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 This came to a head when, after Kiss of Life were withdrawn from KCON LA 2025 for a similar cultural appropriation issue, they were replaced with ALLDAY PROJECT with an outcry from fans declaring that CJEM were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

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 “...

  Despite my lack of concert activity towards the end of 2025, I was pretty active at the beginning of this year. And that was in part to how many ATEEZ concerts I was able to embark on. It’s no secret how much I enjoy ATEEZ’s music- they have always somewhat been on my radar since their debut but they weren’t a group that I followed closely until I was lucky enough to see them perform live towards the end of 2023 for another one of those “K-pop Award Shows” businesses create to ‘recognise’ groups (but in reality are just a glorified indoor music festival) They only performed one song that night, ‘Bouncy’, but I was IMMEDIATELY sold. And I haven’t looked back since. I have been blessed to have the rare feat of seeing them on three different continents this year alone- Asia, North America, and Europe. A couple of people wanted to know what each concert and atmosphere was like; if there were any similarities between the three or if they were all vastly different. I had a thought abou...

A fun little tidbit of an adventure happened to me a couple of weeks ago. I went to support my friend who was performing on stage for a K-Pop cover dance festival (shout out to you, Nat, please check out her YouTube channel here ). There was a lot of modern songs and artists that were being performed during the show such as MEOVV and ILLIT. Then, out of the blue, the intro to AOA’s Heart Attack started to play and my ears perked up. I looked at my friends and saw that they had the same surprised but excited expression that I had. THIS was the K-Pop I enjoyed! It was amusing to see that we were the only people in the audience who had this particular reaction. One of my friends commented that we had now become those aunties at parties who talk about how ‘old skool’ music was better compared to the new-fangled modern rubbish… but with K-Pop. We then started talking about what other artists would be great to see covers of and oh boy, we came up with some gems. Teen Top. Fiestar. B1A4. Rain...