Christmas time is finally here, so merry Christmas from Kpopalypse!  Please enjoy your Christmas gift, which is my reviews of all the shitty Christmas songs this year!  Yay!

I like Christmas, it’s cool.  I get to eat roast meals all day, give and receive great presents and listen to smelly tree-humping pagans who don’t bathe complain about cultural appropriation.  However I don’t like Korea’s Christmas k-pop songs.  Why Korea has to release a whole bunch of Christmas shit every year I have no idea, but they haven’t learned from past year’s roundups and are insistent on continuing to pollute the world with this trash.  Therefore, Kpopalypse’s Christmas roundup will continue until they learn!

Rules for selection:

• Christmas k-pop concepts only, not just “winter” k-pop concepts
• Songs must have some form of official MV, however pissweak
• Original songs only, or covers so obscure or butchered that Kpopalypse can’t identify the originals anyway, unless I make an exception because I feel like it

I may miss a few songs but if I do, don’t link or mention them in the comments below because nobody cares.  Here we go with all the Christmas songs, in chronological order!

---

November 8th – T-ara – Tiamo

There’s always that one artist per year that releases their Christmas shit way, way too fucking early, and in this case it’s T-ara, who put out “Tiamo” on the same day that Donald Trump was elected president of the USA.  Some may think that this is coincidental, but I don’t believe so – in many ways this seems planned, as there are a quite a few similarities between T-ara’s comeback and a Trump victory:

• Both Trump’s victory and T-ara’s pleasant-but-bland mid-paced ballad were not the result I wanted but at least they’re both trying to make their home countries great again
• Lots of people are delighted beyond rationality and a whole bunch of other people are phenomenally upset beyond rationality with very little in-between
• MBK ballads promise a lot but are conservative in their application of modern sounds, just like republicans are with their policies
• There’s lots of red in the video, just like there is in Trump’s merchandise, and also Trump’s face when his sweat mixes with his spray-tan
• The Chinese are probably going to start losing a lot more money to both T-ara and Trump very soon

People wondered whether “Tiamo” was really a Christmas concept or just a “winter” concept, but we know it’s a Christmas concept because some of the girls sing in front of a backdrop of unopened presents.  Hopefully one of those presents is a repackage of T-ara’s”Remember” mini-album with a new upbeat feature track that isn’t some boring Christmas bullshit, now that’d be nice.  In the meantime I’ll settle for the generous application of the Snowyeon effect, which has now been applied across the board to all six members.  Did you know that T-ara is the only k-pop girl group that debuted in 2009 and is still together with their original lineup intact?  Merry Christmas, Korean netizens, and for the rest of you I hope you like this song because this list only gets worse from here.

November 22nd – JeA – Winter, It’s You

When watching this boring ballad which is just like every other boring ballad ever, I had one thought instantly spring to mind – I bet all the girls from Brown Eyed Girls are completely boring in bed except Gain.  JeA in particular looks like she’d be a complete starfish, one of those girls who turns the lights off and insists that you fuck in complete darkness even if under those conditions it’s impossible to put the condom on the right way first time or kiss a girl without accidentally headbutting her.  Look at the boring shit that JeA does in this video with some guy and you know it has to be true, she’s old enough now to have “creative control” or whatever so we can definitely blame her for this shit.  Who over the mental age of ten would even think that driving a caravan out into a field of nothing just to fuck around is even interesting.  They go out there all that way just for the guy to jump up on a bit of wood that’s sticking up and go “look I can walk on this”.  Then JeA decides to walk on the wood too, well I HOPE THAT WAS WORTH THE FUCKING DRIVE CUNTS.  If this was a Gain video he’d be pushing her into the long reeds and you’d get lots of fanservicey angles of her cardigan straining against her chest as he pins her to the ground but no, JeA just wants to watch this dude play acoustic guitar and drink coffee, what a boring bitch.  You might be wondering what this has got to do with Christmas but remember that in South Korea Christmas is considered more of a “young couples” holiday than a “family get-together” holiday, so this is very relevant.  Korea is trying to increase its birthrate before the entire country vanishes with this “it’s Christmas-come-on-you-young-people-the-fucking-dick-goes-in-the-pussy now get on with it” business, but JeA’s poor example just makes me wish I didn’t even have genitals.

