I shit you not.


Yes, this actually happened. The Hallyu Wave has taken yet another international victim - but this time, we cannot save him from drowning.


Comments (that I may or may not have made up) include:
"What the actual fuck?"
"To explain his small penis?"
"Don't Asian girls want white guys in the first place?"

He was not a bad looking guy to begin with. I am sure he could have gotten plenty of ladies (or men. Whatever floats his boat. We don't judge here) with his looks. Plus, his Brazilian accent and suave South American heritage would just add to his resume. But nope - he had to go ruin everything.

Max (who now goes by the name of Xiahn - which sounds more Chinese than Korean to me) allegedly became fixated on Korean culture after studying abroad there for a year. His obsession infatuation led him to paying for 10 plastic surgeries to "perfect his look".

I blew up this photo so that you may all stew in jealousy over how beautiful he now looks

Xiahn, 25, goes by the online pseudonym of "Oriental Gaucho". He intends on moving to Korea as soon as possible so that he no longer is a foreign Koreaboo, but a full-fledged obsessive fanboy amongst his self-proclaimed own kind.  

Like a model. SM Entertainment - get right on that shit. He already knows another language!

My gosh. Ten plastic surgeries - most of which were solely concentrated on "fixing" his eyes. That is intense. I could not imagine going through any of those as I am too scared of double eyelid surgery for I fear things going in my eye (que jokes about semen going into a girl's eye. Hah hah. Hilarious. Haven't heard those comments before). This guy has balls.

I feel like this is an extreme version of getting a large, obnoxious, misspelled tattoo when highly intoxicated. But really, if the internet did not have a plethora of drunken tattoos, what else would we laugh at in addition to dumb fangirl comments and cats doing silly things? Unlike a tattoo though, this cannot really be reversed with a handful of follow up procedures.

This is why some boys can't have nice things.

Wow, it has been so long since I started this "series" I should probably reiterate that it stands for "Ways you might be full of shit" and I actually had to go back searching through my published posts to remember that. Anyway, my last one actually happened to be on slut-shaming, and this is a bit similar, but it is also about "slut"-lover-hating and many aspects of sexual performances and sexual objectification and everything.

So gather round kids, because I hope to open up your world to what a complicated bitch life is.

So apparently Hyeri of Girl's Day committed some kind of unspeakable crime insulting Dongwoon of B2ST in the most offensive way possible that only a filthy slut like her could even imagine, and then like a literal bitch eating her own shit, only made it far worse by directly tweeting an obviously fake apology to him because hey, why not get some hate? Shits fun.

Here is the video:


Oh, oops, wrong one. Real video after the jump.


She does it around 4:38:



Looking at netizen reactions, it would seem she hasn't lost any of her fanbase over the disgusting display:

Female netizens: [+11,543, -1,203] THAT STUPID BITCH BETTER STEP OFF MY OPPAR! SHE IS WAY TOO HOT AND ALREADY FUCKED MY OLDER SISTER'S OPPAR! DANGER! DANGER! DANGER! DANGER!

Male netizens: [+9,331, -1,890] I get that Hyeri doesn't give any fucks what fangirls for male groups think, but I'm kind of surprised she doesn't at least try to avoid the hassle. Either way, those dumbshits should just fap and chill the fuck out.

If you watch the video before that point, you may notice her do other things like jam to their music, seem instantly pleased and the first to clap about their win, be the first to turn around to bow to them, and other little things that make her appear to like them. But ALL OF THAT MEANS SHIT BECAUSE OF HER PROFANE MOCKING OF DONGWOON... orrrr maybe that isn't what she was doing at all.

Maybe, being an idol with plenty of wins under her own belt, she realizes that B2ST has won 72145629863459 awards, and that awards mean basically nothing to their personal estimations of success anymore, and Hyeri, being quite familiar with the same old bullshit generic lines idols have to throw out every 10 seconds when they are addressing the public, was making fun of the entire circus around her, and perhaps even thought the way he did it was cute.

Of course, you'll never see fangirls admit that the awards they psychotically spam polls to win for their oppars are nothing to them, or that the thank yous aren't said with the deepest, most heartfelt gratitude a god can muster, or that someone like Hyeri is capable of being a fan. Nope, you'll just see a lot of strange narrative treating all of these things as though they are sacred and to be upheld with the utmost reverence, and of course if they aren't, their oppar must be extremely pissed about it, feeling exactly how they feel, because they have an emotional unity with him like that.

As for Hyeri's response, I can only assume she noticed a wave of fangirl hate coming her way, and knew from a wealth of past experience that there is nothing to resolve it peacefully, and so decided to toss out some SNS for fangirls (since only they pay attention to it) to transform into news articles with their hate, and ride the wave into a media play. Fangirl hate didn't ever do anything but get her more attention and thus more male fans before, so why would it hurt now?

This could all also be completely untrue, because like everyone else I don't know Hyeri, and really nobody knows what she meant or why and what her strategies at navigating the typical drama is except her and close friends that she lets know.

P.S. She will soon be co-starring with Hyun Bin in the new drama "Hyde, Jekyll, I." Enjoy that information.

I know the new guidelines were to avoid articles such as this, but I asked AKF and he agreed: this is a very good exception.

Yes Kpopalypse is back with your yearly Christmas present - reviews of all the shitty Christmas songs that everybody hates!  I posted a Christmas song round-up last year and quite sensibly nobody gave a shit, so like I always do when I sense that people would rather I didn't do something, I return to do it again on a regular basis!   Grab a nice cup of your favourite Christmas beverage and gather around while I take a Christmas-pudding-sized shit on all of 2014's worthless money-draining sentimental dick-sucking Christmas trash!
 

Songs are listed in chronological order.  No need for ratings because they all suck and you shouldn't listen to any of them.  Play the videos at your own risk.  This list is probably not complete but who gives a shit.  If I missed out any videos, good.  Anyway here we go:

October 19th - Seo Taiji - Christmalo.win

Seo Taiji thought he'd get a head start on everybody with the Christmas bullshit, I guess he needed some early Christmas cheer after writing all those artsy songs with IU about massacres.  The real human rights atrocity here though is that he's older than me and he still looks like Lee Hi's computer nerd friend who she hangs out at the net cafe with, which means he's either been having skin grafts or he stole some of Boram's eternal Gangnam youth face cream (see "White Letter", below).  Anyway I guess he really is spending too much time on the Internet while finger-fucking Lee Hi under the computer desk if he thought that making the song title read like a Windows filename was a good idea.  That's the most notable thing about this limp synthesiser-driven ska-lite nonsense, but even so this song is still better than pretty much everything else on this list.  Be warned: it mostly just gets worse from here.

December 2nd - Sung Si Kyung, Kwon Jin Ah - Don't Forget

In this video the girl tries to decorate a Christmas tree, but the star doesn't quite sit right so it falls down, and then she starts crying.  Aww.  Come on girl, cheer up, it's only a fucking paper and plastic star made of wood pulp and petrochemical byproducts that some Chinese labourer got paid 2 cents per day to make thousands of in 12-hour shifts seven days a week in some stinky factory, it's not like you can't go down to the convenience store and just get yourself another one you dumb bitch.  It's the k-pop fans who have these crappy ballads foisted upon them during the Christmas period instead of actual proper songs who should really be doing the crying.  Kwon Jin Ah (the female singer, not the actress) is really cute though, and I didn't know about her before this video, so at least this crappy song enhanced my fap folder slightly.

December 2nd - Crayon Pop, K-Much, Bob Girls & Zan Zan (Chrome Entertainment) - Love Christmas

It's nearly Christmas time and gangster bitches want to party too, so the most thugged-out label in k-pop got all their groups together for this Christmas pool video.  Why have a pool party when it's winter, though?  The reason eventually becomes clear - it's some sort of protection money collection racket, obviously being organised by head gangster Way and the guy in the ski mask at 0:15.  At the end of the video, there's some bonus footage where the Chrome Entertainment members who haven't been able to afford their redistribution fees to Way's Girls get thrown in the icy cold water and humiliated until they succumb to hypothermia, as if being in this song isn't shameful enough.  Let's hope they threw the songwriters in there too.

December 3rd - K.will, Sistar, Jungigo, Mad Clown, Boyfriend, Jooyoung (Starship Planet) - Love Is You

Seeing the gangster party going on at Chrome, Starship Entertaiment couldn't believe it - "they're that cruel even to their own members?  Imagine what they're capable of to other companies - these people are a threat!" they thought.  So Starship responded with their own Christmas video, clearly intent on sending the message "don't step on our turf".  The intimidating video features members playing with covert surveillance devices, vicious guard dogs and even gaudily-painted human skulls, and is paired with the ultimate terror - a song so hideous that playing it over a public address system would be enough of a threat to make any rival gang invading the Starship compound reconsider their assault and put down their weapons.

December 9th - Winterplay - White Winter

The Christmas songs got off to a slower start this year, and for a few blissful weeks I was thinking that maybe I didn't have enough material to justify doing this list at all.  Unfortunately I was wrong and by December 9th were were in full swing, so now you have to read this bullshit.  Who the fuck are Winterplay?  I don't even know, but they're having a dinner party and nobody cares, nor does anyone care for this crap bossanova which sounds like IU tried to record "Obliviate" over at Bumkey's house after taking her own body weight in marijuana and ecstasy.

December 10th - Kanto ft. As One - Before The Snow

This video has one of those pick-up-the-toy-with-the-wobbly-hook machines.  Back when the price of playing those machines was actually cheaper than simply going out and buying the fucking plush toys inside one at a clearance store, I used to play them quite a bit.  I amassed a collection of plush toys that I'd put inside the bass drum of the drum kit I'd use in the punk band I was in at the time.  The front skin of the drum kit was clear so everyone in the audience could see the toys.  I got called a faggot by a lot of people because of that which was great because it means they never suspected that I was messing around with their girlfriends backstage.  This video brought back good memories.  Pity the song sucks and is such typical trash that I can't even think of anything to write about it so I have to go off on a massive irrelevant tangent like this.

December 10th - Teen Top - Snow Kiss

A "snow kiss" also known as a "snowball" or "snowblowing" is when you cum in your partner's mouth during oral sex and then you kiss her afterward and while you're kissing her, she spits your own cum back into your throat.  Sometimes girls do it for revenge if you cum in their mouth without warning, but then sometimes people do it as a mutually enjoyable activity too, or sometimes just for lulz (as I found out once with an ex-girlfriend who had a sufficiently warped sense of humour).  I wonder if this subtle reference has been deliberately inserted into this song to throw Teen Top's gay male followers some fanservice.  Either way my cum didn't taste all that bad and I'd rather be snowblowed a dozen times than listen to this song again.

December 14th - KARA, Rainbow, Oh Jong Hyuk, A-Jax, DSP Girls (DSP Friends) - White Letter

"White letter" isn't a sexual innuendo though, but I think that it should be.  Perhaps a "white letter" can mean a heartfelt letter of apology that you write an ex-girlfriend because you blew in her face too much back when you had a relationship, in the hope that she'll forgive you and you might get back together one day.  If only you had aimed further south a little she might have hung onto you for a bit longer, after all boobs are a lot easier for her to clean off (especially if a towel is thoughtfully provided) and there's none of that stinging when it accidentally gets in her eye.  Mind you semen in the face is apparently great for the complexion so ladies, consider the benefits.  Anyway, someone please add "White Letter" to Urban Dictionary, the world needs to know.  Oh, and this song sucks.

December 15th - The VIBE Family - Lonely Christmas

"The VIBE Family"?  Really?  Can we quit with the potential for innuendos already?  Come on guys, you're making this way too easy for me.  I wonder what vibrators are in the Vibe Family.  Do they have G-spot-tickling rabbit ears that you can detach and replace with reindeer antlers instead to fit in with the Christmas theme?  Something for you to think about this Christmas.  In the meantime this song is such crap that the label knew it would make no money and couldn't even be bothered getting their artists in to film them, they just drew a few stupid pictures instead.  At least I didn't have to endure any k-pop people dressed in stupid red jumpers and swaying awkwardly, I should probably be grateful.

