End of year – Vilppu’s 25 worst kpop songs of 2021

U is a terrible stage name and terrible is also whatever it is on his head but neither of these things is as terrible as the music below.

Yes, you read it right, twenty-five. For some reason, doing the usual 20 songs this year didn’t feel right, as that would leave to leaving out a couple tracks here and there which I was not happy doing so I made myself just a little more miserable by having 25% more writing to do. Enjoy! (You probably will not if your music taste is anything like mine.)

Before we get to what matters, we should get the stuff that no one who needs to read will:

• Eligibility period: December 25, 2020 until December 24, 2021. Here I usually say that the dying days don’t matter either way but not this year.
• Qualifications: music video or at the very least a proper live stage. If the group themselves couldn’t have been bothered to get the song out there then I couldn’t have been bothered to listen to it either.
• Stuff which has videos but is still inelligible: OST songs, Christmas music. Covers are on a thin line, I’ll probably include the ones released as official comebacks, anything uploaded as lazy in-between promotion activity may piss off.
• I copied and edited this list from last year and it had an additional point here which no longer applies now but I’m just going to leave it here because who gaf
• My opinions blah blah make your own list if you can’t handle it.
• Have fun.
• Or not.

25. Lisa – Money

There’s a lot of completely pointless online dispute over whether BTS or Blackpink is the biggest kpop group right now and frankly, both answers are correct depending on what angle you’re evaluating the question from. While it’s obviously BTS who pull in the unbelievable dry numbers, musically speaking, they’re not actually influencing anyone beyond „hey, BTS are a bunch of dudes, you too are a bunch of dudes, maybe we should try it out”. All their recent releases have been goody two shoes recreations of what’s doing well at the other side of the ocean, nothing that other kpop groups wouldn’t be able to figure out on their own. On the contrary, Blackpink are the real ones paving the way by establishing a strong signature sound paired with a certain visual look that every other girlgroup try and copy these days… and that is not a good thing. It’s not really the girls’ fault and their songs have generally gotten quite good recently but almost every other attempt at the same musical ground by lesser known groups has been a complete and utter failure, be it due to the lack of the insanely high production value Blackpink have got us accustomed to or Teddy’s heavy metal songwriting wits (yes, I am serious). Due to the low frequency of actual Blackpink releases, that left us with only a few decent tracks from them over the years and an overall far worse girlgroup environment than we saw back in 2016. Some redemption would be nice and maybe next year, we’ll get an array of „Lovesick Girls” clones which would surely be a breath of fresh air, but for now, we got a redemption of different sorts – a Blackpink-related track that’s just as horrible as all their mindless copies. It’s honestly sort of mind-blowing how much „Money” sucks given Teddy doesn’t tend to switch the formula up – and thanks to that, usually get it right. I can’t tell if he just couldn’t give a shit and threw one of his past off-cuts Lisa’s way to fill in the time before the next full group comeback or if he’s got a vendetta against her personally but what matters is that gone are the solid riffs establishing tough rhythms, in their place there’s just a few saxophone notes which sound like complete ass and as they’re rotating all throughout the song with no variation, there’s no excitement nor anything to hold onto. Once you’ve heard the first few bars, you’ve heard all there is to it and if you don’t like what you’re hearing, too fucking bad. As per usual, they try just a little to break it with a more melodic pre-chorus but all this „dollar bills, dollar bills” whining isn’t any preferable. Who knows, maybe the entire package is just an experiment over how much „Money” can be made with the least amount of effort possible. Now wouldn’t that be a shocker.

24. Horace, Boi Brown – Flower Girl

Most of the Korean rap which sticks out as even worse than the average mould is the funeral slow trap with some grunting over it where you get the truly special feeling that the artist took more time analysing the consistency of the last shit they took over trying to make some music which doesn’t completely blow. One tier above that is the „I’m just some nice guy” R&B happy-go-nowhere rap which is smooth, carefully removes any trace of a possible heavy beat because you can’t just listen to rap music and enjoy what you’re hearing, that can’t be and just generally bores you to death. I rarely, if ever, mention this type as it’s just so nondescript but I suppose you can’t do that type and be completely ass cheeks at it too. Why does Horace insist on using hard autotune over a backing track which is clearly designed to be some pleasant (debatable) background music? It pretty obviously does not fit and only highlights how hopeless both parts are on their own. Why is it that in the sole moment of some melodic enlightenment in the track, the melody actually majorly blows, ending each phrase with the same higher note which is annoying as piss to listen to after the second repetition and neither of these guys can even hit it all that well, as they just come off with some weak whimpers? These are questions I do not know the answer to. Maybe Horace will hit me up one day so I can tell you all but frankly, if that ever happened and got an opportunity to get only one answer, I wouldn’t care about either of them because the greatest mystery of this song is actually whether „Flower Girl” is just a regular hippie girl or something like a horse girl but for flowers.

