Guardian Wokes (2025)

27/01/2025

It’s time for Kpopalypse roundup! Let’s take a look at some new releases!

I’m pretty sure this is a real image of Yujin from IVE, but if it isn’t, it’s probably Starship’s fault.

Jennie – Zen

We’re still in January and we already have a serious contender for turkey of the year. The song sounds like a Lim Kim reject, but I can kind of forgive Lim Kim for her noise because she’s trying to be “art” or some bullcrap, whereas someone wrote this for Jennie and spent big dollars on it actually hoping it would be a breakout worldwide hit or… something? The mind boggles.

Rosé – 3am

Meanwhile Rose just kind of does a lighter-waving rock thing and it’s not going to blow anyone’s socks off but it’s inoffensive enough to be acceptable crowd participation fluff for those solo concerts she’ll inevitably end up doing.

Minnie – Her

A beat like the better (read: faster) Mamamoo songs, but not a lot is done with it.

Minnie – It’s Okay

Another worthless Dingo live thing. I should probably stop including these “fake live” things in roundup, but if I don’t, people will bombard me with endless questions about what I thought about some fake live thing, and that’s often even more boring that writing these reviews where I tell you there’s nothing interesting to see or hear here. Also it’s a slow-ass week so it can go in. People who complain about my roundup content where I review every irrelevant-ass video, just know that it only exists due to popular demand!

Hong Jinyoung – Spring, Again

A ballad as leaden and unwelcome as the BB cream on Hong Jin Young’s face. I just want to reach into the screen and scrape some off with my fingernail.

CIX – Thunder

Some readers told me on my very short regular weekly “let’s quickly skim the main roundup songs and talk s**t” livestream that this sounds like the French electronic group Justice, and they’re right, it does. Pity that the person writing the vocal lines didn’t really notice the influence and lean into this sound as well, because this could have been awesome but instead it just comes out kind of okayish.

PLAVE – Island

Well if I was writing a song like this, I’d want to hide behind a computer avatar too. I don’t even think Asian Ju**ie aka the only documented Plave fan in existence could stan this s**tful ballad.

NCT WISH – Miracle

SM dig into the vault of forgotten Super Junior songs because they couldn’t be bothered writing the same crap for each new boy group they debut, but the biggest disappointment here is no Shindong cameo of him goofing off in the dance break, or even any form of equivalent. What’s worse than crappy boy pop? Crappy boy pop taking itself completely seriously.

CATCH THE YOUNG – You, Always (2025)

Another old song that probably could have used an upgrade, but it ends up just being smoothed over into nothing.

FIFTY FIFTY – SOS (Miami Bass Remix)

One thing that the original “SOS” got just about perfect was the production style, this dreadful remix which butchers all the harmony and replaces the original rhythms with some weak-ass toybox crap ruins everything that worked about the original song and absolutely did not need to happen.

Onew – Promise You

Onew, we are aware that you exist. You can stop releasing songs now.

Balming Tiger – Spirit Chaebol

This nonsense… kind of suits them, actually. Not sure if I would say that I “like” this or would play it again, but I think they do a better job of it than Pungdeng-E ever did.

Dbo x YDG – Count Your Blessings

If YDG’s mother from Squid Game 2 was here she’d definitely disapprove of him hanging out and making music with people like Dbo.

Kaya – Rockstar

Pro guitarists often don’t want to be seen with Squiers because it’s like “baby Fender” but honestly those guitars are good these days. Squiers were dogs**t back when I was learning (weirdly there’s a vintage market for the old Japanese/Korean made Squiers, which just goes to show that guitar collectors are idiots) but these days the manufacturing has gotten so much better, to the point where the only meaningful difference between Squier and Fender these days is the quality of the electronics. I still gig with Squiers because they’re not attractive targets for theft, so they’re great for playing the occasional smaller shows in dodgy high-crime areas while you leave your expensive guitars at home for the big shows where they have secure backstage rooms.

SuperKidd – Roar! Roar! Roar! (Throw Your Passion!)

Well, at least Jennie’s crap song didn’t have sport in the video.

