It’s time for QRIMOLE!  Let’s take a look at this month’s questions for Kpopalypse!

Hi oppar! I have two questions:

1. The pandemic has made me even more of an antisocial cunt than I was before, and I’ve isolated myself from most people. Recently I’ve found myself missing the good times I had talking with online friends in the past, and then I realized I completely forgot about a friend’s birthday earlier this month. That was a wake-up call to reality. However, talking to people has turned into a chore or something that feels overwhelming for the most part. How do I ease myself into becoming more sociable again and getting back in touch with my old friends?

2. You have discussed in a previous QRIMOLE your process for writing and how it starts with breaking down an idea. Do you have other tips? I want to tell my own stories but I always find myself without ways to structure vague ideas into stories, and I’ve always had a problem where I spend too much time on the details and not enough on the actual story (partially because I’ve always been a perfectionist that doesn’t know how to deal with conflict – as a kid I wanted to make all of my characters perfect and happy all the time). Have you ever had a problem like that, or with something like lack of ideas?

Thanks in advance!

1. I was already very antisocial anyway and so COVID just fit right into my lifestyle, now I had a valid excuse to do all the neglecting of friendships that just comes to me naturally.  So what I’m trying to say here is that I could be the wrong person to ask about this topic.  Good luck with it, but remember that you can use COVID as an excuse for not catching up and use that as your ice-breaker, it’ll make it less awkward perhaps.
2. I do know a lot about this, however!  Look forward to a post probably early next year, or maybe later this year if you’re very lucky, specifically about fiction writing.

Between 1994 and 2005 or so I used to listen to fair amount of R&B, but I was struggling through a recent k-pop album that was pretty much all R&B and realized that after reading your blog for 7 years I’m mostly convinced that R&B, or at least the current version of it, mostly does suck. Does this mean that with your help I can now see the truth, or does it instead mean that I let you influence my musical opinions too much and I should strive more to think for myself? Or maybe both somehow? (I guess this is a sideways way of asking if you really believe that musical taste is subjective).

Musical taste is definitely subjective.  I mean there are people growing up right now who probably think the current R&B is great.  Of course we should pity them anyway.   Of course there was a few small fragments of R&B that I consider good back in the day but that doesn’t sound anything like the R&B of now, so how much they really are “R&B” could be questioned.  Remember that R&B as a genre label had little to do with music genre and was actually a racial segregation dogwhistle that only existed and still exists because the music industry was and is racist, so all sorts of different music used to get thrown into “R&B” just because black people were doing it.

I sent in a question some days ago about companies and artists getting scammed by promoters abroad. At the time I had no idea the CEO and top manager of Omega X were a couple of psychopaths which puts this mess into a new perspective. The company even stated “The first company that we contracted for the American tour went bankrupt, and the company that took on the tour afterward was much worse scammers than we’d heard.” So they heard about the previous kpop acts that they scammed and still went ahead??

Guess so.  There are tons of scammers in the music business at all types of levels.  A lot of touring management companies like to skim the cream off the top of touring costs while providing next to nothing in return, this is sadly common practice and takes pretty savvy artist management to negotiate.  I imagine that language and distance barriers faced by k-pop agencies trying to float western touring activity would make it even easier for such scammers to operate.

Have you heard about an issue between youtubers and musicians Twosetviolin and blinks? Sorry about the Koreaboo article but I’ve mostly heard about this on reddit/twt and I don’t want to link all individual posts about the issue: [link removed for reasons]

I do feel like kpop fans can’t have their idols be criticized/made fun of, even when it’s harmless. During this whole thing, I was also attacked by a blink on twitter because I said I didn’t enjoy Pink Venom that much. I have like 200 followers on twitter, never @ blackpink themselves, just made a stupid comment on my account. My best friend and another one of my friends were also dragged into this because they agreed with me. We ignored them and privated our accounts for a bit, just to get some peace, but what do you feel like it’s the best way to act when it comes to stuff like this? I feel like ignoring it and just moving on is the safest thing but I’m not really sure because I rarely have to deal with this shit

We don’t need to see the Koreaboo article, TwoSetViolin’s parody is fairly self-evident to anyone with a brain and nobody needs to read Koreaboo’s clickbait trash or the inflated ‘drama’ from k-pop fans to be able to guess the general reaction.  TwoSetViolin are just acting ‘in character’ as if Paganini was alive today and imagining how he would react if he incorrectly interpreted the song “Shut Down” as a diss against him and felt like making a reply.  They even spell this out directly after the song finishes, when Paganini is told “you know it’s not about you, right?” and then he feels really stupid that he made the song at all, TwoSetViolin probably added this because they knew some k-pop fans would be too dim to understand the joke if it wasn’t made super obvious.  Of course k-pop fans still didn’t get it because they really are that fucking dumb, OR they’re so invested in the toxic “music as sport” mentality that they DID get it but are playing dumb anyway so as to be seen as more “team Blackpink”.  It’s pretty clear from some of the very sharp k-pop references in the song that TwoSetViolin are k-pop fans themselves to at least some degree, they didn’t miss a beat with the various k-pop references and even hint in the lyrics at the amount of unfair control that Blackpink and other k-pop artists have to endure, which they probably wouldn’t bother to do if they didn’t have some empathy for k-pop’s stars.  You don’t have to go very far to find k-pop friendly content on their channel either.

So as usual it’s all just a fuss about nothing.  As for what to do about crazy fans, blocking and going on private for a while is a good decision, wait a couple weeks and it’ll blow over.  If things get really extreme click here for advice.

Hello oppar! I went to my first metal concert, it was crazy. I have never really listened to metal other than briefly but the event was super fun! The atmosphere was pretty good and it was my first time seeing people crowdsurfing (kinda crazy to see people just being tossed around on the crowd). I am confused that a lot of people were just standing around on the floor? It seems like in the US post-COVID a lot of people don’t know how to have a good time at a concert. For me this is jumping around, singing along, and bopping. For others it was standing with their phone up. Seemed weak for metal fans. Have you noticed this being more prevalent post-COVID?

I saw Sabaton and Epica, and it was interesting even if a lot of it felt like war propaganda. The Epica keyboardist used a curved keyboard and it looked really awesome. Also he was spinning his regular keyboard around like a top? Could you please explain this because it’s hard to imagine the curved keyboard is good for anything other than looking cool (it did look really cool!).

Also I tried listening to metal afterwards but it was too grating through my earbuds. But I’d definitely attend a concert again! What’s the best way to find out which acts are worth seeing? I have limited money as a student so I’d like to maximize crowd engagement. I find that if music is live, I tend to really enjoy it so genre doesn’t really matter.

Thanksss oppar! Let’s hope for more good music this fall.

I’ll let the Epica keyboardist explain his own keyboard rig, watch here from 4:17 and he will take you through it all.  But yes the curved keyboard mainly just looks cool!

While there are fans who like to get active at the front of metal shows, most fans just want to see the band and hear the music.  Also keep in mind that a lot of fans of the power metal style that bands like Sabaton and Epica perform are older and when you get older that moshing shit gets really old because being in a moshpit hurts!  Best way to find out which bands are good live is just to search up people talking about past shows on forums, YouTube is also good for this, most high profile bands have plenty of footage on YouTube that you can check out which will give you a feel of what to expect.

In the last roundup you said it isn’t the 4th generation yet. I thought it was just another way of saying that a group debuted during a certain time period, and that it sounded kind of silly and made up. Do the “generations” of Kpop have an actual meaning? How do you know when it’s a new generation?

I didn’t take that comment too seriously when I was writing it, but for a rough guide to what I think is the meaning (which is obviously subjective):

1st gen: k-pop emergence, lagging behind pop from other countries in sound, fashion and technically, few people care outside Korea.  Era of Seo Taiji & The Boys, H.O.T, s.e.s, BabyVOX, TVXQ, CSJH etc
2nd gen: k-pop catches up, emergence of “golden age” artists gaining cult status in the west.  Era of SNSD, T-ara, EXO, Super Junior, 2NE1, Wonder Girls, miss A, BigBang, f(x), 4minute, KARA etc
3rd gen: k-pop as a major player on the world stage, realistically competing on global pop charts, now starting to set music fashion trends.  Era of BTS, NCT, Blackpink, Twice, aespa, Itzy, Loona etc

I think the fourth generation will start when Blackpink get inevitably put out to pasture like 2NE1 were… or maybe it’ll be some other event.  Don’t worry I’ll let you know when it’s time.

Hello oppar!

I’m that dude from the giant post in QRIMOLE January 2021. The one who asked about how to study well in third-degree level when your professors sucks ass, about a sus dude that sparked my interest and about finfing job in sundays-only.

I kinda gave up the job thing. I really don’t think I got the time for it. And that’s because I am still struggling a bit with the adult life.
Nowadays, I eat well. Since I am studying Medicine, I actually learnt a bit about how my diet back home was fucked and how it prejudiced my body and mental health. Since I am still poor (got no job), I learned how to make nutritious meals for myself, and it has been wonderful to be honest! Eating what I prepared limited the chance to get diarrhea and other mishaps that were usual when I went out to eat, which also let me be more productive.

Which leads me to the study part. The professors are still a pain in the ass (even more so in some subjects) but I am doing your tactic of sharing the work with other responsible colleagues. It is working, since to this day I still haven’t failed any subjects! My scores are kinda low, I admit, but that’s more because of the reduced vacations (thanks covid) that the university is imposing to remediate the delay in 2020. We got less than a month of it between the semesters now. Everybody is quite tired of it, but most of us are managing, somehow.

About the guy that I had a crush on… Found out that he is really gay, which made me really hopeful, but then found out that he’s also married (to a man, just to be clear). LOL. We are friends now.

This friend is really fit, and this fact stimulated me to start working out, but I still have to step up my game in my training frequency. I am slowly stopping being a lazy ass, caonima.

In the university I am having more contact with Psychiatry and I am currently in a process of self-understanding about my mental state. There’s a diagnostic, which I prefer to not reveal, that explains a lot of my characteristics, but it’s validity is quite a big discussion in the medical field. It really explains a lot of things that I do, how I process some events and the conflicting feelings that I have. Current in search of an adequate professional that can help me in this journey.

In short, even with all the hardships, I am living a good life. Could be more exciting, more happy or with more money? Yes, definitely. But considering the path for self-destruction I was before, I like the way that I’ve chosen, for now.

Thanks for helping me oppar. You are the best cunt.

Thanks for checking in and letting us know about your progress!  Onwards and upwards!

Hi Oppa! As a struggling musician I thought I would plug my first album I just did – mainly since I transcribed Savage for piano and featured it. I, like you, was conflicted on the song especially with how empty the chorus felt but was still sort of intrigued by the weird rhythms running around in the background. Reminded me of the Rite of Spring so I tried incorporated harmonies from that to give Savage a bit more beef. What do you think?

