Merry Christmas!  Please enjoy your gift from Kpopalypse this year – a roundup of all 2018’s worthless Christmas songs!

Christmas is a wonderful time, full of gift-giving, leisure, good cheer and Christians complaining that everyone else has forgotten the true meaning of the stolen Pagan festival that they’ve also forgotten the meaning of.  However every Christmas in k-pop also has its negative side – the influx of absolute pure musical garbage as everyone stops their usual comeback schedule to participate in the “festive spirit” of writing special Christmas themed songs that lick sweaty nutsacks.  Please now sit back and enjoy as Kpopalypse listens and reports on all of these completely worthless songs, so you don’t have to waste your valuable time listening to or caring about any of them!  Yay!

Rules for this list:

• Released in 2018
• Songs are presented in chronological order of release
• Christmas k-pop concepts only, “winter” k-pop concepts with no specific Christmas content don’t cut the mustard
• Songs must have some form of official MV even if it’s just a lyric video where a dude masturbates a reindeer in time to the beat or something
• Original songs only, or covers that I’m dumb enough to think are originals because I listen to Christmas songs pretty much never outside of this list
• I probably forgot a few songs, please don’t add them in the comments below because nobody cares, listening to the ones already here was bad enough

November 29th – Tiffany Young – Peppermint

Every single year in k-pop that I’ve documented, there’s been that one high-profile group who has brought out a Christmas k-pop song a clear month before everyone else even booked studio time.  However in 2018, the usual routine changed – all through November I kept waiting for that special early Christmas shit song moment, and it didn’t happen.  Then of course Tiffany Hwang Young had to fuck it up for everyone, sliding out “Peppermint” like a belated constipated shit in the dying days of the month, and what a stinker it is.  All the Christmas content is in the lyrics, as the music video is just a picture of Tiffany looking off into the distance as computer-generated snow falls, which does look a bit strange as the picture is indoors so it really shouldn’t be snowing, but then this song really shouldn’t be existing either, so maybe it thematically matches in a way.  The music however is the real crime, some completely lazy throwaway lounge crap over the most basic default-setting-workstation beat possible, which might initially seem odd as the song is by western production team The Rascals, but the low quality may make more sense once you look at their horrible resume.  We don’t even get any moving images of Tiffany to look at in the video, which would have taken at least some of the sting out of having to endure this R&B-lite nonsense, because Tiffany really is stunning these days and now that she’s free from SNSD’s aegyo shackles and overexposed photography that never suited her, she is edging into Kpopalypse bias list material.  I mean, check her out here, she looks great in a tiger-print dress which is a look that probably only about three people worldwide can pull off, and here she is amazingly fappable in possibly the ugliest jumper known to mankind.  But then again, despite the lack of visuals here I really kind of hope she doesn’t release a proper video for this because then I’m going to have to write this review a second time, which means listening to this bullshit song again.  Fortunately there’s no way that this could ever happen, the world I live in surely couldn’t be this cruel.

December 1st – CAN – White Christmas

Once December kicked in, then came the Christmas drama videos.  After a brief prelude where a young boy prays for the song to not start and the video to end right then and there, CAN’s “White Christmas” begins in earnest anyway with the story of a supposedly homeless girl with suspiciously well-managed hair and clothes who hangs around a noodle bar trying to guilt others into giving her free food.  “Can I get a free meal” she asks the shop owner while sitting on the doorstep.  “Are you just going to sit there and stare into space you tubby little scam artist, why don’t you take some customer orders and earn your supper?” replies the cook.  “Screw that, I’m cute, I shouldn’t have to work” the girl huffs.  Then some homeless dude turns up and gives her a coat to wear even though she already has one on, and the girl quickly dehydrates and passes out from heatstroke due to the needless extra layer of clothing.  When she wakes up, the noodle bar establishment has abducted her into a religious cult and they all dance and smile and throw fake snow around a church stage so some imaginary man on a cloud can be happy while the kid grimaces and bemoans her new lack of freedom.  It’s a touching story if you’re a parent who likes lying to your own children for fun, but the real child abuse happening here is the song, your typical festive snoozer with the cheese turned up to eleven and no concessions made whatsoever to anything approaching good music.  They even insert bits of “Jingle Bells” halfway through it because they really are that bereft of creativity, if they’re going to do that they might as well just stick to covering one of the established 259 pieces of fucking shit in the Christmas canon instead of adding another one to the pile.