Coogie – 1,2,3,4,5

Rappers are walking in AI-generated streets now because they’re too p***y for the real streets. Meanwhile the girl looks like she’s trying to not laugh at him. Relatable.

Fleeky Bang feat. Sik-K –

You don’t need to hear another song from these losers and neither do I, so let’s put our weekly non-Korean LGBT feature here instead! There’s a lot of heavy metal celebrities who are too scared to come out of the closet, but one who definitely isn’t is Gaahl, the singer from Norwegian black metal band Gorgoroth. A lot of people reacted strangely to the news of his homosexuality, but I think it fits perfectly, after all so**my is supposed to be a sin, and since black metal is trying to be the most self-consciously sinful music out there, they should be embracing it. It’s also worth noting that besides being a talented musician and a straight-shooter with his beliefs, Gaahl is great at interviews. If only politicians worldwide were this good at answering the goddamn question.

RANDOM BONUS VIDEOS OF THE WEEK

Sexyy Red & Bruno Mars – Fat Juicy & Wet

No k-pop people are in this musically, but Rose makes an appearance in the video along with Lady Gaga for seemingly no reason other than she had a free schedule that day. It’s especially funny because the presentation here is way more sexual than any k-pop video would allow, isn’t it funny how k-pop stars tend to show up in relatively sexual content almost immediately after they cut their association with the big Korean labels. It’s almost like k-pop is a hyperconservative bubble with a really weird and unhealthy anti-woman view on sexuality that nobody actually shares in the real world, and that the women involved in it often can’t wait to get away from.

Chuu Can Do It – learning how to use a combat rifle, with Park Boram from Steel Unit W

Americans get your ge****ls out because Chuu is learning how to shoot an M4 assault rifle. She’s a pretty good shot for a newbie as it happens, there’s no question that she’s handled guns before, but then is anyone who reads this website even surprised? Her female instructor is from some reality special forces TV show (I think) and there’s lots of subtle BADING energy happening here so enjoy.

Son Dam Bi – Saturday Night

Why doesn’t k-pop have more solo singers? Well it always did, it’s just that for the most part they didn’t make bank. Bravesound were still in their “Wonder Woman” phase back when this song for Son Dam Bi came out, and it shows, with the production being pretty rough around the edges compared to what the production team became known for slightly later. The song even comes with a completely unspectacular guitar solo with horrible midrangey distortion instead of the usual cringe rap breakdown part, that’s how you know it’s old school.

That’s all for this week! Kpopalypse roundup returns next week!

It’s time for Kpopalypse roundup! Let’s take a look at some new releases! I’m pretty sure this is a real image of Yujin from IVE, but if i...

25/01/2025

Kpopalypse recently watched Squid Game 2, but should you? Does the series meet required standards? This post has all the trufax!

Kpopalypse.com generally does not investigate Korean TV shows, because traditional Korean dramas tend to suck massive amounts of balls. However I made an exception for the original Squid Game television series when it came out, because I heard the show was very high quality, the theme and setting appealed, and also everyone I knew was posting about it on the Internet every three seconds so I knew if I didn’t seize my chance to see it quickly, it would be spoilered for me. So when the sequel appeared late in 2024, which featured not one but two ex-kpop stars, I thought I should once again quickly grab the opportunity to see this thing before everyone went ahead and ruined it for me.

Released: 2024

Running time: 7 x 60 minutes (approx)

IMDB entry

I figured that the chances of people ruining the second series for me were… oh wait, that’s the wrong image. Oops! Gosh, I have no idea how that image got here. Excuse me, while I just go and find the correct artwork… ah, here it is:

Released: 2024

Running time: 7 x 60 minutes (approx)

IMDB entry

Okay, that’s better. Gosh I’m not sure how that happened, but please no hate, I mean I’m sure that it’s a mistake that could happen to anybody. Anyway, like I was saying, I figured that the chances of people ruining the second series for me were in fact higher than the original series, due to the k-pop connection, which is why it’s of course getting coverage here. Those two ex-kpop people are T.O.P, formerly of BigBang, and Jo Yuri, formerly of IZ*ONE. I was already noticing a lot of online chatter about T.O.P’s performance in this series being… not that great, and not much at all about Jo Yuri, so I wanted to check them out for myself and make up my own mind. So how did they do, how is the series as a whole, and should you watch it?