It’s a better chorus than the original!  Not sure about the rest of it though, as an innately rhythmic song it doesn’t really go that well with extended harmony, to really make this work I think you’d have to change it to the point where it didn’t actually sound like the original song at all anymore, which is actually not such a bad idea – that’s how a lot of original songs get written, by the composer starting off with something unrelated as the base and then twisting it beyond recognition to the point where it’s essentially their own.  So I’d encourage you to get even wilder with what you’ve got and discard the link to “Savage” completely.  Yes you lose a little marketability that comes with doing a cover song, but you potentially get royalties that you otherwise wouldn’t…

So Mr. Kpopalypse-oppar, I recently heard the OST of one of my favourite games ever, Knights in the Nightmare. This is a extremely obscure JRPG, even in Japan (the only youtuber I ever found talking about it in english was this one). Probably I wouldn’t like this game so much if it hasn’t such good music in it and it has at least 2 different OSTs, since the game was released do the NintendoDS and the PSP in the late 2000’s – early 2010’s but it was re-released for Android and IOs in Japan this year, which I don’t really know anything else about.

1. While I personally have a big distaste for the sound capacity of the NDS, I found it to be more enjoyable than the PSP one.
Using one specific track for comparison, what version you think is objectively musically better, the NDS one or the PSP? And, concerning your personal opinion, does that choice change?

2. This one might be a little bit more difficult to understand, since english isn’t my native language (one of the brazilian caonima [and fuck Bolsonaro, your time is near, bitch!]) but, 4 of these tracks have the same leitmotif in common. Each one of the tracks are heavily related to a different character, which shares a deep bond with themselves.
I highlighted the moment where this leitmotif happen in them down below. I believe that listening them in this order facillitates the perception of the similarity:
Maria:
Mellia:
Melissa:
Marietta: a more subtle on here() and other here
While the use of leitmotif in video games is obviously nothing unusual, the use of this one specifically seems to bridge a gap in the style chosen to tell the story in the game (totally fucking non-linear), highlighting the importance that these characters have to each other. Since the moment that I perceived this, I felt that it was a really creative and interesting detail in the production of such a product, even more once when it is made by a reasonably small development studio.
Have you ever played a game that managed to produce a similar felling in you, especially related to music like in the aforementioned exemple? I would love to feel that amazement again, if possible.

3. Not really a question, but if others haven’t told you already, Brazil’s election that will happen next Sunday, October 30th are probably the most important that we had in decades, not only for the country but for the world as a whole. If Bolsonaro wins, the chances that he will seize the power from brazilian people and instititutions are extremely high. Australian cunts thejuicemedia even made videos about it (shame that they preferred the sociologist with that annoying voice, I love the usual one) here.

Even before the beginning of the electoral race in July, people that simpathized with the opposing candidate are being murdered by the president supporters.
One of the biggest Bolsonaro allies (who was his “minister” of Human Rights) is involved in criminal ways to prevent abortion in a 10-year-old child. Even with this, she easily just got elected as a senator at the start of this October. She is heavily associated with protestant christian churches in Brazil, and uses the religion to manipulate the faith of the voters.
3 years ago, the Supreme Court decided to criminalize homophobia in Brazil in the same way that the law treats racism (lightly, but still better than fucking nothing). Since then (and for other reasons), Bolsanaro’ allies decided to attack the Supreme Court, to the point of his followers started do literally demonize the Supreme Judges (most of them are not conservatives, obviously). Everybody in this country knows how much Bolsonaro hates the gays and don’t give a shit about the rights of minorities. So I guess I don’t even need to tell you what might happen to LGBT rights.
Talking about human rights, a lot of people here seemed to “forget” that 700,000 brazilians died of COVID since 2020. Google says that is 688,000, but I am quite close with the health work force and a lot of psysicians that are also Bolsonaro’s supporters defrauded death certificates of undoubtful cases of COVID to similar death causes like, SARS, which are NOT reported as COVID and therefore diminishes the death count. Bolsonaro actually made his best to stimulate the population to NOT do the social distancing during 2020, NOT wear masks (to this day) and delayed the purchase of the vaccines.
I didn’t focused in this part during the writing, but even in English, that’s a lot of content showing that to each one of these situations (and various others that i didn’t mentioned but are on thejuicemedia link), the current federal administration acted in various corrupt ways to actualize the president’s bidding.
Just to rub it in, a lot of brazilians are feeling shame of their own nationality (which I actually agree with you that shouldn’t be a reason to feel pride anyway), because Bolsonaro supporters also fanatically uses brazilian “symbols”, like the yellow&green soccer shirt and even the brazilian flag. The propaganda of the regime is quite brainwashing, exactly because of this (cultural?)appropriation.
Basically, if Bolsonaro gets reelected, just like the USA still flirts with and like how Russia is right now (there’s quite a lot of internal interest of the Brazilian Army to invade Venezuela and depose its far-left dictator, Nicolas Maduro, wouldn’t be that different from Ukraine, since both are full of oil reserves), Brazil will tread the path of a christian fascist nation so yeah, it is hard out here for a bitch.
I sincerely don’t know what to do if these bastards re-elect this excrement. I guess I gotta to leave the country if the situation keeps worsening like it has in these last 4 years?

Sorry for the length and thanks for the platform to vent my frustrations. Wish you a wonderful month and a painful slow death to Rupert Murdoch.

1. I have no opinion on it, they both do the job.  The power of a particular computer’s music hardware isn’t as important as what people do with it.  Some amazing music was written for the Commodore 64 back in the 80s and that thing only had three mono channels.  The Commodore Amiga only had two 8-bit stereo channels (two left, two right) and people made whole albums with it.
2. Linking me five songs in one question godddamn how much time do you think I have LOL – at least you timestamped the relevant sections!  This type of repetition of the same melodic idea in different songs is borrowed from classical music and you’ll hear it in there all the time.  It’s also heard a lot in tangenital styles like opera.  For recent examples, “Repo: The Genetic Opera” continually uses the same melodic motifs throughout many different songs, as do a lot of concept albums like Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” and others, it’s a very common technique used deliberately to tie different songs together into an overarching story, both narratively and emotionally (by hearing a previous theme again you’re brought back to the emotions from when that theme was heard before).
3. If this political rant was an American one I probably would have edited it, but since it’s Brazil I’ll let it slide.  Bolsonaro sucks, and he absolutely WILL lose the election and absolutely WILL do a Trump and falsely claim that he won it, because Trump is his idol and he has no original ideas.  Brazilians however do love democracy, the question is how hard will they fight to keep it when someone like Bolsonaro threatens it.  It’s really important that Bolsonaro loses, because if he wins the Amazon rainforest is toast and if the Amazon isn’t protected basically bye bye any hope of climate change leading to anything less than mass starvation and natural disaster for many people across the world (this will probably happen anyway but the question is one of severity).  EDIT: I wrote this answer just before the result came out, Bolsonaro conceded defeat woo!

Hello Kpopalypse, I hope you’re fine.

After 5 years of entering and exiting 2 of the top 3 university of my country bcs I was stupid enough to react to my first major failure by losing any motivation to do anything other than playing my phone 24/7, I got accepted to University of Western Australia in Perth. Far from your hometown, but I plan to watch Blackpink in Melbourne, I hope we could cross paths IRL. In preparation so I don’t quit from college AGAIN, I had :

1. Went to a psychiatrist that couldn’t care less that I’m an atheist and I also have a good amount of antipathy towards marriage ( I LITERALLY coudn’t tell ANYONE about it before bcs my country is one of the most conservative country in the world. Not my family and friend, not my previous psychologist and psychiatrist)
2. Discovered that I was unintentionally blocking the fact that I was sexually assaulted when I was a kid, (I’ve FORGOTTEN about it until an incident that I won’t share here triggers the memory back in the beginning of 2022) Now I’m working towards my recovery with my physiciatrist from no. 1, and it goes extremely well.
3. Start running 1km/morning
4. Restarting my hobbies, baking and learning piano
5. Will take an University Preparation Class (how to write essay, scientific journal, etc.)
6. Taking a major from my number 2 interest (Biology-related), so I won’t be burned out bcs of taking my fav, politics-related major (Because you rec to not make money with something that you love, you said I will lose interest bcs I will see it as a chore)
7. Already have someone I know to look after me in Perth
8. Decreasing procrastination bit by bit. It’s working, I’d rather preparing to go study in Perth than playing my phone now. (FYI in the past, even when the final exams was happening I still online on my phone 24/7)

What do you think I should add so I won’t have any relapse and quit uni for the 3rd time?

Do you know how much the living cost for students in Perth? (It’s okay if you don’t, I just want to make sure those youtubers aren’t lying)

I also have questions about Blackpink concert promotors in Australia :

1. Does the promotor love to keep a lot of tickets to themselves so they could ‘insader traded(?)’ the tickets in 2x – 3x pricier tag than the normal price?
2. Were they able to organize the concert timely and minimal fainting fans?

I hope I can finish my degree this time and get a good job so my mom could enjoy her life to the point she doesn’t have to worry about money (My mom is a single mother, wealthy husband — my father — died at the end of last year so me and my mom got A LOT of money, that’s how I’m funding my study at UWA). Dear Kpopalypse and Caonimas, please send a prayer to me at your nearest Rainaism temple, Thank you😄.

Sincerely, your reader since 2013.

I think you’re doing fine, the main thing is don’t overload yourself, take some time to smell the roses.  Self-improvement is great but so is self-care, that’s what will sustain you.

I don’t know the cost of living for students in Perth, I’ve never been there, it’s too far away from anything!  Maybe one day.

Blackpink concert:

1. Unlikely that the promoter themselves would do this (or they would find themselves out of a job quickly) but other third parties might.  Don’t buy tickets from shady reseller sites that will rip you off blind and half the time not even give you the ticket you paid 3x the price for.
2. Concerts in Australia at big venues are pretty tightly organised, I would expect things to run smoothly.  Big multi-artist events can have mishaps but something like a Blackpink tour – they’ve been touring for a while, expect a pro event.  When I saw them a few years ago it was nothing but organised.

Good luck with things and thanks for continuing to read!

I’ve only been at my current job for about two months and I have never had anyone complain about me until recently. Of course I messed some things up at the very beginning, but after about two weeks I’ve rarely made any significant mistakes. However, recently most people found out that one my coworkers liked me and suddenly I hear about quite a few of them complaining about the way I do things behind my back, despite them kissing my ass while I was at work. Only one of these insecure cunts actually had the guts to say it to my face when they didn’t like something, the others only do it when I’m not there. I had no problem with her. On the contrary, I tried to fix the issues she told me about. Why don’t they all do that instead of complaining about someone who’s still new in that place. Are they that bored and unhappy with their own lives? Cause I do not think about them when I am outside of working hours and unless they affect everyone else with their actions I mind my own business.
What really annoys me is the fact that they won’t say it to my face when they have a problem. I don’t mind criticism as long as it’s reasonable and explained to me personally, not to other people. I guess I’ve always believed that if you have something to say you should say it with your chest.
I guess this is common experience but I haven’t been in the work force for that long and I don’t know if I’m dealing with it properly. I’ve been polite to everyone involved but I don’t know whether I should just tell them to fuck off, especially since I don’t plan on staying there much longer. How should I deal with this?