December 3rd – GOT7 – Miracle

What really would be a miracle is if GOT7 wasn’t made to release shitty Christmas songs, but I guess JYP has decided that we’re not quite ready for that level of miraculousness in our lives just yet because here we are again in December listening to this bullshit ballad.  The drama video for this is even more terrifying that CAN’s – remember back in school where the teacher asked you “what would you do if you became an invisible angel with superpowers?” and everyone said good-hearted stuff like “I’d help my grandmother in her old age by carrying her everywhere so she knew that angels were real” but that one fuckhead dude in your class was like “I’d rob the bank, steal girls’ underwear and throw rocks at my neighbour’s dog”?  Well it seems that the dickweed in your class grew up to join GOT7, because in this video the group use their powers of invisibility in the most creepy ways possible to stalk, scare and abduct a young girl, removing her from her suburban home into a far-off wilderness for an unspecified purpose but one which surely can’t be good.  Kpopalypse readers with long memories will remember that this isn’t the first time that GOT7 have made an abduction-themed Christmas k-pop video, and I’m not quite sure what type of people JYP is hiring but I’m really very concerned about the alarming pattern that is forming here.  However, I’ll give GOT7 due credit for one thing – at least they made the girl wear earmuffs so in the last few minutes of her life before they knock her on the head with a shovel, harvest her organs for Project Luhan and bury her corpse in the snowdrift, she at least doesn’t have to listen to one of the worst Christmas ballads ever created.  Hey, who am I kidding, this song isn’t anything special, they’re all this bad.

December 5th – Starship Planet – Christmas Tree

Of course it wouldn’t be Christmas without the annual serve of total bullshit Christmas music from Starship Entertainment.  It’s telling that the very first thing that both the boys and the girls do in this video is get maggoted on cheap wine, and it figures, because who the fuck would want to listen to this while sober.  Christmas carols only make sense when you’re pissed as a fart and passed out on the stairs because you don’t have the co-ordination to make it up to your bedroom, so I guess the annual predictable Starship Planet comeback is as good an excuse as any other to get trashed.  I didn’t check whether all the people involved in this were over drinking age, but then Christmas is the time when parents (and presumably k-pop agencies) will kind of let slide age-related rules about what young people can and can’t do a little bit anyway.  I know plenty of people who had their first puff of weed, bike-shed handjob or back paddock high-speed burnout around late December of any given year long before it was legal for them, but I’d certainly advise all of them to stay well away from the Starship Planet Christmas songs until they’re a lot older.  You don’t want to introduce smart erudite young people to music like this that could easily make them lose all hope for humanity and purpose in life, the suicide rate among young people these days is high enough.  Anyone listening to “Christmas Tree” or in fact anything Starship releases with a Christmas theme attached should be at least 75 years old and have ID.

December 6th – Rira – Love Spoon

Well, I asked for something different out of k-pop’s Christmas material, and I suppose I got my wish.  Rira is a spoon player, and “Love Spoon” is a mostly instrumental track where she clicks along in time to the beat, I suppose you could think of it as a Korean electronica equivalent of Soundgarden’s “Spoonman” with a festive theme.  I’m not really sure what the deal is with spoons and why someone would pick that over the violin or piano, imagine the look on the faces of Rira’s parents when Rira broke to them the news about what she wanted to spend her life studying, I can only guess that there was some domestic friction over that particular career choice.  The joke’s on them however as Rira certainly is going to get the last laugh – her track is actually the best one in this list, which says a lot about the quality here if a few metallic ticking noises is all it takes to get over the line.  Maybe it’s a little unfair to include her in this list at all given that the song technically doesn’t have any Christmas content musically, but she does dress up in a Santa costume at one point and Mirrorball also chose an image of her in the Santa getup for the video thumbnail, so that’s good enough for me.  Besides, I could use a little hiatus from the rest of the fucking crap music here, so in the absence of anything else here approaching good or even average, I guess Rira’s “Love Spoon” will have to do.

