KPop - aka Only Scott Cares - aka Not as Good as Metal

Music
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Ahh, this is some good insight, and also explains the BTS situation as well. There’s quite a bit to the industry, and I’ve definitely missed a lot of context. It’s really interesting to see how it’s all evolved, and how well defined each “Generation” is.

Makes me wonder how much crossover there is with fanbases across generations. Did 2NE1 fans inherently gravitate towards Blackpink, and are Blackpink fans gravitating towards BabyMonster?

Regarding K/DA, that’s totally right that it was mostly a hire for a marketing campaign, and not as much a partnership, interesting point!

Many of the 7 K/DA songs are on regular rotation in our household, and has directly contributed to our interest in K-Pop as a whole. I can’t help but wonder whether K/DA has done the same for other folks in the West as well.

Here are some of their more seemingly more K-Pop inspired songs, from the latest “EP” in 2020.

They even brought in NewJeans for their recent Worlds song, which I found to be more interesting than their own stuff at the moment. I don’t quite know just how much it’s inspired by the K-Pop genre, since it doesn’t sound like any K-Pop I’ve heard before:

Makes me really curious to see how prevalent these Western “collaborations” are becoming, and whether there will be more overlap between the Korean eSports and K-Pop cultures.

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There has always been eSports and KPop crossover because eSports is probably bigger in Korea than anywhere else. It was actually for real huge during the Starcraft days. There’s just as much crossover as there is between US pro sports and US pop music. Think Super Bowl halftime show. Not to mention just how many KPop idols actually play games for real, especially LoL. Some of them even stream.

Enjoy this video from 2016. IU got hired to perform the equivalent of the half-time show at a championship tournament for a multiplayer FPS called “Sudden Attack.” She just showed up because it was a paying gig, and was surprised that the gamers were so happy to see her.

Could you imagine being at a Counter-Strike championship tournament and Taylor Swift shows up?

There are also a few TV shows where idols play eSports. The infamous Idol Star Athletics Championship has included PUBG, even though it’s usually traditional sports.

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Right now the KPop scene is kind of quiet because IU is back. Everyone else got out of the way.

Except for one group that dared to release music in late January. (G)I-DLE. I’ve never been a huge fan of them. They’ve had some good ones, and some meh ones.

Their new title track “Super Lady” is kind of ok. It’s less dark and more powerful compared to their previous work. I don’t think I’d listen to it on purpose, but I don’t hate it.

However, they also made a music video for another track, “Wife”. The lyrics have some weird English going on, which kinda puts me off a bit. And musically, it’s just a little tiny bop. But I do really like the “um um um” part, which is catchy and fun.

What I like a lot is the music video. I might never listen to this song, but I will watch this video again for sure. They are doing so much with so little here. And the aesthetic gives me Jeff Koons vibes.

Also worth noting that the trend of incredibly short songs continues, and is here to stay. Just 2 minutes and change. Can’t blame them. Not only is it cheaper to make a short song, but it probably gets more revenue than a long song due to the way streaming payouts work.

EDIT:

Seems like I’m not alone. “Wife” is way more popular. It’s no the first, nor will it be the last, time that the most popular track is not the title track. The fact they still invested in a music video for it, suggests it was a difficult choice.

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She’s coming, and she’s bringing DPR Ian!

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DPR IAN features heavily in IUs new music video. Much more than I thought. He is credited as directing, editing, and coloring the video, wow??? But he doesn’t feature on the song at all! Maybe he was like hey IU, I’ll give you a discount on the video if you let me star in it. Getting paid with exposure on purpose.

Meanwhile

It’s not the best, but at least it’s fun. We need more KPop like this again.

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Seems like this is going to be the thing. Get other KPop stars to be in the music video, even if they don’t feature on the song. This time it’s HYEIN from New Jeans, the group that has taken the KPop world by storm.

You should know that when you watch this video that IU is almost 31 years old and HYEIN is 15 years old. She’ll be 16 in April. IU debuted as a singer in the same year that HYEIN was born.

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We got a real sad news.

This guy Shinsadong Tiger was a tremendous figure in the KPop industry. He started working in 2005, and has been cranking out hits pretty much non-stop since then. He made so many songs for some groups like T-ARA, 4Minute, and BEAST that it’s not unfair to say he defined their sound. Later he went on to make his own groups, EXID, and currently TRI.BE.

TRI.BE was literally just starting promotions for a new song, which they have now postponed/canceled.