If this was a big job that meant a lot to you I think perhaps it would be worth talking to someone higher up who you trust about the situations.  However if you’re worried that this might make things difficult, since you’re not going to stay there long, my suggestion would be to just ride it out by ignoring it.  If you’re mature minded enough to insist that people talk to you directly about issues, then you should also be mature enough to just push through and get the job done without letting people being weird and petty bother you overly.  Don’t let people rattle you, get your revenge by being better than them – and then leaving for greener pastures.

(Quoting from the retrospring question) The porn industry criticism is absolutely valid and I support it, and I do agree that consuming porn way too much can leave you desensitized and can be quite bad for you. So how do we critique porn with nuance

Firstly understand that a lot of the people pushing anti-porn narratives are either fundamentalists christians, or people who have forged alliances with fundamentalist christians.  A lot of anti-porn propaganda sites that seem simply anti-porn with no other agenda on the surface are actually run by these types of people but they try to keep their religion as under the radar as possible, because they’re worried about putting the radical feminists offside if those feminists were to discover that they’re being hoodwinked into siding with people who would probably also deny them abortions, contraception, sex outside of marriage, gay rights etc.  Fundamentalist christians go after porn because it’s a ‘soft target’, it’s an easy thing to criticise and strawman and get people onside with, and then they trot out their real agenda later on.  Sex work is the frontline of human rights and free expression, once that barrier goes down then queer content and reproductive rights are always next in line.  So whenever you’re reading information do some research on what the source is, and what’s behind that source.

Secondly understand that like the music industry, the porn industry is very fragmented and there’s lots of different aspects to it, it’s impossible to really put under one umbrella and say “the porn industry is all like [x]” because you’re guaranteed to find areas of the business where it’s not like that, just because of the sheer size of it.  Just like in the music business there are several different companies on all different sizes, levels of legitimacy/legality, and ethics, AND a very large quantity of smaller independent operators, and a wide variety of business practices and ethics spread across all of this.  Yes there are human traffickers and shady companies blackmailing or tricking people into making porn content and/or paying them unfairly, and that should be exposed and criticised, as should similar practices in the music industry.  There’s also porn performers who are making their own work exactly when, how and with whom they choose, and are being paid very well for it.  There’s also a lot of other people who don’t fall neatly into any of the above.  Sometimes what looks like a self-determining smut-maker making all their own decisions is in reality being tightly controlled (see Amouranth), sometimes what looks like someone in a strictly controlled system is actually very self-determined (see Kaho Shibuya).

Thirdly, there’s no firm medical consensus on how harmful porn actually is, or even if it’s harmful at all.  If nothing else everyone can probably agree that literally anything done too much is harmful no matter what it is, and that porn addiction is definitely harmful if it prevents a relationship from functioning, but there’s no reason why that has to be the case, or any evidence that this is what happens in every case or even most cases.  There’s also quite a bit of research showing that porn has benefits.  Again, it’s a deep and complex area and “porn is medically good” or “porn is medically bad” are both drastic oversimplifications of something that in reality can be either good or bad for you depending on how you choose to use it to enhance your life (or not).  However if you’re someone who doesn’t enjoy pornography and genuinely wouldn’t miss it I’d say why not just go without it, if nothing else you’ll save yoursaelf a lot of time and money!  I’ll be here with my JAV recommndations waiting for you if you change your mind.  JAV of the month for October is DVDMS-883.

Hello Kpopalypse.
Um, I am kinda of a internet iliterate… How exactly can I know when will you have your next livestream?

It’s always at the same time each week, although this time is subject to change due to “daylight savings” (ugh) in Australia.  This post has more information.  I also tend to update the Twitter just before I stream so look out for that.

Help! I want to make cute girl music like all the cool producer oppars do for my k-pop bias groups. Unfortunately I am the opposite of a cute girl, and all of the cute girls I know are either too busy, don’t like me, or can’t sing. I don’t have any money to commission a girl to sing on a track that I make, so what should I do? Pitch down my track to fit my husky man voice? Use an AI or vocaloid? Give up and just make songs that actually fit the way I sing?

Pitch your songs to k-pop companies and let them worry about the wrangling of cute girls part.  But if you can’t be fucked, any of the other options you suggested are fine!

I saw this tweet the other day about Yeri and her debut with ICC’s concept and it’s relation with sexualization of minors. You said in your blogpost from 2016 that outsiders are more likely to be aware of the dog whistles because they haven’t been desensitized to them. Yet, here we have the exact opposite happening, with locals defending the concept and the only ones who are calling the concept weird are kpop stans (by proxy of calling Min Heejin weird). Can you explain what’s going on here?

Well it’s hard to tell what’s going on here exactly but I think it might have something to do with k-pop fans misunderstanding what lolita actually is.  Rest assured that if k-pop fans are complaining bitterly about something and nobody else cares, it’s usually the k-pop fans who are wrong.

I’m going through a weird mental crisis at the moment.

A bit of background – I was a fat girl, stayed fat throughout high school and college, and over this past year I’ve lost around 20 kilos.

I grew up hearing the same thing that lots of fat girls are told – that I’d never have a husband or a family if she stayed fat, I’d never get a good job if I stayed fat, I wouldn’t even be able to make friends if I was fat.

But I didn’t believe it. I thought it was a gross exaggeration designed to scare me into losing weight. I refused to believe that people were that shallow. Once I lost weight, however, I realized all that was told to me was 100% true.

I’d only been kissed a handful of times when I was fat. Each ended with the guys saying “I’m okay to keep it lowkey but don’t tell anyone about this” I was hoping that losing weight might change all that. And it did. New Me lost my virginity within 2 months of being slim.

Old Me had looked for a job for a year after uni. New Me was offered work a month after I hit my goal weight. I was getting asked to drinks and dinners after work by coworkers, my bosses were introducing me to people higher up in my industry – I can’t say for sure that my older self would have not gotten all this, but my older self was literally not going past the interview stage to find out.

A little while later, a guy I’ll call Robert introduced himself at the Starbucks we both frequent. We began talking, and dating, and very soon he said he was falling in love with me. One night, he told me, “I liked you from the first moment I saw you.”

He was obviously referring to the Starbucks meeting, but we’d met long before that. We’d gone to the same high school for four years and we were in many classes together. We dated for another 2 months, but I couldn’t let it go. I thought we were falling in love but it was based on the way I looked. He didn’t even know I existed when I was fat. I didn’t matter until I was this size.

I wish I could just enjoy the attention I get from men and people at large. Instead it makes me sad. It’s the unfairness that gets to me. Old Me longed for someone like Robert and never got him. She tried so hard for everything that I now get so easily. I didn’t necessarily have to be a good person, I just had to be thin.

All this has made me so bitter and cynical about people and the world at large (ha). It’s made it hard for me to trust people. My old self was fat, for sure, but she was happier.

Prettiness is a double-edged sword in the same way that fame or money is.  On the one hand, attention and opportunities that such things provide are certainly nice.  On the other hand, you can never quite be sure of someone’s integrity, are they really interested in the “real” you, or do they just want you for the superficial aspects?  What is the “real” you, anyway?  Does it matter?  Ultimately, I know the following:

• No doctor is ever going to tell you that you shouldn’t be in a healthy weight range, so it’s good to be in a healthy weight range for this reason alone, because you’ll live longer and have less medical issues later in life.  Any other reason is only important if you choose to make it so.
• Nina Nishimura is way hotter now as a “fat chick” than she was 5 years ago, I can’t even fap to her old videos anymore where she’s skinny.  But Ichika Matsumoto looks great and is super skinny and would look weird if she was bigger, I think.  Or maybe she wouldn’t, but it’s hard to imagine her bigger.  So I think different people suit different weights.  But I’m still very much biased towards fat chicks, to a degree.  Mega-obese to the point where they can’t walk properly is a hard no, a definite turn off, but bigger than average is a definite yes for me.  You’d be amazed what guys like and it really sucks for you that the guys who did want to date you when you were bigger wanted to keep it on the DL, guys with the courage to defy social norms in public as well as in private are definitely out there though.  My current girlfriend is not skinny and we were together at the front row of a concert last night.
• The beauty that comes from self-acceptance is as real as any wrinkle, the real reason why fat people don’t get dates and skinny people do is that fat people tend to have less self-acceptance and it’s that lack of self-acceptance that turns people away… but the fat people who DO have tons of self-acceptance, trust me, they have queues forming.  I bet Lizzo does just fine.  Lizzo isn’t popular because she’s fat, she’s popular because she’s fat and she says “take me as I am, or don’t, see if I care, but I’m going to have a good time”.  That’s a great attitude that will draw the right kind of people to you regardless of your weight (and will draw some of the wrong kind too, but you will get used to honing your radar for the better ones over time/experience).  Self-acceptance isn’t about saying “let’s glamourise bad eating”, it’s about saying “my sexiness is more than my meal choices”.
• Life is unfair because people suck, but that doesn’t mean everyone always sucks or that fairness can’t be found.  Look at all the nice and fair people who read kpopalypse.com for instance – they are out there.

I know you’ve already made it clear that a ton of audiophile crap is pure bullshit. Is there anything you can add to this video from your perspective? This is a tech (primarily computer hardware) channel, so the people there don’t have much knowledge of music theory and audio engineering experience like you do.

Digital audio is just data built up from ones and zeroes – a signal is either in the “off” state or the “on” state, there’s no in between with a digital circuit.  So the kind of fidelity aspects that apply to analog signals have no relevance to digital audio, because improving the clarity of the signal doesn’t change the state of the signal digitally, it’s just “on” or “off” and that’s all there is to it.  That’s one of the great things about digital audio, your songs won’t lose fidelity because of how they’re stored, they don’t accumulate noise because “on” is still “on” and “off” is still “off”.  A future music theory post will probably go into greater depth about digital audio!  For now, just know that Linus is correct here.  Linus may not be an audio engineer but he knows his computers and he would know how digital circuits work so I’m not at all surprised to see him correctly calling out this horseshit.

What’s your favourite Depeche Mode song?

