musical reason for why she’s doing that).  This is not possible with a headset microphone, unfortunately – however, almost all k-pop singers use headset mics at one point or another.  So, how to get around this problem?  For the answer to that, we need to talk about…

VOCAL SIGNAL PROCESSING

Once the vocal gets into the microphone and gets converted into electrical signal, then it’s motherfucking open season, bitches.  Think what you hear on a recording or on a live stage is the pure sound of your favourite star’s vocal, think again – this is never the case in k-pop, ever.  Here’s the most common effects used in k-pop, in rough order of how frequently they appear on recordings and live stages.

COMPRESSION – a compressor is basically a “volume-ducker” that evens out volume discrepancies.  You set a threshold of volume and any input signal above the threshold gets reduced in volume by a selected ratio.

Infinity-to-1 compression is also called “LIMITING“, because you’re setting a strict limit that volume cannot go above, however this sounds ugly when used on vocals.  A 2:1 or 4:1 ratio is much more common when dealing with vocals.  Compression is a very subtle effect to the untrained ear, it’s the kind of effect where if it’s applied correctly you’re not actually supposed to hear it working at all.

Compression is the solution to the live sound headset-problem noted earlier, but it’s not just used for that.  Compression smooths out volume levels, giving a much more consistent sound to a vocal and is used for all studio-recorded pop music vocals everywhere at all times.  To find commercial pop music recordings without compression on the vocals, you would need to go back to the 1970s, if not further.

PITCH CORRECTION (aka AUTOTUNE) – pitch quantization for vocals, moves a sung note to the nearest correct note.  Can be an obvious effect (that “snapping” electronic robot sound) but usually is not used this way, and I’ve discussed the little-known subtleties of pitch-correction in much more detail here.  It’s almost as common as compression.  Occasionally pitch correction isn’t used in very specific situations (it’s only occasionally used on a rap part, for example), but you can safely assume that a “mild” form of pitch correction is in use on at least 98% of k-pop recordings that you own or have heard and which were created in the last five years.

REVERB – artifically-added room reflections.  Common studio practice is to record in a “dry” (non-reflective) room, and then add the room reflections later. Whenever you see a singer in a studio cooped up inside a small soundproofed recording booth cutting a vocal track, such as Bom in this picture, it’s pretty much guaranteed that artificial reflections will be added later.  The small booth is designed to be as non-reflective as possible, giving the engineer a “clean slate” to work with when adding reflections.

Reflections can be added mechanically via SPRING REVERB or PLATE REVERB (the audio signal is passed through a resonant metal spring or large plate and then re-routed back into the mixing desk) or more commonly by a DIGITAL REVERB unit which samples and replays the original signal at lower volumes to simulate a room reflection.  Modern digital reverb units can make a vocalist sound like they are singing in a concert hall, in a lounge room, in a shower, or just about anywhere else.  In a recording studio it’s also possible to record NATURAL REVERB by sticking a microphone in a far corner of the room while someone sings and taking a separate feed from this microphone into the mixing desk.  In a live music environment, if reverb is required the only type used is digital reverb because the other options are a true pain in the ass on live stages and not exactly practical.

How common is reverb?  Very, very common.  Vocals recorded without any reflections at all tend to sound unnatural to most people’s ears like there’s “something missing but I don’t know what” and only artists on smaller labels or not working in the field of pop music are willing to reside in such an uncanny valley.

EQUALISATION – adjustment of bass, midrange and treble frequencies, just like on your home stereo.  However while your home stereo has maybe three or five or seven parameters you can adjust if you’re lucky, a professional equaliser unit usually has 30.  Here’s a picture of a typical unit, note that there are 60 faders because it’s in stereo and processes the left and right channels independently.

Digital audio workstations (DAWs) such as ProTools give even finer control over equalisation than this.  Vocals have an annoying nasal quality?  Find the nasal frequency that’s annoying you and get rid of it.  Vocalist has poor resonant notes?  Use the equaliser unit in conjunction with reverb to boost the resonating frequency of the singer’s vocal cavity and create a resonance.  Microphone feeding back on a live stage?  Instead of turning down the volume of the entire sound system, just find the frequency that’s feeding back on this thing and turn it down a notch while keeping everything else the same.  Want to make a singer sound like they’re singing over a telephone line?  Find all the frequencies that a telephone speaker is unable to reproduce and cut them out of the mix.  Etc etc.  Equalisation can be used to create incredibly artificial effects, or incredibly natural effects, and it’s rare to find a vocal track that isn’t equalised in some way.

AURAL EXCITATION is a specific type of equalisation that delves into the realm of psychoacoustics which is a bit much to cover in a k-pop blog, but it’s also used commonly on pop vocal tracks.  Aural excitation boosts certain upper frequencies that are associated with audio clarity, sunshine, fluffy bunnies, lollipops, kittens and walks in the park holding the hand of your one true love, so it’s natural that k-pop would want to use it and I’m not going to go into detail about how it works because it gets really up-the-ass technical and shit.  Just know that aural excitation units are something that exists and you don’t really need to understand the inner workings of them to be able to use one, you just turn up the knob that says “bunnies” until you like what you hear.

