Non-Koreans (Survey).... how did you learn about K-pop?

[koganbot]

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 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 :D

Three 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.

"Dineyra - Raqsga tushgin uzbek song" (Watch on YouTube)

Comments

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I'm sure I first heard *about* K-pop here, though I'm not sure when I heard my first K-pop song. In fact, as I recall there was discussion of Korean rap at the end of "Real Punks," though I don't think I listened to it at the time.

"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.)

[koganbot]

So you've misplaced the jewel box (w/ song listings) I'd packed the thing in?

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:

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[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I would say that "Jumping" works the same way freestyle tends to work, which is unpredictably and with a kind of contrapuntal emotional action. The backing makes me move, focus, while the emotions creep in unexpectedly. And, like freestyle, I've never gotten used to how that emotion (or when that emotion) creeps in. There's some relationship to a context of abundance, I suppose, but actually it's more like a context of ambush -- the way it compels movement preps me not for emotional impact, but emotional hijacking. I remember a description that Michael Freedberg (linked here: http://koganbot.livejournal.com/109530.html) made about house music's relationship to 50's rock n roll. My sense is that the experiential impact of house music is often lost on me, maybe because of its relative sophistication in terms of my own musical references. It's too easy to tune out. Freestyle and K-pop both take the best of the house groove, which may be in part the way the music is made and in part the fact that I don't understand the lyrics much of the time (I sang along to "Jumping" as "Chompin' chompy chompin' yeah," an earnest take on Ke$ha's "Cannibal" -- I only chomp YOU!). But it layers that extra thing, usually through the performance, that pierces the more experiential pleasure, turns it into something else. I think this is what I refer to when I talk about the "intellectual--visceral" axis -- and what I'm saying is that the "emotional" emerges as a kind of reverberation from that axis, like when the Magic Eye picture finally starts to pop out (except that, crucially, and unlike a Magic Eye, what pops out is not the focus, it just recontextualizes the prettiness that was there in the first place).

[koganbot]

Volume 1, Track 17, Drunken Tiger's "취권 vs. 당렁권" (which Google translate can't make heads or tails of) was on The Great Rebirth, the album reviewed near the end of Real Punks.

(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.)