No idea tbh but perhaps it’s the one that sounds like this mariachi band

I finished a uni degree a couple years ago that I chose right out of high school. I did well and finished it (bachelor of games design lol) but ended up not going into that industry for a lot of reasons. I lost direction and motivation and fell into a casual job at target. It’s now been 5 years there and I’m about to turn 29 and feel so depressed. My life felt promising but somehow I “failed to launch” after uni. I feel alone and hopeless, with no connections, friends or direction.
[I did try to leave and got a job at an office but the ceo of the company r*ped me and I had to crawl back to target. it honestly kind of traumatized me and made me feel even more hopeless]
I still live at home too, and feel like a loser. Because of that I haven’t dated either, I crave a relationship but feel too ashamed to meet people in my current situation (living at home, no social circle, no career). I wish I had moved out during my 20s but my one friend at the time didn’t want to and I can’t afford a place by myself. I did really well all through school and won a lot of awards, had friends and was on a good trajectory. I don’t know what went wrong. I don’t know how to fix my life before it’s too late.
I feel so lost and I don’t know where to start. Do you have any career or just life advice? Or advice for choosing a career direction, applying to jobs.. thanks

Firstly – there’s no shame in living at home if it’s a situation that’s working for you domestically.  The best thing about it is it allows you to save money.  Saving as much money as you can, while you can, will prepare you well for any next steps.  Put aside some money from that Target job each pay. 

Secondly – there is nothing at all wrong with a casual job either, even if it’s not where you want to be long term.  You can use this job as a stepping stone to something else.  If you get super good at your job perhaps you can climb at Target.  Or perhaps not, in which case you can look for other work and use your experience at Target to help you reach for something better.  Remember when writing a resume that experience is nice, but skills and attitude are far more relevant.  If you send me a resume privately I will help you, but if you don’t feel comfortable with that, a “what a resume should look like” post may appear on this site one day.  Another option is starting your own business… if you can design games, perhaps you can design one that makes money and code it, if striking out on your own seems too bold just keep the Target job and work on the game in your free time, there are great tools out there these days that should allow someone with coding experience but minimal time to make something good.  Another option again is to just say “fuck it”, and learn to love getting a little bit of money doing a boring ass job, while you do the shit you really want to do on the side.  None of these options are inherently better or worse than each other, it’s all up to you and what YOU want, not what society expects.

Thirdly – I graduated later in life than you did, with an even more useless degree than yours (music composition, alumni plus honours no less, also known as a “would you like fries with that”).  It didn’t matter much.  Any degree is a good degree – the main value of a degree is not the qualification itself and what it means, it’s the fact that you’ve shown you’ve got the discipline and cleverness that’s required to finish a degree.  So just keep that in mind, even the most useless degree isn’t toilet paper from an employer’s perspective.

Warning a long text (yes i am venting a little)

Okay so i became friends with two girls a few years ago, i didn’t have a social circle and i was lonely so were they .Anyhow I moved to another country and dealt with plenty of bullshit especially because of my horrible working environment. At some point they came to visit me for a few days and I was in desperate need to talk to someone in person about my problems regarding the job I had and just how stressed I was about my future and in general i was at the lowest point of my life (at that time at least, life is a bitch) .I didn’t want to use them as my therapist or trauma dump them BUT I just wanted to not feel alone, I wanted to be heard ,and I wanted some empathy. Well I didn’t get that if anything somehow i felt more alone after speaking to them than before!! Specifically one of them was more a cunt than the other. I tried to talk to them and tell them what they did hurt me but they were like that’s not what we meant you are taking this the wrong way (no i fucking wasn’t). After they left the one who wasn’t directly a cunt texted me to ask me if i was okay bc i seemed a little down.(no shit sherlock) I decided to lie and say I am just a little stressed. After around a year I cut ties with the cunt but I kept talking with the other one, because for some stupid reason i thought i would look immature if i just cut ties with both of them and since she wasn’t directly a cunt she wasn’t that bad. It was weird, at some point she came alone to visit me again and it was so obvious she was wary of not mentioning the other cunt and it was just ridiculous we were trying to ignore the elephant in the room for what? Or at least why was I doing that ? Well one bad thing is she also became interested in kpop (she is an army) and kdramas( i am sorry but i hate them) .We were even planning to go to a bts concert( i didn’t really want to but at the time i thought that instead of making her uncomfortable i should make me uncomfortable) Then the pandemic happened (THANK GOODNESS I DIDN’T BOOK THE TICKETS) so no concert also that summer i dealt with some incredible stressful financial situation, I was so stressed to the point of growing some gray hair, and during that time I had some personal awakenings one of them was about those girls and the friendship we had and I realized many things such as 1. They were shit talking about me behind my back(ok everybody gossips but you know it felt like every action I took was going to be discussed later as negatively as possible) plus I got he impression they thought I was stupid, incapable and kinda of slut (man i wish if mental health wasn’t a bitch i would be fucking more) 2. I don’t miss their friendship and I am actually relieved that we aren’t talking anymore .They weren’t horrible people,I mean, I am still bitter about them but they just weren’t my people and it was pretty obvious from the beginning but I was in such desperate need of having friends just so i can seem more well adjusted (i wasn’t i don’t think i will ever be) that I ignored their snide remarks till it got bad 3. Just because the other wasn’t directly a cunt it didn’t make her any less of a cunt,she didn’t support me and in general she didn’t give a fuck about my well being.

After that I stopped texting her first ,I was texting back after days with monotonous and boring answers. Well during January I honestly was in no mood at all to text , talk , communicate with anybody unless i absolutely had to (like work and family).She texted me an article of a young korean actress who was found dead in her apartment , asking me why do they die so young,( i think she was referring to korean entertainers idk why). I was actually writing this big text about what I think the reasons may be ,like poor mental health treatment , social pressure, working conditions,drugs etc.But then I was like why i am spending this much energy and time for her ?(plus i am not korean so my opinion is not that accurate) In the end I just ignored the text, a couple months later she texted me a video but I didn’t reply. I hoped that she finally got the message and she would stop interacting with me. Well a month ago she texted me to ask how i am doing. I was thinking maybe I shouldn’t be an asshole and text her back but then again every time she texts she just reminds me of what happened that day i wanted to open up to them , which annoys me, also i am kinda angry at myself for not standing up for myself from the beginning, so I think that the anger and bitterness which I repressed back then are telling me to at least do something now. Talking to her about the whole thing is pointless now because it was years ago plus I honestly don’t believe she ever gave a proper fuck about my well being, we were always surface level friends,I made the mistake to think otherwise. So after all this my questions are:

1.Do I stop ghosting her and talk to her even though it’s going to be awkward and I know whatever I say is going to be turned into gossip?
2.Would I be an asshole or petty if I deleted her from my socials?(i don’t check hers)
3.Those past couple years I stopped forcing myself to be social and make friends since I really didn’t want to meet anyone new and I was also too busy focusing on how to unfuck my life. Lately though I have been thinking it would be beneficial for me to find people who I truly like and they truly like me, however I think as I am growing older I have lost hope that people can be good and I am afraid of being vulnerable. Any tips on how I can deal with that?

 

P.S. During that difficult summer one thing that greatly helped me was one of your answers here for someone else. You said something about people being inherently worthy and we don’t have to do anything to prove our worth. Such a simple fact. It helped me have a more positive outlook of myself and life in general. I am worthy of love,what a groundbreaking concept!

I’d just ghost both of these people fuck it.  The fact that you can even write two long-ass paragraphs about how annoyed you are about the situation, that alone should tell you all you need to know.  Look forward not backward.  But then that’s me and I’m an asshole, if you wanted to reply back and give the nicer one a second chance you could, but I certainly would fucking not, I would just forget about them both without a moment’s hesitation.  Don’t delete her from your socials though, that’s just going to cause more replies and maybe more drama too, don’t reply to her either, just don’t do anything.  Ghost means ghost, it doesn’t mean block, it doesn’t mean react, it means ghost.  As far as these two are concerned you are not there.

Vulnerability is an inevitable part of socialisation.  It becomes easier to handle this with practice, and with getting better at finding the right groups of people.  The easiest way is to congregate around a mutual interest that may attract like minds (hint: not k-pop).  If you want to practice, practice with people you don’t know.  Last night I went out with my girlfriend and we saw The Sisters Of Mercy because she’s a huge fan so I thought I’d take her.  They were good, I liked the concert.  Afterward I saw some of the guys in the band in the audience area just going to get drinks and stuff so I just started talking to one of the guys because I had some stuff I wanted to ask him.  “Hey, great show, I really enjoyed it” – good icebreaker.  We got talking, what a cool dude, well spoken, polite, friendly.  I’m the most introverted person ever, and people mistake introverted for shyness but it’s not, if I want to talk to someone, I will talk to them.  You can do balls out shit like that, but you really don’t have to jump in the fire to that extent.  Just be cool and be you, and if you’re worried that the you that is you isn’t cool – don’t worry, it will be, it just takes a little while to find you comfort zone maybe.

How can I become more accepting of my aging body as a 30 year old woman? I have a youthful/cute face and I dress accordingly, I like fun, feminine clothes and hairstyles, but I also have deep forehead wrinkles due to stress and permanent tics and it just looks awful and jarring. I had bangs to cover them up but I decided to change my hairstyle and I’m starting to regret that because I can’t even take selfies anymore and even those apps that make you look like an alien with a v-shaped face can’t smooth down my forehead because the wrinkles are that noticeable (also it’s not healthy, I know.)
I’ve been to the psychiatrist but I don’t have tourettes. My tics are just caused purely by stress/autism so there isn’t a magic pill that’s going to paralyze my forehead. I did get botox injections in my forehead in past years and those worked super well but the prices skyrocketed post-pandemic and just I don’t have the budget to splurge on that every six months anymore. Plus it feels like a waste because it’s not permanent.

The logical side of me says it would just be cheaper to accept my face/body as is and that the pressure to look immaculate is just part of a sexist society and a plastic surgery industry that wants me to waste all my money chasing an impossible beauty ideal, plus I’m not even a celebrity that needs to get shit done so who cares if I have wrinkles and I better deal with it because I can’t stop the process of aging and I should just… accept myself? But I don’t know how to actually do it. The emotional side of me just feels very ugly. Like I obviously don’t dress like a rookie underage girlgroup but I don’t want to look like a boring person in a boring style either. What can I do? How can I make this work in my favor instead of against?

There’s a few options:

• plastic surgery
• change your hairstyle back or find another cover up
• learn to love it, fuck it

None of these options are “wrong” but guess which one I recommend.  In my opinion most women don’t even look good until they hit their 30s anyway, there are exceptions but generally speaking what women consider “wrinkles” and “blemishes” I consider “character”.  We’re all only going to get older anyway so you might as well jump on the path of least resistance which is “I am what I am and fuck society they have to deal with it”.  If society is sexist and stupid, and you already know this, why play by those rules?  Let your righteous indignation be a path to freedom!  Yes there may be benefits that typical beauty provides but (as discussed earlier) these benefits are a double-edged sword, learning to love your face is ultimately a better, more stress-free way to live life than trying to hide the bits you don’t like or sandblast them away, and as discussed before self-love is contagious and radiates attraction even if your actual physical appearance is “flawed” or whatever.  If every woman I’ve ever dated had just one thing in common, it’s a ton of self-perceived “flaws” that I either found to be “attractive quirks” instead, or that I just didn’t give a crap about either way because it didn’t get in the way of why I liked them.

