KPop, Pop-Punk and Poetry

When you subscribe to feeds from several music sites, you do tend to end up hearing a lot about things you probably wouldn't otherwise, some of which you're glad to discover, others you wish you hadn't. If it wasn't for Pitchfork, Stereogum and NME, there's a very good chance I'd have had no idea who Belghast was talking about when he gave us his take on Machine Gun Kelly last friday.

Unfortunately, I did know who he meant. Over the last few months, I've read much more than I wanted to about the rapper-turned-pop-punk's endless spats and kerfuffles with other musicians, most of whom, like Corey Taylor of Slipknot, I don't much care about, either. 

Okay, I didn't have to read all those "news" stories. I could just not have clicked through the links. Sometimes these things have a lugubrious undertow that can't easily be resisted.

At about this point I suppose you might expect me to interpolate something by MGK by way of illustration. That would be crazy, although not quite as crazy as it sounds. He did a song called Forget Me Too with Halsey. I could have used that, in a pinch. Halsey is predictably great in it. MGK, though? Yeah, not so much.

I've liked Halsey for years, enough even to have bought their recent collection of poetry, I Would Leave Me If I Could.  Hey, here's an idea. Maybe we just have Halsey alone, reading a poem. The best choice would be this, which is stunning and magnificent but also a little much to throw at an unprepared audience. I very highly recommend it all same but just know what you're getting into. 

We'll have this one instead. 

Halsey's such a great reader of verse, something that's so much harder than almost everyone, especially poets, seems to realise. I really need to get the audiobook.

Machine Gun Kelly may take up more than his fair share of space in my feeds but since I subbed to NME his tantrums fade into complete insignificance in comparison with the coverage of KPop I'm routinely expected to consume. I'm ashamed to admit I click through fewer of those links than I do for MGK or Liam Gallagher, even though it's a sure thing I'd enjoy listening to just about any KPop icon more than either of those two. 

Pop stars having a pop at each other is so hard to resist, though, and Liam does have genuine comic timing. I kind of wish he'd use it on MGK sometime.

Despite the best efforts of the highly enthusiastic NME team, I still can't pretend to know anything about KPop, unlike Michelle of A Geek Girl's Guide. She joined Blaugust this year after seven years of blogging, and she's posted KPop pieces here, here and yes, here  already. 

I've learned a lot, not least because I love the format of those posts with the huge, embedded videos. It amost makes me want to give Inventory Full a makeover. That look just demands you scroll all the way down. I did.

It's just as well because about the only act she mentioned in her long Debuts and Comebacks piece that I'd heard of came right at the end: Stray Kids. There's something by them in one of my music posts here, somewhere,I'm pretty sure, although I'm not going to be the one to go find it. 

As Michelle suggests, Stray Kids are pretty "rock" for KPop, something you definitely can't say about the artist whose link I did click through at NME last week. It was the headline that got me: "Choi Yena brings out her gamer side in new music video for ‘Smartphone’."

As the piece goes on to explain "In the vibrant visual, Choi is a gamer who guides an avatar of herself through a playground filled with whimsical mascots, eventually stopping at a shooting game inspired by the Five Nights at Freddy’s franchise." You want to see that, don't you?

Well, tough. I do.

One of these days I'm going to do a post about songs inspired by or based around video games. Can't believe I haven't already. 

That'll have to wait until I've done some research though because right now the only one that comes to mind is the most obvious one of all and I'm pretty sure we've had it here before, maybe more than once. 

Still, it's clinically impossible to have too much Lana del Rey so what the hell. Let's do it.

And with that, I'm off to bed. God knows what I'm going to post tomorrow. I imagine I'll come up with something. 

Welcome to Blaugust!