Plot synopsis: I’ll try and keep details of the plot light to prevent critical plot spoilers, but there will necessarily be a few anyway as we’re discussing an entire-ass series that’s a sequel to another entire-ass series where the plot has already progressed a certain way through. Although if you ask me, there’s more spoilers in the official preview material than in this review. I’ve embedded the preview below but I actually recommend that you don’t watch it unless you’ve already seen all the episodes in the second series and are just checking out this review for funsies, because there’s a few things in the preview material that genuinely surprised me when they happened in the actual series and you’ll ruin those surprises for yourself. I also think that at the very least, before reading this review, that you go and watch the original Squid Game series if you haven’t, as I can’t help but spoil the first series when talking about a second series that picks up from where it left off, and it’s really good so stop reading this review and don’t click the video below either but just go and watch the original series right now.

Okay, if you’re just joining us, now that you’re back, we can continue. I mean when you think about it, just the posters for Squid Game 2 are a spoiler of Squid Game 1 if you’ve never seen the first series because they reveal that the main guy survived until the end of the first film, which may be “obvious” but it’s also the premise for a lot of the tension in the original series. Anyway enough of that, let’s get on with it.

So as mentioned, the second series does literally pick up from exactly where the first one left off, and shows our main character contestant 456 Seong Gihun (Lee Jungjae) investing his Squid Game winnings into attempting to expose and take down the entire operation, with several characters saying to him “you should have gotten on that plane and left Korea to live a happy life with the money instead”. Like, no fu***ng s**t. You’ll be thinking the exact same thought as he comes up across several obvious obstacles to success, like not knowing who the f**k any of these people are or where to find them, or even seemingly having much of a plan once he does find them. Of course it wouldn’t be a Squid Game sequel in spirit if there weren’t more games, so naturally he finds himself dragged back into competing again so the show can recycle a similar format to the original series, because if they did anything else people would probably be wildly disappointed. It makes sense I guess, as it was well-publicised before the series even came out that the director was just doing the sequel so he can put money in the bank, so why on earth would he f**k with a winning formula, he probably needs the money even more than the contestants do.

Appeal to average TV watchers: I wasn’t super hopeful about this series going into it because of the aforementioned money-first motivation, which might be a neat allegory of the plot itself and underscore the need for a series like this to exist, but still don’t bode well for creative endeavour in general. However at first I was pleasantly surprised. The first couple of episodes have some genuinely intriguing moments in them, and most interestingly of all, they cover off not just the recruitment of new players, but also the recruitment of the facility staff. The subplot that follows around Kang Noeul aka soldier 11 (Park Gyuyoung) represents some of the show’s freshest and most interesting moments, as we’ve never seen this perspective before. I spent quite a bit of time wishing that the show would dump the focus on Gihun (who becomes increasingly annoyingly preachy and illogical as the series wears on) and show a bit more of itself from her point of view.

Anyway as the show wears on it gets gradually weaker – once we settle into the “games” it’s a fairly predictable formula from there. The constant interrupting of the story for lengthy discussions and voting on whether the games should continue or not has some valid social commentary but also gets tiresome, because these scenes have no tension – of course the games are going to continue, or we don’t have a series. It’s also not clear why Gihun doesn’t just try to bribe a few people to vote his way, given how cliffhanger the voting scenes are he’d only need a few votes, and he’s got all that Squid Game 1 competition prize money just sitting there at home. Gihun never saying the right thing at the right time despite having all that knowledge from the first series is irritating, watching him bumble around has all the frustration of a lazily-written horror movie where protagonists split up so they can conveniently get themselves killed. Also some very charismatic characters who could have made the show a lot more interesting if the director had chosen to do more with them end up dying way too early. Meanwhile we have to put with another annoying religious character again, and I get the reasons for her inclusion, but the character is such a one-note caricature that she becomes irritating almost immediately. Worst of all though is the final episode which pretty much just devolves into a generic action movie with generic action movie problems and setups, you’ll yearn for the series to stop fu***ng around with trying to be lame Hollywood action 101 and just get back to the things that made it great… but you’ll probably have to wait for the third season (coming later in 2025) for that. Also notably missing are the VIPs who weren’t even touched on in this second series so I really hope they get more involved in the third one, as they represented some of the original series’ best moments and the series suffers without the context that their scenes bring.