November 27th – Mamamoo – Memory

I made a sincere declaration to not review any Christmas songs in Kpopalypse roundup, and then being the caonima that I am I broke this declaration quicker than a YG comeback promise.  Mamamoo’s song is so fucking dull that I was reduced to a goddamn coma about 15 seconds in and therefore completely failed to even notice that it was a Christmas song and just reviewed it in my roundup series by mistake.  Thanks to the person on ask.fm who pointed it out to me that I had fucked up here because I had no idea – it just sounded like the kind of worthless crappy jazz ballad that would be Mamamoo’s bread and butter normally anyway so I just sort of tuned everything out including all the presents, tinsel and whatever the fuck else is in this video that I could only bring myself to half-watch each of the 26 times I watched it to help myself write this review.  How people can like this fucking shit is beyond me, but at the time of writing, this video had a 99.4% like/dislike ratio on YouTube which means that for every 1000 people who listened to this song only six disliked it.  As luck would have it, I happen to be one of those six, but at least I’m not alone, maybe I can find those other five people and we can start a k-pop group called Apunk and we can write songs about taking a shit in a box, then wrapping it in tinsel foil and mailing it to Mamamoo’s agency.  Anyway, the song does have at least one purpose – the instructions on how to make a coffee in the music video might help out some of you kids trying to stay awake through this crap.

November 28th – HaHa and Oh My Girl ft. M.Tyson – White

If T-ara exhibit the Snowyeon effect with all their Christmas-themed songs, Oh My Girl have got a severe case of its much-feared opposite – the Noyeon effect.  The main thing that stuck out when watching this song straight away is that Kpopalypse bias Yooa really looks like crap here.  Yooa works really well with big frills and fairy dresses, she doesn’t pull off this “bumming around in a daggy jumper and cheap clammy-looking hooker make-up singing Christmas bullshit” look at all, although to be fair, neither do any of the others, proving that the Noyeon effect is strong here.  For some reason there’s only four of the eight seven girls from Oh My Girl participating here (who can fucking keep track of k-pop line-up changes not me), I guess the other three decided that this song was just too much bullshit, or maybe they just didn’t want to succumb to wearing such absolutely shitty clothes and makeup.  At least the video directors were smart enough to realise that nobody wants to look at a similarly adorned HaHa or M.Tyson, but they still make the track even more terrible than it would otherwise be with their worthless vocal contributions and some of the weakest, pissiest reggae-lite to ever come out of a Korean recording studio.

December 1st – LaBoum – Winter Story

“Winter Story” only barely scrapes over the line as a Christmas song for inclusion here, just due to the lights strung up inside the blue building – nobody does that shit when it’s not approaching Christmas time.  In fact nobody does a lot of things in this video.  Stagecoaches fucking suck dick, have you ever ridden in one of those?  I certainly have, and they’re the most rickety-ass non-OH&S-compliant suspension-lacking vehicles you can imagine, if a wheel rolls over anything over one inch in diameter it pretty much throws you out of the vehicle.  Polaroids are bullshit too, people only decided that they liked instant cameras after they found out that Polaroid discontinued them which suddenly made them “cool”, so now Polaroid are making them again to milk some cash from the fuckwit hipster demographic.  The real cringe here however is the girls from LaBoum praying at the dinner table, presumably for their CEO to feed them something of sustenance, although why they pray like they’re having an orgasm I’m not sure, maybe they’re imagining their much better songs from last year.

