While we live in a divided world that is full of disagreements, controversy and division, there are some things in life that all decent humans can agree are just wrong.  Murder, rape, molka, nuclear war, the sample that plays at the start of most GroovyRoom songs, all of these things are universally recognised as morally reprehensible by all except the most fiendish degenerates of society, but now we can add k-pop teasers to this list.  Read on and discover the true horror of k-pop teasers!

This post is probably long overdue, as teasers being garbage is something which is common knowledge to many Kpopalypse readers as I do talk about it all the time.  Of course, it goes without saying that most Kpopalypse readers are very erudite individuals who are aware of the world around them, and therefore will already know and agree that teasers are complete trash which should be disregarded at all times.  However you as a reader may on occasion encounter other people within the kpoponlineosphere who deem teasers to have some small sliver of relevance or importance or at least a vague semblance of moral acceptability.  This post therefore exists as a handy ready reference and a community service from me to you the lovely reader, so you can easily rebuke these false claims and reveal k-pop teasers for the blight on the planet that they are, as it contains my collated thoughts on the subject which are spread across many posts on this site.  Feel free to link this post to other k-pop fans when they doubt your wisdom about the folly of k-pop teasers and you couldn’t be bothered writing out the same thing to each and every dumbass who wastes their time watching and sharing teasers… or just copy-paste it if they couldn’t be fucked clicking the link, I don’t care.  Anyway, please enjoy.

* Of course, in order to demonstrate accurately why we shouldn’t watch and share k-pop teasers, I have to watch and share k-pop teasers to clearly illustrate the reasons.  The inherent hypocrisy of this post is duly noted, thank you very smart people for pointing this out.

Why you shouldn’t watch k-pop teasers – reason #1: a teaser is an advertisement… for an advertisement

As I’ve discussed before, a k-pop music video is an advertisement, in the following ways:

1. It’s an advertisement aimed at music fans, to get them to buy the song and support the artist, hopefully falling in love with them enough to ensure continual support
2. It’s an advertisement aimed at anyone who sees the video, to get them to buy whatever sponsored products are placed in the video
3. It’s an advertisement aimed at consumer product companies’ marketing departments, who are interested in hiring people to do points 1. and 2.

Aspect 2. may not always be present in every video.  Not all k-pop music videos have paid-for product placement, just… a hell of a lot of them, and sometimes it’s obvious, and sometimes not so much.  For instance, in the above video Blackpink could be waving any old phones around, but of course they’re waving around a very specific phone, one that they hope you might want to buy.  They don’t specifically highlight the brand or anything, but they know if you’re an obsessed enough fan you might do your own research on that regardless.  Other music videos might have product placement which is more obvious:

However, while aspect 2. may or may not apply, aspects 1. always applies, and aspect 3. applies nearly always.  There is no k-pop music video that is not trying to get you to buy the music and invest in the artist.  There are also very few k-pop music videos which are not trying to appeal to companies and say “hey, wouldn’t you like these particular boys and/or girls promoting your products, they have ready-made fanbases eager to buy anything associated with them, this service could be yours for a price”, the only k-pop videos that wouldn’t have this as a goal might be those from certain independent artists who may refuse all endorsements on principle (and such artists don’t usually release teasers anyway so are irrelevant for the purposes of this post), but that’s the exception rather than the rule.

So something like this, is just making sure that you know the advertisement is “coming soon”.  It’s an advertisement for an advertisement.  Which, as a k-pop fan, you don’t even need, because you’re probably going to know when your favourite group drops a new song anyway.  So the question is, exactly how much do you want to bend over for these companies and be their bitch.  If the answer is “I want to bend down all the way and also I have pre-lubed my hole for their use”, then let’s move onto…

Why you shouldn’t watch k-pop teasers – reason #2: a teaser is sometimes an advertisement… for an advertisement… for an advertisement

Of course you don’t have to have just one teaser:

So now we have an advertisement, for an advertisement, for an advertisement.