December 7th – Vitamin – Christmas Star

Hey, Christmas is great for kids.  Getting presents, getting more presents, having roast dinners cooked for you, Christmas pudding, candy canes, nice warm fireplaces (if you have Northern Hemispherian privilege) or a chance to go over to your rich friend’s house and use their pool (for the rest of us serfs), it’s fuckin’ ace.  So it must really suck a fuck to have to practice some Christmas bullshit song for weeks and then be dragged over to Nugu Park by your parents just so some cunts at an agency too stingy to throw down for a proper music video set can harvest YouTube click revenue.  The song’s not doing too badly with over 100k hits at the time of writing, which definitely puts Vitamin outside Kpopalypse Nugu Alert eligibility territory, and you know that these kids aren’t getting compensated a cent for this shit even though they’re the ones doing all the work trying to make this crap appealing, they’re no doubt getting “paid in experience” like Asian Junkie writers.  Despite the lack of income the kids do a great job making the best fist of this nonsense that one could reasonably expect given the massive handicap they’re lumbered with, and really deserve some proper renumeration for their tolerance levels alone.  Sure, some of their voices sound suspiciously similar, I suspect one of them messed up their lines a bit too much for them to be salvageable so one of the other girls stood in for her, but Christmas is all about the spirit of giving, which I guess could include giving other people your vocal parts.  Let’s not be too hard on these kids, it’s not their fault – their parents on the other hand should be made to stand in the corner with their nose against the wall and think about what they did.

December 7th – Moonlight ft. 109 – I’m Curious About You

Between these two clowns is the crappest Christmas tree ever.  I mean, you might as well not bother, except its presence certainly serves as an excellent metaphor for the uselessness of everything else happening here.  In fact it would have been great if neither of these two bothered with anything at all that’s going on here, visually or musically, and I could have spent my 3:06 listening to Slayer or something, but alas, it was not to be.  The performers don’t even look all that interested in the festive proceedings themselves – the guy looks like all this is a terrible inconvenience that’s taking him away from his fried chicken dinner, there’s nothing very Christmas about that, at least be eating a plum pudding or whatever the fuck it is people eat to celebrate some guy with a halo being squeezed out of a whore’s vag.  Speaking of which, one of the big things that made my mother lose faith in her Catholic upbringing was when she found out how sanitised her religious instruction was compared to what was actually in the Bible, in particular she was pretty miffed to find out that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute after the question about how she made a living was constantly dodged by her teachers.  All religion everywhere can get fucked and so can this song.

December 8th – Fatdoo ft. Ham Ji Min – Problematic Christmas/Why Is She Angry?

It’s just a lyric video, and I don’t understand Korean so I have no idea what’s going on here, but I’m going to take a wild stab in the dark and say that the reason why she’s pissed off with Fatdoo is because he made a Christmas-themed rap song and now she feels obliged to listen to it and pretend to like it so his fragile rapper ego isn’t hurt.  All rappers are egotistical beyond belief, I mean who else would be drawn to a genre of music where all you do is talk about how great you are and how everyone else sucks all day long.  Some might see some parallels to Kpopalypse here, but I’m actually a really positive person.  I don’t think everything sucks, I just think these Christmas songs suck.

December 9th – Hyungdong & Daejune – Secret Love Song

This parody of shitty love ballads isn’t that successful simply because the Barry White cosplay here is accidentally slightly better than 95% of the usual shit love ballads and this ruins the joke.  If Korea’s shitty love ballad music really sounded like this then it would actually be a marginal improvement over what we currently have.  I’m not completely sure if this is a Christmas song or not but one of the guys does intone “Merry Christmas, I’m your Rudolph” in a breathy voice so I’m going to take that as a yes.  At least they passed the Shure Super 55 test so props for that.