December 16th - Choeyoungtae - Merry Christmas

Christmas is for everybody, even nugus with acoustic instruments.  This is probably one of the better songs here actually just due to the lack of cheesiness, which isn't saying much but maybe it's worth a listen - maybe.  The phrase "Merry Christmas" is really the only Christmas-ish thing about it, they're not trying to rape you up the ass with tinsel and bells and shit like in every other video here, and maybe he's got Christmas decorations on his guitar but the camera is not really at the right angle for me to see them so it's okay.  Don't get too excited though (the performers here sure aren't) but the fact that this song is just kinda boring and not completely pathetic nonsense has got to be a Christmas miracle.

December 17th - Hansalchai, Hoso, Red Chair - Christmas Hug

Nugus like to wait a little before they release Christmas songs for some reason.  I'm not sure why this is the case but it's definitely a trend that I have observed.  Maybe it's like how if you're really poor you tend to put off buying your presents until the last possible minute to scoop some good deals, maybe video directors do better deals on Christmas music video rates if you make them closer to Christmas time because it means that they get to recycle their existing props over and over.  Perhaps this is a question that I'll put to Chad Future if he ever agrees to that second interview.  I like this song about as much as Chad Future's songs, by the way.  When he says that k-pop and American pop is all the same he's certainly not kidding, this song sucks just as much as any American Christmas pop song out there.

December 18th - Nalseon Melody - Winter Love

What girl sleeps with their top and their bra already on?  This never happens ever, bras are uncomfortable and the first thing girls do when they get home and they're not in polite company is they swiftly remove that shit.  They certainly don't go to sleep with their underwire jabbing into their sides, fuck that - only if they're so fucking drunk that they passed out straight away, in which case they wouldn't be in bed with the covers over them neatly.  I can see those bra straps through the clothing, I guess Santa's perky boob elves visited her in the night and somehow got that bra on there.  It must have taken a lot of determination... more than I've got to listen to this song all the way through, that's for sure.

December 18th - Roy Kim - It's Christmas Day

Hahahahaha Roy Kim you are fucking shit.  Roy Kim's overdone facial expressions while singing this, like he's "really feeling the Christmas spirit" are painful to watch.  It's just a day to waste money propping up the economy and polluting the planet by overconsuming on pointless shit, there's no need to get so emotionally overwrought about it all.  Or maybe he's not actually making an overdone facial expression but his face is stuck like that from too much plastic surgery.  Either way it makes me want to punch him in the head a few times just to reset his eyebrows back to their normal position.

Decenber 21st - Younha - Do You Want To Build A Snowman?

No.

December 23rd - Badkiz - Last Christmas

Right just before Christmas hits we get the crappy nugu covers of established western Christmas songs, all the people who didn't have the cash to make fancy videos.  This one is so awful that Badkiz' management couldn't even be bothered getting the girls into the studio, they just stuck a ghetto blaster in the corner of the room and said "sing for your supper, you bitches".  Badkiz must be feeling like the agency just gave them socks for Christmas.

December 23rd - Tell And Listen - Christmas

Here's more nugus.  There I was, lulled into a false sense of security with the low initial rate of Christmas songs but now every cunt wants to do one.  These people are obviously embarrassed enough by this shit song to not want to show their faces and plus there's once again no video budget so instead we get some stupid still life with Christmas lights and cheap CGI and other crap.  They're probably also trying to avoid the face punching.

December 23rd - IU - 12 Months 24 Days (D.ear Cover)

IU has obviously been reading Kpopalypse blog and therefore is wearing a shirt that meets required horizontal stripes standards - good work!  In a return to Christmas innuendo on this list she also sings "in your eyes, in your face" while staring at the camera, perhaps suggesting that this song is going to get used as a soundtrack to Viki from Dal Shabet's next celluloid excursion, presumably a bukkake Christmas special.  IU's trying really hard to get me to like this crappy song by appealing to my more primal instincts and I appreciate the effort but sorry, nothing could get me to like this limp R&B Christmas trash.

December 23rd - Jubora - Christmas Song

I don't know who Jubora is but she has nice boobs, however she sounds a bit like a Korean Amy Winehouse, which makes me just want to force-feed her drugs until she passes out so I don't have to listen to her wail any more.  Someone introduce her to Bom.

December 23rd - Park Jimin, Eric Nam and some other people nobody cares about - a bunch of crap

Watching people you don't know from another country sit around and sing a bunch of stupid carols on YouTube is just as boring and insipid as watching your family and friends do it in real life.  Who would've thought.

December 23rd - EXO - A Winter's Tale

SM couldn't be fucked doing a proper Christmas song for EXO this year, so they just tossed out this trashy "live" video on their channel.  I guess they were worried that if they laid down the big bucks on some ultra high-budget Christmas MV like last year, they might lose another EXO group member a week later and then they'd have to mothball it.  This live video is notable because the EXO fans actually fucking shut up for most of it, not quite sure how SM managed that, an airborne sedative distributed through the ducted airconditioning perhaps.  Of course the EXO boys have to breathe it in too, but this song's so sleepy and awful that it probably makes no difference to their performance, and besides a sedated EXO member is an EXO member who doesn't have enough energy to sign contracts with other agencies.

December 23rd - Hitchhiker - Merry Christmas!

Proof that you can put just about anything over that Hitchhiker beat, cut it up a little in a rhythmic way, and there you have a song.  Also the title has an exclamation mark on the end so we know it's edgy and cool, should appeal to YG fans who like that sort of thing.  At least it's only 20 seconds long, which makes it the best song on this list by default.

So that's the Christmas dick-sucking trash song roundup for another year!  Merry Christmas, cockheads!  Oh and if there's any songs that I missed definitely don't post about how I forgot them in the comments below because nobody cares.


Kpopalypse is now taking a break to do Christmas shit like eat other people's food and fap to girls in elf costumes so the next posts from me will be the best and worst lists of 2014!  Expect them fondly!

As you FISHies know, I live a fairly private life. But since I have been gone for so long, I thought I would do something special for my favourite people. Today I am going to share with you some of my personal text messages regarding a certain SNSD-related scandal that occurred not too long ago that I just had to return for.

Context: my friend just read about the rumours (well, now confirmed) that Jessica was kicked out of SNSD - potentially due to some alleged tiffs between Taeyeon and Jessica.

~*~*~

This week's photos come from… uh… my phone, I guess.


Some of the screen shots are slightly edited to capture only the best parts:

Merry Christmas, everyone!

This year, as we celebrate the holiday season, we reflect on what brought us all to AKF. Author Krakenoid (who can't access a computer this week, #prayforKrakenoid) asks you to share your stories of what made you "come to the light" and shed your fangirl/fanboy ways.

For me, it was the truth of Qri's nose mole. What made you come to the AKF light?
Or JYP here?

If you said "Yes!" to both of these questions, fuck off, we don't want you. But if you want to write for AKF without making everyone want to vomit, read on.


Yes, it's that time again, friends: AKF hiring time! We'll generally be following Zaku's guidelines from last time, so we're looking for people with:

• A good grasp of the English language — You don't have to be an English major, but we need to be able to know what you're trying to say. 
• Amusing uniqueness— We like amusing posts. But be yourself. Don't just try to imitate the writing styles you see here.
• Time commitment— We're talking about at least a post every week or two. Quality trumps quantity, but we still want people who will actually show up and post shit. 

To apply, just send three posts (They can be reviews, reaction pieces, whatever) to thefanypack@gmail.com. A few other authors and I will review them. As always, we'll accept applications any time, but the sooner the better. It'd be nice to start 2015 with a few new authors ready to post.



Whoever we pick will have a two-month trial period. So if you are only enjoyable for a few posts or you write one post in two months, you're getting the boot.

Jolin Tsai kisses another girl in the MV. C'mon Kpop! Taiwan: 2 (don't forget that Popu Lady MV from the summer), Korea: 0.

I know most people here won't like the song since it's a ballad and I'm basically the only one here who likes ballads, but watch it for the two hot girls kissing. (I do have plans on reviewing "Play" and "Medusa" when I get the time.)

Call me @ 1-800-IDONTGIVEAFUCK

As another exciting year in Kpop comes to a close we should all pause and reflect on what a year it's been...

Great.


Of course Kpop never rests, nor does a fangirl's ability to get butt-broiled about the most mundane things, in this case colors.

Nugu-girl-group Sonamoo just debuted with their song 'Deja-vu' but the fangirl anus clenching has already surpassed that of a neutron star. On the 27th, it was revealed that their fan colors would be sapphire green. Of course, as you know, a certain other group already has that color... You didn't know that? Oh, right, you're not a retarded bitch fangirl, but that's actually Shinee's color.

Look at it. It's shit no one cares about.

The very notion of colors being a thing for fanbases is retarded to begin with to anyone with even a half functioning brain, but leave it to fangirls to get super salty about it.


I mean it's like OK... They're going to promote and may or may not be successful, but either way you'll still have your panties in a bunch over a color.

"I only have 5% brain function and even I think this is stupid."

The anal anguish hasn't stopped with retard Shinee fans, however. Big Bang fans have also felt a clenching in their butts as Sonamoo said that Big Bang is their role model.

The news was greeted with such truly witty comments as:

That's right. Even complimenting another group is seen as an attack by dumb fangirls.

Every time someone debuts it's the same shit. Sonamoo just made the mistake of riling up a particularly annoying fanbase. In conclusion:

2014 has been a year full of ups and downs, with many hilarious plot twists we never saw coming on top of many tragedies we never wanted to experience. Regardless, 2014 was a surprisingly good year for Kpop musically. I don't know if I'm early or late on this, but since people wanted me to share my opinion on the best songs of 2014, here's my picks for the year.

CRITERIA:

• Release from Jan. 1 - Dec. 25
• Korean releases only (sorry Japan)
• all tracks are fair game (meaning not only title tracks)
• no double dipping -- a group can only appear once 

20. Hyuna - Red



Some of you may be looking at me (or rather this article) with thinly veiled looks of disgust and bewilderment at the very first entry on this Top 20 list, but hear me out.

I like Hyuna's Red because it's a solid track that delivers exactly what I've come to expect from Hyuna's overall image -- big bass, anthemic hooks, and dripping sexuality. She don't fuck around with this solo track, and I think it's her best since Change way back when. The chorus is easily the best part of the song, dropping one of the best aforementioned anthemic hooks of the year in a spray of aural fireworks, funfetti, and hookers. Who else could turn a children's rhyme into such a pussy popper?

Unlike a certain other female soloist's solo offering, it's not a pretentious mess of try-hard and cringe that tries to pass itself off as just raw hip hop. Maybe it's a trashy song, but it's something that makes you stand up and shake your ass with Hyuna.

19. AOA - Like a Cat

Since their debut as that one girl group that could allegedy play musical intruments just as well as the boys can, I never really paid attention to them. Their songs had always been solid but nothing really noteworthy to me until now when they finally dropped Like a Cat, the best of their three songs released this year.

Like a Cat starts off with random sirens that make you think this is going to be an EDM party popper or an MLG montage, but when we get a midtempo burn instead... More than a little confusing. I guess that's what held my interest until we hit the chorus. I feel more than a little ashamed for not realizing how great Choa is both visually and vocally (goddamn she's hot, why didn't anyone let me know she existed??), but now I know the Gospel Truth. The instrumental is an understated trendy rock number with the occasional trumpet for flare, something that I really enjoy these days when I'm just looking to chill and kick back. Oh, and the LA LA LA LALALALALA stuff is pretty good too, I'm a sucker for that kind of thing...

All in all, solid song that doesn't try to reach for shit it can't handle.

18. CN BLUE - Can't Stop



CN Blue's Can't Stop is another song that took a while to grow on me.

