Audio is available here.

My guest for this episode is Amanda Kennell, author of Alice in Japanese Wonderlands. As a long time fan of Lewis Caroll’s Alice books, I was thrilled to get the opportunity to geek out with a fellow enthusiast. For anyone who isn’t familiar with the original novels, they are available for free from Project Gutenberg and I highly recommend reading them.

A list of the manga/anime that Amanda mentions are:

• Miyuki-Chan in Wonderland

• Alice in Borderland

• Black Butler

• Ciel in Wonderland

• Pandora Hearts

• Earl Cain

• Angel Sanctuary

• Alice in Murderland

• Villains are Destined to Die

• Grand Guignol Orchestra

I refer to the Red King’s dream, which is a sequence from Chapter IV of Through the Looking Glass:

“He’s dreaming now,” said Tweedledee: “and what do you think he’s dreaming about?”

Alice said “Nobody can guess that.”

“Why, about you!” Tweedledee exclaimed, clapping his hands triumphantly. “And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you’d be?”

“Where I am now, of course,” said Alice.

“Not you!” Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. “You’d be nowhere. Why, you’re only a sort of thing in his dream!”

“If that there King was to wake,” added Tweedledum, “you’d go out—bang!—just like a candle!”

“I shouldn’t!” Alice exclaimed indignantly. “Besides, if I’m only a sort of thing in his dream, what are you, I should like to know?”

“Ditto” said Tweedledum.

“Ditto, ditto” cried Tweedledee.

He shouted this so loud that Alice couldn’t help saying, “Hush! You’ll be waking him, I’m afraid, if you make so much noise.”

“Well, it no use your talking about waking him,” said Tweedledum, “when you’re only one of the things in his dream. You know very well you’re not real.”

“I am real!” said Alice and began to cry.

“You won’t make yourself a bit realler by crying,” Tweedledee remarked: “there’s nothing to cry about.”

“If I wasn’t real,” Alice said—half-laughing through her tears, it all seemed so ridiculous—“I shouldn’t be able to cry.”

“I hope you don’t suppose those are real tears?” Tweedledum interrupted in a tone of great contempt.

Check out images from Kusama Yayoi, the “modern Alice,” and her 1960s happenings.

Some of the psychedelic flowers growing in Matsumoto. (Photos by me, 2019)

For some fun discussion of Disney princesses and the branding behind them, I recommend the Thirty20Eight podcast; they also have an episode on Duffy, the image character of Tokyo Disney. The cell phone game we discuss is Twisted Wonderland.

I restrained myself in adding too many Alice-themed songs to the episode but I uncovered quite a few.

Please enjoy some of the ones that didn’t make it into the episode including from Yonezu Kenshi and Ali Project. Then there are the videos:

• “Bounce” by Boyfriend

• “Cheshire” by Itzy

• “Mad Hatter” by DUSTCELL

• “First Rabbit” by AKB48 (note the floofy Lolita-adjacent costumes!)

• “Bloomin’!” by tommy february6

The songs played are:

1. まきばアリス! by 坂本真綾 (Makiba Alice! by Sakamoto Maaya)

2. “Alice’s Theme” written by Danny Elfman, performed by the Moscow Boys Choir

3. “White Rabbit” by Jefferson Airplane

4. “Rehtorb Ym No Hcram” by Mark Fry (from Dreaming With Alice)

5. “Alice in Wonderland” written by Sammy Fain, performed by Oscar Peterson, The Way I Really Play

6. モノクロのキス by シド (Monokuro No Kiss by SID, theme to Black Butler, season one)

7. 人柱アリス (Hitobashira Alice, Alice of Human Sacrifice)

8. 意味なしアリス by 谷山浩子 (Imi nashi Alice by Taniyama Hiroko, Alice of No Meaning)

9. 時間の国のアリス by 松田聖子 (Jikan no Kumi no Alice by Matsuda Seiko, Alice in the Land of Time)

10. “Alice in Wonder Underground” by BUCK-TICK

Monia Ali, the Exiled Fan, and my podcast BFF is back again to discuss the 2001 film Josie and the Pussycats. I wrote about it back in 2021; the Unspooled episode mentioned is here.

Some of the topics we discussed are:

• The 20th anniversary Josie reunion.

• Josie and the Pussycats absolutely solved crimes in the comics.

• There’s no need for subliminal advertising anymore because we are constantly advertised to; the flip side of that is subtextual analysis is everywhere but nobody is talking about the text itself.

• “Selling Out” as a concept doesn’t exist anymore (but it is a great book by Dan Ozzi).

• Meet Me In The Bathroom (2022) was a documentary covering the late 1990s and early 2000s rock scene in New York. It’s an interesting counterpart to Josie because it’s covering the same era in rock but from a different angle. This is an era I’m intimately familiar with, as I was very active on the scene and saw quite a few bands like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs in concert before and during their mainstream/major label crossover. A friend and I even interviewed Adam Green from the Moldy Peaches at one point. I’d been very into the idea of an Andy Warhol revival and leaning into the absurdity of celebrity at the time and I remember Adam just not picking up on anything I was talking about. An early lesson in how critics project meaning onto artists. The documentary is worth watching as a snapshot of a lost moment in time, a reverse image of the pre-9/11 world of Josie.

• The rise of the “normal person” celebrity à la the cast of The Jersey Shore leading to influencers.

• Faux boy band DuJour is barely even parody. “Back Door Lover” and “Liquid Dreams” are kissing cousins. One of the most charming elements of Josie is the fact that literally everyone loves DuJour, including the girls in the band. Who doesn’t love the boy bands of the era—even the music production dudes I went to school with loved *NSYNC.

• Poptimism vs Rockism (along with the “Westernization of K-Pop”) is seemingly the debate that never dies. You can read plenty on poptimism.

• Part of getting older is apparently seeing what we considered slop culture get unearthed as treasures by the younger generations. I suppose one woman’s Gilligan’s Island on Nick-at-Nite is a younger woman’s Puddle of Mudd.

• Kay Hanley isn’t getting paid—which led to discussion of the production designer of Obsession’s viral post and the cast of the original Blair Witch Project.

• And Party Every Day is the book about Casablanca Records.

• Vinyl record plants booked for what is essentially just merch nobody is going to listen to and often sound terrible.

• Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains (1982) may have to be another episode. The film was directed by Lou Adler, who we discuss in episode 79 on the Mamas & the Papas.

• Alexandra is here because she’s in the comics. (Side note: I love Missi Pyle.)

• Backstreet Boys sues their label for interfering with the group and trying to poach Nick as a solo act.

• Alan M. in the comics is a hunk like Fred from Scooby Doo but in the movie he’s giving Quinn Allman from the Used.

• “The Ugliest Man on Hinge” viral post.

• Tara Reid’s incredible low rise pants. (I miss these.) And her relationship with Carson Daly. (I don’t miss him.)

• Should Melody have been more heavily coded as a stoner?

• Hallmark movies are the best. The Rachel Leigh Cook one I just watched is this one.

• B4-4 rules and I will take any excuse to play this song.

The songs played are:

1. “3 Small Words” by Josie and the Pussycats

2. “You’ve Come a Long Way Baby” by Josie and the Pussycats

3. “Backdoor Lover” by DuJour

4. “Get Off the Internet” by Le Tigre

5. “Liquid Dreams” by O-Town

6. “Waste of Time” by the Fabulous Stains

7. “I Want It That Way” by Too Many Zooz

8. “Crush on Me” by the Donnas

9. “High” by Feeder

10. “Get Down” by B4-4

11. “Josie and the Pussycats” by Josie and Pussycats

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

George Orwell, 1984

Recently, a post lamenting Pentagon’s disappearance went viral on K-Pop Twitter and left me feeling nostalgic for circa 2018 K-Pop. It doesn’t feel all that long ago to me but the K-pop landscape is completely different now. And it’s different in a way that means the history of that era of K-Pop has been essentially wiped clean in English language spaces.

The biggest song of the year, by miles and miles, was… (no, not anything by BTS, despite what you may have been told) it was “Love Scenario” by iKon.

On the Korean Circle (nee Gaon) chart, alongside “Love Scenario,” it was Momoland’s “Bboom Bboom,” Mamamoo’s “Starry Night,” BigBang’s “Flower Road,” and BlackPink’s “Du Du Du Du.”

But by 2018, what the Korean public is listening to and “K-Pop” have already diverged but what K-Pop fans are listening to, globally, is still more or less the same.

The Kings of K-Pop fandom in 2018 were Wanna One and anyone who tells you differently didn’t live through this era. To be fair, 2018 was admittedly the downward slope of their 2017 dominance but their fans still had enough juice to force flight delays and rack up music show wins.

Along with the previously mentioned broadly popular acts, looking at music show wins, other acts with big active K-Pop fandoms were veteran groups EXO and SHINee along with Twice, Winner, Red Velvet, GFriend, Apink, and GOT7… and, especially, yes, BTS whose fandom was on the rise in this year, in part thanks to a crossover with what Monia and I refer to as the free-floating BL fans, whose primary interaction with fandom is fanfic.

One of the things that was still present in 2018 but that has almost completely vanished now, was the presence of K-Pop bloggers reviewing music. These weren’t the big industry publications who have include enough content from big companies and acts with big fandoms, just regular bloggers. (One of the few left standing is the Bias List for reviews, along with Kpopalypse and Asian Junkie.) The turnover from writing to video went hand in hand with the change from reviewing to reacting in this space.

And “Shine”wasabsolutely mentionedon a variety of lists.

But what struck me more than anything else was the wide variety of acts that were mentioned, there was a lot of depth in the level below the large fandom behemoths like Wanna One. Not just variety as in there were a lot of groups, but variety in that they were all doing different things, musically and performance-wise.

For boy groups, my wheelhouse, there’s not just Pentagon, but you had groups like Astro, Nu’Est, the Boyz, Seventeen, Golden Child, Day6, MonstaX, etc. all making appearances on best of lists of regular K-Pop listeners with a wide variety of songs, despite not having large enough fandoms to rank in on charts or win music shows. MonstaX had a hard edge, the Boyz were cutesy teenybop, Astro had just pivoted from cutesy teenybop to sweet sounding pop, Day6 did rock music, etc. etc. And that’s on top of the variety you were getting from the more prominent acts. SHINee had just released a triple album, concept album with a tropical house banger as the title track. Winner’s “Everyday” played with chilltrap and EXO had the slinky “Love Shot” that went viral around K-Pop spaces for Kai’s red suit.
And it’s important to note here that this isn’t what the current lore tells you: Big 3 dominance where? The truth is that the “Big 3 dominance” was always more marketing ploy than reality. Midsize agencies can and were able to compete against the Big 3 just fine in this era.

But something that is true and rarely talked about is that the period centering on 2018 saw a purging of the biggest boy groups from the field.

• 2PM went on hiatus in 2017.

• BigBang went on hiatus in 2018.

• Block B went on hiatus in 2018.

• Highlight (nee Beast) went on hiatus in 2018.

• Infinite went on hiatus in 2018.

• Vixx went on hiatus in 2018.

• B1A4 went on hiatus in 2018.

• BtoB went on hiatus in 2018.

• WannaOne disbanded at the end of 2018.

• SHINee would start their hiatus at the end of 2018 with Onew’s enlistment.

• EXO would start enlistments in 2019.

These were all acts with significant, if not huge fandoms.

In theory, going on what happened in the past, the gap in the field should have led to the growth of another crop of large and varied acts. And we did start to see the seeds of that happen. Astro—who I will never stop singing the praises of—got their first and very emotional music show win in January 2019. Seventeen also absolutely surged in popularity in 2019, with their album An Ode. MonstaX was doing really well in 2019 and you also had the mega debuts of X1 and Ateez. And SM’s NCT was finally gaining some traction (thanks in part to SuperM, which is a hill I will die on.) Winner was also huge in 2019, with member Mino even having a massive hit with “Fiance.”
So, why is it with this massive variety of boy groups with large and growing fandoms who had been left an essentially an empty playing field, BTS took home basically every award for the next few years and dominated K-Pop conversations in English while songs like Pentagon’s “Shine” which were quite popular among K-Pop fans globally at the time have become essentially deep fandom lore shared on X instead of entering the English-language K-Pop fan canon?

Well, let me tell you my theories.

1. English-language fandom got a massive influx of BTS fans beginning in 2016-17. It started with a small trickle but became a flood leading up to “Dynamite” and then exploded. These new fans came from a few sources, none of which were traditional K-Pop fandom demographics: One Direction fans and other boy bands looking for a fix, the aforementioned free floating slash fans (many of whom are now currently in Heated Rivalry fandom), and moms brought in by mainstream entertainment, many of whom were experiencing Baby’s First Fandom.

While these demographics weren’t proportionally huge on their own in the United States or other Anglosphere countries, it was enough to absolutely swamp the existing global K-Pop marketplace, which responded to the economic incentives in predictable ways, especially as the pandemic kicked in and these new BTS fans were willingly acting as unpaid bot labor, streaming, buying, and streaming and buying songs like “Dynamite” and “Butter.”

All of this unpaid fan labor and new focus on the American market helped to build a very expensive new K-Pop arena. Now, companies needed to generate not 100,000 copies or even 500,000 copies (which would have been a mega-blockbuster album in 2015) but by 2018, the bar had been raised to the million level for a hit album and it kept rising. There are huge upfront costs involved in that—let alone some of the alleged shenanigans like selling albums at an upfront discount to bulk buying fan groups, among others. The same for streams. 500 million on YouTube or risk being called a flop. Fans can’t generate that all on their own and various streaming sites, it also takes cash money. And don’t forget touring. Instead of Korea-Japan-Taiwan-China-SEA, acts were expected to hit more American dates and in bigger and bigger venues. That takes money up front. Even things like music show appearances, which are expected from K-Pop acts, can be costly. Let alone things like awards, which were fandom bragging currency. No daesang, no opinion.

The upshot of this, in my opinion, is that it became prohibitively expensive to participate in the K-Pop marketplace for all but the biggest of big companies. And even for the big companies, that mean sticking to “safe” output—too expensive to experiment now. That healthy midtier of groups was basically wiped out. It has become such a problem that the Korean government finally stepped in this year to offer financial assistance to smaller agencies. Presumably, even they are tiredof thecurrentofferings from the dominant company and want to give groups like Rescene (from label the Muze) a leg up.

2. The BTS exceptionalism narrative fed to the new incoming, outside fans may have done great things for BTS (and their company) in the short term but, in my opinion, the long term effects have been brutal for both BTS and the industry itself. I’ve often talked about how “BTS paved the way” is very much a thought terminating cliche and means nothing but here’s the nuance: they absolutely did pave the way to the current and very stale state of K-Pop.

For one thing, I like to talk about the K-Pop trend generator. That trend generator is currently running on fumes and skibidi toilet music. For years, K-Pop worked by filtering concepts down from the top acts, where they’d get adapted by others in a very Korean trend cycle. E.g. Boy groups in the style of BigBang were the template for years and everyone wanted their own nasal-voiced, self-producing rapper a la G-Dragon… until they wanted a Zico from Block B. Kai from EXO went viral and then everyone wanted a hunky main dancer… until they wanted something else. It sounds formulaic, and to an extent it is, but just because an idol was cast “in the mold of” an idol like G-Dragon, didn’t mean that the idol wouldn’t eventually form their own identity. I would argue that E’Dawn from Pentagon was in this category.

The problem with the K-Pop trend generator is that it needs artistic input. BTS provided none—they had spent their careers downstream of acts like VIXX, BigBang, BAP, Block B, SHINee, EXO, etc. With BTS dominating the K-Pop scene, the trend generator for boy groups had nothing to feast on except maybe bubblegum concepts and over compressed, autotuned vocals—which, to be fair, when done as a “concept,” by a talented group could be made palatable.

Instead of anything artistic trickling down the generator, what’s trickled down is the focus on sales, streams, and charts, etc.

3. And then there’s the very specific BTS-exceptionalism narrative that meant that a large swathe of these incoming fans were (at least initially) unreceptive to anything other than BTS. This is the origin of the (now forgotten?) “multi is a slur in Korea” mythos. While it is true that in Korea fans may have stuck to one group or another, global fans and especially English-language fandom had tended to support numerous groups. In Korea, fans would have a lot of opportunities to see media, as well as to engage with in-person support and events that just weren’t available for foreign fans. So, by necessity, foreign fans, generally, engaged with content from a lot of groups when engaging with K-Pop. This meant that when a K-Pop group would tour in your country—no matter which group—K-Pop fans would turn out to see them. The downside of this was that if another group you liked better announced their concert a few months later, fans may not have had the money to attend a second concert. So oversaturation of the relatively small global K-Pop marketplace was a real problem… and still is, in my opinion.

Even BigHit Entertainment, BTS’s company, tried to interest BTS fans in TXT in 2019 when they debuted, but it didn’t work. Despite BTS having been around for six-seven years at that point, the newer fans who had just discovered the concept of K-Pop were still caught up in the initial buzz of BTS and wouldn’t budge…yet.

(Now, here we are six-seven years past when these new fans joined and we are seeing that cohort of BTS fans—what is left of them—spreading out and taking their bad habits with them.)

BTS fans were quick to say “this isn’t a group project,” meaning that they didn’t have any obligation to take any interest in the history or broader context of K-Pop. Sure, okay. But removed from the broader history and context of K-Pop, BTS makes no sense. It’s like taking a fish out of water and expecting it to fly. I flagged this as early as 2018 when I was a new BTS fan, but I was coming from an Asian pop fan context. And I think my predictions have come true.

In isolation, BTS wasn’t coming from a rich musical and pop culture history with its own references and touchpoints. They became, essentially, Menudo Redux, singing about drinking milk with King Kong and being smooth like butter.

What happened to Pentagon is a little different from the doldrums of a group like MCND. Pentagon lost key member E’Dawn in a dating scandal in 2018 and never really bounced back.

Some of these groups (and idols) that might have at one point existed as part of the healthy midtier, tried their luck with competition shows like Road to Kingdom but even the Produce series that gave us Wanna One got taken out in 2019 by a voting scandal and the series never bounced back. Other rising groups (conveniently, coincidentally?) lost key members in this key era—NCT’s Lucas, MonstaX’s Wonho, and iKon’s B.I. among them. Woodz seems to have been the only large mainstream artist to really emerge from the boy groups of this era.

I hope this is starting to change… the girl group scene, at least, has bounced back from the NewJeans-pocalypse and showed signs of wanting to engage with the genre’s own history.

It’s been really refreshing to see Rescene bounce onto the scene and with a throwback to classic girl group KARA and former IZ*One idol Yena has also had a retro-themed hit with “Catch Catch”.

Over in Japan, when Johnny’s & Associates (now STARTO) was taken out, the boy group midtier exploded and although Snow Man is still the dominant group (for now), the rise of formerly low-to-midier M!LK to the upper echelons of J-Pop has been wonderful to watch.

I’d love to see the same thing happen in K-Pop but you need the midtier groups to do so… maybe a LNGSHOT?

One of the things discussed in Holiday’s book is the fact that negative information holds our attention so much better than neutral or even positive information. This stirring up of negative emotions can be spun into what we may as well call Persecution Marketing, a phrase I’ve seen used in Christian media but I think is a very handy descriptor of a tactic I’ve been seeing in K-Pop.

Here is persecution marketing at work, as described by the American Conservative:

Costco pulled D’Souza’s new book off its shelves a month into its run, claiming poor sales. D’Souza cried foul, saying it must be because the company’s former CEO gave money to Obama, and Obama has had good words to say about the company. The story went viral on conservative media, and the D’Souza book became an Amazon bestseller … which resulted in Costco putting the book back on its shelves.

Pretty neat little marketing trick! Gin up your base by claiming you’re being persecuted and then sit back and let the money and unpaid positive PR roll in as they rush to defend you.

To properly use Persecution Marketing, you need to create the Persecutor. This can be done by fandom amplifier accounts whipping up stans into a frenzy to attack a specific target. These targets can be fellow fans, journalists, random online netizens, basically anyone. Like the people in the example sticking it to Obama by buying D’Souza’s book, it doesn’t matter to the frenzied stans whether or not the accusations against the target are true or untrue or even relevant, only that they have been made and that they fit into a narrative of persecution.

The most recent example I’ve seen online began with amplifier accounts directing stans to attack writer Leah Bess for her column at the Needle Drop on BTS’s “Swim.” I’m not too familiar with Bess’s work but the column seems to be an answer to Tom Breihan’s Number Ones looking at the dregs of Billboard Hot 100. Like Breihan, she compiles sources and quotes from industry publications to tell the story of “Swim.”

Here is Bess in her column:

“SWIM” was written by nine people at the LA songwriting camp, spearheaded by OneRepublic frontman and pop machine stalwart Ryan Tedder. Under his wing were ghostwriters Kirsten Spencer, Derrick Milano, and James Essien, 3OH!3’s Sean Foreman, producers Tyler Spry and Pdogg, and Diplo collaborator Jamison Baken (Diplo himself contributed significantly to ARIRANG).