You’ve probably heard about Jessie getting stranded without a hotel room during her European tour. Omega X got it even worse when they were stuck in Chile without their promised flight to the US. Luckily both situations got resolved. However both situations were predictable: Jessie tried to save money by using a contact who turned out to be a fraudster and Omega X’s agency did business with a company known to have previously defrauded small K-pop acts. I don’t want to victim blame but I think agencies have a duty to do some basic research. What does this keep happening?

Sometimes it’s the agencies’ fault – companies try to cut corners and scammers know this by promising almost-too-good-to-be-true deals, and the agencies didn’t practice their due diligence when shopping around.  Having said that, some scammers are just legitimately very good at scamming, especially in the music biz where scamming runs rife, anyone who has been in the business for a decent length of time has probably come across a scam operator of some type, hello Naureen Gana if you’re reading.

I recently learned that Oasis is like, the single biggest foreign rock act in South Korea. This is almost “Mexicans worship the ground Morrissey walks on” (also true!) levels of surprising to me. What do you think? I just didn’t think Liam’s voice would be palatable to the general Korean public, lol.

They love that average boring plod-rock shit, and they also love bullying, so I guess it makes sense.  Each to their own.

I want to teach myself how to sing and how to play the guitar, purely just for my own enjoyment. We have an electric guitar laying around at home that nobody uses and it feels like a waste.

Learning the guitar alone doesn’t seem too difficult according to the people I know irl who did it, but the singing part is what really confuses me because some of the tutorials and stuff I see dabbles way too much on vocalf*ggotry and contradicts what I’ve learnt reading through the V Files, but at the same time nobody is going to autotune my vocals to the point I can get by without learning that shit so… what do you recommend? I don’t care about my minimal vocal range but I’d like to learn whatever technique is neccesary to avoid my throat feeling all raspy after singing one song.

Yes there is Autotune and yes it works but if you want to be a singer it’s still important to learn proper singing techniques so you can still ballpark the notes, and also more importantly so you don’t trash your voice while doing so.  Check out this video which shows some of the same exercises that I give beginning singers.

If you can do these and apply them consistently while making notes with your mouth, you’re already 50% of the way there.

Please consider making a Eurovision round up of the year 2022… Now that Australia has been joining for a few years I think you should also make it… make it as a april fools joke?? Please it would be so fun reading your reviews on ESC songs… ((

I’ll think about it, but I’d need a really good reason to do this.  Perhaps I’ll try to think of one.

why do “innocent” type songs (e.g. Pop? Pop! by CSR, Ah-Choo by Lovelyz, etc.) have so much going on in their instrumentals compared to other genres?

Well, most of them actually don’t.  Those are two very unusual examples which are not representative of that type of songwriting as a whole!

How much of Yeojin’s bust is clothing here?

It’s an official image from their company so you can bet that the agency have shopped her assets quite a bit.  I wouldn’t take it as a gauge of anything other than how creepy Blockberry are.

The cat that roams inside our apartment building – we call him Tangerine bc he’s orange lol – got into a huge fight with another cat from across the street, and his face was pretty scratched up. No damage to his eyes/nose/mouth thankfully, just a lot of torn fur and scratch marks and a lot of fright.

Me and some neighbours took him to the vet and have been taking turns caring for him so he doesn’t have to go outside the building for a while, but his behaviour is still…..erratic, for lack of a better word. Tangerine’s always been a gentle cat so he never scratches or bites us even when he doesn’t like what we’re doing (which is why the other street cats pick on him), but he’s been pooping outside the litter box, pissing on bedsheets and sofas, and scratching at random surfaces much more than usual.

How do we help him realize he’s no longer in danger? Do we just give him time to recover mentally and cover our sheets with plastic while he gets his spirit back?

He’s the first cat I’ve cared for beyond just leaving food out and petting on the head, so I’m at a bit of a loss here.

Yeah I don’t know either, I’ve never had to deal with this.  I did have a cat that peed indoors and I couldn’t work out what to do about it either.  This is a question for a cat expert beyond my skill levels, fortunately for every cat problem there is a Jackson Galaxy video.  Stick with it, it gets relevant, it might give you some direction.

Apparently the guy who co-produced NCT 127’s “Cherry Bomb” and “Sticker” (Dem Jointz) is the same guy responsible for GOT the Beat’s “Step Back”, NMIXX’ “Tank,” and Lee Chaeyeon’s “Hush Rush.” Is there anything in particular that makes those first 2 songs work for you compared to the latter 3?

Yes and I talk about all of this in the respective reviews of those songs.

This is why I never bother to “follow” songwriters and producers, and pay very little attention to who produces what (usually the only time I even know this information at all, is when readers insist on pointing it out, usually in the hope that it’ll change my opinion on something, which it never does).  The same songwriter can have a good song or a bad song for many reasons.. even when working with the same people, for the same group, for the same album, during the same studio session!

Do you believe a member of BlackPink owns a Lamborghini? Do you think a member of BlackPink knows how to drive a Lamborghini?

Apparently she did, and that was a while ago so presumably she’s gotten a chance to drive it at least once by now.  It’s not any harder to drive a sports car than any other type of car, both are equally capable of getting stuck in Seoul traffic.

Kpopalypse Hyung, can you please explain to us the difference between the disciplined and undisciplined type of I Got A Boy-esque songs? What are the elements (either in harmony or musical instrument choices or bridge or random distortions) that make them disciplined or not?

I use that type of phrase loosely but what I’m really talking about is – do the parts make sense when they go together, do they sound like they actually belong together, or do they just sound like random genre-hopping because a producer had a bunch of conflicting ideas and didn’t know where to put them, or was under pressure to create a “multi-genre” song so they just rushed out any old shit and stapled the bits together randomly with a bare minimum of thought?  If you want examples of it actually done well, Queen were great at doing this the right way within a pop context.  If you listen to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody“, and then some of the other songs that they did with a similar multi-style multi-part format, like “Innuendo“, “Princes Of The Universe“, “The March Of The Black Queen“, “The Millionaire Waltz” etc you’ll hear that the individual parts, while sometimes wildly different, all still share a thematic and sonic consistency, that would sound out of place in any other context other than the one it’s in.  If you only listened to the first minute of each of these songs, then you were blindfolded and played a random snatch of the music from some other part of any of these songs, you could probably tell to which one of the five songs that second random part belonged to – instantly, even if you weren’t at all familiar with any of these songs and had never heard them before.  Whereas members of a large control group who had never heard NMIXX in their life would probably get the same blind test right with their two ‘multi-genre’ songs… about 50% of the time.  In other words, they would be guessing.  That’s because the parts of those songs really sound like they have fuck all to even do with each other.  You could swap out any of the three parts of “O.O” for any of the three parts of “Dice” and they would still fit together just as well (i.e not well at all).

thoughts on armys reaction to bts finally announcing enlistment?

I’m really not following their reactions, so I don’t know what they are.  Like most things concerning BTS in general, or reactions in general, I have no strong opinion.

so nightcore (aka sped up versions of songs) is pretty popular as a genre and especially on tiktok kpop nightcore songs gets lots of views and engagement and whatever. and i like it well enough but i wanted to know whether there’s a specific music theory reason why it works so well and is so popular. like sure there’s the simple answer of ‘fast songs are good’ but does it also have to do with pitch or tone or whatever

This “nightcore” playlist isn’t even sped up enough to actually sound like nightcore to my ear, but ignoring the mislabeling:

• people like fast songs because fast beats are more exciting than slow beats
• people are too lazy to wait for hooks, nightcore remixes get to the chorus sooner, or focus on it exclusively

Really though, if the vocals aren’t sped up to the point where they sound like the original Alvin & The Chipmunks then it’s just not nightcore.

I feel sad that idols are not getting paid for example Chuu and Yeojin of Loona. To emphasise, they are not unknown nugus who no one gives a fuck about. In particular, Chuu has so many CF deals. I wonder if is it possible for the industry to reform and treat idols better or do we have to accept that idols will always be mistreated. Please give me your opinion on this.

Of course it’s possible.  Whether labels will do it, that’s another thing.  That’s why people need to relentlessly put the pressure on, and why I shame Blockberry and other agencies at every possible opportunity for the pittance that they pay idols (if anything at all).  Things will get better if enough noise is made that the labels simply can’t get away with ripping artists off anymore, because they’ll suffer such a huge image hit that they’ll start to lose sponsorship etc which is the real earner.  Will I alone make a difference?  No.  Will just the few thousand readers who read my shit on a regular basis alone make a difference?  No.  Can the influence of us and others talking about these issues gradually spread and grow to bigger and bigger places with more reach, to the point where some change could actually occur?  Maybe. 

My friend thinks you’re hot

I give your friend all my respect.

So the thing is a friend of mine

presumably not the same question-asker with the same friend but go on

from Japan I met in the US came to my country (Spain) to visit and do some tourism. We decided to meet in Barcelona, and I showed him the typical places and so on. On the last day, I decided we would have something different based on Japanese culture so he could also feel like at home. He told me he loved karaoke and singing, so I searched for a karaoke place nearby. I came across this place, which was ran by Chinese people, but it kind of works for us.

According to the reviews and pictures, this place has karaoke rooms and it looks fairly decent. I called to make a reservation and the lady was speaking in Chinese, so she called a colleague who barely spoke Spanish to help us get a room! From here everything went really weird…

Once we got there, the place was empty. There were only the woman who picked up the phone, his husband, a few men working and a few fine-dressed young ladies. All of them were Chinese. The men working there looked like goons. Anyway, I told the lady at the counter that we had a reservation and she took us upstairs and we entered the room. Wow. It was a very fancy room. We even got a plate of beautifully sliced fruits, an expensive Whisky bottle and more stuff. We looked at each other and I asked if this was the same in Japan. After a negative answer, I decided to ask for the price of the room, and the lady told us it was €288 for the night. Just the room. …… yeah, definitely not like Japanese karaoke.

There was no way this could be this so expensive, so we told the lady that we would just have dinner instead. She agreed and we went downstairs. The food was actually really nice, but we couldn’t help but ask ourselves if this was really a Chinese brothel. The young ladies were waiting downstairs using their phones until a customer arrived and one of them went upstairs with him. She started singing (really beautiful voice btw) and after that, the man did. The issue was, they increased the volume so much that we almost couldn’t hear each other. I mean, this is pretty suspicious.

