![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Non-Koreans (Survey).... how did you learn about K-pop?
While searching "Oscar song meanings," I incidentally found this thread where non-Koreans talk about how they discovered K-pop and why they love it.
"I'm just wondering...... I see many people who aren't Korean listening to Kpop.
"How did you find out and learn about kpop?
"Why do you love it?
"What is your ethnicity/nationality?
"What are your favorite groups and why? What are your favorite songs and why?"
"Do you prefer boy groups over girl groups or both?"
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20120412182534AAbtXrF
I think this is my favorite bit of meta:
Most emblematic authenticity argument:
Anyone reading this can answer in the comments, if you'd like, even if you are Korean. How does one define "Non-Korean" anyway? I'd say that I'm non-Ukrainian, non-Belarussian, non-Russian, non-Polish, non-Austrian, nonshtetl, non-European, non-Yiddish, etc., though I could claim all those ethnicities (or whatever) under certain circumstances. By the way, the first-released (though unauthorized) version of "Tell Me Your Wish (Genie)" was not by SNSD but by an Uzbek. Not that Uzbekistan is anywhere near the Ukraine. But it's closer to the Ukraine than to Korea.
"I'm just wondering...... I see many people who aren't Korean listening to Kpop.
"How did you find out and learn about kpop?
"Why do you love it?
"What is your ethnicity/nationality?
"What are your favorite groups and why? What are your favorite songs and why?"
"Do you prefer boy groups over girl groups or both?"
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20120412182534AAbtXrF
I don't think nationality matters at all because puppies of all countries listen to kpop. A norwegian puppy or a belizean puppy - they all love it! I'm central european, now living in Phnom Penh where local khmer kids dance to kpop in parks. Few nights ago they were swaying their hips to Abracadabra :DThree people like that the groups don't have to sing about sex, money, and drugs.
I think this is my favorite bit of meta:
At first when I listened to [SNSD's] music, I didn't like it and I sorta became an anti. (I think that to like a group you have to be a bit negative to see if you prefer them. If their music and personality can persuade you then they are a good group. A group must be able to have strong persuasion to have fans)Best food reference (in regard to Onew of SHINee):
Onew- he's adorable, he's sweet, he's kind of awkward, he loves chicken (and I do too), and his voice is amazing; though he's quiet, he's a good leader.
Most emblematic authenticity argument:
What are MY favourite groups and why?
Well .... I love mostly YG's lol. BigBang&2NE1. 2NE1, because i just love their music that they sing. I mean it's just so beautiful, and has a good feeling, it gets my emotions inside. That song ugly. It really got to me how they're calling themselves ugly. When everyone is unique, and pretty in the inside. I think their song just like gives a message to the people who think they are ugly. 2NE1 i think is just amazing, they don't care about anything. Especially Dara's hair, does she care that everyone thinks her hair is crazy no? I just love it how they all got their style, and just care about their own opinions. I love it how their different from other bands. I mean do other bands have the guts to call themselves ugly in a song? Narhh they don't! 2ne1 sings sad songs, and even their hyper songs have some feeling and emotion init for some reason !
BigBang, GOSH where do i start. Well most of the reasons are in 2NE1, some of them are not very attractive. But they don't care too, do they lolz. Bigbang's music is just A-MAZIN-G! I love their new album Alive. I like Fantastic Baby, the most yes because it's hyper. But through all the drama they went through, this is like the song that just says to me ' WOW BIGBANG IS BACK!'. With all the drama, u wud think BigBang's party-songs are gone. I love BLUE though, its like a starting-new fresh song if you get me. Like the songs 'i'm sing my bluee-oo' the songs feeling just makes me think their syaing bye to the drama and starting fresh and stuff like that. Bad Boy was like wow. I didn't understand the meaning of it, but it was a good song. What i like the most about them both is that they only got a few members! I can easily remember the members now. Bigbang - 5Members (TAEYANG, T.O.P, G-DRAGON, DAESUNG, SEUNGRI) 2NE1 - 4Members (PARK BOM, SANDARA PARK, MINZY, CL)
Anyone reading this can answer in the comments, if you'd like, even if you are Korean. How does one define "Non-Korean" anyway? I'd say that I'm non-Ukrainian, non-Belarussian, non-Russian, non-Polish, non-Austrian, nonshtetl, non-European, non-Yiddish, etc., though I could claim all those ethnicities (or whatever) under certain circumstances. By the way, the first-released (though unauthorized) version of "Tell Me Your Wish (Genie)" was not by SNSD but by an Uzbek. Not that Uzbekistan is anywhere near the Ukraine. But it's closer to the Ukraine than to Korea.