In press materials, the song was attributed to BTS member RM, who said “I wrote the lyrics and I tried to express the confusion that we all had before [and] after the military... and we want to just keep swimming.” This is not true. According to Spry, the process was more like this: “That day, we were paired with [producer] Leclair, who’s signed to Diplo. When we were working, we’d write two or three songs because we weren’t trying to deliver a finished, polished thought. There weren’t any references. Leclair and I just put together the rough beat while James and Sean were freestyling on the couch. The chorus just fell out of thin air.”

The juxtaposition of the marketing materials and the industry quotes is brutal.

But stans are very good at ignoring things they do not want spread around. While a few stans may have read this and been annoyed, the Needle Drop is not a publication read by large numbers of BTS stans and it may well have passed unnoticed except that a new persecutor was needed to rile up the troops and their chosen offense was the Persecution Narrative that has been used throughout this current BTS album cycle for Arirang: BTS’s Korean identity.

The idea is that critics like Pitchfork’s Joshua Minsoo Kim aren’t giving Arirang middling reviews because the album is mediocre, it’s because something-something BTS’s Korean identity is being attacked!

Here are some replies to Bess’s post on the article on X:

It doesn’t matter that nothing in Bess’s article had anything to say about BTS’s Korean identity re: “Swim” and how that played into the quality of the song (a mediocre song about nothing). All they needed was a couple of lines they were able to twist out of context to fit the chosen Persecution Narrative regarding identity.

The article dropped on July 27 but the attacks didn’t get going until the 28th which laid the perfect ground for BTS to drop their announcement that they weren’t submitting for the Grammys on the 29th into a fandom primed to feel persecuted over identity.

It’s the perfect Persecution Marketing rollout for BTS to hit America’s largest media market in New York with their Arirang tour this weekend, giving outlets a reliable hook for any potential stories. Now it’s not Lame Boy Band Shuffles Into Stadium After a Floptastic World Cup Halftime Show, it’s Brave Social Justice Warriors Stick It To the Grammys.

I have already written on the ridiculous “Asian Pop” category and won’t repeat myself here but I will say that multiple things can be true at once:

1. the “Asian Pop” category is poorly thought out and feels like a giveaway for K-Pop acts,

2. the Grammys has an unfortunate history of racial slicing and dicing of categories to protect the interests of powerful industry cliques,

3. the Grammys have long given boy bands and male vocal groups short shrift, and

4. Arirang was simply not very good which meant it wouldn’t have won in the major categories and, unfortunately, seems to have been ineligible for the Asian Pop award.

If Grammy isn’t awarding *NSYNC, who could actually sing and dance, why would they award BTS?

Over the weekend, I watched Josie and the Pussycats for the first time in many years. I vividly remember going to see it when it came out in spring 2001 with another female musician friend of mine—a drummer—and we left the theater happy and with plans to cover some of the catchier songs on the soundtrack the next time we practiced together. 20 years ago (for teen girl audiences) the film felt like a sharp and witty skewering of the oppressive and soulless mainstream music culture. Watching today, Josie and the Pussycats is like a time capsule of Rome just before the fall, the last gasp of the Monoculture.

The movie tells the story of the eponymous band comprised of Josie (Rachel Leigh Cook) and her Pussycat friends Val (Rosario Dawson) and Mel (Tara Reid). The Pussycats are a floundering garage band looking for their big break when they become ensnared in an evil government conspiracy to brainwash the youth of America into becoming consumerist robots through pop music. Of course once Josie, Val, and Mel figure out what’s going, on they smash the machine and tell the youth out there that it’s okay to not a like a song or a trend. Just be true to your own tastes!

Ironically, what struck me as the most archaic aspect of the film wasn’t the presence of CD stores (or CD store DJs) or even the idea of a “rock band” yet alone Carson Daly as a cultural touchstone. It was the “like what you like” message free of any broader ideological position. “If you like the song, great! If you don’t, no big deal!” Stan culture in Current Year has made that an unspeakable position to hold online. Say you don’t like a song and risk getting tarred and feathered by a mob far more ruthless than the teens yelling “Pink is the new red” in the movie.

Maybe it’s just an inbuilt part of human nature and we are all il conformista at the end of the day, squashing our consciences and tastes to fit in. And, anyways, in Current Year, the government doesn’t need to insert brainwashing messages under catchy pop punk tunes to get you to buy a fast food hamburger. Today’s artists are happy to shill directly for the companies themselves. The fast food commercial and the new single are one and the same. Back in 2001, the extreme branding and product placement in the movie seemed over-the-top and distracting. Even I, who genuinely enjoyed the film at the time, remember wishing they had used parody brands to make the anti-groupthink point. Now, the use of branding seems prescient.

In 2001 we still had some vestiges of the “music” part of the music industry. Songs were meant to be purchased, yes, and consumed but also broadly listened to and enjoyed. All of that is gone now.

I was inspired to watch the film again in large part because I wanted to refresh my memory on faux boy band DuJour as part of my research in Boy Band Studies. DuJour (comic actors Seth Green, Donald Faison, Breckin Meyer, and Alexander Martin) were a goofy parody of the type of Backstreet Boys/*NSYNC male vocal act that was dominating the charts at the time. But for any of us who have seen a young Justin Timberlake proclaim that baby blue was “his color,” the bickering between Seth Green and Breckin Meyer over who got to do a certain “face” appears only lightly exaggerated.

DuJour’s gay-baiting parody lyrics (“I’m your backdoor lover”) may seem a bit crass in retrospect but I was pleasantly surprised that DuJour themselves emerge victorious. Even in goofy parody form, the Max Martin-style beat and BSB/*NSYNC-style vocal harmonies are catchy and put a smile on my face. And much like their Norwegian counterparts Boyzvoice, the comedic bickering and performances of the four DuJour members were genuinely enjoyable. DuJour may have been a tool of Fiona (Parker Posey) and her evil MegaRecords brainwashing organization but they were an unwitting one. I’d happily watch a DuJour reunion.

Josie and the Pussycats is fighting a cultural battle that was lost long, long ago. We’ve all come to accept the corporate branding and cultural export as the dominant forces in American popular art. And while there’s nothing wrong with singing a jingle for fast food (just ask NSYNC) one wishes Kpop stans, in particular, understood that they also have a MegaRecords in Seoul.

Episode originally posted on March 29, 2023.

Audio is available here.

I’m so excited to bring you an episode on the best film of all time, ever: GET READY TO BE BOYZVOICED!!!!!!

If you haven’t seen it, please stop right here and watch it.

Monia, the Exiled Fan from Episode 47, joins me again to discuss Boyzvoice, boy bands generally, and all sorts of Scandinavian goodness. You can check out her substack here:

Fandom Exile

Anti-nostalgia in the form of cultural criticism. Investigating the (d)evolution of fan culture and communities, contextualizing the rise of stans, with focus on corporate strategy and group dynamics.

By Monia Ali

First some video links: the Norwegian Eurovision semi-finalists and finalists for this year including the Shoe Guy (Rasmus Thall), the super adorable Norwegian boy band Unami Tsunami, Germany’s 2016 last place finisher, the superior 1979 Dschinghis Khan, Markoolio (if you know you know), and Norwegian National Treasures: a-ha.

And then Espen Eckbo in character as Ove interviewing Ke$ha, trailers for Director’s Cut (the Penn Jillette film where he plays the psychofan), Triangle of Sadness (the Ruben Östlund film), All You Need is Cash (The Rutles) (the Beatles mockumentary), The Boy Band Con (NSYNC member Lance Bass’s excellent documentary about Lou Pearlman), Maxxx (Max with three x’s about the ex-boybander looking to make a comeback), 2Gether (2000 American boy band mockumentary).

And some articles: the class action lawsuits against lip syncing were very real, Lance Bass talking about being bullied into coming out by Perez Hilton, George Shelley talking about his time in Union J, and Monia’s review of the Louis Tomlinson documentary.

The Boyzvoice songs are available on all of your favorite streaming platforms so please drink deeply and enjoy!

The songs played are:

1. “Space Man” by Sam Ryder (Eurovision 2022)

2. “Cha Cha Cha” by Käärijä (Finland National Final Performance 2023)

3. “Freaky for the Weekend” by Bryon Williams Jr & Jowst (Norway Eurovision Semi-Finals 2023)

4. “Cousin” by Boyzvoice (and the video)

5. “Dancing Queen” by A*Teens (and video)

6. “Diggi Lou Diggi Ley” by The Herreys (Eurovision winners 1984)

7. “Take On Me” by A1 (and video)

8. “Let Me Be Your Father Christmas” by Boyzvoice (and original video plus the 2021 updated remix version!)

9. “We Are The Playmomen” by Boyzvoice (and video)

10. “Spy Me At Noon” by Boyzvoice (and video)

11. “Hey Mr. President” by Boyzvoice

12. “Bye Bye Bye” by NSYNC (live mic feed from a performance)

13. “What’s Happening To My Body” by Boyzvoice (and video)

14. “Twelve Year Old Woman” by Boyzvoice (and video)

15. “En godt stekt pizza” by Staysman & Lazz (and video and Kollektivet parody of the video)

16. “Piggy in the Middle” by the Rutles (and video)

17. “Superheroes Can’t Be Gay” by Kollektivet

18. “Tell Me How U Wanna B Done” by Prince & Carmen Elecktra (and video)

19. “Fairytale” by Alexander Rybak (Eurovision winner 2009)

20. “Spy Me At Noon” by Boyzvoice

Here is the late, great physicist Richard Feynman explaining “cargo cults”:

“In the South Seas there is a Cargo Cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land.”

That is from his speech to the 1974 graduating class of Caltech warning them about what he saw as the proliferation of what he called “cargo cult science” and how easy it is to fool yourself into believing things.

What brought it to mind was the recent K-Pop meltdown over Last.fm, an app that you probably haven’t thought about in years, if at all.

The TL;DR on last.fm is that it’s had many forms and functions over the years (including as Internet “radio”) but, as of 2026, the purpose is to track every single thing you listen to via “scrobbles.” These scrobbles allow you to quantify your listening habits and turn the analog act of listening to music into metrics! It’s the app that monitors your listening habits like your blood sugar levels.

Why was there a meltdown over last.fm? Well, below is the weekly chart from June 18-25, 2026. The first column here is “listeners” and the second one is “number of scrobbles.” Note the massive difference between BTS (with slightly fewer listeners than Mitski) and the artists on either side of them.

Now, this is what the Daily Chart looked like on June 24th:

And this is what the Daily Chart looked like on June 25th:

And the reactions from BTS fans were totally normal! Just kidding, they were over the top hysterical with BTS fans doubling down on all their favorite tactics: calling last.fm misogynists and racists, claiming to be the saviors of pop music, etc. etc.

Why the huge meltdown? An algorithm switch ranking based on listeners, not scrobbles.

I wrote a post last year simply titled, “The Metrics Stans,” and we’re seeing the exact same behavior running wild over last.fm.

To pull it back to Feynman, it’s all the Cargo Cult mentality at work. These stans have done everything they can to mimic large scale popularity. They’ve built networks of fans who mass purchase CDs and mp3s. They generate thousands of dummy social media accounts and email addresses to boost popularity numbers. Fans even have the B-CD (BTS Chart-Data) app that helps to bundle song streams to feed into sites like last.fm. And yet, when the algorithm is tweaked slightly, the facade comes crashing down and their earphones are revealed to be made of coconut shells.

I’ve been observing this behavior for years and it’s only gotten worse as time goes on. What I can’t quite figure out is why.

I can certainly understand thinking that your favorite artist is the best. I think my favorite artist is the best and I think it’s great when other people like them too! Do I think it’s cool when their videos hit a million views? Yeah! But even if a song only gets a thousand views, it doesn’t change my opinion. I still think they’re the best.

Which is why I have had a hard time squaring the circle of why the validation of metrics are so important to these particular fans to the point that a change in algorithm can trigger a fandom meltdown.

Monia has written about the parallel world of cyberspace and in her (excellent!) post she talks about the way fans were trained to curate (including via last.fm) these massive archives of content and statistics for free.

This home grown infrastructure wasn’t perfect, but it was significantly different because there was no monetization, no commercial exploitation. Bad actors still existed, catfishing and other online frauds are not unheard of.

But being part of that scene, the constantly shifting ground, it’s impossible to see ourselves in context. It’s hard for me, to see how easily we offered up our goods, our trust, in things that were part of the escalation into the full-blown attention market we see today.

All it took was the fan industries tweaking the existing behavior to get it working for them. Instead of curating archives of gifs to be used on LiveJournal, stans are out there curating streams to create the illusion of popularity in order to make Hybe’s bottom line go up.

Stans caught up in the metrics cargo cult will claim that faking big metrics is how to support their favorite artist to ensure a steady supply of content in the future. Yet, many examples exist to the contrary—popular artists break up (see also: Arashi, SMAP, etc.) and small, niche artists hang around touring forever and ever and ever (e.g. Shonen Knife is still touring). Sure, we should all put our money where our mouths are and buy an album to support our favorite artist if we can afford it but this idea that you need to scrobble obsessively or drop thousands of dollars on mp3s you don’t need is incredibly toxic. It turns off normie listeners and leads to fandom burnout in the long run.

Enjoy what you enjoy; support your favorite musician; but don’t act as free labor for multimillion dollar corporations. You don’t need metrics of what you’ve listened to. What will it really tell you?

1. This is because they need to award Hybe (who have thrown a lot of money around) and they can’t produce a product that will win in any other category.

2. This is because they need to award Hybe but the Grammys are too racist to award them in the main category so they have to segregate them in this separate K-Pop award.

I probably won’t shock anyone when I say my take is right down the middle.

Hybe is incapable of producing a quality product even when the Grammys are basically handing them the award on a silver platter. Like much of the rest of American cultural institutions after 2020, the Grammys were acutely aware of how they were perceived with regards to identity politics. I strongly suspect that the Grammys wanted to award BTS for the year after “Dynamite” if they’d been able to produce anything more substantial than “Butter.” But they couldn’t and “Rain On Me” carried the day.

As “K-Pop” has been absorbed into the American marketplace, led by Hybe, it has undergone a transformation from buzzy, critically acclaimed, trend forward pop music to… well, this.

Grammy 2027, here they come!

Netizens have been referring to this style as “skibidi toilet music” and that seems about right. (I’ll be adding it to my K-Pop Vocabulary post.)

But Hybe has thrown a lot of money around in America and the industry wants (or needs) to reward that somehow.

But here’s the other piece—“Asian Pop Music” as defined by Grammy is not a coherent category in any real shape or form. I won’t say it’s “racist” but it certainly seems like a giveaway category for K-Pop that can’t win anywhere else.

The Grammy guidelines are here for anybody curious; let’s go through them.

“This category recognizes artistic excellence in Asian pop music performances. Eligible recordings include contemporary popular music originating from or widely recognized within Asian markets, including K-Pop, J-Pop, and C-Pop.”

The first sentence already has me cringing.

• K-Pop has come to mean exclusively idol music.

• J-Pop is a catchall term somewhat analogous to 邦楽 (ho-gaku) or Japanese music that can include anything from ex-vocaloid singer-songwriter Yonezu Kenshi (whose song “Iris Out” has crushed it across Asia this year) to veteran rock stalwarts ONE OK ROCK to any of the numerous soggy, soft rock bands that dominate domestic rankings. Sure, idol music is part of that but that’s not all of what “J-Pop” is. Idol music is idol music.

• “C-Pop” doesn’t mean anything. The term was crafted out of nothing in a response to “K-Pop” and “J-Pop.” There’s Mandopop in Mandarin, Cantopop in Cantonese, etc. but those terms—again—are more analogous to “J-Pop” in that they don’t mean exclusively idol music.

“Asian pop is a distinct and globally recognized form of popular music characterized by its integrated approach to music, performance, and presentation.”

So, yes, by “Asian pop” here the Grammys mean a specific kind of performance-based idol music that just so happens to be what Hybe specializes in and not the “Asian Pop” made by blockbuster domestic acts like Woodz in Korea, whose mega-hit “Drowning” involves him standing and singing (very well) into a microphone.

And, look, I love “integrated approach” idol music and think it deserves recognition. My favorite idol group of all time, A.B.C-Z, are kings of the “integrated approach.”

(Check out their new song, “TAP”!)

But idol music is not all pop music and idol music is definitely not all pop music from Asia. If this is meant to be a K-Pop Award, just say so.

“Eligible recordings typically feature melody-driven composition, mainstream pop songwriting, and commercially oriented production, as recognized within their respective markets, and may incorporate elements of pop-adjacent styles such as pop-rock, pop R&B, and other related forms. Recordings in this category are often characterized by genre-blending arrangements, layered production, and dynamic structural shifts designed to support both audio and performance-based delivery.”

So, “Asian Pop” is distinct for its “integrated approach” to performance, etc. but musically it’s just mainstream pop songwriting with some genre blending? What on Earth would separate “Asian Pop” then from, say, an “integrated” piece from somebody like Lady Gaga, who won a Grammy for “Best Dance Pop” for “Abracadabra,” which certainly seems to hit on most (if not all) the points in this description. (Not to mention that “melody-driven” compositions seem to be rapidly on the decline in K-Pop.)

“Recordings must feature meaningful use of one or more Asian languages. An Asian language should play a significant role within the song in bilingual or multilingual structures such that the recording is identifiable with that language. Recordings performed entirely in an Asian language are eligible. Incidental or minimal use (e.g., isolated words, adlibs, or brief phrases) does not qualify. Recordings performed entirely in English are not eligible in this category and remain eligible in other appropriate categories. The musical style is determinative of eligibility, not the ethnicity or nationality of the performer(s).”

Ah, here we go—recordings must be in “an Asian language” (not specified) but ethnicity doesn’t matter. So, if Lady Gaga released “Abracadabra” in Thai or something, would that count? What about Indian film songs which are in Asian languages and “integrate” performance and music? Or is this simply a carve out to award Katseye? I mean, BlackPink’s Rose didn’t have a problem competing in the main category with “APT” and did quite well for herself, so why the special new category? The whole thing is so ridiculous.

Did Grammy think they could waltz in and define “Asian Pop” as an outside authority? It’s quite audacious when you think about it. Stans, academics, critics, and other interested parties have been arguing for years about whether or not the English language is important or whether you can remove the “K” from “K-Pop” or if Asian music is just mainstream American music reskinned.

Well, according to Grammy, “Asian Pop” is essentially just regular mainstream American pop but with some “integrated elements” in performance and sung in an “Asian language” (unspecified) but it doesn’t have to be sung by people of Asian ethnicity.

In other words, what it appears like to me, is that Grammy wanted (or needed) a “K-Pop Award” but didn’t want to call it a “K-Pop Award” so they created a K-Pop Award based on who they wanted (or needed) to award and called it something else with the thinnest layer of plausible “Asian” deniability layered over it.

None of the explanations for this are remotely flattering to Grammy or to anybody nominated under “Asian Pop.”

Trend chasing? Audience chasing? Well, the AMAs had a K-Pop-palooza this year and ratings fell by a third over 2025 so good luck with that.

It can’t be the artistry, which has been on the decline for years with no signs of a rebound on the horizon. The one act in the past few years which had both critical acclaim and popularity in the US among non-K-Pop fans was NewJeans and they were unceremoniously tossed on the garbage heap by the dominant K-Pop company in favor of groups making “skibidi toilet music”

This “Asian Pop” Grammy announcement also comes as Korea announced grants to help small to mid-size companies compete on the export market. The idea, I think, is to give groups like RESCENE a boost when they manage to go viral online but may not have the capital to… capitalize on it outside of Korea.

It just makes me wonder, who even is K-Pop for in 2026? What is it for? Who is enjoying this? What are they enjoying? Streams and sales are a battlefield; the stan culture is beyond toxic; and the focus is not on creating enjoyable content.

What on Earth is Grammy rewarding? Money? Stan armys?

I’m happy to be proven wrong, if Grammy nominations aren’t just a Hybe/Export K-Pop giveaway and include “integrated” Asian pop aka idol music from groups like M!LK or Fruits Zipper from Japan. Is this an award for reskinned mainstream pop meant as a sop to American stan armys? Is it an award for Hybe groups that can’t win anything else? Or should we let Americans experience the “integrated” content for themselves, pure and uncut!

We have a different perspective on idols living overseas but whenever I did visit Japan during Arashi’s heyday, their advertisements were always plastered everywhere. And by advertisements I don’t mean advertisements for the group, I mean brands using the group or the individual members as brand ambassadors. The list of Arashi’s advertising campaigns listed on Oricon has almost 500 items dating back to 2000 and that doesn’t even include solo endorsements.

(Arashi’s Matsumoto Jun and the great Miwa Akihiro in a 2019 commercial for chocolates.)

I was Jun-baited all the way back during the Hana Yori Dango (花より団子) years and followed along with Arashi both more and less closely all they way up until their hiatus in 2020. My favorite Arashi variety show was Mago Mago Arashi (まごまご嵐) which ran from 2005-2007 and featured the members (then in their early 20s) tagging along with elderly Japanese for a day and acting as surrogate grandchildren. It was sweet and very heart-warming.

