Did you know that your favorite K-pop artist’s music videos are banned on TV? KBS, MBC, and SBS are some of the TV networks that have banned some songs from broadcasting.
The reason for banning ranges from explicit language to traffic rule violation. Here’s a list you should check out!
The biggest boy band in the world, BTS, released Dope in 2015, and KBS banned it because of “vulgar” lyrics. Fans have deemed this judgement to be silly. Dope was the first music video of BTS to reach a million likes on YouTube.
Even though the song is upbeat and catchy, the lyrics are meaningful and speak of their trend-defining nature. The song is not a complete diss track, but it encourages people to follow their dreams. It gives the message of not letting others bring you down and question your willpower.
A year after PSY went viral for “Gangnam Style”, he released a new single called Gentleman, which set the record as the most-viewed YouTube video in 24 hours and held the record for 4 years!
Do you think the decision to ban the songs from broadcasting was the right one? Comment down below and let us know your opinion!
Listen: Khaleeji music and K-pop come together in new Spotify song 'Is it On' | The National
As part of the platform's emerging artist initiative, Radar Mena, Kuwaiti-Saudi singer Bader Al Shuaibi teams up with K-pop artist AleXa for Is it On, a dance-pop number fit for the summer.
The track is Radar Mena 's first collaboration featuring a K-pop act as it continues its mission of paring regional artists with international names.
Other tacks released under the banner include last month's remix of Jordanian singer Issam Alnajjar's viral hit Hadal Ahbek with Canada's Ali Gates and Loud Luxury, as well as 2020's Save Me , featuring Dubai-based British electronic music duo Hollaphonic and Lebanese soul singer Xriss.
While Is it On may initially sound like a random pairing, the collaboration occurred off the back of impressive streaming numbers.
"K-pop is performing amazingly well across the world, but especially so in the Gulf, where we see K-Pop releases shoot to the peak position on charts," says Wissam Khodur, head of Artist and Label Partnerships at Dubai's Spotify Mena.
"Equally as important is opening up the export market to artists both ways, growing their fan bases globally and paving the way for more opportunities in their career development."
Al Shuaibi, 26, also sees the possibilities, with musical and physical borders no longer challenges to overcome.
"AleXa is an extremely talented artist and together I believe we created the coolest cross-cultural collaboration, ever."
Alexa adds: "I'm so grateful for this collaboration. It's a fresh, never-heard-before mix of cultures and sound," she says.
Billie Piper: From vulnerable teen pop star to director of an 'anti-romcom' | Billie Piper | The
B illie Piper has occupied a near continual, if shifting, position in the public imagination for almost a quarter of a century. That's a notable achievement by any reckoning of a performer's career, but it's also rather alarming, given that she's still only 38.
With one of these men, Pete, she begins a difficult relationship, tentatively getting things started by stripping off to show him the parts of her body about which she's insecure, while he issues a critical commentary. It culminates with her bending over to expose her "arsehole". Not for nothing does it bill itself as an anti-romcom.
Nonetheless Piper, who speaks of the self-insight therapy has brought her, sees a gathering "mental health crisis" among women in their 30s who have been force-fed a "have-it-all" narrative that she has described as "bullshit".
One scene in Rare Beasts has Mandy, whose mantra is "even though I feel scared and angry I still love and respect myself", and her group of thirtysomething female friends taking turns to snort cocaine while discussing childbirth and vaginal tautness.
It's shot with starkly unflattering close-ups, and there's a feverishness and fragility to the proceedings. They feel located near the edge of a nervous breakdown, that unstable territory towards which celebrity, arguably more than womanhood, drives some famous females. It's a road that Piper knows all too well.
The eldest of four children, she grew up in Swindon but from an early age nurtured a powerful desire to leave. She told Laverne that she wasn't impressed by what was on offer for women. "I didn't want to leave all my ambitions at the door to raise kids and serve men."
She says it was Evans, who was 35 then, who saved her, teaching her how to have a good time and, just as importantly, how to ignore the media. The three years they spent together, she says, were her version of the student years – lots of pub visits and an escape from crushing expectations.
