The Good (And The Bad) About KPop | Part 2: The Bad

Hi everyone and welcome to our place!

As promised last week, today is time to share my thoughts towards Kpop again, but this time the negative part of it! If this is the first post you are reading first read my thoughts on the positive side of Kpop! I love Kpop and I just don’t want to you to think that I’m just bashing Kpop without saying the good part of it! 😛

To the ones who were waiting for the Finals of Hunger Games yesterday… Sorry that didn’t come out but I’ve not been that inspired in the last few days so I decided to not post a half assed version of it and wait a little bit for my muse to come out and help me! Nevertheless, sorry about that (I do hate to fail my promises you know…).

Really don’t have any idea for the Finals lolol

Now, let’s start talking a little bit more about the Kpop industry which has everything in life has its ups and downs. Today we will be focusing on the downs!

The Negative

Music is seen as a Business and Not as an Art

Not everything is good in the Kpop Land. This is something that is pretty usual with everything in the Asian culture. People have to do their max and work their ass off to anything they do. The problem with that is people will start to be more mechanic and less creative.

It’s like a factory, but for gorgeous and perfect idols

What do I want to say about this? Well, in Kpop you can see that in most cases every part as a role and the singers and just that: Singers (And dancers). Their job is to sing, dance and look pretty all the time. It is a no-brainer that they are not the ones writing the songs or something like that. This is something that I love about American Pop that we are seeing more and more in the past few years. Singers are, before that, artists and they will write their songs, they will decide their next move and so on. This let us with completely different types of Pop and the possibility to see our fav singers transform themselves again and again. Yes I’m looking at you Rihanna and Beyonce!

In Kpop, since it’s seen as a business the music that is put out is always going to be what the marketeers studied about the consumer and what they want to listen right now. Something that you normally do with a product.

The singers are way too perfect

Ok, I’ll need to explain this one well! First of all, yes they are gorgeous and I just want to cuddle with them. Second, American Pop singers also seem perfect most of the times.

However, in America this is turning. Mainly because of all the woman empowerment, accepting yourself, bla bla bla. The reality is, American Pop singers are destroying barriers and putting themselves out more to show to teenager girls that perfect doesn’t exist! Things like showing how much the pics are not themselves but Photoshop, taking pics without makeup, Rihanna just got fatter and doesn’t give a F and is able to be sexy non the less, Alicia Keys completely stopped using make-up, Kelly  Clarkson also got some weight and doesn’t care… Things like that which I think it’s really important to the young girls and boys to help them accept ourselves and be happy with ourselves.

Even my confidence goes in the gutter watching this!

Now, South Korea is not like that. In reality, people there are way too upfront with your looks and will say it to you on your face if you are fat, don’t have the nicest teeth and things like that. This kind of culture made South Korea one of the countries with the highest (I think it really IS the highest but I’m not sure) rate of population going under plastic surgery. For you to understand, in South Korea is normal to give teens who finished HighSchool a plastic surgery as a congratulations gif. Being the double eye-lid the most famous one.

Now, what do you think these young teenagers think of themselves? Most of them will have problems of self-esteem and it’s in the powers of celebrities to change these kind of mind-sets and make the World a better place to live. Being so perfect all the time this will just make young people to go and have plastic surgery to make themselves look better.

That’s basically the goal! I mean… It’s way too perfect!

Now, I know this is a culture thing and everyone has the right to have their own culture. But, I do think that everything which is too much is bad and therefore I think this is not really a good thing to have in one’s culture because it’s making people feeling bad with themselves. There is also things that I don’t like in my own culture for the same thing, so yeah…

In conclusion, what I want to say with this is: Yeah, really like to see those hot guys dancing and singing. However, I have enough confidence in my looks to just enjoy it and don’t think that I want to be like them. However, I think a teenager who looks at them and let’s say doesn’t have the nicest teeth will feel self-conscious and will want to change himself before even accepting himself. Do not take me wrong! I’m completely ok with people doing plastic surgery and using make-up and so on! That’s not really the problem here, it’s the amount of it and how the culture will make teens and small children not feeling ok in their own bodies!

Voices are too mechanic

What I want to say with mechanic is that there are a lot robotic parts in the music to the point of when you listen to them you immediately know that those are not the voices of the singers. But ok, completely normal in MVs! The music sounds really good and the voices are cool. So what I did right away was to listen some Lives.

Oh boy! They are singing yes, at least you can listen their voice faintly! However, the voices you will listen are the robotics ones that were made on the computer most of the time! I mean they are not doing playback, however their mics are put in such a low-level that you can’t almost hear them!

Those moves though!

I’m not saying that they can’t sing. Let’s face nobody gets to that point without being able to sing. However, it’s a shame that in lives you aren’t able to really hear them sing. However, again, since I’m amateur on this probably this just happens on the musics that are most dance like. Probably you can hear their own voices on the ballads and so on… I don’t know. I can say that I prefer the american way of doing it though. Even in these kind of musics that are more robotic they add always some spice to it by doing some vibratos and slides with their voice… You know, just for showing that they can sing 😀

Dance Moves never change?

Ok, this is really an honest question… I’ve seen like 4 different lives of the same music and they ALWAYS do the same dance routine! And no, it was not from the same tour where it’s normal for that to happen. They never, ever seem to change it! I don’t know if this is the normal though, but if it is I don’t like it.

Again, this comes from the seeing music as a business making it to become robotic, with no space for creativity… Those dance moves worked? Cool, we’ll use for the years to come! I do understand that there are some moves that you have to put it in there, those easy and catchy dancing steps that everyone knows and paid their ticked to have the opportunity to do it live. However, I think it would be nicer if there was some differences in the dance moves.

The moves are LIT though!

Because, if you use the robotic voices and then always do the same dance moves if you see one live you see them all… It’s true that this way you are certain that things will go well… However it takes a little bit the magic out of it!

Those Girls are way too mean to each other

Ok… So, this is completely normal in show biz! Beefs between female singers is also a common thing in the USA. However, I sense that in South Korea they have way more difficult to put a mask and don’t let it pass their jealously, envy and so on towards others! I’m not saying all of them are like that, but there are way more girls in there that when I watch them in interviews they look to behave like children.

She’s not having any of it!

However, I’m not naive enough to not know that most of the beefs and people getting mad at each other is just business! It’s the same as the actors starting dating each other when they are doing the main couple in a movie for teens. It’s pretty damn easy! Any kind of talk is publicity and therefore most of the times those beefs are just making them to go viral and people getting to sell more records.

I don’t know if this is the same for the koreans or not though… Are these mean girls just a pesona or are they in fact like that?

Aaaaand, those are aspects I think being the most negative about Kpop. What do you think about it? Comment down below! 😀 In the end I love Kpop non the less and I still do the dance moves when listening to Super Junior!

See You Soon! 😀