Later on, both the members and their image would get a lot more polished but in those early days, Arashi could be quite raw and you saw real emotions break through the surface on Mago Mago. A series of episodes where Arashi are coached in rowing by a retired grandpa stand out for that. We see the members struggle and struggle and finally learn to work together as they prepare for a boat race.

Himitsu No Arashi-Chan! (ひみつの嵐ちゃん！), which ran from 2008 to 2013, was another favorite of mine—specially the “Mannequin Five” (マネキンファイブ) segments where the members would get dressed up and have their outfits voted on. Many fandom memes like Sho’s infamous “double parka” were born from Mannequin Five.

Over the years, as the members of Arashi became more in demand, their schedules became more crowded, and the group sort of faded to the background. Each of the members has had a very successful run in both television (drama and variety) and in film. Matsumoto Jun (who Jun-baited thousands and thousands of us in Hana Yori Dango) has become an accomplished actor and I finally had the chance to see him live on stage in London in 2024 and was blown away by his performance. Ninomiya Kazunari has long been known for his acting from Oscar-nominated Letters from Iwo Jima and just starred in Exit 8 which was screened at Cannes. Sakurai Sho became a newscaster and even interviewed Mikhai Gorbachev (!). Aiba Masaki has been beloved on variety television for literally decades now since he began playing with animals on Tensai! Shimura Dōbutsuen (天才!志村どうぶつ園) in 2004—and I believe the show is still running with Aiba under a different title since the passing of Shimura Ken in 2020. And Ohno Satoshi, a multi-talented man and wonderful artist, has now finally retired from show business.

Arashi were never extremely musical nor were they marketed as “self-produced idols.” They didn’t even pretend to write their own material (as some idol acts do these days) but they were very innovative with their concepts and, especially, their stage performances. They weren’t the best looking idols, let alone the best singers or dancers. But what they did have was a) charisma b) likability c) ambition and d) will power to see things through. Even before their popularity grew enough to start playing in massive domes beginning in about 2008, they were putting on innovative stage performances like Matsumoto Jun’s delightful 2007 stage for “YabaiーYabaiーYabai” (from Time) that features the idol using wirework to push past the limits of the stage, dancing in mid-air!

Arashi pioneered the use of the bluetooth enabled lightsticks to make the audience a part of the show. They also pioneered the use of those giant clear moving stages for dome concerts that have become standard for idol acts playing in Japan.

There are so many stages I could recount; so many favorites. The one on Music Station where they get blasted with cherry blossom petals stands out in my memory!

As an overseas fan, my feelings about Arashi are going to be different than those of someone on the ground in Japan. We were always locked out of irl participation. We never really had any way to get tickets to concerts or live events—although there were some loopholes if you were savvy enough and before crackdowns on foreigners buying tickets really took off. But I do know from listening to fans over the years that there was a sense, at a certain point beginning in the late 2000s and early 2010s—maybe even from 2010 onward, that Arashi almost grew too fast all at once. That they were in reach and then… they weren’t. You could get tickets and then you couldn’t. They were doing lots of group content and then they weren’t. Suddenly Arashi went from the friendly neighborhood guys to Arashi: National Idols who were now teeny-tiny on stage and that’s even if you could get a ticket to some back bench at Kokuritsu.

My impression is that Arashi did their best to mitigate that feeling among fans but when there is a massive influx of new fans coming in, big enough to swamp the existing fandom, it’s impossible not to alienate at least some of your old fandom.

After they hit it big, Arashi did yearly albums with an accompanying tour from 2010 through 2017. With the exception of Untitled, their 2017 release, these are some of the finest bubblegum boy group albums you will ever hear with some of the most innovative tour stages to accompany them. It was Arashi’s Imperial Phase and they took full advantage of it.

Do I enjoy the sounds of light funky disco? Yes. Yes, I do.

What about Showa-throwback faux-Spanish songs? Yes. Absolutely.

City pop? GIVE IT TO ME DIRECT AND UNCUT!

But by the time Untitled rolled around in 2017, it felt to me, personally, just my opinion, that their hearts weren’t really in it anymore. (I mean, the theme is untitled and unfinished? There’s really nothing left to say at that point.) The hiatus announcement in 2019 was both a shock and not a shock. Ohno—who has now officially retired from show business—in particular, just seemed tired.

Considering these guys have been working nonstop in the public eye since they were teenagers, a break and a real private life are both well deserved.

Nobody can ever usurp their place. Arashi were once-in-a-lifetime idols and I wish all the members well in their idol retirement.

Foreigners Want To Attend Concerts for J-Pop Artists and Can’t Because 1) They Can’t Get Tickets in Japan and 2) Concerts Held Overseas Are Full of Japanese Fans.

Honestly, yes, and yes. Not for every artist, obviously, and I’ve been welcomed as a clear foreigner at many J-Pop concerts but I’ve also encountered both situations and it sucks. There is no real solution for foreign fans unless you move to Japan, learn Japanese, and get a permanent Japanese address and accompanying ID. There used to be some wiggle room where staff would turn a blind eye when you had paper tickets sold on secondhand sites but now everything is digital. Measures taken to prevent scalpers from reselling tickets at massive markups also inadvertently block the small number of foreigners who want to attend these shows.

A small pool of tickets could be set aside for people with foreign addresses but I know that when this has been tried before, some Japanese fans complained—loudly.

Unless companies decide it’s worth irritating a number of outspoken domestic fans to accommodate an unknown number of foreign fans traveling from overseas, then we’re just out of luck.

And those of us attempting to see a domestically popular Japanese act overseas will also be dealing with Japanese fans but at least we’re on our home turf and can legally purchase tickets to the event.

The New York Times Best Songwriters List

I didn’t particularly agree with the list but it did what it was supposed to, which was generate a bunch of discussion (and clicks). So Mission Accomplished?

The NYT music section has joined outlets like Rolling Stone and Billboard in providing good publicity for acts that the majors are pushing. Take everything with a big grain of salt. It doesn’t mean the artists they are pushing are bad but it also doesn’t mean they are necessarily good. Always use your own ears to decide if you like something or not.

If the American Music Awards happened and absolutely nobody cares, did the American Music Awards actually happen?

This is one that’s been rattling around in my head for a while. BTS/K-Pop had a heavy presence at the AMAs this year; is that really what Americans are listening to?

I know elementary school aged kids listen to Katseye and the KPDH soundtrack, so those would both be a lock for the Kids Choice Awards, but are the majority of Americans listening to “Pinky Up” as they wash dishes or commute or fold laundry? I’m going to say… No.

Stans love to throw around Spotify metrics but Spotify is not the dominant way that Americans consume audio content. There are about 55 million paid Spotify subscribers in America, a country of about 350 million people. Sure, there are people with free accounts and listening to stuff on YouTube and Apple Music but a lot of people still listen to the regular old ad-supported radio everyday—93% of all American adults according to Nielsen—and the biggest share of that audience (minus the people listening to talk radio) is listening to adult contemporary and country music. We’re talking Ella Langley and Alex Warren and throw in some Morgan Wallen and Teddy Swims (who did appear so that’s at least one for the AMA).

So, why then did the AMAs feature BTS?

In my opinion, what has happened over the past 8-9 years is that the American music industry, specifically the pop sector, has stagnated and lost audience share and attempted to bring in K-Pop to boost their numbers with young (but are they young?) people. And by doing that they did get a dedicated cohort of new K-Pop fans from around the world who follow these outdated industry events like the AMAs, the Grammys, etc., along with Billboard metrics, as if they’re tracking the cure for cancer. The size of that audience interested in K-Pop is only a small subsection of the mainstream music audience but they are very loud online and make all sorts of online metrics go up.

One of the trends that has been on-going is the growth of catalog music aka old music aka more people in general are tuning into Michael Jackson than are listening to new music. And that’s not good. Much like the IP-farming that has decimated the audience for movies and television coming out of Hollywood, you can only milk these old properties for so long before the audience loses interest and when the old properties are artists who aren’t even with us any more, what is the end point? An industry of hologram acts that travel around putting on “Beatles” concerts and “Michael Jackson” concerts? It certainly feels that we’re trending that way.

But like Hollywood’s IP farming, audiences will move on if they aren’t getting what they want. It’s one reason I started listening to more Asian music to begin with a few decades ago.

Enter BTS.

As I’ve said in previous posts, I think what happened with BTS post-2017 and the current Hallyu Wave is that BTS was seen as an easy replacement for a boy band market that had been left hungry after the dissolution (“hiatus”) of One Direction. This initial BTS crossover audience was similar to (if not comprising of the exact same individuals in) the 1D audience aka traditional teenage boy band fans as well as the smaller cohort of older women who have long been a part of boy band fandoms.

BTS’s music of this era also began the turn from the classic sound of cutting edge K-Pop trend chasing to catering to the tastes of these new fans migrating from 1D. BTS’s company studied this new audience and quickly pivoted to including elements of genres like Hillsong, which spoke to a growing audience who vibed with the positive “Love Yourself” messaging (echoing what Harry Styles had done with “Treat People With Kindness” messaging). My Brazilian guest from episode 48 recorded in 2022, even spoke to the pull that this sound and message had specifically with Evangelical Christians…which, to give their company credit, was a brand new audience for K-Pop (even if it did alienate existing fans).

The pandemic artificially extended BTS’s boy band lifecycle but—and this is just what I’ve observed—those teenage fans have now more or less fallen away and the main audience for BTS is women over 40… which is the exact age demographic who fell for and rioted over Bae Yong Joon in Japan in the first Hallyu Wave 25 years ago. In my opinion, you can’t understand either the original Hallyu Wave or the current Hallyu Wave driven by BTS without understanding that the primary audience for this material is older women.

The success of Winter Sonata in Japan was fueled by older women enjoying a nostalgic romance that reminded them of their youth; the success of BTS in America (again, in my opinion) has been fueled by older women re-fighting the cultural battles of their youth on an empty battlefield and claiming victory. What do I mean by that? I mean things like a sweeping victory at the AMAs in 2026 when nobody is watching and nobody cares. Diatribes against critics of “Fan Girls” as if fan girls are an oppressed class who can’t have their behavior critiqued and not one of the primary drivers of pop culture in the Current Era (see also: Heated Rivalry).

In other words, in my opinion, BTS have essentially become a nostalgia act for an audience trending at least a decade older than them. The NKOTB audience today is also the BTS audience, which is why NKOTB were also playing the AMAs. That is the small sliver of the American audience who cares about things like the AMAs. The big difference between the two acts is that NKOTB comes from an earlier era when singers actually did need to be able to sing and entertainers were expected to entertain.

Judging from concert reports from BTS fans (and people fan-adjacent who I’m friendly with), NKOTB probably don’t need to bother because the Meet-and-Greet Concert Era is here. To quote from Monia’s excellent post:

Overall, they do a good enough job of contextualizing the issue. But at one point, Lindsay asks what the value of a concert is, because, “I can pay a bunch of money to be really far away from you in a room or I can follow your Instagram stories,” suggesting that social media has replaced the concert experience. But it also suggests the concert experience was never really about live music in the first place, as while describing pre-social media concerts, Lindsay says they were “a chance to be in the same room as an artist and feel like you’re closer with them.”

Well then.

Rolling in the Hallyu Moms, doubling down on emptying wallets for Meet-and-Greet concerts, and going all in on IP-farming nostalgia acts may keep things chugging along and making the right people money for now. We’ll see if it’s sustainable.

No, K-Pop did not come directly from Motown.

I’ve loved Motown since I was a kid and listening to a drug store cassette of Motown hits on my walkman. And the Motown legend is truly impressive. Berry Gordy with $800 borrowed from family and a vision of assembly-line hits that could cross over to mainstream (white) radio to make money. He had a crack team of songwriters (Holland-Dozier-Holland), a phenomenal in-house band, and a stable of talented young performers.

But the Motown story is not the K-Pop story.

“K-Pop” as we know it today comes from a few different cultural influences.

1. Johnny Kitagawa and “Johnny’s & Associates” (now STARTO).

This one is huge and is obvious if you have even a passing familiarity with 1980s Japanese pop culture.

Here is one of the earliest K-Pop boy groups, Sobangcha, in 1988:

And Johnny’s & Associates group Shonentai with their 1986 hit “Diamond Eyes”:

Even if you track the origins of modern K-Pop only back as far as Lee Soo Man’s SM Entertainment and H.O.T., in my opinion (in which I am not alone) the group was pretty obviously modeled after Johnny’s & Associates flagship group SMAP.

You can also trace this influence pretty directly for a couple of other foundational SM groups:

V6 -> Shinhwa

Arashi -> SHINee (these two groups also shared a significant overlap in global fandom in the late 2000s and early 2010s with comparisons between Ohno/Onew, etc. etc. being very common around sites like LiveJournal)

2. Club Moonlight and the Korean-American diaspora based in Los Angeles

This is one I’ve spent a lot of time on. In my opinion, the primary vector for the introduction of the hip-hop sound into contemporary K-Pop is the small cluster of Korean-American returnees from Los Angeles (and their fellow travelers, like Perry) who injected their taste in hip-hop into YG Entertainment, which led pretty directly to the career of guys like the (half of an EGOT-winning) Teddy Park from 1TYM.

Club Moonlight was another important element here as a gathering place where these early K-Pop artists met and mingled with Black soldiers posted to Seoul with the American military. (You can read a bit more on that scene here.) It’s important to note that Seo Taiji, whom many post-BTS K-Pop stans claim as the father of K-Pop, was not a part of this early hip-hop scene in Seoul and only came to it later via Yang Hyun-Suk.

Later on the hip-hop influence from the Berklee guys like Psy and Cho PD would also play a role but neither of them were on the ground idol guys. They both entered later. (You can listen to that story here.)

3. Maurice Starr and Lou Pearlman

Maurice Starr was the boy band impresario who took first New Edition and then their white counterparts New Kids on the Block to fame… while (allegedly, reportedly) pocketing the fortune.

Lou Pearlman did the same with Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, O-Town, LFO, etc. etc.

The training model that Lee Soo Man eventually emerged with borrowed from both of these guys, along with elements of the idol trainee model from Japan.

If we take that H.O.T. was positioned as the Korean SMAP, then TVXQ a few years later was positioned as the Korean *NSYNC.

Here they are doing *NSYNC’s a capella arrangement of “O Holy Night” at debut in 2003:

One could (and people did at the time) make the argument that both Maurice and Lou were trying to capture that Motown magic—or more specifically, that Berry Gordy Midas Touch.

So, in a very roundabout way, if we take that Lou Pearlman was trying to be the “Berry Gordy of teen pop” then some elements of Motown did make their way into K-Pop today.

But that is not the argument being made on stan twitter.

4. Korean Government Soft Power initiatives.

This is one that the stans don’t like to acknowledge but it’s there and absolutely affects the type of and quality of (musical and other) product being released, supported, and (globally) promoted. Berry Gordy very much did not have the support of the Federal Government (and may have had other, less savory, alleged, financial ties.)

The TL;DR is that it’s extremely reductive to claim a direct through line from Motown to today’s K-Pop. While there are definitely elements of Motown artists and training that were transmitted down—especially from Michael Jackson, who remains a massive inspiration to artists like Taemin—K-Pop evolved from a number of disparate sources and has become its own very unique musical ecosystem.

(Link to Audio)

Episode 36 explores the idea of a “boy band” and takes a look back at where the form originated and what it looks like today. I also try to recapture some music history that has been scrubbed from the narrative that has become common consensus. The Sex Pistols best selling song was the post-Rotten “Friggin’ in the Riggin”; the most popular band in the world in the mid-1970s was the Bay City Rollers; and the three biggest sellers of the British Invasion in America were the Beatles, the Dave Clark Five, and Herman’s Hermits. All of them were boy bands…

Tracks played are:

1. “Pop” by *NSYNC

2. “Do Your Thing” by *NSYNC

3. “Summer Girls” by LFO

4. “I Feel Fine” by The Beatles, recorded live at Shea Stadium August 15, 1965

5. “Apple Scruffs” by George Harrison

6. “Catch Us If You Can” by the Dave Clark Five

7. “A Hard Day’s Night” by the Beatles

8. “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and the Comets

9. “Pretty Ballerina” by the Lefte Banke

10. “Tomorrow Never Knows” by the Beatles

11. “Dandy” by Herman’s Hermits

12. “(Theme from) The Monkees” by the Monkees

13. “Help, I’m a Rock” by Frank Zappa

14. “49 Reasons” by Crosby, Stills, and Nash

15. “Listen to the Band” by the Monkees

16. “For Pete’s Sake” by the Monkees

17. “Ditty Diego (War Chant)” by the Monkees

18. “Porpoise Song” by the Monkees

19. “I Want You Back” by the Jackson 5

20. “One Bad Apple” by the Osmonds

21. “Fools Paradise” by the Sylvers

22. “Break Your Promise” by the Delfonics

23. “Stop the Love” by the Jackson Five

24. “Down by the Lazy River” by the Osmonds

25. “Bye Bye Baby” by the Bay City Rollers

26. “Puppet on a String” by Sandie Shaw

27. “Remember (Sha La La La)” by the Bay City Rollers

28. “Bay City Rollers We Love You”by the Tartan Horde (Nick Lowe)

29. “Saturday Night” by the Bay City Rollers

30. “Blitzkrieg Bop” by the Ramones

31. “Steppin’ Stone” by the Monkees

32. “Steppin’ Stone” by the Sex Pistols, performed live at the Chelmsford Prison on September 17, 1976

33. “Pretty Vacant” by the Sex Pistols

34. “Friggin’ in the Riggin’” by the Sex Pistols

35. “Public Image” by Public Image Ltd

36. “Girls on Film” by Duran Duran

37. “Is There Something I Should Know?” by Duran Duran

38. “Voulez Vous” by Menudo

39. “Sera Por Que Te Amo” by Los Chicos (please click through to see the Greatest Boy Band Video Of All Time)

40. “Ronnie, Bobby, Ricky, Mike, Ralph and Johnny (Word to the Mutha)!” by Bell Biv Devoe

41. “Candy Girl” by New Edition

42. “Cool It Now” by New Edition

43. “Step by Step” by the New Kids on the Block

44. “I Think We’re Alone Now” by Tiffany

45. “Looking for a New Love” by Jodi Watley

46. “You’ve Got It (the Right Stuff)” by the New Kids On the Block

47. “The White Stuff” by “Weird Al” Yankovic

48. “If You Go Away” by the New Kids on the Block, recorded live on February 5, 1992

49. “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)” by the Backstreet Boys

50. “We’ve Got It Goin’ On” by the Backstreet Boys

51. “Wannabe” by the Spice Girls

52. “I Want You Back” by *NSYNC

53. “Freak on a Leash” by Korn

54. “I Want It That Way” by the Backstreet Boys

55. “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” by the Backstreet Boys (released May 17, 2018 and 20+ years later BSB is still killing it! Check out the video!)

56. “All the Small Things” by Blink 182

57. “This Ain’t A Scene, it’s an Arms Race” by Fall Out Boy

58. “Year 3000 (It’s About Time)” by the Jonas Brothers

59. “Live While We’re Young” by One Direction

60. “I Want It That Way” by the Backstreet Boys, socially distanced 2020 pandemic version

    ---

Welcome to Filmi Girl’s Idol Cast. Hit it!

Our opening song today was NSYNC’s “Pop” taken from their PopOdyessy tour DVD recorded live on tour during the summer of 2001. If you haven’t listened to NSYNC since you were in middle school (or if you’ve never listened to them) take a moment to pause here and go buy their fourth and final album Celebrity, released July 21, 2001, and listen to it. I’ll wait.

The album is a pop masterpiece. I vividly remember when it came out and not because I was a teenybopper pasting pictures of Joey Fatone in my locker. In 2001, I was in the middle of my audio engineering degree and my audio nerd friends and I were geeking out over how well crafted it was. Celebrity was produced by well known “electronica” artist BT and songs like the album cut “Do Your Thing” sparkled like jewels, each individual sound slotted perfectly into place. I mean, BT was the guy known for time correcting rain… perfection was the baseline! And that precision sound combined with the very human voices and passions of the five NSYNC members led to an album of the highest quality pop. Truly a masterpiece of the era.

Notice I didn’t say the album was a boy band masterpiece, although NSYNC are considered a boy band, and that’s because in today’s episode I wanted to dive a little deeper into Boy Band studies and expand a bit on the post I wrote a few weeks ago that attempted to untangle the differences between western-style “boy bands” and Asian idol groups and why there is such confusion when it comes to classifying and contextualizing these groups in general and BTS in particular. In this episode I’ll attempt to shine a light on the boy band construct and help separate the hysteria from the music, good, bad, and crushingly mediocre.

To kick off the episode, let’s start with basic definitions. What is a boy band? Here’s my definition: if the band members marketed in such a way that their first names appear with an exclamation point on the cover of magazines like Tiger Beat and teen girls are encouraged to paste pictures of Paul (exclamation point) or Les (exclamation point) in their school notebooks and hang pin-ups of Johnny (exclamation point) or Simon (exclamation point) in their lockers, then congratulations, you’re a boy band. To be a boy band is to participate in the teen girl economy, hit at the right time with a generation of young teen girls and reap the benefits for at least 2-3 years, no matter the actual quality of the music. From Beatlemania to Bandom, it’s simply a fact that teen girls love 1) cute guys, 2) cute guys who are friends, and 3) cute guys who are friends who also play music together. And honestly, who can blame them.