She split from Evans at 21 (they remain close), and decided to focus on an acting career. The result was the part of Rose Tyler in the newly revived Doctor Who . The role brought another burst of fame, but it was 2007's Secret Diary of a Call Girl (written by Prebble, and based on the blog of an escort) that garnered respect. Both amounted to success and a preoccupation with that aim has not, she's said, left much room for self-care.
No one knows what goes on within other people's relationships but it's fair to say that if you were a woman looking to explore the felicities and complexities of being a female in the early 21st century, Fox was unlikely to be the most understanding of partners.
Biden gives K-pop a shout-out as part of global cultural connections
K-pop, or Korean pop music, has such a global reach that even President Joe Biden on Friday gave the music's fans a shout-out.
"K-pop fans are universal," he said at a Friday press conference with South Korean President Moon Jae-in."I can tell those who laughed know what I'm talking about."
During the press conference, Biden also mentioned other ways South Korea and the U.S. have bridged cultural divides.
"Our people share a long history. Our soldiers have fought alongside one another. Our scientists work side-by-side in both our countries. Our students study together, share ideas and seed new opportunities for future collaboration. And our people-to-people and cultural connections are only growing," he said.
"And so our two countries, our two nations have the tools and the deep connections that we need to make even stronger alliances and stronger cooperation," Biden said.
New Music Friday: Everything out today you have to listen to
New Music Friday can be so overwhelming. Where to start? Where to stop ? Not everyone's got a spare hour to sift through their Spotify release radar to find their new favourite songs. With that in mind, we've been charitable enough to do it for you. Here's a quick roundup of the 10 best new songs out this New Music Friday and the albums released that are definitely worth a spin:
When Lana Del Rey announced that her new album Blue Banisters would be coming out on July 4th, with the above image as the album cover, it wouldn’t be daft to have assumed she was joking. She only released her sixth album in March, and the self-made artwork for Blue Banisters is… a choice, let’s just say that! But, she shuts you up as soon as she starts singing, and this is one of the most well written and sang tunes in her discography. Her vocals sound so powerful.
Listen if you love: Listening to the most gorgeous music to ever grace a human being’s ears
MARINA is back this New Music Friday with the title track from her upcoming fifth album Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land, and it’s (thankfully) great! She kicked off the era with the sublime Man’s World last year, and followed it up with the bloody dismal Purge The Poison; a racket with some of the worst songwriting in the game. But she’s back on track with this one, and the pop punk elements with her signature head voice work wonderfully.
This is officially Little Mix’s first new music as a trio, and it’s a really fun chart ready feature with David Guetta and Galantis that’s a bit of a paint by numbers bop but it’s a bop all the same. The girls sound amazing, but literally when do they not.
Georgia was the last gig I went to before we were locked down in March 2020, and there’s now this kind of extra euphoric layer to her music that signifies clubs being open and partying with your mates. Her new single Get Me Higher is her most danceable yet, and is just an absolute BLAST.
GET. ME. TO. A. CLUB. NOW. This is an absolute banger. Funky baseline meets house drums and a clapping instrumentation that needs vogueing choreography put to it immediately.
You know when you press play on something and you just know you’re going to listen to it all year? That’s how it feels with Like I Used To. It’s got a timeless charm that’s just stunningly beautiful. Feels like a huge American classic. Unreal.
The biggest new pop star on the planet has shown up to New Music Friday with her debut album and it is outrageously brilliant. Pop rock and balladry in equal measure, her songwriting is just really setting her apart from any other new artist right now. Everything feels so self assured and confident – one of the albums of the year for sure.
On 'Sour,' Olivia Rodrigo Is A Lowercase Girl With Caps-Lock Feelings : NPR
Olivia Rodrigo's debut album, Sour , is out May 21, less than six months after she shattered streaming records with the breakthrough single "drivers license." Renee Klahr/NPR hide caption
Lowercase girls tend to fly under the radar by design, but once you start looking you'll see them everywhere . For one thing, they've been all over the streaming charts in the past few years: folklore , evermore , "thank u, next," girl in red, mxmtoon, dodie, beabadoobee, how i'm feeling now , "drivers license," "deja vu," "good 4 u" — to name just a few recent, femme-forward musical phenomena that wouldn't even think of imposing the tyranny of capital letters on the listener's imagination.
