Welcome to Kpopalypse's worst songs of 2014! Let's round up 2014's greatest k-pop stinkers!
I assume that because you've all actually clicked here and are reading my worst-of list, you can actually handle some criticism of your bias constructively and maturely. However if this list has too many nasty negative vibes for you, remember that I have a favourites list as well so why not read that instead, you complete fucking pussy? Otherwise, read on!
Eligibility criteria:
Feature tracks only - either an MV of some description and/or has been promoted on music shows
If a k-pop person is in it, it's k-pop - I don't give a fuck if the producer lives in Antarctica, half of them do now anyway
No Christmas shit, those songs all suck, we already know this
No sport songs, they all suck too (hey Wassup's fans you just dodged a bullet here, be grateful)
No OST songs unless they have a separate unrelated MV
Other shit:
These are really my opinions.
No I'm not trolling you. Well okay, maybe it's honestly a little funny to see you bitch and moan - but these are STILL my opinions, just because they're different to yours doesn't mean that I don't feel the way that I do. Different people like different shit, get over it sunshine.
I'm not saying that my taste is superior or whatever other bullshit message you want to read into my statements that isn't there. Take the list as face-value entertainment only.
Let's get down to it. Starting off with:
30. Mio ft. Baek Chan - Want To Buy A House
Let's start this list off with a lovely fairytale, because people often complain that I'm not positive enough: Somewhere in a perfect alternate universe, Korean ballads are outlawed. Armed police roam the streets of Seoul and Busan wearing high-sensitivity hearing equipment and they raid shop fronts, houses and apartments when ballad-like waveforms are detected in close proximity, arresting the occupants and confiscating the offending material. The MOGEF rates songs not according to sexual content but according to how closely they resemble a ballad, with 19+ reserved for mid-tempo almost-ballads and the slowest and sappiest songs simply refused classification altogether. Imported ballads are seized by airport customs and those transporting the contraband material are thrown into prison, while strict Internet censorship regulates the digital flow of ballads into Korea. The result is that Korea has become a musician's paradise, where only true and good music prevails... at least on the surface. Deep in the underground scene, ballad-makers and those that assist them continue to practice their evil craft at great risk to themselves and the community. These balladeers work their insidious and disgusting trade in secrecy, making songs and MVs in hidden basement studios. The songs are of course dreadful rubbish which should be listened to by nobody, and the accompanying videos have to make do with ancient black and white cameras that don't leave a traceable digital signature that the anti-ballad authorities can track, plus whatever poor-quality lighting is available. Performers engaging in this illegal black-market activity must also remain masked during MV shoots to protect their identities as anyone recognising them in public could alert the police to the musical crimes they are undertaking. These shady individuals also make sure to use exactly the same generic and boring vocal style so nobody could possibly recognise them by voice alone when out in public. Please now appreciate this contraband video, extracted from the aforementioned alternate universe by KT Music, to remind yourself of how good Korean society could be, if it dared to undertake the serious reforms necessary to ensure high music quality in mainstream culture. Until such a utopia is realised, my worst-of lists will have to do as a gentle encouragement to agencies to not produce this type of shit.
29. Spica.S - Give Your Love
Poor Spica. Poor. Fucking. Spica. They just can't catch a break, can they. Everybody seems to "want them to get popular" but that doesn't actually extend in any real way to anybody actually giving a shit about them enough to make them popular. They keep getting lumped with crap songs like this that not only have just about zero chance of winning them any new fans, but that even half their existing fanbase can't get behind. To their credit, the label went all-out doing all the textbook appropriate things: they dumped the not-so-hot girl for the special Spica.S sub-unit (I guess S stands for "S-line", or "Sexy" or maybe "Shafted by their company" or "Sister, pack your bags"), got all the other ones in sexy dresses and got them to dance sexy, got them to get their boobs out as much as is possible in a k-pop video... and still no pot of gold. It seems that despite all this the agency forgot the one small detail of making Spica.S sing a song that anybody wants to listen to, maybe they didn't think that was important, and I suppose one could forgive them for thinking that way given some of the other ultra low quality trash that actually charts in Korea (foreshadowing alert!). What a drag, what a disappointment it must be for the girls and their company. Imagine being one of the girls in Spica. Imagine arguing with your morally conservative disapproving parents about how you're completely on board with the new sexy concept that the label wants because at least it'll finally make some damn money like those other groups and then it flops anyway. Imagine photocopying your own tits for nothing. Poor Spica.