I think it might be fair to say I wouldn’t have become nearly as much of a fan of KPop as I did without this guy. If you just remove all the music he made from history, what remains would not have kept me around.

In addition to the emotional tragedy of such an early death, this will be extra devastating to many people’s careers that depended on him. And of course a real shame for music fans everywhere as we expected to get several decades more of music from him, and now we just won’t.

Here is the song TRI.BE was just promoting. Likely to be the last song he ever worked on.

And here are my favorite of his hits, which are, IMO, all-time bangers. There are a lot because he was just that good. He had a pretty wide range able to do sexy, serious, fun, powerful.

T-ARA Roly Poly is top 5 KPop songs for me. And EXID’s albums are all no-skips.

RIP Tiger

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Surprised to see the NY Times run this piece about the late Goo Hara in 2024.

RIP

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I guess it comes in waves. a Bunch of my favs all came back with music at the same. time.

Chungah’s contract was over, and she was considering changing careers. She was successful at her previous company, but she was heavily overworked. Since she was the only successful thing they had, the whole company really depended on her to make as much money as possible. But of all people, Jay Park convinced her to come to his company, and now she’s back.

Red Velvet’s Wendy came back with another solo release. The song isn’t really anything interesting, but even an average song is lifted enormously by Wendy’s voice. The lyrics are fun, if simple. Send this song to anyone who sucks.

Meanwhile, YooA from Oh My Girl came back with another solo release as well. She seems to be the only OMG member trying hard to have a solo career. Her first attempt she had this flowery fairy/dryad in the woods vibe going on. She completely changed it up to be a lot darker. Of course, you can’t make a cool music video without renting a Ferrari.

Lastly, we’ve got the very surprising comeback of HIGHLIGHT (formerly Beast). I thought we would never see them again.

Basically, there’s this other KPop dude, Jung Joon-young. He secretly and illegally filmed himself having sex with various women. He would then share these videos in a chat room with his buds. He also committed pretty atrocious acts of sexual assault. He was convicted and sent to prison.

Anyway, this other guy Yong Jun-hyung was a member of HIGHLIGHT, and he was in those chat rooms watching those videos. So in 2019 when he got found out, he was done. I thought losing that guy in such a horrendous fashion would end the group as well, but apparently not. Here they are again, and they still have fans.

It’s honestly kinda fun to see these guys still performing like they’re 24 when they’re 34.

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KPop continues to trend in a direction I don’t care for.

A new group named ILLIT is here. They are from the same company as Enhypen, which is just one of the now many under HYBE (the BTS company). Like many, the group was formed on a competition/survival/reality TV show. Although one of the members dropped out?

The group also continues the trend of having people in it who are too young. Three of the members are 20, one is 17, and another is 16. Child labor.

They debuted a month ago with an EP that has four tracks. The title track, Magnetic, has now achieved Perfect All-Kill status. If you recall, that means it is #1 on every music chart in Korea simultaneously.

The song to me is so meh. It sounds just like all the other groups nowadays, especially like New Jeans who are also at the height of popularity. So I guess it’s no surprise that this is also a hit. Just going all in on what’s trendy.

One positive thing I can say is that the dance has lots of small, fast, and precise movements that are really eye-catching. It also doesn’t have too much repeat choreography, so it remains interesting and surprising throughout.

Be prepared to hear the song in every clothing and department store, but I would never listen to it on purpose. Here’s the dance practice video. The default music video is nothing interesting.

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Sadly, we must continue to add to the list of KPop tragedies.

Last month, singer Park Bo-Ram passed away at a friends home at the age of 30. Just today, the real information came out in the autopsy report.

Alcoholism is a plague upon most of the Earth, but in South Korea it is quite extreme. In the US you do have plenty of drinking on television, and no shortage of beverage advertisements. But if you watch Korean television, as I have, it seems like every single show brings up alcohol on a regular basis.

Every guest is asked about their drinking habits. Nobody can escape being asked “how many bottles (of soju) can you drink?” If you made a spreadsheet trying to collect that data on every South Korean celebrity, you would only have a hard time getting the data for minors and for people who never appear on television or radio.

I know several Korean drinking songs and rituals. There’s one about someone’s shoulder getting dislocated that they sing all the time completely out of context.

Of course on broadcast and cable television they don’t often have people actually drinking. I imagine there is some amount of restriction on that. But on YouTube, there is no holding back. There’s even a show called Tipsy Live where performers gather in a restaurant, get drunk, and then sing.

