K-Poppin

A few days ago I was watching a local music channel. The program was a top 20 countdown show and shows the 20-2 recap and I noticed a lot of them were foreign and non-English songs. Then they show the number one song for the week voted locally by a lot of fans, behold,  another non-English song performed by a K-Pop group.

K-Pop, or Korean pop is a music genre, just like in the 80s say, where boys and girls look the same. They are popular, probably in their prime. I think the K-Pop and obsession with everything Korean began during the height of Meteor Garden, those F4 guys and that 5566 group, so on and so forth.

The only thing I don't understand is why the K-Pop is so darn popular. They sound catchy and danceable but 95% of the lyrics is in their native language which obviously a lot of us cannot understand. I think the only words that you can understand are love, heart and more love. Its like the boyband invasion of late 90s all over again, but this time, we cannot understand them.

Then we got a chunk of scary fans, their own fantards, remember not all of them, just a chunk of them, probably more than 50%. They dress like them, wearing fur and other bondage looking outfits, singing their favorite K-Pop songs even they have really no idea what the lyrics were. They might saying bad words about you or something they will eat you while you are sleeping  and you still don't grasp it because the music sounds good.

Locally, some music executive cashes in with the K-Pop popularity and invents what he or she calls P-Pop, or Pinoy Pop. Hoping to fork more cash by emulating what does a lot of K-Pop does but the advantage is they are local countrymen and we can understand their lyrics. Covered with ridiculous amount of make up that makes Death from Bill and Ted cry in envy and make them look more oriental as possible, with a little hint of  skin retouching here and there. Alas, we got a localized K-Pop known as P-Pop but sounds like K-Pop but we can understand the lyrics which consists of love, heart and more love because they are P-Pop. I think the P-Pop approach failed horribly because I only saw one P-Pop group and already disappeared in obscurity.

Admittedly, the main background music of the most K-Pop songs are good. I actually wish that they remove all the non-English singing parts of the song and just keep the background music, especially the one that sounds like a slow pace electronica music. Even that over abused Nobody song from the Wondergirls, if you managed to ditch all the singing part, will sound better I guarantee you that. The musicians behind the main music do a better job than the real singers.

In the end one of the things that bothered me is sometimes, with all their manufactured glory, I can't tell if the singers are male or female. I am not an all the way against K-Pop and other similar counterparts, but come on, there are other musicians that are good, looks decent and does not look like slapped together by a fat music executive.

Yup, its different strokes for different folks so I have no right to preach them but I can tell that in few months or even years time, they will say "Oh man, K-Pop sucks, I never knew there are other musicians out there that are good... and whats this? I can understand the lyrics? all those wasted years....ALL THOSE WASTED YEARS!!"