no subject
So I'm thinking "non-Korean" means that you neither were born in Korea nor carry some significant fraction of the Korean ethnic group's DNA.
Gotta love the Scandinavian Music Revolution.
"How did you find out and learn about kpop?
Through Jpop forums and blogs that also covered Kpop.
"Why do you love it?
Kpop as music: Because it's not in english, so I can listen to songs in mainstream pop genres without having the experience sullied by bad lyrics.
Kpop as fandom: because I'm an idol fan, and Kpop offers an idol fandom with a more polished performance talent and image, which sometimes I crave.
"What is your ethnicity/nationality?
American, Chinese/Taiwanese heritage
"What are your favorite groups and why? What are your favorite songs and why?
In terms of "bias," I guess "favorite" group is SNSD. Although I probably favor other groups more than them currently, I'm the most invested in SNSD. But "favorite" is never a question I can answer simply because I have different answers for so many criteria, like "best" vs. "favored" vs. "approval" vs. "respected," etc. But at one point, SNSD was the top for nearly all of them.
Favorite songs depend on genre and/or "tone/mood/emotions the song evokes." Considering that I'm not actually much into Kpop music right now, ranking songs to pick a favorite will take more mental effort than I'm willing right now.
"Do you prefer boy groups over girl groups or both?
I like both, but for some reason I've never followed a boy group, even though there are some I really like and probably know about more than casual fans, I simply have never followed one the way I've followed my "bias" girlgroups.
no subject
Things are in such flux, but we don't know where the flux will lead. San Francisco, where I lived in the '80s and '90s, used to have sections of town that were identified as Irish and Italian, but it doesn't anymore. It does have a Chinatown, and concentrations of Southeast Asians in the Tenderloin. And it has a very noticeable gay neighborhood. And I'd say that, back in the '70s when I was in New York, in the East Village, along with the blacks and Hispanics and what was left of the old Jews and Poles and Ukrainians etc., there was a noticeable social group that didn't have a specific name ("bohemian" or "freak" or "punk" are too narrow to encompass the group), but was distinct, was as distant from the old eastern Europeans as the blacks and Hispanics were. Not that it makes sense to call gays and bohemians ethnicities. But I'm wondering — I hardly know — to what extent such groups will in the future supersede previous social groups.
I've never seen any mention of f(x)'s Amber's ethnicity on a YouTube comment thread, though maybe the comments not in English tell a different story. The issue of her "boyish" look drowns out everything else. Not that that one example necessarily proves anything. I'm just playing with ideas.
no subject
(Interestingly, on college campuses there's a little more segregation. There are an increased number of undergraduate student immigrants, and they tend to stick to their ethnicities, so the Chinese don't hang with the Koreans, and each ethnicity has its own association, and they don't merge celebrations of Asian holidays either, etc. I believe this is partially due to language, as the Korean groups stick together speaking in Korean, the Chinese speak Chinese, while many of the American-born Asians actually choose to hang out with non-Asians instead and speak English.)
On the other hand, the two Chinese members in Morning Musume were affectionately referred to by the fandom as "the pandas." But f(x) is such an interesting group to consider concerning ethnicity, as Amber is usually not grouped with Victoria as Chinese, but rather, grouped with Korean-heritage Krystal as fellow Americans.
no subject
It was a very random way. My girlfriend started watching K-dramas after she discovered them through Netflix, then she started talking to her sister-in-law (she's Salvadoran; my girlfriend is Cambodian) who had also been into K-dramas (as well as K-pop) and, through her, discovered the video for Dara's song "Kiss." The reason why my girlfriend even watched that video in the first place had nothing to do with the music (K-dramas use a lot of K-pop singers for their soundtracks but it the music doesn't sound "K-poppy") but was instead because it starred Lee Min-ho as Dara's love interest (and he's my girlfriend's favorite K-drama actor). Then probably through the "Related Videos" thing on YouTube, we discovered 2NE1 and pretty much fell in love with them that night. That was around October of last year, and I spent the next couple of months listening to pretty much 2NE1 exclusively while slowly expanding to discover other groups.