Tl;DR: The impression that Korean TV gives off is that many working adults have the drinking habits of college fraternity and sorority members.

So to see a celebrity at age 30 drinking so much that they have liver disease, and then pass away, is sadly unsurprising. I don’t think just one will be enough of a wake up call to overturn an entire drinking culture, but maybe it will be a wake up call at least for some who were close to her.

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In South Korean if you post defamatory stuff online, you can actually get in legal trouble. Several Korean celebrities have filed, and won lawsuits against Internet trolls who are harassing them and posting false and defamatory content online.

Well, there’s a new wrinkle in this situation.

They want to sue a YouTuber, but YouTube is in California. So now they’ve got a subpeona from a US court to compel Google to identify the YouTuber so they can be sued.

This opens a lot of questions. What if the YouTuber isn’t Korean? What if the harasser is in like, France or something? What if a Korean person posts things about ME online, can I sue them in Korea despite not being Korean, or does the law only protect Korean people? If I want to identify a fellow US citizen on an online platform, can I get someone from another country to get a subpeona by proxy even though I can’t get one from inside the country?

The more likely scenario. What if some young KPop fans outside of Korea post online the things that children post. Fan posts for groups they like and hate posts for groups they don’t. Could they one day end up traveling to Korea and find themselves in surprise hot water because those terrible posts from childhood?

I do like the principle of actually going after Internet trolls and forcing them to suffer real consequences. It just seems like celebrities are the ones that are really being protected moreso than every day people suffering more intense harassment. And the processes involved may be starting to go too far.

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Also in Korea is truth a defense against defamation? (It isn’t in a lot of countries).

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Tourism is down, and our birth rate is down. We are exporting culture, but we need warm bodies. Young children who don’t know better. Leave your home country and choose us instead!

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They back.

Only a few days late with the Midsommar imagery.

How about that driving bass line on the chorus?

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This is actually kind of a big deal.

AFAIK none of the Korean music shows have been on broadcast or cable TV in the US. They’ve been available on YouTube for many years, but that’s about it. The only KPop that has been on US TV are when there are promotional performances on awards shows, morning shows, and late night talk shows.

I haven’t been to a KCON, but from what I know, it’s not worth it except for super fans. I know TV watching is way down, but… Having people singing, in Korean, on a US primetime TV broadcast. We’ve come a long way.

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In a big shocker, 2NE1 is reuniting, and still under YG. They have already got two concerts scheduled. Concern is that the venue is too small and the tickets will sell out.

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My concern is they are old and out of practice, so the performance won’t be the greatest. Also, you would hope they would have some new material before they go out and start performing.

And in other news about old groups making a comeback. KARA has decided to release another song after their previous reunion was quite successful. This song doesn’t really wow me, though.

What does wow me from KARA is this YouTube show where Gyuri goes to visit various nerds at their homes.

Finally, something somewhat unique with regards to extra curricular KPop content. I love how Gyuri really shows no shame or hesitation whatsoever in going all out with cosplay and everything.

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2NE1 comeback addendum:

CL performed at a festival a few days ago.

This is exactly what I’m worried about. I can’t deny, this is one of the weakest performances I’ve seen. She’s not even pretending to sing more than a small fraction of the lyrics. Though her mic is on, so you can hear her live voice the rare times she does.

As for dancing, she does the bare minimum, isn’t doing it very powerfully, and is visibly getting tired. I’m no dancing expert. But one thing I do know about dancing that is true across most genres, is that good dancers make the difficult look easy. If someone is visibly tired or laboring, that’s not a good look, and it’s not going to make someone feel good if they paid to see it.

The majority of this performance is someone running around the stage while their tracks play.

I don’t say this because I hate CL or 2NE1 or want to take them down. They are incredible. Almost all their songs are legendary. It’s because I’m a fan that I don’t want to see them come back like this.

Take this legendary performance as a point of reference.

Yes, it’s not an entirely fair comparison because a big awards show has a much higher production value, but the difference in CLs performance is dramatic.

Don’t sell what you can’t deliver.

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This is a ranking of which Korean music tracks have the most streams outside of South Korea this year.

I’m surprised that New Jeans isn’t higher. I guess because it’s only counting 2024, and their release wasn’t until May/June. The others had more time to build up their numbers.

Not surprised to see Magnetic at the top. That song has taken over.