I've previously enjoyed most of CN Blue's material because they're mostly uptempo pop-rock offerings I jam to in my car whenever they come up on shuffle during long car rides, so I was eagerly anticipating their latest comeback as more of the same highs that came with Intuition and I'm Sorry. However, the only thing this song has in common with the previous song is the use of a white girl in their music video.

Starting off with a slow ballad-ey feel, I thought this was going to be one of those songs I just ignore because it's not my cup of tea. However, the bridge's buildup to the chorus changed my mind and by the time Yonghwa Title Drops the first notes to the song's hook, I was ready to jam as it transitions into a midtempo track and doesn't really shift back down into that lower gear.

I do wish that CN Blue used more Jonghyun in their title tracks as I think he's the better singer and has the more pleasing vocals, but I'll take what I can get when he does get a chance to sing.

17. Stellar - Mask



When Stellar first debuted with much hype as the girl group produced by Shinhwa's Eric, people (including me) sat up and took notice with a lot of anticipation. Their first single, Rocket Girl, immediately shit on those expectations and I sadly sat back down as they dropped off my radar as another bust. But 2014 was to be a Renaissance year for them (like several other groups it seems), and with a change in membership I never really heard about til now and a revamp in image towards sexy sex, they've successfully re-debuted in my eyes.

Between Marionette and Mask, I (quite obviously at this point) prefer the latter. Mask is a more understated song with less frills and slicker production in my opinion. I really enjoyed the parts where Jeonyul sings the "neol saranghange nae cheotbeonjjae joe / bwajugil barange dubeonjjae joe" (and Gayoung's equivalent part too) in such a great melody/rhythm that gives me tingles. Good tingles in my brain, not the genitals you pervs.

I will be waiting for their next single with eagerness.

16. BTS - Danger



BTS or Bangtan Boys or Bulletproof Boyscouts or whatever the fuck else they call themselves is one of the better rookies to release material this year.

My first exposure to BTS was through the semi-deranged rantings of my Twitter timeline that I shrugged off as unfounded hype for yet another lame-o boy group. I finally took notice of them when they played at K-CON this year, and I hopped on board the BTS Army hype train.

BTS follows in the footsteps of early Block B in the sense that they're fusing slick hip hop with an uptempo KPop vocal color in a way that both makes sense and doesn't feel as forced as many of their compatriots do. Danger is a great example, and their best single yet. A not-overly complicated (I don't want to keep saying understated) rock-hiphop instrumental lays the solid foundation for this track, and the gritty timbre of the sing-shoutey chorus and hook goes a long way towards earworm status. Furthering the Block B parallels is the Zico-equivalent in BTS's Rap Monster (yeah that's his name, and it's shit). Despite this shit name, he does a solid job at grounding the verses with his raps.

Don't let the slightly try-hard hip hop image turn you off, this is a good song.

15. Block B - Jackpot



Ever since their contract scandal and subsequent departure from Stardom Entertainment, I admit I've been apprehensive about their material in the Seven Seasons era. Though Very Good was in fact very good (cracking my 2013 list at #10 if you didn't remember), I feared it might have been a fluke or a step down hill as I had thought it wasn't as good as say Nanlina or Nillili Mambo.

Fortunately, 2014's releases were very solid and deserve to be at the top of their best songs list. As it stands, I preferred Jackpot over HER. Jackpot reminds me of a demented circus attraction, in no part helped by their pretty creepy MV though Kim Sae Ron is a qt3.14, and it shows in the fanfare-laden bombastic sound of their instrumental. Zico's rap delivery is a wonder to listen to as his flow does a great job of establishing that whimsical crazy-guy image of the song.

The chorus is a bit of a tone shift, but it makes sense within the context of the song. Maybe it's something about the year, or something about the song, but there sure are a lot of LA LA LA hooks on this list...

14. Sunmi - Burn

I blame Sunmi for kicking off the semi-trend of female soloists doing midtempo artsy concepts full of dance and similar sounds. 24 Hours was proof that someone could get that idea down pat, and several copycats have followed since (I'm looking at you Yenny and Jiyeon). Sunmi's second solo follow up to 24 Hours was a mini-album full of songs, but the Full Moon track was more of the same sound she was already doing (not necessarily a bad thing though, Full Moon was solid). Almost because of this and bizarrely following the example of Miss A and the other female groups JYP produces, I found the best song to be a non-promoted track instead of the lead single.

Burn is another EDM-pop inspired anthemic pussy popper of a song that I find JYP likes to bury in his mini albums (Miss A's Lips and Time's Up are good examples of this in recent memory). Like the title implies, the start of the song is a bit of a slow burn that quickly blows up into a conflagration of blaring synth and pounding beats I could easily see someone creating a sick choreography to. Or just shaking their drunk ass off to in the club. Sunmi's vocals are used rather sparingly in the verses and bridges in between the beat drops, but that's perfectly fine since she isn't a particularly strong singer.

Maybe it's not much more than that, and some could argue that there's a reason why this song wasn't chosen as the lead single, but this kind of thing is exactly my cup of tea.


If you've come to know my musical taste or me in general by now, I think you'd be surprised I have VIXX on any best of list let alone the 2014 list at #13. I didn't really take note of them until they performed at K-CON this year, and I found myself enjoying their songs more than I thought I would or had previously.

Thankfully, they released Eternity just in time for them to perform it at K-CON for me to jump on the VIXX train. It's a fantastic summer anthem that hits all the right notes for blasting at either a party (Korean probably or you'd get a lot of confused glances) or in the car. One thing that stands out to me is how they spend just the right amount of time in all aspects of the song for maximum impact and enjoyment. For example, the first verse is just long enough to lead into the bridge which is just long enough to build up hype for the chorus which is just long enough to deliver the punch without dragging on and on with gimmicks. You get what I mean yet?

Clocking in at around 3 minutes, it's a bit shorter than what we're used to listening to in KPop but I think that's just part of the appeal.

12. Rain - La Song

Rain, Rain, Rain. When it was revealed that he was banging Kim Tae Hee and understandably skipping out on his military duties to do so, people were enraged and jealous of him. Let's face it, any self-respecting man would take every opportunity to skip out on doing hard work with a bunch of dudes in the army to be with Kim Tae Hee in a heartbeat. They said shit like "ur career is over ㅋㅋㅋ" or "fuk u rain lemme bang her too"

Well he sure showed them, cause he's still banging Kim Tae Hee and his first album since finishing his military service contained some damn good songs. At first I didn't like La Song as much as I did 30 Sexy, but now I feel like La Song is way better. Shut up about the prevalence of LA in this list. It's a song whose blaring horn instrumental makes you want to get up and dance, and combined with Rain's cocky vocal delivery, it's a perfect party starter. La Song's obvious la-ing chorus is anthemic and burrows into your brain as much as it makes you want to shout along with it, and I found myself playing it more often these days as a time-filler for boring moments in my life.

Now if only he could lay off banging Kim Tae Hee and pursuing acting delusions in favor of more songs...

11. Taeyang - 1AM

Taeyang's image of late has been a mix of hideous hair, try-hard gangsta clothes, and a ridiculous inclination to suck G-Dragon's dragon balls. We all begged him to change his hair from the fauxhawk to change it up a little, but with the loss of the hawk and the subsequent transition to dreads or whatever the hell it is he has these days came a loss of the RnB sound we all loved in the Solar days. Damn you GD.

Thankfully, the Rise album was an almost 180 turn back into the work I originally liked from him in the first place. Though Korea and all of my female friends were enamored with Eyes Nose Lips, I much preferred 1AM.

It's strange but it's almost a comfortable intermediary between his RnB sound and his new swaghop sound that leans more toward the RnB side. The swaghop influences are there mostly in the instrumental and a little in the song structure, but the delivery is blessedly reminiscent of the Solar era. Definitely deserves to be right up there at the top with stuff like Wedding Dress or I Need a Girl, I just wish he did this kind of thing more than the godawful Good Boy with GD.

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:

1. This song is a fucking cancer that the world could do without.
2. 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.
3. 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 that Kony 2012 guy) - when that song came out every PSY fan from back in the day was like "come on - you've got six albums under your belt, we know you can do better than Gangnam Style part 2".  At least with "Hangover" he's done what he should have done before and tried something different, it's just a pity that the result is a horrible rap stinker that probably wouldn't even make the cut on a 2NE1 album and which has likely now firmly cemented the perception of PSY as a one-hit joke in the global marketplace.  PSY himself is barely even in it vocally, but the fact that it's billed as "PSY featuring Snoop Dogg" means that he probably still fucking wrote most of it, so we can blame him anyway.  The end of the video teases a new song from PSY called "Daddy" but it didn't come out when promised and we should probably be grateful.  Just like a real hangover, everyone just wants it to be over as soon as possible so let's just thank PSY for his biggest cultural contribution over the last two years which is making Brown Eyed Girls do the Abracadabra dance again and try to pretend that none of this other business ever happened.

8. M.O.A - I'll Call Ya

This song is a true rarity in k-pop, and something that I'm not used to hearing from Korea's slick studios - not just a bad song but an amateurish-sounding sonic production.  Sure, in 1997 nobody could produce a k-pop record properly, not even SM (just listen to anything from H.O.T, or better yet, don't), but for a k-pop song in 2014 to have this level of production incompetence is really unusual.  The main problem with it is poorly-adjusted vocal compression (also a H.O.T trademark), if you listen to the vocals carefully you'll notice that the volume of the girls is dipping around all over the place.  The song itself is even worse, with the only good thing about it being the instrumental break that first happens at 1:26 which is actually pretty cool, but completely unsuited to all the material around it and which only serves to emphasise how horrible and unlistenable everything else is.  Also, a repetitive electronic telephone noise in the middle of a pop song is something that you simply DO NOT DO (more on that later in this list).  At least the people behind this group managed to churn out the equally-badly-produced but far better musically "Run For Your Dream" before M.O.A inevitably imploded from nobodygivesashitaboutthesenugusitis.

7. SM The Ballad Vol.2 - Breath

Anybody who knows my music taste well enough either knew that this song would be riding high on this list, or just forgot that this song existed.  I fully expected it to be complete trash and of course I was right - SM and generic ballads for fuckheads go together like barebacking and STDs, and given the option you'll wish you were getting fucked up the ass without a condom instead of fucked in the ear canal by Taeyeon and Jonghyun in this hideous aural gangbang.  This song sounds like shit and I'm not even being insulting or having a joke or making a metaphor for bad music or anything like that - I actually literally mean it when I say that this song sounds like the sound of shit.  If you listen closely at 1:29, you'll hear a plopping noise that sounds exactly like two tiny turds deattaching themselves from somebody's log-encrusted asshole and breaking the water in an echoey toilet bowl.  Another, slightly bigger and more runny turd audibly plops into the same bowl at 1:54, and from that point onward, the continual sound of fecal matter dribbling from the distended butthole of whoever in SM Entertainment needed to take a shit that day in the studio toilet gradually increases and integrates itself more fully into the mix, until the soundscape becomes one seamless mush.  I suspect that the asshole belongs to either Jonghyun or Taeyeon, as in the video the two maintain a distance of at least eight meters from each other at all times despite the fact that they're supposed to be singing a song together and it's kind of customary to stand together closely when singing duets.  Clearly, one of them smells like poo and the other one is trying to maintain some distance from the stench, but that won't save them from the real terror - neither of then can escape the pungent fecal nature of SM's ballad songwriting.