"Why do you love it?"
I've already written a lot on this topic (probably more than most would want to read), so I'll just distill it down to its essence: I love K-pop because it does everything I like about pop music better than anything else today. It's virtually never cynical, there's no shame about being pop music, and there's a good, proper respect for the value and power of a great song performed well. It's experimental/creative in all the ways that matter to me, and it's a culture that is explicitly welcoming (its presence on YouTube is emblematic of that). And like the way someone woud describe a great television show or play, it's "got great characters." The idols (male and female) are beautiful, interesting, and talented people, the kind you want to see more of and know more about. They take on an importance above and beyond the music itself without overshadowing it.
"What is your ethnicity/nationality?
I am American and I would describe myself as "white" more than I would in terms of my ethnicities (German, Polish, Czech).
"What are your favorite groups and why? What are your favorite songs and why?"
2NE1 is my favorite and I can't imagine that changing anytime soon. I hate to say I like them because they are "different" because everything that they are different from is also stuff I adore. I guess it's mostly that they are four strong females with distinct personalities. I don't see any conflict between liking someone like CL, who is a dominant personality whose persona would seem to suggest that she could make any man her bitch, and liking someone like Sunny, who seems like the total opposite (even though anyone who pays attention can see she knows how to be in control in her own way).
Aside from 2NE1, my other favorite groups are Girls' Generation, Big Bang, 4minute, T-ara, and f(x).
I think the two best K-pop songs are "Gee" and "Sorry, Sorry." They sound so perfect, you feel like it's somehow necessary for them to exist. Their hooks feel simple, but the more I listen to them, the more complexity I discover in the actual recordings. In some sense, I'm drawn to songs like this because they recapture something of the classicism that was valued prior to modernity that I'm nostalgic for, in the idea that a design can aspire towards perfection (something like the golden ratio). (Which is probably another thing I like about K-pop: it's a musical culture largely unburdened, if influenced in oblique ways, by modern Western aesthetic thinking, about which I feel rather ambivalent.)
I don't mention a 2NE1 song specifically, even though they are my favorite group, because I just like everything they do so much. But if I had to choose one, lately my pick would be "Lonely." To me, it sounds like the kind of perfect song that everyone should know, and people should play it and sing along with it in big groups around campfires (despite the incongruence of that given the song's meaning, or maybe because of that, who knows?).
"Do you prefer boy groups over girl groups or both?"
I would say I favor girls to boys by a 3-to-1 ratio.
no subject
Presume the vid was paid for by a beer company.
no subject
no subject
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dr2PH0OWqLo
no subject
"Love it" -- not sure I do love it yet, actually, but it seems to be a catalyst for good conversations, and for whatever reason it's more capable of ambushing me with emotion than other music right now. I've listened to Track 05 on a K-pop comp Frank put together on repeat, no idea why it keeps hitting me the way it does. Part of it might be the flashes of English, part of it might just be that K-pop feels very adventurous and unpredictable.
Ethnicity/nationality: Not sure. I usually just describe myself as "white" and "American."
Favorite groups/favorite songs. I'm not sure that I've ever disliked a "group," because most groups have too much going on to dislike everything. They remind me of Celine Dion, distinctive but chameleonic. Most consistently seem to like 2NE1, T-ara, SNSD. Subjects for future research/more listening: everyone else, probably.
Songs that have ambushed me with emotion: IU's "You & I" (emotion: happysadness); CL's individual contributions to a buncha 2NE1 songs (esp. "I Am the Best") and that one where she raps with someone else on that K-pop comp and the solo thing where she changes the words to "Did It On Em" (emotion: badasseriness), e.Via (pretty much the whole 2011 EP) (emotion: eyeball-exploding), That Song Whose Name and Performer I Don't Remember (Traack 05 on K-pop comp 2) (gobsmacking inexplicable wistful something-or-other).
