Bias & Beyond

  Apologies for the long gap between posts! I have been extremely busy with daily life here including getting ready to change jobs and hosting my sister for her first ever visit to Asia for the Seollal holidays. We are now slowly escaping the end of the extreme winter we have been having here in South Korea. At one point in January the average daily temperatures in Seoul were not creeping above -6c. For the most part I was simply trying to keep myself warm so I don’t freeze off my extremities while commuting to and from work. During one of those freezing days, I was at the gym with one of my closest friends who currently works at an entertainment company. We were on the treadmill gossiping about life when NCT 127’s Fact Check came on over the speakers. We both paused in mid conversation and ended up dancing on the treadmill, cracking up as we had realised what had happened. After our mini jam session on the treadmill, we continued as normal but a thought crossed my mind at that po...

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 This came to a head when, after Kiss of Life were withdrawn from KCON LA 2025 for a similar cultural appropriation issue, they were replaced with ALLDAY PROJECT with an outcry from fans declaring that CJEM were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