23. Lightsum – Vanilla

Cube Entertainment’s complete inability to react in any way whatsoever to any controversy surrounding them all year would probably be hilarious if I gave any more of a fuck about any of said controversies. Not that any of it matters, either – having a group with an alleged bully member disintegrate doesn’t solve any of the fundamental issues within the industry where bullying and unhealthy competitiveness are actively encouraged, it just temporarily halts the problematic individual. It’s probably a topic for a lengthy discussion I don’t feel like getting into at the moment but for what it’s worth to an average kpop stan, it just means (G)I-dle are pretty much as done as CLC, who apparently happened to have an even more unceremonious finish. The sudden demise of both of Cube’s girlgroups left the company with the need to debut a new one and if this is their way of diversion, then staying quiet truly was the preferable option. Residing somewhere in between „cute” and „girl crush”, the song takes the worst out of both styles, pairing the usual uninteresting verses where the girls try their best to convince you how badass they all are like we don’t all know it’s all smoke and mirrors with a painful nursery rhyme melody in the chorus. Then there’s also that stupid vanilla-nilla-nilla hook which isn’t really catchy but gets repeated so many times it probably will eventually get stuck in your head and that horrible post-chorus breakdown because I suppose that was the only area where the track didn’t shit the bed yet. I can only wish for the members of Lightsum to receive better music in the future or better yet, for one of them to become a bully, get either kicked out or have the group disbanded altogether, hence not having to perform „Vanilla” ever again.

22. Choa – Dreaming

One sunny July afternoon at the Sandbox Network headquarters:

– Sir, I got some good news, good and bad.

– Mmm, hit me with the good one first.

– We finally got Choa of viral Crayon Pop fame to agree to do a song for us. We know her star may not be shining as brightly as it used to but we surely can squeeze some out of it! Some annoying freaks like that Vilppu guy who for some ungodly reason listen to kpop further back than two months prior will surely get pumped as fuck for it.

– Well, that sure sounds like a tax break opportunity. Now what’s the bad news.

– We have got to give her a song, otherwise it’s all for none.

– Fuck, that is quite the inconvenience. What are our options.

– As you probably remember, sir, Crayon Pop rose to their short-lived stardom with „Bar Bar Bar” and after watching the video a couple times, I conclude people liked how upbeat and fun it was. It also had oddball fashion and honestly some pretty dumb but memorable moves. All wrapped up in that zany Korean style humour but not enough to make a well-adjusted adult gauge their eyes like they would after watching a variety show. Other fan favourites from the group included stuff like „FM” and „1,2,3,4” – both excellent pop songs that share the bright and cheery presentation from „Bar Bar Bar” but are a bit more musically involved and less repetitive so further listens can remain more rewarding. I think if we just follow that lead, we could end up with some golden.

– That will never do. Excitement? Fun? Did you see what kpop songs are sent oversees these days? No one wants to have a good time listening to this shit anymore. As you were listing all those horrifying good qualities a pop song could have, I had a better idea. What if we carefully remove all that you were talking about, slow the tempo down to minimise the chance of anyone feeling too alive and replace the more electronic sounds with some bizarre orchestral pop where the brass instruments will cut in and out in very inappropriate places completely cluttering the mix and fighting for every empty space not otherwise occupied by vocals, creating a very uncomfortably tense and suffocating listen?

– Sir, I’m not sure about that at all.

– It will be fine! My last brilliant idea of a side channel mixing anime with Minecraft music videos has been a blooming success! And this one is undeniably of equal quality!

– I haven’t looked at it from that angle! On it, sir.

And the rest was history.

21. Vinxen – All Time

Although kpop trends come and go pretty fast, or at least as fast as their American counterparts allow them to, the one that’s like a cockroach you just can’t seem to kill is trap, and to be fair, it doesn’t surprise me all that much. Does it sound like ass ten out of ten tries, absolutely, does it halt some otherwise good-intentioned songs in ways which make no musical sense, undeniably, but creating a trap breakdown is relatively easy. You just need to drop your drum machine own to halftime, remove any vaguely interesting production elements happening at the top of it and there you go. However, „All Time” is not quite like that and instead opts for an opposite approach. Most of the song’s running length is filled with barely anything happening beside that mind-numbing trap/R&B-lite no-beat but when the chorus hits, you might get a lick or two of electric guitar, as that’s apparently what emo kids decided is cool again. That is if you can ever even fucking hear said guitar as every surface of the track is so heavily drenched in hard autotune, trying to focus on anything else may prove to be a real challenge. I’m not always opposed to hard autotune but it requires a sonic context which it fits within, and with how minimalistic this track is otherwise, the autotune just overbears everything else making for a really tedious and annoying listen. It’s actively detrimental to the shy rock elements as well, completely softening the blow the guitars could have maybe provided if they were given any space in the mix. In fact, this song could’ve maybe even benefitted from removing the guitars altogether, as having its uniqueness decreased even further would’ve likely made me skip right over it.

20. Tae Jin Son, Wendy – Be Deep

Okay so me and Red Velvet fans may have historically had somewhat different musical principles but even then, I was surprised that even Joy’s drab cover attempts seemed to gather more of a positive feedback than Wendy’s legitimately good power ballad „Like Water”. A distorted guitar solo away from getting on the higher end of the list, the song did a lot of things most kpop ballads do wrong, right – it had interesting instrument choices, a proper climax and Wendy surprisingly exercised some musicality in it by shutting up when appropriate and mostly sticking to the singing the assigned melody unlike some other supposed SM vocal talents who would undeniably turn it into an unbearable vocal wankfest. It was so unlike anything I expected a solo Wendy release to be that now the existence of „Be Deep”, the 180 quality turn, might just be restoring the balance in the universe. Forget all the good things I said about Wendy’s other track, this one is Generic Kpop Ballad 101 made all the worse by how both of the performers are somewhat above average by Western standards good vocalists so any shot at subtlety is thrown out the window and once you get past the first verse which is just piano (assuming you even make it that far) and hear the strings take over right on the fucking clock, you know shit is about to go down. From then on, the track gets very busy which you may think is impossible for a ballad but when you get two vocals constantly trying to one each other up in how annoying they can be, cellos which try their best to catch up to speed and that damn underlying piano reminding you that we haven’t left kpop ballad territory yet so any excitement is not advisable and you get a really claustrophobic package where everything tries to impress but nothing is actually impressive. And yes, I was sure Wendy’s solo debut would go exactly like this so in the end, I feel even sort of grateful that she was allowed that one decent release before getting dumped off to the doomed fate of her group’s best vocalist.