28. Ailee - Don't Touch Me
There's an incredibly hot girl that I know who I tried to get into the pants of on and off for at least five years a while back in between various other doomed-to-failure relationships that I had going on at the time. I completely failed to get anywhere with her because while I was in and out of every other bedroom door in the city she had a steady long-term relationship for the entire time, plus an unfortunate aversion to infidelity. Now that I've been in a steady relationship for quite some time myself, the pressure is off her, which I think she misses but then maybe that's just my arrogant male ego talking. Anyway whoever did the styling job on Ailee performed fantastic work because there's quite a few scenes in "Don't Touch Me" where she resembles this girl extremely closely. I always find that girls on TV and in the media are hotter to me if they bear some kind of resemblance to a woman who I personally know (especially if I tried to get into that person's pants and failed, after all it's the things you can't have that are the most tempting), so this means that Ailee has now climbed up a few rungs on my fapability list. Superb stuff, I can only be thankful. Pity the song is the usual bullshit Ailee does now with lots of cheesy brass stabs, annoying vocal overdubs and other unwelcome Beyonce-ish nonsense ("all my ladies clap!" *cringe* *shudder*), as if anything Beyonce ever did in her entire career should ever be considered worthy of anything else except lining rubbish bins let alone be influential to anybody, anywhere, ever. Ailee will probably sadly never get back to the quality of "Heaven" and "I'll Show You" as she seems to have now made being the third-rate Beyonce clone nobody asked for her 'thing' but at least I got to see more of Ailee nude than the aforementioned girl that I lusted after for all those years, so at least there's a silver lining to her career trajectory.
27. JJCC - At First
"Jackie Chan to debut his new male idol group JJCC this month", the headlines screamed. "Wow, Jackie Chan the martial arts movie star, making his own pop group, fuck yeah, this is going to be great!" I thought to myself, "the song will probably be really uptempo and cool, a deliberately kick-ass pulsating dance number specifically designed to showcase super fine crazy martial arts-inspired choreography crafted by Jackie Chan himself that will kick SM Entertainment's ass!". Then "At First" was released, and was I let down by the result after all the hype? Let's put it this way, the climactic highlight of both the song and the dance routine in "At First" is at 2:19 where one of the group members steps dramatically in a puddle and the water splashes a little bit around his foot. It may not be 2014's worst song of the year, but it's certainly 2014's most disappointing, saddest moment in k-pop debuts. Whenever someone asks me these days "are you looking forward to [comeback/album/group x]?" I always reply "I don't look forward to anything - I'll wait until it happens before I decide if I'm excited or not" and the reason for that attitude is that I've been burned one too many times by shit like this. Fuck you, Jackie Chan for plummeting my faith in the k-pop industry's ability to capitalise on a good concept to new lows previously thought not possible. Go 'rumble in the bronx' some more and leave k-pop alone, you fuckhead.
26. Crayon Pop - Uh-ee
Even in the ultra-commercial world of k-pop, songwriting is still an inherently creative form, and creative people typically don't respond well to performance pressure, which is understandable because it's the lack of traditional workplace pressures which is part of what makes creative industries appealing to many seeking this career path in the first place. Of course, once a creative occupation becomes a money-making venture, cold hard realilty intervenes and those pressures will exist anyway and exert their influence as they do in any other profession, and as they definitely have here. Not only did the songwriter of "Uh-ee" have the enormous pressure of penning a follow-up hit to Crayon Pop's massively viral "Barbarbar" but on top of that he would be conscious of Crayon Pop's long history of organised crime involvement and therefore would be acutely aware of the consequences of failure. No wonder he flaked out at the last minute - sweating in the studio control room and shaking in his boots, he could only come up with this children's TV theme-style nonsense. "Uh-ee" starts off sounding reasonable enough but deteriorates rapidly as it progresses and the chorus is so cheesy and cringeworthy that it'd probably get rejected for an anime ending credits tune for being too babyish. Still, we needn't worry too much - if the author of this song isn't floating face down in a river somewhere with a few gunshot holes in his neck, he's probably been sufficiently "educated" regarding his failings to make sure that he doesn't write anything this offensively bad ever again. You might have to wait a bit more time than usual for Crayon Pop's next comeback because it takes a little bit longer to operate a digital audio workstation when you're missing a few fingers, but don't worry, have patience and he'll get there. Except a return to quality songs from Crayon Pop soon, folks.
25. Sonamoo - Deja Vu
Okay, all of you YG Entertainment fans who claim that I can't stand YG and are just hating for troll/clickbait/cruelty/lulz purposes, bow down to me, kiss my feet and worship me as your holy defending angel right fucking now. Why? Because Sonamoo's "Deja Vu" is on this list, and it sucks, that's why. Is "Deja Vu" worse than YG's average output these days? Well, it's certainly right down there with some of their worst efforts, horribly recalling all the most forgettable parts of 90s American dance-pop and early k-pop (cheesy keyboard stabs, tinny synthesisers, overused breakbeats) and combining it with all the things I hate about the worst of today's girl-pop (Beyonce-cloning wide-interval melodies, awful rap sections, cringeworthy swag-trociousness in general). At least the song title is accurate because it's sure reminding me of a whole lot of awful shit, and it says a lot about this song that the only musically interesting section is the part where somebody just hits one note repeatedly on a synthesiser, over and over. It's a shame too because I really, really wanted to like this one - as usual when girl groups debut these days, Sonamoo seem to be copping a ton of hate for no specific reason other than that they're girls (also see Red Velvet, Lovelyz) so hopefully they do something really good in the future and then I can stan them and irritate the fuck out of some people. I guess for now they'll have to wait. In the meantime, the real reason that YG fans should be thankful that "Deja Vu" is here is this - I had my list already prepared and good to go in advance by Christmas time, and then "Deja Vu" appeared on December 28 2014 and was horrible enough to qualify for inclusion so obviously I had to turf out another song to suddenly make room for it. That song just happened to be WINNER's turgid awful wrist-slicer of a ballad "Color Ring", which is now shifted into position #31 and misses out on this post altogether, so that's one less time you have to read about Kpopalypse giving your favourite YG artist shit. Don't thank me all at once, YG fans.