CHORUS – similar to reverb but a “closer” type of effect, it’s like a reflection so close to the original signal that instead of sounding like a reflection, it just sounds like the original signal is thicker.  A great effect for giving a bit of body to a singer with a weedy voice, it’s often used to beef up below-average singers who have trouble getting a good tone.  It has a similar net result to DOUBLE TRACKING (which is just the vocalist recording the same part twice and the engineer combining the two parts) but it’s a little less obvious.

Those are the main effects that are used on vocal tracks these days.  There’s a lot more such as DELAY, FLANGER, PHASER, etc but the ones listed are what’s used on almost every single vocal track (with the exception of chorus/double tracking).

Just to cap it all off, once your favourite k-pop star’s vocal sound has been recorded with a microphone with an unbalanced frequency response, into a mixing board, then compressed, pitch corrected, reverbed, excited, equalised, etc etc then it has to come out of a speaker somewhere.  Just like microphones, speakers do not have an even frequency response, and in fact your average music listener dislikes hearing even-response speakers anyway, preferring to boost both the bass and the treble somewhat.  So your vocal signal after going through all of that shit is then finally coloured again by whatever you’re listening to it through.

THE WHOLE PACKAGE

The point I’m making is that nobody hears “natural” vocal anymore.  All pop music vocal is unnatural by definition and this has been the case ever since the rising popularity of multi-track recording in the late 1960s.  If you’re an aspiring singer and you’ve ever wondered why you don’t sound like your favourite idols, take heart in the fact that they don’t even sound like that.  Even without Autotune, the modern pop singer’s voice is still largely an electronic creation.  The sound that a singer makes on a recording, there is no way you can hear that same type of sound naturally, with your ears, if you were standing in a room with them.  The artificial electroacoustic creation of an unrealistically super-smooth singer has become the standard practice, and it’s been this way in the pop music business for at least four decades.

Just like the real sound of an opera singer is:

Operatic voice —> room ambience colouration —> your ear

The real sound of a pop singer is:

Pop voice —> microphone technique —> microhpone colouration —> effects colouration —> more effects colouration —> speaker colouration —> your ear

To cap it off, take a quick look at the Nine Muses documentary “Nine Muses From Star Empire”.  It’s a great documentary that every k-pop fan should watch all the way through, but the relevant section for the purpose of this blog starts at 6:08.

In the studio one of the singers tells the composer/producer that she just can’t sing that high.  His response: “just yell it out”.  He then proceeds to smoke his cigarette and chill out.  The composer knows that he can fix her poor vocals in the mix with his small arsenal of electronic toys.  She sings again, and then stops because she’s unsure of herself, not because he asked her to.  She felt self-conscious about her poor singing, but he didn’t care that she wasn’t singing the notes right, he only wanted her to sound confident – vocals can be smoothed out, pitch-corrected and tarted up to sound good but personality and confidence can’t be electronically generated (yet).  That’s why instead of telling the girls to “sing in key” and “use resonance”, he instead tells them to “take it seriously” and “use power”.  He’s trying to capture some confidence and personality on the take, not necessarily a “good” vocal performance – he knows he won’t get that out of her anyway.  There’s eight other members in the group to bury each girl’s vocals under, so if she really just can’t do it at all he doesn’t exactly have to use the parts.  Ever wonder why your favourite groups always have uneven line distribution?

Anyway I hope this post has demystified a few things for some of you out there.  And if it hasn’t, because you already knew all this stuff, then hopefully this post has been a nice eg0-boost for you instead and you can go and stroke yourself off on some forum about how you already knew all this stuff because you’re so clever and what’s with Kpopalypse’s lame condescending posts etc.  Consider this my gift to you.

You know the deal.  We’ve all been there.  You’re sitting at home fapping to k-pop idols but you just can’t get into the groove this time – you’re having trouble maintaining your arousal.  You fap harder, you try some lube, you try your other hand, but it’s no use.  You’re in good physical condition, you’re not even tired… relaxing and giving up for the moment, you sit and think about your predicament.  It becomes clear to to you that the problem is mental, not physical – after many years of fapping to k-pop videos and GIFs you’ve been finally desensitised to the coy, controlled, choreographed prancing and posing of you bias, and you need something more hardcore to keep your solo-libido going.  However, you don’t want to fap to anyone but your bias…. because that would be like cheating… well, okay, not really… but you’re delusional, so there’s no talking to you.

NEVER FEAR – KPOPALYPSE IS HERE TO HELP!

Since we can’t have k-pop stars doing porn because Korean laws are a super-conservative killjoy, I’ve taken the trouble of finding for you six lookalikes that you can search up on porn sites and use as a fap substitute while still keeping your mind clean and pure with thoughts of only your precious bias (assuming you bias is one of these six, but then, these six idols are pretty fucking smoking hot, so it probably is*).  These lookalikes definitely don’t have the same body types, but they do have similar faces.  Or maybe they don’t.  Whatever.  It’s a k-pop porn post – why are you complaining?