I emphasize the exclamation point names because despite the attempts of copious boy band svengalis, boy band members are not plug and play. The charms of each individual member of a boy band are extremely important. If your group doesn’t have a Joey (exclamation point) or a Davy (exclamation point) then it will be destined for the scrap heap. Try and try and try as they might, there’s a reason that the rotating member concept pioneered by Menudo svengali Edgardo Diaz never truly caught on. Girls don’t want any old pretty face hanging on their bedroom wall, they want Davy Jones’s specific pretty face and woe be upon any boy band manager who doesn’t get this.

And speaking of svengalis, let me just take a moment right here to state up front that most of the boy band managers I’ll be mentioning in this episode have had allegations of sexual abuse, financial mismanagement, and many other things leveled against them. These are serious crimes and I want to make sure that listeners know that while this episode will not be dwelling on these charges, I am very aware of them. If you’d like more information, the articles, the tell-all memoirs, and in some cases even the court documents are available and make for some truly harrowing reading.

Another thing to keep in mind through all of this is that many of the “boys” in these bands came from very modest upbringings and worked their asses off to earn their places on stage. Country boy Kevin Richardson had been working two jobs to support himself, including, infamously, playing Aladdin at Disney World, when he joined the Backstreet Boys. Mike Nesmith had shown up at the LA casting call for the Monkees fresh from Texas with little but his guitar and his attitude to his name. The boys in the New Kids and the Bay City Rollers, were from blue collar, working class families. Many of these boys were thrust into high pressure situations (financial and otherwise) completely outside of their (or their parents’) experience.

Additionally, many of them were also very young when they started out. Joey McIntyre was 12 when he started with NKOTB. Michael Jackson younger than that when his father was taking him and his brothers to play four shows a night in Chicago. While you were worried about whether or not you’d pass 8th grade English, these boys had major financial stakes and sometimes even their families wellbeing resting on whether or not they could master a piece of choreography or learn to mime playing the drums convincingly. These are pieces of the puzzle that are often lost when discussing these bands, so I wanted to flag them up front.

Boy bands and their fans have been unfairly maligned since the dawn of the genre. Critics turned off by the hysterical fans or unable to understand the appeal of like a really cute guy singing a song to you dismiss anything with even the slightest whiff of “boy band” about it as garbage music.

In order to counteract this critical disdain, in recent years there has been an attempt to rehabilitate the reputation of the much maligned “boy band”. The prevailing counterargument is one part poptimism, one part 3rd Wave feminism, and one part PR flack flattering fans that actually teen girls have excellent taste in music and didn’t you know that rocktivist critical darlings the Beatles were a boy band? Please like and subscribe!

Personally, I think both takes are wrong.

One of my favorite anecdotes I came across in researching for this episode was when the Monkees got Jimi Hendrix to open for them on a nationwide stadium tour. Whatever you think of “dad rock”, Jimi Hendrix was an incredible guitarist and performer--which is why the Monkees invited him to tour with them. But when Hendrix played “Foxy Lady” in front of the hordes of Monkees fans, they just shouted back “Foxy Davy”.

Obviously, just because teen girls like a band doesn’t mean the band (or music) is bad but the teen girls who flock en masse to boy bands are not doing so because of the music. That’s an important distinction to make. To fully appreciate a boy band means being able to put yourself in the hormone-soaked shoes of a 15-year old girl who is feeling a lot of really heavy Capital F feelings which require a safe outlet. It means giving yourself over fully to Dionysus and drinking deep of the erotic cocktail provided by these handsome young men, their tight trousers, and their hip thrusting choreography.

In the classic 1987 book Re-Making Love written by Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs, the authors revisit Beatlemania and try to give voice to the young fans and the romantic appeal of a male idol. For young women in that restrictive pre-Free Love era, a real world romance carried with it a heavy element of danger, of navigating strict social conventions around purity, of being trapped into marriage and motherhood before you were ready. When you were in love with a male idol, all of that fell away. As the authors explain it: quote “The star could be loved noninstrumentally, for his own sake, and with complete abandon. To publicly advertise this hopeless love was to protest the calculated, pragmatic sexual repression of teenage life.” And as a bonus: quote “There was the more immediate satisfaction of knowing, subconsciously, that the Beatles were who they were because girls like oneself had made them that. And the louder you screamed, the less likely anyone would forget the power of the fans. When the screams drowned out the music, as they invariably did, then it was the fans, and not the band, who were the show.”

Love and power, the fundamental ingredients of the erotic cocktail served up by boy bands.

Obviously as times have changed, the forces that teen girls are rebelling against have changed but I believe that Ehrenreich et. al. hit the nail on the head with the underlying diagnosis. These are boys we love with complete abandon and our screams are both a celebration of that love and the weapon we wield to control them.

Here is the thesis I want to put across: while many all male singing-dancing music groups can be considered boy bands, it’s not the act of singing and dancing that makes them boy bands. Singing and dancing makes them pop groups. It’s the marketing and the way fans interact with them that makes them boy bands. That love with complete abandonment.

When you’re inside the bubble, it’s impossible to objectively judge the quality of the art being produced because the quality doesn’t matter to the fans in the moment. It doesn’t matter if it sucks, it doesn’t matter if they’re making groundbreaking pop masterpieces--what matters is that right here, right now, young fans feel that the music is meaningful to them personally. And that is something which cannot be captured in an objective music review.

To quote K-punk himself, Mark Fisher, in a post from 2004 discussing the then-current drought in pop music, “A year or so down the track, when the gleam of success and publicity and shiny contemporaneity has left the records, when Time performs a reverse alchemy, transforming commercial dominance into unsaleable carboot sale fodder, that is when the error of our ways is revealed.”

To go back to my example at the top of the episode, NSYNC were a boy band, yes, but they were also an excellent pop group who were constantly pushing the boundaries of what was possible in bubblegum and taking their fans with them. A song like “Bye Bye Bye” remains a classic pop song not just because of middle aged nostalgia but because it was a well crafted song with catchy visuals and NSYNC nailed the emotionally charged performance. NSYNC were both a boy band and an excellent pop group.

The Beatles film, A Hard Days Night has stood the test of time as a comedic masterpiece and also a huge part of its appeal is how cute and funny the Beatles were in 1964. The Beatles were a foundational rock group and many of their screaming female fans could not have cared less what they were playing. It’s when the dust clears and the teen girls move onto college that we find out who will be discarded in carboot sales… or (to throw it back to episode 24) who ends up in the Sugar Ray Section of the used CD store.

So, let’s start with the Beatles and the 1964 British Invasion. Despite the retroactive rewriting of the British Invasion to highlight critical darlings like the Kinks and the Rolling Stones, the three biggest sellers of the British Invasion in America were the Beatles, Herman’s Hermits, and the Dave Clark Five. All three were boy bands.

The Beatles are now widely regarded as the “first boy band” and for good reason. The previous generations of teens had dreamboat solo stars like Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra but there were four Beatles, which meant you could pick your favorite and debate the pros and cons of marrying each one with the girls in your first period class. Trust me. Having been a teen Beatles fanatic (albeit 35 years or so after the initial wave of Beatlemania) I have an intimate understanding of the group’s appeal. John Lennon, the snarky one with hidden emotional depths, Paul McCartney, the cute romantic one, George Harrison, quiet and earnest the dark horse choice for girls who were a little offbeat, my fave, natch, and then loveable Ringo, for girls who couldn’t resist an underdog.

Here’s the bare bones recap of the group’s history for the uninitiated. The Beatles were a cheeky skiffle band-turned filthy hot R&B bar band from Liverpool who moved to London and were cleaned up and re-packaged into a cheerful guitar group for wholesome mainstream teen consumption. They became popular in their native England in the early 60s and then in 1964 rode a wave of shrieking teen hysteria to America and beyond. By 1966, exhausted and increasingly aware of their own exploitation by the industry, they exited the teen dream and retreated to the studio, started their own record label, bickered over their creative direction, made some true masterpieces of 60s rock, passive-aggressively bickered some more, and then broke up.

It was a combination of market forces, timing, and the Beatles own chemistry that sparked their boy band boom. Rock’n’roll hysteria had been bubbling under for a few years, with Bill Haley and his comets sparking teen riots in the late 1950s with the rebellious sounds of “Rock Around the Clock.” Add in the skyrocketing market of cheap 45 rpm singles perfect for teenagers with limited pocket money, a boom in teen-oriented rock radio, and a nation looking for a cheerful distraction in the wake of the assassination of President Kennedy and the groundwork was perfectly laid for the cheeky, super cute, super exotic moptops from the UK to conquer America--and from there, the globe. Their irreverent and humorous responses to dumb questions from the media were breathlessly transcribed. Their long hair and suits were copied and parodied from coast to coast. TV shows of the era feature plenty of outraged or simply baffled adults in the face of shaggy haired groups called things like “The Bugs” singing unintelligible lyrics while girls screamed wildly.

What’s remarkable about the Beatles is that their real impact on popular music happened despite the fact that they were a boy band, not because of it. The Beatles (with producer George Martin) helped usher in one of my favorite eras in pop music in the mid to late 1960s, the blending of high octane rock with classical music, the pioneering use of the new multi-track recorders which allowed for a crisper and cleaner soundscape that simply hadn’t been possible when Phil Spector was working on his wall of pop soundscapes a few years earlier. Bands used to record essentially “live” in the studio but the Beatles pioneered and popularized recording techniques that really broadened the idea of what was possible.

I want to emphasize this point because I think it gets lost when well-meaning critics attempt to claw back the Beatles as just another boy band. If you look at the teen magazines of the mid-60s when the Beatles were at peak boy band, it’s immediately clear that the Beatles were only one of a horde of popular boy bands. The two other top sellers Herman’s Hermits and the “DC5” in particular gave the Beatles real competition for teen girls’ hearts. The Beatles “love tragedies” and “1001 facts you didn’t know” migrated from the front covers of 16 and Dig and into the sober classic rock history section of the book store because the Beatles deliberately broke from their teenybopper image. They took a gamble with the groundbreaking album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and it worked. Their artistic impact would live on far beyond “boy band,” even if it was the “boy band” adoration that originally made them superstars. Meanwhile if you want to know Herman’s Hermits love secrets, then you have to read the December 1965 issue of 16 where they remain buried alongside “50 Flipped Out Pix”.

That’s not to say that Herman’s Hermits and the DC5 didn’t have some killer bops because they did but fairly or not, both groups remain consigned to the boy band garbage heap, written out of the British Invasion, and erased from popular memory.

As the Beatles were attempting to shed the vestiges of their teenybopper image, over in Hollywood, California, the first attempt to manufacture a “boy band” was getting underway. The idea was to create an American, TV-based version of the Beatles-style screwball comedy that had won girls hearts in A Hard Day’s Night. It would be targeted at kids who were too young for the scent of marijuana wafting off the Beatles new songs. This new band would advertise the songs through their show and advertise the show through their song. Plus all there was all of that delicious boy band merchandising just waiting. This was going to be a groundbreaking exercise in cross-promotional marketing.

The casting call went out: “”Madness!! Auditions. Folk & Roll musicians-singers for acting roles in new TV series. Running parts for 4 insane boys, age 17 - 21. Want spirited Ben Frank’s-types. Have courage to work. Must come down for interview.”

A reference long forgotten, Ben Frank’s was a diner on Sunset Strip known for being a hip hangout spot for the kind of young people who needed a cup of coffee and a groovy place to like have a rap session at 2 am. Legend has it that Buffalo Springfield formed in the parking lot of Ben Frank’s. Frank Zappa used to hang out there.

Of the four members of this new manufactured American Beatles, two were show business ringers--Davy and Mickey, who would end up as the main vocalists--and two were “Ben Frank’s” types--Pete and Mike, both actual musicians.

Davy Jones, the pint sized English dreamboat, had been nominated for a Tony Award for his performance as the Artful Dodger in Oliver, another now forgotten product of the British Invasion, and actually made his debut on the Ed Sullivan show on the very same episode as the Beatles did in February 1964. Davy was charming, with a big toothy smile and a soft brown proto-Cassidy shag haircut. The twinkle in his eye could and did slay all women within a 50 foot radius.

Mickey Dolenz was another former child star, but of television rather than stage. He had warm eyes, a goofy sense of humor, and an expressive, soulful singing voice that added just the right amount of teen angst to proto-punk songs like “I’m Not Your Steppin’ Stone”. Mickey radiated “approachable friend of your older brother” energy and it’s no surprise that he and Davy were the most popular members while the show was on air.

Peter Tork, an intellectually minded banjo player well known around the Greenwich Village folk scene was recommended to the Monkees producers after his friend Stephen Stills--yes, that Stephen Stills--was turned down for not being cute enough for television. “We’re looking for somebody like you but cuter,” they told him. He gave them Peter’s name. And Peter Tork was cute. He had shaggy strawberry blond hair and a winning boy-next-door smile. His role on the Monkees was as the dopey and perpetually stoned but good hearted goofball. The Shaggy to Mike Nesmith’s Fred, if you will. Peter was the Monkee whose stage persona was probably the furthest away from his actual personality.

And then there was Mike Nesmith, tall, dark, handsome, with a honey sweet Texan drawl and perpetually seen wearing a woolen hat. Mike was both the brains of the fictional Monkees on the television show and the loudest agitator for creative freedom behind-the-scenes. While most of the group’s material was written by a stable of extremely talented songwriters--Neil Diamond, Boyce & Hart, Goffin & King--from the beginning Mike was always pitching songs and, to his credit, was responsible for quite a few b-sides and album tracks as well as writing for other quote unquote serious groups like the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Mike was the thinking-girl’s favorite Monkee.

Unlike the Beatles who spent A Hard Day’s Night trying to escape from their hordes of fans, the fictional Monkees were underdogs, beach bums always hunting for their big break. The Monkees played Sweet 16 parties and auditioned for big wig producers on television, in real life, they were selling out arenas.

Given the nickname of the “Prefab Four”--a take on the Beatles nickname as the “Fab Four”--the Monkees would never escape their manufactured roots. Despite their great personal charms as entertainers, their top quality discography, and the fact that they could actually play their own instruments, thank you very much, the Monkees would be ridiculed and unfairly made a punchline for decades after the television show went off the air. The reasons for this are the same as those which faced boy bands to follow--critics simply don’t understand the talent it takes to be the Monkees.

The Monkees used the same session musicians, the same songwriters, the same producers as groups who have been retroactively canonized as rock legends like the Byrds, but the Monkees were never able to shake that manufactured boy band gloss. And not for lack of trying. The Prefab Four demanded and received artistic freedom after the initial burst of success but the alchemy that held together the Ben Franks side with the old fashioned show biz razzle dazzle began to fray. The sharp teen pop of their early albums gave way to the meta-meanderings of Head and the Monkees project eventually collapsed in on itself. Much to the relief of all the members, I’m sure.

Rather than attempting to re-claim the Monkees as a serious rock band, they should be remembered for being incredible entertainers and makers of influential pop art. The television show remains extremely watchable and holds up far, far better than recent attempts at the genre, such as Nickelodeon’s Big Time Rush. The Monkees are cute and they have great comic timing, a knack for slapstick, and always deliver at least one killer jam per episode. They were completely authentic in their inauthenticity, putting a hell of a lot of heart and soul into a band whose primary function was to sell sugary cereal to kids.

Unlike later and much campier television bands that followed in their immediate wake, the Monkees were not only aware of their status as a “fake band” but actively tried to reclaim it. That their pivot to pop art ended up fizzling out doesn’t mean that it was a worthless experiment. We wouldn’t remember the Monkees today if they actually were the puppets on a string they’ve been unfairly stereotyped as all these years. It’s no mistake that one Mr. David Jones (no relation to Davy) namechecked the Monkees when creating his own “plastic band”-- David Bowie and the Spiders From Mars.

As the 60s turned to the 1970s, the next big thing in boy bands was a mini boom in family bands led by, yes, the Jackson 5. The five Jackson brothers burst into both the pop charts and teen girls’ hearts with a string of number one hits produced by the Motown team known simply as the Corporation. Starting with “I Want You Back”, the Jackson 5’s R&B bubblegum pop with the signature funky walking bass line was like nothing white America had heard before and launched a sea of imitators, including the Osmonds, a white family band from Utah, who got their big break with a Jackson 5 cast off in late 1970.

Other popular family groups included the DeFranco Family from Canada and the Finger 5 aka the Tamamoto family from Okinawa and the Sylvers, who were the Jackson 5’s main rivals in Black teen magazines.

The Jackson 5 were brothers Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon, and Michael with littlest brother Randy added a few years later. The J5 began life as an R&B vocal group in the vein of a group like the Delfonics.

Motown boss Berry Gordy’s big innovation in the 1960s was to simplify and straighten out the R&B beat to sell to quote young america unquote aka white america. Motown vocal groups like the Temptations and the Supremes held their own against white vocal groups like the mamas and papas and the Association on the mainstream hit parade. When Berry Gordy took his template into the 1970s, he turned the J5 into the first and only black boy band to have really won the hearts of uh “young American” teen girls.

What set the J5 apart from previous Motown acts is that they were packaged and sold like a boy band, on their image and personalities, rather than as a pop group. Like the Monkees, the J5 were a “band” who used session musicians. I will never forget my bass teacher telling me about the day he found out Jermaine wasn’t actually playing those sick bass riffs--that would be Wilton Felder of the Jazz Crusaders--it was like finding out Santa Claus wasn’t real. The J5 story was mythologized. The members--like the Beatles and Monkees before them--played versions of themselves in the public eye and further blurring the line between reality and fantasy, there was even a Jackson 5 cartoon fictionalizing their home life. (And as an aside, the cartoon by Rankin and Bass, followed boy band tradition by trading in some extremely horny-in-plain-sight double entendres. Michael has a pet snake, which is pink. Uh-huh.)

The J5 songs and performances were top notch but the boys themselves (except for charming youngest brother Randy who joined the group later) were stiff and awkward on camera and it became harder and harder to uphold the chaste, wholesome brotherly love boy band edifice as 1) the oldest boys married and had kids and 2) Michael was being groomed to go solo. By the time the group was venturing into early disco in 1974-75, while they were still an active pop group, their boy band days were pretty much over. Tiger Beat doesn’t feature DILFS.

Still, the legacy of the J5 lives on today. Their lite R&B sound as well as the choreographed dancing popularized by the Jackson brothers became the standard template for pop vocal groups moving into the disco era and beyond. But one thing I found interesting watching old interviews with the Jackson 5 on Soul Train is that not only were the J5 fighting against the same boy band stereotypes as a group like the Monkees but they were also called to account for their popularity with uh young america. This passive-aggressive 1973 question from a Soul Train audience member is very telling:

Was there a bigger insult to one’s street cred than being compared to the white bread, never tasted skim milk, rosy cheeked Osmonds? It’s a reminder that while the J5 have been rescued from the bubblegum pop scrapheap by critics, the reality at the time was much more complicated.

Also, the Osmonds kind of rule.

As the sun sets on the J5 photo spreads in the pages of Tigerbeat, a new boy band dawns. From the council flats of Edinburgh, Scotland comes… the Bay City Rollers!

Tartan Mania swept the globe like only the Beatles had before them. The gimmick was simple--combine the erotic appeal of a group of rough and tumble young men in tight trousers with the infectious pop of legendary veteran songwriters Bill Martin and Phil Coulter, the team responsible for the song that became the first UK winner of Eurovision in 1967.

The result was electric.

Like the Beatles, the BCR were an actual band before they became a boy band. The group began life as the Saxons, a popular local bar band out of Edinburgh, Scotland. They snagged themselves a cooler, American sounding name--the Bay City Rollers--and a major label record contract but the group of 20-something rockers languished in middling popularity until singer Gordon “Nobby” Clark left the band and manager Tam Paton replaced him with baby-faced 18 year old lead singer Les McKeown and bought in even younger 17 year old guitarist Stuart Wood to join brothers Alan and Derek Longmuir (bass and drums respectively) and guitarist Eric Faulkner. The result was boy band magic.

The new BCR exploded onto the UK singles charts in 1974 with “Remember (Sha la la la)”, an easy-breazy pop song written by Martin and Coulter that leaned heavy into the then ultra-trendy 50s rock nostalgia boom--a sound that now seems impossibly dated but trust me was all the rage at the time. And the lyrics are pure Eurovision camp in the best way possible, with the immortal opening line “Shimmy shammy shong” fitting very comfortably alongside Sweden’s winning 1984 entry “Diggi Loo Diggi Ley”, the Netherlands’ 1975 winning entry “Ding-a-Dong”, and the UK’s own 1969 winner “Boom Bang-a-Bang.”