We played some pool as well, but the staff was looking and talking about us in a really weird way. I mean, I couldn’t understand them but just looking at their faces, you know. So… kpopalypse oppar, do you think this was a Chinese brothel? I think so…

By the way, when I paid by card and I took a look at the payment in my bank app, and the company’s name showed up as “Mature party blah blah”. Yeah…

Yes.  The giveaway, as you discovered, is the high prices.  Legitimate karaoke bars that don’t have a prostitution side hustle will be priced much lower!  If in doubt always ask for the price ahead and then you’ll know for sure.  Note this also applies to anyone perusing karaoke bar job offers, if the salary is just unreasonably amazingly good, it’s not because they’re looking for a professional singer.

are you ever really hyped for a release and watch the teasers over and over again and then its released and its just like ,,, its good ? like lately ive been so excited for all these songs and then they drop and its not fulfilling. kpop gives me so much to look forward and lets me down — the songs are good they just dont give me a sense of fulfillment. maybe ints just me

No, and that’s because I never, ever, ever, watch k-pop teasers.  Not ever.  Not for any reason.  Only exception – acceptable to watch them after the full video is released, because their function is moot at that point.

A k-pop video is essentially an advertisement.  This makes a teaser an advertisement, for an advertisement.  There is no reason for anybody to be that much of a bitch in service of these companies.  I know we all love hypercapitalism and shitting on poor people, but come on now.  There’s a line somewhere, and k-pop teasers are firmly, irreversibly on the other side of that line.

HYBE/Source Music group LESSERAFIM is going to release their song ANTIFRAGILE soon.

Antifragility is a concept famously popularised by essayist Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and describes things that benefit from disorder (instead of being fragile aka weak to disorder, e.g. your grandma’s china plates, or merely resilient to it, e.g. that brick you once kicked because you were drunk and your friends told you it was a football, you moron).
An example is your immune system, which needs some stressors to get stronger. Taleb, being a former finance person, gives the example of stocks. It’s fitting that he made a bunch of money during the 2007-2008 financial crisis: a finance guy who isn’t rich is like a Kpop star who didn’t get plastic surgery – clearly something is wrong and you shouldn’t trust their advice on the industry.

LESSERAFIM’s choice of antifragility for their new song begs several questions:
– are they planning to blow shit up soon and are teasing it by telling us they’ll thrive on the chaos?
– did someone at HYBE independently rediscover this now-famous concept?
– most terrifying of all: are disagreeable essayists going to become the next trend in Kpop?

Stay tuned for upcoming singles Marketplace Of Ideas, Intersectional, and The Cathedral! (oh shit oh fuck oh no)

Well it’s not all that much of an out-there concept, thematically it’s honestly not much different to this:

Or even this:

Or maybe this:

These type of themes have appeared in music before, and will again in future.  And why not.  I think it’s cool, better than “I like him but I’m too shy to say anything, why doesn’t he make a move because I’m too busy conforming to stereotypical gender roles to dare do that myself” or “I’m so bad I’m so bad I’m so bad as long as my agency says it’s okay”.

I have a friend, I’ve known her since high school. We are in college now, early 20s.
But recently, I’ve had the feeling that something is going on with them and I hate the somewhat accidental influence I had on them…probably.

[some stuff edited at reader request]

Most recently, I’m concerned about the types of stuff she’s into online. They mentioned really liking hololive/vtubers which is like 3D cartoon avatars mods on real women that talk on youtube and incel guys pretend they’re real “anime waifus” and give them money. They usually have these anime faces and speak in childish voices.

(Here is a clip for example – and the reddit community)

I’m afraid now that this may be a sign that she is going down a rabbit hole. The reason why I’m arrogant enough to think I could influence them like this is because she does not really have a lot of friends outside of this group from high school. None, as far as I know aside from her gf.
I am worried that she’s made certain choices to be closer to us, her group of friends. And especially since she is a lesbian and doesn’t like hanging out with guys at all, I wonder if her bad experiences with guys…possibly led to her transitioning too soon.

On the other hand, I fear that I’m being transphobic and not understanding her perspective well enough. plz help

I don’t really have an answer for you, but then I’m not sure what the question is.  So here’s some things:

• I think you’re overestimating your/your friends’ impact in terms of being the catalyst for their transition, after all who has the same group of friends for life?
• One thing that should be understood about people transitioning is that they really do not want to be their birth gender, and really do want to embody as much as they can, that gender that they are transitioning to.  As a result they tend to be drawn to/want to emulate very extreme masc/femme versions of that destination gender in order to “most differentiate” themselves from their starting point.  They may not always succeed in actually getting to a result that they’re happy with, but that’s still often the aim.  So in that context, some of what you’re describing isn’t that unusual or even that new (it’s just getting talked about more now).
• The reason why anime avatars online have childish voices isn’t coincidence or even fetishism – it’s because realistic male-to-female speech synthesis is a programming nightmare, it’s not as simple as raising the voice pitch, there’s all sorts of other subtle differences between male and female voices that are really hard to replicate in code when moving from one to the other, so the result of such converters tends to sound like a hybrid between a teenage girl and a pre-pubescent boy, because the more you raise the pitch, the harder those subtle differences are to pick.  This is one way to be able to reveal people faking the opposite gender online by the way, if they kinda sound “somewhere between a woman and a male child” it’s probably actually a guy with a voice box behind that waifu avatar, real women doing that shit would sound more like actual women (and are probably also a lot rarer, I would imagine).  If you want to know what I’m talking about, listen to Projekt Melody – AI my ass, that’s just a guy behind that voice, I 100% guarantee it.
• Hololives are creepy but would I pretend to be an anime girl online for enough coin if I had the tech to do it convincingly enough, fuck yeah, anyone who can help me with this get in touch privately I have a mortgage to pay

My friend ended up telling someone they had a crush on them. This person pulled the “I’m not emotionally ready to face how I feel about you but let’s remain friends” card, yet they keep leading my friend on by being overly clingy, making sexual jokes, HIGHKEY flirting, etc. I haven’t met them, but they also seem to be petty af and have frequent temper tantrums.
My friend knows they’re being played but is eating that shit up, while also always complaining about this person. I’ve told them my honest opinion multiple times and suggested they distance themselves from their crush. It’s been more than 6 months and they haven’t done anything to improve their situation, but they whine about it so often that I am running out of patience and things to say. So many of our conversations revolve around this, just constantly going in circles. What should I say and do, oppar? Keep in mind we’re not in middle school, we’re all grown-ass adults…

Just refuse to talk about it.  Simple as that.  ONE warning, VERY clear, and ONE time only – change the topic now and forever, or this conversation and all conversations end here, forever, always.  Then – stick to this religiously.  Stand firm and walk away, do not waver, not even once.  Your friend won’t change this dynamic and neither will their crush, so… you have to be the one.  Stop talking about it, for good, forever.  Watch what then happens next, it might surprise you…

With all the talk of girl groups debuting with very young members, an old interview of Hello Venus resurfaced. Back in 2016, Nara claimed that the company not only warned her about men in the industry but also gave her a list of dangerous senior men to “avoid for her safety”. Do you think such a list still exists and is given to young idols nowadays?

Such lists absolutely exist, not necessarily “on some official secret website somewhere” but certainly verbally between some group members and some female label staffers.  My most recent fiction “Show Me Love” actually alludes to such lists existing which is why the intent behind the “business cards” is an immediate common knowledge among most of the trainees.  Whether your favourite idol gets access to such a list is down to good luck and good management.  Not all staffers are evil and many do have genuine concern for idols’ safety, they may not be in positions of power to guarantee that safety but they can certainly do what they can to give worldly advice.  Women talking to each other is one of history’s oldest and safest social networks. 

Why are k-pop stans so sensitive about literally anything?

Like, I once brought up the possibility of a BTS member having plastic surgery done to a family member (she’s in her 60s-70s btw, so a full adult) and she got so pissed at me for even suggesting it? South Korea has a shit load of plastic surgery, all of the members probably at least got fillers or some shit. Why do we delude ourselves to deny the realities of the world???

Or like, k-pop fans continuously getting mad in situations where they make connections to Jonghyun/Sulli/Hara. Like, fans say “only talk about their achievements” but in the same breath will connect “suicide/death = these k-pop idols”. Like you’re the one making that connection, not me. I don’t think of these idols when I think of death/suicide, I think of the wonderful and cool shit they fucking did and how giving a shit about mental health in Korea doesn’t fucking exist, fucking them over in their conservative ass country.

I mean you could honestly ask the same about non-kpop people (just ask the right wing nutjobs in the USA who have banned multiple books in multiple states because it’s “harmful for children’s minds” even though there’s more harm being done during fucking school shootings we all refuse to do jack shit about). Why are people so fucking sensitive about every little fucking thing? Are humans this fucking emotional about everything? I’d rather be a tree at this point than deal with the stupidity of the world, I’m fucking so annoyed

(And even then why I am sensitive to the sensitivity. Fuck)

People are silly.  Just learn to control your media consumption and this shit will bother you a whole lot less.

Just letting you know if you want more “androgynous man in historical costumes” fan service between kingdom comebacks look up MXTX and look at the character art. Your welcome!

Yeah I did, this didn’t hit with me quite as well but thanks for the tip!  Readers may appreciate.

You mentioned in your Oct. 10 roundup that you’ve cut out “all chocolate and sweets except on one day per week.” Do you find that plan easy to maintain? I ask because I wouldn’t mind dropping a few pounds (I’m not overweight, this is just for vanity reasons, though I’m probably less chubby than you find attractive), but dessert is my downfall. I seem to recall that you have a sweet tooth as well, so I’m curious whether you have any tips for sticking to a once-a-week sugar regimen. In the past, I’ve had success cutting out all added sugar for weeks at a time; it’s when I try to reintroduce moderation that my plans go to shit. Thanks, oppar, and ignore the haters!

I find this truly difficult to maintain.  I tend to make excuses to consume more than I should, but I find that a good way to compensate is to intermittently fast for each time that I break my regimen.  It’s worked okay so far, I’ve dropped a couple of kilos since writing that, plus my blood pressure has gone back to normal, and it’ll probably be easier to get back on track with this now because I just had a throat operation and eating sweets and junk food actually hurts, pain is a great teacher.  I agree that going cold turkey isn’t that hard but then I miss chocolate because it’s always been something I’ve loved and moderation is more difficult, when I eat chocolate I like to eat ALL the chocolate, hahaha.  So I’m trying to train in myself good habits.  The struggle continues but you’ll know if I’m succeeding because you’ll see the results on livestreams.

Oppa, I was reading about the Australian outback just now and it’s so fascinating. Have you been there? Is it really that deserted? How does fuel last for such long stretches? I can’t imagine wanting to venture into such remote areas so this is really interesting to me. Would love to hear stories from you if you have any.

