#yes i misspelled and asterisked the word because if you subject me to your takes you're going to listen to me too

[doux-amer]

Don’t reblog this because I frankly don’t care about opening a dialogue about this beyond people I know, but it’s been tiring to see well-meaning people including longtime friends and mutuals have opinions on K-p0p that are disingenuous, ignorant, or flat out racist. It bears repeating that I’ve grown up in this world and I’m also highly critical of it, so I’m not blind to its faults nor is this post a kneejerk defensive reaction. 

Look, I respect you all. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be following you, and if you follow me back, then please extend that same courtesy to me because as silly and unimportant as it is to you—and to me too most of the time—bearing with years and years of this from different people with no escape is taxing. 

I don’t have the energy to deal with this and everyone has limited attention span so I don’t want to put in effort, but these are my main issues:

1. If you look down on K-p*p for being generic but are okay with or even enjoy non-Asian pop music—namely white pop music—do some self-reflecting because that’s racist. I see some of the artists and groups you all like, and people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. 

2. Actually, if you like other genres, that still applies. God, the number of white indie acts that sound the same and are as unpleasant as oatmeal that I dealt with over the years because people raved that they were “good” or “interesting.” 

3. Don’t generalize an entire country’s pop scene if you don’t know anything about it. I can tell right off the bat that you don’t because idol acts =/= the entirety of K-p*p yet 99% of the time, that’s what you’re criticizing. You also tend to lump virtually all Korean acts under the meaningless umbrella term “K-p0p” when some are not, in fact, even pop or pop is only one of the various genres they play around with.

4. Saying that all K-p0p is manufactured and there’s no real emotion or deliberate craft behind it is racist! You might not mean it, but there’s a long history with Asians being stereotyped as emotionless robots who have high technical skills and are efficient/good at mass production but are incapable of creativity or original thought. Your thinking falls neatly into that pattern. This goes hand in hand with #1 because you can say the same with numerous pop scenes across the globe and it’s eyebrow-raising that it’s only really when people talk about K-p*p, that this becomes a prominent argument. 

5. It’s also racist because once again, you have a superficial understanding beyond your annoyance at seeing idk, pretty people dancing in synchronicity on your screen because they’re ubiquitous and maybe you tried one song and hated it immediately. It’s a huge insult because yes, it’s true that there are acts that are carefully produced, packaged, and branded. AGAIN, this is not specific to K-p0p. Yes, there are artists who don’t care what they’re churning out and have zero calorie songs (to be clear, I’m of the mind that sometimes that’s what you want/need; if I want to jump up and down at karaoke with friends, I don’t need to put on the world’s greatest masterpiece). But there are also a lot of artists who DO care about artistry; are talented, creative, and even boundary-pushing; and put a lot of meaning and thought behind every aspect of their music, performance, wardrobe, etc.! By being so readily dismissive of an entire country’s pop scene and painting everything with the same brush, you’re shutting yourself into a provincial mindset when you don’t know what’s out there. 

This was blunt and it probably got mean at points, but I’m too tired to care. If you do want to talk about it, though, I won’t bite your head off or be short with you because again, if you’re a friend/mutual, then I like and respect you. I don’t know why I bothered wasting my time writing this, but I’m so sick of this.