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Crowstep  11mo ago (mattlakeman.org)   2654 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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Having finally finished the article, I really liked it. I'm somewhat of an outsider to K-pop in its entirety, though I am familiar with the reputation that K-pop fans, at least the ones in the English-speaking world, have for being insanely-obsessed and toxic.

Speaking of which, I'm surprised Lakeman didn't go much deeper into the English-language/Western fandom side of things, as my impression is that such fans tend to play the "woke purity spiral" on 1.5x speed: they subscribe to the Tumblr/Twitter-Progressive memeplex, and not only will they absolutely dog offenders against the memeplex (including the circular firing squad), they seem to be equally vicious against rival fancoms. Ironically, they're way more progressive than the actual cultural mileu that birthed K-pop.

I think you are just describing very online teenage girls. Keep in mind some of the most-viewed discussions on kpop on the internet are actually more like places like 4chan and /r/kpopfap once you see the numbers.

I know many of the media owners of this kpop push, and they are not woke at all. They're 100% pragmatic American Psycho types or at least like to think of themselves as such.

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