19. Rocking Doll – Rocking Doll

I always wondered why most publications do their year-end rankings by the end of November or at the beginning of December. It’s always felt incomplete to me no matter how little happens in the entertainment business when everyone either saves their stuff for the upcoming months or, which is the far worse outcome, puts out their variation of the Christmas crap everyone else is doing too. I never noticed the few legitimate December releases get their due in the next-year lists which are supposed to still cover them either. If you’ve ever thought similarly, worry no more. I got you covered and as long as the music came out before Christmas Eve and doesn’t fall into the few excluded categories, it will be included. One could argue it’s not enough time to properly digest it but let’s be real here, how much is there to digest in a track like this. As soon as you hear that painfully cringe „Hey, we’re gonna make you stun RAHR” spoken intro, you know damn Rocking Doll are trying to get all „Blackpink in the area three streets down from yours where all the creepy kids who eat their own snot live” on us. Slow beats, corny rap-talking and a chorus which switches gears for completely no reason because it’s apparently no longer cool to have a song that stays consistent for three damn minutes are to be expected but additionally, it all feels way more cheap than a song like this can get away with. Even when Blackpink put out bullshit, it’s always very well-produced bullshit, „Rocking Doll” on the other hand comes off weak and whimpering, with some of the texture choices coming straight off a free sample pack and the vocals just laying over the top of it all without much of a proper mix. No rocking at all and unfortunately a lot of (plastic) doll – and given the surprising high quality of the music video which definitely had some real money put into it, it has no right to be this way.

18. Raisa, Sam Kim – Someday

If you happen to have ever had the misfortune of studying any microeconomics at all, feel free to skip this part of the post but if you’re a lucky one with no knowledge about it, the consumer-based microeconomics at the core focuses on analysing the person’s preferences and allocates them a basket of goods that provides them the biggest satisfaction given their budget restraints. Although in most cases, the goods are only somewhat interchangeable, there’s a few specific types:

• Supplementary goods – I like Twice’s „Fancy” and „I Can’t Stop Me” roughly the same amount. That means listening to one will give me the same level of satisfaction as listening to the other, meaning I can substitute one listen of „Fancy” with one listen of „I Can’t Stop Me”
• Complimentary goods – if you ever feel like buying a kpop album, you obviously aren’t buying it for the music – you want the packaging and the photocard which come with it. At the same time, you may not want to buy only the photocard. I mean, obviously you can’t be stupid enough to put out $30 for a piece of cardboard, right? That means the kpop album and the photocard are complimentary goods – you only achieve the full level of satisfaction if you have both at the same time.
• Negative goods – the music video for „Maverick” by The Boyz is obviously of very high quality and I like watching it a lot. The song, however, is obviously an abysmal piece of garbage that failed to make this list only due to heavy competition so in this situation, turning the volume up would count as a negative „good” which directly lowers the level of satisfaction.
• „Golden Circle” – I could never really find a good example for this on my own so let me just quote my university professor: „the exact amount of weed, alcohol and Hot Cheetos you need at a party to reach nirvana. Any less and you just feel like shit, any more and you drown in your own vomit”

Basically the point of the Golden Circle is that there is one specific amount of each of the goods in the basket that precisely fills your needs in. In the case of supplementary and complimentary goods, you always want more, in Golden Circle, any amount, less or more, outside the exact point provides a lower level of satisfaction. Whenever I listen to „Someday”, I feel like I found my own Golden Circle. Yes, it is a Golden Circle of shit, but it is one nonetheless. This exact combination of Fender Rhodes, horrible R&B style vocalisations and completely uninspired instrumental choices just so happens to perfectly drive me up the wall – if there was any less of it, I’d probably have a less miserable time and if there was any more, the song would reach such grotesque level of cheese, it would just make me laugh. I don’t think anyone will be quite as annoyed with it as I am… but I am so suck it.

17. Majors – Spit It Out

While everyone else is fighting over whose favourite member of a well-established A-tier group is treated the most poorly, the agencies which lay low is where the often much more shady shit resides, so when a group called ANS debuted and fell apart in a span of half a year, I wasn’t exactly surprised. The various causes behind the disbandment – a member getting bullied and ending up hospitalised, the rest of the group responding with claims it was a point of view difference and re-directing the blame at the company for giving up on them professionally and personally, a further and more detailed read here – didn’t shock me either and frankly, the thing I understand the least is why one of ANS members decided to stick in with the company’s next project instead of getting the fuck out when she could have. I guess the push for that 0.1% chance of success is just that strong. For the record, unless someone read up on the behind the scenes stuff, the only thing that’s going to be different for them is the group name. ANS debuted with a crappy Blackpink clone and Majors debuted with a crappy Blackpink clone too, except this time it’s even worse, as „Spit It Out” also bares a lot of resemblance to Exo’s „Growl”, arguably the most boring kpop non-ballad in existence, because of how maddeningly stagnant it is. That digitally distorted voice serving as the track’s hook is seriously annoying and aside from the pre-chorus trying to be just a little bit of a melodic breather like every song like this tries, it never fucking changes. I counted and even before the first chorus hits, the backing hook appears nine times so you better warm up to it quickly, it’s not going away. Of course everything else about this is just „How You Like That” stripped of the cool off-kilter keyboard riff, the melodic smarts and the insanely high value production and surely no one was listening to that song for the goofy sloganeering and corny raps. It’s really a shame these poor girls were entangled into it but don’t worry, if the label operates as well as it has been, they’re going to all get fired by next month.