Decemeber 1st – Starship Planet – Love Wishes

For some reason the annual Christmas agency collaboration from Starship this year is a complete sausage sizzle with no girls anywhere to be found.  Probably just as well for Sistar who put out their first genuinely good song in about 4 years recently, they probably were happy to not get roped into this rubbish as they likely weren’t in a hurry to remind the public of the super-low-quality bullshit music that they usually do.  So instead we get some assorted rappers and boy group singers from the Starship label which is fine because while there may not be any tits to look at at least I don’t have to listen to Hyolyn going “aahhh-oooho-hohohh-wooowooo-woooahhahah” all over the bridge so that’s something.  I don’t really know who is who but you can kind of tell who the rappers are because they have less eyeliner and look awkward as fuck trying to look “festive” and generally failing (I suppose you can also tell by the actual rapping if you’re game to turn the sound up – proceed with caution).  I feel sorry for them, their contract probably requires that they participate in the annual Christmas bullshit song and you can tell it’s right out of their comfort zone.  Let’s be sure not to buy this song so the agency learns not to do this shit to them ever again.

December 2nd – Bubble Sisters – White Carpet

This song is fucking bullshit suckitude like every song on this list, but the video is cool because there’s a girl in it who is genuinely chubby and you see that in k-pop videos almost never, the dude she’s with even pinches her face at 1:00 like “wow your chubby face is so cute, I love you so much, I can’t wait to rub my balls into your chin later” and it’s a really sweet touching moment.  However I freaked out when at 2:28 the guy put his coffee travel mug right up to her face to keep it warm and then gave her a kiss, way to burn her fucking face right off, you cunthole.  Coffee that they serve in those fucking things is always way too hot, it’s a little known fact that the woman who famously sued McDonalds for millions of dollars and won because she spilled coffee in her lap wasn’t being a fucking frivolous bitch but actually had a really good reason – McDonalds were serving their drive-thru coffee at ridiculously unsafe temperatures that melt skin and muscle tissue with the line of reasoning “well, people won’t drink it straight away”.   In non-OH&S-compliant Korea I doubt they do it much differently, so if I were her I’d slap that dude’s hand away from her face for the good of my own safety and then give him socks for Christmas.

December 8th – Laf – Together

How come k-pop only ever brings out the chubby girls at Christmas time?  Maybe it’s some kind of fat acceptance movement to make fat sluts and whores feel better about going on Christmas dates, or perhaps it’s a way to make people feel better about overeating on Christmas pudding, but whatever the reason, it’s definitely the only notable thing about this boring song and video.  Maybe it’s neither of those, perhaps they’ve heard about my chubby-chasing ways and have decided that adding fat girls to a Christmas video is the only way it could possibly get a good write-up here.  No such luck for Laf unfortunately, who definitely blow a whole herd of farm animals with this incredibly boring song, it’s going to take a lot more than that chubby singer to make this acceptable Christmas entertainment.  Even the dress the girl has on is boring, they could have gone for something clingier, or with horizontal black and white stripes, or maybe a French maid outfit and less of that horrid sugar-glaze makeup too.  Just saying.

December 10th – Lyn – 20th Century Carol

I don’t even know if this is a Christmas song or not, I can’t even fucking tell anymore with the ambiguous Christmas-but-not-really-okay-kinda releases that Korea churns out each December.  It’s got “carol” in the title however so I guess it qualifies, although maybe “19th century carol” would have been a better title for this noodly fucking soft jazz bollocks.  I also don’t know why Lyn capitalises the Y in her name, maybe it stands for “why” as in “why am I writing this trash”, “why is every song I’ve ever done some super-boring ballad shit”, “why do I think anyone would want to listen to this” etc.  The video is stupid too, no boy at that age smiles like that at a girl, when you’re 8 years old or whatever boys think that all girls are weird and smell funny.  That’s also a real “gosh I’ve found my true love” kind of scene there that the video director is insinuating and he shouldn’t be getting people so fucking young to do that shit, so this video is therefore creepy as fuck and clearly he has no morals whatsoever, although I guess that goes without saying anyway as this is a k-pop ballad and you would really have to be morally sketchy to think that more of these are required on the planet at this point.

