K-Pop Sucks
Feb. 19th, 2024 07:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kimberlysteele
This is Black Pink. They bore me.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Pop music of any sort these days is more about looking cute than how the artists actually sound, and therein lies the rub. I am OH SO VERY TIRED of the "looks trump sound" proliferation of musical styles. Can we please be done with this kind of trashy cacomusic? Or at least can we be done with obsessing over it? Apparently not. Clearly I disregard my own reputation and popularity because I am going to be the first to say it: K-pop sucks.
A Pale Imitation: Literally
K-Pop, J-Pop, and their Chinese equivalents suck because American popular music sucks to begin with and adding an Asian flavor to garbage results in... drumroll please... Asian-flavored garbage. K-Pop trends always seem to lag about a decade behind the American pop trends they slavishly imitate. When K-Pop was young in the 2000s, it was largely an imitation of the Backstreet Boys and N'Sync. In other words, the groups emanated the vibe of what was trendy in the US about 10 years earlier. By 2010, K-Pop began its love affair with Britney Spears, producing come-hither schoolgirls by the gross. In 2020 to the current day, a hefty amount K-Pop looks like a lite version of US hiphop circa 2010, Travis Scott, Drake, Nicky Minaj, a dash of Black Eyed Peas with a smidge of Beyoncé, also now in her decline. This is all fine and good and I'm not complaining about it -- there is nothing new under the sun and copyright Karens need to go back to hiding under rocks; we all see through their petty greed. It's just a bit uncanny how directly imitative K-Pop has always been, and how it reliably apes the bilge spat out by California music execs of a decade ago.
As I mentioned, K-Pop's current cringey fixation is hip-hop. It is the absolute worst when conformist copycats try to be edgy. American hip-hop is mostly tripe at any rate, but when some post-teen, tormented trainee tries to be their manager's focus group version of "edgy", it winds up about as edgy as a thirteen year old who has stolen her mom's credit card to buy an oversized holiday-themed Stanley cup at the mall. It's not bold so much as it is sad. Even I know that a K-Pop trainee's life is a death march of conformity in body and mind. Trainees are not allowed to have public boyfriends or girlfriends because that would spoil the fantasy. They are expected to conform to impossible beauty standards. Once they age out, they are DONE. They are not allowed to eat... much. A particularly psychotic regime K-Pop idols are known for inflicting upon themselves is called the IU diet. The IU diet, named after a blandly anorexic-looking K-Pop star, involves eating an apple for breakfast and a small portion of brown rice and sweet potato for dinner. That's it. One is supposed to subsist on these two quasi-meals and no other beverages save water until the weight melts off. Plastic surgery is de rigueur for K-Pop idols, whether male or female, at an obscenely young age. By the time they are twenty, every one of them is expected to shave down their jaws, raise the bridge of their Asian nose, and turn their eyes from monolid to double lid. Another fun beauty standard K-Pop's darlings are expected to endure is pale skin. The fixation with white skin happens reliably all over the world except the US and Europe, where most white people still equate being tan with status. We always want what we don't have.
Back to the music, if you can call it that. Conformity isn't just a looks thing in K-Pop music. The whole sound is conformist. Like the Western pop trash it imitates, there is no improvisation or spontanaeity in the tightly choreographed group dances or lip-synched cameos. Keep in mind Western art music (what we plebes call Classical) is dead precisely because it is all rote repetition of old masters and no innovation/improvisation. Classical music is a museum for the worship of the dead. Western pop has gotten somewhat of a revival as internet fans do interpretative covers of famous tunes, but if that music is rarely changed in any significant or meaningful way, it may end up dying the same death as Classical a hundred years down the road.
This is the AI-generated K-Pop group MAVE. There is no discernible difference between MAVE and live action trainee bands. To think that all of those girls and boys are getting surgery and starving only to be replaced by zeros and ones!
When I watch what little K-Pop I can stand -- sometimes I turn off the sound because it is annoying and shrill and plays a distant second fiddle to the visuals anyways -- I feel like I am watching an army of marching zombies, and not the fun kind featured in Michael Jackson's Thriller video. Every video looks and sounds the same, choreographed down to the last miserable inch. I guess K-Pop is fun if you are into fashion, because mostly it is a bunch of people who look like plastic mannequins prancing across rapidly changing, vaguely controversial sets while striking vaguely controversial poses. There is one popular style of K-Pop video where some random K-Pop girl with a generic clothes hanger body stalks about as the outfits change every two or three seconds. Whether male or female, it's always the same slightly pissed off, arrogant, cooler-than-thou grimace under a ton of expertly-applied makeup. In this day and age, of course it begs the question why such perfect people cannot be made by tapping the figments of a computer's imagination: AI. That has already happened, and it is a K-Pop band called Eternity. None of the members of the group actually exist. This is a nice development for the grotesque, middle aged producer sleazebags who create K-Pop: there are no trainees to audition, no mouths to feed, no hotels to book, plastic surgery is instant, and best of all, the "stars" are ageless, hence the name Eternity. In its way, Eternity is a far more honest and direct way for middle aged producer sleazebags to connect with the legions of young girls they want to fleece of their parents' money: via a hologram. The caveat for the middle-aged producer sleazebags arrives belatedly when they realize there are no actual young people to groom, molest, and destroy, which makes me think the AI idol trend may not take off after all.