16. Keith Ape, Okasian – Orca Walk

Five Nights at Freddy’s was at the time a unique game concept that caught on due to its simplicity and due to how we collectively react to jumpscares – we know they’re coming yet we just can’t look away. In terms of pure gameplay, it was honestly just pretty boring, making the player routinely perform the same three or four tasks and if they did it properly and happened not to run out of the provided power, the reward was… not getting a jumpscare which, back to square one, was the game’s main appeal in the first place. I probably wouldn’t have thought of it twice if it hadn’t impacted the horror game community. Now everyone wanted to have their own game with minimal gameplay and maximum loud sounds assaulting your eardrums, and one of those games was Baldi’s Basics in Education and Learning. While the player was certainly more mobile in it than Five Nights at Freddy’s, it was hardly any more interesting and mostly stood out because of how just plain horrid the graphics were. Aside from the 3D models, all of it is pulled straight from MS Paint, the old version (not like anyone wants to use the new one anyway) and as much as I’d love to believe the creators were just taking the piss over how many thoughtless Freddy’s rip-offs were coming out, the game built up a bit of a fanbase. Said fanbase seemingly includes Keith Ape and Okasian who for some reason use the awful graphics of the game as the music video with the only changes being setting the colours to negative and inserting themselves into it, which are both visual downgrades. Furthermore, they even sample some of the game sounds, as well as sounds of the titular orca, in it and while those don’t really equal to much beyond just existing in the recording, they’re also probably the best part of it. The rest is as mindless as this type of yolo rap gets and come to think of it, the Baldi’s Basics may have been a very deliberate choice, as that’s possibly the only visual accompaniment which is uglier than what it sounds like.

15. Flat Earth Society – Breaking News

When I moved into a flat together with a guy from my high school during my first year of uni, I knew it could be a peculiar time since that was after all a peculiar individual but actually, most of the time we just went on with our days with little interaction, despite generally liking each other. Sure, he spent about three months moving objects around the house trying to convince me there’s a ghost haunting us which, looking back, was a little messed up as the neighbour living two floors below us passed away at the beginning of the year, and he did try his best to embarrass me in front of our landlord, but he was cool other than that so you may imagine I was more than a little surprised to find out he joined a flat Earth support group on Facebook. After showing me a couple of posts of his, it quickly turned out he was just a troll, an artform that was already on its deathbed in 2017, but I guess there’s worse people to troll than flat earthers who seemed like a genuinely sweet bunch… even if completely dumb and misguided. Maybe they were all trolls like him or maybe they truly believed in every word you said, even ones directly against their rights, as long as you added a disclaimer that you’re definitely 100% a flat earther as well. These guys right here probably belong to the latter group now that I think of it and if I called up my roommate right now and he told me he talked them into creating a trap song where all of the halftime drum machine was replaced by weird glitch sounds, I would probably just nod like he told me something as trivial as how it’s snowing outside as I’m writing this. This idea actually is not that terrible on paper, and there’s artists all over the world who’s made some great songs based on various noises and seemingly grating sounds, but for that to work, you need to either have great melodic foundation that will sort of cancel out the abrasiveness or lay all-in on the abrasiveness which also requires different kinds of sonic textures. Flat Earth Society do neither of those things and instead their rap just clashes with the cacophony of sounds in the background in a really unpleasant way which might match the horrible „intentionally ugly” video but absolutely does not match to anything anyone would want to listen to. The best part of the song is when everything stops and the sound of Windows XP shutting off starts playing, as that gives you a hint it’s finally over but unfortunately, a moment later it picks back up.

14. Dakshood, Tommy Yang – Hi*Draulic5

Bashing Tiktok musicians is at this point beating a dead horse so I’m going to add my three cents as well. That said, my opinion may be a little different from the general, as I do believe it’s had some positive aspects to it so let’s start with that. Although rarely in practise, in theory Tiktok is a great opportunity for young creators to publish their stuff in a short, eye-grabbing format, if they were lucky, there would be a funny clip to go along with it too. That’s genuinely fine, the music industry was and continues to be practically entirely controlled by big label executives, and Tiktok somewhat changes the playing field on what can become successful and allows people to make their own listening choices in place of getting force-fed with radio fodder like what has been happening for decades. The problem arises in that when you’re a kid, you’re almost certainly extremely damn stupid and are going to regret the choices you’ve made in two years. Paired with how writing a good pop song is a very hard challenge which is constantly underestimated and we’re left with maybe one acceptable Tiktok music entry per every 23971 boring worthless fillers. In case you couldn’t tell from the title, „Hi*Draulic5” firmly belongs in the latter group and I’d argue it’s even worse than most of what’s come out of Tiktok, as those tracks usually at least have those 10 seconds which get stuck in your head cause no one wants to do a challenge to something that irreversibly sucks. This doesn’t even have that, it’s just all the cringe from having to watch a guy with really terrible tattoos all over him trying to act tough over the weakest whimpering no-beat in the sample pack. There’s some guitar in here but I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t notice under the thick layer of listlessness on top of it. Keep trying, boys, perhaps a „Build a Bitch” is within your reach even though it probably isn’t.

