Alizée and K-Pop (it being Another Saturday)

Last Saturday, being so ahead of the curve as I am and all, I posted to a video for Mr. Taxi by the Korean popular music group Girls' Generation, only to find that they're featured this week in an article in The New Yorker. The article focuses on the burgeoning "factory music" scene in Korea, which is dominating Japan, China, Taiwan, as well as Korea, among other Asian countries -- a situation where the singers' lives as well as their music and dancing is tightly choreographed, and which has obvious precedents not only in Motown but in U.S. and U.K. boy bands and J-Pop. The music, too, while borrowing from many genres, has its primary roots in New Jack Swing, mostly from the U.S. The result is K-Pop -- a genre that does not really include Psy, by the way (he sort of makes fun of it) -- a genre where looks are every bit as important as the music, and Korea apparently leads the world in plastic surgery per capita.

Which leads to the fact that K-Pop and J-Pop girls groups sell sexuality (leading the niece of John Seabrook, the author of the New Yorker article, to call him "Uncle Pervy"). They're sexual but not erotic.   That's hardly something new -- the boys groups are the same way to their own audience -- and many singers have gone much farther in trying (often failing) to be erotic -- Madonna, for instance. Alizée, who was huge in France about 10 years ago, then took some time off and is trying to come back -- idolized Madonna and had a very sexual if innocent approach (Madonna was never innocent).  Her video is at the top.  It's that innocence that perhaps distinguishes the K-Pop girls groups from Americans like Madonna, Lady Gaga, and Christina Aguilera.

Well, Uncle Pervy Seabrook refers to watching Girls' Generations' hit Gee 20+ times, so here it is:

Gee has over 90 million views in various versions on YouTube.