I really like that the boybands hit me with the binary safe/sexy flip-flopping that I still get from early BSB and NSync, who were the only two boybands I still like from the era (can't stand the second-rates, O-Town, 98 Degrees, etc.).
One thing I'm starting to wonder is if K-pop tends to operate (for me) on the Rachel Stevens principle, which is that there are no unifying features or particular talents that I can point to that *should* make the music any better than any other music. But then cumulatively it's not only better, but *much* better, leaps and bounds above the competition, and sometimes useful in presenting styles that I don't think I like in a way, esp. in context with other songs, that I love. "Come and Get It" is a perplexing album, in part because it just shouldn't be as GOOD as it is. But it is. And so is a lot of K-pop, though not always in album format (that is, I haven't heard a "Come and Get It" of K-pop, but the cumulative output is greater than the sum of its parts. Often in American pop I sense that somehow the parts are the story, and the sum leaves me somewhat cold.)
no subject
Volume 2, track 5 is Kara's "Jumping." I think of it as high-energy and sound-engulfing more than as full of ambushing emotions (well, freestyle and sound-engulfing, but you know what I mean, the bright uplift side of freestyle rather than the deep eerie anguish):
Btw, what, if anything, do you think of freestyle (Cover Girls, Debbie Deb, Corina, Lisette Melendez, etc.)?
The CL duet is the CL & Minzy "Please Don't Go."
Speaking of Rachel Stevens:
[Error: unknown template video]
no subject
no subject
(That review, by the way, which is — if I say so myself — a brilliant example of how to write a review when you have no idea what you're talking about, does contain a few factual errors, though is presented with enough honest uncertainty that the readers wouldn't have gotten the false impression that they were getting the straight dope. In any event, Tiger JK, one half of Drunken Tiger, was born in Seoul not Los Angeles, it turns out, but according to Wikip did move to L.A. when he was 12. Also, when I wrote of Drunken Tiger's "exquisitely beautiful use of Korean pop music," I might have been very wrong in thinking the music they were appropriating was Korean. May well have been Chinese, to fit the martial arts theme. Or something else. I don't know.)
no subject
A lot of my friends are Asian-American (because we shared the bond of being academically-oriented minorities at a mostly African-American high school), so I was exposed a bunch of times, but it didn't stick. I specifically remember a lot of former NSync fans being into Big Bang around 2008 (because subtext (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcTcQXxvb2o)), but I was never an NSync fan or a boyband fan, so I was never interested.
My girlfriend post-college, who is not a big Kpop fan herself but whose younger brother is a very intense Taeyang fan, once sat me down and showed me a bunch of Very Sad Kpop Ballads with Kdrama-like music videos - I remember JYJ In Heaven (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJM0uAAHt3A) was one of them - to see how I would react. And I remember thinking they were so transparently emotionally manipulative that they almost became parodies - and then turning to my GF who was silently crying over the tragic unfairness of Junsu's dead girlfriend. That left a deep impression.
And then, around November of last year, I took another look at 'I am the Best' and when CL showed up in the straitjacket, I got it. The emotions aren't exaggerated, Kpop is full of large personalities that run very hot and very cold. And like Sabina said in her review of that video way back when, Kpop and especially the girl groups is in its imperial phase right now.
"Why do you love it?"
I like the imperial phase of Kpop girl groups, mentioned above. I like that Kpop uses different metaphors and has different touchstones than US pop music, so even songs that might be very formulaic sound new and different to me. I like trot-inspired stuff because it reminds me of Yiddish folk songs, rap-inspired stuff because it reminds me of songs I heard on the bus on the way to school in the mid-ninties, Eurodance-inspired stuff (the Norwegian wave) because it sounds futuristic and experimental, and uptempo stuff because it reminds me of anime theme song music. (And like anime theme song music it sounds like it was made by people on speed...and sounds extra-good when you are on speed. "Ritalin" explains a lot about current teenybopper music tastes, I feel.) Finally, I like 2NE1 because it's has that happy-sadness (or sad-happiness) that is great for exercising. To Anyone is my exercise CD.