24. 2NE1 - Happy
Speaking of YG, they have got no idea what side their bread is buttered on with 2NE1 these days, it's as if "Fire" never happened, and they never noticed the success of that song and thought "hmmm... maybe we should try and capture what was great about that song and use it to define 2NE1's signature sound". Nope - none of that thinking from YG these days! The entire "Crush" album is just one gigantic compost heap of "fuck it, we don't know what 2NE1's fans want, but they keep asking us to release stuff, let's just throw these shitty songs we've got laying around out there and hopefully people will like it just because we've already got them hooked". It's just lucky for YG that thanks to the overall high quality of 2NE1's early material there are now plenty of brainwashed Blackjacks out there who would buy CL's diarrhea-infused turds in a cup and drink it like it was molten chocolate as long as YG sold it to them with 2NE1's logo on the side. "Happy" is a grating straight-from-a-Sesame-Street-singalong nightmare that's musically even messier and more unwelcome than the pen-scribble on the right side of Dara's head in the video. At least they got the "happy ending" bit right, you'll be as happy when this song ends as 2NE1 appear to be.
23. Kiss&Cry - Domino Game
It's always a big risk in k-pop for an agency to try something new, it takes true courage to break the mold in such a strict and competitive genre as commercial pop, and you can count on Kiss&Cry's agency Winning Insight to do just that, after all this was the company that debuted chubby-chaser fap group Piggy Dolls (and their slimmer reconfiguration that everyone hypocritically complained about but musically sucked just as badly). They've really taken it to the next level this time though and done something even more daring than eliminate the spaces between the ampersand in the group title; they've debuted k-pop's very first honker concept. It warms the heart to see that agencies with guts and determination can break down the perceived barriers within the industry that girls owning a gigantic wind-breaking schnozz surely face every day. Imagine going to audition after audition and being knocked back constantly because of your massive protruding beak, imagine the pressure to conform in such a looks-based society... it'd surely get to you after a while. Imagine all the other bitchy girls in the auditions saying "why did they hire THAT girl? Her face is not aerodynamic at all." Then imagine the tears from the girl's parents when their daughter finally got to debut with this song. "Oh my god.. my daughter's been put in umpteenth clone of Beyonce's "Crazy In Love" with stupid unlistenable vocal wanking everywhere mixed with some awful Ricky Martin reggaeton bullshit and a crappy out-of-tune brass thing that sounds like it was ripped straight off a Wacklemore track, her career is doomed! Oh well, at least I'll get to see my precious daughter again soon when this song flops and the group disbands and she comes back to live with mom and dad for a while before she goes solo. It'll be good to see her again." Or alternatively, don't listen to this track or watch the video at all and you won't have to think about any of this stuff. Won't that be nice.
22. Gain - Truth Or Dare
Gain's videos are always great and never fail to entertain. If she's not fapping, or being "classy sexy", or both, then she's usually doing any other combination of things that would be banned under the UK's new insanely draconian porn legislation, which is always a ticket to k-pop MV-watching fun times. "Truth Or Dare" is up to usual standards, and features Gain:
pushing her boobs together
trying to get her big tits into a corset and only partially succeeding
encouraging "classy sexy" behaviour from her date ("why didn't you just break the door down?")
wearing a horizontal striped top that meets required standards
making everyone else in the video call her a slut
Pity the song itself is just a "Blurred Lines" clone, what a letdown and waste of potential after that great video build-up. Sure, it's true that "Truth Or Dare" certainly is a bit more listenable than "Blurred Lines" but that's a bit like saying that cancer of the dick is more enjoyable than cancer of the dick plus arthritis in your fapping hand. In fact, "Truth Or Dare" is even a little bit closer musically to Marvin Gaye's "Got To Give It Up" than "Blurred Lines" is, but of course Marvin Gaye's family certainly won't be going after Gain's songwriters in the same way they've been headhunting Robin Thicke and Pharrell because why accuse someone of plagiarism when you can't make any money off of it. However unlikely it is that Gain will get a legal spanking to match the physical spanking that she gets in most of her MVs, let's hope that the potential threat of attention from Gaye's litigation-happy relatives dissuades any further "Blurred Lines" clones and Gain's songwriters get back to ripping off Prince or whatever the fuck it is they usually do. In the meantime thank the fapgods for 1theK's English subtitles so I can fap to Gain being "classy sexy" with full context evident while leaving the sound down.