6. 2NE1 - Gotta Be You

YG, can we have a proper feature track from 2NE1 one day again, please?  Is it really that much to ask?  Apparently so because YG keeps giving them shit like this to perform.  Certainly not the only sonic high-contrast mess to appear in 2014 but certainly the worst, the hodge-podge music and hideous visual stylings of "Gotta Be You" are heavily reminiscent of Girls' Generations' "I Got A Boy".  However, "I Got A Boy" did have one thing going for it, the soundscape while largely awful was at least a little varied and unusual in places with the odd rare good bit, whereas "Gotta Be You" is just content to cycle around the same few sections over and over and they all suck.  CL's verses are some easy-listening/trap hybrid with terrifyingly grating synthesised harmonica (maybe it's there to make CL's rapping sound smooth and pleasant in comparison), Minzy's bit is just "let's hit a drum", Dara's is "let's hit the same drum a bit faster and do a typical predictable crescendo build to the chorus like in every other song ever" and then Bom and Minzy get "I guess we'd better finally put some actual song content in here, here's a disco beat and some other stuff that was lying around from the BigBang reunion that was going to happen before we decided to postpone it for another three years".  None of it sits together well and 2NE1 songs are increasingly sounding like stapled-together offcuts from other unfinished material.  Perhaps that's all 2NE1 is these days for YG, an exercise in spare backing track clearance.  No wonder some of the video's coloured rooms resemble the bars and charts my computer makes when it does a disk defragmentation, I think what we're really hearing here is the tidying up of Teddy's studio control room hard drive.  I suppose he needs to make more space for pictures of Han Ye Seul, but if he could do that without releasing any songs like this in the process that'd be thoughtful of him.

5. Honey Finger 6 - Different Positions

When you have a certain sound for a ringtone on your mobile phone, after a short while, your brain attunes itself to respond to the sound appropriately in a manner required for a phone user - the sound's purpose therefore transforms from one of aesthetics to one of functionality.  You begin to associate the ringtone sound not with the effect that the sound produces in its own right, but with the higher state of alertness that you need in order to answer your phone before the call diverts to your messaging service.  Eventually this association becomes so deeply ingrained that it transcends conscious thought - the first few notes of the ringtone become an aspect of subconscious memory that upon detection gives your brain a slight unpleasant flinch that jolts you from a relaxed state into immediate alertness.  Honey Finger 6 decided that it would be a great, absolutely wonderful and oh-so-witty idea to give you this slight unpleasant jolting sensation at the start of each verse of their song, by incorporating an annoyingly common ringtone that we've all heard on our own phones or on our friend's phones directly into the song itself.  What a bunch of cunts.  The only thing that could be higher on the subconscious irritation scale is if they did the same thing with a digital alarm clock like that fucking annoying Laurie Anderson song.  I'm including them on this list as an example in the hope that they and all other k-pop artists who might happen to chance upon this post learn their lesson and never do anything this fucked to people's brains ever again.  Fucking assholes.

4. Switch - 39°c

It's said that sexy k-pop girl concepts sell, and there's no denying that they at least have given some otherwise destined-to-be-ignored groups a solid leg up this year.  However the girls from 2014 nugus Switch could have participated in a hardcore porn video concept and blurted out the syllables to "39°c" in between slobbering on dicks and taking cumshots to the face and it probably still wouldn't have helped this song make a dent on the charts.  I'm not entirely convinced that shooting a porno MV to this wasn't the initial plan anyway - pornographic videos always seem to lack decent audio quality, and so does this song.  You always have to turn up the volume really loud on a porno to hear the mumbling, badly-recorded scene-setting dialogue (often the most entertaining part of the film), but once the girls start accepting thick veiny cocks inside their buttholes you're swinging that volume control right back down to the lowest setting so you don't have to hear the tediously overacted "ahhh ahhh ahhh ahhh!" from the female performers at eardrum-perforating, neighbour-alerting levels.  The chorus to this song has a very similar "ahhh ahhh ahhh ahhh!" refrain which is about as pleasant to experience as herpes simplex but nowhere near as catchy, and the rest of the song is a mess of keyboard notes more random and less pleasant than this hedgehog running across a piano, combined with out-of-sync mumbling and tuneless warbles.  Also, when a "sexy concept" song actually starts off with the word "sexy" mouthed in awkward "sexy" fashion, you know that it's just not working out the way that it should because if you're actually being sexy it should be self-evident and you shouldn't need to ponce around going "look how sexy I'm being!" which is self-conscious behaviour that's in fact the very opposite of sexiness.  At least the girls look good, so in another similarity with adult video this MV is best enjoyed with the sound down.

3. Zan Zan - Chicken Feet

This video from Chrome Entertainment, home of Crayon Pop, kicks off with one of the guys in Zan Zan crying.  Then it cuts to a girl, and she's also crying.  Then later on in the song it cuts back to the guy and he's crying some more.  Then the other guy in the group starts crying.  Then I started crying, because I realised that I was wasting precious seconds of my life listening to one of the worst k-pop songs of all time.  Then I thought to myself that maybe these people were crying for the same reason that I was crying, and maybe they didn't want to listen to this trash either.  I can't really blame the group for this sleepy-time caterwauling R&B shitbird, and here's why: the guys from Zan Zan are both dressed up like 80s rappers yet the music sounds like Barry Manilow at half speed, which is such an incongruous combination mismatch that it makes me think that it's not their fault and that somebody at the label has pulled the rug out from under them.  Here's how it probably went down, from what I can tell by looking at this video:

"Yeah, bring your rap swag gear, we're gonna shoot a hardcore hip-hop video, there'll be great old-school beats, pretty girls in bikinis and free barbeque", the manager at Chrome Entertainment said over the phone to the Zan Zan boys.

"Sure, we'll be there with our cool RUN-DMC chains and black hats!  Let's debut with something special!  Hip hop forever!", they replied enthusiastically.

Then they drove to the shoot and were met by Choa with an apron and a sad look on her face.  "Sorry, guys - the company changed their mind, you have to sing this soppy ballad full of suck, is that okay?  The bikini girls all went home too because the weather got all overcast and cold.  Hey, at least I saved you some barbequed chicken!"

The Zan Zan boys immediately start crying.  Choa sees their reaction and starts feeling glum.  "Hey, don't be like that... why are you crying?  My cooking's not that bad, is it?"

One of the Zan Zans puts her arm around Choa to console her.  "Sorry... it's not you... we were just expecting to debut with a good song that people actually wanted to listen to, and instead we get this trash.  Our company just crushed our dreams, nobody is going to like this."

"Hey, Chrome are alright!  Don't be so mean!", Choa scorns.

"That's easy for you to say, Choa.  You got to debut with 'Bing Bing'.  If only we had a song that good..." ...his voice trails off into tears.

"Oh, don't worry", Choa replied sympathetically, perking up a bit.  "Korea's taste in music is complete dogshit - remember how hard Bing Bing flopped when it came out?  We couldn't even get on music shows for months!  Knowing Korea, your crappy ballad will probably be a surprise hit!  Here, have a barbequed chicken foot, it'll cheer you up.  Crunchy."

2. Skrillex, Diplo, G-Dragon & CL - Dirty Vibe

It's official - in 2014 dubstep was out, and trap was in - so much so that even dubcrap architect Skrillex couldn't be bothered making his dubshit anymore.  Trap is rap music's unwelcome smelly friend that nobody invited to the party, pissing in the punchbowl, and nobody invited Skrillex to start making trap and especially not collaborate with anyone at YG.  This song is so terrible that I couldn't even be bothered talking about it that much, and its worthlessness should be self-evident anyway, so instead I'll hand it over to some random YouTube comments:

What I find funny is that I was expecting to see a lot of Skrillex fans or western music fans bashing this song, MV, GD and CL but after reading the comments....it's the opposite. Skrillex fans and western music fans seem to really enjoy this song and MV but many kpoppers are bashing it.

That's because Skrillex fans are used to listening to complete fucking random computer asslick masquerading as an actual song because that's what Skrillex has been doing for years.  K-pop fans on the other hand know that pop music can sometimes be listenable and therefore they occasionally expect some vague form of quality.

NEWS FLASH FOR ALL THE "DISAPPOINTED" KPOP FANS!~
This is NOT Kpop. Therefore if you were coming here expecting GD and CL's usual. I'm sorry to let you know, but this is not it. So stop getting butt-hurt.

Translation: I'm a YG fangirl and even I admit that this is garbage.

You kpoppers get so fucking butthurt when people go on your oppar's or unnir's videos and talk shit, but here you are, doing the exact same thing. GROW A PAIR AND LEAVE NEVERLAND. And if you don't understand what that means, GROW UP. If you don't like the song, you should leave without INSULTING anyone. This is not a kpop song, THIS IS SKRILLEX. You can't expect this to be your usual kpop song.
Sometimes, I don't want to admit I'm a kpopper with all the likes of you immature little ones.

Translation: I'm a YG and a Skrillex fangirl and even I admit that this is garbage.

I'm laughing at the line of argument YG fans are taking with defending their artists' inclusion in "Dirty Vibe", saying that it's not really k-pop and that their faves didn't have any say in it.  I didn't see anybody trotting out the "it's not k-pop because a foreigner wrote it" argument when SM used Swedish songwriters to craft hits for SNSD, f(x) and EXO.  Also never mind that whether they wrote bits of the song or not, both G-D and CL were obviously quite on board with the idea of being in a Skrillex song in the first place, obviously knowing full well in advance how bad Skrillex sounds, and thus showing total lack of musical taste and discernment, so they're still partly to blame for this shit.  Anything for those American bucks I guess... but it's interesting to me to see the fan reaction, because usually YG fans are championing their faves' artistic abilities and creative input as much as possible e.g "I know Teddy writes 95% of the songs for 2NE1 but CL wrote some raps and some music on the Crush album, wow she's so talented!" "YG give their artists so much freedom to create!" etc etc - but now this piece of shit has come out the tables have definitely turned.  Now it's all "nope, my Queen CL had nothing to do with this, she just rapped what Skrillex said, nope this isn't G-D's fault, he's got nothing to do with this at all in any way shape or form whatsoever, nope YG had no hand in this it's 100% Skrillex, nope nope nope don't blame my bias oh please for the love of god don't blame my bias" - if this isn't the sign of a true stinker of a song I don't know what is.   I know you probably all think I'm just a YG hater, but think about it: Skrillex won't even list this song publicly on this YouTube channel... when Kpopalypse, YG fans, Skrillex fans and even Skrillex himself are all united in their opinion that nobody should ever hear this trash, maybe they're onto something, and maybe you should take heed.  Just a thought.


It was a tough competition but the #1 spot for the worst k-pop song of 2014 according to Kpopalypse goes to:

1. g.o.d - Wind

The music industry, like all creative industries, attracts a lot of people from all walks of life and many different cultures and sexual persuasions.  For anybody who doesn't feel like they fit into mainstream society for whatever reason, creative industries offer them an opportunity for expression and not having to work a regular 9-5 job so you meet a lot of folks who don't play by society's rules.  A long time ago I was over at the house of just such an individual, a drummer who was struggling to perfect his craft so he could one day "make it" in the industry.  He has what I call "perfectionist procrastinator syndrome", a mild form of musical autism where someone is perfectly capable at their craft of choice but they're afraid of success and getting out there so they retreat into this idea that they just need more practice first.  They'll practice their instrument to death and get super-good but if you try and say "hey let's start a band!" they'll reply "no way... I'm not good enough yet" even if they're already twice as good as anybody you've ever heard.  Anyway, one day I was over at his house in his practice room.  It was a really impressive room, with a big drumkit and cymbals and drumsticks lining the walls.  Every time he broke a cymbal,a drum skin or a drumstick he'd add it to the wall display, and since he practiced constantly he was always breaking them so he had quite an impressive collection of wall-mounted broken shit.  We were having a chat about music and then suddenly he got all deep and meaningful on me.

"Hey I've got something that I've been meaning to tell you, it's important." he said, with an earnest look in his eye.

"What, you've finally started drumming in a fucking band?  Congratulations, about time!"

"No, no..." he replied quickly "It's not that.  Wow, I'm not ready for that yet.  It's something else."

"Oh, so you're gay then.  Okay, whatever."  I replied.

His eyes widened in astonishment.  "How did you know?"

I probably couldn't help an eye-roll at this point.  "Dude, do you know how many gay people I know?  People come out me every other week."

"I was worried that you'd hate me or something."

