While searching "Oscar song meanings," I incidentally found this thread where non-Koreans talk about how they discovered K-pop and why they love it
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Korean is an actual ethnic group, so being Korean isn't necessarily based on being born in Korea or having parents born in Korea. For example, Koreans live in China, and are considered an official minority group. (So they got a slot during the Chinese Ethnic Minority Arts Festival 2012 From a nationalistic standpoint, these people are Chinese, but are not "Chinese" in that they aren't Han. (This isn't a case of Koreans migrating from the peninsula into China a la America's melting pot, either. China's many, many ethnic groups were basically left untouched by the dynasties other than Qin's standardizing of measurements and the written language, taxes, and obeying the government if they came along. So ethnically Korean people have been living in China for millenia
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Ethnicity is a fascinating question. I'd say a group is an ethnic group if it acts like an ethnic group or if it gets treated like an ethnic group, though "acts like an ethnic group" and "gets treated like an ethnic group" aren't self-explanatory terms. Jews in Poland in the 1930s were clearly an ethnic group, but Jews in Germany or in Austria or Italy weren't so clearly an ethnic group. (And the Nazis treated them as a racial group, which is a somewhat different concept. A Christian with four Jewish grandparents was marked for extermination.) Anyway, I won't argue with the notion that "Korean" is an ethnic group; but if we ask the question, "How did you find out and learn about kpop?," it's not obvious that "Because my ethnicity is Korean" or "Because I have a certain percentage of Korean DNA" actually answers the question
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I think the purpose of the survey to specify non-Koreans is to try and discover why people who may not be culturally inclined to be exposed to Kpop, nonetheless find and enjoy it. At least in America, this isn't very effective, as American-born Asians tend to group together and share cultural interests, so many Chinese/Taiwanese/Japanese/Malaysian heritage Americans will give the same answers as Korean heritage Americans: "Due to my Eastern Asian heritage, I had an interest in/predilection for Easter Asian culture, including its pop culture
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It was a very random way. My girlfriend started watching K-dramas after she discovered them through Netflix, then she started talking to her sister-in-law (she's Salvadoran; my girlfriend is Cambodian) who had also been into K-dramas (as well as K-pop) and, through her, discovered the video for Dara's song "Kiss." The reason why my girlfriend even watched that video in the first place had nothing to do with the music (K-dramas use a lot of K-pop singers for their soundtracks but it the music doesn't sound "K-poppy") but was instead because it starred Lee Min-ho as Dara's love interest (and he's my girlfriend's favorite K-drama actor). Then probably through the "Related Videos" thing on YouTube, we discovered 2NE1 and pretty much fell in love with them that night. That was around October of last year, and I spent the next couple of months listening to pretty much 2NE1 exclusively while slowly expanding to discover other groups.
"Kiss" was a video I saw early in my K-pop education, sometime in mid 2010, embedded by anhh or Mat. First K-pop story vid - typical of the genre in that it's one you have to puzzle over - that truly touched me (story vid as opposed to excellent provocations like "Shake!" which anhh embedded at about the same time). Love the end where Dara rejects the expensive ring but secretly keeps the free beer-tab ring that the guy also gave her, the authentic boy hiding inside the rich boy winning her heart.
Funny: cutie-pie Sunny seems scarily formidable to me, someone I think of in the same way I think of Hillary Clinton. Whereas strong rapper girl CL is indeed strong but also adorably joyous and spontaneous, feelings on the surface, hurts and happiness, and unlike Sunny isn't so much trying to control the room but rather is insisting in finding a place in it where she can flourish in all her aspects.
I'm sure I first heard *about* K-pop here, though I'm not sure when I heard my first K-pop song. In fact, as I recall there was discussion of Korean rap at the end of "Real Punks," though I don't think I listened to it at the time
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So you've misplaced the jewel box (w/ song listings) I'd packed the thing in?
Volume 2, track 5 is Kara's "Jumping." I think of it as high-energy and sound-engulfing more than as full of ambushing emotions (well, freestyle and sound-engulfing, but you know what I mean, the bright uplift side of freestyle rather than the deep eerie anguish):
Btw, what, if anything, do you think of freestyle (Cover Girls, Debbie Deb, Corina, Lisette Melendez, etc.)?