13. Ian Ka$h, Sway D, Kor Kash – Outta Here

Year by year, this list could frankly be only rap songs as even if the worst idol tracks are often worse than the worst rap tracks, there’s always something very clearly wrong with them that can be identified and re-worked into something listenable, even if still not exactly good. On the other hand, most of k-hip hop is just so sluggish and boring in a way that I can’t even constructively criticise, with some of this music I really have to grasp at straws. Probably says enough that the thing that caught most of my attention here is that this guy decided that naming himself „Kash” may be a little lost on the less observant of us so out of his utter thoughtfulness, he also replaced the S with a dollar sign. What a considerate man, really, even though if I were a musician, I would probably try to appeal to a fanbase that doesn’t most likely overlap with the people who yelled for weeks straight about how Squid Game was an anti-capitalist manifest when most of them would probably never realise unless (spoilers ahead, not that anyone cares months after everyone’s watched it anyway) the old dude explicitly laid out how „the rich have it as bad as the poor, that’s why we fucked you over”. And yes, that is all me rambling about something as insignificant as a stage name but the music has roughly equal amounts of depth with that worthless repetitive synth making up most of the backing track that couldn’t carry even the most skilled rap performance and the grunting, whining and other guttural sounds emitted here by fuck knows which of the three performers doesn’t quite cut it as one. Better luck next time and I suppose if you want Mor Kash, you’d have better luck Swaying your D. Ex dee.

12. SMTown – Hope

Dear Uncle,

Thank you for your last letter which I didn’t even bother to read so I’m just going to pretend it was very sweet and nice. Life in LA has been slowly getting better, I think. Covid has truly been kicking my ass but I found it had some unexpected positive sides, namely I no longer have to participate in moronic shows catered to idiots with the brain capacity of a three-year-old and act like a disgusting three-year-old myself despite being fucking 30 and I’m finally free of interacting with my reeking fans in person and I’m just constantly so sad that I can’t bring more joy to all the wonderful people who have supported me throughout the last decade, including all of my dear eight seven co-workers sisters. I heard you had some problems yourself as well, with that cold-hearted bitch Irene who I definitely have never had any issue with at all myself, Giselle letting out her Asian babygirl loose whom I can’t wait to ignore for the rest of my life get to know better and that fucking annoying STD superspreader Lucas whom I know must have had a difficult time due to being just so utterly hopeless Chinese, we all know the tensions between them and us Koreans. I’ve been thinking of ways to improve your current public image and I can’t believe I’m saying that but you’re probably doing as well as you can cause all our fans are fucktards who don’t actually want any of us to get real as that would mean getting to know our real feelings and opinions and not what they’d like to assume are our real feelings and opinions so they just keep this thinnest façade of pretending to care whereas in reality, they’re happy as fuck the industry doesn’t allow us to take a shit if the timing isn’t right and I’m sure this extremely worryingly fake and irritating charity or whatever the fuck this is song where we can’t even pretend we tolerate standing next to one another for 5 minutes as it’s all filmed separately show how close and united we truly all are will only benefit your bottomless pocket cause there’s always going to be some creep or two who are going to skip showers just to stream this sack of shit our public stance, just how lovely is that! I’m very happy I’m kinda past my prime so you didn’t bother to get my ass to board the next plane and do that dead-eyes smile I perfected over the years for any more than necessary, maybe you’re not so bad sad I couldn’t be a part of this heinous project, I sincerely hope I get to do the same one next year.

Best regards,

Sunny

11. Niziu – Chopstick

I’m generally pretty flexible as to what constitutes as kpop for the list’s purposes – there’s quite a decent amount of good music coming out of Korea that isn’t necessarily idol pop and hardly anyone covers it in any capacity. What you need to qualify is basically just being somewhat related to the Korean music industry in any way, that’s why everyone from underground rappers and bands without a big label backing to idol groups releasing songs in other languages meant for a more international appeal and artists who moved on to different markets but used to have kpop ties are all eligible. Having said that, including Niziu is really stretching even my highly liberal definition, as the group doesn’t have any Korean members as far as I know and they perform exclusively in Japanese specifically for the Japanese market. Yes, they might be entirely managed by JYP, undeniably a kpop company, and their debut song is pretty much just an elaborate joke about how there’s three hundred kpop songs better than it that you could be listening to instead but frankly, those aren’t very convincing arguments. However, then „Chopstick” came out and everything became clear to me – I simply had to make room for it. Who’s going to tell these people off otherwise? Interestingly, if you’ve ever taken up any piano lessons, you’re probably already more or less familiar with this song, as the main melody of it is just the chopsticks piano exercise for children. Of course, as it’s beginner level, it can’t be anything too complex and I suppose that’s fine when you’re practising but when you’re extending this really quite annoying motif that overstays its welcome by nearly the entire length into a full length pop track, you know you’re probably not in for the most exciting of times. Frankly, I don’t think the ever-persistent melody could be salvaged in any way and it surely isn’t salvaged here, where it’s actually the highlight – the vocals on top are just the usual randomness that’s equal amounts boring and annoying and placed against the piano line which moves in too repetitive patterns creates a bizarre package which is not stagnant enough to leave the listener completely mind-numbed but just stagnant enough to irritate the shit of me. And even then, the worst thing about it is honestly that just for the sake of consistency, me putting this shit song on the list means I will have to spend the next 12 months checking out what Niziu decide to terrorise us with next.