21. Madtown - Yolo
Now I'm not one of these language snobs who complains when something like 'adorbs' winds up in the dictionary, after all any dictionary worth a damn isn't designed to be a historical document for setting language in stone - it's there so people who don't know the definition of 'amazeballs' or whatever they come across dunderheaded kids saying these days can look it up and find out what it means. A dictionary is meant to be a practical tool for deciphering the meaning of unknown words, not a device for Internet language Nazis to suck each other off with. So when I heard that the Oxford Dictionary was including 'Yolo' I thought to myself "hey, that's okay - I can accept that language changes and evolves over time and that the English language today is different to that in Shakespeare's day. Then I heard that a nugu boy group called Madtown was doing a song that would also be called "Yolo", and I thought "hey, that's okay too - the company just want to position their group at the cutting edge of Western language and culture so the group can relate to a young global audience", so I was cool with that. Then I heard the song, and I realised three very important things:
This song is a fucking cancer that the world could do without.
If it wasn't for the use (and by extension, the very existence) of the word Yolo, this piece of music couldn't actually exist in its current form. The word strictly defines the song's chorus hook, rhyming scheme and lyrics, and without it, the entire song would need to be rewritten from scratch.
Given that 1. above is true, rewriting the song as per 2. above would be a positive development for all of humanity.
This completely changed how I feel about the term, so here's some advice. Next time someone says "Yolo" to you, or to anybody, just go up to them and start repeatedly punching them in the fucking head. No conversation, no explanation - just go straight up and start hitting. Don't worry - they'll figure out why eventually, hopefully before they're on the floor bleeding out of their skull. Or if that's too nasty for you, just lock them in a room and make them listen to this song on repeat until they piss their pants and promise never to do it again. If we all pitch in together and do this, we can make the world a better place. If you can believe, you can achieve. Come on everybody - let's live the dream.
20. Akdong Musician - Give Love
When The Rolling Stones first broke through the international marketplace in the mid 1960s, many Rolling Stones fangirls were interviewed about why they found the group preferable to their main music marketplace competition at that time, The Beatles. The answers were varied but a lot of girls came back with statements along the lines of "The Beatles are pretty but they're so clean cut... but the Rolling Stones are so much more fascinating, because they're so ugly!". That's kind of how I feel about Suhyun from Akdong Musician - her fascinating charms draw my eyes to the screen like a magnet, and I know what I'm looking at is not attractive by any objective standard in society yet I can't look away. In that Hi Suhyun song which is really just a rehashed version of Lee Hi's "1,2,3,4" with a slightly better beat I wince at the MV when looking at Lee Hi who looks like some botched YG genetic lab experiment where they tried to cross Diana Ross with Gollum*, but Suhyun honestly is styled really good there for the first time - when they're both on the screen my eyes go straight to Suhyun every time. Maybe this is what CL really meant by "bad meaning good". I'm wondering if Suhyun might blossom into a very attractive woman when she comes of age, and we all know how YG artists are notorious for "getting prettier" over time so with the correct styling and maybe a little Gangnam fairy dust who knows. We've all seen pre-debut school photos of k-pop idols that look ugly as fuck who then gradually transmogrify into fantasy pin-ups over time. You are all laughing at me now but you just might find yourself fapping to Suhyun by 2019 so remember that I told you this could happen. For now though, know that even this bizarre can't-quite-place-it ugly-but-fascinating thing that Suhyun has got going on for me doesn't even provide 1% of the required motivation to make me want to listen to this fucking awful nightmare song ever again ever. I don't even want to watch it with the sound down simply because it evokes memories of what the music sounds like that I'm trying to blot out of my brain, like a Vietnam veteran hiding from the sound of his neighbour's leaf-blower because it sounds like a helicopter chaingun warming up. Forget how the performers look because that's just a red herring, the true ugliness in Akdong Musician is the music.
* A while back I read some comment somewhere (can't remember where exactly) from some k-pop fan who said that she gets really hurt when people criticise Lee Hi's looks, because her friends tell her that she looks like Lee Hi. Wherever you find yourself today, my heart goes out to you. Don't let those haters get you down - I'm sure you look much prettier than that fugly Lee Hi woman and your friends are just being mean. Maybe get some better friends.