December 10th – Sweden Laundry ft. BOL4 – Be Your Christmas

Someone asked me if I like this girl’s keyboard, and I’m not sure if they meant her keyboard playing or the keyboard itself.  I’ve never played this particular model of Yamaha so I can’t really comment there, but this song is weird because it actually sounds totally improvised, both musically and lyrically.  The piano sounds like just random noodling jazz crap even though it almost certainly isn’t, because a culture like Korea’s isn’t really a “culture of improvisation”, I’d say that there’s in fact very little improvised content in all Korean music across the board.  Think about how strict k-pop’s dance routines are – with everything planned out and executed to perfection, that’s how Koreans tend to view so much of performance practice.  The vocals also sound similarly random even though once again I’m sure they’re not, but damned if the singer just seems to be throwing out just any old shit and tacking “Christmas” onto the end.  “You’re my Christmas / I’ll be your Christmas” sorry but excuse me, what the fucking fuck?  Bitch that doesn’t even make any sense, nor does “winter loves you / Christmas loves you” or anything else in this song.  So I guess what I’m trying to say is, fuck this song and kick the keyboard down the stairs.  I hope this answers your query about the keyboard, you’re welcome.

December 10th – Sweden Laundry ft. Vanilla Acoustic – Snowball

Is this a Christmas-themed track for a winter-themed track, is another question that I was asked.  Well, there’s an effing great big white decorated Christmas tree in the background so I’m going to go with it being a festive song and therefore it can go in this list.  Don’t take it personally, you could definitely be forgiven for not noticing the tree at all given that absolutely everything in the background of this video is the same shade of white, and it’s just as well that these girls didn’t also dye their hair white or a lot of music video watchers would have trouble finding them too.  For all the visual interest on offer here, they might as well have just shot a white piece of paper for three minutes and made that the video instead, it certainly would have saved on the setup time.  If they also made the sheet music for this song a blank white piece of paper they would have killed two birds with one stone and the improvement level would be off the charts (literally).

December 10th – B1A4, Oh My Girl, ONF – Timing

Well it’s not exactly good but at least it’s upbeat, which is something.  Also, everyone looks great, which can’t hurt.  Having a verse for the guys and one for the girls is kind of cool too.  This isn’t horrible, or at least the music isn’t as horrible as the video’s general cheesiness, which is huge, but then when isn’t it huge in any of this type of bullshit generally.  I’d say that this is in the top 5% of Christmas k-pop songs for 2018, which is kind of like winning the Fuckhead Olympics but then I suppose it’s better than going away empty-handed.  Oh and for the person who asked, the guy’s glasses suck.

December 10th – Anna – Let It Snow

It occurred to me while watching this latest super-cheap ultra-nugu effort that part of the reason why Christmas comebacks are so popular in k-pop is probably budget-related.  Just like how zombie films are the most popular type of horror film for Z-grade directors to produce because you don’t need much more than some tomato sauce, some charcoal and a few dusty old flanellette shirts to get the right effect, pretty much all the props you ever need for a Christmas comeback are available at your $2 variety store.  I’m pretty sure the “Merry Christmas” sign here is exactly the same one that’s in one of the other videos on this list, so I guess there’s just one fucking great big Cheap As Chips right in the middle of Gangnam and all the agencies both A-list and nugu alike source their Christmas props from there.  Anyway “Let It Snow” doesn’t have much going on visually or musically with only about three difference scenes and not much action, trying to play those crappy jazz chords on the guitar is about the only way to extract any entertainment out of this.