December 11th – Yang Da Il, Chancellor, MC Gree, As One, Kang Minhee – Already Christmas

Here’s Brand New Music’s obligatory yearly Christmas collaboration and it’s just as awful as Starship’s, but at least there are both girls and boys in it, giving everyone at least one reason to watch.  Note that “As One” is the female duet group, not the multi-member idol group, and that’s good for me because the girl from As One with the dark hair is really hot, but bad for me because all that group ever does is shitty smooth jazz/R&B hybrids just like this song here.  However the worst section of this song is actually the rap, and the guy rapping even seems to be fairly self-aware of how shit this is judging by the way he introduces himself with “Merry Christmas” and then a little “heh” that feels to me like “heh I hope my rap buddies don’t all find out that I was in this crappy collab”.  The Christmas cringe is real and it’s impossible not to feel huge second-hand embarrassment for these poor musicians who no doubt would have their sweet potato and brown rice rations cut in half if they refused to participate in this poo.

December 12th – Poomgil – My Merry Christmas

What the fuck is a Poomgil is that some new kind of Pokemon.  I could keep track of Pokemons in the old days when there was just 150 of the fucks but there are all these special ones now and I don’t even know anymore.  In my old guitar teaching room about 15 years ago I even had a poster of all 150 of the Pokemon, which automatically made me cool with any students under 8 years old, unfortunately it was also really hard to get them to stop staring at the poster and actually learn some fucking guitar. Obviously I’m trying to delay talking about the music here to pad out this review because there’s literally fuck all to talk about other than “same old fucking shit Korea thanks a bunch cunts” but I guess what I’m trying to say is that it’s conceivable to me that a stray Pokemon may have defected to Korea and been involved creatively somehow in some bullshit Christmas song for fuckheads.  Actually I’m being a bit harsh on this one, the chorus is actually okay as long as you can dig the fact that it sounds like a lighter-waving X-Japan ballad, but the rest of it really isn’t up to snuff and I think I should get a free reroll.

December 13th – Pungdeng-E – Jingle Bells

I normally don’t include straight covers of western carols in these Christmas lists, but sometimes one slips through anyway because I’m honestly not all that familiar with what all the western Christmas songs actually are.  Mind you we all know “Jingle Bells” but I’ve included it here anyway, because in this case Pungdeng-E have kind of made the song their own.  Don’t get too excited kids – that’s not a compliment.  Whoever is writing music for Pungdeng-E doesn’t seem to actually understand how music works, and they’ve consistently released horrible crap for these three poor girls ever since they’ve debuted.  I’m pretty sure Pungdeng-E only exist because some idiot CEO just thought “Orange Caramel and Crayon Pop are random and sometimes they shout a bit, so if I have a group that is even MORE random and shouty, they’ll do even better!” and forgot the little detail about writing actual songs someone might want to listen to.  Anyway they’ve made a fucking mess of this song like they do with all their songs, and this one was already pretty shit to begin with so fucking it up even more I guess is an achievement of sorts.

December 14th – Apink – ‘Cause You’re My Star

Hey this song isn’t bad!  It’s bright, fun and not very Christmas-like at all apart from the decorations in the video.  Plus the girls all look fantastic, I can’t even tell who is who really, nor do I even give a fuck, because this is about as good as Apink have ever looked in a video, and even better Asian Junkie hates it so you know it’s definitely quality.  Oh but then that little trap section happens and everything starts sucking a bit.  Two of the girls even look at each other and giggle at the end of it as if to say “hahaha, people thought this was going to be a decent song all the way through but they didn’t see that coming!  Eat our shit!”  The problem is of course, that we definitely did see it coming, k-pop has been doing this bullshit to us constantly over the past year or two and we’ve all really had enough.  It’s not even trolling anymore, it’s just par for the course.  “Oh here’s the shit part of the song.”  At least they keep it short and then get back to the bits that make the song good, well, unless you’re Asian Junkie, who hates it, what a weirdo.  Did you know that even though I’m a “writer” for Asian Junkie, I don’t even have access to his site but he just copies my articles, edits and then pastes them to his site with my name on them?  Hey, wouldn’t it be interesting if that worked the other way around and Asian Junkie also became a writer for Kpopalypse?  That’d be cool, right?  I think he should apply and I can repost the articles here from his site that I find interesting, making sure to add extra swear words so it meets my site’s writing criteria.  Hi there IATFB, just checking that you actually read down this far.

