Bias & Beyond

I am not sure if this was actually something that is true or just what I was personally observing on my various platforms that I frequent on but there were a lot of top 10/20 lists floating about on the internet with different media and professionals talking about their top K-Pop picks of 2025. So despite me being late to the party, I thought why not join in and have some fun with the songs that I enjoyed that were actually released last year. I admit it is going to be hard because I tend to blast things that actually were released in previous years if my Spotify Wrapped was anything to go back but nevertheless I am going to share my top eight (in no particular order) K-Pop tracks of 2025 with as much personal justification as possible as to why I liked them. Why eight? Because eight is great! And I wanted to be different. Python - GOT7 As mentioned in a previous entry on this site, Python was my most listened to track of 2025. And it wasn’t until I watched Form of Therapy’s reaction t...

  So... ALLDAY PROJECT. Depending on how you feel about the co-ed group, the name of them may make you feel one of many different ways. The Korean audience has certainly found an appeal with them; they have scored several advertisement deals already despite them not even being a year old and their songs are consistently real time charting in the top 10. For a lot of (native) English speaking fans though, there have been a myriad of backlash incidents that have plagued the group from ex-YG powerhouse Teddy’s entertainment company, The Black Label.  The biggest being member Tarzzan being accused of essentially Blackfacing by wearing his hair in cornrows and putting on a ‘hip hop’ persona when in reality he is anything but. This came to a head when, after Kiss of Life were withdrawn from KCON LA 2025 for a similar cultural appropriation issue, they were replaced with ALLDAY PROJECT with an outcry from fans declaring that CJEM were essentially jumping out of the frying pan and int...

It’s that time of the year again where global corporations pump millions of dollars into algorithms and AI prompts so that we have a roundup of the media that we have consumed over the past 12 months! Yay! Regardless of my snarky tone in my initial sentence though, I do look forward to this time of the year to see what my consumption habits were like over the year, especially to see if there was some sort of trend in terms of what I was listening to. This year, Spotify went down the route of tying your listening habits to your perceived age (if you were someone who went for modernity or nostalgia) as well as what kind of “tribe” you would fit into. It was certainly better received than the Wrapped they presented last year which seemed robotic and entirely AI driven in comparison. I guess they listened to the gnashing of teeth from users last year to make the wrapped a bit more palatable for 2025. I am someone who is an avid music listener- I particularly do so on my commute to work...

There are some of you out there who know that my journey into K-Pop came from my interest in anime and therefore J-Rock and J-Pop (thanks to the opening and ending songs of certain songs). This is the case for a lot of us K-Pop fans from the 2000s. People don’t realise how difficult it was to try and fully listen to a high quality anime OP that wasn’t the “TV size” version (basically, the version of the song made for the anime) or a short PV as YouTube was still relatively new as a platform (we’re talking during the years when I was at university, so 2006 - 2009) as Japanese music companies were not seeing it as useful platform at the time and overall the Japanese music market was pretty much self sufficient that it didn’t need to market its artists outside of Japan. In fact, even now Japanese is still the second biggest music market globally behind the United States and in front of the United Kingdom. Still, despite its inaccessibility, people of the West still tried to listen to the ...

I have a feeling that this particular article is going to ruffle a few feathers out there. And honestly, I do not care. It truly needs to be said. The more people that fear speaking out, the more it gets ignored. So, here it goes. The K-Pop industry needs to take accountability more in terms of the influence that Black American culture has had on its music. Now, here’s my disclaimer. I am not American. I am British. I have American relatives (in fact, not including those in my family who remained in the West Indies, the majority of my family on both sides either resides in or was born and raised in the States) but that is as far as my link to the Americas goes. But in the U.K. we were influenced a lot by American media so while I wouldn’t profess myself to be some sort of expert on Black American culture, I have been immersed in it somewhat. Disclaimer over. What I will say is that there are a lot of companies out there who are willing to be “influenced” by certain aspects of Black Ame...

A couple of weeks ago I started this site on the back of a conversation that I had with my personal trainer about how the nostalgia of K-Pop can be affected by actually (and finally) fully understanding the lyrics of songs from the past. I took a dive into this by looking at some of the songs from my favourite girl groups, particularly focusing on Girls Generation’s “Oh!” as a prime example of songs specifically tailored to the male gaze to drive sales and devotion to the fandom. Back then, it was a very clear divide of girl groups were for male fans and boy groups were for girls (something that took me a long while to wrap my head around as it is quite different in the west, if not completely the opposite) But hey, if the girl groups had lyrics specifically tailored to male fans to appeal to and praise them for their devotion, then the same must be true for the boy groups and their female fans right? … right? Well, yes and no. And for different reasons. Of course you had your SHINee “...