Appeal to k-pop fans: Okay, so I haven’t discussed any of our k-pop friends yet, have I. Let’s get it out of the way. T.O.P plays Choi Subong aka contestant 230 aka Thanos, which is his “rapper name”. As has been written about extensively in the k-pop media, his character is a rapper who is also a drug addict, and much of both the praise and criticism of him in the role from the public comes from this similarity between T.O.P’s real life and that of his character, the criticism being “this feels like they’re trying to exonerate his real-life crimes with self-deprecating humour” and the praise being “well at least he knows how to play a character like this, he’s got the qualifications”. However while T.O.P in real life just puffed a little harmless w**d from Han Seo Hee’s private stash, Thanos is into some weird unspecified pills that turn him into a total lunatic, so neither the praise nor the criticism seems sensible if you ask me. The way people in the k-pop media were crapping on about how T.O.P supposedly ruined this thing, I had assumed he was the new main character or something, but as it happens he’s not the main character anywhere except in his own mind. Honestly, I didn’t think his performace was too bad – yes, he is annoying, but he’s playing a very annoying person, so he should be annoying. I’m sorry to say that I’ve sent quite a bit of time with rappers in my own country who were also drug addicts, and T.O.P’s performace wasn’t too far from the mark. In fact in a couple scenes, like the one where he’s asked to pose for the cameras, I think he absolutely nailed it, but you probably have to be someone like me who has been up close and personal with di****ad types like this to really appreciate just how cringingly accurate this portrayal is. Suggestions that the director should have hired Swings instead seem off-base to me, I think he would have tried to be too “cool” for the role and blown it due to his rapper ego, but T.O.P debases himself enough to bring some welcome lightness into the pretty heavy and violent proceedings.

Jo Yuri is the other k-pop who is in this thing, and she plays Kim Junhee aka contestant 222. There’s a lot less to say about her character because she just kind of mopes around clutching her abdomen for all her scenes because she’s late-stage pregnant and has a s**tty ex-boyfriend who is into crypto. Yes those are valid reasons to be miserable and she certainly plays the part fine but in a series where there’s already so much misery especially from the main character, it’s hard to really get behind her, except in the few scenes where she’s telling her ex to f**k off, which are actually quite satisfying. Anyway nothing wrong with her acting credentials here either, and she’s not annoying or anything, but if you’re looking for a female with the proactive charisma of Saebyong from the first series, she definitely isn’t it (I’d give that title to the aforementioned solider 11 instead).

Appeal to k-pop fappers: Given the amount of Squid Game p**n remakes that now exist, I think that the Squid Game green and white tracksuits and numbered shirts are now well on their way to becoming fe**sh wear for a lot of people. I don’t count myself as among those people, but clearly it’s becoming a popular look for adult content worldwide thanks to Squid Game’s cultural pe*******on (pun intended). Not only is there the “Sq**rt Game” JAV listed above (that’s DASS-534, starring Misono Waka and also featuring Mizuki Igarashi, the same girl who dances to Seo Eve’s “Malatanghulu” in FTKD-019), but there’s also not one but two Taiwanese “Sq**rt Games” (RAS-0107 and RAS-0108) that came out not long after the first Squid Game series was released. Aren’t you glad I went to the trouble to find all of this out, feel free to thank me by donating or buying a book, they probably cost a lot less than a Sq**rt Game film. Anyway, I really think that if you were interested in fap (and if you are I know you’re reading, my b***s posts don’t trend for no reason) you’d be better off checking out those films instead of bothering with Squid Game 2 as T.O.P acts like too much of a di****ad and Jo Yuri is just too goddamn miserable for words, neither of them are putting me in the mood for much at all.