Additionally:
High production values: elaborate music videos, beats that don't sound like they came out of a box, the best vocal performances the singers are capable of captured on record. The vertical integration of artist, label and studio has advantages here.
Ease: there is good, high-production-value, experimental music being made in English too, but you have to dig for it. There is less Korean music overall, but many more great songs proportionally. Often the most popular songs (by Youtube hits) are the best or most interesting ones.
Finally, I like the way the entire Kpop industry sounds like it is driving over a cliff at 100 miles an hour. It's exuberant music, bubble music.
"What is your ethnicity/nationality?
Jewish-American mom, Macedonian-American dad.
Continued in next comment!
continued
2NE1, Big Bang - it's rewarding to be a fan of these groups. The more you pay attention, the more you get out of the music because it is written as *if* you have been following their careers closely from the beginning. Everyone in these groups has musical talent, and Teddy Park is a great producer. The music videos are visually interesting (2NE1) or symbolically rich (Big Bang). Production is close to US pop production - I have started to appreciate US pop music more in a kind of reverse-discovery process.
Brown Eyed Girls - I like the individual members. This group has a lot of stature and they work with great people on their solo stuff. Also, girl-on-girl fanservice!
Infinite - I like the 80s synth + electric guitars + emotional singing + obsessive lyrics thing they have going on. Their songs are consistently good and their music videos are intriguing, in that "what's going on here?" kind of way. Someone at that company is putting a lot of thought and craft into every aspect of this.
T-ara & 4minute - There's a clearly "most charismatic" member of each of these groups but instead of overshadowing the other members, the charisma seems to rub off on them/to be contagious. I admire both groups' willingness to push boundaries.
B1A4 - Good lyrics by a good-looking-but-very-introspective songwriter who is also in the band. Kind of like B2ST, but I like B1A4's style/message a little more. Group members seem to be pretty smart too.
Tablo - Fever's End is a good, cohesive album with a story behind it.
B.A.P. - I like their identification with the oppressed. So far none of their music has "stuck" on me, maybe because I'm not a fan of Linkin Park style rock-rap. But I have high hopes for this group. They are very interesting people and I like... okay, this is getting into unsupported theorizing territory, but sometimes I wonder whether Kpop is the domain of young + old female fans, and older male fans, because most of the young Korean guys are more into video games. I like that BAP has a kind of gamer sensibility - instead of playing themselves on TV, they play characters, and are promoting themselves between albums with a comic about their alien bunny avatars.
I guess what all of these groups have in common is "stories". They are interesting people and that interestingess is reflected in their music or music videos.
"Do you prefer boy groups over girl groups or both?"
I like girl-group singles more, but I follow more boy groups.
I think girls are freer in some ways: to express superiority or to physically threaten their partner, for instance. I think this is because it's "cute" when girls do this - or at least not as threatening - because of the assumed power difference between men and women. (Personally I find something something like "Heart to Heart" to be terrifying - but terror also increases adrenaline which can be fun in a way, since the violence is a fantasy. But a video where the guy was manipulating his girlfriend into staying with him would be awful, because he already has the overt power in the relationship, and now he has the covert power too... in other words he's a controlling douchebag... double standards etc etc)
On the other hand, unless it's a ballad, I don't think women are as free to tell personal stories of pain and growth as men are. I like stories, so I'm more drawn to the boy groups in this respect.
Background Becomes Foreground, part one
Anywhere I start would be the middle, but let's begin our story with James Brown. The funk he and his band creates in the mid '60s expands on a tendency in black American music — to be an interplay of parts, voices in conversation, rather than dividing into a lead voice (or melody or thematic progression) with the rest as accompaniment — takes it to an extreme, so that what the drums and bass and guitar are doing rhythmically are as defining of the song as what the singer is doing. And what the singer is doing is correspondingly rhythmic and has to take its cue from the rest of the instruments as much as they have to take their cue from him. "Give It Up Or Turn It A Loose" is a great example, in that changing the "arrangement," especially the rhythms laid down by the bass and the guitar, wouldn't just change the accompaniment, it would change the song, in effect replace it with something else, a different one.