Yes and yes.  My father used to mine opals in Coober Pedy which is a desert town that is unlike any other place on Earth, we’d go up there occasionally, it’s pretty wild, Hollywood film directors routinely go there to shoot their “generic barren wasteland planet surface” scenes for sci-fi movies.  Have also been to Northern Territory which is just as deserted, seen Uluru, The Olgas etc.  My dad liked bushwalking so we’d go out there and just park the car and walk a lot, I’ve seen most types of wildlife thanks to that, mainly kangaroos and lots of snakes.  There are petrol stops of course, there’s towns dotted along the roads that are pretty much just a fuel station, a hotel and maybe a few houses.  Obviously you need a car with a bit of range and preferably a bullbar to prevent damage to the vehicle or occupants from impacts with wildlife, SUVs and utes are common.  One of the reasons why electric vehicles have taken off slowly in Australia so far is because a lot of the first-generation electric cars don’t have the driving range to get from one electricity point to the next, so they’re not much good once you get out of the built-up areas in this country.

I read something you posted (think it was the Caonima quiz) that said Kpop isn’t good for your mental health.
When it comes to EVERYTHING EXCEPT THE ACTUAL SONGS JESUS CHRIST I agree wholeheartedly, but otherwise I have to disagree.
I was (am?) a big metal/industrial fan. (no I am not a BIG INDUSTRIAL FAN, lol.)
My mother died of basically unknown stage four cancer in my late 30s; it was metastatic already by the time they found it so there was no saving her.
I drank a lot, I cursed a lot, etc.
What got me out of the pit was yes, my friends, but also Kpop.
Around this time, I was introduced (as we all were, willingly or not) to Psy’s “Gangnam Style” and that led me to Hyuna, and on that, a friend of mine in the know turned me on to SNSD (“Oh!” is a better song than “Gee” and that’s a goddamn fact) and from there I was hooked.
My point is, unlike the other shit I listened to, it was all upbeat. Hell, “I Got a Boy” could’ve been about ritual suicide but I couldn’t tell what they were singing about except boy chickens and bringing the beat back up to 120.
So anyway, long story short, Kpop helped save me.
Also “Sleep-walking” by Dreamcatcher is a fucking killer b-side and fuck you to hell if you’ve never heard it.
Cheers, mate!

I think k-pop is good for mental health if you can distance yourself from its message, but what I refer to mainly when I’m talking about bad mental health and k-pop is that a lot of “love lyrics” actually promote really bad mental health and that’s not just k-pop but pop in general.  Disregard that and all the media/fan circus crap and you’re good to go with just the music though.  A big industrial fan might be bad for your physical health if you stick your arm in it too.  Sorry to hear about losing your mom to cancer, it was the same with mine, I discovered (the better songs of) k-pop a few years after she passed too so maybe there’s a connection here.

I can’t stand fandoms in general and [site name deleted due to boycott restrictions] is a “great” slice of how toxic they can be, both internally and externally focused bull shit.
Thank you for being a bastion of all encompassing “meh.”

Thanks!  I will do my best to continue to be enthusiastically unenthused in the future.

scale of 1-10, how agreeable is this list?

(also i love how fucked the voting distribution is, almost popularity driven but with many big groups being below borderline nugus)

Yeah I didn’t agree with it, but then I think lists like this are a bit pointless anyway, this is why I list favourite songs each year but generally shy away from talking about favourite groups.

hi there Kpopalypse, I have 2 questions regarding this song

1. do you think it’s good?

2. when I hear the intro (until 15 seconds), the song is a half beat ahead of what i think it is. like, the song is in 4/4 and the first note that you hear hits on the 1, but my brain thinks that the 2nd note hits on the 1 and the 1st note hits between 4 and 1 (it’s called an anacrusis i think) and doesn’t correct itself until after the intro, where it feels like the song skips half a beat and i hear the song normally again. even counting the beats while the song is playing doesn’t sound right to me. is it just me and i need to rewire my brain to hear the song correctly or is there something about the rhythm that’s making this effect, and if there is, could it be on purpose?

Not really into the song tbh, I’ve never been huge on Paramore’s music.  It’s not terrible and honestly none of their stuff is bad I just find them a bit eh.  I do like the singer Hayley though just personally, when she came to my city she did a good thing and was big on promoting some of my independent music acquaintances here that were struggling, in situations where she was under no obligation to do so.  She also really pushed to keep her own band together back when they were hot in the marketplace and her label were really trying to poach her as a solo artist and get her to dump her group.  That type of move takes guts, she has integrity, I have lots of time for her.

The rhythmic thing – it’s not just you, the reason why you’re perceiving the 1 where the 2 is is because of the snare pattern being played behind the beat, this is deliberate!  I’ve heard other songs do this, it’s not that uncommon and I always like this sort of thing when it appears.  Here’s another example and it’s not the only one I’ve encountered but the only one that springs to mind right now that I can remember:

What you initially hear as the 1 is actually the 1 and a half, it’s only when the drums kick in that the groove actually makes sense.  Watching them do it live it’s the same!

I’m a hs student deciding on an area of study and although I had a clear idea of what I wanted to pursue I’m not really so sure anymore. It’s a science subject and since I had some difficulty with conducting experiments in my science classes I dunno whether to go ahead with it or not. I’m also aware that I’d need to go to grad school at least to make something out of this major and that coupled with it being a science subject brings up images of sitting at a desk covered in a whole mess of sheets of some essay I’m trying to write but can’t figure out how to. In other words I’m scared of it’s potential difficulty. Lol what do I do

Well you’re doing better than I did at your age, at least you have some idea of what you want.  My big question would be: do you enjoy it?  If so that’ll probably be enough to propel you through the suckier aspects of it.  If you had difficulty with experiments – why?  Is it something you can address?  It’s a bit hard to advise when I’m not familiar with the field and probably can’t speak on how difficult it would really be or how to tackle it, try to talk to some people who have done it perhaps, maybe you can reach out to some of those people through the net or something.

Do you have a strategy for coping with disastrous election results?

None except be sad, fortunately you won’t have to worry about this.

Hey oppa. I’m from Brazil and given the political climate here, my parents are sending me abroad for my safety. I never thought i’d come to this, but they’re adamant it’s bound to get worse (my father was imprisoned during the military dictatorship years). I’m still waiting on the universities, but I should be heading to Australia soon, either Melbourne or Sydney. Any tips on how to start a new life as expat? Anything I should know? I should be feeling excited about such a drastic change, but it’s all very bittersweet. I’m leaving my family behind and I’m desperately hoping I’ll be welcomed once I arrive.

I know some Brazilians already in Australia, they love it here, you should be fine.  I’ve never had to move countries so I’m probably a bit out of my depth talking about what you might need to organise for yourself, but living in a big city in Australia (Sydney and Melbourne are the two biggest ones) probably isn’t radically different to living in a big city in any other western country.  Just take people and situations as you find them and don’t worry too much about things, because most people living here don’t.  Sydney living is a bit more fast-paced than Melbourne, which is a little more laid back, if I had to choose I’d probably choose Melbourne for that reason but both are good places to live with low unemployment, high cost of living though so look for work and get some money coming in ASAP.  Just be wary about living anywhere that’s lying very close to either sea level, rivers/waterways or the bush, or that is hard to keep cool, as floods, fires and heatwaves are a real thing down here and they will kick your ass.  The mega-heatwaves they’ve been having in the northern hemisphere this year, that’s just a regular summer for us.  Your biggest adjustments to living here will probably be natural, not man-made.

One of the reasons I quit playing the guitar was my fragile pinky finger. During some stretchier chords, the second joint of it (PIP joint) would “collapse” and bend inward (as in towards the strings). Once locked in that position, I often had to readjust it with my other hand because it was a bit hard to make it move. Sorry for the shit explanation, hopefully it’s clear.
I haven’t played in years but I want to start again. Do you know how I can strengthen my weak-ass pinky and have you seen this happen to your students, oppar?

I know exactly what you mean about the pinky as several of my guitar students have had issues like this.  There are times when you DO want to collapse your pinky (to get certain shapres that are unobtainable any other way for instance) but generally speaking it’s better not to.  Learning to work with your pinky better just means using it more.  A good way to get your pinky up to speed is to practice lines that utilise it equally with other fingers.  A lot of guitarists tend to avoid using their pinky when they can but I’d encourage you to incorporate it.  When using it, apply a bit of pressure in the direction of the ring finger to stop your pinky flying out.  Watch Michael Angelo Batio here, who has some of the best pinky technique I’ve ever seen, his chromatic scale exercise is worth doing (don’t panic about the start, he slows it down).

Hi oppar, I’ve been procrastinating on sending you a QRIMOLE, partly because I’d forget it and only remember when QRIMOLE was already out, partly because I am very lazy and would rather not type this whole thing out, but I’m finally here now, yay me
So, to put it shortly, I think I’m addicted to self-help and obsessing over my flaws/becoming a “perfect” person. Frankly, I don’t know what happened here, but I find myself more and more overwhelmed with everything I feel like I “should” be doing – training my social skills (I’m extremely quiet and awkward, it’s getting a bit better these days but I still want to work it out more), becoming confident, becoming motivated to do art, learning how to set boundaries, learning what the fuck is it that I want to do with my life, while also learning how to deal with my emotions… erghh. All this while I’m still in high school, mind you, so yeah, I am extremely overwhelmed and I think I realized now that it’s all mostly coming from myself and my need to “be a better person”, at all costs. I want to improve, I want to be perfect, and I want to do it fast, because I want to be “ready” for life. Isn’t that a bit silly? Everyday I open like 7 tabs with 7 different topics that I feel like I should “Improve” on, but never get around to actually watching them, and feel really guilty about it later on. To put it bluntly, I seriously don’t know what the fuck am I supposed to do other than just focus relentlessly on progressing and improving. I’ve been berating myself for months now for not doing art, because I somehow put it in my head that it’s my “purpose” to draw (and feel the need to get real good at it in order to get money with it), when, at the end of the day, I just wanted to have fun, and I thought art looked fun.
I just can’t face the fact that, no matter how much self-help content I use, no matter how many self-help practices I do, no matter how “perfect” I am on paper, I’m still gonna get hurt, and the only way to truly know a thing about life is by living it. I can’t face the fact that, even if I got the best therapist with all the answers I need, it’d still take me a long time to”Improve”, or to just be fine with myself. I don’t know what to do. I’m not okay with being flawed.
I guess my question would be – How can I accept myself as flawed, and be okay with that? Does that mean I just have to give up progress?
Also consider that I barely have any life experience since I don’t leave my house much, maybe I wouldn’t overthink all this stuff if I went out there and lived life a bit, both the good and bad parts? No idea

You have kind of answered your own question, you know what you need to do, just go out there and live life a bit.  Don’t worry so much about the theory.  I’m not saying “never look at self-help again” but what I would suggest is just keep the more useful stuff on bookmark and just come back to it if you have a problem with something.  I love playing music and I play or teach or listen to or write about music every day, but I don’t look at “instructional content” every day, I save it for when I need it, if I need a refresher on how to do something or I feel like I need a few tips to do something better because I’m not happy with it.  Self-help stuff can be really good, or it can be really inappropriate, but ultimately it boils down to how you can relate it to your own experience, so you need to HAVE that experience first, that’ll give you a better idea of what self-help material relates to you and what can probably be discarded, rather than just binging on everything hoping that it will all help you somehow.  I mean, learning jazz chords probably would help me get better as a player, but I have no real desire to play in a jazz band so I’ll probably never use that knowledge.  I’ll cross that bridge if I come to it.