Conclusion: It’s annoying that the series is clearly just a warm-up for the conclusion in Squid Game 3, because it definitely feels like a lot of the things that are happening in series 2 are just setups that will be resolved later. This series doesn’t have a satisfying mini-ending of its own, the heavy focus towards action at the end feels like it’s supposed to give the viewer that kind of end-of-the-action-movie catharsis but it just didn’t do it for me because almost no plot threads are resolved, it’s cliffhanger all the way. That said, it’s probably worth watching this anyway if you’re at all into the “Squid Game universe” because there are some great moments here that will stick with you that I deliberately haven’t discussed here. Also the social commentary is as biting as ever and is probably the one area of the series where the value of the narrative has actually increased, and I’ll definitely also be checking out the third season. So I guess that’s a cautious recommendation, if nothing else I can confirm that the k-pop folks definitely don’t ruin it anywhere near as much as you might be led to believe by reading bulls**t comments on k-pop forums and translation sites.

Final score: 3 sq**rts out of 5, but add an extra half a sq**rt if you ever wanted to see your favourite k-pop boy punch a crypto bro.

Kpopalypse recently watched Squid Game 2, but should you? Does the series meet required standards? This post has all the trufax! Kpopalyp...

20/01/2025

It’s time for Kpopalypse roundup! Let’s take a look at some new releases!

Sena from ADYA apparently is a school bully according to… random-ass people on the Internet. Where’s Iseul’s limousine to sort this type of thing out.

GFRIEND – Always

Another frankly disappointing song from the reunited Gfriend, and it’s still abundantly clear HYBE doesn’t give a single s**t about them, but for once the lazy-ass “modelling shoot disguised as a music video” trick pays off because if there’s anyone you want to see modelling random clothes for no reason it’s definitely Gfriend.

BBGIRLS – Love 2

The song’s just okay, but the video is absolutely inspired, watching BBGirls reunite through strings-and-tin-can communication sounds exactly like the kind of joke that I’d write in one of these roundups that all the idiots on social media would cry pathetically over. Good to know that BBGirls have the sense of humour that their fans don’t.

BABYMONSTER – Really Like You

Credit to whoever is behind the new BabyMoster song because it IS different to what they’ve tried so far. Unfortunately it’s not the good kind of different. Also it’s only January and we already have a contender for the most s**ttily memeable k-pop kiddy-rap phrase of the year, watch all the k-pop kiddies complain that I’m anti-black because I like KRS-ONE and Public Enemy but don’t like their bias rapping “ding diggy ding like a liggy ding ding”. At least DAS EFX had decent beats.

GOT7 – Python

I didn’t completely hate this because I thought some of the keyboard textures were nice, and that actually makes it a pleasant enough listen just on its own. Not wild about anything else here though, and definitely let down by a lack of pythons in the video. They really needed a big snake moving across the screen from one side to the other at both the start and end of the video just so you know that it’s not a song about anything other than snakes.

KickFlip – Mama Said…

Absolute p**p from the first note to the last. Mama said get a better song.

ZEROBASEONE (ZB1) – Now or Never

At first I facepalmed because it sounded like we were in s**t ballad territory, but the song picked up quickly and tuned out to be pretty rocking. Pity about the lame pre-chorus drops that every song seems to have to have now. Like 90 year olds in North Korea who remember the days before the dictatorship but get thrown in prison and tortured just for talking about it, I’ll continue to advocate for fast songs having beats and sticking to them.

ZEROBASEONE (ZB1) – Doctor! Doctor!

Sorry doctor, you got here after the songwriting meeting, we can’t save this one. We’re going to have to put it down.

ONEUS – IKUK

The bass player is really working overtime here to try and carry this mediocre song, and the bassline is so slippery and groovy that it almost works.

ALL(H)OURS – Graffiti

I love what they wrote on those plastic sheets. “The set director told us to write some graffiti, just like, tagging and spray paint… gosh so what do we write?” They really didn’t have any ideas at all, did they.

