nanoomi

After a bagillion votes and shares and tweets and comments, B.A.P.’s “Power” came out as the top ranked video of the week. Check it out if you haven’t already:

For starters, we know that this is a shorter video than usual. Our Music Mondays can get to be quite long. Today, we kept it short because, well, we’re both pretty damned sick. Martina can’t even speak. Kinda hard to do a speaking show if you can’t speak. We sure couldn’t skip this, though! You all voted insanely, and if we didn’t do a Music Monday it sure wouldn’t stand a chance next week when video decay on the charts kicks in strongly. So we made a compromise: kept the video shorter, but hopefully still entertaining. We’d like to have Kpop Music Mondays this length, we think. Keeps it snappier, no? Let us know what you think: if it’s too short or if it’s alright

Anyhow, with a shorter video, the results are lots of ideas that get cut out. We were planning on talking about the crash scene. Something we found interesting about the video: from our understanding, B.A.P. is playing off their whole alien shtick, in which they say they’re otherworldly, which explains the spaceship crashed in the desert. What we want to know is this: which one of them was the one driving it, because they are soooooo gonna be grounded. You gotta be, like, at least 37,000 years old to get your UFO driver’s permit, which means someone here took their mom’s alien minivan for a joyride. Our guess: it was Zelo. That guy looks like nothing but trouble. We were gonna do a skit about this but naahhhhhh. We’re barely functioning as is

Otherwise, we announced in this video that we’d be giving away the new B.A.P. Power album along with their poster. Yay! We said it’d be for our YouTube subscribers to leave their answers in the comments, but we’re also leaving this blog post open for comments, but you need to leave your YouTube username in the comment so we can check if you’re subscribed, obviously . So, feel free to let us know what you think B.A.P. is spraying. Or, if you feel your chances are better on Facebook, do so on ourFacebook Page’s Contest Thread. Yay!

If you’re not the luckiest person out there, but you still want the album, you can pick it up either via iTunes or YesAsia. Huzzah! Or, if you’d rather skip those two and just get our awesome Shower rendition instead, you can check it out here:

Lastly, if you’re interested in checking out the bloopers and the mass amount of difficulty which Martina’s lack of voice caused, or if you’re looking to see who won theU-Kiss “Doradora” giveaway, this video’s for you!

For the original post on B.A.P. – Power: Kpop Music Mondays, or for our kpop andKorean Food videos, check out our Korea blog!

This week’s K-Crunch Indie Playlist is a special edition in lieu of the South by South West concert happening in Austin, Texas next week. The reason why this is important is because a few Korean Indie bands are playing at the festival, so we thought it would be perfect timing to talk about them!

A lot of people who move to Korean and aren’t into kpop feel frustrated and claim that Korea has no good music. It is really unfair to say that, since Korea has tons of talented musicians that play almost every genre of music, but it’s still true that it’s not easily accessible, partly because Cyworld, Naver, and Daum (the Korean search engines and blog sites) aren’t open to be browsed by outsiders. Search for a wildly popular K-indie band and you’ll get like five good hits on Google, and those hits are often not even related to the band’s real website. On top of that, the radio is pretty much dominated by either trot music (new and old) or kpop (new and old) but there isn’t really K-rock or less popular Korean hip-hop playing. Even when you go to coffee shops, they play English speaking jazz or an easy listening cover of classic Top 40 songs. I always imagined that when I came to Korea I would hear Korean jazz and Korean Top 40 hits, but I was very mistaken.

That’s why I’m so happy for YouTube! It has really opened up Korean music to the rest of the world. I can search korean rock music and get a bunch of random bands, even fan cams of these bands playing in Hongdae. But still, a lot of these bands don’t have their own page nor have they added tags with their names in Korean and English to help in being found. Unless you’re music geeks, like us, who love to actively seek out new music all the time through browsing other nerdy music websites (like Pitchfork or Korean Indie) it’s pretty tough to discover Korean music outside of kpop. I’m hoping this will change over time, and more people will be blogging about their favourite Korean indie bands that they found easily on iTunes, myspace, and wherever.

Ok, enough of that. This week we have a special playlist for the Korean Indie bands playing in South by South West. Hopefully they’ll get boatloads of recognition, come back to Korea praised as gods, and crack open the mainstream to get some K Rock in there. YES! Well, maybe that won’t happen, and maybe you’re not into K-Rock that much, but we don’t talk about it all too often. So…yeah! On with the videos! Check out the videos in the playlist above, or check them out below, if your playlist won’t work!

