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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.

The K-pop invasion of the west

What invasion?

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

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.