I would say that "Jumping" works the same way freestyle tends to work, which is unpredictably and with a kind of contrapuntal emotional action. The backing makes me move, focus, while the emotions creep in unexpectedly. And, like freestyle, I've never gotten used to how that emotion (or when that emotion) creeps in. There's some relationship to a context of abundance, I suppose, but actually it's more like a context of ambush -- the way it compels movement preps me not for emotional impact, but emotional hijacking. I remember a description that Michael Freedberg (linked here: http://koganbot.livejournal.com/109530.html) made about house music's relationship to 50's rock n roll. My sense is that the experiential impact of house music is often lost on me, maybe because of its relative sophistication in terms of my own musical references. It's too easy to tune out. Freestyle and K-pop both take the best of the house groove, which may be in part the way the music is made and in
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Volume 1, Track 17, Drunken Tiger's "취권 vs. 당렁권" (which Google translate can't make heads or tails of) was on The Great Rebirth, the album reviewed near the end of Real Punks.
(That review, by the way, which is - if I say so myself - a brilliant example of how to write a review when you have no idea what you're talking about, does contain a few factual errors, though is presented with enough honest uncertainty that the readers wouldn't have gotten the false impression that they were getting the straight dope. In any event, Tiger JK, one half of Drunken Tiger, was born in Seoul not Los Angeles, it turns out, but according to Wikip did move to L.A. when he was 12. Also, when I wrote of Drunken Tiger's "exquisitely beautiful use of Korean pop music," I might have been very wrong in thinking the music they were appropriating was Korean. May well have been Chinese, to fit the martial arts theme. Or something else. I don't know.)
A lot of my friends are Asian-American (because we shared the bond of being academically-oriented minorities at a mostly African-American high school), so I was exposed a bunch of times, but it didn't stick. I specifically remember a lot of former NSync fans being into Big Bang around 2008 (because subtext), but I was never an NSync fan or a boyband fan, so I was never interested.
My girlfriend post-college, who is not a big Kpop fan herself but whose younger brother is a very intense Taeyang fan, once sat me down and showed me a bunch of Very Sad Kpop Ballads with Kdrama-like music videos - I remember JYJ In Heaven was one of them - to see how I would react. And I remember thinking they were so transparently emotionally manipulative that they almost became parodies - and then turning to my GF who was silently crying over the tragic unfairness of Junsu's dead girlfriend. That left a deep impression
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Background Becomes Foreground, part onekoganbotJuly 2 2012, 18:48:56 UTC
How did you find out and learn about kpop?
Anywhere I start would be the middle, but let's begin our story with James Brown. The funk he and his band creates in the mid '60s expands on a tendency in black American music - to be an interplay of parts, voices in conversation, rather than dividing into a lead voice (or melody or thematic progression) with the rest as accompaniment - takes it to an extreme, so that what the drums and bass and guitar are doing rhythmically are as defining of the song as what the singer is doing. And what the singer is doing is correspondingly rhythmic and has to take its cue from the rest of the instruments as much as they have to take their cue from him. "Give It Up Or Turn It A Loose" is a great example, in that changing the "arrangement," especially the rhythms laid down by the bass and the guitar, wouldn't just change the accompaniment, it would change the song, in effect replace it with something else, a different one
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Re: Background Becomes Foreground, part onearbitrary_greayJuly 3 2012, 15:02:05 UTC
"Death Rock 2000" talked about "Bills Bills Bills" in how the arrangement and vocals played with each other, and when I ran across this mashup in my library again, it began forming questions about how important it is that vocals and arrangement be integral to each other. Is this mashup simply melody pasted over the rhythms of the arrangement, or are there moments of synergy where the arrangements lends new perception of rhythm play in the originally straight-forward vocals, in how it's set in contrast to the arrangement? If this were attempted live, there would be tension in the singer needing to keep track of where exactly they were supposed to enter/change notes in syncopation with the arrangement. (I'm reminded of those moments in classical music where the long-notes main theme is played on top of the rest of the orchestra going nuts underneath
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Re: Background Becomes Foreground, part onekoganbotJuly 18 2012, 20:34:28 UTC
This works. (1) It sounds good. (2) It is distinct from the originals, so much so that I might not have recognized them if you hadn't alerted me to this being a mashup. (But I'd never heard "Heart Station" before.) I might have thought, "they're borrowing the start from 'Bills Bills Bills,'" while assuming it was a song in its own right.
