From "All points east — how the West got hooked on Korean and Japanese culture/K-pop titans BTS are taking on the Grammys, manga is on the London stage and Japanese literature is breaking records. What’s driving the boom?" (London Times).
We're told that BTS is very popular because of their "mix of pop, hip-hop, R&B and electronic music, with lyrics about mental health and social pressure," and it made me wonder what the group is saying about mental health and social pressure. So, the world being what it is, I said to Grok, "All I want from you is about 10 quotes from BTS songs that are 'lyrics about mental health and social pressure.'"
Click through if you want to know.
Keep in mind they they are mostly singing in Korean, but the fans look up the translations and can understand. Be fair: literal translation can be awkward. I've added some boldface:
- “I have a long way to go but why am I running in place? / I scream out of frustration but the empty air echoes / I hope tomorrow will be different from today / I’m just wishing”
— “Tomorrow”- “The conflict with ideal, my head hurts / Around the age of 18, I developed social anxiety / Right, that was when my mind was gradually polluted”
— “The Last” (Agust D / Suga)- “At times I’m scared of myself too / Thanks to the depression that takes over me / And all my self-hatred”
— “The Last” (Agust D / Suga)- “That’s right, fuck, I live because I can’t die / But I don’t have anything I want to do / I’m in so much pain and loneliness but people around me / Keep telling me to regain my consciousness”
— “So Far Away” (Agust D / Suga)- “In this loud silence / I live to understand the world / But the world has never understood me, why”
— “Always” (RM)- “I wish I could love myself / I wish I could love myself / I wish I could love myself”
— “Reflection” (RM)- “The fact that no matter how much they shout, it won’t reach / Makes them so gravely lonely that they quietly shut their mouths”
— “Whalien 52”- “Is it anxiety or depression? / Am I just an animal that regrets / Or is it me born out of loneliness?”
— “Blue & Grey”- “I just wanna be happier / Melt me, I’m cold / Oh, this ground feels so heavier / I am singing by myself”
— “Blue & Grey”- “Insecurity, this is a disease / … / Is the world sick or am I sick? I’m confused / … / There more than 400 kinds of mental diseases / But no one really fits into any of these categories”
— “Dis-ease”
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39 comments:
My granddaughters are nuts about K-Pop. They can watch the video "Demon Hunters" (in English) over and over.
But i can promise you now that kimchi will never, ever become nearly as popular as sushi.
Hollywood and the US gaming and movie industry are losing to China, Japan and Korea for an obvious reason the State media wont talk about.
In Asia they make movies for their audience to make money.
In the US these industries have gone woke.
There's a lot of Korean Western classical music performance. Somebody's noticing the intellectual content enough to get good at it.
K-Pop Demon Hunters is about using music to drive out the demons around us and inside us. The plot is the main character fighting the duality of wanting to stop the demons and deal with being half demon herself.
K-Pop Demon hunters is a well written story with good world building that challenges the main character's flaw and forces her to make decisions that are not obvious and have consequences.
The problem is that Hollywood and US triple A game studios are all corporate woke and they are getting their clocks cleaned by Tencent and Japanese/Korean Manga/Manhwa. Big budget video games like Concord and Dragon Age and memes now.
The gap is exploding now because the cost and effort to make a movie or an anime series is falling fast. Right now the pitchforks are out and the average creators have started attacking books that may or may not have been written by "AI."
Not exactly Jimmy Webb, Carole King or Bob Dylan.
I really liked Althouse’s setup but was disappointed in the payoff. The lyrics reflect the very inward focused tone of their generation and uses the buzzwords of the perpetual fretting youth. The more we see the effect of isolation and screen time the clearer the dichotomy is: nature soothes and heals / screen engagement stresses and enhances anxieties.
How did we get from peace and love songs, rebellion and party tunes to a catalog of psychological self diagnosis? Was Emo an early indicator of the shift. Was Tears for Fears ahead of its time with “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” etc?
This post raises questions that have no easy answers.
If soros hadnt cracked the baht
S. Korea puts it's performers through a system of training and management that makes me question that there's any concern for mental health.
Cultures routinely go through an industrialization -> wealth -> art and creativity cycle. See early 1900s USA radio and silver screen films; Japan after WW2 with Godzilla and Kurosawa; Korea after they were solid global economic players.
In every culture, the established creativity industry players run out of folk tales and cultural cliches, and they then repeat themselves with remakes.
BTS...new generation of derivative BS pop...filling the void in the young-safe-guys-favored-by-pubescent-girls boy band industry.
Mary Beth said...
S. Korea puts it's performers through a system of training and management that makes me question that there's any concern for mental health.
And South Korean fandom is particularly toxic.
There are several videos out about the numerous South Korean Pop stars that have killed themselves and you can point a pretty convincing finger at the people in SKorea driving that.
