All this means is that the Billboard K-pop chart is only 51 weeks old
Of the top fifty songs on last Thursday's Billboard K-pop chart, seven of them have been charting for ten weeks or longer. Here they are, in ascending number of weeks:
Busker Busker "It's Hard To Face You" 10 weeks
Verbal Jint "Good Morning" 10 weeks
Juniel "Illa Illa" 10 weeks
Wonder Girls "Like This" 11 weeks
Big Bang "Monster" 11 weeks
Kim Tae Woo "High High" 12 weeks
Shinyoo "Hands Of The Clock" 51 weeks
51 weeks doesn't mean that "Hands Of The Clock" began its run 51 weeks ago. It just means that the Billboard K-pop chart is only 51 weeks old, and that's when they started counting. The track could be years old, for all I know. Maybe decades old. The singer looks a couple of decades younger than I am, but I'm more youthful at heart. Here's a live version that was uploaded to YouTube in December 2009:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESNBkv_4akM
It's currently at 32, the highest it's been in the Billboard K-pop era.*
We've talked about it before. Me: "In the olden days, this would have been my stereotype of what Asian pop sounds like." Also, "Presumably, it's old people who listen to this. I'm an old person, and I like it." (Probably like it somewhere between 4 and 6 points, but let's not quibble.) arbitrary_greay: "Holy cow that sounds like some generic Chinese karaoke staple. I can hear the color change scrolling through the karaoke captions on a flickering blue screen." davidfrazer: "You might enjoy Bret's visit to the noraebang from Flight of the Conchords."
In other chart news, T-ara's "Day By Day" almost held steady, dropping one from 9 to 10; on the Gaon Chart it fell from 10 to 13. Would expect it to have been somewhere between 5 and 8 had there been no uproar, but I don't know that. Is still behaving like one of the hits of the summer, and isn't taking nearly the hit I expected.** I could speculate as to why, but that's all it would be: speculation. (All right, some of these explanations contradict one another, but: a good song's a good song, still getting a boost from rubberneckers, Netizens and entertainment sites are less of a big deal than they appear, at least some members of the K-pop public have critical thinking skills [haven't been following this story as closely as I might, to tell you the truth, but, as far as I can tell, actual evidence of actual bullying is as nonexistent now as it was back on July 25th]), human beings getting into scraps doesn't necessarily make fans and onlookers like them less.) Not that I think things will be all right for T-ara going forward. Eunjung seems to have been dumped from a couple of TV shows (stories translated on allkpop seem uncertain, which doubles the uncertainty given allkpop's unreliability in general). And what image to go for now may be a real quandary for T-ara.
In regard to the bracketed material in the previous paragraph: Something else that's been on my mind is Niall Ferguson writing some misleading text - apparently deliberately misleading - in his Newsweek attack on Obama, and Paul Krugman and a host of others taking him to task. I say "apparently" because so far I've decided not to read the article, just as I've decided not to go through all or even very many of the purported examples of T-ara's bullying. I'm not claiming the two situations are parallel, but there is a similarity in my decision not to look further. Not that I'm dropping attention to either story, just that I think I already know what I need to know about several aspects. E.g., I have little idea of what happened group member to group member in T-ara, but I've decided that no photo or gif or game-show/variety show/reality show clip of T-ara is going to contain evidence of bullying, and that people are idiots for thinking that such things would and do. I believe I know this without having to look at any more of the clips than the few that I already have. All this deserves a post of its own.
*Unless my Ctrl-F skills are failing me, it's not on the Gaon Chart at all. Maybe it's barred by some statute of limitations. I assume that when Billboard says "weeks on chart" it means "weeks in the Top 100."
**For comparison, "Sexy, Free, and Single" by usual chart toppers Super Junior, which started more or less at the same time, give or take a week or two, is down to 46 on Gaon and is no longer top 50 on Billboard. And tracks by Brown Eyed Girls and Ga-in haven't done much either, though I don't believe they got big featured promotions.
Busker Busker "It's Hard To Face You" 10 weeks
Verbal Jint "Good Morning" 10 weeks
Juniel "Illa Illa" 10 weeks
Wonder Girls "Like This" 11 weeks
Big Bang "Monster" 11 weeks
Kim Tae Woo "High High" 12 weeks
Shinyoo "Hands Of The Clock" 51 weeks
51 weeks doesn't mean that "Hands Of The Clock" began its run 51 weeks ago. It just means that the Billboard K-pop chart is only 51 weeks old, and that's when they started counting. The track could be years old, for all I know. Maybe decades old. The singer looks a couple of decades younger than I am, but I'm more youthful at heart. Here's a live version that was uploaded to YouTube in December 2009:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESNBkv_4akM
It's currently at 32, the highest it's been in the Billboard K-pop era.*
We've talked about it before. Me: "In the olden days, this would have been my stereotype of what Asian pop sounds like." Also, "Presumably, it's old people who listen to this. I'm an old person, and I like it." (Probably like it somewhere between 4 and 6 points, but let's not quibble.) arbitrary_greay: "Holy cow that sounds like some generic Chinese karaoke staple. I can hear the color change scrolling through the karaoke captions on a flickering blue screen." davidfrazer: "You might enjoy Bret's visit to the noraebang from Flight of the Conchords."
In other chart news, T-ara's "Day By Day" almost held steady, dropping one from 9 to 10; on the Gaon Chart it fell from 10 to 13. Would expect it to have been somewhere between 5 and 8 had there been no uproar, but I don't know that. Is still behaving like one of the hits of the summer, and isn't taking nearly the hit I expected.** I could speculate as to why, but that's all it would be: speculation. (All right, some of these explanations contradict one another, but: a good song's a good song, still getting a boost from rubberneckers, Netizens and entertainment sites are less of a big deal than they appear, at least some members of the K-pop public have critical thinking skills [haven't been following this story as closely as I might, to tell you the truth, but, as far as I can tell, actual evidence of actual bullying is as nonexistent now as it was back on July 25th]), human beings getting into scraps doesn't necessarily make fans and onlookers like them less.) Not that I think things will be all right for T-ara going forward. Eunjung seems to have been dumped from a couple of TV shows (stories translated on allkpop seem uncertain, which doubles the uncertainty given allkpop's unreliability in general). And what image to go for now may be a real quandary for T-ara.
In regard to the bracketed material in the previous paragraph: Something else that's been on my mind is Niall Ferguson writing some misleading text - apparently deliberately misleading - in his Newsweek attack on Obama, and Paul Krugman and a host of others taking him to task. I say "apparently" because so far I've decided not to read the article, just as I've decided not to go through all or even very many of the purported examples of T-ara's bullying. I'm not claiming the two situations are parallel, but there is a similarity in my decision not to look further. Not that I'm dropping attention to either story, just that I think I already know what I need to know about several aspects. E.g., I have little idea of what happened group member to group member in T-ara, but I've decided that no photo or gif or game-show/variety show/reality show clip of T-ara is going to contain evidence of bullying, and that people are idiots for thinking that such things would and do. I believe I know this without having to look at any more of the clips than the few that I already have. All this deserves a post of its own.
*Unless my Ctrl-F skills are failing me, it's not on the Gaon Chart at all. Maybe it's barred by some statute of limitations. I assume that when Billboard says "weeks on chart" it means "weeks in the Top 100."
**For comparison, "Sexy, Free, and Single" by usual chart toppers Super Junior, which started more or less at the same time, give or take a week or two, is down to 46 on Gaon and is no longer top 50 on Billboard. And tracks by Brown Eyed Girls and Ga-in haven't done much either, though I don't believe they got big featured promotions.