Watching performances from mid-1970s BCR is like trying to make sense of a fever dream. The hysteria generated by the five tight trousered, tartan wearing, feathered haired men feels completely at odds with the midtempo bubblegum rock music they’re playing. In true boy band fashion, the songs didn’t matter to the fans--all that mattered was Erik Alan Derek, Les and Woody...

The BCR had enough drama, trauma, and in-fighting in those years when they were the most popular band in the world to fill a dozen episodes of VH1’s Behind the Music. The guys argued about everything from who received the most fan letters to who was the most talented and lead singer Les--the only Roller to actually perform on the recordings--was at the center of the raging jealousy. The bubble finally burst during a 1978 tour of Japan when Les, convinced the band was starting songs in the wrong key to fuck with him, got into a physical altercation with Woody.

The sad coda to the BCR story is that much like other boy bands who would follow in their wake, the “boys” at the center of Tartanmania were left with nothing to show for it except empty pockets. All their money vanished; they would receive no royalties. As the girls hung up their tartan jumpers and mufflers in the back of their closets and took down their BCR posters from their bedroom walls, so too would the BCR vanish from popular memory. But their legacy lives on in an unexpected way--

Legend has it that Dee Dee Ramone was inspired to write the famous “Hey Ho Let’s Go” chant that opens “Blitzkreig Bop” after hearing the Rollers mega-hit “Saturday Night.” And that’s not the only punk connection. When the kids raised on the ear wormy, super simple garage rock via the cereal box sung with youthful sass by guys like session vocalist Joey Levine and, yes, Monkee Mickey Dolenz, grew up and started their own bands, they may have been singing about doing drugs and fucking shit up but their sugary influences were never far from the surface.

Yes, that’s right. The Sex Pistols were assembled by Malcolm McLaren to be the Bay City Rollers, but, like, a counterculture version. Do you think it’s a coincidence they wore all that tartan?

McLaren himself admitted to modeling the Pistols on the Rollers in 1980 as the whole project was falling apart. Leaving aside the Eurovision-adjacent music sung by the Rollers, what McLaren was after was the enthusiasm of BCR’s young teen audiences. He wanted hordes of teens dressed not in their plaid Roller trousers from the local high street but in plaid Pistols trousers from his boutique Sex. Unfortunately for McLaren, in selecting lead singer John Lydon aka Johnny Rotten, he ended up with a talent far more like the razor sharp and combative Monkee Mike Nesmith than the starry-eyed, golden voiced Roller Les McKeown. Like Nesmith before him, Rotten led the fight for the group’s creative freedom and then later over the band’s image, as well as in absolute classic boy band fashion, suing McLaren for not paying them fairly.

The original Sex Pistols--pin ups not available in Tigerbeat but soon to be available in teenybopper music rag Smash Hits--were the aforementioned vocalist Johnny Rotten, handsome bad boy guitarist Steve Jones, drummer Paul Cook, and bassist Glen Matlock, who would eventually be swapped out for bassist Sid Vicious who could not in fact play the bass but who was sexier and fit the band much better than Matlock who Rotten claimed saw the group as a quote “camp version of the Bay City Rollers” (fair enough, mate) and who unforgivabely had been heard sticking up for the least cool Beatle, Paul McCartney.

After gaining a cult following by word of mouth, the unruly boys snagged a major label contract with EMI in 1976 and then broke through into the public consciousness after the national tabloids spent days gleefully making hay of an incident where the punk rockers swore on television.

Is there anything so appealing to young teens as a band that annoys the fuck out of every authority figure? And it didn’t hurt that Johnny Rotten wrote excellent tunes.

While the Sex Pistols narrative has been retroactively massaged to end with Rotten leaving the band in 1978, the reality is that the Sex Pistols highest selling single by far was the post-Rotten double A-side “Something Else”/“Friggin in the Riggin” which sold almost 400,000 copies in the UK. In particular, the now incredibly dated sounding “Friggin in the Riggin”, a cover of a traditional pub song, was a schoolyard smash with it’s cheekily naughty nautical lyrics. A lesson to the young ones listening that big sales do not indicate quality, nor do they guarantee a lasting legacy.

The Sex Pistols story I’m telling ends with the meta-boyband film: The Great Rock and Roll Swindle, a mockumentary masterminded by McLaren, casting himself as the great punk rock impressario, swindling fans of their hard earned cash in exchange for a piece of plastic containing--as director Julien Temple later put it quote “Two hit singles and a mountain of crud”. The Great Rock and Roll Swindle was an attempt to make explicit and celebrate the cynical Bay City Rollers roots at the heart of the Sex Pistols project. It didn’t work. John Lydon’s song “Public Image” was the way McLaren’s role in the Sex Pistols would be remembered.

“Public image.

Two sides to every story

Somebody had to stop me

I’m not the same as when I began

I will not be treated as property.”

While the film (and McLaren) ultimately failed at claiming ownership of the Pistol’s legacy, the punk Rollers and their safety pinned tartan trousers left a lasting legacy on pop music as New Wave began its rise in the charts on the backs of those tween fans, soon appearing side-by-side with cartoon-in-real-life boy band Kiss in yes, Tiger Beat but the biggest boy band of them all of this early 80s rock era was Duran Duran.

Duran Duran are the last of the great rock boy bands. Although boy bands that were actual rock bands would live on in zombie form for the next few decades, none would ever reach the giddy, glossy image-over-substance heights of Duran Duran. As John Taylor put it in a 1986 issue of Tiger Beat, “Originally Dura Duran was to have been a cross between the Sex Pistols and Chic but we somehow got overproduced and packaged.” Yes… “somehow.” Duran Duran were the ultimate 80s MTV pretty boy boy band. Truly the Monkees television show walked so that the Pistols Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle could run… and Duran Duran’s music videos could take you back to the hotel to fuck.

Their videos were groundbreaking, mini-films, packed full of exotic locations, action, adventure, beautiful women, and, of course, the extremely handsome members of Duran Duran themselves with their feathered hair, winning smiles, and shoulder pads as wide as the ocean. They were built to fuel the day dreams of romantic teen girls who longed to be swept off their feet and out of their boring suburban lives. And it didn’t hurt that the songs were absolute bops. Johnny Rotten attitude layered on top of Bernard Edwards bass lines. “Girls on Film,” “Rio,” “Hungry Like a Wolf,” these are songs that feel as vital and fresh today as they did when they were released 40 years ago.

In early interviews, Duran Duran come across as regular lads, like your older brother’s super cool friends. The dangerous sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll bad boy image of Duran Duran was just an image in the videos until… it was eventually revealed to be not just an image. And the group took an open ended break in 1984, appearing increasingly out of place and too old for the teen magazines that had nobody to replace them with. That is until five white boys from Boston danced their way into our collective teen hearts.

I will take a brief detour here to mention Menudo, the Puerto Rican boy band, now remembered for two things 1) Ricky Martin and 2) Edgardo Diaz’s rotating member concept in which boys were cast aside when they got too old. Menudo are an interesting case study because they are probably the closest antecedent to BTS in American boy band history.

Menudo were formed in Puerto Rico in 1977 by Edgardo Diaz as sort of an all male version of La Pandilla, the Spanish kids group he had been managing. Menudo became successful first in Puerto Rico and then through Spanish-speaking regions. They even inspired creation of a rival group, the far superior Los Chicos. And as an aside to the aside, let me tell you that the video of Los Chicos singing “SERA POR QUE TE AMO” on long running El Show del Mediodía on Televisión Dominicana in 1983 is one of the greatest pieces of boy band performance ever captured on film. Future Latin superstar Chayanne is unflappable as security tries and fails to hold back the screaming girls. Every few seconds one escapes from the pack to fling herself at him before she’s manhandled off set. He never misses a beat.

But back to Menudo. The early 1980s saw crooner Julio Iglesias have some major crossover success with mainstream (aka white) America and record companies immediately hopped on the bandwagon hoping to uncover the next Julio. This is the era that is responsible for wonderful and genuine crossover Latin pop acts like Gloria Estefan and the Miami Sound Machine as well as rock acts Los Lobos. Menudo, on the other hand… well, it wasn’t for lack of trying. They were snapped up by RCA Records who pushed them hard. There were no other boy bands--especially for girls too young for Duran Duran and the other New Wave acts--so Menudo made it into magazines like Tiger Beat and even had a short run television show on ABC. But the campy song-and-dance routines along with the costumes that could have come from the sets of the Brady Bunch Variety Hour just weren’t doing it for mainstream America’s tween girls and Menudo quickly faded from popular memory until Ricky Martin taught us how to shake our bon-bons in the 1999.

Black American teens and tweens, on the other hand, were happily pinning up pages from Right On magazine to their bedroom walls thanks to Boston’s own Ronnie, Bobby, Ricky, Mike, Ralph, and Johnny otherwise known as “New Edition”.

Named because they were the “New Edition” of the Jackson Five, the young teens caught the eye of writer-producer-all time music legend Maurice “the General” Starr at a Boston talent show he hosted and he helped launch the group to stardom with their first single “Candy Girl”, released February 24, 1983. What Maurice Starr did with New Edition and “Candy Girl” was bring “kids music” back to the radio. Teens and tweens are a reliable pop-music loving demographic and Maurice Starr clearly sensed that there was a big opening in the market. The single and the album of the same name were hits, getting to number one on the American Hot Black Singles chart and not doing too shabbily on mainstream pop charts in America and the UK.

“Candy Girl” is essentially a vintage Jackson 5 song updated for 1983. Instead of Jazz Crusader Wilton Felder on bass, it was a (then) cutting edge electric bass synth. And there was even a little rap thrown in for good measure. You can clearly see the influence of the J5 in New Edition’s performance style. They performed high-energy, coordinated dance moves from behind a row of mic stands, inspired not only by the J5 but also great 70s Soul Train regulars like the O’Jays. The biggest difference between NE and the J5 is that NE didn’t even bother to pretend to play instruments. There was no need. NE was all killer no filler.

The group parted ways with Starr after this first album and tour--the possibly apocryphal story is that they received a grand total of $1.87 for their troubles at which point they said bye bye bye to The General. Starr may have had the golden touch but New Edition would do just fine without him. 1984’s post-Starr “Cool It Now” is one of their most fondly remembered songs… at least by me--and the members would continue delivering hits for years to come even after kicking charismatic bad boy Bobby Brown out of the group. Subunit Bell Biv and DeVoe went quadruple platinum with 1990’s Poison. Michael Bivins helped launch Boys II Men. Bobby Brown was… Bobby Brown.

But New Edition played on Soul Train, not on the Tonight Show. They were breathlessly promoted and covered by Right On, not Tiger Beat. So with his New Edition experience in hand, Maurice Starr decided he was going to try again. And this time he would be aiming for Berry Gordy’s “young America”. In a lot of ways, the General’s new group could be considered the true heirs of the J5, popularizing Black music and dance for white audiences.

Let me set the scene for you before we hear from the five kids from Dorchester. There wasn’t much in the way of pop music for kids in the early-mid 1980s. Music loving kids--like myself--listened to New Wave bands and colorful singers like Cindi Lauper and, of course, Michael Jackson. But sometimes the themes of these songs were too adult or there was too much controversy around them for parents to allow kids to listen. We wanted something cool but also like… not full of things we were too young for like sex and drugs. This was an untapped and growing market and absolutely exploded in 1987 when 15-year old Tiffany went on a tour of suburban shopping malls, doing three 20 minute sets a day to growing audiences of tween fans.

In the wake of Tiffany came Debbie Gibson, a young Kylie Minogue, family band the Jets, Weird Al, and an absolute boom for television’s KIDS Incorporated. MTV debuted Club MTV based on the old American Bandstand for older teens and Disney revived the Mickey Mouse Club for the younger set. And keep an eye on these new Mouseketeers because you’ll be hearing from them later: Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Justin Timberlake, and JC Chasez.

But rewinding back to 1984, New Edition kicks Maurice Starr to the curb and he begins assembling his new group in 1985. Donnie Wahlberg, the dangerous bad boy, Danny Wood, lead dancer, Jonathan Knight, the gentle older brother, Jordan Knight, the be-rat-tailed, sparkling eyed, falsetto, and the baby of the group, the secret weapon, the absolutely adorable blond, blue-eyed Joey McIntyre.

A little background knowledge of Boston is useful here. Because of the school bussing laws intended to help reduce segregation in the city’s schools the original four members of the group that would become New Kids on the Block, Donnie, Danny and brothers Jordan and Jonathan, were all bussed from their Irish Catholic neighborhood to a school in the Black neighborhood. They liked and consumed the music of their peers in school, which happened to be groups like New Edition instead of like… Twisted Sister. I think it’s important to emphasize this because the New Kids are often called the Osmonds to New Edition’s Jackson 5 and I don’t think that’s fair. It’s more like… the New Kids were the Jackson 5 to New Edition’s the Sylvers. And I mean no disrespect to the Osmonds when I say they weren’t really a blue-eyed soul act at heart. They were entertainers, professionals who could do whatever genre you threw at them. The New Kids really did grow up listening to R&B.

Anyways, after Starr casts the final New Kid, his “Michael Jackson”, the then 12 year old Joey, the group rehearses and hustles and releases their first album in 1986, aimed directly at the New Edition market. The group’s first single “Be My Girl” is a charming tween slow jam ballad that managed to get to number 90 on the Hot Black Singles chart. But second single “Stop It Girl”, a close cousin to the retro Jackson 5 sound of “Candy Girl” only much lamer and featuring a super lame dad rock guitar solo, vanished. As did the album. The New Kids needed a new sound.

For their second album, they would have a more contemporary, cooler sound, perfectly capturing the rock-flavored R&B that was big at the time and with a super cool title to match: Hangin’ Tough. To put it in context, this was the era of Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know”, Prince’s “Kiss”, Jody Watley’s “Looking for a new love”. And as luck would have it, the album’s first single, the devastatingly sugar sweet “Please Don’t Go Girl,” released April 16, 1988, maintaining just a hint of the retro Jackson 5 sound for flavor, crossed over to pop radio. That summer the New Kids supported Tiffany on another Mall Tour. By the fall, when the second single from the album came out, the infectious “You’ve got the (Right Stuff)”, the Kids were a genuine phenomenon. The suburban mall audiences had spoken.

The New Kids would ride their wave of boy band popularity for a few years but despite being a talented blue eyed soul act at heart, they were ultimately unable to pivot away from their bubblegum image and disbanded in 1994 amid declining sales and member Jon leaving to deal with his anxiety disorder. Part of the problem was that the New Kids were never really taken seriously as a pop act. Critics were extremely disdainful of what they saw as garbage teenybopper music, refusing to look past the marketing and screaming tween fans to the solid performance group underneath the hype. They were also seen as deeply inauthentic because they were white men doing R&B. Weird Al captured the mood of the era perfectly with his parody of the Right Stuff titled, “The White Stuff”. Trust me, early 90s middle school kids thought this was an epic burn.

The mood around pop music had curdled after the Milli Vanilli lip syncing scandal played out in 1990 when, after months of rumors, Milli Vanilli finally admitted that they did not sing their own songs, like at all. The floodgates opened on a sea of opportunistic class action lawsuits alleging consumer fraud, especially after Cook County Illinois awarded damages to Milli Vanilli fans. The New Kids on the Block, already figures of ridicule among “serious” music fans, had a target on their backs and the hammer dropped in early 1992, when they were publicly accused not only of lip syncing in performance but of not even providing their own vocals on their recordings.

While it’s certainly possible--if not extremely likely--that there were some additional vocals recorded by studio ringers to help sweeten and fill out the New Kids’ harmonies, there’s nothing remotely unusual or deceptive about the practice. And I don’t think there’s any doubt that the main vocal tracks were all done by the members themselves.

But the seeds of doubt had been planted. The New Kids--then on tour in Australia--rushed back to Los Angeles to make an emergency appearance on the Arsenio Hall show to do damage control, singing ballad “If you go away” completely live with absolutely no vocal support tracks but it was too late. Like the Monkees before them, the New Kids were made scapegoats for using the same industry best practices as their peers. The New Kids were no more or less “fake” than any other vocal act but they couldn’t escape the smear of inauthenticity.

In any case, the tide was turning. Bands were about to come back in a big way. Grunge was bubbling under in America as was the movement about to become Britpop in the UK and the singing-and-dancing of the New Kids was quickly becoming deeply unfashionable. It would be years before the style returned to pop music and when it did, it would be in a completely different form. American teen magazines had tried to make the UK’s Take That--assembled in 1990 as Manchester’s answer to NKOTB--a thing but they made about as little impression in America as Menudo had done a decade earlier. While one could make the argument for Nirvana as a boy band (I can testify to seeing Kurt Cobain’s posters smouldering at me from the inside of quite a few girls’ lockers) I’m going to take this narrative in a different direction for the moment.

While the New Kids were imploding in 1992, inspired by the huge amounts of money that the New Kids were pulling in, former Florida blimp magnate and eventual convict Lou Pearlman decided to put together his own boy band based out of Orlando. How hard could it be? He’d asked himself. Pearlman combined local teens Howie Dorough and AJ McLean with a young kid named Nick Carter (who had turned down a role on the New Mickey Mouse Club) and added the ambitious and hardworking Kevin Richardson, a country boy from Kentucky, and his golden voiced cousin Brian Littrell. Pearlman put the new group under the guidance of former New Kids tour manager Johnny Wright and gave them a name. They would be called the Backstreet Boys.

Perhaps sensing that the dour American grunge-and-gansta rap era would not last forever, a forward thinking executive at Vibe Records encouraged the label to sign the act in 1994 and sent them to Sweden to work with up and coming pop songwriter-producer by the name of Denniz Pop and his young apprentice, Max Martin.

Something to keep in mind is that while American lawyers were making bank on class action lawsuits against fun pop music, over in Europe the good times had never stopped. UK boy bands Take That (as mentioned earlier, Manchester’s NKOTB) and East 17 (London’s Take That) were still topping charts across Europe in the early 1990s, not to mention pop groups like Sweden’s Rednex and, yes, Ace of Base, who had had a blockbuster hit with Denniz Pop. So it made sense to send for Jive to send this promising young vocal group overseas where the market was primed and ready for a group of charming and handsome young guys who could sing.

The BSB’s first single, co-written by Denniz Pop, Max Martin, and Herbie Crichlow, was the supremely catchy “We’ve Got It Going On”, and it set the the classic Backstreet sound. Eurobeat disco overlaid with their pitch perfect gospel harmonies. As soon as you hear that ascending “naaaaaa na na na na na na” you know it’s Backstreet. And with the new popularization of wireless microphones for live sound, Backstreet were able to ditch the mic stands of previous generations and really utilize the whole stage, bringing in all sorts of new formation styles and dance moves to their performances. Their sound and performance style were like nothing American or European audiences had seen before.

With their good looks, even better vocals, and exciting performances, BSB quickly won over audiences in Germany, Austria, Switzerland… then France, who passed the mania along to Montreal and before too long teens across the border in New York were calling up the radio and asking who this new group was.

And then a stroke of good luck. Just as Tiffany’s 1987 Mall Tour led the way for NKOTB, a UK girl group called the Spice Girls brought pop music back to America in 1997 with the earwormy bubblegum pop megahit “Wannabe.” The song unleashed a flood of teen pop in its wake including BSB, teenybopper brother band Hanson, and the white BoysIIMen, 98 Degrees. Almost overnight magazines like Tiger Beat kicked cover boy staples like Jonathan Taylor Thomas and Mark Paul Gosselar off their covers in favor of this brand new crop of hunks.

And the hits didn’t stop there. MTV launched teen pop video countdown show TRL, hosted by Carson Daly, in 1998 and was soon counting down hits from multiple girls groups including Destiny’s Child, rising star Britney Spears, as well as a brand new boy band named NSYNC.

As good as the Backstreet Boys are--and they are good--it’s NSYNC that like Duran Duran before them, represent the high artistic water mark of the genre. They were pop visionaries but the world they crafted wasn’t one of exotic foreign adventure like Duran Duran, it was the meta-fantasy world of celebrity itself.

NSYNC was formed in 1995 thanks to the hustle of acapella enthusiast Chris Kirkpatrick, who had just missed the cut for the Backstreet Boys. He brought in the ambitious, handsome, and talented ex-Mousketeers Justin Timberlake and JC Chasez followed by Chris’s affable buddy Joey Fatone--working as the Wolf Man at Universal Studios, and then the last piece of the puzzle was the baby Lance Bass, a quiet doe-eyed show choir kid from small town Mississippi with a bad haircut and a surprisingly deep bass voice. Much like the Backstreet Boys, NSYNC was put through “boyband bootcamp” in Orlando and then shipped over to Europe to work with Denniz Pop.

The group released a pair of very Backstreet-esque singles in Europe in 1996 and 1997 to great success--“I Want You Back” and “Tearin’ Up My Heart”--and then released them again in America in the wake of the teen pop wave that the Spice Girls had unleashed. They were marketed as Backstreet Jr. for all intents and purposes and that wasn’t a mistake. Lou Pearlman had infamously supported the creation of NSYNC primarily to provide a rival group for the Backstreet Boys. The idea was partially that, as manager Johnny Wright explained in a 1998 interview with Rolling Stone magazine, “...we were going to turn Orlando into the next Motown, but we were going to call it Snowtown – because we weren’t doing it with R&B acts, we were doing it with pop acts.” And partially, in a time honored tactic, to help generate fan engagement. And it worked. A look at the chart of number ones on MTV’s Total Request Live shows a furious battle between the two groups with the number one slot flipping back and forth from BSB to NSYNC from TRL’s beginning in September 1998 until it was broken by Korn’s “Freak On A Leash” on February 25, 1999.