"As far as I'm concerned it's a good thing - it means less competition for the girls that I like.  Every guy should be gay except for me, that'd make my life very easy.  I should introduce you to some of my straight male friends and you should try to convert them, because they keep hitting onto the girls that I like, it's annoying."  He laughed, he was relieved at my reaction... but I was curious about something.  "So how did you find out you were gay, anyway?"

"Years ago, I started shoving drumsticks up my ass."

"How did that come about?"

"Well, you know... when you're masturbating, you experiment.  I was worried about pain but heard that it felt good so I started off just putting it in an inch, and that felt alright, so then I tried putting it in a little further and that felt really good, and then I thought that maybe I'd prefer a dick up there instead, so..."

"Okay, that's probably enough information." I said, quickly cutting him off.  I looked around the room at the drumsticks on the walls.  "Am I looking at your sex toy collection?  How many of these sticks have been up your ass?"

"Oh, none, don't worry.  I have special sticks stashed away for those."

"Special sticks?"

"Yeah.  What I found out was that it feels a bit better if the drumstick has a bit of an uneven surface.  If I practice rimtaps on the snare drum, after a while the stick develops little ridges along the flat surface and once a stick is sufficiently 'notched' I stop drumming with it and add it to the special collection instead."

For those of you unfamiliar with drumming jargon, a "rimtap" isn't anal sex jargon, but is when instead of hitting the snare drum on the skin, you bring the side of the stick down onto the edge of the drum (demonstrated at 3:00 here).  It makes a wooden ticking noise, and this is often used in slow ballads and quiet sections when an actual snare drum noise would be considered too powerful and dominating in the mix.

There was just one more thing that I was curious about.  "How long does a stick take to get sufficiently dented before it qualifies for the special collection?", I asked.

"Oh, when I rimtap I tend to do it pretty hard, so just a few runs through one song is usually enough especially if you've got a slow song with the powerful glam-rock style rimtaps, I like to slam those down with a lot of force.  You definitely don't want to get the stick too dented though because it can splinter, and wood splinters in your anus are really painful, I found that one out the hard way."

I'm not in touch with this person anymore, but if I was, I would have directed him to g.o.d's awful, sentimental ballad from the pits of hell "Wind", for sure.  Not only do the group utilise the aforementioned glam-rock style rimtaps heavily through the entire song, but in a neat coincidental touch they even wear the same style of cutoff leather jackets that he used to wear.  He could have used it as the perfect song to prepare his sticks for 'later use'.  The only question is - would listening to this trash for long enough to tap along and get a drumstick into the desired condition be more painful than having a wooden splinter lodged in your colon from shoving a drumstick up your ass that had been 'tapped' too much?  As I can no longer reach this individual, I need your help.  Anybody who has experienced the pain of such an incident, please answer this important question in the comments below, because I don't want any of you getting curious and experimenting with anal splinters deliberately because that would be potentially very dangerous and non-OH&S compliant.  Also please don't listen to g.o.d because it could be potentially just as painful for all we know, the embedded YouTube video above is only so you know for sure that this song really exists, you're not supposed to actually click on it and watch any of it.  It's a dreadful travesty of a song from an old k-pop group that should have stayed in the past, so please be careful.  Kpopalypse wishes that all readers both fap and listen to music safely and do not do any of the things described in the story above.  This has been a Kpopalypse Community Service Announcement.

---

So that's it!  I hope you enjoyed this list!  And if not, Seunghee can help:


Leave a comment below extrapolating on your incredible butthurt and she'll make sure to document your concerns thoroughly... your whining may then appear later in a future Kpopalypse blog, and ultra-E-stardom will be yours!  Your comment could potentially change everything!  Or maybe it'll be ignored completely - you won't know until you try!  See you in 2015, folks!

Welcome to Kpopalypse's 2014 favourite k-pop songs list!  It's time once again to run through my best songs of the previous 12 months!  Although k-pop's first Golden Age is definitely over and 2014 was honestly pretty meh overall, it still had some jewels to be found and here they are.  Get ready to listen to some songs that I believe don't suck... and hopefully you'll also find out about a few that have so far flown under your radar!


 Rules for list eligibility:

• Must be a feature track - no MV is okay, but if not, must at least have been promoted on music shows.  After all k-pop is a visual experience as much as it is an auditory one.
• As long as someone in the Korean music system is involved somehow, it counts as k-pop.
• No Christmas songs, they have their own special blog (with one notable exception made as it isn't really a Christmas song due to the timing of its release and the context, more on that later)
• No songs for sporting events, as they all suck
• No songs from OSTs unless they also had separate completely unrelated MV or promotions.

Other things:

• These are my opinions.  Your own opinions will probably be different.
• No I'm not trolling you or clickbaiting you.  These ARE my opinions.
• If this list is too feel-good and nice for you, there is also my worst of 2014 list which should meet required hate-standards.
• I've never claimed that my opinions are superior to anybody else's for any reason because they are not.  People like different music because all music is processed through the brain and each brain perceives music differently.  This is just a run-down of how I perceive things for your entertainment purposes.  So take what you read with a grain of salt and try not to cry about it.

30. Luluz - How About Me?

Let's start off the list with a Kpopalypse tradition - highlighting nugus that nobody gives a fuck about.  Not only is this shot in the same run-down theme park that many nugu groups use these days when they're watching their purse-strings, but they've got that weird-looking girl in them who was booted out of that other nugu group Badkiz, presumably for exceeding nugu quota.  This song would have easily qualified for the next Nugu Alert series but it's too close to the end of the year so fuck it, it can go on this list instead.  So what's so good about this song?  Well, it draws heavily on Van Halen's great "Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love" in the verses and some other 80s pop song that I can't remember right now in the excellent breakdown at 2:24 which is probably one of k-pop's best breakdowns ever but it's all sung by moderately attractive women who are pleasant to look at rather than a bunch of sweaty lycra-clad 80's hair-rockers.  The other parts of the song aren't quite so great but the better sections mentioned above are still enough to scrape this song over the line to get it into this list.  It's been that kind of a year.

29. Mamamoo - Piano Man

Mamamoo were a new 2014 group that I had no hopes for at all, as they'd been releasing nothing but utter shit all year.  "Mr. Ambiguous" was unambiguously fucking boring, that song of theirs with K.will just made me want to say "k, won't", their album tracks all sucked penis and worst of all was that stupid horrible R&B nonsense that they did with Bumkey.  I guess the girls didn't have enough money to pay for the meth on the spot so he demanded that they compensate for the shortfall by warbling all over his awful backing track.  Then "Piano Man" came out and I quickly fell out of my chair when I realised that it didn't felch colons and was actually quite rocking.  Maybe Bumkey did the right thing and passed some of the crystal meth onto Mamamoo's producers because finally they've perked up a bit and produced something with a bit of a decent beat to it and that breaks away from the blues and R&B nobody wants to hear.  If this is what distributing a bit of drugs around the k-pop scene can do, then I approve.  Let's hope Bumkey gets a suspended sentence so he can go and visit Brave Brothers and get them all fucked up on E so we can have a decent 2015.

28. Epik High - Born Hater

Oh look, YG artists CAN still release good music!  Amazing!  What's Epik High's secret to evading the rampant shit music disease that has seemingly infected the entire surface area of YG Entertainment HQ lately?  Well, it's probably got something to do with YG's CEO Yang Hyun Suk not allowing Epik High to work in the in-house studio, because he didn't want them getting influenced by all the other lame-ass music floating around there and thus having them sound too much like the rest of the bullshit on his label.  Smart thinking for sure!  Strict quarantine of Epik High's musical ideas has kept them safe, allowing them to produce something that sounds almost exactly like an actual rap song without the likes of G-Dragon breaking down the studio door, offering everyone reefers and suggesting that they swag it up a little with godawful trap beats and corny catchphrases.  YG's new quarantine policy is such a good idea that I'm thinking maybe they can repeat it with some of their other artists, using a process of elimination to narrow down and isolate the source of the trendy bullshit infecting their label's core sound so they can remove it for good.  Just the fact that the CEO came up with this idea in the first place shows that at least he acknowledges that the problem with YG sucking lately exists, which is an encouraging sign.  There is hope, k-pop fans!

27. AOA (Ace Of Angels) - Like A Cat

Speaking of which, Brave Brothers produced not one but two great songs for AOA this year (plus one forgettable song, the dull "Short Hair"), and I agonised over which one was going to end up in this list.  In the final analysis I think that "Like A Cat" is a slightly better song than "Miniskirt", and I feel this way for the following reasons:

• Vuvuzelas annoy people which I think is funny
• Jimin says "hey" a lot louder
• The syncopation on "the pretty girls are AOA" is cool, and that whole spoken intro is corny and hilariously awesome
• Jimin meows, it sounds silly but I like it because I know it annoys others (you'll find that me liking things that irritate other people is a recurring theme in this post in general)
• A little more sonically harsh and wall-of-noise than the usual Bravesound production, not so fucking boring and smooth like every other piece of shit song this year, fuck all you dickheads who want music that's "relaxing" and "soothing", go fuck yourselves
• Jimin's squeaky voice irritates the living shit out of people which makes me love her
• Jimin
• Jimin in general

Jimin musically carries AOA, they'd be nowhere without her, and it's simply because she sounds different, it gives the group some character to make them stand out in a genre where everyone is trained to sound the same, look the same, dance the same, act the same.  You could have someone blindfold you and put on a bunch of k-pop songs that you've never heard before, and ask you to guess the groups - with a lot of them you'd probably have no clue but as soon as you hear one fucking syllable of that squeaky voice you'll say "yep... I'm definitely listening to AOA".  That kind of instant recognition is money in the bank and means 12957320 times more than "vocal talent" in terms of what actually matters to k-pop - catchy songs that build a brand identity.  It's a pity that the rest of the song doesn't live up to the bliss of the first 30 seconds and Jimin's rap parts but it's okay because I've got seven girls in catsuits to watch during the other bits and that pretty much takes up all my leftover critical faculties anyway.

26. T-ara N4 & Chopstick Brothers - Little Apple

Everybody loves to criticise CCM/MBK's decisions as if listening to k-pop gives them a wealth of experience and wisdom in music management and creative entrepreneurship, but which one of you fucking self-appointed business experts noticed that T-ara were about the only k-pop group to NOT have a controversy in 2014?  Everyone else's faves fell apart at the seams or went through some other major drama but the well-oiled T-ara machine kept right on chugging, debut line-up still intact years after every editorial predicted disbandment, releasing songs and touring around Asia... oh and releasing "Little Apple" with Chopstick Brothers as the first step in their multi-million dollar Chinese enterprise after Chinese fans warmed so much to "Number Nine" and "Sugar Free" that they became impossible to justify ignoring.  The song is far from T-ara's best, but given that the bar is set so high quality-wise with T-ara songs generally, that's no surprise.  It's still got all the typical elements that make T-ara's best feature tracks work (upbeat disco feel, multi-layered melodies, succinct arrangement, lack of trendy bullshit, T-ara being hot) and it still kicked the shit out of 99% of other k-pop this year.

25. Pritz - Sorasora

Unlike pop groups who aim to be polite and liked by as many people as possible, metal artists thrive on offending overly sensitive fuckheads, and are generally happy to exist with just a cult following that understands their mission rather than trying to resemble a dollar bill that is made to be liked by everybody.  Whether Pritz is a pop or a metal artist sonically could be debated, but at least on an ideological level the answer lies in how their agency reacted to people whining about their super-cute pseudo-Nazi doll concept - a very polite "go fuck yourselves, we'll do as we please".  This puts Pritz squarely in the "metal" camp conceptually, and that's a good thing because what the k-pop scene definitely needs are more groups and agencies with a "fuck what you think" metal mental attitude.  Pritz are therefore already in the good books with Kpopalypse before I've even factored into the equation a single note of their music, but the fact that "Sorasora" looks and sounds like J-gimmick Babymetal but with a focus on catchier tunes instead of schizophrenic genre-hopping and sung by women of actual fappable age means that this is a group I have no choice but to support.  The reactions to them are hilarious - Babymetal haters hate them because they sound like Babymetal, the Babymetal fans hate them also because they sound like Babymetal, and everyone else hates them because they can't admit to themselves that Nazi fashion is hot.  Go, girls!  Extract those netizen tears, I think you'll find it's not too difficult!

