Welcome, friends, to the last Best of the Worst of 2015. So what's been going on in kpop in the final week of the year? Fans getting outraged about stupid shit, of course.
You know, at first I thought this whole misunderstanding couldn't get even dumber but as usual, people that live their lives through the internet never cease to amaze me.
Throughout this year, we have all aged; grown wiser and more experienced. However, time has also ravaged our once youthful looks, and we are left with a feeling that maybe we could have put our time to better use. I, for one, used my time absolutely perfectly: listening to lots of shit music, some mediocre music, and a decent amount of good music too now that I think about it. I won't bore you with my wonderful opinions on music that isn't performed in Korean and will instead focus all of my buzzwords and poor reviewing skills onto describing my 15 favourite singles of the year created by folks who hail from the same general area as JYP. How I have chosen to construct this is through using the best song from each of the months of the year, whilst adding in three extra tracks at my own discretion to bring it up to a more pleasant number. I know that you readers have not been privy to four of my honours lists, so I will flag up how every song on the list fits into the magnificent puzzle of my opinions. Once more into the breach my friends, before we are done with the crushing mediocrity of 2015 for good.
I have no idea who or what TC Candler is, but people are making a big deal out of this list. This list just goes to show no matter how hard women try, men will still end up on top.
Christmas is here, and your Christmas present from Kpopalypse has
arrived! It's time to round up all of the shitty k-pop Christmas songs
that were released this year!
I'm sure this song is going to be everyone's #1 song of the year.
Anyway, knowing that I was going to be busy this year, I saved an Excel spreadsheet and rated the title songs I listened to throughout the year so that I wouldn't have to wait until the last week of the year asking myself "What the fuck even came out this year?" Halfway throughout the year I only started rating the songs I liked because there was no way I was going to write a list about shitty songs as well. My list ended up with 31 songs that had a rating of 7 or higher, so I removed the song I liked the least and ended up with 30 for this list. Lastly, this list only includes songs up until December 19th. I doubt any Christmas carols released by K-pop groups will make my list, so I am good to go.
This is FEMM by the way. Yes I know they're Japanese. Yes they're singing in English. Yes this is a blog post about K-Pop. Are you confused enough yet?
2015 got off to a dry start when it came to albums but that doesn't mean that there weren't some gems to be found. These are the songs I personally found to be stand-out tracks that could have been promoted on their own. Disclaimers:
- I kept it one song per artists because I knew if I added more than one song by one artists then the list would have contained songs from like two albums, which would have been accurate but boring. Plus, some other groups had songs I wanted to mention. - I cheat twice on this list by adding two rap songs. Only twice. - Quite a few b-sides I liked didn't make it on the list and it does pain me. - I didn't have enough time to listen to every album by every artists, but I do listen to a lot of albums. - More nugus are on my favorite promotional songs lists, as many nugus don't release albums. - We all know why this is mostly girl groups. - It's all my opinion.
What I learned today is that beauty rankings should not depend on actual beauty, but how good they are at variety! This user got mad over these results.
Welcome to Sunday Shitpost, the series you read during the extremely long commercial breaks in football games or when you're having a painful bout of diarrhea and need something to laugh at while your asshole is screaming in pain.
Christmas is right around the corner and we all know that means it's time for shitty Kpop Christmas releases. Yay. To be honest the only two X-mas releases I listened to so far are EXO's and Girls Generation's and neither are all that good really. Since I don't really have any other ideas for a showdown, I'm just gonna put those two up against each other for Best (or in this case, more tolerable) Christmas Release.
In other words, would you rather be happy or depressed this Winter?
I can see netizens jacking it/rubbing it to Choa now after this song. "Unnie/noona is so talented, she slaaaaayyyysss, yaaaaasssss!" The song is much better than I expected, and if I have some time over the holiday weeks (I still have to work -- it's so hard to get used to working in the last half of December when you have been used to having that time off since you were in kindergarten), I'll write a review for the song. Then again, I still need to start my best of 2015 list since I don't have the luxury of waiting until the final day of the year, because then my list would be several weeks late.
This week's submission comes from Sam, and it's Nine Muses' Sojin. I finally learned one of the new members' name, so that's my accomplishment for the day.
Are there fancams that you want to nominate? Email them to antikpopfangirl@yahoo.com or tweet them to @antikpopfangirl.
I was so busy that I forgot about BoA's Lookbook. I knew that it was supposed to come out around this time (and as of the time this post comes out, the single was released yesterday in Japan), but with singles/albums being announced two months in advance in Japan all of the time, it is easy for me to forget about songs. Then I figured it would be a ballad song because of the time of the year, so I figured I would listen to it eventually, but wouldn't rush to listen to the song.
Then yesterday (as of the writing of this post, [I know, what a fucked-up timeline for a scheduled post]), I listened to it for the first time. This was the BoA that made me become a fan.
In the past couple of years, I'm sure you guys have seen a proliferation of people just quoting comments from Koreans and not adding any input. Many fans tend to take what Koreans say at face value and believe those statements to be fact. This series is to help demonstrate that just because you fap to a lot of idols from a certain ethnicity, it doesn't make their netizens any smarter.