10. Hi Cutie – Gray Area

By definition, a gray area is „an ill-defined situation or area of activity not readily conforming to a category or set of rules” which means the contestant of the local Who Wants to Be a Millionaire completely seriously saying she’s never been to one isn’t exactly the smartest of comments. Kind of an ill-advised title for this song, honestly – the set the music video was shot at is actually very popular with nugu groups, try to keep up with the lesser known releases for the next few months and you may be surprised how many more times you get to see it. So renting it has to be a completely legal activity, right? On the other hand, recording and then even releasing music which sounds like that might not be punishable by law but certainly should be. I actually really do not like putting groups with clearly very little luck on the low tail-end of the rank as being an unfortunate, poor musician is just as crappy as it seems but once that overbearing brass instrument takes a huge dump over this tedious even without it melodic foundation I really have no choice. I feel like the intention was for this track to be a little of ska and the singing has a bit of a Latin flavour to it and both seem like deliberate choices rather than accidents but nothing in this song is properly done nor fits together with anything else so in the end it seems more like a poor parody of those genres without a punchline to go along with it. Just a painful listen through and through, even the dull, blues-based „Little Witch” released after this song was a huge improvement and since the girls were even able to afford to go on music shows with that one, let’s hope that’s a sign for better things to come for and from them.

9. Rekstizzy, Jay Park – Fake Laugh

And they were not lying.

8. Zior Park – Black Fin

I’m a generally a really quite non-assertive person and if you catch me on the street and beg for money, I probably won’t take much to give in. That said, if you still put in some effort to play on my emotions or just simply interest me, I will feel less reluctant to help. One day, the latter happened and when I got out of the underground, I was approached to a goofy little guy who tried his best to engage me, asked me if I’d played the guitar (I did not) and if I’d been listening to metal at the time (I was). Of course, it couldn’t have been just a stranger’s curiosity so after some small talk, he did ask for money, but alongside offered me a copy of his… literary work. I took it cause why the hell no, I paid for it after all. I kept it in my backpack until a couple days later when I finally remembered to read it and what I’ve got was a blatant rip-off of the first Saw movie written entirely in a dialogue form which made it impossible to insert all the interesting flashback stuff into it, and the entire thing had a lot more cheap dramatics in it. What a scam, isn’t it. Although I have never purchased any item by Zior Park nor do I ever intend to, listening to „Black Fin” leaves with me with the exact same feeling now. A few brass rotating brass notes, complete lack of catchiness, terrible raps, a whole damn lot of cultural cringe. If that seems familiar to you from this very post, then bingo – „Black Fin” is basically just Lisa’s „Money” played at a much lower speed and performed by someone far less attractive than Lisa, and those were the only two aspects of „Money” which didn’t suck. Of course, it’s not even possible that Zior Park plagiarised Lisa’s work as his song came out a couple months earlier but once I made the connection, I could never rid myself of it. There’s a lot of trends which repeat on my lists yearly but rarely do two versions of nearly the exact same idea slip through the cracks. I suppose that’s about as close to a victory as Zior Park is ever getting.

7. Enhypen – Hey Tayo

Oh My Girl sure are a cool group with some good songs released 84 years ago but once we’re done executing Blackpink for making the kpop sphere shit for everybody else, Oh My Girl should come next on the chopping block. „Banana Allergy Monkey” was silly and annoying but it was a cool video game-sounding track at the same time which we really should’ve taken way more seriously than we did back then. As it stands, it was a sign of the impending doom, the newfound genre of children TV theme idol pop where everything is meaningless, dumb and devoid of any qualities a well-adjusted adult (and a well-adjust child, to be fair) would want from their music. Oh My Girl themselves were actually the biggest victim of their own curse becoming a kids party act almost full-time but the bad seed was carried over everywhere else and Enhypen happened to pull the shortest end of the stick in 2021, releasing not one but two completely worthless songs about some hideous animated truck. Unlike „Billy Poco”, „Hey Tayo” tries to be proper music and weirdly ends up all the worse because of that. The nursery rhyme melody in the chorus would probably drive anybody up the wall if repeated enough times and boy, are they on track to accomplish that – even though the song is not even 2 minutes long, the chorus repeats four times, with half of those repetitions changing key which I suppose was a last-minute effort to make you feel slightly less like a time-wasting idiot. There’s some funky guitar in here but if you’re expecting it to play anything even the least bit interesting, you might be disappointed. And if you’re wondering why Loona, who also had two kids songs out this year, managed to escape my lashings, I actually do have solid reasons – once you get past the terrifying presentation of „Yummy Yummy”, it has some pretty solid doo-wop concessions making it far less musically unbearable and „Yum Yum” becomes a different sort of entertaining when you just focus on how much Kim Lip is suffering throughout the entirety of its music video. No such saving graces here. Not only is the music entirely pointless, the boys also look very much into it for some reason.

6. DBO – Who U

Rap is a fun genre as you don’t need any level of music theory knowledge to create it. That is also its biggest downfall because when you really don’t have any skill in that regard, there’s a good chance the result of your work is about to be shit out of ass. In a way, it also negatively impacts consistency – when a rapper with hardly any musical background hits gold, you should expect them to fuck their next attempt up and much in the same vein, someone who’s consistently sucked prior might out of the blue come up with something cool and catchy. With that in mind, DBO was one of the few I fully believed would never create anything of worth. Just a gut feeling, you know? To an extent fuelled by how his highest artistic achievement up to this point was an epic music video joke where it looks as though he’s getting a blowjob where in fact, he and his one night stand are actually playing phone games. Truly inspiring. Therefore, I was really quite surprised when „Who U” opened up not with the fully expected trap drum machine nonsense but instead with some pleasant piano. Piano is an instrument which is heavily underutilised in rap music both by the talentless rappers who either feel like they don’t need any instruments at all or just can’t figure out how to program their keyboards properly and those who got us used to putting out something worthwhile every once in a while. I guess for the latter it’s because it can easily soften a hard beat which is something I’d avoid doing as a rapper too but a carefully implemented piano melody could truly enhance a rap track. Just take a listen to Giriboy’s and Seori’s „That’s How We Ended Up”, a rare case of slow, understated hip hop which still has enough of a rhythmic grounding to pack a punch. The intro to „Who U” gave me hope I was about to hear something of similar quality and if not that, at least something which doesn’t outright blow.