24.  Stellar - Marionette

In today's world true political power is minimal, concepts like "left" and "right" no longer have any real meaning, and global commerce is now the real democracy.  This means that if you like something, get behind it and vote for it with your dollar, because every time that you spend money you're enabling more of what you're spending on and less of what you're not spending on.  If everybody who was concerned about Apple's shitty iPhone factories didn't buy an iPhone but bought phones only from we-treat-our-employees-fairly-r-us, there would be no more demand for the Apple product and their factories would close down.  By spending or withholding money, you're making a tangible difference to society and casting your vote for the kind of world that you want to live in.  As for the world that I want to live in, it's definitely one where there are more songs and music videos like Stellar's "Marionette", so I made damn sure that I went out and got my autographed copy of their excellent Sweetune-produced mini album as soon as possible, because I wanted to send a message to the k-pop industry - keep making more shit like this.  You don't need me to tell you how great this song is because you've already listened to it 21096 times while fapping to the excellent video (or complaining about other people fapping to the excellent video) so let's just move on.

23. Kemy & Minju (A.KOR) - And Go

How To Save Worthless Shitty Western Rap Music Forever:

• Locate awful western rap song with a good beat and nothing else going for it.
• Remove L'il Wayne.
• Remove any other assholes.
• Remove the shit chorus, rap music doesn't need lame sing-songy bullshit choruses, rap needs to GO HARD OR GO HOME.
• Add a couple of hot k-pop girls who can rap, change the lyrics to suit them.
• NO!  Not her.  Can't you read?  HOT k-pop girls who CAN rap.
• Ah, that's better.
• Repeat as necessary.

You could say it's not k-pop and not eligible for this list because they're just rapping over a western beat, but most SM groups spend most of their time singing over a bunch of European-made backing tracks these days so I don't see how this is any different.  I played Kemy and Minju's mixtape raps more than just about any other rap shit this year, and that was before I found out about Kemy pissing off Blackjacks which only made me like her more even though I disagreed with her anti-drug stance.  It's a pity nothing Kemy or A.KOR have done since has come even close to this yet, and it's also a pity Minju hasn't done any solo rap stuff because she's the hot one and I would appreciate some more fanservice.  Give these two girls a full rap album already... or just tell me where I can get this mixtape if it's got a dozen tracks like this on it.

22. Lovelyz - Candy Jelly Love

Speaking of Park Drugs, it's fairly obvious that "Candy Jelly Love" is a shady reference to Bommie Realdoll smuggling drugs inside her jelly sandwiches, but that's not actually the best thing about Lovelyz' debut song.  Nor was it Seo Jisoo's iconic "you're the best ever cum in my life" line, the subtle jizz references elsewhere throughout the Korean lyrics, or even the obviously fake but completely hilarious Jisoo rumours (you'd think k-pop fans would be used to this shit by now and be able to pick fabricated evidence a mile away but nope, they're still dumb as fuck).  The best thing about "Candy Jelly Love" was the music, which completely nailed the sound of the melancholy 80s British synthpop groups that pop songwriters from just about everywhere have been trying and dismally failing to recapture the spirit of for decades.  These influences sailed right past dipshit k-pop fans undetected, many of whom rushed to accuse Lovelyz of copying SNSD and Apink, but the overall sound plus the video's randomness and artsy still-life vibe seems more to me like a nod to New Order's "Blue Monday", except that the New Order members probably wouldn't look this hot dancing in school uniforms.

21. 100% - Beat

Now that BigBang don't want to be BigBang anymore because G-Dragon's too busy running around being a swag-prince to write an actual song these days, someone's gotta fill the gap and 100% look like a strong contender.  They've got everything that a k-pop boy band needs: silly leather outfits, weird metal arm and leg guards, makeup, strange geometric sets, makeup, silly hair, energetic dance moves and makeup.  Pity they're still somewhat in nugu land but the song is pretty damn good as far as epic k-pop anthems go and I really wish some girls were singing it instead of these skinny dudes so I could fap but I guess I'll settle for it how it is because at least they've got a sexy female armguard-curator (or whatever the fuck she's doing) in the MV.  Also, did you know that the mini album that this song comes from is called "Bang The Bush"?  Ladies, form an orderly queue, no shoving!  I moved them up a few places on this list for that title alone.

20. Yery Band - Romeo Mannequin

Here's a song and a video that just about all of you fucking slept on, and you shouldn't have because it fucking rocks - time to fucking catch up on what you fucking missed, you fucking fucks.  While you were all jerking yourselves off to other girl rockers doing some limp blues-rock or some other weak generic Nickelbackian bullshit, Yery Band were killing it and you were oblivious.  The video alone for this song is unbelievably great, with gory, artery-severing bone-snapping swordfighting fun that makes the action in T-ara's epic and amazing "Day By Day/Sexy Love" drama double-MV look leaden and tame in comparison.  It's easy to get carried away in the video and ignore the song itself, partly due to how great it is and partly due to the overbearing sound effects, but strip all that away and what you're left with is Marilyn Manson's "The Beautiful People" if the whole thing was taken apart and put back together again by someone with pop songwriting sensibilities who knew how to make music beyond pressing "go" on a sample-and-hold device.  Of course, most k-pop fans didn't care about how great this song was because it wasn't "soothing" or "relaxing" or whatever dicksucking bullshit pop music fans in 2014 seem to want a song to be but I liked it so fuck 'em.

19. Purfles - 1,2,3

Purfles' "1,2,3" got quite a bit of attention from avid nugu followers, some claiming it to be the nugu song of the year - I personally wouldn't go that far, but it's certainly got something about it that's worth paying attention to.  Whether you like this song or not might depend a lot on whether you're playing it through a speaker system capable of reproducing the sub-bass melodies in the chorus, because it's the pedal-point of the static melody over a changing bassline that provides the hook, but if you can't hear the bassline the "na na na na" bit on its own is boring as hell.  It probably wasn't the best idea in the world to bury the catalyst for the catchiest part of the song in the below-80Hz sub-bass range given that most people these days listen to their favourite songs on tinny phone speakers that would struggle to reproduce it, but oh well.  This may not be my #1 song as far as overall song quality but it's probably in the top five this year for subwoofer-wrecking.  Don't ask me to make a top subwoofer-wreckers list by the way, I've had enough lists for a while.

18. Delight - Hate You

Delight's songwriters finally learned something from last year's great "Mega Yak" and that messy horrible "School Bell" song - namely, dubstep breakdowns fucking suck.  "Hate You" mercifully doesn't have any of that bullshit and is therefore free to rock uninhibited by a sudden need to drop to half-time and start going WUBWUBWUBBZZZZZTWEUBWEUB for no reason other than that it's trendy.  The result is a great upbeat dancefloor stomper, the sort of thing 2NE1 used to do well and nowadays refuse to even do at all lest they gain a new fan one day.  The part from 0:54 is just begging for Bom's characteristic voice (which everybody loved when they first got into k-pop until they read endless Internet posts by vocalfag idiots giving superfluous technical reasons why they're not "allowed" to like it) instead of generic k-pop nugu #572 but that'll never happen because Teddy lost the fire to write songs this good when he cooled out the fiery passion of his burning loins inside Han Ye Seul's gaping snatch.  Oh well, let's hope Delight continue to exist and pump out more songs this good so we can have our 2NE1 cake and eat it too.  Also, who the fuck is that girl at 0:40?  She's super-cute and I don't remember her being in the group before this video came out, but maybe that's the fault of styling, or maybe I've had one too many jelly sandwiches.

17.  Orange Caramel - My Copycat

A lot of people liked Orange Caramel's "Catallena" and while it was definitely a good song, for my ear it was just a little bit too clever for its own good.  Rather than capitalising on Orange Caramel's core strength which is upping the ante on SAW-style catchiness, "Catallena" was pitched just a little left-of-center to maximise appeal to stuffy music critics rather than actual pop music fans.  On "My Copycat" the balance was firmly restored in favour of addictive melody and fun, with a great dance rhythm and a saxophone riff that you will probably remember in ten years.  I was literally jumping up and down in my seat when I first clicked on this going "ORANGE CARAMEL ARE BACK AGAIN FUCK YES" because after that horrid j-turd that emerged from their collective anal rings last year I had nearly completely lost my faith that they would ever consistently be this awesome again.  How foolish of me to worry, I shall proceed to my nearest church of Rainaism, kneel and do ten Hail Rainas.

16.  The Seeya - Tell Me

It's no secret that CCM/MBK have been retreading what I like to call the "We Were In Love" template with all of their artists, with only the most minor of variations.  However on try number 37 or whatever "Tell Me" is, they've finally perfected that song they've been trying to write for the past two years.  What sets this iteration of CCM Ballad 101 apart from the others (I'll get into the habit of calling them MBK in 2015, honest) is that the backings are a lot lighter and breezier, not to mention faster.  If you're going to play through a song every asshole has already heard before in a slightly different form 3 gazillion times you might as well do it quickly.  Also, there's some nice acoustic guitar that recalls some of the fluid swing-jazz guitar work on IU's "Modern Times" album, plus a great video with Kpopalypse bias-list approved Seunghee (also in the header picture for this list) cast as the slutty wench, always a good thing.  Her sluttiness is implied rather than stated outright but it's k-pop so they can't show too much - we all know she sucked that dude off about five minutes before he had the argument with that other woman.  The The Seeya girls (not a typo) look great too actually and this whole production just oozes the kind of style that only CCM/MBK/XYZ/whatever they're calling themselves this week can consistently bring.

15.  912 Crew - Roller Skate

Regular Kpopalypse readers all knew that "Roller Skate" was going to be on this list ever since I featured it on Kpopalypse Nugu Alert, it was just a matter of how high it would get.  I owe the discovery of "Roller Skate" to one of my ask.fm anons and if any of you are wondering why I bore you all with that fucking thing, it's because for every 5000 questions I get about the same couple dozen topics, someone throws me a video like this and I watch it and start fist-pumping the air as the pure awesomeness washes over me.  At that point endlessly typing out "no, I don't like [insert shitty western pop artist here]", "yes my girlfriend knows I have k-pop biases and fap", "no I don't want to have children", "yes I like fapping what's the big deal everybody does it", "no of course I don't like anime I'm over 6 years old" etc suddenly feels like it was all worthwhile.  "Roller Skate" is proof that you don't need much of a budget to make a k-pop video if you've got a bit of imagination, personality, a sense of humour and a cool song and if you don't mind too much if the results look a bit ragged.  It's probably not good enough for the average k-pop fan spoiled on half-million dollar productions but I grew up from a punk and metal background where almost all the videos are this crappy, so I love it.  The whole package is awesome, simple and effective and most of all fun.  These five people are probably having more fun in this video than every oh-so-serious k-pop netizen put together ever experienced in their lifetime.  Also the girl is cute.  Just saying.

14.  Orange Caramel - Abing Abing

"Abing Abing" was a bolt out of the blue, it arrived with absolutely no fanfare at all from the agency, and proceeded to be the best thing Orange Caramel have done since "Magic Girl".  "My Copycat" might have great sax riffs and a great beat but "Abing Abing" trumps it because it's got superior vocal melodies and a better chorus which is more important for a pop song, plus more traditional electro SAW-style backing which is what Orange Caramel have always done best.  It's also an advert for Baskin Robbins ice cream which I didn't even know was a thing that existed until this song came out.  Now of course I have to eat it at every opportunity because idols make more money from endorsements than music sales so hopefully someone over at Harbour Town has noticed the influx of ice cream fans since this song came out, makes the connection and Raina gets a brownie point or something that she'll later thank me for.  Also it's fuckin' hot where I live at this time of year and I could really go an ice cream right about now so that might also give this song a slight advantage in Kpopalypse chart positioning.