WEi – Not Enough

That thumbnail reminds me of this video I saw once where a US soldier in Iraq was clearing the inside of a building and got shot at by a sniper from outside a window, and it was a perfectly accurate shot straight for his head but the bullet didn’t end up hitting him because it had lost so much energy in flight that it just bounced off the glass window he was behind. Or maybe the sniper was just using nerf bullets, I dunno, you Americans are all experts in guns so you’ve probably already seen the video and know exactly what happened and will probably send me 57 comments correcting the stuff I got wrong here. Anyway I think nerf guns are great and a few snipers with foam bullets camped outside the boardrooms of k-pop agencies might just be the motivation the Korean industry needs.

BTOB – Hi Beautiful

Ah, “for the fans” is back. I like how they say at the start of this one that “the love we have for their fans is so great that we couldn’t put it into words, so we made this song… which has a bunch of words in it, because we’re just talking nonsense really, just keep coming to our concerts and buying our s**t thanks”. Okay, they didn’t say that, but in an honest world they would have.

The Kingdom – Warning

Someone asked me today if I’d review a song for roundup that was released as a single but had no music video. I said that while technically it is eligible, I like to hold off on reviews like that for as long as possible because video content is more interesting to feature, and sometimes agencies are just very late to making videos. Case in point is The Kingdom here, this song is actually three years old and it just gets a video now for some reason. Maybe this is their way of apologising to Australians for cancelling that Australian tour they were very adamant we go and support when I saw them live the other month. Now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure they did this song at that show too and it doesn’t sound bad in video context but I think it works better as a live song. Also points off for no hanboks. although the suits do look okay this is not going to make me gay.

VVUP – 4 Life

Keeping on the “late ass videos” point, this one has fu***ng Christmas trees in it. It’s bad luck to keep Christmas decorations up for more than 12 days after Christmas is over, and I think it’s equally bad luck to have Christmas decorations in videos for boring songs released well into the new year.

Kim Wansun & Seulgi – Lucky

They get the sound and look right, but the song itself, not so much. Leaning back into retro 80s style doesn’t work that well if you also include all the lame trends from the current pop era like needless pre-chorus drops and a really good instrumental section at the end that should have been integrated into the song itsef but wasn’t.

Jungseul feat. Shindong – Tabom

Shindong’s hamming it up makes this latin nonsense tolerable. Pity he didn’t take a few seconds out of video-shooting time to teach her how to use a damn microphone.

Slushii x HYO – Money

Why is Hyoyeon a computer avatar instead of a person in like 50% of all her videos? Being in the same group as Rachel Kim for all those years must have really made her self-conscious. Mind you I’d want to hide my face too if I was responsible for this mess.

Odetari with Hongjoong of ATEEZ – SMB

What the f**k is this.

Jinjoo Park, Ailee, Mijoo, Haewon – Is it still beautiful

It’s not that beautiful if you couldn’t even be bothered standing.

Onew – Boy

Onew’s been throwing out a song a week lately, but this one’s just average. Someone tell the man that he doesn’t have to release literally everything.

Kandis – Playground

Sometimes the most awful song has the best beat.

Dept x Pretzelle – Tell Me

Dept is Korean and Pretzelle are from Thailand and they are here to prove to you that not all Thai-Korean collabs are worth listening to.

HYNN – Unspoken Goodbye

Hynn’s new ballad is dreary as expected and her video is full of p**p AI snow effects so let’s have our non-Korean LGBT feature here instead! This week’s it’s Limp Wrist, and I couldn’t pick just one song from them so why not have an entire live set, performed in a church no less (not all Christians are anti-gay, you know). There’s quite a lot of LGBT representation in punk music (and you’d better believe you’ll be finding out all about it in Kpopalypse roundups this year) but Limpwrist wear their heart (and their asscheeks) on their sleeve in ways that a lot of other groups don’t and they certainly have a way with song titles and lyrics. The straight-edge hardcore punk scene is notoriously boringly conservative and anti-sexual, something they actually have in common with k-pop fans, but Limp Wrist are fighting back like the hardcore punk equivalent of Holland, pushing the gayness in your face until you can’t take it, and then doing it just a little more… and then a lot more. Recommended.