Then I hit the 0:12 mark and all balance in the universe got restored.

5. Rad Museum, Wonstein – AirDrop

There’s a bunch of things I’m embarrassed about in my life, a lot of which are just small insignificant details which just so happened to stick with me over the years, others are things that are a bit more serious and at the time were the result of misguided decisions out of sheer stupidity or particular conditions in which they were made, but one that truly cannot be forgiven nor forgotten under any circumstances is that I missed becoming a theatre kid by a hair. Our middle school had a small drama club and since they were in dire need of any male joining and one of my best friends – who also started to actively avoid me just a month later to add insult to injury – who was among the performers had bugged me to try it for a while. Unsurprisingly to anyone involved, I was a complete failure of an actor which frankly was a blessing in disguise cause I can’t even imagine how much more I annoying I would have become, and that very first meeting firmly cemented that I would never return. Although not quite the worst of all the exercises I was made to do there, the one which has stuck with me the most was one where out of nowhere we were told to perform an expressive „lifetime of a flower” dance to the prepared music. I’m not sure what ability we were getting evaluated on during that but I do remember the music was some really brainless and repetitive piano tickling paired with a drunken voice of the group leader talking us through that. Although „AirDrop” is honestly an overall superior listening experience, it sucks for very much the same set of reasons and on top of that, the only other guy who attended the practise with me had a hairstyle largely resembling Rad Museum’s. It’s just such a personal track to me now – not only does it suck a thousand cocks by itself but it also evokes one of the dark aspects of my life that I would like to bury as much as relaying the entire experience to all of my readers allows me to bury it. Fuck that.

4. Never Sober Son – Thanks Thank

Bad music usually falls into one or more of these three groups: songs which aren’t inherently awful ideas but fail on an execution level, songs which are just plain dull and wouldn’t work no matter how hard you tried to re-work them and songs which are so goofy they just make me laugh, against the author’s intentions. Then there’s also shit like this, which to an extent falls into all three, but above all just leaves me speechless. And it’s not actually speechless in a „wow, this is so horrible I can’t even find the words to describe it” kind of way – although it isn’t that far off, either – as for that to happen, it would have to possess a quality for me to latch onto and evaluate. This one does not. I sat to write this description a bunch of times using different approaches, some more humoristic like the Choa one, other times trying to come up with another of my boring life stories no one actually wants to read, and none of them seemed to work out how I wanted them to, as when it came to connecting them to the track at hand, my mind was going blank. This song is nothing, there is no melodic or harmonic variation in it because there’s no melody or harmony in it in the first place, there is no actual rap because a rap requires some sort of flow, there’s hardly any instruments at all around the thudding bass that if you heard approximately three seconds of, you heard all there is to it. It’s such an odd situation where I should hate this song, as it is fundamentally wrong on just about every level and stands for everything I dislike in music, but I find it hard to care about it in any way because of just how empty it is in the end. And that might be worse – how often have you heard someone say „so average, it’s good”?

3. Rumble-G – Roopretelcham

If you are a human being and have been alive for any period of time over the past 20 years, you have heard that extremely intelligent joke about authors giving their characters blue curtains. Yes, it may have been funny when it was first said, it definitely was not the next 131042 times you read it online, but it’s only recently come to my attention how much damaging impact it’s had on younger kids who now consume content with zero understanding of its context clues and metaphors which aren’t blatantly laid out (cue in Squid Game once more) and as moronic as I feel typing it out, it carried onto kpop audiences as well. I’m not even talking about the ridiculous stuff like the Loona lore which largely actually has little meaning but has been so expertly pulled together, it now has fans filling in all the holes themselves, but many of the regular kpop songs which may seem all cute and nice at first glance, have some sort of a more or less hidden second meaning. However, when the guitar gets thrown at the ground from a height of maybe 10 centimetres in „Roopretelcham”, that’s only because the agency is clearly too poor to handle instruments any more carelessly and when the camera zooms in way too close on the members’ faces, it’s only because no one in the editing team had a fucking clue. The entire package here is almost as if made by one of the people who don’t understand or don’t want to understand context and take everything at face value and while I wouldn’t particularly care if it only extended onto the visual side, it is a huge problem on a musical level. The track might have all the things any other high-tier kpop track has – a corny English intro, unnecessary rap verse, driving riff (here played on a flute and then repeated by a synth), a token high note etc. – but whoever had the final say evidently had no idea how to put any of those things together in a way that makes sense. Add just utmost incompetence of the production team which couldn’t even apply any vocal processing properly – or maybe they did, in which case however, they didn’t do it anywhere near enough – and you’re left with a song which might not be the worst of the year in terms of sheer „unlistenability” but effortlessly beats out all the competition solely due to how poor it is on a technical understanding level.