At the moment I have nothing more intelligent to say than that.
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It was a very random way. My girlfriend started watching K-dramas after she discovered them through Netflix, then she started talking to her sister-in-law (she's Salvadoran; my girlfriend is Cambodian) who had also been into K-dramas (as well as K-pop) and, through her, discovered the video for Dara's song "Kiss." The reason why my girlfriend even watched that video in the first place had nothing to do with the music (K-dramas use a lot of K-pop singers for their soundtracks but it the music doesn't sound "K-poppy") but was instead because it starred Lee Min-ho as Dara's love interest (and he's my girlfriend's favorite K-drama actor). Then probably through the "Related Videos" thing on YouTube, we discovered 2NE1 and pretty much fell in love with them that night. That was around October of last year, and I spent the next couple of months listening to pretty much 2NE1 exclusively while slowly expanding to discover other groups.
"Why do you love it?"
I've already written a lot on this ( ... )
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Presume the vid was paid for by a beer company.
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Volume 2, track 5 is Kara's "Jumping." I think of it as high-energy and sound-engulfing more than as full of ambushing emotions (well, freestyle and sound-engulfing, but you know what I mean, the bright uplift side of freestyle rather than the deep eerie anguish):
Btw, what, if anything, do you think of freestyle (Cover Girls, Debbie Deb, Corina, Lisette Melendez, etc.)?
The CL duet is the CL & Minzy "Please Don't Go."
Speaking of Rachel Stevens:
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(That review, by the way, which is - if I say so myself - a brilliant example of how to write a review when you have no idea what you're talking about, does contain a few factual errors, though is presented with enough honest uncertainty that the readers wouldn't have gotten the false impression that they were getting the straight dope. In any event, Tiger JK, one half of Drunken Tiger, was born in Seoul not Los Angeles, it turns out, but according to Wikip did move to L.A. when he was 12. Also, when I wrote of Drunken Tiger's "exquisitely beautiful use of Korean pop music," I might have been very wrong in thinking the music they were appropriating was Korean. May well have been Chinese, to fit the martial arts theme. Or something else. I don't know.)
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A lot of my friends are Asian-American (because we shared the bond of being academically-oriented minorities at a mostly African-American high school), so I was exposed a bunch of times, but it didn't stick. I specifically remember a lot of former NSync fans being into Big Bang around 2008 (because subtext), but I was never an NSync fan or a boyband fan, so I was never interested.
My girlfriend post-college, who is not a big Kpop fan herself but whose younger brother is a very intense Taeyang fan, once sat me down and showed me a bunch of Very Sad Kpop Ballads with Kdrama-like music videos - I remember JYJ In Heaven was one of them - to see how I would react. And I remember thinking they were so transparently emotionally manipulative that they almost became parodies - and then turning to my GF who was silently crying over the tragic unfairness of Junsu's dead girlfriend. That left a deep impression ( ... )
Reply
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Anywhere I start would be the middle, but let's begin our story with James Brown. The funk he and his band creates in the mid '60s expands on a tendency in black American music - to be an interplay of parts, voices in conversation, rather than dividing into a lead voice (or melody or thematic progression) with the rest as accompaniment - takes it to an extreme, so that what the drums and bass and guitar are doing rhythmically are as defining of the song as what the singer is doing. And what the singer is doing is correspondingly rhythmic and has to take its cue from the rest of the instruments as much as they have to take their cue from him. "Give It Up Or Turn It A Loose" is a great example, in that changing the "arrangement," especially the rhythms laid down by the bass and the guitar, wouldn't just change the accompaniment, it would change the song, in effect replace it with something else, a different one ( ... )
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At the moment I have nothing more intelligent to say than that.
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