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Crowstep  11mo ago (mattlakeman.org)   2657 thread views

A Deep Dive into K-pop – Matt Lakeman

mattlakeman.org

Submission statement: Eternally interesting blogger Matt Lakeman goes on a (very) deep dive into K-pop. He covers the history of Korean pop music, obsessive fans, gruelling popstar cram schools and the corporate machine behind it all.

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The K-pop invasion of the west was suspiciously closely preceded by the height of popularity of the competitive SC2 scene, which was of course extremely heavily Korean, with the most prestigious tournaments being Korean productions in Korea often with a heavy K-pop presence (most prominently a song that goes "GG GG baby baby baby").

I think this is underexplored.

SC2

It's true. This is how I got into K-pop. You know, besides destroying the west and all that it was mainly SC2.

Jjijji = boobs in Korean. Jiji = dirty.

I'm not seeing how this actually threads together, though, unless you include League of Legends.

The K-pop invasion of the west

What invasion?

I've yet to see a single trace of K-pop outside niche nerd circles.

K-pop is apparently popular enough that K-pop groups like BTS were doing ads and promo deals with McDonalds that made it onto primetime TV.

Well the video he links is from a production company with 70 million Youtube subscribers and has 1.5 B views after 5 years. DNA by BTS: https://youtube.com/watch?v=MBdVXkSdhwU

I don't understand it at all, the lyrics aren't even English and it's not exactly something you can hum. I don't understand why expensively generated music videos are good, why do flashes of colour and camera angles improve it? They're not exactly telling a story where the lyrics fit with the video (for example: https://youtube.com/watch?v=60ruvzfXQoE), why do BTS's visuals fit its song?

Yet it's clearly more popular than my preferred music, which has a grand total of 746 views after 7 years: https://youtube.com/watch?v=JLVAGtM1VcQ

Someone must be watching this stuff, presumably teenage girls.

Its mentioned in one of the sources for the article that the fans will play the youtube videos on repeat for days on end to drive up the view counts.

it's not exactly something you can hum

What are you talking about? I took a look at the video and it seems easy to hum? Or do you mean it's difficult to sing along because you don't understand the language?

The tune is pretty complex to my mind.

Take a look at this guy playing it on piano, it's not the simplest thing in the world: https://youtube.com/watch?v=WhwQD3I2eVA

I suppose I'm trying to justify why I don't think it's a good song, which is ultimately futile since these things are subjective.

I don't know what to tell you, the chord progression is very simple and easy to hum along to.

To be clear I don't like the song either, It feels like the lower grade kind of soulless shit they play in malls to make you shop faster, I just thought the claim that it's hard to hum along to bizarre.

The issue with the song is that it's soulless and boring, not that it's hard to hum.

I watched the official music video and the piano video just 5 minutes ago and I couldn’t hum it if you put a gun to my head. It is not very melodic. It instantly slips away, like a memetic anti pattern.

Or to phrase RandomRangers bafflement differently: I often have ear worms from music genres I don’t care about. But I don’t think I ever had K-Pop stuck in my head (except Gangnam Style, which sounds different).

in 2018, a K-pop group (that I had also never heard of before) sold 2.5 million tickets to a 7-city US/Canada tour.

For comparison:

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