What's the hype to listening to shit you don't know what you are listening to? If you cannot speak Korean you don't really know...
I agree. K-pop sounds like you've gone into a time-warp.
I had two friends who were really obsessed with k-pop in high school, one with boy groups and one with girl groups. The girl who liked boy groups said her particular favorite was revolutionary and I kept thinking to myself, "This is foolish. They're
manufactured. Yes, their sound's a bit different but it's nothing special." So I spent a summer trying to get to know these people through the Internet and see things from her point of view. The culture that surrounds k-pop can be quite endearing because fans feel like they've really connected to the artists, but the ultimate problem is the language barrier, and even more so, the cultural barrier. There is one singer in my former friend's favorite group that speaks English fairly well, but he stills misses nuances from American or just anglophone culture as a whole and they still hold him up as the expert. The popularity of k-pop is ever-expanding into different realms, and they can't keep up with the language and cultural demands. So they seek out idols from different countries that serve as unofficial translators and appeal to the masses in those "underserved" populations of fans. They already have their claws in Chinese and Japanese markets, and have started expanding to Spanish-speaking markets (in terms of languages they produce songs in). I speak Spanish pretty well, and I tried listening to one of these supposedly professionally produced works, but I couldn't understand it because it was so lazily pronounced. It sounded like a mixture of Korean and English, forced to sound like Spanish. The Spanish-speaking fans apparently went crazy for it, though.
Korean culture can be highly interesting because it's ancient and new at the same time. But at the same time it has its problems and koreaboos seem to gloss over all the problems even though there are new generations of fans that try to be fresh and cool by educating themselves. They're also the same fans that obsess over their favorite idol's mental health and take to Twitter to try to get their idols' foreign label to treat them right, or get a music video taken down because they see misogyny in it and don't understand Korea hasn't come as far as the US has with treating women better, and it's a
different country.
I could go on and on about it, especially about how everyone thinks BTS are angels and are akin to gods.
They actually did a study about why BTS is so popular, and one of the reasons why is
because it's in a different language. People
want to feel different and cool because no one else can understand what that person is listening to.
If I'm wrong here, please let me know. I'm mostly a casual fan and observer.