After a long wait, the STFU series finally returns. I had planned to start writing the series earlier after I took over this series from Shinbi and PTS, but graduate school ruins your life during the last few weeks of a semester with all of the group projects, final papers, and final exams to work on.
Anyway, like AKF pointed out, my goal is to have two STFU articles per week on Mondays and Tuesdays and then a new series for Wednesdays. It's the holidays and then I have another internship in January before finishing school in the summer and starting full time after that, so I will also be on a scheduled-post schedule.
Anyway, let's get to it. The first batch of these submissions came from AKF himself as he helped me find some material to get the series rebooted.
It's rare that an opportunity for me to drop a post about something
extremely topical comes up, but occasionally k-pop will throw me a jewel
like that and here one is. K-pop girl group Oh My Girl had some visa issues recently when attempting to enter the USA
and since touring headfucks is an area in which I'm uniquely qualified
having managed many of them personally, here is now a quick, helpful
trufaxual post for your entertainment and education!
I actually got home just in time to write the Saturday Shitfest article. I have no idea what happened in K-pop this week, so I'll have to catch up tomorrow while I write the Sunday Shitpost article. Anyway, enjoy the birth of the next Hallyu. Moranbang Band is Kim Jong Un's personal band.
[You can check out the results of last showdown here]
So Nine Muses recently marked their third comeback of the year with "Sleepless Night" which, in my opinion, is a pretty good song. Despite the fact that it sounds more like one big fat verse rather the usual verse-prechorus-chorus-bridge, the song has this mysterious feel to it and diverts considerably from their usual sound and the sound of kpop in general. Sure, it's a little monotonous, but weirdly catchy at the same time. Or that's my take on it, anyways. I have seen a lot of positive reactions for this song so far but some people weren't too into it. Two things are for sure though. One, it's definitely not another generic pop release (which there have been a LOT of this year) and two, it's just gonna be slept on again because Nine Muses are unlucky like that. Sigh.
2015 was a pretty great year in k-pop tbqh, fam. However, it was a pretty bad year if you were in one of the groups mentioned in this here post. Basically, a lot of groups disbanded because they were shit, most likely, or because one of their members got put in jail. I'm going to tell you some groups that disbanded this year and whether you should care. (For full disclosure, a lot of these groups were already pretty inactive, but for the sake of this, I'm just going off ones that officially disbanded this year. For full-full disclosure, any group not mentioned in this post is not even worth mentioning/caring about.)
Welcome to the newest series (until HYSF reveals his new series once he returns -- it is finals week for him, so no STFUs next week) on AKF! I get to troll you guys already by posting a picture of U-Kiss' Eli. Anyway, the premise of this series will be to have posts like I did back in early 2011 when the blog started. It will contain my signature kinds of articles, all wrapped up into one article. This first installment will be a bit shorter than I wanted because I still need to go back to packing.
After two years, Saturday Shitfest returns! The name of the game is to talk about anything K-pop related. Normally I'll try to briefly cover some news, but not too much since I need to use the good material for the Sunday Shitpost articles. This will most likely be the only Saturday Shitfest that comes out at 12 AM. I'll be working out of town for the next three months, so I'll be getting home at 2 AM every Saturday morning because of my flights. So yeah, honestly, don't expect too many articles from me aside from the scheduled ones for the next three months.
Today marks the revival of one of my favorite series for plenty of reasons. One, they don't take long to write. Two, you guys can contribute fancams that you want to be featured on here. Three, who doesn't like hot girls (except for homosexuals)?
People have asked me for the opportunity to guess the content of my
2015 favourites and 2015 worst-of lists ahead of time, so I've created a
short survey for you to enjoy! Given that the new releases are slowing
down in preparation for the Christmas bullshit period, now seems like a
good time for you to speculate on what ass-licking music I'm going to
throw in my best and worst lists. The survey will remain active until
the official lists are published, and results will be shared in 2016.
Click the caonima below to start the survey, and have fun, everyone!
Okay, what is it with all these EXO graduates releasing yoloswag bullshit these days? What the fuck has SM been feeding these guys? I thought Luhan would actually go somewhere with his solo career since he's the only one who can actually sing, but then "That Good Good" happened. But you know what, I still had hope in him. I thought, "Maybe it's just a phase." Like that little phase of victory you have when you take a really epic dump, and you feel like you just lost 10kg. Maybe that's what he felt when the burden of being an SM idol was off his shoulders. Maybe. But just when we thought things couldn't get any worse, along came "Lu" to prove us wrong.
Lesson: There's no limit to how bad music can get. Keep your expectations low to the ground so you don't feel too disappointed later.
Kiss My Lips is still a great song, but it sounds terrible in Japanese. I am not a fan of groups/artists translating songs because it ruins the lyrical melody of the song. It is always worse going from Korean to Japanese due to how long Japanese words are compared to Korean words, so in songs such as Kiss My Lips and Only One, we get a barrage of extra syllables so that the meaning stays in tact and more English thrown into the song. Who knows, maybe it only bugs someone like me who can understand both languages because I see the usual "this song sounds better in Japanese" crowd posting on YouTube.