But lowercase girls have been there forever, in the back rows of classrooms and the corners of parties, daydreaming, doodling, stockpiling vivid details and observations in the marble notebooks of their minds — waiting for the precise moment to launch them like a carefully crafted dart that punctures everybody else's apathy and proves just how sharply she has been paying attention. Some of the best of them never grow out of it. "My only advantage as a reporter," Joan Didion wrote in 1968, unwittingly describing her own species perfectly, "is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does." Beware the lowercase girl. Although she is usually overlooked, underestimated and even ignored, she sometimes turns out to be the one who's been writing the story all along.
"I'm very emo," Rodrigo said in a recent Rolling Stone video interview, sitting beside her co-writer and producer Dan Nigro. "Dan was in an emo band, and he still tells me I'm emo — that's how you know you're really emo."
Now 39, Nigro used to be the frontman of the Long Island-based band As Tall as Lions, who found moderate success in the booming East Coast emo-punk scene of the early aughts. He might seem an unlikely musical partner for Rodrigo, until you remember that perhaps the most prominent current producer of pop music made by young women, Jack Antonoff, is a veteran of the very same scene. (His first band, New Jersey-based Steel Train, was signed to the beloved, influential pop-punk label Drive-Thru Records.)
But as a one-time lowercase girl / emo kid / Drive-Thru Records enthusiast from suburban New Jersey, I do find it pretty surprising that two of the most successful producers in crafting pop music from a feminine point of view came out of that scene. Because, as I remember all too well, it was a realm almost entirely devoid of women's voices.
Nigro's production style for Rodrigo is both playful and atmospheric, conjuring a kind of dreamy internal space in which it seems like the listener is eavesdropping on the singer's thoughts and impressions. Seemingly small, intimate moments — an ex sharing a Billy Joel song with his new flame, say, in "deja vu" — are underscored with operatic flair. Though updated for this world of social media surveillance and stream-of-consciousness text messages, this approach isn't exactly new. It's basically the foundation of modern pop music as we know it, dating back to the youth-oriented concerns of Brill Building songwriters in the 1950s and the early 1960s girl groups whose adolescent experiences were dramatized into three-minute symphonies thanks to Phil Spector's "Wall of Sound."
Rodrigo's creative partnership with Nigro, though, seems to fit within a newer paradigm of pop star/producer power dynamics. Much like Antonoff's pairings with some of the artists who have most directly inspired Rodrigo (Swift, Lorde, Lana Del Rey), and even a little like the intimate workings of Eilish's bedroom pop laboratory with her brother Finneas, Rodrigo and Nigro present their work to the world as the result of a genuine, non-hierarchical collaboration. "I realize I'm okay at navigating my job because I played in a band for 10 years with three other very emotional, crazy people — myself probably being the most emotional crazy of the four of us," Nigro told Vice earlier this year. "Having those experiences with my bandmates has really helped me work with so many different artists, because I'm able to understand what they're going through and get them to feel open enough to be who they actually are."
Suzy Shinn interview: Van Weezer's 26-year-old producer is a rising star.
I'm no music industry expert, but it's hard to imagine anyone being more fun to hang out with in a recording session than Suzy Shinn. The two-time Grammy-nominated producer, composer, and engineer's vibrant personality immediately draws you in (even via Zoom), and her dynamic storytelling qualities clearly aren't contained only within the songs she creates.
Despite maintaining Weezer's distinct sense of humor, Van Weezer , the band's long-delayed 15 th (!!!) album, is chockfull of bombastic anthems in the style of Poison, Slayer, and (naturally) Van Halen. It's the kind of album I want to blast with my friends on a summer road trip, the kind that makes me want to queue up every tune ever produced by Shinn. But before I compiled that playlist, I gave Shinn a ring at her home in Los Angeles to hear her thoughts on working with Rivers Cuomo, the pure joy of making music, and how she inadvertently helped create the "Mayor Pete" dance.
Madeline Ducharme: To kick things off, how did you initially connect with Rivers Cuomo and the rest of Weezer?
