Yellow Fever/Yellow Immunity

[greywing]

You probably don't know who Yani Tseng is. But that's ok, because I don't even remember why I know who Yani Tseng is. She does, however, have a few things in common with SNSD: she's an '89er who's claimed a heaping chunk of #1s and just happens to be Asian. She's also the non-face face of the LGPA . . . at least in America

Comments

[koganbot]

I hope I'm wrong, but there's another potential barrier to SNSD's succeeding in America, one that has nothing to do with attitudes towards Asians: American popular music is awash in what I consider a pseudo-knowingness about sex and relationships, or sex and drugs; anyway, it jabs you pretty much in the ribs with it in 9 out of 10 r&b and hip-hop songs, while portraying itself as sophisticated or tough or some such nonsense. For reasons probably both bad and good, that doesn't play the same way in Korea. HyunA gets to cause an outrage with stuff that'd be considered mild and rather sweet here. I consider it mild and rather sweet, anyway. "Gee" probably wouldn't compute here as music for the 20 to 35 crowd. As I said, I hope I'm wrong about this

[arbitrary_greay]

What happened to Yao Ming anyways?

A couple of years ago there was a kid-to-young-adult market for Jason Derulo and Iyaz and Jay Sean, so I don't say that there's no potential market for SNSD. And if SNSD were to hit with something that sounds like "Genie" or "Gee," which are hardly exotic or incomprehensible but at the same time don't match what's on the U.S. charts, they would own the territory, since we have no one here who sounds like that.

Can you elaborate on that, especially the connection to Derulo et al? For that, did you mean the sound, or just the fan demographic, and why SNSD would be able to capture that?

It'll be tricky. Preexisting SNSD fans are clamoring for harder beats, but in the direction of what's already B-list in America like "Evacuate the Dancefloor,"(To which I always twitch because of Son Dambi's uncanny Cascada impression.) or "DJ Got Us Falling In Love Again." SNSD's Ke$ha affectations were clear in "Run Devil Run," too, and there is no distinct vocal sound to be found on their albums, so I don't know

[arbitrary_greay]

*so I don't know that they themselves are aiming to continue along that

[greywing]

American popular music is awash in what I consider a pseudo-knowingness about sex and relationships, or sex and drugs;

I really like how you phrased that.

For reasons probably both bad and good, that doesn't play the same way in Korea. HyunA gets to cause an outrage with stuff that'd be considered mild and rather sweet here.Because they haven't had their Madonna. XD Which I say only half in jest. As far as I know, Asian countries haven't had the same type of sexual revolution that happened in America. And I won't include Europe in this because they're much more open about and accepting of sex than we are. Americans have a very contentious relationship with sex and sexual expression, partly because that revolution, when it happened, was very divisive. As a result, On one hand, we're inundated with sex through imagery, song, advertisement, even sometimes depressing reality. On the other hand, there's still a force that wants to push all this sexualization under a rug

[arbitrary_greay]

As far as I know, Asian countries haven't had the same type of sexual revolution that happened in America. What's curious is that Asian countries aren't having the same "revolutions" that the West has had (Industrial, Economic, Sexual) because the West has already had them. I read a now-deleted blog post postulating that one of the reasons why Jpop is so quirky is that they got inundated with American pop culture, without any of the context. So they went with what they saw on the surface and developed their own takes. (And ironically, now America is doing the same thing with kid's shows with anime visual aesthetics, and usually failing horribly for not taking into account context of anime content aesthetics

[greywing]

That's . . . really interesting. I wonder if anyone has done a study of this!

You say that Korea hasn't had its Madonna, and yet it's clear that many Kpop groups are drawing some inspiration of Madonna's spiritual successor Gaga.

I've been pondering how much of a spiritual successor Gaga is to Madonna. That Gaga is following in that tradition is clear, but the contexts are so different that the definitions of "outrageous" seem to be on different levels. And it seems like you can't like Madonna and Gaga? Apparently being a fan of the one means you shouldn't be a fan of the other, as if putting down one changes the music of the other. I can say that that one song Madonna sang with Nicki Minaj and MIA at the Super Bowl halftime show was terrible.

Certainly what people keep trying to say is how divorced anime is from the existence of most Japanese. Again, the weird consequence of only exporting parts of cultures and the importer's impression of the originating culture.