K-Pop

Korea has its own style of popular music, loosely modeled on American pop music circa 2000-2004.....even moreso than North American tastes, K-Pop is a type of marketing system that is transfixed almost entirely on hair style and aesthetic fashion.....porcelain, chiseled faces, caustic androgyny, and hair styles that require hours and incalculable quantities of hair products, are perfect for establishing a new idol in this genre.....instructing said inductee in any number of simple, yet wholly ridiculous dance routines and lip-sync-ing exercises becomes an easy matter once these basic properties have been established.....there are several popular 'artists' who a listener can, with little effort, realize that the notes his or her voice is straining to hit are anywhere from about 5 tones to an entire octave out of this person's comfortable singing range.....the result is a sound not unlike a gerbil whizzing through a garbage disposal in a wind tunnel.....and listening to it feels like being hit in the head with a hammer for about 5 minutes

that being said, norae bangs (karaoke music rooms) have spawned an entire generation of Koreans who possess fabulous singing voices.....unfortunately, they are not as marketable as the melodramatic plastic idols found pervading K-Pop.....and so one routinely cringes at the mere suggestion of Korean radio play, remembering that garberated gerbils have little talent for music performance