If you’re running a k-pop company, you can continue this disturbing loop of bullshit for as long as you want to.

Of course, it’s a bit boring if all these teasers sound the same.  This sometimes means that the people making these endless teasers insert music which isn’t actually in the final product.  Which leads us to…

Why you shouldn’t watch k-pop teasers – reason #3: teasers often are useless for music appreciation as they do not reflect the quality of the final product

In preparation for this post I used the last fading embers of Elon Musk’s rapidly dying social network to probe my readers for trufax about disappointing k-pop comebacks that didn’t match the quality of their pre-release teasers.

Of course some of my followers responded in a manner similar to the above, indicating that they would not waste their time with such activities in the first place.  This of course is the “most correct” answer and is just further proof of the intelligence of Kpopalypse readers.  However for those of you who took time to learn these important lessons and did at one point subject yourself to the true horror of k-pop teasers, here are the teasers that disappointed you the most, and which all certainly demonstrate the problem of teasers creating anticipation for a product that was in fact completely different:

T-ara’s initial “Sexy Love” teaser had a riff that was so outstanding that it inspired a complete Kpopalypse post of its own.  Sadly this riff was replaced with a bunch of burpy semi-dubstep robot noises that were in fact still pretty cool, but not even the endless Sexy Love remixes featured the original superior riff.  Sad times.

Rainbow’s “Whoo” had a trippy teaser with music that was clearly inspired by Jean-Michel Jarre’s “Zoolookologie“, a 1980s classic of electronic synth-pop that no k-pop song has ever attempted to replicate.  Unfortunately that included the final release of “Whoo” itself which was some boring and generic trash that sounded nowhere near as good as the teaser.

Rachel Kim and the girls had a pretty decent song with “Run Devil Run” back in the day, but it would have been even cooler still if the backing track actually used any of the music from the punchy and abrasive teaser.

Even after massive fan disappointment, post-Rachel Girls’ Generation didn’t learn their lesson or shy away from the deceptive teasers featuring music that would never get used again, anywhere, ever.

Loona were always purveyors of the David Lynch style weird-ass bullcrap teaser, it’s a pity they didn’t bother to inject some of that adventurous musical esotericism into their final songs as a full group, instead electing to mostly trend-ride themselves into oblivion (and debt).

SF9’s teaser for “Roar” had a fantastically moody vibe… that was nowhere actually in the final song.

If Pristin’s “We Like” sounded anything at all like the absolute kick-ass music video teaser, perhaps their career would have lasted more than five seconds.  Well okay, that’s probably being a bit too optimistic given that it’s Pledis, but hey at least the final song would have been better and I would have had a reason to care when they disbanded.

There’s plenty of other examples, but it gets even worse than this…

Why you shouldn’t watch k-pop teasers – reason #4: sometimes you don’t even fucking get a final music video

Since teasers are as much about selling the artist as anything else, sometimes k-pop labels don’t even give a shit about giving you a full music video to enjoy, preferring to fill you with anticipation and then leave you high and fucking dry.  Here are some examples.

IU, the current reigning queen of blue-balling her fans, looked like she was all ready to release full music videos for these songs, and then just… didn’t bother.  Thanks for nothing I guess.

I guess IU was taking a leaf out of labelmate Gain’s book, who is all about teasing and definitely not about pleasing her fans with actual final music videos for any of these songs.  So I guess all this is probably LOEN’s fault.

And that’s not to say anything about the teasers for group album and tour projects that have music in them that don’t resemble anything those groups have ever done, or will ever do.  Cunts.

Why you shouldn’t watch k-pop teasers – reason #5: teasers are not very environment

If you really need one more reason to not watch teasers, just know that YouTube has the highest carbon footprint of any website in the world, so the less videos on it, probably the better for everyone.  Let’s encourage k-pop companies to not upload unnecessary YouTube videos, with Chuu’s YouTube series, because this post is already pretty hypocritical so why not go the extra mile.

That’s all for this post!  Kpopalypse will return soon with more probably non-teased posts!