Do you think companies give groups like Nmixx and NCT (or basically any other boy group today) intentionally divisive music as a strategy to increase fan devotion/loyalty, because the fans feel obligated to spend all their time “defending” their faves from criticism? I’m kind of obsessed with this idea but I can’t remember where I stole it from; if it was you, I wouldn’t be surprised.

No.  I think what the biggest agencies do sometimes however is try and have music that is pushing forward in a certain less-explored direction, as a way to (hopefully) be the trendsetters and keep ahead of the competition.  They’re not trying to be divisive, it’s pop music, they want it to be as popular as possible, they’re just trying to keep ahead of the curve, because if they don’t at least attempt to set the trends, someone else will beat them to it…

I have an issue that I want to rant about, but no one I know is unbiased to the issue. About half of my friends dislike my fiancé due to an event that no one will tell me about that occurred about a month ago. My friends are providing vague hints that he’s toxic and not treating me well, and my fiancé tells me that they’re avoiding him for a reason he can’t explain clearly.

Obviously this sends a lot of flags so fucking red they might as well be bloodstained, but I don’t see the problems with him, even if I don’t know what the hell happened. Examples: we evenly split chores/tasks when we’re together, we usually split the bill when eating out, and we message each other about once a day. We don’t fight, we have similar interests, and we’re usually fairly mellow together. Our sexual chemistry is also pretty good. We’re a happy couple, and we talk a lot about our long term future, and the strict boundaries that we want to follow to succeed in our relationship in when we’re older (and possibly with kids).

I’ve tried asking both sides what happened, but whenever I do, they always just avoid the topic or try to say something along the lines of “it’s not that serious” despite the fact that they’ve very obviously had a severe falling out. My fiancé has also grown progressively more and more distressed about something in the past few weeks related to our friends, and the only thing that I’ve managed to discern lately is that he’s vehemently saying that he’s not in the wrong of whatever argument they had.

How the fuck do I get both sides to talk to me about what happened? My other friends are avoiding the issue and I might be going paranoid from this, but I almost suspect that the “neutral party” are attempting to distract me by dragging me away to do other things with them whenever I try to approach the issue.

Help?

Just talk to your partner about it.  Your friends you probably can’t control how much they tell you, but someone you’re planning a future with, should be able to open up to you when prompted because you have leverage to get him to do so (I mean, he wants a future with you, right?)  If you’re already having long term future type of chats then this should be par for the course.  It may be worth even showing your partner this question.  Whatever it is though, if it’s not affecting the relationship, and you can get an ironclad commitment of some type that it won’t also affect the relationship in the future, does it even matter?  I guess it’s hard to say if you don’t know what it is but if he didn’t murder someone and isn’t preparing a “Bound By Love” style rape dungeon in his house to imprison you in later, I’m not sure that there’s an issue?  But then it’s well established that I’m an ammoral cunt, you really need to know what it is so you can decide for yourself if it matters.  This question came through right at the start of October so I would hope that by the time you’ve read this, things have come to a head and someone has come clean about whatever’s going on.

I put some music on while studying, but in a very low volume just because too much quiet makes me sleepy. On shuffle, EXID’S DDD came up. Because of the low volume, at first I could only hear the beat. I had to check which song was on because the beat sounded exactly like Justin Timberlake’s Sexy Back, is this correct?

And since I’m here, other songs that I feel like have a sample here and there: Chocome’s Super Yupper starts exactly like Maniac from Michael Sembello; Wonder Girls’ One Black Night pre-chorus has New Order’s Blue Monday beat (I think it’s from the start of the song, can’t recall exactly). Are those right, am I imagining? How does it work with sampling, do they need to indicate that in credits, do they need to pay for it, or is it only for obvious cases (such as IVE’s after like/I will Survive, or Madonna’s Hung Up/Gimme Gimme Gimme, or Nicki Minaj’s Anaconda/Baby Got Back)?

EXID/Justin, Chocome/Sembello, Wonder Girls/New Order – not a sample in any of the three cases, just similar groove and tempo.  In each example the first artist is deliberately going for the feel of the second artist, but they haven’t directly lifted the original tracks, just played something similar, with very similar sounds, tempo and feel, to try and capture the same type of spirit.

With literal sampling (where you’re actually physically grabbing the original audio for your reinterpolation/use) you do have to get permission, and you may also have to pay and/or give credit unless the person you’re sampling from says you don’t.  There’s no set fee for this, it’s a matter of negotiation between the different rights holders.  Some artists may insist on a royalty/songwriting credit that pays a percentage, others may insist on an upfront fee, others may just want a visible credit in liner notes only and no money, some may not even care at all and just say ‘go for it’, and some may just refuse permission completely. 

What do you do if you’ve fallen in love with a polyamorous person when you’re monogamous? Give them dating someone else at the same time as you a try and deal with your insides feeling wrong? Or leave now before you’re in emotionally deeper?

Notable that breaking up would be guaranteed to be painful and I think make me very sad for at least a few months, though I think I’m in a stable enough place to handle it. It’d feel like a waste, though, because I think this might be one of the best people I’ve met in my whole life, and she loves me. However, so far, thinking about her dating someone else is also pretty painful—like sometimes I don’t care, but sometimes I get actual physical painful symptoms. I’ve had no appetite for the entire day, for example, and felt panicky before sleeping last night. But maybe I could get used to it? I don’t know what information would make my brain okay with the idea of her loving someone else. I don’t know why I’m okay spending lots of time one on one with friends but as soon as kissing/romantic feelings come into the picture I’m scared.

Not ideal.  If you simply don’t find the idea of polygamy tolerable to the point where you’re getting physical symptoms just thinking about it, I think just break up, yes it will be painful but it will save you more pain later.  I think polygamy is fine when it works but it has to work for everyone involved or there’s no point, if you haven’t already warmed up to the idea by this point I don’t think going along for the ride just to see if you have a change of heart is going to make much difference.

On the last roundup you mentioned how impressive was Luli Lee for singing while playing bass, it made me think about how Sunmi mentioned during her tour that singing and playing bass was a really difficult thing for her, and that’s (according to her) why it is rare to see bass players also being singers, which is… true to me but my ignorant ass needs an opinion on this from you. Is it really more difficult than singing while playing guitar?

Depends on the nature of the guitar lines or the bass lines that you’re playing.  The specific instrument doesn’t matter a whole lot.   Singing while playing a complex guitar part is about the same difficulty as while playing a complex bass part.  Luli Lee ripping out complex slap bass during a vocal line, that’s hard.

Easy bass and singing:

Notice how when he’s singing the bass it’s just repeating the one note, and all the complex riffs happen in the breaks when he’s not singing.  This is not very difficult, I could do this if I had the voice for it, I can already play the bass part…

Easy guitar and singing:

In the first song Taylor’s right hand is actually marking time of the song, this type of co-ordination isn’t super easy but it’s certainly “on the easier side” of co-ordinating guitar and voice.

Hard bass and singing:

The co-ordination required to bust out complex rhythmic raps and back them with syncopated bass lines like this, just wow.  Divinity Roxx is amazing.

Hard guitar and singing:

Just playing this at all is nearly impossible let alone doing an odd-timing syncopated vocal line over the top.

Longshot but if the girl from the caonima action survey who wants to cheat after a 5+ year relationship reads QRIMOLE:

kpopalpyse i love you but i’d like to give a different perspective:

GIRL, GET REAL. cheating and not telling isn’t “the best if I take my needs into consideration”, come on, everybody and their dog knows it’s the flimsiest lie. are you going to marry someone you can’t even be honest with? what a sad fucking life.
same thing for going on no-sex dates behind your partner’s back (sorry kpopalypse): if after 5+ years you have to hide things from your partner when you know they’d want to know, your relationship is just sad. sure sometimes there are reasons to stay in a bad relationship, you have kids or a mortgage or whatever. but that’s not you, come on.

if the urge to have sex with other people is stronger than your love for your partner, don’t lie and hope it will never come up. own up to it and tell him you want to have sex with others! if you think it would make him miserable but he wouldn’t be able to break up with you, initiate the break up yourself! you’re supposed to love him, aren’t you? then do what’s good for him!

anyway, hope you’ll find a solution that works for everyone involved.

additional rambling: always gets me how young people think you can do things you KNOW are unethical and not suffer from it. i don’t mean things SOCIETY thinks are bad but you don’t – these are fine. i mean things YOU, in your heart of hearts, know are bad. sure some psychopaths will be fine, but for most people this stuff will stay with you, it will stress you out, it’ll be a weight in your stomach forever. doesn’t matter if your partner never learns you cheated, YOU’ll know and it will mess you up.

ok i’m done being the voice of standard morality. thanks for coming to my ted talk.

This is good advice for the original asker to follow and if you haven’t fucked your life by following my own shitty advice you could try this route instead I suppose because I think it’s probably a fair bit better than mine.  I guess your mileage may vary depending on how much of an asshole you are, I’m pretty much a complete cunt with no moral values and probably autistic as well so any advice I give should definitely be taken in the spirit of “this is what a complete asshole would do, but would it be the right choice for me, hmmm let’s think about this”.  It’s just one perspective out of many.  It’s an important lesson for anyone asking me shit – while I definitely don’t mind helping, and I know a lot of people have been helped, ultimately I’m just some guy, and a guy with a pretty weird moral compass at that.  So please when asking questions about what to do about your personal issues please don’t take my advice as the gospel truth, it’s just one person’s opinion coming at it from an outsider and while an outsider perspective can definitely be valuable it doesn’t mean that it’s always the right advice for you.  Unless we’re talking about trap breakdowns.  Don’t do trap breakdowns, people.  Trap is no fun. Trap endangers the life and happiness of millions.  It must stop.  We appeal in particular to the youth of today.  Stop the madness!  There are better things in life.

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That’s all for this month’s QRIMOLE!  This series will return next month!  In the meantime remember that Gibson guitars are still trash!

Oh, and do you have a question that you’d like to see answered in the next episode of QRIMOLE?  If so, use the question box below, or if no box appears, click the Qri on the sidebar to open the box as a separate webpage!  Kpopalypse will return!