3rd Line Butterfly - A Heavy Night Fog

Galaxy Express – Jungle The Black

Bonus: Check out their super fun Noraebang version here.

Yellow Monsters – Riot!

Crying Nut – 말달리자

For the original post on K Crunch Indie Playlist: the SXSW Edition!, or for our kpop and Korean Food videos, check out our Korea blog!

1) The Pony “Goodbye”

Hands down, our favorite song on the list. There’s something so…Lost in Translation-ish about it. Not that you get the feeling of being lost in translation. It just sounds like a perfect fit for that movie (or for a similar movie). Not sure what it is. Probably because Kevin Shields has some tracks on the Lost in Translation soundtrack, and this song does remind us of My Bloody Valentine a bit. Well, whatever it is, this song is totally awesome. Hopefully you like it as much as we do. You can read more about them over at Korean Indie, and check out some of their live performances there (one of which was at Club FF, which – if we didn’t mention it by now – we love)

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It’s time for the Indie Playlist for the week of February 26th 2012. We got rock, ballads, and acoustic guitars.

1) OKPUNK – Not the End

We’re starting with OKPUNK which sounds like they should be a punk band but they’re not…but now that I think about it, I suppose Daft Punk is also not a punk band. Anyways, this band is a kind of TV project which puts an actress named Kim Ok Vin as the lead singer of a rock band. The band is made up of famous indie musicians that already have successful bands. We got GoGo Star vocalist Lee Tae Sun (bass), The KOXX vocalist Hyunsong (guitar), Devin of N.EX.T and Dr.Core911 (guitar), Toxic‘s Kim Seul Ong (drums) and Kim Hyun Woo of Dick Punks (keyboard). While I’m really happy to see these epic indie musicians getting an awesome chance to advertise their skills and thus promote their own bands, the lead singer of OKPUNK just doesn’t do it for us, and yes, I know she isn’t a trained singer, but considering the vast amount of good singers out there in Korea who aren’t getting exposure, I just can’t grasp the concept of the show. Put an actress who likes punk as the lead singer of a super talented band and watch her flail? Simon likes basketball, but that doesn’t mean they should put him on an NBA all star team and film him get crushed by Jeremy Lin. We all know that Kim Ok Vin is not a trained singer, and I suppose that is the point of the TV program (but why?) Read the full story

Let’s start by saying that we totally want to hang out with these guys. We found out about them via an MTV article about them, and we fell in love with their stuff instantly. Bought their album on iTunes, watched a bunch of their videos, and knew that we’d have to talk about them for K Crunch. This song, 12:00, is a lot different than another one of our favourite songs by them, Troublemaker, but both songs are rock your socks awesome. Side note: we sometimes go dancing at the club they’re playing at in the Troublemaker video: Club FF. Read the full story

JYP!

THIS IS JYP!

HAY I’M JYP AND I PRODUCED THIS SONG! JAAAAAYYYYYY WHYYYYYYY PEEEEEEEE!

Ok JYP. Enough already. We’re not suggesting that you’re ruining your songs by saying your name at the beginning of them, but we are suggesting that this kinda needs to stop. It’s not really adding anything to the songs. If you didn’t include your name in it, doubt anybody would be like “hey, you know, this was a great song, but I just couldn’t get into it because I didn’t have the producer whisper his name at the beginning of the song.” Bah! We know that it’s not for the benefit of the song that you’re including your name though. Yes, branding is important, we know, we know, for business, yada yada. For music, though…helllllll it gets annoying. JAY WHY PEE! Read the full story

In case you didn’t know, we were recently in Toronto for three weeks for our summer vacation. Oh, how we missed Canada! Funny thing is, when we were in Canada, we missed Korea as well. We felt kinda homesick, in a reverse homesick kinda twisted way. Luckily for us, since we were in Toronto there were two different Koreatowns for us to visit to get our fix for Korean culture.

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Since we got our new camera, we feel artsy-fartsy every once in a while, like you can see in our ajosshis video a little while back. Today’s another one of those days that we feel artsy. We were inspired by the scene in “Lost in Translation” when Bill Murray and Scarlett Johannson are driving through Tokyo at night, and you see the city through their eyes. So we made a Korean version of it. Martina and I took the taxi home from Seoul, and – hell – Seoul’s so beautiful at night that we had to get it on film. So here it is, our little Homage to Taxi Drivers and “Lost in Translation.” Hope you like it!

You can see the original post at Eat Your Kimchi.