This makeup took a minimum of 1.5 hours, guaranteed, and we aren't even talking hair or skincare regimen.
The Men
I was looking at my husband in Home Depot while he leaned over a chunk of drywall he was measuring, his big shoulders stretching as his arms opened to wield his tape measure. There is something special about a man who can fix an build things. Fixing and building things is something I am OK but not great at. I admire people, especially guys, who have fixing and building as part of their masculine package. The same big shoulders just aren't exciting on the K-Pop guy who likely spends most of his time getting made up in the mirror before executing his prefab, robotic dance routines when he isn't incapacitated with anesthesia for his latest surgical tweak. Far sexier is the guy who spends a grand total of five minutes in front of a mirror (just enough to wash his face, smooth his hair, and make sure he hasn't grown a second nose or a third ear) before going off to do actual work. The truly sexy man isn't excessively self-conscious about his appearance. In the antique world where I come from, looking pretty is mostly a girl thing. If you want to be a pretty boy, that's fine and good, but you should expect some attention from the gays along with twelve year old girls as your demographic is feminine in one way or another. I prefer a man who is un-enthralled with his looks because they distract from things like working hard, rescuing people and animals in distress, and building stuff. Give me that plain dude any day over the preening eunuchs with guyliner and nightly face routines that cost more than my mortgage, plus the creepy, middle aged, Yakuza-looking producer who is always hanging about because AI phantasms do not give good head.
That Said...
If you love K-Pop, holy hell, YOU DO YOU. It's not my cup of tea but I won't stop anyone from loving it, and if you love it, please go ahead and enjoy my unconsumed share with every blessing. I will shut up now... go enjoy your saccharine, semi-musical, Asian entertainment confections with glee.
no subject
Date: 2024-02-20 01:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-21 03:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-21 02:56 pm (UTC)Ultimately, I think the internet is temporary, but this is an intermediary step to get us from "Rockstar Records Owns Everything" back down to "Musicians are skilled workers who live in your neighborhood and you can hire them for your wedding/barn dance/event".
In semi-related news, I recently worked my very first paid singing gig :)
no subject
Date: 2024-02-22 04:18 am (UTC)Who?
Date: 2024-02-20 07:16 pm (UTC)I can see why females of this century choose not to breed with that type.
There's no point.
I see this leading to imminent population decline.
Re: Who?
Date: 2024-02-21 03:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-20 08:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-21 04:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-22 12:30 am (UTC)JLfromNH
no subject
Date: 2024-02-22 04:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-22 03:36 pm (UTC)JLfromNH
no subject
Date: 2024-02-22 07:07 pm (UTC)Classical
Date: 2024-02-21 11:18 am (UTC)Regarding classical... did it die or was it murdered? From my vantage point it looks more like the centuries long conversation that was classical music (and architecture for that matter) was dropped like a hot rock around the turn of the 20th century.
Most of the grand traditions that were so gleefully abandoned around that time were not (in my opinion) driven by innovation instead changed slowly over long periods and that change was usually at the hands of some excessively skilled prodigy. Raising the bar seemed to be the standard form of "progress" for the technical skills.
Progress musically now really just means novelty.
As with most things I'm a hypocrite because my favorite composer is Vaughan Williams and he participated in ending the classical tradition while wrenching that tradition out of the hands of the Germans. I am unapologetic.
Re: Classical
Date: 2024-02-21 10:14 pm (UTC)Vaughan-Williams was right to take the relay of Western art music. If anyone destroyed Western art music, it was the Germans, or more precisely, the Viennese School: Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. They opened the floodgates for atonal garbage to be legitimized as "art", much like Picasso opened the floodgates for Warhol's soup cans and Jackson Pollock's splatters. If anything, Vaughan-Williams kept Western music alive despite the efforts of no-talents such as John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen to destroy it forever.
Re: Classical
Date: 2024-02-22 02:57 pm (UTC)Davie
Re: Classical
Date: 2024-02-22 11:16 pm (UTC)When all the other teenagers were going through the angst grunge thing... I took up Mahler. Literally locked myself in my room to be sad and listen to Mahler's 5th, sometimes 9th. Or if I didn't have that long, Janacek's Sinfonietta. Teen Angst soundtrack.
I'm still a little nostalgic about them. I'm reminded that I have a 12yo and perhaps I need to leave some Mahler CDs lying around to be sneaked like discarded girly magazines...
Re: Classical
Date: 2024-02-23 04:40 pm (UTC)