all hail k-pop!

a friend of mine finally forced me to watch psy’s ‘gangnam style’ vid the other day (I like to stay 4-8 months behind cultural trends) and I laughed my ass off. not only was it wicked funny but also enthralling in simplicity of its beat and riff.

then last night I read the new yorker article on k-pop and have been gorging on it all day today (I have an excuse — I’m sick in bed). that fucking girls’ generation thing is a machine, and I almost mean literally. whereas american pop stars flourish by finding something “individual” about their absolute same-ness, the koreans are making art out of synchronized human life.

watching these girls dance is amazing. it’s as if they’re clones, all bred and trained to dance together. but that would be weird — and this is better. this is a group of very similarly shaped young women who have been trained for many years in the same form. of course, I’m not inside the cultural subtleties of their movements, but from the outside their precision is mesmerizing — not just the dancing but the poses, the expressions, the walking…

this is a common theme running through asian art and culture, but I love seeing it blended with western culture in this way. it makes the narcissism celebrated in western pop acts look coarse. I like!

This entry was posted on Friday, October 19th, 2012 at 9:29 am and is filed under paulblog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.