So, Korea is a little bit different in terms of the music scene and pop industry than, say, the UK and America. And not in a good way.
The Korean pop industry seems to be a hyperactive version of the western scenes, but with half the amount of songs rotating at any one time, and a pitiful amount of variety.
In the UK, you'd perhaps have 40 or 50 songs at any one time that play on radios, some being out for a couple of months. In Korea, the number is 10, and songs are considered old after being out for one month.
My kids describe
2NE1's song 'Fire' as "so old". It was big when I arrived here. In July. Now it's uncool to like it.
Unless an act has a current song out, nobody cares about them.
Wonder Girls are a good example. No current song out at the moment. And everyone seems to hate them. But the minute they release another song, everyone will love them again.
This fickleness bothers me, as does the robotic manner in which my kids (not mine biologically, I'm a teacher) adore these stars.
G-Dragon for example. He can't sing. His dance routines are laughable. He wears women's clothing, and looks like a male version of
Lady GaGa. Not a good thing.
Even worse, is that a lot of the songs are carbon copies of the original. When I played
Rihanna's 'Umbrella' for my kids, they thought it was a cover. Why? A girl group here released the same song, but in Korean. This happens on a regular basis.
G-Dragon's Heartbreaker is identical to
Flo Rida's 'Right Round', minus
Ke$ha. So not only are the artists produced in a manufactured manner that is a LOT more literal than how we use the phrase in the west, they peddle their songs as original, which they're anything but. At least in the west, the original song is at least acknowledged as a general rule.
And then we have the stars themselves. They're dull beyond belief. They have no personalities and only say what they're told to say. Yes, that happens in the UK, but not to this extent. One slip and that's the career over. Look at the lead singer of
2PM. One slip up from 6 years ago has come out, written when he was much younger and recently moved from America, and he's out of the band.
Korea is a cut-throat society, and the music industry here is a perfect example to reflect this hardness.
User
DaJungKi sums it up perfectly when he writes:
Underneath all that glamour and makeup, the KPop industry is a messy scene. Huge entertainment conglomerates pour millions of dollars into carefully manufactured pop groups that sometimes spend years preparing for their debuts, often including cosmetic surgery (which is growing rapidly in popularity in Korea). Artists rarely write their own songs, which sound like they're cut-and-pasted from American electro-house music with an added R&B/hip-hop flair. 2NE1, Girls' Generation, Brown Eyed Girls, T-ara, 4Minute, Wonder Girls, KARA, After School--they all seem to blend together, don't they? Even within the groups themselves, can you tell one girl apart from another? Don't get me wrong; I'm not trying to bash people who listen to KPop--hell, I do it myself sometimes. But I don't try and pretend it's good music, because it's not.
2NE1 4minute Girls' Generation BIG BANG Super Junior Kara BoA Wonder Girls Brown Eyed Girls 2PM 2AM G-DragonSHINee
BIG BANG
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Freaks
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Generated on 26 Nov 2009
