Round-up on Rolling K-pop

[koganbot]

Did a brief 2011 round-up over on Rolling K-pop, with more than a score of links:

http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?showall=true&bookmarkedmessageid=2714591&boardid=41&threadid=80662

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I also prefer a lot the image you are talking about. Anyway I think there is a strong tendency to package certain feelings under “traditional”, “productive” stories, like say, the relationship on a dating game, or selling girlgroups as the “dream” fantasies of soldiers or otakus (I know that there are quite some girls that bought the AKB game (to answer (a bit, hard to think that after how boring I have been about that around here, people still find that almost pathological need to find the “hidden truth” and use the same arguments than the sensationalist press or the Japanese extreme right) your fulmination of J-Pop idols on The Grand Narrative)).

Anyway, nor that anybody cares, what I found interesting about this is how you get inside a video a reflection of your consumer habits: you get the same girls on interchangeable images, spaces, places, in the same way you see them on different music TV shows, or reality shows, or magazines, or late night shows were they talk more or do more mature sounding songs, all that media mix, and how you are floating, enraptured on the interstices of it, a network of meanings that only exists because of your work. Probably that also the reason why I like more “OH!” as a record than the first Japanese album: there I got things that doesn’t fit together (like bossa novas, sugary disco bits, ballads, etc.) and I have to think how all of that fits together, while the other one is lineal and already-made to consume in that sense and I don’t find it that challenging (even if it does have great tunes, more dynamic sequence, songs that draw how your emotion resonates through your skin and all that). Probably that is also the reason why people don’t get J-Pop (“why do you like it if the song is shit?”). If you are interested in this (basically how every idol group has been marketed in Japan in almost the last three decades) you can read “World and Variation: The Reproduction and Consumption of Narrative” by Otsuka Eiji.