The massive popularity of this funk, from the mid '60s through the '70s, created an ineradicable tension between foreground and background, one that permeates any modern popular music that's substantially related to soul and R&B. This is because the funk runs up against another feature of black American music, the tendency to be (in
There's an equivalent foreground-background tension in life as everyone lives it, between your life as your own story, you the lead character, on the one hand, and the events and social context and everything else around you, your context, your accompaniment, on the other.
So... one day in late spring 2009 I saw a piece on the UPI wire about a Korean pop group that was playing support on the Jonas Brothers' latest U.S. tour, so I searched 'em on Google and found a nice song that didn't knock me out but had a truly clever video about a James Brown star-of-the-show type character creating a song (albeit in Brown's pre-funk mode) but then his background singers come along and take over the performance. I embedded the vid under the title "Background Becomes Foreground," and lo! — here comes anhh, a Spaniard (I think) who's visited this lj in the past to talk about social theory, and turns out to be a fan of K-pop, who embeds SNSD's "Gee." And
I'd say the rest is history, but history took a while to rev up. [To be continued.]
Re: Background Becomes Foreground, part one
The mashup is clearly more bent towards the intent of "Bills Bills Bills" than "Heart Station," but does the long-notes nature of the vocals cause the result to be missing something critical, or are those moments of novelty enough to make the mashup its own entity and/or direction?
Re: Background Becomes Foreground, part one
At the moment I have nothing more intelligent to say than that.
Background Becomes Foreground, part two
But still, this did little more than stay in my head, general knowledge, until it was finally time for mid-year lists, another six months later. In the meantime, Chris Randle was managing South Korea in the Pop World Cup and taking advice from Maddie (iirc I voted against "Bo Peep Bo Peep" in favor of an intriguing Argentine indie song submitted by J. Bogart that few other people liked; "Gee" got my vote and a lot of other people's, obliterating a strong entry from South Africa), and Mat must've put some K-pop on his
From there, I'm in.
no subject
(Anonymous) 2012-07-03 07:47 am (UTC)(link)I can't remember - I know the first song I heard was Big Bang & 2NE1's "Lollipop". It was so full of hooks and earworms that I couldn't stop playing it. I had no idea there was a whole sea of Kpop in addition to the song - I only re-visited Kpop by chance about a year and a half later, when I went to see if Big Bang had done anything since. Since they were on hiatus for so long, I assumed the song was a flash in the pan.
"Why do you love it?"
I love pop music, I love hooks, and considering this, I love how unabashed Kpop is. No music right now is as devoted to pure pleasure as much as this music is, and the more I listen to Kpop, the more I realize that there's not enough satisfactory English-language pop music coming out right now. Kpop artists are also very prolific and in some cases, eclectic. There doesn't seem to be any scene in music as exciting as this.
"What is your ethnicity/nationality?
White, American.
"What are your favorite groups and why? What are your favorite songs and why?"
Hands down, my favorite group is Big Bang. Big Bang 2 / Tonight was my favorite album(s?) of 2011. It was exhilarating, honest, and true in the way it chronicled youthful love and loss, and considering that I'm in my early twenties, it was more than relevant for me. Each member shines, the lyrics were shockingly humorous and oftentimes beautiful, and as a whole the album felt like the big beating heart of a young guy whose world was rocked by a breakup.
That said, I really love Girls' Generation self-titled (the Japanese album, which I found through your Pazz & Jop ballot) because of it's steely dance beats and thick-skinned lady anthems, and currently I'm enjoying T-ara's wacky Jewelry Box, even though it's a cashout repackage hits album. My favorite this year is probably Nine Muses' Sweet Rendezvous EP, which is just four perfect disco songs in a row. There's also a lot of singles from other artists I'm crazy about, especially GG's "Having an Affair", Miss A's "Touch", and BoA's "Copy & Paste".
"Do you prefer boy groups over girl groups or both?"
