It’s time for Kpopalypse to look back on his predictions for 2023, and make all new predictions for 2024! Come with Kpopalypse for a look into the crystal ball of k-pop!
Before we delve into the incredible revelations of 2024, let’s take a look at 2023 – at around this time last year I made a lot of bold predictions with my notorious super Boram ESP powers! How well did Kpopalypse do?
RESULTS OF 2023 PREDICTIONS
More girl groups disintegrate – CORRECT. Loona, Momoland, GWSN and WJSN were some of the more well-known groups that either died or only survived the year with some bits missing Let’s also not forget Jinni, who left NMIXX before the ink was even dry on last year’s prediction post.
Boy groups will also have some “issues” – CORRECT. Boy, did they ever. And let’s not talk about how certain websites monetized some of those issues.
Aespa step up – CORRECT. Despite various doomsayers predicting the group flopping, it seems that they’ve moved comfortably into Red Velvet’s spot as the girl group who gets the primary focus from SM Entertainment (not to mention the Kpopalypse objectification surveydoers).
Big year for solo artists – CORRECT. The amount of second-generation idols striking out solo this year was overwhelming, completely crowding out each week of roundup with their desperate attemps to eke a few slivers of extra time out of their pop star lifespan. Of course most of the music stunk like dogshit but hey I wasn’t predicting the quality, only the quantity.
Mergers and acquisitions – CORRECT. HYBE has been busy continuing to gobble up everything in sight both inside and outside of Korea to ensure themselves a post-BTS-enlistment future. This may bother some people but just remember that it probably bothers HYBE themselves too, after all, most guys I know, who work in mergers and acquisitions, really don’t like it.
Blackpink do a thing – CORRECT. They did some shows, had a game, and otherwise behaved like a group of girls in a girl group doing stuff. Yes this was a pretty bold prediction but that’s what you should come to expect here at kpopalypse.com.
Oh no I can’t believe my k-pop bias said THAT – CORRECT. They sure did.
K-pop companies will keep flogging the NFT dead horse – CORRECT. Despite k-pop fans being completely fed up with this shit, tone-deaf k-pop agencies continue to push it anyway.
Major sex scandal alert – CORRECT. Nobody wanted to see JYP’s nipple pasties, but we did, and that was pretty much all the sex we could handle for 2023. And of course there was Blackpink’s Jennie holding hands with some guy much like Chuu and Yves are known for, and no it didn’t last but hey you gotta get in that precious hand-holding while you can before your military service because who knows what will happen to your hands after that.
A previously jailed person finds a way to remind you of their existence – CORRECT. Apparently Seungri cheated on some girls while he was in Bali and that’s definitely something that upset a lot of people more so than anything else he’s been up to recently.
Independent artists hit big – CORRECT. Everyone’s favourite independent k-pop CGI bunny apparently had a great year, even getting interviewed in Billboard. Not so sure about anyone else.
Misogyny will cause some new ripples in the k-pop world – CORRECT. Not that I even know what Heechul said because all I can find is paraphrasing and selective quotes and I’m still waiting for a full English transcript of everything in context, so I’m just going to take everyone’s word for it that it wasn’t great. The most stunning thing though was that people actually noticed for once.
K-pop “AI” is coming your way – CORRECT. Never mind the avatars, that awful cheap digital AI art is creeping into music videos now, and they’re now even going to use AI to exhume some fresh corpses for another crack at the k-pop bucks, lucky us.
More rock songs from idols, big and small – CORRECT. Lots of rock everywhere in k-pop this year. Sadly not much of it was all that good but you can’t have everything. Crawl before you can walk, I guess.
K-pop clickbait sites change things up – INCORRECT. They suck today no different to how they did last year, or the year before that. Oh well.
K-pop scams get bigger and bolder – and get caught – CORRECT. Concerts big and small have become more bold about not delivering what was promised to k-pop fans. Amazingly, the k-pop fans (perhaps inspired by this post) have been noticing and are now more alert to scams than ever!