Suzy Shinn: It's a funny story. I met Jake Sinclair , the phenomenal producer, writer, and engineer, at a Halloween party. I knew he was working by himself, and then one day he calls me and he's like, "I broke my arm on my motorcycle." His arm was in a sling. "Can you come in and help me run Pro Tools?" And it was just two days that first week: One day was with 5 Seconds of Summer, and one of those days was production for the White Album with Rivers and Weezer [released in 2016].
And that's what kicked off a long relationship with the guys and Rivers. Over the years, they'll say, "Hey, we wanna record something. Hey, can you help us out with this? Can you do this?" and it's always a "Yes!"
When you first began working on Van Weezer , did the band approach you with the sound they wanted to capture? What was that conversation like?
We were all at the [2019] Grammys. And nobody won from our group. But we were still there after: It was Weezer, I think Panic! at the Disco, and Fall Out Boy. There was also this band Ghost, who is more like a metal band, and I co-wrote a song on their album. And Rivers was like, "What? You don't listen to pop music?" And we were talking and he didn't recognize me for the first 20 minutes because I had makeup on, which I never do! I usually show up [to the studio] in leggings and a hoodie. Even Brian [Bell] texted me a week or two after and was like, "Wait, was that you at the Grammys?" But Rivers kept turning to me like, "So do you like guitars?" And I'm like, "Yeah?" And he's like, "Do you like distortion?" And I'm like, "Yeah?" And he's like, "Do you like metal music?" And I'm like, "Yeah." And he's like, "… Cool."
Yeah! Yeah. And then he was like, "What about Weezer?" And I was like [laughs] , "Yeah!" And later I was working in the studio in the basement of Crush [Music] one day, and Jonathan Daniel, who runs Crush , came down and asked me if I wanted to produce an album by Weezer called Van Weezer , a very guitar-driven, Van Halen, '80s metal album for this tour they're gonna go on. I was like, "Of course!" while very calmly freaking out.
As soon as we got started, Rivers, who has so many demos, was sending me maybe 200 songs at a time, and then if I liked certain songs, he'd send me more like that or write new songs.
Connecticut concert venues reopening as major acts from Alice Cooper to Harry Styles return -
On a single week in Connecticut this August you can see Kiss, John Legend, Drive-By Truckers, 311, Foreigner, comedian Tom Segura and a double bill of Alanis Morissette and Garbage.
Connecticut's major concert venues have announced a slew of summer events, ending the drought of major touring bands caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
It's an embarrassment of riches. Major tours from 2020 have been rescheduled for this year, while whole new tours are getting rolled out. Connecticut will see everyone from Lady A to Alice Cooper, from the Jonas Brothers to Brothers Osborne, from Rod Steward to Harry Styles. There are farewell tours from both Kiss and the Monkees and a 50th anniversary tour from the Doobie Brothers. Whitney Cummings, Norm MacDonald and Dave Chappelle are among the comedy heavyweights stopping by.
A lot of venues have eased into reopening with local and regional bands — springtime has been very good to tribute bands, sidelined Broadway stars with cabaret acts and folk duos. But as summer heats up and COVID restrictions continue to fade, you'll see top names from just about every genre and era of pop music back on the road.
The waters were tested for outdoor shows last summer, and demand has only grown. But large indoor venues are also back in the mix. Hundreds of shows have been announced in the past couple of months. Some of the venues' schedules extend right through the end of this year and into 2022.
Here's what to expect as the state emerges from isolation and prepares to rock out again. (Some venues, such as Hartford's XL Center and Bridgeport's Webster Bank Arena, don't have major summer music events on their schedules yet, and aren't included here, but stay tuned.)
All the venues have health and safety guidelines in place. Some still require masked, and some have reconfigured seating for social distancing. Check the websites for details.
Also remember that reduced capacity means fewer tickets on sale. If you need to see a show, don't delay.
Dozens of bookings have been announced in the last few weeks: George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic on June 25, Japanese Breakfast on July 29, Drive-By Truckers on Aug. 28, Too Many Zooz and Big Fredia on Sept. 24, Mt. Joy with Trampled by Turtles on Oct. 7, Guided By Voices on Oct. 23, Sylvan Esso on Nov. 10, Purity Ring on Nov. 13, indie rock icons Dinosaur Jr. (who have a new album out) on Nov. 19 and frequent visitor Scott Bradlee's Postmodern Jukebox on Oct. 29.
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