19. Block B - Jackpot
Block B were a good group with some good songs, "Nalina" and "Nilili Mambo" will probably remain two of the better male k-pop songs out there from the past few years. Then something happened to Block B to change everything - they left their label. They're probably making a lot more than the $14 that Stardom paid them now thanks to breaking out from under their previous company's shackles, and good on them all for making that move. However there's been an unfortunate side-effect - it seems that in the process they also severed the ties with whoever was writing all their old material as the new emancipated Block B can't turn a trick anymore, musically speaking. I hear that Zico himself has a fair hand in the productions these days and maybe he should stop all that and leave it to the experts because their new songs are just a mess. Nowhere is this more evident than "Jackpot", a horrible song that flits back and forth between a 6/8 swing feel in the verse and a 4/4 disco-rock chorus with all the clunky awkwardness of the gearshift in your grandmother's Volvo. It would be tolerable if the individual sections were decent but the melodies all have that horrible boy-group cheese-grater quality and by the time you get to the point in the MV where the girl is running away from Block B's thugged-out bicycle-riding swag-lords you'll be wishing that you could also run away from ever hearing this again like a faggot bitch.
18. Taeyang - Eyes, Nose, Lips
It's easy to fool a k-pop fan into thinking they're listening to the song of the year. Just do the following:
Make sure the song in question is a piano-based ballad with not too much drum machines especially at the start. Electronics are for kids, piano is "deep and meaningful" shit for serious music people, man. You can sneak the trendy trap bullshit in later on in the song if you want, but only once the piano's been fully established.
Use mainly dark and moody photography in the MV because it's artsier so therefore anything you shoot with it is more artistic and hence musically better straight away. Also if you have to paint abs onto the lead singer, it blends in better if you shoot it nice and dark.
Make sure your fog machine is in full working order. Fog is symbolic, it represents mystery and the unknown, like the mystery of Taeyang's musical genius, or the mystery of Koreans lapping up every cookie-cutter ballad that YG puts out.
Fire is also good because it represents the burning passion of YG fans stanning their faves in forums and blog posts against mean haters who just want to bring them down. If you've got a prop why not set it on fire? Don't be afraid to light it up and let it burn like you don't care.
Even though we're in sensitive ballad territory, preserve some of the hip-hop vibe by having the singer wear a beanie and a gold chain. You wouldn't want someone to stumble into this video halfway through and think they're listening to 2AM or something.
Male chest must be exposed, this is very important, it's not about skin exposure for the pleasure of fappers, it shows the performer's willingness to be vulnerable in front of his audience and share his emotions deeply (plus his body odours, which is definitely another hip-hop vibe enhancing thing). Remember this important fact to defend your bias with when people start complaining about double-standards.
Busting out a few Michael Jackson style dance moves in the climax of the song is totally appropriate because when guys get really emotional and express their deepest emotions, they dance in a carefully planned, tightly choreographed manner.
If you want drunk sluts to sing this at karaoke and have a good time they'll never remember complex harmonies and vocal phrases, or adventurous arrangements and harmonic patterns, so remember the KISS rule, Keep It Simple, Stupid. Dumb the song down as far as it can go - and then a little further if you possibly can. Basic lyrics, basic chords, basic melody... the less interesting, the better. If you can't follow along to it when you're ripped off your tits on a combination of soju, methamphetamine and E's at 3am on a Sunday morning in a karaoke booth while simultaneously trying to grope your booth partner between their legs, maybe you need to slow it down a little more and make it just a little more basic.
Hey presto, Song Of The Year, bitches.
17. B.I.G (Boys In Groove) - Hello
There's a phenomenon in Australia which is extremely widespread and has been so since colonial days, called the "cultural cringe". Essentially it's the opposite of patriotism - Australians mostly find their own culture to be extremely fucking corny, and we groan whenever we see homegrown portrayals of it in a positive light, because we know the truth that Australia really ain't all that (apart from the killer wildlife, which is awesome - most people in Australia who die from wildlife attacks do so because they're too busy being blown away about how they just got bit by some amazing cool deadly creature that they forgot to call an ambulance or go to hospital). Rest assured that something like B.I.G's "Hello" could never have emerged from Australia, and listening to it with the captions on (because you need to understand the lyrics to really appreciate the thudding awfulness of this one) makes me wonder if Koreans roll their eyes at this stuff and find it as mortifyingly embarrassing as I would if I saw some Australian rappers do a similar song for export about the virtues of Chiko rolls and lamingtons. Not that improved lyrics would have worked much better because there's no saving that horrible trap beat, but I actually feel bad for Korea and get "secondhand cultural cringe" from listening to this. Also, fuck these guys for bragging about their fast Internet while my government dithers away wasting billions trying to squeeze more juice out of Australia's shit-tacular copper network instead of replacing the whole damn thing with fibre-optic cable at about a third of the cost like the previous government was going to do. I'm not sure what I hate more, Tony Abbott's government or this song's lyrics... but fuck them both.