And the animosity between the two groups was quite real at the time for various reasons. BSB felt like NSYNC was trying to usurp their position, snatching away opportunities such as the 1998 Disney Channel special concert which helped break NSYNC to American audiences. The special had originally been offered to the Backstreet Boys who had been forced to decline but it still stung to see NSYNC walking away with the glory.

It was once the two groups started speaking to each other that all of the pieces fell into place and both groups realized that--yes, the classic boy band complaint--neither group was getting paid their fair share of the money coming in. NSYNC, in one of the balliest boy band music business moves before or since, managed to break their contract with Lou Pearlman, sign to a different label as a group with their name, and released a real meta-pop masterpiece album, No Strings Attached. BSB were not as lucky legally, although they did manage to put out a classic album that year, Millennium, which features one of the best known and most beloved pop songs in the entire world: “I Want It That Way”, a song that still ranks as one of the most popular English karaoke songs in Japan to this day.

But Millennium was still very much in the Max Martin/Swedish pop wheelhouse. When No Strings Attached was released on March 21, 2000, NSYNC was going forward with their own sound. Something much more American sounding. Although the two lead singles, “Bye Bye Bye” and “It’s Gonna Be Me,” were both from the Max Martin team, the rest was an interesting and fun mix of styles. Member JC Chasez contributed whimsical pop soundscapes like NSYNC member favorite “Digital Getdown” and this podcaster’s personal favorite “Space Cowboy (Yippie Yi Yay)” featuring the late Left Eye Lopez, as well as the album’s title track, “No Strings Attached,” whose puppet theme and marionette video were inspired by Chris Kirkpatrick’s love of campy 70s show the Thunderbirds. The album also included an old Teddy Riley track, a smooth R&B song written by the group’s touring band, as well as a straight acapella number. No Strings Attached was a blockbuster album and it marks the pinnacle of both the teen pop and boy band craze.

While the Backstreet Boys popularity faded as the new millennium began, the BSB project has continued in various forms, including a pre-pandemic Vegas residency that I very much wish I could have attended, and they are still putting out great new material--although not, perhaps, targeted at the American market. NSYNC released one more excellent album--Celebrity, which I mentioned at the top of the episode--before shattering when Justin Timberlake launched himself into solo stardom with a pair of banger of an album called Justified.

Lou Pearlman, on the other hand, discovered that you couldn’t just put a bunch of cute guys together and make them into a successful band. In 2000, in a now very painful-to-watch reality show called Making the Band, Pearlman tried to pull what McLaren did with The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle, making himself into the star. The band that resulted from the show, O-Town, was popular with tweens at the time, much as the Pistol’s “Friggin in the Riggin” had been, but… the creative spark was missing. There was no “there” there. The era of the American singing-and-dancing boy band was fading. And this time it was gone for good.

As the new millennium marched on, a new genre was getting mixed in with the bubblegum teen pop and, uh, Korn. Pop Punk.

One of the early vanguard leading the Pop Punk wave was Blink-182. Their videos rarely won against those of NYSNC and the Backstreet Boys on TRL in the late 90s but as vocal groups fell out of fashion it would be Blink-182 and pop punk groups like Sum 41, Good Charlotte, and Simple Plan who replaced them on both TRL and in the pages of teen magazines like Tiger Beat.

Looking back, the writing was on the wall as early as the 1999 video for Blink-182’s song “All the Small Things”, which made a nasty mockery of vocal groups like the Backstreet Boys and NSYNC. Much as the New Kids on the Block has faced charges of inauthenticity and fakeness, despite being a great blue-eyed soul group, Blink-182 and pop punk in general moved to position themselves as “authentic” against the then current crop of pop vocal groups. This is despite the fact that Blink-182 appeared in the same teen magazines like Bop and Tiger Beat as these other boy bands and their posters hung in middle school girls’ lockers just like these other boy bands. Despite the fact that singing-and-dancing on a professional level takes arguably at least as much talent and skill as playing rock instruments and that members of these pop vocal groups contributed to the songwriting and production of their tours, it wasn’t enough to save the Snowtown groups from the label of plastic and fake. And so the boy band torch was passed along to a sea of floppy haired emo boys with piercings and tattoos who made a game of dry humping each other on stage. Yes, that’s right, I’m talking about the mid-2000s phenomenon known as Bandslash also known as Bandom.

This is the part of the story where the boy band narrative shifts away from the music, art, and stagecraft and into fandom. Primarily this is because post-Backstreet and NSYNC, the post-2000 boy bands made very little impression on mainstream culture and existed mainly in closed fandom ecosystems which were moving increasingly online or accessible only through cable television. There were teen music properties with some mainstream footprint during these years--specifically High School Musical and Glee, as well as the soundtracks to the Twilight series of films--but we’re talking about boy bands so just take it as read that I am aware of Zach Efron and his killer smile.

But back to Bandom. The genre was focused around three pop punk cum emo groups My Chemical Romance, Panic! at the Disco, and Fall Out Boy and represents the beginning of a big shift of boy band fans away from traditional media such as teen magazines, television, and radio and towards online communities where they mingled with older fans and fan communities from other genres on platforms like LiveJournal and Tumblr. I strongly suspect the boom in RPF or real person fanfiction, much of it explicit and written about homosexual male pairings, that rose from the fandoms around properties like Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and the television show Supernatural helped feed the communities that would become Bandom. These fans were encouraged in their pursuits by both what was called “stage gay” at the time, that is band members doing things like dry humping each other on stage, and fourth wall breaking interactions from the Bandom members themselves who would comment on the stories. Fans wrote their own narratives onto these bands, deepening the connection they felt with every story about Frerard banging.

While the Bandom groups certainly sold a lot of CDs and had a presence in traditional platforms like teen magazines, especially Bandom breakout star Pete Wentz, bass player for Fall Out Boy, ex-husband to lip syncing emo teen popper Ashlee Simpson, their impact on popular culture and on popular music was minimal. I was an active consumer of pop culture and pop music during this era and while writing this I actually had to look up their best selling songs and not a single one triggered any kind of memory for me, musical or otherwise. Bandom’s biggest and lasting impact would be on boy band fandoms.

Meanwhile over on the Disney Channel, the overtly Christian brother band the Jonas Brothers were selling purity rings and squeaky clean pop punk to a generation of young girls too young or not online enough for emo. It’s a concept that can only make sense against the specific American culture war of the mid-2000s. There was a reality show, concert films, cross-promotions with super popular tween favorites like Taylor Swift and Hannah Montanna, and even a sitcom. Oh, and albums, I guess. But the main product of the Jonas Brothers wasn’t music or even teen mania, much like the Bandom groups, the main product was the guys and their story. Kevin, Joe, and Nick were packaged and sold by parents former pastor and Christian musician Kevin Sr. and wife Denise, as aggressively normal boys next door. No flashy costumes or dance moves, no stage gay antics or theatrics. No delightful candy colored bubblegum earworms and no above all, no weird stuff.

This worked for a while but as the Jonas Brothers grew older and attempted to pivot and grow their brand into a more adult one with (extreme secondhand embarrassment) reality series Married to Jonas, across the pond in the UK, boy band mania the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the heady days of the BSB/NSYNC rivalry was about to bloom.

Like the Jonas Brothers, One Direction were another television boy band. They were formed in 2010 by music industry veteran Simon Cowell out of a handful of contestants on his talent show X-Factor. Niall Horan, Zayn Malik, Liam Payne, Harry Styles, and Louis Tomlinson. The boys were cute, charming, had nice voices, and, most importantly, had enough chemistry as a group to catch the attention of Great Britain’s boy band fans. Despite not winning the competition, they had something more important, momentum. They signed with Simon Cowell’s record label as a group and dove head first onto the boy band treadmill and began putting out a string of bland but vaguely catchy Top 40 hits. Not to damn with faint praise but while 1D would never release anything as masterful as “I Want It That Way” or “Bye Bye Bye”, at least songs like “What makes You Beautiful” or “Live While We’re Young” have choruses you can remember and sing along to.

But much like their country-mates the Bay City Rollers, the music and performances are by far and away the least interesting thing about One Direction. Let it be known that One Direction do not dance. Nor do they wear glitzy stage costumes. The group represents the unholy merger of the reality show and “let’s not be too weird” tween mania of the Jonas Brothers with the older fans’ stage gay and RPF of Bandom and, the cherry on top of this fandom sundae: internet voting culture. Directioners of all ages weren’t just pinning posters to their bedroom wall or reblogging gifs on tumblr, they were online whipping votes, combing videos for clues to the “real” relationship between group members Louis and Harry, writing RPF relationship manifestos and 40 chapter OT5 orgy fanfics, and also reblogging gifs and putting up posters.

Where Bandom was a closed ecosystem with fan activities more or less contained to fan spaces, One Direction tore down the walls and invited everyone to take part in previously niche fan subculture activities like shipping. The group’s biggest legacy is hidden in the ship tags on the fan fic site of your choice: Harry/Louis, Zayn/Liam, Niall/Harry, Niall/Zayn, Liam/Louis... It’s one thing to have a laugh about a few thousand girls reading an erotic fanfic about you fucking your bandmate on a dedicated LiveJournal community. It’s quite another to have millions and millions of views on innumerable YouTube videos titled things like “Things that don’t make sense if Larry’s not real part 5” and “Top Ten Heart Breaking Larry Moments”.

1D went on hiatus at the end of 2015--and honestly, I don’t blame them. Judging from the footage in the 2013 tour documentary This Is Us, the members seem extremely unhappy and only minimally engaged with the music and performances. While all of the members have solo careers, the fan-created legacy lives on. One Direction made the news in 2019 because teen drama Euphoria aired an explicit sex scene between members Louis and Harry that was framed as a fantasy of one of the characters on the show. Louis took to twitter to say, “I can categorically say that I was not contacted nor did I approve it.”

And that leads to the final stop on this whirlwind boy band tour: BTS. The seven member unit from South Korea who crossed over from K-pop idol group subculture to become a boy band, with all the baggage that implies. You can listen to my history of K-pop idol groups if you’re interested in the details but the short version is K-pop is an export product from Korea and while there had been previous unsuccessful attempts to target Berry Gordy’s “Young America” in previous years--K-pop girl group Wonder Girls had opened for the Jonas Brothers on tour, for example--what had developed in their wake was a large K-pop subculture, somewhat similar to the anime subculture or even something like the English Premiere League subculture in America. News or trends would occasionally crossover to mainstream media but for the most part, it operated as a closed ecosystem.

What happened in 2016-2017 is that fans pushed BTS out of the K-pop subculture bubble and into the mainstream entertainment spotlight. Despite already being in their 20s, the group was repackaged as a full fledged boy band and their sound pivoted away from the BigBang-esque hiphop tinged K-pop they had been making towards the tween market-oriented One Direction-esque bland but professional American Top 40, culminating last year with their biggest song to date, the song they will probably be remembered for, “Dynamite”, which was written by a pair of songwriters best known for their work with, yes, the Jonas Brothers.

As with One Direction, the fandom is by far the most interesting part of BTS in their form as an American boy band. It combines everything from One Direction, especially the prominence of the older fan demographic, but with the online voting and mass streaming turned up to eleven (as I write this in early April 2021 I can still find fans fundraising thousands of dollars a week to mass purchase “Dynamite” which came out in the fall of last year), institutional support from academics and journalists who rely on the fans for engagement, and a healthy dose of online social justice activism added in.

But the clock is ticking down fast.

And on that note, we’ll close out this mega episode with the Backstreet Boys socially distanced version of “I Want It That Way,” from 2020 which is accompanied by an incredibly charming video that I highly recommend you click through and watch. Talk to you next time, bye bye bye!

My guest for this episode is writer Ella Dorn. You can find her work at Fairyland on Substack and in other places, such as the New Statesman.

We discuss the wonderful 1968 film version of The Black Lizard, which is based on a Mishima Yukio stage adaptation of a detective story by Edogawa Rampo. The short story was originally serialized in 1934 and features Edogawa’s storied detective Akechi Kogoro facing off against the slinky “Black Lizard,” a lady jewel thief and master of disguise. Mishima Yukio adapted the novel into a stage play and the first production was staged in 1962. In the stage adaptation, Mishima—with Edogawa’s blessing—wrote in a love story between the Black Lizard and Akechi.

In 1968, another theater production was staged starring Miwa Akihiro as the Black Lizard and Miwa would then go on to star in the 1968 film version, directed by Fukusaku Kinji (Battle Royale). Music for the 1968 version was by electronic music pioneer Isao Tomita.

Miwa Akihiro is a fascinating artist. He survived the bombing of Nagasaki, became a beloved singer of chanson, and then and went on to become a mainstay of Japanese entertainment for decades to follow and even making his debut Kouhaku appearance in 2012 at age 77, all while refusing to compromise on his own unconventional aesthetic.

Along with the 1968 film version, we also discuss the 1962 film version of the stage play, which was directed by Inoue Umetsugu as a musical, and starred Kyo Machiko (Rashomon) as the titular Black Lizard. Inoue was a journeyman director who ended up making all sorts of films, including some for Johnny’s & Associates talents. The music was by jazz musician Mayuzumi Toshiro.

The Black Lizard remains in popular memory and new theater productions are mounted quite often. The “Black Lizard” character—like “Death” in Japanese versions of the musical Elisabeth—may be played by male or female actors, specifically the all female Takarazuka theater troupe is known for their productions of Elisabeth. The Takarazauka theater troupe also has a version of The Black Lizard in their repertoire, a new production of which is going to be mounted this summer.

Some of the other topics discussed are:

• Ella’s piece on Katsyeye

• Pinkpanthress as a “native” K-Pop consumer

• 1960s Hong Kong film, in particular the Shaw Brothers musicals

• Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations for Oscar Wilde’s Salome

• Quentin Crisp and Divine

• 女形 (onnagata) is a term from kabuki theater (and please do check out Kokuho if you haven’t!) for men who play the female roles. And these aren’t camp men in dresses a la the Panto-dames—but men seriously playing women’s roles. The women of the all female Takarazuka theater troupe perform their opposite in the 男役 (otokoyaku). These are performance styles with long traditions in Japan. Kyo Machiko—who played the Black Lizard in the 1962 film version of the story—came up in an all female theater troupe similar to Takarazuka, which almost certainly informs her male disguise in the film.

• Ella’s piece on Paglia

• Valley of the Dolls as a visual reference for the 1968 film—I mention Sharon Tate’s babydoll nightie.

• The 1960s Edwardian throwback era in fashion

• Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters

• Gore Vidal on Mishima in the New York Review of Books (the piece is titled “Mr. Japan”) and his novel Myra Breckinridge

• Responses to Lauren Oyler’s book of essays.

• Jed Perl on Koons, one of my favorite takedowns

• “Webster’s defines…”

• The BTS fan “journalist” from the Atlantic who attempted to leverage fan work into book sales

• Stan LOONA

• The tumblr aesthetic in late 2010s K-Pop feat. Cosmic Girls, BlackPink, and VIXX

• K-Pop pulling references from the second generation feat. Yena, Hearts2Hearts, and LNGSHOT and building a internal narrative but can it work when the dominant agency wants to remove the “K” from K-Pop.

• The faux “semiotics” of K-Pop and copying vs collaging, feat. Charlie XCX’s video for 360

• K-Pop fans preventing serious critique of the genre by sending threats to anyone who attempts it.

Additional recommended viewing:

Jewel Thief (1967), the classic Bollywood thriller starring Dev Anand.

The Diamond Arm (1969), classic Soviet comedy featuring the legendary “song about rabbits.”

Charade, the classic 1963 Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant comedy-thriller

The songs played are:

1. 黒蜥蜴の唄 by Miwa Akihiro (1968)

2. 虹色の湖 by Nakamuura Akiko (1967)

3. 乙女の祈りby Mayuzumi Jun (1968）

4. 愛してヨコハマ by Carousel Maki (1968)

5. 白い蝶のサンバ by Moriyama Kayoko (1970)

6. メケ・メケby Miwa Akihiro (1957)

7. オリビアの調べ by the Four Leaves (1968)

8. 愛の果てに by the Peanuts (1968)

9. 당신의 뜻이라면 by Yang Mi-ran (1968)

10. ヨイトマケの唄 by Miwa Akihiro (1964)

BTS has managed to skate by on the knife’s edge of this cognitive dissonance for years because—despite being assigned the label of the “biggest K-Pop act” or even “the biggest band in the world” by fans and the media—most normies were not actually paying attention. They just accepted the hype at face value. But on Saturday, this facade came crashing down and the Potemkin Idols were exposed.

I’ve seen popular boy groups return from military service before but I’d never seen anything like the media hype for the BTS comeback and I was in Korea when G-Dragon was discharged from the Army. The New York Times dedicated an entire news vertical to it; a media blitz went out across the English language entertainment sphere featuring bold-faced names like Diplo, Ryan Tedder, Max Martin, Netflix, Super Bowl, Hamish Hamilton. The public was blitzed with mysterious ads asking what our love song was and were told 260,000 fans were going to flock to Gyeongbokgung in the heart of Seoul to see BTS perform in a triumphant comeback that would have them walking the kings’ path in a figurative coronation streamed globally to hundreds of millions of fans worldwide on Netflix.

(Dedicated coverage at The New York Times.)

(Use of bold faced names to generate even more hype)

(The number of 260,000 fans was heavily promoted.)

(“The King’s Path” was also used in promotions.)

It was going to be Wyld Stallions but real.

We also saw the government get involved with the president even tweeting in support of the concert and the prime minister dropping by the airport to check on all those fans (reportedly) flocking to Seoul for the concert. Freelancers working the K-Pop beat feasted on the hysteria. Here’s a Seoul-based freelancer in the Guardian in an article dated March 18, 2026, that captures the tone of coverage we were seeing:

Up to 260,000 people are expected in the area, a crowd size similar to the mass protests that filled the same square during the 2016 presidential impeachment crisis of then-president Park Geun-hye.

Some 22,000 free tickets were made available, but most attendees are expected to gather in surrounding streets without tickets, where an array of fan events will take place.

The Seoul police agency will deploy 6,500 officers, including more than 70 riot police units, on the day. Seoul city government will deploy a further 3,400 personnel, with 102 fire trucks and 803 firefighters positioned around the concert site. Subway trains will bypass stations that are close to the event.

The venue will be managed as a stadium-style operation, with 31 entry gates each fitted with walk-through metal detectors. Authorities have also banned civilian firearm withdrawals from police stations across Seoul.

Special forces units will be pre-positioned around the venue, while vehicle barriers, including iron spike strips and police buses, will secure the perimeter. Access to and rooftop use of 31 surrounding buildings will be restricted on the day.

And then the album was released.

And then the concert happened.

And then BTS slunk off quietly to New York City with a half-baked apology to Seoul from Hybe and another one from RM.

The 260,000 fans had been a fantasy; just like BTS has become a fantasy. Anybody following along live during the day of the concert would have witnessed the narrative collapsing in real time as the Seoul public realized their lives had been disrupted and tax dollars spent on an idol concert that could have and should have taken place in a stadium, just like every other idol concert, because that’s exactly what this performance was: an idol concert, and a bland one at that.

(Images from a CNN article)

There was no live band; the singing was very heavily processed if not lipsynced; and the performances themselves (from what video I saw online) were nothing out of the ordinary for an idol stage and far less charming than some of the rookie stage acts you’d see on Music Bank let alone some of the other reunion stages we’ve seen in the past few years like 2PM, Block B, or domestic powerhouses Winner. BTS had shut down the city to essentially film a plodding idol stage in front of Gyeongbokgung (which was barely visible in most images) and between 16-22k ticketed fans, 15k security, and a number of lookie-loos that fluctuated depending on which outlet you were reading and how friendly that outlet was to BTS’s parent company, Hybe. The negative reaction was swift and brutal—most notably with Hybe stock prices dropping sharply as soon as the markets opened.

Finally, the truth that my long-time readers should all know has hit the mainstream: Bang took what had originally been a perfectly fine, middle of the pack, third generation boyband à la Boys Republic, Uniq, or ToppDogg and transformed them via the media into the Heirs of Seo Taiji and the Saviors of K-Pop who Paved the Way for Korean Culture worldwide. And he accomplished this transformation using songs that were essentially the musical equivalent of the ending theme song to Trolls at best and unlistenable at worst.

Using shadow puppets, string, paint, some cardboard, and fans willing to bot stream and bulk purchase mp3s, the legacy media and tech platforms like Spotify and Netflix were more than happy to help build and support the Potemkin Idols. As long as one didn’t look too closely at the facade, it was fine. But Hybe forgot that the key part of building a Potemkin village is that you can’t actually take your shareholders on a nuts and bolts tour…because there is no there there.

