K-Pop / J-Pop makes no sense

I finished with the very last tutorials, lectures, or lab sessions here at NTU last week. It’s hard to believe it has been nine months in Singapore already!

Anyway, so I was working on this software project for a bus simulation software for an academic course and one of the guys on my team is a massive K-Pop / J-Pop fan. He could code going without food for more than 24 hours but take away his music video breaks from him and he’d lose energy faster than all those other non-Duracell bunnies in Duracell advertisements.

I have attended a handful of K-Pop / J-Pop / Canto-Pop sessions organised by the International Student Centre and the night-outs with friends here. It still confuses me. For instance, this video by massively popular band SNSD called Mr Taxi.

Fair enough, I know neither Korean nor Japanese. I still have an inkling that even if I did, the song wouldn’t make logical sense. What do Tokyo, Seoul, London, and New York have to do with each other, other than cities which have taxis in them? More importantly, what are the word ‘supersonic’ – which is related to the speed of sound – next to ‘hypertonic’ – which is about solution strengths – and why are either of these words in a song supposedly about some taxi driver? There are nine girls in that video and collectively they seem to be more confused about life than Rebecca Black and her existential dilemma about car seat choice. See, when I hear this song it’s all gibberish to me. “Always gay, let’s feed the bear!” 😀

Any K-Pop / J-Pop fans in the audience? If yes, could you please enlighten me to what you see in this, beyond what seems to be an obvious fap fap fap factor.