Nam Taehyun – On the Edge of the Night

Are you fu***ng kidding? What a bunch of boring crap.

An Shinae – South to the West

Zero song here to speak of, just a bunch of blues vocal improvs trying to pass itself off as something more. Note Hwasa in the video for no reason, which kind of fits I guess as this song sucks for the same reason that a lot of Mamamoo’s songs also suck.

Dynamic Duo, Gummy – Take Care

Dymanic Duo pi***ng their status as rap legends down the drain as usual with this boring weak slow soft s**t. Their musical bladders must surely be nearing empty by now.

Giriboy – You Get Out

no u

XWALLY – Better Day

Just your public service announcement that s**t music like this still is being made and the people who make it haven’t gone away.

ALL THE S**T UNIVERSE LEAGUE SONGS IN ONE SECTION SO YOU CAN SKIP IT ALL FOR YOUR MENTAL HEALTH IF YOU WANT

UNIVERSE LEAGUE – Butterfly

I don’t follow this s**t Universe League show, but I guess we’re past the “expose how badly they can sing for audience engagement purposes” section of the show and well into the “look how hard they’ve worked since then, we didn’t just turn the pitch correction on, pinky swear” section at this point.

UNIVERSE LEAGUE – Only U

All the songs for this Universe League thing are just kind of exceptionally average and competent and not exciting at all.

UNIVERSE LEAGUE – Don’t Hit The Brakes

Okay, I take that back, this one’s a bit s**t, not sure what they were thinking.

UNIVERSE LEAGUE – Roller Coaster

By the way the next Kpopalypse book is going to be all about a survival show so I hope you enjoy it. I realised that audition and ‘survival’ processes was a really big hole in the Shin Hana series of books so I thought I’d do a new one that was just covering off that stuff. Enjoy the torture later this year when it happens.

UNIVERSE LEAGUE – On&On

I feel like they’re trying to do the early SHINee sound here to some extent, and it kind of works but the backing track is a little undercooked to have the right impact. 99.999999% of k-pop lives and dies on the instrumental NOT the vocals (because vocals are and always have been and always will be a secondary concern for pop songwriters, which is just how it should be), and here they just didn’t pay enough attention to giving the backing track its due.

UNIVERSE LEAGUE – My, My, My

Here’s the last one and I stopped listening to his halfway through because Nickleback came up in my recommends and I actually clicked on it and watched the whole thing instead, that’s how uninteresting this was.

RANDOM BONUS VIDEOS OF THE WEEK

Jeewon talks Waterbomb on “No Bbaku Tak Jae Hoon” Season 2 EP.66 ENG SUB

Because I keep talking about it in posts, here’s the full episode of Jeewon talking about Waterbomb, along with English subs nicely provided by a lovely reader. The “evil edit” that went viral on Twitter as “proof” that Jeewon disapproved of Waterbomb/was uncomfortable about the questioning was manufactured by someone stitching together the question about Waterbomb at 5:36 (which Jeewon responds to by saying she’d love to do it) with Jeewon’s reaction to a completely different question at 8:24 (about her groupmates groping her in the dorms). This means that the yearly comic that accompanies my “most fappable music video post” is actually more correctly in context than all those viral videos, which all just completely lied about the situation to suit their own agenda. You’d think k-pop fans would be smart enough to be on the lookout for evil editing given everything that survival shows have taught them, but I guess you can never underestimate the pure stupidity of a k-pop fan. Feel free to use this video example in your media studies class.

Do you feel like a shark?

A reader said they would pay for someone to overlay Oh My Girl’s “Shark” onto the Jaws trailer, so I did just that and I didn’t even charge for it. Thank me by buying all my books except “Love Carousel”.

Block B – Nilili Mambo

I always thought this song was pretty good, and time hasn’t hurt it at all. The only thing that might have aged poorly in retrospect is how Zico seems to get about 80% of the screentime here. Yes there were other Block B members but since they didn’t look at molka nobody cares about them apparently.

That’s all for this week! Kpopalypse roundup returns next week!

It’s time for Kpopalypse roundup! Let’s take a look at some new releases! Sena from ADYA apparently is a school bully according to… random...

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