I was watching an episode of curb your enthusiasm and Alannis Morisette was on it, and I was thinking that she made more money on the one album she wrote as practically a teenager than Larry David made from ten years of Seinfeld. It seems like an unpredictable business.
Not to mention the kinds of jobs that disappear when you change your economic model from manipulating molecules to manipulating bits in computer memories.
…that’s such a strange cause and effect. Full disclosure I was a small part of a team that showed ip in S Korea with capital offering fifty cents for a dollar of assets. A classic got em over a barrel…so it’s odd to my war to hear Korean central planners reacted to this by creating K-pop. I suspect Achilles has it correct- Hollywood went woke and made scores of Tom Hanks climate change apocalypse movies, Meryl breaks the fourth wall to scold lecture the audience to vote Democrats. Those movies and shows must lose much in translation to Korean, so enterprising Koreans recreated the Partridge Family and The Jackson Five, which begat K-pop and appropriation of whatever else worked…
My wife and I were introduced to Korean food by one of her classmates 40 years ago. We love it. I’m told there are about 100 types of kimchi. I’ve tried maybe 10 types and enjoy all of them. Some kimchi is very mild while other types are quite hot. Korean fool is delicious and healthy.
I must insist… I will not eat dog.
BTW, Jagged Little Pill contains fodder for a lot of therapy.
Sounds like your standard teenage angst.
Korea is invading our media culture, somewhat. There have been some excellent shows (Squid Games), but just like Hollywood, some bad ones, too. But Japan also turns out some competitive shows (Alice in Borderland).
US dominates the market because the Western formula works for 99 percent of the world.
How similar are the two cultures? It would seem Korean entertainment is predicated on making a profit by actually providing entertainment, unlike modern American propaganda culture. And yet, and yet.... birthrate.
The Koreans began dominating women's professional golf several years ago. More recently, Japan, Thailand and other Asian countries are beginning to dominate.
God bless 'em, it's a true meritocracy, at least on the course if not the marketing.
BTS helpe save my daughter's life. I am full-time single father of a 15 1/2 yo daughter, who was routinely abused by her mother, including violently, going back to baby shaking. It took me 8 years to build up enough contemporaneous third-party documentation finally to have the mother arrested, removed from the home, and convicted of domestic violence against both the child and me.
Because of the DV convction, and that by 9 yo the child could speak for therself, the Court decree 5-50 residential, when iin Kansas it is almost always 100% to the mother, regardless. The abuse continued when she was stuck with her mother, and she increasingly despaired, to the point of researching suicide methods.
BTS and their lyrics gave her enough hope for the future that she persisted. A close friend in school told her that she had to get out of that home, and follwing a couple more police-involved DV incidents she was allowed to move in full-time with me, and the mother -- certified mentally ill by Court-ordered evaluation -- is now also under a No Contact order. My daughter is at last beginning to relax and build hope. She's counting the months until she can obtain a Restraining Order in her own name.
This past weekend we drove from NE Kansas to Dallas for a BTS concert there, something we had been anticipating since getting some of the first tickets, in great seats [2nd Tier Row 1].
For the first time, since wordles baby-games from before the baby-shaking began, and everything which followed, I saw true dilight and pure joy, not only in her eyes, but all over he face as she sang along with all the songs; she and tens of thousands of others. She has a beautiful voice, but I've never heard her let it loose like that.
It's too soon to tell, but I think that concert truly liberated her from her horrific past, and will be seen as a key transition in her life. She was so relaxed, happy, and free ... free at last to move ahead. And as a side note, BTS inspired he to teach herself Korean, and when the band were speaking to their Korean fans she was able to understand enough [maybe 25 to 30%] that she could understand the basics of what they were saying, and she could read a lot of what posted.
BTS has given her interests, encouragement, joy, and challenging, wholesome endeavors beyond herself. With a formerly-abused adolescent it's hard to do much better than that.
Here is what grok said about the music of the 1950’s:
Here are 10 lyrical examples from the 1950s capturing those very same themes of mental weight, social pressure, and isolation:
“I stand alone in the world, you know / It’s mighty strange, it’s mighty lonely, everywhere I go”
— “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” — Hank Williams (1949/Early 50s standard)
“Oh, yes I'm the great pretender / Pretending that I'm doing well / My need is such I pretend too much / I'm lonely but no one can tell”
— “The Great Pretender” — The Platters (1955)
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“Because you’re gone, the moon and stars above / Are shining sad, because I’ve lost my love / Tears on my pillow, pain in my heart / Caused by you”
— “Tears on My Pillow” — Little Anthony and the Imperials (1958)
Reddit
“You’ll find me in lonely town / Where the lights are turned down / Where there’s pity for sighs / And a chill in the air”
— “Lonesome Town” — Ricky Nelson (1958)
Reddit
“Well, since my baby left me, I found a new place to dwell / It’s down at the end of Lonely Street at Heartbreak Hotel / I’ve been so lonely, baby, I’m so lonely, I could die”
— “Heartbreak Hotel” — Elvis Presley (1956)
“You don’t know what it’s like, baby / You don’t know what it’s like to love somebody / To love somebody, the way I love you”
— “The Great Pretender / Doo-Wop Tradition of Isolation” / Alternative: “Crying in the Chapel” — The Orioles (1953)
“You'll search and you'll search, but you'll never find / No peace of mind, until you hear the sound / Of the gentle rain falling on the chapel ground.”
