QRIMOLE Episode 3: imagine there’s no stupid questions, it’s easy if you try

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Krystal – yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is Jine using here?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kindest Regards,
a desperate wretched soul

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

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