13.  M.O.A - Run For Your Dream

One of the most astounding achievements in k-pop nugudom, 2014 nugus M.O.A debuted with the completely hideous "I'll Call Ya" and then instantly redeemed themselves with the amazing "Run For Your Dream", a bizarre pop song with a progressive arrangement that does something incredible - it actually works (unlike manyothers).  The secret to having a progressive arrangement work well is that it actually has to progress, rather than regress, and "Run For Your Dream" always sounds like it's building and going somewhere, right up until the orgasmic chorus at the end, with no gimmicky stylistic hiccups to completely kill the momentum.  Unfortunately, M.O.A as a group didn't progress quite as well career-wise as this song does and have since disbanded, although some of the girls involved found their way into nugu fap group 4Ladies and are probably still running for their dreams as you read this... just with less clothing.

12.  Minx - Why Did You Come To My Home

"Why Did You Come To My Home" definitely shouldn't work, but it does anyway.  It has an annoying YG-style intro thing, a dubstep breakdown and even irritating vocal wank at the end where one of the girls shows off her whistle register vocals as if anybody with a life gives two shits.  However it's also got that killer chorus, which makes me forgive all its other sins and just goes to show the importance of a good chorus in these things.  Adding to the appeal are the cute 80s verse rap parts that are kind of like Wassup but with the swag-lite toned down to acceptable levels.  Then there's one of the girls who looks a bit like Sulli from f(x), and given that Sulli's interest in k-pop right now is probably hovering somewhere between "meh" and "cao ni ma", it's good to have a replacement idol to fetishise handy in case she bails completely.  Plus bonus points for how at 1:41 one of the girls is wearing orange Dead Kennedys socks and I'm just impressed that those are something that actually exists.  I wonder how Jello Biafra would look in those.  Anyway this song is basically 2NE1's "Gotta Be You" in a parallel universe where it isn't a complete piece of shit.

11.  Infinite - Back

Speaking of 2NE1 sucking (always a relevant topic) some of you may remember that in 2013 I singled out 2NE1's "Missing You" as the complete pile of cow dung that it undoubtedly is.  This was a controversial selection - some of you had difficulty understanding why I felt that way and even suggested that I was just trying to be "edgy" or that I was clickbaiting 2NE1 fans by stating an opinion that nobody could possibly agree with, but a listen to Infinite's "Back" should explain everything perfectly.  Both songs start off with a mellow, slow paced ballad-style intro, and both songs sound like they're gradually going somewhere interesting.  However the payoff is very different in each case - while the chorus to "Missing You" is a giant snaky carrot-encrusted turd of a piano ballad gradually sliding out of Bom and CL's gaping anuses directly into your ears, Infinite's "Back" gets to about 1:38 and then fucking explodes in your face with a fast beat and great chorus melodies paired with an awesome keyboard riff vaguely reminiscent of "Sweet Child Of Mine" except better because it works its magic over more than just three fucking chords.  The idea is similar but the difference in execution is utterly massive.  I don't know what's so difficult to understand, it's as if YG fans don't remember the musical glory days of their own favourite groups and don't want their music to be interesting and exciting and engaging and fun... oh wait, you guys actually liked "Eyes, Nose, Lips", forget I said anything.  Anyway, back to "Back" and it's easily Infinite's best song ever and not many boy groups are ever going to get given anything this good to sing during their careers... but even if you hate the song and hate Infinite, you get to watch them get the shit beaten out of themselves in the video so there's still a positive side.

10.  Badkiz - Ear Attack

I figured that I was probably going to like this in some way before I even clicked the video - any group with a name describing themselves as "bad" is already a welcome change from all the boring fucking goody-two-shoesness that goes on in k-pop before they've even done anything.  It makes me sick how fucking nice k-pop artists behave to everybody, especially people who don't deserve niceness in any way, shape or form (netizens, the media, their own crazy fans, stupid people in general).  Most artists in other genres besides k-pop that I like are lucky to stay out of jail long enough to complete a tour, so even if the song was seriously knob-polishingly awful I can at least get behind a group full of self-proclaimed assholes.  The song being called "Ear Attack" was an even better sign, because k-pop doesn't have enough music in it which actually attacks me instead of trying to lull me into a stupor like a parent trying to placate an emotionally underdeveloped infant that just crapped its pants into going to sleep in its own soiled nappy so mummy and daddy can get some fuck-time in.  The song thankfully delivered on this promise and then some, with a constant driving beat that doesn't compromise for weak breakdowns, annoying (to others, not me) whistles and chants in the chorus and even a fun slap-happy video.  Best of all it's by a nugu group nobody cares about so I can appreciate it without being swamped by any awful fanbases because there's probably only about three fans of this group right now.

9.  Henry - Fantastic

Okay, so Super Junior M's Henry may look like an Asian Rick Astley, but he's got the songs that Super Junior themselves haven't had in at least five years.  The intro to this may be the corniest shit this side of Chad Future but that's only because Henry is in fact the man that Chad Future wants to be, however nobody's ever going to write a song this good for Chad because any k-pop songwriter getting regular work would be crazy to give him something this good instead of their lazy offcuts.  K-pop as a whole is kind of like the shittiest music imaginable buffed and shined to perfection, proof that you can polish a turd once you get used to the smell, and this turd smells damn good with great melodies throughout and SAW's hi-NRG sound pilfered extensively.  The only thing wrong with it is a crappy breakdown but then if the best k-pop feature track ever can have a shit breakdown two and a half minutes in that everyone hates, so can this.  Also, people say SM's box videos are cheap and lazy but here's more proof that those people are full of shit, when I look at the "Fantastic" video all I can see is the tons of money that's obviously been spent.  I think that it would have easily cost them six digits just to build not one but two Deus Ex foyers in real life let alone the rest of the costs (and as usual with SM no it's not CGI).  Then I looked at it closer and realised that the interiors are actually designed around different parts of the inside of a violin... come on SM, you're just showing off now, stop that.  I wish SM would produce a lazy video for a change, it'd probably help the environment or something because I'm sure they just use sets like this for kindling once they're done with them.

8.  Tahiti - Oppa, You're Mine

Tahiti are one of the best groups in k-pop for sheer consistency of the songs that they get handed.  They honestly don't have any shit feature tracks at all, but on the other hand nothing of theirs has stood out for me quite like this song before either.  It's just a really catchy and slightly doo-wop inspired dance-pop number and those "ooo-oooo" parts on the way to the chorus are some of the sexiest backing vocals you could ever want in a k-pop song.  I don't have a lot else to say about this great song except that ever since doing that Sarah Wolfgang interview all I can now think of when I watch this is what insane backbreaking work being in this (or indeed any) k-pop group must be.  No wonder Tahiti has a revolving-door membership, I wonder how long they can sustain themselves before they either fall apart or finally snag a hit, in the meantime I'll definitely support this though.  I also support the MV's excellent colour-matching styles - one colour at a time to figure out is good for colour-blind people like me, thanks Tahiti.

7.  Puer Kim - Manyo Maash

There was a rumour going around a while back that Quentin Tarantino was going to do a remake of Russ Meyer's iconic badass 1960s boobsploitation flick "Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill!" and that he was going to cast pornstar Tera Patrick in the lead role.  I don't think those rumours had much legitimacy unfortunately, but if he ever does consider such a move in the future, I think Mystic89 singer Puer Kim would be a superior casting choice.  Supposedly an "indie artist" (whatever that means in today's age where even U2 and Radiohead can be called "indie" with a straight face - in k-pop I'm guessing it means that they're allowed to eat red meat occasionally), I'm convinced that Puer Kim debuted just after I posted my first "big boobs in k-pop" list just to force me to make a sequel.  Not only does Puer Kim easily win the race for k-pop buxomness, she gets pretty close to the top of the musical tree too with this great, dark song which I think would sit equally well in the soundtrack for the same hypothetical Tarantino movie.  The video's so-obvious-that-even-netizens-noticed shade of SM and YG's high-gloss productions is the hilarious icing on the severely generous cake, and the only downside of Puer Kim's debut is that now I have to piece my bias list back together.

6.  Tae Jin Ah - I Love You, Darling

This song didn't get an MV because Tae Jin Ah is self-aware enough to realise that nobody wants to see his wrinkly sagging ass gyrating in a box, but it was a feature track that was promoted by Tae Jin Ah on music shows along with his awful duet with Rain, "LA Song", so it qualifies for this list.  Another important qualifying factor is that the song is fucking cool as shit - trot music sounds like Chinese restaurant music often but not this time, there's too much coolness going on here.  "I Love You, Darling" apparently gained some small virality with the Girls' Generation fandom due to Sunny dancing stupidly to it while feeding her face in the SNSD dorms, (check the YouTube comments for this live clip) but looking at the guy he seems way too confident and self-assured to accept any help from some big-boobed k-pop girl to get things rolling.  Tae Jin Ah doesn't give a shit that he's old as fuck in an industry dominated by people less than half his age, and since Koreans have a huge "respect your elders" culture for some reason and a lot of k-pop fans like Korean culture, that means you should like this song.  It also means that because I'm also old as fuck you should all respect my opinion about everything on this list and if you don't then you have to donate me your lunch money.  Do it, it'll make you "more Korean", I promise.

5.  f(x) - Red Light

Probably the most musically forward-thinking k-pop song ever at the time of writing, "Red Light" threw f(x) fans for such a curveball and gained such a negative reaction that myself and Anti Kpop-Fangirl felt compelled to spend the next six months telling all the other k-pop fans how wrong they were in the most offensive manner possible.  Often mistaken for a trap song, "Red Light" actually could best be described as "post-trap", eschewing the 16-beat mechanical shuffle that defines trap but instead stealing its textures and marrying them to the rhythms of metal, while also adding f(x)'s usual monotonal bridge and chorus hooks and topping it off with enough subwoofer-wrecking sub-bass dives to prolapse Amber's anus.  It's just a pity that SM fucked up the visual side of things a bit, f(x)'s "dark" look really doesn't suit them, and only Luna is styled flatteringly which I guess is at least a nice change as she's usually the only one the stylists don't give a fuck about.  No wonder Sulli didn't give a cao ni ma about staying in this group a minute longer than she had to, but I don't really give a shit because this rocks.

4.  T-ara - Sugar Free

Life must suck being a Korean netizen and a female k-pop fan who appreciates music simultaneously.  You've got T-ara's "Sugar Free" on your phone playlist because it's obviously the best T-ara song since Roly Poly, combining the newer signature T-ara dual-melodic chorus anthem assault with the sonic stylings of Absolute First Album.  However it's not trendy to like k-pop's reigning global EDM disco queens right now so you have to go incognito - you keep your love for "Sugar Free" hush-hush and make sure nobody's looking at your phone screen when you play it.  You can't keep it a secret forever though - one day someone grabs your earbuds out of your ears without warning just to fuck with you and as soon as they recognise the song you get swiftly ostracised and before you know it you're the school bread shuttle.  The bullying gets intense with your former school friends getting you to buy them bread wrapped in T-ara merchandise just before class so you're always late, forcing you to fap to a different T-ara member every day in the school toilets before class even though your heart belongs to Block B, making you sing to "Sugar Free" at the top of your lungs with your skirt around your knees and your bra on your head in the middle of the school oval while they throw rocks at you from the edge and try to hit you - life seems unbearable and each school day brings a new T-ara-related way for them to terrorise you.  Even the teachers can't put a stop to it, one day the teacher decided to get to the bottom of the situation by confiscating everyone's phones and going through them, she figured that whoever didn't have "Sugar Free" in their music directory must be the anti T-ara bully... but the bitches who bullied you all secretly had T-ara on their playlists as well, so that didn't help.    T-ara and the activities of your school peers start to blend and warp inside your own head, eventually it becomes impossible to separate the two, or to listen to T-ara without quivering and crying just out of knee-jerk reflex.  Oh well, maybe once you graduate high school you can run a netizen comment-translating site, inserting subtle editorial bias against T-ara here and there where you can.  That'll show everyone who's really in control, won't it.  Won't it?