16. GP Basic - Pika-Burnjuck
Every k-pop following idiot cried pathetically like little babies when super-cute girl group Pritz dressed up in some sexy Nazi cosplay for their great Babymetal rip-off "Sorasora", as if Nazi-inspired fashion isn't already in everything from Pink Floyd: The Wall to Star Wars. On the other hand nobody gave two shits when GP Basic dressed in nearly exactly the same type of getup for "Pika-Burnjuck". If anything GP Basic's Nazi concept is more authentic than Pritz due to the lack of frilly dresses which I'm pretty sure were verboten for SS girls in uniform - but strangely nobody noticed that because "Pika-Burnjuck" was actually a piece of music bad enough to do the impossible in today's no-fun ultra-PC age - it made people forget that they hate Nazis. Cruise the comments section of YouTube and all you'll see under "Pika-Burnjuck" besides the obligatory "good on them for not doing a sexy concept" stuff that we always get from pathetic fangirls nowadays is people saying that the girls are trying too hard to be gangster, which must look pretty hilarious to any actual gangsters out there, not to mention any Nazis. The song besides being generally obviously musically awful actually has not one but two breakdowns in it, a traditional dubstep one that we all hate, and another one where they just remove all the music and leave only the drumbeat, which maybe isn't actually that bad of an idea come to think of it. Maybe they should have ran with that idea for the entire song and left out everything else, now that would have been a marginal improvement.
15. Switch - Bikini
Many years ago I was at a party, it was getting late and I was bored because the hot girls had already left but I couldn't leave because I was relying on someone else as the transport and that person wanted to stay. Because I wasn't drinking and was looking for something to do with my time, the party host was happy to let me "be the DJ" for a while, so I got to be in charge of selecting tunes from everyone's CDs and cassettes that they had brought along (this was back in the early 90s, when people actually did that). As I was going through the big pile of shit, some guy who seemed reasonably off his face on some kind of chemical entertainment products came up to me and thrust a homemade cassette in my hand.
"Hey man, you've gotta play this, it's amazing!"
"What is it?" I asked warily. I knew this wasn't a good sign.
"It's a mixtape! Do you know what a mixtape is?" He didn't wait for a response. "There's all these songs on it, and then when one song ends, it just goes right into the next one and the beat all matches! It's like it's the same song, but it's different! It's amazing! I did it myself, it's awesome! You gotta hear this, it's so great, it'll blow you away!"
None of the other music they had at the party was any good so I thought fuck it, why not - how bad can it be? I motioned for my new friend Mixtape Man to use the stereo system and he stopped whatever music was playing and put his tape on. The first song started up and the sound was just a total wall of shit, he had mixed it so there was almost always more than one track going on at once, and you never really got to clearly hear anything because there were too many layers of competing sound. This was before I even started DJing at a radio station but even then it was obvious that he didn't know anything about how to do a mixtape. Every now and again a new song would cut in and he'd point at the stereo and scream "DID YOU HEAR THAT - FUCKING AMAZING TRANSITION, MAN!" and I'd just kind of smile and nod because he was pretty off his face so who knows what he might be capable of if I started getting disagreeable. Anyway "Bikini" by Switch reminds me of the sound of his mixtape with so much sound fighting for space and not much of it getting through, and the feeling of relief when "Bikini" ended was much the same as the feeling that I had when I turned around after about the fourth "amazing transition" to see that Mixtape Man had finally passed out in the corner so I didn't have to play his stupid cassette any more. On another note, it seems that "Bikini" is statistically a dangerous name to give a k-pop song, there were two songs called Bikini released in 2013 and they both made it onto my worst-of list for that year as well. At least the girls of Switch look good in their bikinis, even though their underwear also seems to reflect the "too much going on" theme of the music. Oh well, points for effort. And boobs.
14. GD & Taeyang - Good Boy
G-Dragon made it very clear recently that Taeyang's basically just his fawning lapdog, so we can safely say that G-Dragon should take full responsibility for this. Taeyang's input probably consisted of nodding his head and saying "yes G-Dragon this sounds good you are great" over and over, and the whole song is a good example of just how bad music can get when a creative artist is surrounded by too many yes-men. If you get so large that nobody will ever step back and tell you that you suck, exercising quality control becomes difficult because a somewhat objective outside opinion is harder to find. It's a good thing Kpopalypse is here to tell him how much this song blows and give G-Dragon a taste of reality he's unlikely to get elsewhere, let's hope he's reading. Even the video looks poor with too much awkward poncing around from everybody involved, and its only notable visually interesting feature is that G-Dragon and Taeyang are wearing caps from the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games. It took me back to 1988, a time that I remember well, a time when rap music was decent, shithouse abominations like trap and dubstep hadn't been invented, G-Dragon and Taeyang were just jizzloads floating around inside daddy's ballsack and people didn't try to look gangster while wearing glow-in-the-dark dreads while someone blew bubbles in the background. Nor did people back then sample the beat from Hitchhiker's "Eleven" and do half-assed lame raps over the top, shave their song's name crookedly into the back of their skulls, or have a chorus hook as lame as "I am a goooooood boy" which I guess was what Taeyang was saying to himself all throughout the recording session as he shambled around on his foreknuckles dutifully doing whatever G-Dragon told him. It's like Private Pyle made a rap song, jesus fucking christ.