Both, but for me many groups walk a fine line between enjoyable and unbearable. Girl groups can be too cute (T-ara is about as far into kawaii that I'll go), and boy groups often go overboard on being macho. I really do wish there was a co-ed group that involved some back and forth between the sexes. Considering that Kpop songs are almost exclusively about wayward relationships with the opposite sex, you'd think that one with some serious verbal sparring would come along. A whole album with the vibe of "Troublemaker" would be wonderful.
no subject
Since I'm Sex Pistol, How Come I Love T-ara? (Background Becomes Foreground, part three)
Passion, dance, boppability, possibility (meaning that it's got the entire world to explore and lift from, but remains unsettled as to what it is and what it can do), athletic ambition, personality, beauty, sex appeal that seems joyous rather than a grim task. Pretty good for a music that's mostly mainstream and not wildly contentious. But I don't think my list of attributes really explains much. Why do I love music, for that matter? I mean, I get strong appealing personalities in my life and on these threads, so what more do I gain from the wisps of image and sound out of Korea? "Artistry," perhaps — not in the Fine Art sense but more along the lines of "here's the shuffle dance, how can we make it ours?" (dance it in a circle, add astronauts). And then all this can be source material for our own lives, our own art, our dance of words.
K-pop has flipped me, in that, though I've long given lip service to the importance of visuals and hairstyle and social style and context and fan activities, etc., I'm actually quite poor at visual comprehension (I'm a verbal guy who lives in his head). With K-pop I find myself at least trying to use my eyes, sometimes seeing the real story more in sketchily vocalized, day-in-and-day out TV dance shows than in full-sounding mp3's. I love the YouTube mix and visual mash of "Lovey-Dovey" live clips by KPopMuzikLuvr34, it unintentionally constituting a History And Compilation Of T-ara Fashion, January, 2012.
What is your ethnicity/nationality?
American, white, musical marginal intelligentsia (MMA).
Heritage: Eastern and Central Europe, Jew, Kid From Tomkinsville, Desolation Row.
"Ethnicity" is an interesting question but it's not necessarily the most relevant, unless we drastically redefine and rethink it. In 1980 in New York, a sort-of bridge-and-tunnel metal punk asked me, incredulously, "Since you're a fan of the Sex Pistols, how is it that you love Donna Summer?" Whereas, "Since you're white, how come you love Donna Summer?" "Since you're American, how come you love Donna Summer?" "Since you're a Jew, how come you love Donna Summer?" "Since you derive from Eastern Europe, how come you love Donna Summer?" aren't crucial questions. So my real ethnicity is, "Since I'm Sex Pistol, how come I love T-ara?"
(As I indicated above, the terms "punk" and "bohemian" no longer cut it.)
Since I'm Liberal Left, How Come I Love "Like An Indian Doll"? (Background/Foreground, part four)
T-ara, 2NE1, E.via, Miss A, LPG, SNSD, 4minute, GD&TOP/Big Bang, DJ DOC, ChoColat. Solo = HyunA, IU, Lee Hyori. Producers/writers = Shinsadong Tiger, Teddy Park, SweeTune, JYP. Personality = Sunny.
Why? How about in 25 words or less? Here's 2NE1 doing the most exuberant performance ever (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T395Nuoi7rM), and here's T-ara doing the least exuberant performance ever (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GO2hGgQml40), and IT'S JUST AS GOOD!*
T-ara "I Go Crazy Because Of You," T-ara "Lovey-Dovey," 2NE1 "I Am The Best," Wonder Girls "So Hot," 4minute "Hot Issue," After School "Bang!" T-ara "Like An Indian Doll," E.via "Pick Up! U!," Fat Cat "My Love Bad Boy," IU "Sorry, Sorry." I just did a top ten that excluded "High High," "Come Back Home," and "Gee"! Amazing! But I want to say that it's really important to me that Korea's got someone like E.via, whom I'm able to imagine as an estranged art bitch who's quite joyously willing to cross over and try to master the forms of life she's estranged from.
Do you prefer boy groups over girl groups or both?
Girl groups, obviously, though some of the boys compensate in the dance. Was considering citing Seo Taiji & Boys or SHINee as male affirmative-action choices, but decided I couldn't leave out hearty underdogs ChoColat.
*OK, it's not really the least exuberant performance ever. That would be the one in The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly where the small prisoner orchestra is forced to play music to cover up the sound of Tuco being tortured.