Background becomes foreground

Jun 07, 2009 08:57

Wonder Girls to tour U.S. with Jonas Brothers this summer (says UPI):

image Click to view


Seem like a variation on NY-Miami 1988, which I think is a good thing.

Tell Me )

snsd, wonder girls, first k-pop post, jerkin', bullies, freestyle

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Re: Gender wars? petronia June 10 2009, 04:14:45 UTC
(wrote a response earlier but browser died)

Anime/manga fandom, which has a musical component Western counterparts (Marvel comics, Star Trek etc.) don't have - soundtracks, "in character" albums by voice actresses, J-pop/J-rock tie-ins. Fair amount of overlap with Asian pop fandom in general. IME kids heavily into the scene listen to little else.

Korea's pretty homogeneous ethnically. There's class consciousness but I don't know how it plays out w/r/t youth culture, other than the assumption that "good kids" ought to be studying or playing classical violin or whatever. It's also a highly wired society. A lot of K-popstars are diaspora, so Korean forays into hip-hop/R&B have been (from a North American taste perspective) more convincing for longer than similar efforts by Japan/Taiwan/China; there was a lag of maybe five years where Korean bboys could rap, Japanese couldn't, and it hadn't even occurred to Chinese to try.

I don't know much about NAmerican hip-hop culture either. XD; I think most K-pop feuds don't (intentionally, anyway) start at the artist level - they start at the fan level, or given the wacko incestuousness of the Asian music industry, at the label level.

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Re: Gender wars? koganbot June 10 2009, 05:06:58 UTC
My Drunken Tiger review was an exercise in how to review Korean diaspora hip-hop when one doesn't know anything about Korean diaspora hip-hop.

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Re: Gender wars? petronia June 10 2009, 05:29:45 UTC
I have just learnt from Wiki that main dude from Drunken Tiger is married to T and writes songs for her! Feels like it should've been obvious. XD;

(Since I don't speak a word of Korean we're pretty much on the same footing methinks.)

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Re: Gender wars? koganbot March 21 2024, 16:06:56 UTC
Re-linking my Drunken Tiger review (the Village Voice annoyingly changed their URLs at some point, destroying all my links to it).

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