The nugu stash has been building up, and web traffic to Kpopalypse is still quite high, so it’s time to purge the archives and calm down those clicks once again with another episode of Kpopalypse Nugu Alert, the most unpopular k-pop series in all of the kpoposphere!  Read on as Kpopalypse takes a look at another group of performers and songs that you probably don’t give a shit about!  Yay!

Music videos are ideally suited to telling stories, and if there’s one thing that k-pop fans universally love, it’s a good k-pop drama video.  The k-pop world appears to be in a bit of a lull in drama video productions at the moment, with the form seemingly having peaked about a decade ago with epics like T-ara’s “Day By Day/Sexy Love” and B.A.P’s “One Shot“, and very few agencies trying anything quite as ambitious and high-budget since.  However you don’t need a big budget to make a drama video, just a big imagination, and there’s plenty of companies and artists out there still giving us drama epics on a somewhat smaller scale.  This episode of Kpopalypse Nugu Alert focuses on what’s happening with drama videos on the very nugu end of the spectrum – who are the less well known artists out there making drama videos, what ideas do they have, and how do they measure up to the well-known epics?  Let’s take a look!

Usual Kpopalypse Nugu Alert eligibility criteria applies:

• Less than 20,000 views on official channels
• None of these artists are likely to be caught up in a public face-slap controversy anytime soon
• Relevant to Kpopalypse

Let’s go!

 

---

 

Jeon Ki Sung – Nevervill

In a horror-style plot closely reminiscent of Kpopalypse fanfiction, “Nevervill” starts off with some random guy being chased down a street and abducted by an anonymous Daewang-faced individual.  He later wakes up and is subjected to various forms of confinement and torture, not including the music itself which is actually rather poorly-matched to the mood of the action.  It remains unclear whether the man has been randomly selected for his meat quality or if he performed some specific act in order to be deserving of this fate, but his constipated walk and withered facial expression means that he doesn’t seem like he’s living significantly less of a tortured existence before anything actually bad starts happening to him.  Meanwhile the singer delivers the song in a classroom with a chalkboard behind him, possibly teaching about “the fap equations” so when his replacement hand finally comes online at the end of the video, he can experience smooth fapping action to his k-pop fave’s next comeback (probably Apink).  Oh and the Iron Maiden shirt one of the accomplices wears depicts the front cover from “The Trooper” single, a far better song than this one, oh well.

Youtube views at the time of writing: 2674

Notable attribute: the baseball bat being used as a torture instrument is proof that all sport is morally wrong

Nugu Alert rating: very high

---

 

Pinn – Hide & Seek

An intense video that once again has a horror theme, with a generically “The Ring” style outcast girl seeking revenge on her classmates for schoolyard bullying.  It’s not quite clear how she’s gradually bumping off her tormentors, as I imagine just giving someone the stink-eye Kubrick-stare on its own probably wouldn’t be enough to kill someone without some knives or blunt instruments also involved, but it seems to be effective even if as a past bullying victim I was hoping for a bit more gore.  Fortunately the music is a slightly better fit for the action this time, with some subtle instrumentation working well with the visuals, even if it’s somewhat less effective as a standalone song.  It’s a pretty good package overall and just shows what can be achieved with a few old school uniforms as long as your school gives you permission to film stuff on the weekend and doesn’t mind their good name being cast into disrepute as a haven of nugu bullying. 

Youtube views at the time of writing: 2178

Notable attribute: one of the bullies throwing the ball at the girl’s head at 0:47 is proof that all sport is morally wrong

Nugu Alert rating: very high

---

 

Lee Yejin – Will You Show Me My Heart

Less heavy on the horror (unless you count the very poor microphone technique) but just as keen to show the immorality and degeneracy of all things sportball-related, Lee Yejin reminisces about the time she used to dress like Tsuki from Billlie and have fun with her childhood friend.  Then of course this was ruined when they became teenagers and everything fell apart because he tried to peer pressure her into liking the sportball.  The guy has no tact, gleefully bouncing the ball thing around Lee Yejin and putting it in the net, playing ultra-competitive for no reason when he should be letting her have the ball at least some of the time, so she has a massive dummy-spit and leaves as she rightly should.  Later on he’s about to throw another smaller sportball ball thing clean at her head and she encourages him to go a bit slower so he doesn’t break her fucking face.  In return for having to chastise him into being a decent human being, she then makes him pay, return-lobbing the accursed ball far into the distance, probably screaming inside her head “you’re so keen on exercise, why don’t you go run for your precious ball, you fucking cunt”.  A moment of great justice that is hard to beat in k-pop videos and their obsession with “Hann” (a Korean word that roughly means “everything sucks in my real life right now so I won’t get your hopes up by making creative output that is in any way more hopeful, pleasant or optimistic than my own depressive spiraling inceldom”).

Youtube views at the time of writing: 1338

Notable attribute: dopey cunt boyfriend at 1:00 has the slowest reaction to a surprise balloon-pop ever, more proof that all sport is morally wrong and also curdles the mind

Nugu Alert rating: extreme

---

 

MustBe – SweetPea

Somewhat more inexplicable than anything else on offer in this episode, the drama video for MustBe’s “SweetPea” starts off with a girl sneaking into a guy’s house because she likes lollies, or something?  After throwing around the sweets for a while she eventually works out that they’re actually for physical consumption rather than juggling and starts chowing down, then the guy comes along and they have a bit of under-the-covers sexy times, then she vanishes and appears behind him after he wakes up… or something?  I watched it quite a few times and I still don’t really get what is supposed to be happening or why, and I’m also not sure why the performers have weirdly garish henna cheek tattoos that make your average 2020’s-era rapper’s random facial scribbles look somewhat tasteful.  Fortunately in this case the song is quite bad so I don’t feel too compelled to watch this video a bunch more times to try and figure anything further out about it, so I probably won’t be thinking about “SweetPea” all that much by the time the next Nugu Alert rolls around.

Youtube views at the time of writing: 889

Notable attribute: no sportball content here at all, so that’s a positive, let’s keep it up folks

Nugu Alert rating: extreme

---

 

That’s all for this episode of Kpopalypse Nugu Alert!  Kpopalypse will return at a future date with more nugus – you can count on it!