The fixation on “attention narrative” that k-pop fans have been pushing (along with others) becomes a big focus of criticism, and actions are taken – PARTIALLY CORRECT. It’s certainly true that k-pop fans’ bad behaviour is getting more attention these days, with essays appearing in everything from academic journals to medical websites. However jack shit is being done about it.
(G)I-dle’s Soyeon gets asked directly about plastic surgery rumours and she actually talks about what she’s had done, and it’s… not nothing, to put it mildly. These facts go viral and people start giving her shit for it. Neither her nor her label say much about it but then the next (G)I-dle song has a concept that pretty clearly is dog-whistling to those people that they can get fucked. She also has another procedure done at the same time just for good measure – CORRECT. I must have missed the tell-all interview, but Soyeon certainly got the hate and certainly prepared the response. The video for (G)I-dle’s “Queencard” is set in the plastic surgery ward (specific signage visible at 0:11), and clearly shows Soyeon going under general anaesthetic (0:08) for a procedure during the course of the video. While asleep she imagines various scenarios where she is a “queen card” and her ‘boob and booty hot”, then wakes up at the end (2:50) with doctor’s markings on her face and finds out that it’s true.
Kpopalypse writes the first fictional k-pop novel that doesn’t suck objectively as a novel (and also isn’t porn) – CORRECT, the novels “Show Me Love” and its sequel “Love Light” have both been released! Whether it’s classifiable as porn or not, gosh I wouldn’t know anything about that, I guess that you’d have to ask someone who is into that kind of thing…
So as usual Kpopalypse predictions were mostly correct thanks once again to SUPER BORAM ESP POWERS – James Randi eat the dried crust from my anal rim! Now it’s time to see what Kpopalypse forsees for 2024! Super Boram ESP powers are now activated!
KPOPALYPSE’S PREDICTIONS FOR 2024
NewJeans for all – the NewJeans trend-following is only just getting warmed up. Expect 2024 to be dominated by fast tempos, wispy vocals, very physical dance routines that try to play themselves off like “just girls/boys having fun, we didn’t kill ourselves in the gym for this we promise uwu” and disingenuously low-gloss fourth-wall-breaking video packaging (as discussed in the final question here). Oh, and on a related note…
Underage performers aren’t going anywhere – k-pop fans love to bullshit and lie about how upset they are that agencies are debuting boys and girls younger and younger. However where those fans spend their time and money tells us what those fans really think. The money and the attention shows that fans clearly want their performers as young as possible (for whatever reason ahem), and don’t stress kids, because that’s what you’ll continue to get. Just don’t blame anyone but yourselves when nobody takes you seriously the next time you go on a “companies shouldn’t debut idols before age 18” rant.
The BTS solo projects continue – just because the rest of the boys are finally biting the bullet both literally and figuratively and going off to war doesn’t mean that we’ll see a dip in BTS projects. No doubt they rush-recorded a wealth of material in advance to be used while they’re away, so expect one shit collab every other week of 2024 between some BTS boy and some rando westerner riding the coattails for a bit of reflected ‘not a k-pop’ glory.
YG struggle to replace their legacy – with the big earners at YG now well past k-pop retirement age (i.e anything over 18 years and one day according to both labels and fans these days) and their new groups without much in the way of a convincing catalog just yet, an increasing void will open up. Eventually YG will figure something out and churn out a bunch of songs but don’t expect the quality to be there just yet.
Drug scandals return – the quality of narcotics and illicit substances on the other hand is doing just fine. Expect some interesting ‘findings’ in 2024.
Speaking of which… did someone mention Han Seo Hee? – there’s no drugs without a drug dealer. Don’t expect our favourite girl to vanish from the news for too long.
Euphemisms ahoy – now that Min Heejin has proved that fans will hand-wave away any old bullshit excuses as long as it means they can continue happily fellating the corporate dingus, ludicrous dog-whistle shenanigans will be coming at you hard in 2024. Expect me to continue linking that one post a lot.