December 10th – Hello Venus, Astro, Weki Meki – All I Want

Everything that is bad about Christmas comebacks condensed into the one song:

• shit bells
• the usual stupid song
• “Merry Christmas ho ho ho” fuck off cunt
• let’s overact in the video like a bunch of morons
• holy shit there’s that group who have been inactive for 2 years why can’t they have a real comeback

December 11th – Ladies Code – The Last Holiday

We’re never going to get cool upbeat k-pop tracks from Ladies Code like their pre-accident songs ever again, are we.  That phase of the group seems to be permanently on ice now, which is a damn shame as their agency were quite good at finding songs for the girls back in the day.  Kpopalypse was one of the only k-pop fans who recommended Ladies Code’s music before their accident (evidence here if you want it), and I really miss their old style.  Of course their agency decided that post-tragedy fast songs weren’t appropriate anymore, and have been serving them nothing but boring ballads and mid-tempo snoozers ever since.  So when I heard that they were going to be doing a Christmas song I knew it was just going to be the same old slow boring bullshit that most groups do for these, because heaven forbid they ever take any chances with this group ever again, and unfortunately I was right.   At least the licking of the knife at 3:00 is cool – I was always told that licking a knife at the dinner table was rude but I never gave a fuck and still don’t, thanks Ladies Code for validating me, where were you when I was 12 and my mum was telling me off for that shit.

December 12th – VAV – So In Love

How ironic that the only k-pop boy group in the history of post-Golden Age k-pop to debut without Autotune on their vocals start off their crappy Christmas song with completely machine-smoothed-to-perfection harmony vocals.  I guess they feel like they have something to prove, or maybe they’re just trying to make it all up to us.  The problem is, of course, that their debut song was pretty cool, whereas this song here is asspaper.  Here not only do we get the usual insipid crap song but we have to tolerate the group all pretending to be bestest buddies ever with their constant touchiness, pillow-fighting (really) and even playing some stupid basketball flick game or whatever the fuck which the camera returns to again and again, maybe it’s what all the cool kids in Korea want for Christmas.  I think when Santa puts me on his knee in the Magic Cave this year I’ll ask for a music video where everyone stabs each other.

December 12th – Twice – The Best Thing I Ever Did

I guess something had to interrupt Twice’s current string of oddly high quality songs, and it might as well be a Christmas song I suppose, because it’s not like anyone’s expecting any quality from those anyway.  Seriously, even the people who despise these lists and think I’m a complete cunt for picking on the “wonderful Christmas songs”, I bet not a single one of them can even name five Christmas songs from last year without actually looking some up – probably using my previous Christmas posts to do it too – because nobody else cares enough to even write properly about this shit – that’s how forgettable all this fucking crap is.  The only people who could possibly think Twice’s latest Christmas attempt was good are crazy Twice stans who would like anything the group does anyway.  Even the trusty YouTube speed control doesn’t help this slow soppy crap, and just transforms into an awful Christmas-themed trap song instead.  At least the visuals are outstanding with the wardrobe department doing their very best to wrap Twice softly in festive garments like Christmas presents for you the viewer, but the music definitely isn’t the best thing they ever did.

December 12th – Yang Chang Keun – Christmas U

Even though we started later than usual with the Christmas bullshit songs, they seem to be more condensed than ever with so much new Christmas crap coming out each day.  The latest piece of shit by some ultra-nugu with a baritone voice (although some vocalfaggot will probably correct me on that) is just as garbage as anything else this year, as well as a real shame because the sounds themselves here are interesting even if the song is not.  The moody intro isn’t too bad but then just when you think it’s about time that the song’s going somewhere it steadfastly refuses to do anything at all, just like the woman in the video.

December 13th – Othankq – I don’t actually know what this is but it’s Christmas related

…and it can fuck off.  Incidentally, Othankq was the producer who debuted a k-pop group with a transexual in them a while back.  Not sure what happened to that group but unfortunately there’s no ladyboys (that I can tell) in this video to give me a reason to care or make this review longer than two and a half sentences.

December 16th – Jessica – One More Christmas

Wow, this had less than 200k views the last time I looked at it.  How could an ex-member of the biggest K-pop girl group of the Golden Age achieve this feat?  Oh – by the song sucking really badly, of course.  Makes sense now.  Jessica, like Tiffany, also looks way different since leaving her former agency now that she’s allowed to have her face taken from all those non-SM-approved camera angles.  Not that it matters, I mean the real issue is that the song sucks balls, I’m just trying to keep myself awake here by finding irrelevant things to write about.