Let’s kick things off with the obvious choice, that has been pointed out to me on several occasions:

HYOYEON (GIRLS’ GENERATION)

Hyoyeon’s hot sexy appearance is no stranger to any k-pop fan who likes their smiles cute, their eye-spacings wide and their World Of Warcraft accounts fully paid.  I don’t mind admitting that I myself am quite partial to the old Hyogster (on the SNSD fap scale I rate her third just below Sunny and Seohyun and above Jessica), but I often wonder to myself, when is she going to make her AV debut?  She would certainly have the physique and the required dexterity, but alas, the adult video industry eludes her for now.  We can only hope that the Korean media’s rampant speculation about SNSD being a spent force has some truth to it, thus economic necessity forcing her to diversify her career, but unfortunately the Korean pop media are usually full of shit when predicting anything at all so I’m not holding my breath.  Seeing as how Hyoyeon probably won’t make that AV debut for quite some time, it’s just as well that in the interim JAV star Hitomi Tanaka looks just like her.

Well, maybe not exactly like her, but close enough…. and I’m not the only one who’s noticed.  Time to go “raiding”, what do you think?

MINZY (2NE1)

Be honest – you’ve been fapping to Minzy for quite a while now, but her resolute lack of fanservice is a distinct boner-killer.  She’s obviously got such a great athletic body and it’s always hidden under 26 layers of baggy hip-hop clothing at any given moment.  At this point you’re convinced that she sleeps with three jumpers and six pairs of pants, there’s probably no chance of a cheekily upturned ankle let alone the nipslip you’ve been secretly craving…

If you find yourself in this position, perhaps the charms of Rio Natsume will be to your liking.

Same dull stare, same basic facial features, same mouth-breathing expression, but with less Photoshop and about 700% more boob.  It’s a win/win.

PARK BOM (2NE1)

While clearly every bit as beautiful as a freshly unboxed Realdoll, Bom never really gets to show off her assets in the way that many 2NE1 fans would probably like.  It’s clearly upsetting for the poor girl to be lumbered with 2NE1′s disingenuous and morally fraudulent “female empowerment-lite” concepts while other groups get to happily shake their tits and ass, but there’s not much we can do about that.  However, what we can do is fap to Julia.

Sporting a similar carefully crafted face and plastic sheen, the anonymous and extremely active JAV star simply known only as “Julia” should bear enough of a resemblance to satisfy the cravings of Bom-lovers frustrated with Jeremy Scott’s anti-fapwear.

JIYEON (T-ARA)

Having already gotten a taste of the cottage AV industry before her stint in k-pop even began, Jiyeon surely has no desire to go back to such shenanigans now that she’s a mature adult.  This means that the upcoming Jiyeon solo is probably as close as we’ll ever get to seeing the sexy cyclops have a bukkake gangbang with all the members of SPEED.  That smile and that sultry eyes-close-together thing, who can replicate it?  Introducing: JAV starlet Wakaba Onoue.

Although Wakaba doesn’t have great dental appearance (always with the horrible teeth in JAVs, what’s with that?) and her teeth have been obviously shopped in this photo, to be fair, so have Jiyeon’s.  Even in live action Wakaba is still at times remarkably close to Jiyeon (without makeup) in appearance.  Thank me later when you’ve got both hands free.

SOHEE (ex-WONDER GIRLS)

Stare into the eyes of a true beauty.  Who else has the incredible charms of Sohee?  To find a porn actress capable of matching both Sohee’s fascinating jaw profile and incredible microphone technique I had to search far and wide, and my hunt took me away from the sharply-defined cheekbones of JAV.  Imagine my delight upon finally finding Czech AV star Shione Cooper.

Same face shape, same microphone angle – a perfect hit on both counts!  JYP, if you’re looking for a replacement, take note!  She looks hot, she probably can’t sing a note – she should fit right in.

SHINDONG (SUPER JUNIOR)

It’s been said that I don’t cater to people who want to look at guys enough, so here you go.  Shindong’s appeal and red-hot sexuality are beyond dispute as he’s recently been banging models up and down the house lately so say what you want, the proof is in the pudding (so to speak).  I’m sure there are some of you diligently fapping it to “the ‘Dong” and wishing he’d present himself in some harder material than a Super Junior video.   Of course, there’s only one man in porn who can match up with this undisputed stud’s characteristic smile, incredible breast girth and sexual exploits:

Ron “The Hedgehog” Jeremy’s celebrity status transcends the AV industry and he should be unknown to very few of you, but if you find yourself wanting to know more you can read up on his career here.

I hope this post has been helpful.  In the incredibly unlikely event that your bias isn’t one of these six, you’ll have to do your own searching.  Why not add any k-pop/porn lookalikes you’ve found in the comments below?  Together we can help each other preserve the fap!

* could be a lie