December 14th – HeeJin, HyunJin, HaSeul – The Carol

I can sort of forgive the songwriters behind the three already-debuted Loona members for this piece of shit Christmas song because with such a ridiculous release schedule ahead of them they must be spreading their ideas a bit thin.  Sometimes you’ve just gotta churn out the fucking songs like a production line to meet the fucking quota or the boss will crack the shits, it doesn’t really matter if it’s any good or not as long as the numbers stack up.  Hey can you imagine the fucking fights this group are having?  Can you imagine what “debut a girl a month” is doing to them in their dorms, psychologically?  I bet they’re all pulling each other’s hair out by the roots, screaming about “you only got to debut first because you gave the producer a blowjob, I have to wait at least three months!” and backstabbing each other like fuck.  Just wait, they’ll keep up the facade for a good while but when it all comes out down the track this group is going to erupt with After School levels of hatred and vitriol.  The sort of thing Asian Junkie would call “a mess” and rub his hands together about like fucking Scrooge because he’s an unfeeling animal who lives for web traffic to his adverts.  Sorry AJ I don’t mean to keep picking on you but these songs are fucking boring and there’s nothing else to really say about them so I have to fill up the space with rambling shit just so in the unlikely event that you want to repost this to your site, you’ve got some editing work to do.  I know you like editing work.

December 15th – Baek Yerin – Love You On Christmas

The member of 15& that nobody cares about did a Christmas song and it’s boring so let’s ignore it completely.  I actually finally caved in and signed up for Instagram the other day.  My Instagram is “Kpopalypseoppar” if you feel like following it but there’s no actual point in following me really, there’s nothing to see.  I don’t have any photos on there at all and I haven’t even put a profile picture up yet or anything.  I only signed up so I could follow k-pop girls, and in particular so I can look at Park Jimin’s photos, the other girl in 15&.  Park Jimin’s Instagram is private these days so I have to be a follower of hers to see any of it, which means I have to sign up, so I signed up and sent her a friend request.  I’m sure she’ll be like “oh fuck it’s that Kpopalypse dickhead with the stupid blog again no thanks” and quietly just delete my application but hey it’s worth a shot.  I probably should have named myself something else like “hi it’s your mom, why don’t you post more pictures of yourself, you’re beautiful really” but I’ve always been too honest for my own good to go around making false accounts and shit like that.  Anyway Park Jimin if you’re reading, Kpopalypse thinks you’re really cool and thanks for not recording a shit Christmas song this year.

December 15th – Solbi & Real Smel – Handmade Gloves

The studio footage here is great, these two aren’t even pretending that they’re actually recording it, and are just dicking around like a bunch of cunts.  It’s good because I get sick of all the obviously faked “studio footage” that groups put into their videos where it’s completely obvious at least to me that they don’t even have the microphones switched on.  I’ve got nothing against miming in videos, I just think why bother to put up the pretense of making it look like you’re “really recording something”.  You might as well do what Arch Enemy do and just get rid of the microphone completely, which looks awkward and silly but at least it’s honest.  I wonder what the ratio is of Korean recording studios booked out to record a song vs recording studios booked out to pretend you’re recording a song, I wonder which one makes more money for them.  Anyway, that’s really the most interesting thing about this video because everything else is the usual Christmas bullshit and I have to distract my brain with thoughts like this or my brain cells will break down from lack of use by the end of watching this anal licking.

