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Politics in Northeast Asia affects the circulation of popular culture in multiple ways. As we discussed in class, whenever there are political tensions, governments try to stop the stream of cultural imports from the country they have tensions with. If we look at what is actually

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Today we talked about cultural appropriation in K-pop and if it has become less common these days. Compared to ten years ago, it has definitely become less common because of the growing international fan base that started to call out the artists who were culturally appropriating.

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If we compare older generation girl groups with newer generation girl groups and their sexuality we can see a lot of changes. It used to be more blatant sexualization and objectification whereas right now it is more hidden. Today we watched a video of Hyuna shaking her ass for basically

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In an article about masculinity, Park analyzes Psy’s Gangnam style and how it is received overseas (Park 2015, 195). He finds that his popularity is largely due to people laughing at his funny appearance instead of laughing with him because they don’t understand the lyrics (Ibid, 196-97)

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According to Jin and Ryoo English appears in K-pop because of globalization and the influence of western powers (Jin and Ryoo 2014, 114). This influence causes local products to get more and more westernized and get replaced by western based formulas, or causes western and local

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Saying the government “made K-pop” is disrespectful to the artists (not just singers, but all the artists involved in a production). The South Korean government obviously helped the K-pop industry a lot through various laws and investments. However, K-pop could never be K-pop without

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Today I will talk about the Coca-Cola advertisement of Newjeans. It was a full length song about cola with zero sugar. I cannot find how much they got paid for this, but I did find that they received more than 10 billion won for advertising contracts. I think this song was slightly

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Today I will introduce the history and development of YG Entertainment. It was founded in 1996 by Yang Hyunseok (양현석) who was a member of the famous boy group Seo Taiji and Boys. After disbandment, he created YGE. It’s first group was not a success and caused a lot of debt for Yang.

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Today I will introduce Hong Jinyoung (홍진영) who is a South Korean trot singer and the singer of my favorite trot song Love’s Battery (사랑의 배터리). She is 39 years old and used to be part of a kpop girl group before debuting as trot singer in 2010 with the aforementioned song. After that she

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The role of the idol star is changing recently and so are the behaviors that become scandal worthy. I think this is mainly because of social media and growing audiences. Years ago it was still acceptable for idols to have interactions with people from the opposite sex, whereas right now

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Understanding a country’s history is important for understanding musical production because the government has the power to influence this. If the government decides to censor songs and artists, this will limit the musical production and creativity, which is what happened in South Korea

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In the comment about #Seunghan from #Riize the fan is talking about how Seunghan had to see funeral wreaths that were sent to him. They were sent by anti fans who were mad that he had a girlfriend before he debuted. Those anti fans wanted Seunghan to leave the group because he was not

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#신중현
He was one of the first and most important Korean rock and roll artists, he was a part of multiple rock bands but got arrested because he did not agree with the government. The government made marihuana illegal when he got arrested so they had a reason to arrest him.

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www.youtube.com/watch?v=IC8f...

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Considering Korean culture and history, I understand why fans expect idols to be nationalists. However, I don’t think they should be criticized for not being nationalist enough. People can decide for themselves if they want to be nationalist or not, if you don’t like it,

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#KoreanGipsy상자루 #경북스윙
This performance is a mix of Korean traditional instruments and a guitar. It’s an interesting performance but I don’t think it is something I would look up by myself. I appreciate the music and the effort that the musicians put into it but it is not the style -

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People often accuse kpop of being ‘factory made’, and I think this is often true. Idols are essentially products that are created to fit the interest of fans. They have to have this perfect image and cannot make any mistakes.