3.  Berry Good - Love Letter

People are often asking me about early k-pop songs that I like and will I mention or list them somewhere, but honestly I haven't done a "best of" list that goes back any further than 2008 simply because I could count all the decent k-pop songs that existed prior to then on one hand and still have enough fingers left to go bowling.  Click B's "Love Letter" was however one of them, but now it's completely redundant anyway as the team behind 2014 nugus Berry Good just made it a hell of a lot better.  Here's how they did it:

• Someone removed the crap NKOTB-style late 80s keyboard stab bits
• They also got rid of the shitty guitar parts
• Berry Good are hot girls
• Berry Good are not Click B, who are fugly guys
• Cool arpeggiated keys and synths
• Look, another nugu group where one of the girls looks like Sulli holy fuck
• The video is pretty
• Better production on this version by a fucking mile
• Teddy bear has stitches across its skull like something out of a horror film
• Berry Good's version has more random English words that will annoy uptight netizens
• Headbanging guitar-bunny at 1:28 rocks hard
• Tacit acknowledgement in the story that marriage is a boring time-wasting expensive wank
• Berry Good are female

Best of all, Berry Good shade the rubbish early k-pop artists by playing a bunch of vinyl at the start of the video that makes them so bored that they actually fall asleep on the fucking vinyl album sleeves.  They don't like any of that bullshit any more than I do.

2. Year 7 Class 1 - Oppa Virus

Imagine if the people behind AKB48 actually had noteworthy songwriting skills and a song like "Heavy Rotation" actually rocked in a punk-rock-meets-"Jump"-era-Van-Halen kind of way instead of sounding like a children's TV show theme sung by a bunch of JAV whores on a 15-minute break from catching jizz in fruit bowls.  Well, you don't have to imagine it anymore because here it is courtesy of some more Korean nugus, Year 7 Class 1.  I'm not sure what's with the weird group name but then to be honest I'm not entirely sure what's with any k-pop group name, so I can deal with it.  I'm also not a fan of the terrifyingly ugly cheerleading costumes, cheerleading isn't really much of a big thing in Australia so the catering to cheerleading fetishes is lost in translation and all I'm left with is a bunch of stupidly-patterned dresses in dumb colours.  However the school uniforms are cute and when the girls put their pom-poms behind their butts and bounce them for the "oppa" chorus line it's an iconic moment in k-pop girl dance as fapworthy as T-ara's "bunny twerk".  If any already-established k-pop group got hold of this song it would be massive.  Calling it now - Year 7 Class 1 are going to have a breakthrough hit one day and get fucking huge.  Or maybe that's just my optimism and they'll end up slurping jizz in some back alley while the handicam rolls which means they'll have something else in common with all those AKB48 girls.  Either way at least we have this song.

And the number one is...

1.  SoReal - My Heart Says

What the fuck.  What.  The.  Fuck.   What the fuck?  What the fuck is this song even doing here?  Did any of you pick this as my #1 song of the year?  I bet you didn't - I sure as fucking fuck didn't fucking anticipate this shit.  So what's going on?

Let's look firstly at all the reasons why mathematically I really should fucking hate this song.  Firstly, it's a ballad so automatically it's at a disadvantage right there.  Also it's from a boy group, so there's another disadvantage because it's no secret that I prefer the girl groups musically.  Not just any boy group either but a nugu boy group specifically promoted as a "ballad group".  If that's not enough ways to lower the odds, the song was released in fucking March but they tacked an irrelevant Christmas intro onto it... and we all know how much I hate Christmas bullshit (although the Christmas shit here is actually more for MV plot reasons than actually celebrating Christmas so that's why it doesn't make the Christmas list, but it's still annoying).  It's like Star Empire wanted me to quit writing about k-pop so they deliberately formed a committee of important decision-making music-creation folks and sat around discussing ways that they could create a song that I would utterly despise, more than anything else released this year, and which would make me give up on the entire genre in disgust, then moved forward with SoReal as their bold action plan.  Then it was released and now it's my favourite song of the year.  How did that happen?

As it happens, I like "My Heart Says" for similar reasons that I liked another controversial Kpopalypse #1 pick - Rania's "Style".  You see, the real reason why I hate k-pop ballads so much isn't because I hate slow songs generally, but because k-pop producers have generally got no idea how to do a worthwhile slow song.  K-pop producers haven't really mastered the art of dynamic subtlety, so they fill their ballads with all this overblown shit, usually ten gazillion layers of awful vocal so there's never a quiet moment where a voice isn't saying something.  A good ballad however needs good phrasing and dynamics, and "My Heart Says" and "Style" (even though the latter isn't a ballad) have something in common - a spacious arrangement where occasionaly the layers drop out and there's some stripped-back sound.  Eventually k-pop's signature layering and overdubs do come in, but it doesn't start that way, which means that the song has somewhere to go, this is important for dynamic progression.  On top of that the vocal melodies over this spacious arrangement are just very decent and there's even vocal harmony.  When I first discovered k-pop I wondered why there weren't more harmony vocals, after all if you've got between 4 and 9 singers in most groups, you might as well use them, right?  I'm sure fans of this group all stroke themselves off about who can sing better than who but that's missing the point (as it always is whenever it comes to k-pop fans caring about vocal skill) - if they can't sing it doesn't matter, no singing talent whatsoever never stopped any of my punk bands from doing vocal harmonies, it's actually easier to do harmonies together than a solo vocal because each voice supports the other (just like how not everyone in a choir needs to be a good singer).  SoReal gradually lay on the Queen-style harmony vocals and it really works nicely, it's the perfect way to progress the song.  The delayed vocals in the chorus also kick much ass, and this whole song is full of this and other audio engineering smarts that keep a tight leash on the vocal histrionics when needed and help build the song in a sensible dynamic way.  The whole thing comes off like a modern juiced-up version of Australian group 1927's hit "If I Could" with better writing, better melodies and better production.  In the meantime every other k-pop ballad is all about "Look at me!  Look how well I can sing!  Listen to my voice do this amazing note!  Did you hear that resonance?  Did you hear my vibrato?  Listen to it again!  And again!  Aren't I so wonderful!  Aren't I so technically brilliant!  Worship me!  Hang on... what was the song trying to say again... oh who cares, fuck how the song sounds, it doesn't matter because it's just a vehicle so I can showcase my AMAZING VOCALS, because it's all about ME ME ME!" which is the cancerous disgusting trashy attitude that losers like Whitney Houston have brought to pop music and which awful idol TV shows worldwide continue to propagate.  This attitude is also what vocalfags love (vocalfags referring not to the singers themselves but to the fans who care excessively about vocal technique) but it's the wrong attitude for creating good pop music and it needs to die if k-pop as a genre is to survive and flourish.


Pop fans brainwashed by decades of vocal competition shows don't realise this, but the companies are all too aware that vocalfagging is the enemy of the catchy pop songs that give k-pop life.  In the above video, Lovelyz' management are training the girls to not jerk off in the public's faces with self-serving "look at me" ego-wank but to instead work together as a team and sing what's right for the audience and the material.  If the girls fully take on board this attitude and the songwriters and audio engineers also come to the party with something that doesn't suck, I predict solid ballads coming from the Lovelyz camp in the future.  In the meantime, we've got SoReal who have completely fucking nailed it with "My Heart Says".  If only they were hot girls so I could fap, then it might just be not only the best k-pop song for 2014 but the best song in the fucking world.  Oh well.

---

Anyway that's it for the 2014 favourites list!  I hope you all enjoyed enduring my music taste, and everything else that I've made you put up with throughout 2014!  Kpopalypse will return in 2015 with more stuff and things!

The nominees are:

SNSD: You are old and played out. You haven't done anything good in music since Genie. Now you got rid of Jessica. WTF is wrong with you?

Brave Brothers: Am I ready for Alone remix #748? No I am not.

YG Entertainment: The biggest cult from Korea. Even bigger than the SONE religion since becoming a fan of one group seems to infect you for all YG artists.

And the award goes to...

YG ENTERTAINMENT

What can I say? Soshi at least has some hot ass left to shake and are okay in variety, and Brave Bros has been enabling AOA to shake their hot asses, which is the Lord's work. YG is full of unattractive people who are completely full of their own shit. I mean, to be fair, despite them being toolboxes, I can dig some of the things Big Bang guys do, but nobody wants to eat a cheeseburger that has been rolled in a pile of shit. YG has a company policy of being pretentious as fuck. They try to presume themselves above other kpop artists, overstating their status and influence and importance, while rarely having any real interaction with or showing any respect to the rest of the industry because they are too busy trying to legitimize themselves through the American industry.

Yet despite their continual effort, they haven't earned one bit of it, having little originality, continually dropping in quality as the years go on, and having no comprehension of what they are even trying to step into or their place in the world and role in music history. Being YG, for what it actually offers, actually isn't that bad, but they don't know what YG is to the world and presume it is everything. Despite all this, they have the most obsessive and aggressive fandom (I would say irrational, but once you're past the event horizon it's done, so many fandoms fit equally) that are every bit as aloof to the rest of the industry as YG themselves, but jumping at every chance to claim YG's superiority over music they haven't even heard. So you know what? You think you're so cool? You want to be set apart from the rest? Go ahead. We won't need you in 2015. GET FUCKED!

Now that you've had the time to digest my #20 through #11 picks for top songs of 2014, I'm back with the rest of the controversial opinions you'll accuse me of shit taste for!!

As a reminder, here are the criteria for the works selected:

CRITERIA:

• Release from Jan. 1 - Dec. 25
• Korean releases only (sorry Japan)
• all tracks are fair game (meaning not only title tracks)
• no double dipping -- a group can only appear once 

10. Mamamoo - Pianoman

I'll probably catch more than a bit of flak and consternation-filled side-eye glances for this, but I didn't think Epik High's 99 album was that bad. Sure the YG influence was there, but that wasn't necessarily a bad thing in my opinion. I still enjoyed Kill this Love and Don't Hate Me, but whatever. For that reason, I and many other Epik High fans were rather concerned that the Shoebox album was going to be more of the same corrupting YG influence. ESPECIALLY considering some of the truly godawful shit that was being pumped out up til that point.

Thankfully, the titular man behind the company himself locked all YG personnel inside the company building, implemented a general emigration ban, and forced Epik High to go back to their own house to record the album, Despite the illegal escapes of several people like Mino, BI, and Bobby from the company premises, Epik High dropped one of the best albums of the year that got as close to their roots as they've come in the years since Remapping (in my opinion).

With a pounding beat that in and of itself wormed its way into my brain courtesy of the magic fingers of Tukutz, we get truly great performances from Tablo and Mithra Jin. Beenzino and Verbal Jint make guest appearances and absolutely killed it. I particularly enjoyed Beenzino's verse. Again, this may be a controversial opinion, but fuck it, I don't give a fuck. I honestly thought Mino and Bobby did solid jobs with their verses and they didn't stand out too bad or get shit on too hard by the other superior hyungs on the track. I'm still a little hesitant to extend the same praise to BI, but even he didn't manage to fuck up too bad to ruin the song for me.

AS AN ASIDE: The one thing I will complain about is how the MV introduced me to the qt3.14 Somin AND brought up my hopes up that she was rescued from that DSP hellhole after failing KARA Project 2.0. For the briefest of moments, I thought she made a sneaky cameo to prepromote her as a member of that new YG girl group or something... But alas, she's still a DSP trainee.

FREE MY NIGGA SOMIN




When T-ara announced a comeback in late 2014 with a set of confusing teasers but a promising instrumental, I eagerly rubbed my hands together in anticipation. My prayers were answered and more when the schizophrenic music video fired its seizure-inducing laser beams into my corneas.