December 16th – Yeonjung & Dawon (WSJN) – Fire & Ice

Not only is this a Christmas song but it’s also an OST song, so there’s no way it can possibly be good.  Mathematically about 99% of Christmas songs suck, and about 99.9% of OST songs suck, so that makes the odds of this song not being shit about 0.001% or 1 in 100,000.  Okay, my maths probably sucks a little, but not as much as this song.  The video is largely CGI and the film it’s for seems to be the story of some humans who meet some creatures with really big noses and then some stuff happens.  I guess a race of creatures that relies on its enhanced sense of smell doesn’t need the other four senses quite as much so those other senses atrophy somewhat, and that probably explains why the nose-creatures are generally smiling and happy throughout this video, their rudimentary ears can’t perceive the full depth of suckitude of the awful music that we’re hearing.  However it pays to be careful, and at the end of the video the nose-creatures let the humans steal their boat and fuck off into the sunset so they can be free of this shitty song just it case it starts a trend on their small island and they have a Shit Music Disease epidemic.

December 18th – Seungyeon – Do You Remember?

Actually, I remember a lot of things.  I remember when KARA was making cool songs like “Wanna“, “Step” and “Pandora“.  I remember when Seungyeon actually used to rock.  I remember when most k-pop acts had a majority of upbeat songs as feature releases.  I remember when I hadn’t discovered the rapid-fire deluge of diarrhoea that k-pop throws out every Christmas and what a nice feeling it was to be blissfully ignorant of the annual red-and-white fecal explosion.  I remember when Christmas songs wouldn’t try to sneakily hide their true identities by avoiding the topic of Christmas entirely except for a few photos of some drunk, passed-out Santa in the video.  I remember when k-pop videos would actually use the entire video window worth of visual real-estate instead of ripping you off with shitty “artsy” borders.  Most of all, I remember before I heard this song, it was a happier time.

December 20th – lalalsweet – Santa Baby

Is this really a cover because I’ve never even heard the original, although I must admit that I don’t exactly have comprehensive knowledge of every piece of Christmas turd that ever floated down the candy-cane river of shit every December.  Anyway this sucks.

December 21st – SF9 – So Beautiful

Well at least this song’s got some tempo to it once it gets going, it’s still basically crap but hey it’s a Christmas song so any small upside or trace of quality seems like an oasis in a desert of dried shit I guess.  By the way, this is the perfect video for my “healthy porn for women” post that I’ll get around to at some point early in 2017.  People complained when I did the “healthy porn for men” post that I sort of touched very briefly on boy group videos at the start and then left the topic completely alone.  I won’t go into it all now but please expect it fondly.  I notice Googling “healthy porn for men” bring up Kpopalypse on the second page, not the first – guess I’ve got to whip my SEO elves a bit more like Asian Junkie does every night (how the fuck are you still reading, don’t you have scandals to busily ignore).

December 22nd – some whores – some shit song nobody cares about

It’s a good thing covers are ineligible or I’d have to tell you how much cancer this song is and then some of you poor dears might get offended.

December 23rd – some nugus with some other junk

Might as well put this bullshit up here too.  Fuck me, they can’t even afford a colour camera.  I’m dreaming of a black and white Christmas.

December 24th – and fuck this and everything else Mystic released in December

Wow a Christmas song from Mystic Entertainment with two warbly vocalists jerking off in our faces and Fender Rhodes, and nothing else.  It’s a Christmas shitception.  Oh dear.

December 24th – Vixx – Shooting Star

Last minute edit – I just had to leave this overacting express here.  Do you think that any of these guys actually act like this when they’re listening to music away from the cameras?  Somehow I doubt it.  I like the guy top center though, the others are all pretending that they’re so into it and he really doesn’t give any fucks.

 

---

That’s all for Kpopalypse’s Christmas roundup for 2016, hopefully you were smart enough not to click on any of the videos!  I hope you enjoyed your Christmas present, Kpopalypse will return with more posts soon!