“I walk the line, ’cause you’re mine / I walk the line / ... / With a love that burns like a fire inside / Now this happy habit’s got me holdin' tight”
— “I Walk the Line” — Johnny Cash (1956) (A raw look at holding oneself together under severe psychological and behavioral strain)
“Oh, what a night for a lonely guy / To cry and cry and cry / Well, my chick left me, left me alone / And now I'm sitting here, crying all alone”
— “A Thousand Miles Away” — The Heartbeats (1956)
“Each time I see you, I go wild / But you treat me like a child / You hurt me, and you make me glad / Oh, the meanest girl I ever had”
— “Summertime Blues” — Eddie Cochran (1958) (Capturing teenage social pressure, angst, and powerlessness against adult society)
“Since I don’t have you / (I don’t have you) / I don’t have plans and dreams / I don’t have anything”
— “Since I Don’t Have You” — The Skyliners (1958)
Reddit
The BTS boys also did their required military service. I think the authorities let them stagger it so the whole band wouldn’t be gone at once. Probably helped them keep a grip on reality. CC, JSM
Jagged Little Pill --
The entire album was unavoidable and overplayed when first released. I thought to myself "That voice is harsh and grating, I'll wait for her 2nd or 3rd album before I buy." It never arrived. That was her creative and commercial peak.
Isn't is ironic? Don't you think? ;-)
Yes, American artists still heavily dominate global music sales and streaming. U.S. music ownership of the recorded music revenue climbed from 27% in 2011 to roughly 38% globally by 2024. Platforms like Spotify and international market reports show U.S. acts leading across streaming, radio, and charts worldwide.Global Reach and Market ShareGrowing Revenue: U.S. talent accounts for a larger share of the global music business than it did a decade ago.Anglosphere Saturation: Countries like Canada give over 75% of their chart spaces to U.S. acts, and major European markets heavily feature American songs.Genre Expansion: Overseas streaming of distinct U.S. genres—like American country music—has jumped significantly.Rising Non-U.S. CompetitionK-Pop: South Korea ranks high globally due to the massive, sustained international reach of K-pop groups.Latin Urban: Artists from Puerto Rico and Latin America, such as Bad Bunny, maintain top global streaming positions.Local Tastes: Certain massive markets like India heavily favor domestic music over imported U.S. tracks.
Did you hear that, American influence on pop music has increased over the last decade.
Your addiction to catastrophizing rage bait is noted.
Good for you, Bart. There's nothing more rewarding than improving a young person's life.
Sure, deindustrialize. What could go wrong there?
US deindustrialization started when Daniel Ludwig realized that the Japanese navy shipyards hadn't been destroyed and shifted production over there after WWII.
Beneath The Sheets... funny.
A little Diversity would assure a robust economic model. Products and processes, not human blocs of color and class.
The lyrical content of the music that is wildly popular among S. Korean teens and twenty-somethings likely contribute to the way-below-replacement-level birthrate in S. Korea.
Re Jagged Little Pill, there is a great music producer on YouTube, Rick Beato, who breaks recordings down to their individual tracks and shows how the parts work together to make the song sound good. Here is the one on You Oughta Know, well worth a watch - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYkM21v4hB0&t=6s
“ We're told that BTS is very popular because of their "mix of pop, hip-hop, R&B and electronic music, with lyrics about mental health and social pressure”
Well, I suppose an epidemic of mental illness might explain the popularity of K-Pap. It’s hard to account for it otherwise.
You are a good father Bart. Your daughter is very lucky to have you to protect her. They do say Music saves lives.
Bart, good luck, man. That was a tough read.
Mark Carney touted Canada's role as the world's third largest "exporter" of music at the Juno awards, unaware that South Korea may already have pushed Canada into fourth place. "Exporting music" has a newfangled ring to it. When did people start using the phrase and thinking in those terms.
@Bart Hall: Echoing Howard's comments, congratulations and kudos on a hard battle, may the girl's light continue to shine.
Jesus Christ, you geezers need to get out more. Look up and watch some Korean cheerleader videos, or anything that include Isaan home girl pop star Lalisa. Who cares about the deep meaning of their lyrics? They’re cute, upbeat in performance, and, ahem, have learned to shake their little assess most fetchingly. Some call it entertainment. Sorry their lyrics don’t rise to the level of Byron, Shelley, or Keats. Who’s the current American diva? Taylor Swift? Meh.
Korea - one peninsula, two dystopias.
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