Which is all just a long-winded way of saying I'm going to do a link dump on you rather than write something longer. Maybe you're grateful?
- If you are interested in music discovery across both genre and geography, you could do worse than keeping up with Ted Gioia. Here are his music recommendations so far this year. You can search his website for past years. Note these are not links to the popular streaming services, which I believe he abhors. You have to search for the artist title on the service of your choice if you want to stream and often they are not available. For the musically curious, it's worth the effort.
- I don't know where I stumbled on the BabelColour twitter feed, by Stuart Humpheys, but it's astounding. If you're not on twitter, congratulations! Here is his portfolio on Insta. This fellow takes century-old color photos -- yes there are many such things -- that have flaws and blemishes and blurs and generally washed out colors, and he restores them, but does not colorize them. The colors are original, just enhanced. I am amazed how much this editing turns the subjects of these photos from relics into real living people.
Maybe it's just me, but old photos in black & white or weak color leave me feeling that the past was two dimensional or incompletely drawn; as if the people in the pictures were simple constructs instead of actual human beings with full lives, this in turn leaves me feeling unrelated to the past instead of a product of it. This sensation is probably worthy of a full essay if I can ever sort my feelings about it out. In any event, check out Stuart's work.
K-Pop is Korean Pop Music. It is a huge thing in many Asian countries, both as music and as culture. It consists of either all male or all female groups, all members in their early twenties and all members looking like fashion models. None of them play instruments. If you remember the boy bands of the nineties, their personas are something like that, although the band members are more numerous, some over a dozen. The music is a pastiche of hip-hop, pop, dubstep. Dormin takes a deep dive into it.
The whole musical experience is corporation manufactured -- that is to say, as the article points out, there is no pretense of authenticity. The article also points to a dark side -- financial (and possibly sexual) exploitation of the young. Although financial exploitation is pretty standard in the music industry, not specific to k-pop. Sexual exploitation, or at least the appearance of sexual exploitation, is pretty common in the entertainment world, as we have seen -- again, not specific to k-pop. The kids are worked hard, physically hard, through years of tryouts and auditions and competitions to finally get in a group, but probably no harder than any athletes or dancers have to work to reach the top of their profession. The upshot is that the accusations of exploitation need to be considered in the context of the wider world. Still it's a fascinating look into one particularly successful corner of the music industry. I admit some of the videos are very striking. I can see why tweens and teens would go for it. I probably would too, just like I fell for the Monkees as a child.
