Bias & Beyond

  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 This came to a head when, after Kiss of Life were withdrawn from KCON LA 2025 for a similar cultural appropriation issue, they were replaced with ALLDAY PROJECT with an outcry from fans declaring that CJEM were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...

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 ...