13. Fly To The Sky - You You You
This awful festering putrid pustulent putrescent boil on the Korean music scene was a huge hit and it begs the question: why does Korea like disgusting worthless ballads so much? I've long pondered the elusive answer to this question and I had a theory about this a while back. I thought that Koreans like ballads because they work so hard, pulling all those 18 hour days 7 days a week, and when they're finished their shift putting spindles in boxes or whatever the fuck it is that they do and get home, they just want nothing more than to sit and listen to something soothing and relaxing and non-stressful, the poor little dears. Then I found out that the "hard-working Koreans" are just a myth and that Korean workers actually have the worst worker productivity of all OECD countries - bam, that sure turned my theory into dust! What a bunch of slack assholes with no determination! I have a new theory now: I think dull-as-fuck music like this piped through the office public address system passes away the hours with maximum calm as Koreans sit in their offices pretending to work hard pulling all that overtime while they're really getting drunk, chatting up the person who comes to change the coffee machine or perfecting their League Of Legends builds. Some consultancy group probably did a study somewhere that showed that awful ballads like this are the least likely to result in industrial action due to gradually sapping the motivation out of employees to question or work, or think or do anything really. Soon all of global society will be controlled this way, with ballads that numb the senses, lulling people into a near-comatose state. Forget radiation poisoning, bath salts or medical experiments - it's going to be Korean ballads like this one that bring about the zombie apocalypse, and you you you are going to be in hell hell hell.
12. Pascol - Merry Black Day
There's a porn movie I have where a girl is blowing two guys at the same time - she's holding one dick in each hand and she swaps every few seconds between blowing guy A while stroking guy B and vice versa. This is fairly standard porn film threesome foreplay procedure, but then all of a sudden, something different happens. Just because it's probably been a long day of shooting porn and our female pornstar is somewhat bored, she decides to lighten the mood by getting the two guys' cocks and touching their ends together. The guys both unanimously say "No! Don't go there!" while the girl starts laughing like a hyena as they both instantly lose their erections, the director yells "Cut!" and they wait a few minutes for them to get hard again so they can reshoot the scene. Then she does it a second time - it's hilarious, what a troll! How those guys felt at that moment when their cock-heads met and started rubbing together against their will is pretty much how I felt when the bridge of "Merry Black Day" kicks in at 1:19 and the song changes from a cute and appealing rap-lite kinda thing into some kind of pathetic R&B warble-fest and falls to shit. There's no rescuing the song from that point onward, and I know it's supposed to be a harmony but the vocals and the backings are sounding fairly out of key with each other at that point, they can't seriously be passing off a bridge and chorus this bad onto a pop audience. In the video they're going for a happy fun hip-hop vibe but the maudlin slow beats and unlistenable vocal wanking ensures that this song misses its mark completely. You can wear all the Crayon Pop-inspired tracksuits that you want, your song isn't going to be any fun to listen to unless it actually sounds like fun instead of some kind of fucking necrotic funeral dirge (first doom metal band to name themselves "necrotic funeral dirge" after being inspired by this post and release a song on YouTube called "Cao Ni Ma Slaughter" gets a present from me). I get the vibe while watching this video that even Pascol themselves hate the song, as they hide their boredom behind sunglasses and sway to the beat in a non-committal half-interested fashion. The Suicidal Tendencies jumper at the start of the video seems more appropriate to the mood of what's going down here because these girls do look somewhat on the brink (don't do it, kids), but then even Suicidal Tendencies were an upbeat thrash group and never had anything quite this boring - it just makes me wish I was listening to "Trip At The Brain" instead of this crap.
11. g.o.d ft. Megan Lee - The Story Of Our Lives
Here's how I believe the recording session for this song went down:
Megan is in the recording studio vocal booth, cutting her verse for g.o.d's latest song. She's wearing big studio headphones and is chewing bubble gum. "What take are we on?" she asks into the big grey vocal microphone.
"Take 36. When you're ready. Try and put some emotion into it" comes the instruction from the audio engineer, the voice transmitted from the talkback microphone on the other side of the soundproofed double-glazed control room wall into her headset. The engineer watches Megan through the glass. Next to him is the producer, who looks on silently.
Megan sighs. "I don't even want to do this fucking shit. I'm so bored."
"It's only four lines, come on Megan. Get this done and you don't have to listen to this song ever again."
"Good, because I fucking won't!", Megan snaps back. "This song fucking sucks dick! And don't think for a goddamn second I'm going to be in that fucking stupid video! He can get one of his slutty actresses for that!"
"We can talk about the video later. Let's just get your vocal part down." The engineer takes a deep breath and keeps his cool - he's used to dealing with kids like this. "Let's go, come on. And take your gum out."