2. YDG – That G

I think I can speak for everyone on planet Earth when I say „Covid” is the #1 on the list of the things which annoy us the most. Unlike most other aspects of life, the c-word has more or less drastically changed the lives of all of us and aside from small bullshit, like an exam getting postponed and then conducted online giving you the only window to actually pass it, clap if you’ve also been there, it’s all been heavily negative. It’s become such a norm in our existence that some of the news concerning it barely even register in my mind anymore but whenever I make the conscious decision to actually think of the horrible failures of governments all around to keep the pandemic under control, it’s not very easy to remain calm. So yeah, that’s a no-brainer but if I were to ask what the #2 on such list would be, I imagine the answers would vary greatly. It’s honestly an involved question I would have to give some thought myself but one of the things I would consider in almost an instant is kids. I’m very much aware it’s not really their fault that they’re disgusting, loud and overbearing monsters who exist for the first couple of years solely to drain all the energy out of their parents and then grow up to become slightly older kids who will then find other ways to make the lives of the adults and other children around them even hell, this time in a more conscious manner – but that’s what they are and I don’t see myself changing that viewpoint at least until I find myself having a child of my own and suddenly see what everyone else does, which is a genuinely frightening concept to say the least. Taking all that into consideration, you can just imagine how ecstatic I would be to hear a group of children yell out every. damn. last. word. and have all of those words be some crappy sloganeering about how Corona needs to go away. Trust me – we know that, we all think that. We truly do not to hear more about and especially not when it comes in the form of my personal hell. The only reason why this did not become the #1 by a country mile is that when in the last third of the track, the children mercifully shut the hell up and some guy starts rapping instead, it magically gets just a little bit better but it’s all too little too late to save the rest of it from itself.

—

You might wonder „what could possibly beat That G out? No way something even worse came out all year”.

I assure you will reflect in just about 3 minutes.

1. Eternity – I’m Real

When SM Entertainment announced their newest girlgroup Aespa would be a bizarre hybrid where half of the members would be AI avatars, it understandably raised some concerns but count on kpop stans to worry about all the wrong stuff. „But what if the computer members sing more than the real ones”, asked Jane from Kentucky who thinks human worth is decided by the time they’re allowed to sing for. As it turned out, the avatars were nothing more than a gimmick which not even SM staff seems to know how to utilise effectively reducing their importance to a 3-second cameo in every the group’s music videos. The problem were never Aespa themselves who would be fine, or I suppose as fine as a person under SM’s rigorous and hardly humane gaze can ever be, the discussion in the air was how much the experiment would influence others to follow and how much of the human element can be removed for people to still feel secure consuming other kpop content. As it seems, it took way shorter than I would ever anticipate to find the answer.

Just a couple months after Aespa’s debut, the formation of Eternity, a group entirely made out of avatars was announced. I was sceptical of how good it would look, after all, even the digital Aespa members look beyond awful half of the time, and few agencies possess the money that SM Entertainment has. However, the final result far exceeded my expectations of how bad it would be, as the „digital idols” in Eternity are in fact real people whose real faces (which I’m assuming aren’t pretty enough according to the company’s standards) have been blurred out and replaced with digitally created eyes and mouths. Pretty fucking creepy as a bare idea and then you see the execution and how the eyes never really move and never look directly at the camera, staring far away into the distance and how unnatural all the head movements are, and it goes completely off the rails and into the uncanny valley territory and if that was enough to deter you from evaluating the music in its own right, then that’s more than understandable. That’s where I come into play.

The biggest issue with „I’m Real” comes from the fact that not only is its visual side supposed to be entirely digitalised – that extends onto the musical content. A robot wrote the song and a robot performed the song. Let’s focus on the latter first. An important quality of a human voice which firmly differs it from computer-generated speech is a dynamic range. When you speak, you use different intonation depending on what emotion you want to convey or what the nature of the sentence you’re speaking out is, whether it’s a question or an exclamation. Point is, it doesn’t stay the same, you constantly alter your speech even if you do it subconsciously, and that is also how a pop song is sung. Never is one entirely chanted, rapped or sung in a very high register and when it is, it wears off very quickly. Now consider this – a computer-generated voice does not have a dynamic range at all. As it’s initially programmed, that’s how it’s going to sound all the way through. That’s what makes listening to „I’m Real” just as uncomfortable as looking at it. Hearing the voice stay in the exact same tone and frequency for the entirety of the song’s length is unsettling and not the kind of unsettled you want to be and when it’s not unsettling, it’s just plain exhausting to hear. For this sort of approach to work, the backing track would have to match up to the weirdness to maximise the mind fuckery but what the computer is given to sing is a fairly standard pop song that coincidentally was also written by a computer. Leaving the songwriting aspect to the machine is a double-edged sword, as computers have unlimited analytic abilities, meaning with the access to the countless songs released ever since people decided to record their music they can match up to what chord progressions worked as per music theory. On the other hand, though, songwriting is still an art where the human element takes the upper hand, and all the digitally-birthed songs I heard up to this point have been competent and entirely devoid of any quirks that would push them above and beyond. It seems as though the computer in „I’m Real” was explicitly instructed to create a song as confusing as a lot of human-penned kpop was in 2021, meaning tempo and mood changes galore, sticking by one chord for way too long before throwing it out the window by the time the next track’s next section comes and having the harmony completely messed up by haphazardly adding and subtracting from it at any given time. There’s even a guitar solo in here which amounts to nothing as it appears completely out of the blue and has no relation to anything else going on. Listening to this is seriously disorienting and it’s cool not to know what’s happening sometimes but I really highly doubt it was anyone’s intention to create something so utterly bizarre to its core.

Let’s make sure we enter 2022 with this disastrous experiment in mind – just so we never make this mistake again.