December 17th – FNC Artist – It’s Christmas

FNC’s label song is the usual cheesy bullshit with one key difference – it doesn’t just have their music artists but their comedians/variety show MCs/who the fuck knows I don’t even watch the crap in there as well.  Unfortunately they aren’t able to make the typical Christmas bullshit any better.  In fact if anything they’re even more experienced at hamming it up and being a bunch of embarrassing wankers, so good luck getting through this without gouging your eyes out.

December 17th – Taeho ft Ungjae – Santa Claus

And then there’s Christmas songs that doesn’t even sound like Christmas.  The video doesn’t look the part either, I’m not so sure what’s so Christmas-like about doing Tai Chi or whatever with a beanie on.  I feel like this was a song originally meant for some completely different purpose and they just threw the “Santa Claus” bit in there because it was nearly Christmas anyway so why the fuck not.  I should be grateful on some level I guess, or I would be if the song didn’t suck anyway.

December 19th – Yu Seungwoo – Dream

It’s not enough for Starship Entertainment to have their usual Christmas buillshit, is it.  We have to put up with this dickhead doing a solo song too.  I didn’t bother to check if he’s in the Starship Planet video or not because who cares.

December 21st – Jannabi ft. Suhyun – Made In Christmas

No Suhyun in the video?  This is like getting boxer shorts for Christmas.  Santa’s cruising for an ass-kicking.

December 21st – The Barberettes – Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer

I know it’s a cover and technically ineligible for this list but I included it anyway because The Barberettes are quite thicc and I want to be able to find this video easily later.  I know the girl on the left looks like a sad grumpy bitch in the thumbnail but she’s quite good when moving, I promise.

December 23rd – CKP Company – Merry Christmas Sweet Heart

Who the fuck is CKP Company?  Who even are these people?  I’m supposed to be the one all up on the nugus and even I have no fucking idea about this one.  All I could find while researching was this video for “CKP Box Company”, but it doesn’t seem related, or even from the same country.  It’s the same Christmas bullshit as everything else on this list anyway so perhaps it’s better that I don’t know.  Anyway I wish they would build a box and fuck off in it.

December 23rd – Jo Donghee ft. Kim CHang Ki – A Day In December

Wouldn’t it be funny if a song was released called “A Day In December” and it was about December 8th for no particular reason.

December 23rd – Tiffany – Peppermint

Fuck you Tiffany, fuck you.  You just had to go and make a video for this, didn’t you.  Sorry, I meant to write, thanks for the fanservicey video, you’re so talented and attractive.  Yes, that’s what I meant.

SO LET’S NOW HAVE SOME GOOD CHRISTMAS NEWS

Ami Kim – 2 Minutes To Midnight

A hit-for-hit perfect drum cover of the Iron Maiden song.  Why she chose this particular song for a Christmas-themed cover is anybody’s guess but it’s Iron Maiden so who’s complaining, not me.  Most people who cover Maiden on the drums wreck it with spamming too much double-kick action but Nicko only ever used a single kick pedal so it’s pleasing to see Ami keep her foot off the left kick completely.

Maxim’s Christmas gift

I don’t know who the fuck this girl is or why Maxim are doing a Christmas thing but I figured some of you might be interested in this.  Not sure why.

Loona didn’t do “The Carol 3.0” this year

Thank fuck for that!  I was really expecting the worst, too.  Mind you all twelve girls did get up on stage to do one of their previous shit Christmas songs, which was kind of cute to see even though the song is deep fried shit, so here’s how you can still enjoy the above video.  Just play it with the sound down, and be sure to start the below video (with sound up) at exactly the same time.  If you get it just right – behold, perfect synchronisation!

That’s all for this post!  Merry Christmas from Kpopalypse, be safe over the holiday season and don’t forget to protect yourself from shit music disease by listening to Christmas songs as little as possible!