Day 67: K-Pop

K-Pop (Korean popular music) has played a strange role in my life here in Korea. While I haven't embraced it as avidly as Anna did, for example, it's still an inescapable reality.

Every storefront. Every restaurant. Every car.

About three different songs.

But these songs change about every two weeks. Stardom in the K-pop world is a capricious wench, with songs becoming hugely, massively, almost unimaginably popular overnight, then disappearing leaving barely a ripple in the soundscape of your average Korean street. I can't even count how many "oh my god best song ever"-style number ones there have been in the past few months, let alone my entire sojourn here. But I guarantee you that my kindergarteners know all the words.

While I know I just said that K-pop hits seem to be almost by definition flash in the pan, I think I failed to emphasize appropriately just the kind of market saturation they achieve. Every storefront, every restaurant, every minute, every second, I can hear a Korean Pop song. Yes, even now.

This makes my relation to them complex. Do I know all the words? No. Do I know who sings it? No. Can I tell them all apart? Hell no. Do I have the melody of every single one and all their English lyrics irrevocably drilled into my auditory cortex? Can I whistle every single one of them, much to my students' amusement?

You bet your ass.

I don't really care for this style of music, with a few exceptions (some provided below), but it is undoubtedly catchy, and I have even begun curating a collection of the most memorable (good and bad) so I will instantly be able to recall my memories of my time here in the distant future.



This is "Gee," one of the biggest hits currently. It's by Girls Generation, who are all quite pretty but the song kind of makes me want to claw my ears off. The word "Gee" has an interesting origin in Korea. In slang, it pretty much means "oh wow, he/she is so hot!" The reason for this is apparently the keyboard. The English letters G-E-E, when typed using a Korean keyboard, spell out "ㅎㄷㄷ" which, apart from being unpronounceable (no vowels), is the noise people are supposed to make whenever they see someone ridiculously good-looking. If Koreans are anything like the Japanese, it would probably be accompanied by a raging nosebleed.



Here's one I actually like, a very K-Pop-ified cover of Craig David's "Insomnia." This one is also huge right now. From what I can tell, this one is actually more popular here than the original was in America. Of course, I wasn't in America. Also dig that totally Korean dancing in the video.



And what collection of K-Pop music videos would be complete without one by Rain? Yes, this is the video Colbert parodied here:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
He's Singing in Korean
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Fantastic, fantastic stuff.



Here's the MV of the song that was most popular when I first arrived in Korea, by one of the biggest names currently shakin' booty in the land of the morning calm: BIG BANG. I actually like this one.



Here, then, is a song on the other end of the spectrum, the genre at its most insipid. This was popular when I arrived as well, but unlike "Lies," I tended to turn up my iPod whenever I caught the strains of this one. Note, though, how catchy still, how it refuses to leave your head. Try listening to this for about TWO MONTHS STRAIGHT every time you leave your apartment.



As for this one, well, the song is so so, but I like the, uh. Moving along.





Thought I'd end with two songs that I actually really enjoy, probably my two favorite of the genre. I've been known to sing along with the latter in noraebangs and actually impress my Korean friends with how much of it I can do.