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

Background Becomes Foreground, part one

[koganbot]

How did you find out and learn about kpop?

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 dubdobdee's words) "casually magpie-ish," to lift and absorb whatever isn't nailed down, including melodies from anywhere in the culture, many of which seem to require the accompaniment to be subordinate to a main melody. So there's a push and a pull here, never to be decided one way or another. (I talked about this a bit with arbitrary_greay on the first Dead Lester thread, and I made the argument in much greater detail in "Death Rock 2000.")

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 petronia drops by, a Canadian of Chinese descent, embeds Shinhwa and BoA and informs us that "K-pop has the most insane and deeply frightening fanclub culture ever" (speaking of background becoming foreground), which of course draws me in; she also tells me that "toilet paper dude" in the vid for Wonder Girls' "Nobody," the one I'd embedded to start us off, "is a famous K-pop singer turned songwriter-producer for other acts."

I'd say the rest is history, but history took a while to rev up. [To be continued.]

Re: Background Becomes Foreground, part one

[arbitrary-greay.livejournal.com]

"Death Rock 2000" talked about "Bills Bills Bills" in how the arrangement and vocals played with each other, and when I ran across this mashup in my library again, it began forming questions about how important it is that vocals and arrangement be integral to each other. Is this mashup simply melody pasted over the rhythms of the arrangement, or are there moments of synergy where the arrangements lends new perception of rhythm play in the originally straight-forward vocals, in how it's set in contrast to the arrangement? If this were attempted live, there would be tension in the singer needing to keep track of where exactly they were supposed to enter/change notes in syncopation with the arrangement. (I'm reminded of those moments in classical music where the long-notes main theme is played on top of the rest of the orchestra going nuts underneath.)
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

[koganbot]

This works. (1) It sounds good. (2) It is distinct from the originals, so much so that I might not have recognized them if you hadn't alerted me to this being a mashup. (But I'd never heard "Heart Station" before.) I might have thought, "they're borrowing the start from 'Bills Bills Bills,'" while assuming it was a song in its own right.

At the moment I have nothing more intelligent to say than that.