The evidence that there was nothing behind the facade had been building for years. Anybody with ears could have heard the deterioration of the quality of their musical output and of their vocal skills. Despite the puffed up reviews from willing outlets like Billboard, Rolling Stone, and the NME, nobody outside the core fandom demographic really seemed to care—either in the West or in Korea—because they didn’t need to. The songs outside of one or two bubblegum kidsbop hits never escaped fandom containment despite millions of fan streams. Everything existed inside of a very large bubble.

The ironic thing is that Hybe themselves ended up bursting the bubble. If they had held a massive comeback event for BTS in a stadium, rather than expose all of Seoul to the Potemkin Idols, I don’t think people would have actually looked closely enough to see the ragged edges of the cardboard cutouts.

There have been a couple of excellent reviews of Arirang from Korean outlets that I’ll link here: from IZM and from Zenerate. Both reviews capture that feeling of cognitive dissonance between the media hype and the product. From what I’ve heard of the album, it sounds surprisingly amateurish for all the talent that they gathered to work on it. The title track is lifeless and the rap sounds a lot more like rookie Soundcloud rappers over expensive purchased beats than the triumphant return of the (alleged) Kings of K-Pop. And the vocals is so overly processed that I wouldn’t be shocked to find that large swathes of the vocals were done using AI, which—in a huge coincidence—BTS’s parent company Hybe has heavily invested in.

A cynical observer may wonder if this Seoul concert had been a Hail Mary Pass. After a year plus of lawsuits and bad press and arrests, maybe it was an attempt to prove the company was Too Big To Fail. Or maybe an attempt to overwrite in public memory the lightstick-filled protests of 2024-25, which saw hundreds of thousands of people pour into the streets of downtown Seoul and generated images like this:

Or maybe they just forgot that while one person buying 100 albums is the same as 100 people buying 1 album each on paper, it’s still only one person in Gwanghwamun Square.

TL;DR answer everyone seems to be looking for is this: BigBang popularized the use of lightsticks as cheering items for K-Pop idols. Before BigBang popularized the lightstick, idol fans in Korea used balloons.

Anyways, I’ve lightly edited and added a few things to the original text since it has been five years since I wrote it.

One of the fan traditions that has evolved in both Korean and Japanese idol culture is what’s called the penlight (ペンライト) in Japanese and lightstick (~봉 or ~bong) in Korean.

The penlight/lightstick is essentially a flashlight designed to be used by audience members to enhance the concert going experience at an idol concert. There are some big differences between the penlights and lightsticks that are specific to the traditions of Korean idols vs Japanese idols but the basic function is the same.

Conventional wisdom says that the tradition began with Saijo Hideki and his fans at the 1974 concert in Osaka Stadium and everything I’ve read and seen has backed this up. You can see his fans with their lights (what appears to be glow sticks or possibly small flashlights) in concert footage in Blow Up Hideki (1975). In response to my review of the film, one of his fans said (my own translation):

ペンライト発祥は秀樹と思い出しました

応援する為でなく

暗くて皆の顔が見えないから

見えるように懐中電灯持ってきて❗

秀樹はいつもファンと繋がろうとしてくれた

(I’m reminded of the origin of the penlight with Hideki

It wasn’t for cheering him on

Because he couldn’t see everybody’s faces in the dark

He said to bring a flashlight so he could see us

Hideki was always looking to connect with his fans.)

This sentiment from Hideki’s fan really stuck with me over the last few weeks as I saw outsiders to idol fandom dismiss penlights/lightsticks as simply expensive pieces of plastic. But to be honest I’ve seen this attitude going back for more than a few years as I saw fans of western pop start to trickle into idol concerts.

In Japan, fans adopted the concert going tradition from Hideki fans and through the 1980s and into the 1990s would bring glow sticks or similar with them to the venue and eventually, in the late 1990s, idol companies began selling official lights for use in concerts.

The adoption of member colors by idol groups in Japan—something inspired by the Super Sentai Series (more popularly known as Power Rangers in English speaking countries)—really sparked a penlight renaissance and today if you attend a concert where the members have member colors, you had better be prepared to use your penlight properly or risk ruining the mood for everyone.

My personal experience is mainly with Johnny’s & Associates concerts but each idol group will have their own traditions, which have developed and changed over time. For my favorite group, A.B.C-Z, fans are pretty equally divided among the members so at a concert you turn your penlight to the color representing your favorite (purple for Kawai Fumito in my case) for most of the time. But there will be specific times in the setlist that call for audience coordination of penlight color changes so you will often find fans practicing with their penlights outside of the venue. Typically A.B.C-Z fans will also turn their penlights to the color of the member speaking during both the opening and closing remarks as well as during the solo songs.

One of the most memorable concert experiences I’ve had was at an A.B.C-Z hall show in Nagoya during the 5 years 5 stars concert tour. Kawai had everybody in the audience turn their lights off, plunging the crowd into pitch black darkness. Then on his cue we all turned them back on, bathing us in a sea of red light. (Red for Hashimoto!) It felt like magic, standing in that venue surrounded by the warm glow of the penlights of fellow A.B.C-Z fans.

Arashi, who worked on a much bigger scale than my A.B.C-Z, pioneered the idea of using the audience and their penlights as an extension of the stage lighting with 2014’s Digitalian tour. Fans had to pair their ticket with the penlight as they entered the venue.

It’s important to note that penlights for Johnny’s idols, are tour specific rather than artist specific. The penlights for each tour are whimsically designed to match the overall artistic feel of the tour. Idol fans from other companies may use more generic penlights that can be decorated to match their own needs, similar to the Japanese fan uchiwa or handfans used to display personalized slogans.

In Korea, idol fans initially used balloons rather than lightsticks as their way to connect but the balloons eventually gave way to lights, possibly as idol culture was being absorbed from idols crossing over to Japan in the early to mid-2000s.

Se7en is technically the first Korean artist to have his own lightstick, with the numeral seven-shaped penlight being imported back over to Korea.

But the first modern K-pop lightstick, as we know them today, was BigBang’s 2007 “Bang Bong.” What distinguishes these from the Japanese penlights is that they function similarly to the K-Pop cheering item balloons rather than the fan-individualized penlights or the tour-specific penlights. The distinctive color and shape of the lights signals their loyalty to their favorite group in all situations, e.g. you can see pops of the yellow light of the distinctive Bang Bong crown as the camera pans the audience here.

And every other Kpop group swiftly adopted the artist-specific lightsticks as standard—with some charming variations like these fun TVXQ member lightsticks.

Penlights/lightsticks are more than just expensive souvenirs. They’re meant to create atmosphere and signal to the idols that their fans are here, in person, not passively consuming an entertainment product but creating something wonderful together.

It may be that we finally did get our K-Pop Slumdog Millionaire with K-Pop Demon Hunters. It may be worth looking into the astroturfing of K-Pop groups following the peak early-mid 2010s “K-Pop is trendy” era discussed below, à la Monia’s excellent post on the rise of Harry Styles.

The first Bollywood film I ever saw was Lagaan (2001). Lagaan wasn’t just an Indian film, it was a real Bollywood film with songs and an intermission and all that real Bollywood stuff. The reason that I, a white American, was able to see Lagaan (with English subtitles no less!) in my local movie theater was that it had been nominated for the Best Foreign Language film at the 2002 Oscars. Lagaan didn’t win but the nomination alone was enough to carry the film into the art house/independent film theater circuit—bringing it to people like me, who otherwise would have had no access to Bollywood film in 2002.

In Bollywood film circles, the conversation around Western success is equally if not more fraught than what currently rages on in K-Pop fan circles and it has been far more fraught for far, far longer. Aamir Khan, the star of and auteur behind Lagaan, has been asked repeatedly over the years what he should have done differently with Lagaan so that it could have won the Oscar. And Aamir—always my favorite of the “Three Khans” for a reason—said he wouldn’t have changed a thing. He did have this to say about Oscar though: “It gives a window of opportunity for your marketing. Because the film was nominated a whole lot of people in the world said, what’s this film that was nominated? Let’s watch it.”

And do you know? He was right. The real winner here is me, who got to see Lagaan in a movie theater when I otherwise wouldn’t have. Oscars, Grammys, honestly, Aamir has the right idea—who cares about a trophy? The goal is to get your art in front of people who otherwise wouldn’t have even known it existed.

Lagaan is a full, proper Bollywood film although it does have some nods to an English-speaking global audience. The way the narrative and songs work is a bit closer to linear western film than the more masala end of Bollywood (to include a song with English lyrics) but the heart and soul of the film was made with Indian audiences firmly in mind. What Aamir accomplished with Lagaan is something that hasn’t been duplicated since: he brought real Bollywood to the American film elite and demanded it be taken seriously on its own terms… made for a mass domestic Indian audience, with proper song picturizations, and at a glorious full test cricket match length.

Contrast Lagaan with the full-English language Slumdog Millionaire (2008), which won Best Picture at the Oscars, and you can easily see the difference between a proper Bollywood film and a film made by and for western audiences. Slumdog borrowed a Bollywood theme and an Indian setting but the film was made by and for outsiders. It was not domestically popular in India and had very few ties to the domestic Hindi-language film industry in Mumbai. Slumdog rehashed common themes done far, far better in films like Parinda (1989, also starring Anil Kapoor), the style of acting from the main leads was not the style of acting found in Indian film, and the pacing of the film was not what one typically finds in Indian films. When one has seen the work of directors like Vidhu Vinod Chopra, let alone films from the great Tamil auteur Bala, why would you even bother with Danny Boyle’s take on “Bollywood”?

I’ll tell you.

There’s two big reasons.

1. As an outsider, you need to make an effort to find which films are considered to be the greats, domestically, like Parinda. And 95% of the time these are not the films that are being served up to you, as an outsider, as representative of the country’s artistic output. For the most part, you’re going to be served up things that have been judged by outsiders or against some nebulous “global” (read: American middlebrow) criteria as the best of the best.

2. Once you do find what are considered the classic works, domestically, you need to make the effort to understand these works on their own terms. Engaging with art from outside your own cultural context means there will be references you don’t understand or may not even notice. Nods to historical events, current political questions, references to previous films or songs you have never heard of or references to the actors’ private lives that everyone else watching will understand intimately, like fish swimming in water while you’re floundering around in the shallow end with a snorkel. In a famous example, the opening to Farah Khan’s Om Shanti Om (2007) is just a giant parody of this scene from Rishi Kapoor’s Karz (1980). Sure, you can enjoy Om Shanti Om without knowing that but how can you truly judge the film good or bad—let alone understand it—without that cultural knowledge?

It’s far, far easier to just watch Danny Boyle serve up something vaguely Bollywood-themed done in a narrative style you understand with actors who are acting in a way you understand and call it a day. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that… but it’s not Bollywood. Even if Slumdog Millionaire had been done with the actors speaking Hindi, it wouldn’t have been “authentic” Bollywood.

I don’t think we’ve seen a K-Pop equivalent of Lagaan although BigBang’s Alive (2012) might come the closest. But I suspect we’ll continue to see attempts at a K-Pop, blockbuster Slumdog Millionaire as we move into the future. As the debate over English lyrics and “western validation” rages on in K-Pop fan circles, I’ve been thinking a lot about these two films recently and especially about Aamir Khan and his attitude towards Oscar.

Part of the problem in trying to discuss English lyrics and K-Pop is that as the target audience for K-Pop has changed over the past few decades so has the use and meaning of English lyrics.

The first generation groups of the 1990s like the mega-popular H.O.T. were singing and performing primarily for a Korean-speaking audience, both domestically and in the Korea diaspora. Not that they didn’t have American and other English-speaking fans but their primary audience was a Korean-speaking one. Listen to their peppy pop megahit “캔디” (Candy)—not a single English lyric to be found.

That changed as K-Pop began to aim, increasingly, at an export audience. The use of English language hooks made it easier for fans in places like Southeast Asia and fans in the non-Korean Asian diaspora in the West to sing along. The exception is Japan, of course, which has a large enough domestic market that acts would release material specifically for that audience but at the end of the day, “Ring-ding-dong” is a nonsense phrase in every language and all fans, globally, can sing along confident in the meaning.

When Korean idol BoA crossed over to Japan and began releasing Japanese material, her target audience was mainstream Japanese pop fans and she was accepted more or less as a J-pop singer. Watch her here in 2002 at 15 years old interacting with the hugely popular Japanese idol Domoto Koichi from the Johnny’s & Associates group Kinki Kids. There’s no English subtitles but the gist of the conversation (done entirely in Japanese) is about her make-up routine and they banter about how old they think they look. There’s absolutely nothing special about how BoA was presented that would separate her from a Japanese pop idol.

This domestic-facing presentation held true for K-pop idols in Japan through the early 2010s more or less. The target was mainstream J-pop audiences and for these K-pop acts to be accepted alongside domestic Japanese pop acts. And they succeeded. Groups like Girls Generation (少女時代), KARA, and, yes, BigBang released Japanese language versions of K-pop hit songs like “Genie” and “Fantastic Baby” that were known to broad mainstream pop audiences in Japan. They were domestic hits, despite being K-pop songs not because they were K-pop songs. There are probably as many—if not more—people who could sing a bit of “Mister” by KARA than any of the AKB48 songs released that year. And the legacy of Girl’s Generation’s leg-tastic choreography continues to loom large in Japanese pop culture. In fact, hugely popular music show Music Station just included Girls Generation’s “Genie” in a quiz on popular debut songs alongside domestic acts like Morning Musume.

It’s true that this 2010s boom of Korean idols in Japan did have the gloss and branding of the K-Pop wave in a way that BoA, a decade earlier, did not but even today there are groups like Twice or NiziU are part of the domestic Japanese idol landscape as well as existing in a separate global “K-Pop” sphere. Not all K-Pop groups manage this but they all aim to, which is why they continue to release Japanese language material.

As the nature of idol group audiences has become more and more insular (and check out my previous guest Patrick St. Michel on this), K-Pop acts have increasingly targeted their releases to that demographic in Japan, Korea, to the global “K-Pop” market, and, increasingly to the American pop fan.

So let’s move to America.

H.O.T. reached primarily (though not exclusively) Korean diaspora audiences in America. As K-Pop spread through Southeast Asia, we began to see K-Pop spreading through the broader Asian diaspora in the West. This era reached its pinnacle with Rain performing to a very excited and primarily Asian-American crowd at Madison Square Garden in New York City in 2006 as part of his Rainy Day Tour. But what makes this concert special is that you saw, really for the first time, tendrils of cross-promotion into mainstream American entertainment news. Rain wasn’t performing under the radar, he became the Biggest Star of the Rest of The World to the American entertainment media, putting K-Pop and Hallyu on the radar of the normies and locals who watched shows like The Colbert Report.

Anybody paying attention to American pop culture in the mid-late 2000s would have seen coverage of Rain in mainstream, normie entertainment outlets like Entertainment Weekly as well as mainstream news media like The New York Times.

Rain spoke English to better reach a broad American audience.

While K-Pop companies were breaking through into Japan with localized material, they were also trying the same thing in America. JYP brought Wonder Girls over with an English language, localized song aimed at a broad American pop audience. Se7en feat. Lil Kim was also targeting a broad American urban radio audience with his English-language “Girls”.

But unlike in Japan, these acts failed to break through to the mainstream domestic American pop market. I think there are a few reasons for that.

1. In the mid-late 2000s into the early 2010s, the competition in the domestic American pop market was simply too strong. This is an era of massive, nationwide pop hits that I think most people today would still be able to sing the choruses of: Black Eyed Peas, Lady Gaga, Flo Rida, Beyonce, the second era of Britney Spears, and so on.

2. The American localization just didn’t hit right. The mismatch between what JYP thought of as “American music” for the Wonder Girls didn’t quite fit with what was actually happening in American music and the result was a somewhat fusty, retro sound.

3. The economic timing was just bad for K-Pop companies and it wasn’t worth sinking resources into the mainstream American market.

But here’s the thing—the American mainstream pop marketplace was far too crowded but the American K-Pop market, which had been growing outside of the traditional diaspora spaces thanks in large part to artists like Rain, was ripe for the plucking.

The year after the Wonder Girls opened for the Jonas Brothers on the American leg of their tour, SM Entertainment hosted a massive concert bringing together all their big acts… SM Town in Los Angeles. The artists spoke English to the crowd but the songs were the same Korean language ones they sang to other global K-Pop audiences. If you look at the footage of the crowd at that first 2010 SM Town concert in Los Angeles, for the first time you really start to see a significant number of non-Asian faces and that number would only increase.

The key here is that these American K-Pop fans were now part of the global K-Pop fandom and (at least for time) had similar tastes and behaviors to other K-Pop fans in places in Malaysia or Brazil or China than they did to their individual domestic markets. They liked K-Pop because it was K-Pop and were willing to put in some extra effort to learn how to sing along in Korean because that’s the language their favorite music was in.

But, again, because awareness of K-Pop had spread outside of traditional Korean diaspora spaces, it allowed these new “K-Pop spaces” in America to function more or less like anime fandom. There would be the occasional crossover with savvy pop culture vultures but it more or less operated independently of what was happening in American pop music. And this served “K-Pop,” as an art, very well. It’s during this era that you get Missy Elliot performing with G-Dragon in a Korean-English mashup, Lady Gaga picking up Crayon Pop to open for her on her ArtRave tour, and English-language music news outlets dedicating major space to Korean language K-Pop songs.

K-Pop was cool and K-Pop was trendy. Two things that are no longer true.

Chart performance, sales, these things were (and I would argue that they remain) irrelevant to the actual influence that K-Pop had and the awareness of it among people whose tastes matter.

There would be one last ride: SuperM.

In 2019, with “Jopping,” SuperM closed the book on the era of fantastic (baby) “K-Pop” unleashed by SM Town a full decade earlier. The nonsense phrase signifying a combination of jumping and popping was a fitting swan song to an era of colorful, forward-looking, super catchy, Korean-language “K-Pop” in America.

What happened over the last few years—at least as I see it—is that as American pop music itself has become more and more of a niche music, K-Pop companies realized they were now on an increasingly equal playing field. Unlike 2009, when K-Pop acts were attempting to compete with Beyonce’s “Single Ladies,” a song that you couldn’t avoid hearing even if you lived like on top of a mountain with no electricity, the competition was now like… Harry Styles “Watermelon Sugar” which you would physically have to like tune into a Top 40 radio station to hear (without Spotify autoplay).

The bar to entry is now just far, far lower for K-Pop companies to compete in the American charts. But what’s interesting is that only some of the acts have tried their hand at localization. So while on the one hand you have K-Pop acts putting out more or less traditional K-Pop music, other acts have localized to American tastes giving us songs that were successfully localized to sound just like the rest of the truly mediocre American Top 40 pop hits of today.

This new wave of English language material is not “less authentic” because it’s in English. It’s not about the English lyrics. What is different from previous generations of K-Pop is that you have songs now competing against mainstream Top 40 songs that are written by and for American Top 40 pop audiences by the same stable of Top 40 pop songwriters that write everything else on the charts. And you get what you pay for. Even when these songs are in Korean, some (not all!) of these songs still sound like the ending theme to like Trollz 2: This Time With Even Less Effort or whatever.

For the groups that haven’t gone the American Top 40 Trollz 2 route, what you hear is a mixture of some domestic Korean pop elements with a heavy dose of contemporary, global “urban” and some elements unique to the global “K-Pop” market. Think of the pots and pans genre like NCT 127 “Sticker” and Stray Kids “Maniac”. It’s certainly not mainstream in America and yet these pots and pans K-Pop sit side-by-side the Trollz 2 American pop songs on the charts. Both equally as valid as the other… at least in terms of chart positions. But what we see now is K-Pop companies motivating fans to compete in the American charts for seemingly the prize of media attention as an end to itself. Chart positions, awards, none of that means anything on its own. The point should be—as Aamir Khan wisely said—to leverage these things, that media attention, to get your art in front of people who might not have otherwise seen it. If what you are putting in front of people who may not have otherwise seen it is incredibly mediocre, then is it really a win for the genre or the artist?

Again, it’s not about English. At the end of the day, K-Pop has already had Western validation a decade ago when CL was getting featured on best of lists in normie outlets like Spin magazine and Missy Elliot was working with G-Dragon in Korean. That’s Western validation. All that English language is doing today is to put a cherry on the localization of the music that already happened as K-Pop companies move to compete against domestic American fandoms in the American charts.

This past week I saw multiple bursts of #discourse on how much anime conventions had changed over the last decade as the genre became more mainstream. Conventions used to be for “weird” people seeking out their tribe but now that anime is available for anyone to stream on Netflix, you no longer need to know anything about the fandom ecosystem to have access to anime. This changes the nature of the anime fandom ecosystem from self-selecting “weird” people willing to jump through hoops to access content to something very, very different.

While I’m not in anime fandom, I recognize these dynamics from other fan spaces. There are trade-offs when the content gates are opened to a previously niche interest and while easier access to that content is nice, the loss of an intimate fandom community space should be acknowledged.

