There's a pretty good chance you want to know how the Kpop Thing happened
We should probably get the Kpop Thing out of the way as soon as possible.
Prior to 2015, Kpop was not part of my musical vocabulary. There had been Gangnam Style of course, and occasionally one of my friends would post Sorry Sorry by Super Junior (really one of the best tracks) or Gee by Girl's Generation (a classic!) to FB, usually as a joke ("OMG how many guys are in this group!"), but nothing else.
Up until this point in the 2010s I had been listening to Arctic Monkeys, Queens of the Stone Age, Porter Robinson, Deadmau5, Robyn, Stars, and going through an REM revival. I was in a weird place.
Then one of my friends posted this Rolling Stone article about The Greatest 50 Boy Band Songs of All Time and at #12 was Sherlock by Shinee.
There are other Kpop songs on that list, including Fantastic Baby, which is one of the best Kpop tracks ever fight me, but only Sherlock caught my fancy. There was something about the song and the dance and the look that spoke to me. It was interesting and layered. It had texture and movement and nuance. It was danceable and singable and boppable. It was everything you would want in a song rolled into one explosive tune!
Now at this point I was a touch old for boy bands. The last time I had been into boy bands was when I was 14 and was really into New Kids on the Block, Bros, and Milli Vanilli (yeah, shut up). That was before I had been shamed into not liking boy bands. I still remember the moment I was shamed out of loving NKotB. I was walking to the bus stop with a friend and lamenting how the collapse of my friendship with my BFF had meant that we weren't going to go see NKotB, and the girl I was talking to — who had a shrine to Morrissey in her bedroom closet (and let's not read as much into that as I did each time I went over to her place and she showed it to me) — sneered that they weren't Real Music(tm).
And thus I was path corrected to Real Music and away from pop. I started listening to The Cure (which I still like), REM (which I still very much like), Aerosmith (which I shall never speak of again), and The Smiths (who we shall also forget).
Over the years I dabbled also in grunge, disco, 70s psychedelic rock, New Wave, and Bossa Nova, changing preferred musical style each time I was "corrected" by someone who "understood" music.
What they didn't realize was that each time they played me something I liked, it got filed in with a bunch of other things I liked, to be eventually catalogued in playlists called "Songs About Driving on the Highway" and "The Phone Playlist" decades later. Does Highway Star by Deep Purple belong in the same playlist as Shut Up and Drive by Rihanna? Yes.
And so like a river that has been diverted to make room for a superhighway but then goes back to its original path after catastrophic floods, Shinee sent me down a Kpop rabbit hole that made me realize that I loved pop music oh so very much!
Prior to 2015, Kpop was not part of my musical vocabulary. There had been Gangnam Style of course, and occasionally one of my friends would post Sorry Sorry by Super Junior (really one of the best tracks) or Gee by Girl's Generation (a classic!) to FB, usually as a joke ("OMG how many guys are in this group!"), but nothing else.
Up until this point in the 2010s I had been listening to Arctic Monkeys, Queens of the Stone Age, Porter Robinson, Deadmau5, Robyn, Stars, and going through an REM revival. I was in a weird place.
Then one of my friends posted this Rolling Stone article about The Greatest 50 Boy Band Songs of All Time and at #12 was Sherlock by Shinee.
There are other Kpop songs on that list, including Fantastic Baby, which is one of the best Kpop tracks ever fight me, but only Sherlock caught my fancy. There was something about the song and the dance and the look that spoke to me. It was interesting and layered. It had texture and movement and nuance. It was danceable and singable and boppable. It was everything you would want in a song rolled into one explosive tune!
Now at this point I was a touch old for boy bands. The last time I had been into boy bands was when I was 14 and was really into New Kids on the Block, Bros, and Milli Vanilli (yeah, shut up). That was before I had been shamed into not liking boy bands. I still remember the moment I was shamed out of loving NKotB. I was walking to the bus stop with a friend and lamenting how the collapse of my friendship with my BFF had meant that we weren't going to go see NKotB, and the girl I was talking to — who had a shrine to Morrissey in her bedroom closet (and let's not read as much into that as I did each time I went over to her place and she showed it to me) — sneered that they weren't Real Music(tm).
And thus I was path corrected to Real Music and away from pop. I started listening to The Cure (which I still like), REM (which I still very much like), Aerosmith (which I shall never speak of again), and The Smiths (who we shall also forget).
Over the years I dabbled also in grunge, disco, 70s psychedelic rock, New Wave, and Bossa Nova, changing preferred musical style each time I was "corrected" by someone who "understood" music.
What they didn't realize was that each time they played me something I liked, it got filed in with a bunch of other things I liked, to be eventually catalogued in playlists called "Songs About Driving on the Highway" and "The Phone Playlist" decades later. Does Highway Star by Deep Purple belong in the same playlist as Shut Up and Drive by Rihanna? Yes.
And so like a river that has been diverted to make room for a superhighway but then goes back to its original path after catastrophic floods, Shinee sent me down a Kpop rabbit hole that made me realize that I loved pop music oh so very much!
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