Misogyny increases (yes, even more) – did you know that 60% of young Korean men equate feminism with “female supremacy”? This means that the chance that any given boy group has at least one if not several incel loser members is very close to 100%. Expect these attitudes to show through in k-pop groups more and more in 2024, and increasingly, in the actions of k-pop agencies trying to keep the splintering demographics of their young audiences onside. Also expect female performers to cop a very hard time over the coming year, being crucified over the thinnest scandals possible while the boys practically get away with murder.
Wonho finally meets a serious contender for his top-tier objectification status – with Wonho busy with the army and thus having lost a little momentum in the marketplace of hot man-meat due to no fault of his own, a new contender will rise. That’s not to say our man is out for the count just yet, but the 2024 objectification survey results will be the closest they’ve been in a long time.
Cultural scandals aplenty – with all this increased k-pop globalism, Korean companies will find navigating the various sensitivities of the increasingly different nations and ethnicities gaining an interest in the k-pops to be very much in the “too-hard basket”. If one of your hobbies is being offended by a bunch of Koreans “just not getting it” then 2024 is definitely going to be your year.
The combination of AI and k-pop will attract idiots aplenty – now that there’s a vague chance that 0.001% of the people using AI might see a net profit out of it, expect the k-pop world to be swamped with AI bullshit as every label gets suckered into some horrible tech company sales pitch and incorporates some variation of the hideous AI con into its product.
NFTs in k-pop will become less and less of a thing – after seeing virtually no return on investment due to irate fandoms refusing to cooperate, companies will finally get the message that nobody wants to play with their toy blockchains. Sadly, those same companies will just move onto the similarly soul-sucking, environment-destroying, moron-attracting AI grift and think that we’ll want that bullshit instead.
More “eco-friendly” projects – never an industry to shy away from hypocrisy, k-pop agencies will happily embrace even more ‘green’ signalling while simultaneously cementing human-trafficking petro-state dictatorships as valid touring destinations and finding new ways to throw every last carbon they’ve got into the atmosphere as long as they can package and sell the process to a bunch of uncritical fandumbs.
Sexy concepts come back – somewhat – nobody’s doing it all that much right now, which means there’s a gap in the marketplace for someone to start doing it soon and make some money. It won’t go back to the days of the early 2010s where there were multiple top-tier groups flashing the sexy times all over the place but you can expect at least one B or C-list group to start pushing the envelope just a little harder than usual. The reason why it won’t go back to full slather is that companies have discovered that dog-whistle euphemism hijinx are a less risky way to fill the ‘sexy’ void without being called out, gosh there I go linking that post again, oh and also now that k-pop is a little more global than before they also want to remain marketable in conservative sex-negative countries that oppress women.
K-pop gets increasingly embroiled in America’s lame culture wars – as the USA starts their boring year-long election cycle to decide whether it wants the crusty senile boring dementia-riddled git or the crusty spray-tanned rapey criminal McDictator to deny them healthcare for the next four years, you can expect k-pop to come up as a talking point in boring political speeches as these idiots and their lackeys try to think of any way possible to capture the valuable “too dumb to think” demographic.
A good year for music in general – the songs will actually be good in 2024, even if nothing else is. There’s actually a correlation here, as the increasingly shitty state of the world in 2024 will inspire creative artists to new heights of awesomeness as they express themselves don’t be silly we don’t do that in k-pop but certainly the urgency to create music that’s good enough to make money will be a factor. The end of the world will have a solid soundtrack, as it happens.
Mamamoo’s Hwasa keeps getting shat on for that harmless vagina-touching incident which just never seems to go away and she starts getting more and more pissed off about it so she just eventually says “fuck it” and doubles down, by including some insinuated vagina-touching in a new music video just to piss people off. It totally works and the media frenzy erupts, at the same time pushing her and her groupmates to higher levels of international relevance and Kpopalypse list inclusion – this year’s very specific prediction is here just to test the extent of my powers.
Kpopalypse will continue to be a cunt – expect more posts, more shitting on crap songs in roundup, more books, and more of Kpopalypse being a complete cunt in all the usual old ways and with any luck maybe even a few new ones.
That’s all the predictions for the next 12 months – expect them fondly! My final prediction is that Kpopalypse will return soon with more posts!