"I swear, if I even have to set foot in the same room as that Kim Tae Woo asshole... he fucking disgusts me..." Megan mutters as she inserts two fingers inside her mouth, removes the lump of stale chewing gum and sticks it onto the metal sheet music stand at chest height in front of her. "Okay, I'm ready." Megan clears her throat.
"Okay, we're rolling. Do your best." The engineer presses record on his digital workstation and the backing track's piano intro comes through Megan's headphones. Megan closes her eyes and tries to focus, but when she hears the 'Love / what is true love" spoken intro, her eyes widen again and she glares angrily through the glass at the engineer.
"FUCK you. Don't play it from the fucking START! My bit isn't even until after three minutes in! I don't want to listen to this trash! Just forward it to the bit where I sing and press record from there, for fuck's sake!"
"Listening to it all might help you get into the feel for the song, for when your bit comes.", the engineer replies.
Megan is livid. "FUCK OFF! What 'feel'? It has no fucking 'feel'! This song is such fucking INSINCERE BULLSHIT! They're trying to come off like they're all sensitive family men and shit, but it's all fucking lies! Kim Tae Woo is such a cuntface, I swear I am so close to suing that fucking slimy lizard, don't fucking think I won't!"
"Are you finished? Can we do this?" the engineer replies.
"No I'm NOT FUCKING FINISHED. This whole thing is fucking trash! 'Story of our lives' my fucking ass - more like 'Story of our lies!' My parents are gonna take him to the fucking cleaners if he fucks with me any more!"
Not fazed at all, but gradually losing patience, the audio engineer replies: "You know, if you were to put a tenth of the passion and energy into your vocal performance that you do into trying to convince yourself how horrible Kim Tae Woo is, we'd be done by now."
"FUCK YOU, YOU CUNT!" Megan screams, rips the headphones off her head and throws them at the engineer's face. Shielded by the thick glazing of the control booth, the headphones hit the double-glass wall between them and drop to the floor. Megan storms off through the studio door to the outside of the building amid a tirade of obscenities.
The engineer laughs and turns to the producer. "Well... she didn't like that suggestion."
The producer shrugs. "Let's not worry about it. Just assemble the best vocal part you can using the bits from what we've got. It's not like it matters much, it's only a ballad... and it'll take less time than trying to get an acceptable performance from Ms. Special out there."
The engineer nods. "It's still a paycheck. Good thing I get paid by the hour. Hey, do you think Megan knows that my wages are added to her trainee debt?"
10. J-Rabbit - There's Got To Be A Good Thing
I know I'll get a lot of shit for daring to have an opinion and putting a song from Korea's indie-darlings on this list but J-Rabbit fucking suck, flat-out. There's no sugar-coating the low net worth of this group's musical output, no matter how much I might want to like them. YES, the girls are obviously extremely talented, YES it's good that they've stayed independent and therefore are probably actually making decent money out of what they do unlike just about every other performer in Korea, YES they're probably really nice people who deserve their success and I sincerely wish them all the best in their future endeavours and YES this fucking song sucks fucking donkey dick all night long. Back when I was 4 years old I used to love songs that sounded just like this when they came on the TV screen during children's television hour. I remember those days, sitting on the carpet playing with my toys and bopping along to some housefrau with bobbed hair and an acoustic guitar or a piano singing "Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush" or whatever the fuck it was that week. Then something happened - I turned 5 years old and songs for toddlers by TV mummy didn't sound all that good anymore. Hell, even kid's music where I live doesn't sound quite this regressive nowadays, Australia's 21st century toddlers have got sophisticated nu-school rockin' soundtracks to augment their coloured-block playtime like The Wiggles and Hi-5 (who even have a Korean member). Of course if you've still got a mental age of 4 years or under, or you enjoy occasionally curling up into a fetal position and crying about how horrid the big bad world is and you just wish a couple of girls would sing you children's songs and smile at you a bit to make you feel better about your pointless, alienating existence, then you might be able to appreciate J-Rabbit. Personally I advocate becoming mentally healthy rather than retreating into the kind of emotionally crippled state that makes J-Rabbit's music seem appealing, but then each to their own. Far be it for me to tell you how to run your life.
9. PSY ft. Snoop Dogg - Hangover
Ignoring the hype, and ignoring the burn that PSY applied to k-pop fans by succeeding where your bias failed by actually making Americans give a shit about him at least for a month or two before the novelty of watching a guy's crotch bounce up and down in a lift wore off, "Gangnam Style" taken on face value is an alright song. If you're any sort of pop music fan and you hate it, the truth is that you probably did in fact like it when you first listened to it but you just got sick of it from overexposure. There was high initial interest for Gangnam Style's follow-up single "Gentleman" too but that song ultimately was a fizzer because it self-consciously tried to replicate the viral happy accident of "Gangnam Style". Virality never works out well when it's manufactured specifically to be viral (just ask <a data-m