Over on the K-Pop side of things we had two viral events demonstrating things I’ve been saying for years. The first was the Belfast “K-Pop Forever” tribute concert which went viral after parents in attendance with their children realized that “K-Pop” did not mean K-Pop Demon Hunters and furiously took to social media to complain.

I’ll say it one more time: The success of K-Pop Demon Hunters should be read as similar to a kids movie phenomenon like Frozen, not as crossover success for “K-Pop” as a genre.

The promotional team for “K-Pop Forever” absolutely knew what they were doing with the poster featuring artwork in the style of K-Pop Demon Hunters and I think the backlash is deserved.

Say it with me now: K-Pop is not popular in the west.

However, despite not being mainstream popular, K-Pop, like anime, had the content gates thrown wide open and all barriers to entry to fandom spaces were removed. The number of Baby’s First Fandom fans (or Baby’s First Asian Media Fandom fans) has exploded since the late 2010s or so and that has fundamentally changed the nature of these fan communities.

In 2006, the audience to a “K-Pop Forever” tribute concert in a city like Chicago would have primarily been Korean-American diaspora, with a minority of fans who had sought out “K-Pop” acts on purpose. Shows like this may likely have even necessitated knowing someone in the local diaspora community who could procure tickets. There were real barriers to entry and a certain amount of baseline knowledge could be assumed at these in person events.

In 2016, the audience to a “K-Pop Forever” tribute concert in a city like Mexico City would have primarily been K-Pop fans, with a minority of fans of “Asian media” (anime fans, J-Pop fans, Asian drama fans, etc.). There were fewer barriers to entry, but you could still assume a baseline knowledge of the genre (and possibly even related genres like anime OST songs) from other attendees.

In 2026, the audience of a “K-Pop Forever” tribute concert in Belfast appears to be primarily angry parents with bored children upset that it’s not songs from a popular children’s film.

There are definitely advantages to having zero barriers to entry—like being able to buy a ticket on Ticketmaster to see Taemin in a large venue in Los Angeles, which I did last year and thank you for your service, Taemin—but we need to acknowledge the downsides. People will walk into these spaces that have no idea what the spaces even are or what the content is about. I don’t blame the parents for being upset. If you’re going to throw open the content gates of niche interests to all comers, alienate your existing fans by ignoring their concerns, and then offer no real guidance to the n00bs while picking their pockets, you will almost certainly find yourself with an unhappy customer base (something the NHL has been dealing with and will likely continue to deal with post-Heated Rivalry.)

When the Baby’s First (Asian Media) Fandom fans overwhelm and take over fan spaces, you end up with things like exhibit two of our viral content last week:

Here we have a K-Pop fan with a large following attempting to flex for her favorite group but in the process she misidentifies the very popular Japanese idol group Snow Man (check out their new song!) as “K-Pop.”

The original post was deleted and the OP has since apologized after getting dunked on by J-Pop fans posting pictures of her faves stuff in the bargain bin but I think it demonstrates how little knowledge of Asian media, let alone how little knowledge of K-Pop, so many of these new fans post-content gate opening actually have. You don’t need a Phd in idol studies to enjoy the new Hearts2Hearts song but a strong minority of fans don’t just want to enjoy the content, they want to get online and argue and brag and get into everyone else’s business. And 90% of the time, this loud minority of fans are arguing from a position of complete ignorance, as demonstrated by the post above.

I mean if we want to get technical about it, Japan’s Arashi paved the way for Asian idols on the IFPI back in 2019.

But I will take Baby’s First (Asian Media) fans any day of the week over smug journalists parachuting into fandom spaces and putting their bad information and takes up on a legacy media platform.

Yes, our offender this week is Alex Jung who wrote the latest Bad Take on Fandom for New York magazine, titled, “Girls Who Love Boys Who Love Boys When did everyone start fujoing out?” and here’s a sample of the knowledge dropped: [Emphasis added]

The “favorite problem to fix” is usually a lack of sex, which is why most fan fiction is a form of slash fiction. Writers project parts of themselves into the characters, things that often have to do with their own bodies, sexual desires, and vulnerabilities.

Sigh.

SIGH.

I don’t even know where to start with this ridiculous article. How seriously are we supposed to take a piece that can’t even get basic facts about fanfic and slash fiction right. I saw this quote making the rounds on X:

The 2016 anime adaptation of the BL manga Yuri!!! on Ice, about a male figure skater and his coach, became a crossover hit.

Lord save me from these smug journalists parachuting into things they don’t understand. This may be a small error but it’s extremely indicative of how much research actually went into writing this article: Yuri!!! On Ice was not an adaptation of a manga.

Jung also makes a number of huge and completely unforced errors but the one I think needs to be blasted the most is this:

Fanfic is not primarily slash and while online fanfic communities on places like AO3 are heavily female-coded, I am old enough to personally know heterosexual male writers of non-romance and certainly non-Slash Star Trek fanfic, among other genres. There was an entire ecosystem of things like mass market tie-in novels for formerly male-coded fandoms like Star Wars or Dungeons & Dragons that were all about adventuring and slaying demons and monsters and the only butt stuff involved was jokes about farts.

That stuff wasn’t personally for me—I happen to really enjoy the slash romance fanfic—but it was out there in print, on Usenet forums, and other places like that.

You can’t understand the prominence of m/m slash in “fandom studies” today without also understanding that it didn’t used to be this way. Over the last decade-plus or so, I’ve witnessed IPs like Star Trek and Star Wars work to shed their all of long time fans (including me) and with them went a lot of male fans and the knowledge of things like the male-written Marissa Picard universe, which I found because it was MSTed on Usenet forums and I thought that MSTing fanfic was hilarious at age 15. My memory of the 1990s is that I was much more likely to stumble across any type of fic written by a heterosexual man than I was to find a m/m slash fic.

All of this is not to denigrate the wonderful women writing m/m slash out there—again, I read plenty of those fics and I salute your work—but just to try to put this segment of fandom into perspective. It has been extremely overemphasized in the media by hack fluff piece writers like Jung, presumably because it is salacious and will generate a lot of interest from lookie-loos, but it does these fic writers and the fandoms a huge disservice to open these content gates wide open for all comers to walk through. These are not subcultures and ideas meant for everyone. What we all accept as fine by our little self-selected group of writers and readers on AO3 (a little A/O/B, a little fuck-or-die, some angst… *chef’s kiss*) is really not appropriate for the majority of readers out there. They don’t want it; they don’t need to know it exists; and they shouldn’t have access to it.

The coda to all of this is, of course, that hack writers like Jung will simply hop aboard the next big hysteria when it rolls around, leaving all of his misinformation on fandom with the imprint of a legacy publication on it. After all, he is the writer behind one of the first big legacy publication fluff pieces on another female-driven hysteria whose time has come and gone. “Women are so horny for Heated Rivalry that they read about two guys doing ‘it’” will join “women are so horny for Twilight that they’re ruining their marriages” and “women are so horny for One Direction… that they’re reading about two guys doing ‘it’” in the dustbin of popular culture memory. They don’t care about the mess left behind in our fandom spaces and will happily exploit the next big fandom bubble when it hits, starting the cycle all over again.

The show exists at the intersection of a lot of different threads that the two of us have been following for a while, so it was fun and cathartic to dig into what’s happened to both the show and actors since it was boosted from #CanCon to the global stage.

(Note that none of the hockey in this show makes sense; sports fans beware.)

Relevant posts from Monia:

• “The Real Heated Rivalry Psychosis”

• “Queer As Folk Ran so Heated Rivalry Could Skate”

• “When the tinhats are right” (discusses PHAN)

• “Are we ‘Canada Down’ enough to save Canadian media?”

• “Fandom Warfare” (on anti-fandom)

• “No, fandom was not invented by Slash fans.”

My translation posts on BL (“Boys Love”):

• A History of Boys Love

• A Guy’s Guy to BL

Things we discussed in the episode are:

• Our love of ice skating/ice hockey movies including: The Cutting Edge, The Mighty Ducks, Yuri on Ice, Ice Princess (RIP Michelle), and classic comedy Blades of Glory. Shout out as well to the lovely Sonja Henie, the White Swan, Tonya & Nancy (a foundational made for TV movie), and my boy Johnny Weir.

• We are tired of brands trend hopping on social media. No, we don’t care if some fast food restaurant RTs our favorite ships. It’s annoying.

• The Captain America “Stucky” ship is Bucky Barnes/Steve Rogers and it’s very popular. Game Changers origins are allegedly reportedly in Stucky fanfic. This is becoming more common. The first big one to cross my path was Cassandra Claire’s Mortal Instruments series. The Fifty Shades of Gray series is another example.

• The blowing up of Ao3 in China by Xiao Zhan fans.

• Garak and Bashir are still a popular pairing and the actors are very supportive of the fan community, even reading fanfics for fans.

• Not everything has to be “the first” to be good or enjoyable. That attitude is tiring.

• Glee exploded into fandom like a gay bomb. If you weren’t around for it, you can’t understand how unescapable it was. I remember Kurt/Puck being very popular, although the ship crashed with Mark Salling.

• Migratory Slash Fandom is an underdiscussed phenomenon.

• It should have been Drarry!

• Rob-stens vs Non-stens was a HUGE fandom divide in Twilight; same with the Great Harmonian Wars in Harry Potter.

• Some of the young actors playing the werewolves had a hard road post-films.

• When a minor fictional character like Blaise Zabini or General Hux takes on a fan-created personality, fans can run wild and have fun but with RPF (real person fiction), fans run the risk of associating their fan object with the fan-created personality.

The songs played are:

1. [Theme song to Ready or Not]

2. “Ooo It’s Kind of Crazy” by SoulDecision [Vancouver; Music Video; also check out “Faded”]

3. “Get Down” by B4-4 [Toronto; Music Video]

4. “Some Kinda Wonderful” by Sky [Montreal; Music Video; RIP James Renald]

5. “Next Summer” by Arkells [Hamilton, ON; Official Music Video; Arkells are still active! Check out their new album]

6. “I’ll Believe in Anything” by Wolf Parade [Montreal; Official Music Video; check out Wolf Parade’s Dan Boeckner on the podcast Fortune Kit!]

7. “Bang Bang Boom” by the Moffats [British Columbia; Official Music Video]

8. “She Says What She Means” by Sloan [Halifax; from Navy Blues which I played incessantly when it came out; check out the big single from the album: “Money City Maniacs”]

9. “T-Shirt” by Beaches [Toronto; Official Music Video; the band is still active! Check out their new stuff]

10. “Oublie-moi” by Cœur de pirate [Quebec; Official Music Video; She is still active! Check out her official site]

11. “Pulling Levers” by Hot Hot Heat [Victoria, BC; Official Music Video]

12. “Love Wins Everytime” by McMaster & James [Winnipeg; Music Video]

13. “I’ll Believe in Anything” by Wolf Parade [Reprise]

Starting in Japan, with hands down my favorite song of the year: A.B.C-Z with “Just Romantic!”

I love A.B.C-Z and I think I love them even more since Kawai left the group. Despite never being anywhere near the top of the popularity charts, they’ve kept slowly plugging along putting out innovative songs. Although the acrobat boys are now too old for the flips they used to do, the choreography for “Just Romantic!” shows that they still have that visual flair that makes them so fun to watch and proves you don’t need a lot of money and special effects to make a good music video—just talent and imagination. The song itself is a super fun earworm. While I do also love the retro stylings of a song like “Cocktail” (also released this year) or a “Jigsaw” (released last year), I like that they aren’t just stuck in the 80s. “Just Romantic!” feels both timeless and very fresh which is why it’s my favorite song year.

Psychic Fever had been on my radar for a while but after seeing them perform live earlier this year, I’ve definitely been converted into a fan. “What’s Happenin’” was written and produced by Japanese rapper JP the Wavy and (at least to this old hag’s eyes and ears) marries hip-hop and idol pop in a way we haven’t really seen and heard since the heyday of the 2010s K-Pop boom. If you’ve been missing the Block B and BAPs of it all, you need to check out Psychic Fever. I’m also huge into their other singles from this year: the smooth, shirtless retro R&B of “Paradise” (which I had on repeat for weeks), “Gelato”, “Swish Dat,” and “Reflection”.

And look, there are things that one goes to a STARTO group for and for better or worse WEST (née Johnny’s WEST) continue to deliver. “A.H.O.” is a classic Oskaka-group don’t worry be happy vaguely surf themed bop and I am here for it. The song is peppy, the video is loud and bright, and the whole thing is just a lot of fun. Is it high art? No. Do I care? Also, no. WEST delivers the goods song after song, year after year. Honestly, you can’t go wrong following WEST. Will you get some clunkers? Sure. But you’ll also get “West Side Soul” (and check out early 2026 entry 愛執).

Naniwa Danshi, WEST’s younger brother Osaka group, also came through this year with the peppy “Gira Gira Summer” but I had to hand the Idolcast Osaka trophy to A.H.O.

SixTones come through again in 2025 with “Barrier.” What I love about this song and about SixTones’s music in general is that they’ve figured out how to take the normie Japanese MOR rock music taste and make it sparkle. We’ve seen it from them time after time—look no further than something like “Mascara,” which is straight up a King Gnu song. “Barrier” shares musical DNA with something more like a “Mela” but just… sparklier. Songs like this are why I’ll always recommend SixTones as an idol group for regular music listeners. They’re just good!

(Bonus shout out here for SixTones’s debut buddies Snow Man who do not share the normie adjacent vibe of SixTones and instead release songs all over the musical map of varying degrees of quality—to include this bonkers collab with Deco*27 that if it had been about 25% more bonkers would have made my list for reals.)

EbiDan’s MiLK, who have been having a moment this year—to include a performance at Kouhaku Utagassen—do some classic Johnny’s & Associates idoling with “好きすぎて滅” written by industry stalwart Asano Takashi. As STARTO has been (understandably) running from their roots, it’s refreshing to see that the old “Johnny’s” style still has strong appeal minus Johnny. The color coded costumes, the choreography, everything is just A+ J-Pop Idol. And as a bonus, see SnowMan’s Sakuma do the choreography on それスノ. There’s everything to love and nothing to hate. 10/10 no notes!

Honorable mentions for BUDDiis sugary sweet “LOVE ME” and the equally sugary “Caramel Heart” from 超特急, both of which are bonbons of pure joy!

Unfortunately we now have to leave the bountiful J-Pop fields and board the struggle bus to head over across the East Sea/Sea of Japan to check on what K-Pop was up to last year. (Gnarly.)

I have to throw in for Allday Project here because until the next group on my liste popped up, “Famous,” was by far and away my favorite song of the year in K-Pop.

ADP have performance chops like we haven’t seen for a hot minute in K-Pop and I was actually looking up performances.

But oversaturation thy name is Hybe Labels. Flooding the market with heavily promoted boy groups we get an unremarkable debut from Cortis (who are making what appears to be a very successful play to siphon off BTS fans by re-using their underdog narrative), to add to their unremarkable 5th gen groups &Team, TWS and BoyNextDoor. JYP contributed the unremarkable KickFlip, SM has the unremarkable RiiZE, and unremarkable MNET reality boys ZB1 add to the undistinguishable mass of boy groups competing for an increasingly small slice of the Obsessive K-Pop Boy Group Fan economy where the currency is streams and planted Koreaboo articles about what a flop the other boy groups are.

It’s into this sludge of sameness that we got Jay Park’s 4 member LNGSHOT just under the 2025 wire with “Saucin’”.

Is it the best song on Earth? No. But it’s fun, it’s refreshing, and—most importantly—it sounds good. Jay Park seems to be aiming for the same audience that EXILE TRIBE is aiming at with Psychic Fever by providing solid global R&B and hip-hop via an idol package. It’s an audience that K-Pop has ignored for far too long and I am here for the return!
LNGSHOT have released some 2026 bangers already but I’ll save those for next year’s list.

There are midtier boy groups still hustling out there and while none of these blew my socks off, there were some fun releases if you dug for them.

“SKIID” from ARcC is the only one worth highlighting but I also enjoyed “Nu Kidz” and “Awesome.”

Bonus mentions include 8TURN’s “Leggo,” POW’s “Wall Flowers,” and LUN8’s “Lost.”

N.SSign only had one release in 2025 (“Itty Bitty”) but I liked it and 2026 sounds promising. I’ll also add in here as a bonus, Alpha Drive One’s pre-release in 2025 didn’t do much for me but “Freak Alarm” is extremely catchy and I look forward to seeing what they do next.

More bonus mentions include two of my favorite K-Pop hags: SHINee’s Onew with “Animals.”

And the one and only G-DRAGON whose Übermensch I had on repeat for much of 2025. “Gyro-Drop” might be my favorite from the album but enjoy the video for “Too Bad”!

Hopefully we’ll be seeing even more of GD in 2026!

The first episode—The YG Famillenium (1988-2006)—covers the founding of YG Entertainment and the origins of both the early YG Family sound and the origins of some of the characteristics that would define the agency through this early era.

The second episode—Majah Flavah (2006-2008)—covers BigBang’s rookie era through their first big hit, “Lies,” and also includes a discussion on what plagiarism in music actually involves.

The third episode—A Road Not Taken (2008-2010)—covers the group’s first period of K-Pop dominance, their push into the Japanese market, and the beginnings of their solo careers. Includes discussion of “Haru Haru,” “Sunset Glow,” “Gara Gara Go,” “Strong Baby,” and “Heartbreaker.”

This episode will cover their solo and unit works from 2010, leading into 2011’s group comeback, their difficulties in the back half of 2011, and ending with a triumphant return at the 2011 EMAs.

• I mention it briefly in the episode but this episode series will not be covering Seungri’s criminal charges and the Burning Sun scandal. If you’re here for the salacious gossip, you may as well close the browser window now. The media coverage of Seungri and Burning Sun has tended more towards sensationalism and less towards, you know, facts, which has not been all that helpful in understanding what actually happened. There is a timeline of events put together by Billboard that is as good a source as any for a look at how the scandal unfolded and Soompi has a fairly dry list of the charges that Seungri was convicted of. Maybe one day I’ll do an episode series on Burning Sun but this series is not it.

• I’ve discussed the Bae Yong-Joon aunties many, many times because their erasure in the “K-Pop narrative” renders the narrative incoherent. You can read more about the aunties and Jang Geun-Suk in a post I wrote over here.

• The late R&B singer Wheesung gets a mention in this episode. He sadly passed away earlier this year but was a crucial part of the pre-idol era YG Family. Jeun Goon, who would go on to work with the next generation YG Family R&B singer, Taeyang, was a frequent collaborator.

• To show how BigBang were already starting to move past the “idol” label, they were invited to the Pentaport Rock Festival (which does not cater to the idol fan crowd) in 2011. Here’s a fan video showing GD and his fresh buzz cut…

The songs played are:

1. “Cafe” by BigBang, performed live in Seoul, April 26, 2015.

2. “Promise” by A.N. Jell

3. [Hook mix: “Sorry Sorry” by Super Junior; “Bo Peep Bo Peep” by T-ARA; “Ring Ding Dong” by SHINee; “Abracadabra” by Brown Eyed Girls; “Heartbreaker” by G-Dragon; “Bad Girl, Good Girl” by Miss A; “Bingeul Bingeul” by U-Kiss; “Mister” by KARA]

4. “A Fool’s Only Tears” performed by Daesung and Seungri as part of a ballad medley, Big Show 2010

5. “Storm feat. Sean, Masta Wu, G-Dragon” by Perry (Official MV)

6. “Turn it Up” by T.O.P. (Official MV)

7. “I Need A Girl” by Taeyang (Official MV)

8. “I Need A Girl” by Taeyang, performed live in 2023

9. “Beautiful Hangover” by BigBang (Official MV)

10. “Tell Me” by JinuSean featuring Uhm Jung-Hwa [Anything feat. Uhm Jung-Hwa is a delight! Check out a 2015 live performance of the classic song!]

11. “Intro” by GD & T.O.P.

12. “Bangin’ the Beat (Bangapella)” by DJ Assault

13. “High High” by GD & T.O.P. [Check out the banned MV!]

14. “It Hurts” by 2NE1 (Official MV)

15. “Oh Yeah” by GD & T.O.P. featuring Park Bom [The live performances of this song are all my favorite.]

16. “When I Think of You” by Janet Jackson (Official MV)

17. “Don’t Leave” by GD & T.O.P. [Check out the banned MV!]

18. “Baby Good Night” by GD & T.O.P. (Official MV)

19. “Bucky Done Gun” by M.I.A. (Official MV)

20. “Knock Out” by GD & T.O.P. [Check out the banned MV!]

21. “What Can I Do” by Seungri (Official MV)

22. “Tonight” by BigBang (Official MV)

23. “Tonight (I’m Fucking/Loving You)” by Enrique Iglesias (Official MV)

24. “Players Anthem” by B-Free

25. “Fat Girl” by DJ DOC (45RPM)

26. “Cafe” by BigBang

27. “Stupid Liar” by BigBang, Alive Tour in Seoul

28. “Love Song” by BigBang (Official MV)

29. “Baby Don’t Cry” by Daesung