Welcome to the second part of Kpopalypse’s clearing house roundup of 2024! Here we’ll be looking at some reader-suggested songs that missed roundups earlier in the year! Let’s take a look!
CLICK HERE if you missed part 1 of this post!
As usual most people submitted songs that either weren’t eligible for various reasons, that I’m holding back for coverage elsewhere, or that had actually already been covered and the people submitting them just didn’t notice that I’d already written a thing about them. Use this site’s search bar folks, it actually works! Also I wasn’t going to go through the big lists of songs people submitted with disclaimers like “I don’t know if you covered these or not”, I’m not doing the searching for you! Lazy caonimas. Anyway, here’s the best of the rest.
Red Velvet – Sweet Dreams
I suppose it’s slightly more than a lyric video so I’ll let it in. This poppification of “Canon In D” is pleasant enough to listen to I suppose but it didn’t really make me want to repeat listen, I’ve heard Canon in D while on hold enough times in my lifetime.
NCT Wish – NASA
Grab your genitals because I actually thought this was decent. Of course it’s too short to be taken seriously and it could use… I don’t know, something? It sounds incomplete somehow. But it’s listenable enough.
Haseul – Fragile Eyes
Some dull yacht-rock thing that you need a ready-made fandom to sell it to because nobody would buy it otherwise. I suppose I’ll take it over Steely Dan or Boz Scaggs or some bullshit like that, but this is still actively uninteresting.
Girl Crush – Drive
Unfortunately a really irritating song, the group have way better, but boy does the video kick so much ass. The girls prove that they ‘get it’ about the industry and you can support them knowing that they are not the ones being fucked around – like you, they’re looking at all the other groups and scratching their heads. If you like the idea of the Shin Hana book series but don’t like reading and would prefer just the violence, agency mistreatment and Caitlin’s cleavage condensed into three minutes of highlights, then this video should hit the spot. A slightly longer version of the excellent drama video but without the music is here if listening to the girls repeat “drive, drive” over and over annoys you as much as it annoyed me.
G-Dragon ft. Taeyang & Daesung – Home Sweet Home
Stuff with no video is eligible if it’s a single but I generally reserve this for only very big or exceptionally relevant releases (like Girls2000). As for this, is it a BigBang comeback or not, I don’t know, but it’s a lot better than G-Dragon’s solo things, I actually like this. G-Dragon works better in small doses when he’s got some other people around to take the weight off him so he doesn’t have to carry the whole show with that squeaky AOA Jimin voice.
Everglow – Colorz
Some horrible sax-riff-pop that I’m glad I missed the first time around. Some songs only get a dance practice video for a reason.
TXT – Forty One Winks
I definitely feel like getting a few winks in after forcing myself to stay awake and listen to this.
IVE – Blue Heart
I ignored this originally because I couldn’t find a stage with decent audio and the song is so slight that it’s barely even there anyway. It’s hard to even comment on.
Lovelyz – November
I deliberately didn’t cover this song because of the limp dogshit lyric video, but you ALL asked for it so fuck it. The song fucking sucks, all the old style of Lovelyz’ debut era catalogue but none of the songwriting substance. Incredibly weak, what a stain on their catalogue, everyone involved should be ashamed.
Jo Jungmin – Parallel Lines
Some semi-trot thing that is reasonable but not really catchy enough to have an impact.
Song Minkyung – Turn It Off And On
For dance-trot bangers, this is better due to having a more interesting, harder-sounding track and better melody writing.
Yang Ji Won – Bae Bae
And here’s the boy version, it’s not bad at all.
BEWAVE – Blue Wave
A pretty good beat let down by the lack of melody writing, it’s still one of the better tracks that I skipped over this year.
CLAVE – Diamond
A nice song, it’s subtle and it works. Not going to set the world on fire but I enjoyed listening to this a lot.
Shin In Ryu – Cosmos
Not awful but just too shoegazey and maudlin for me to give an actual fuck about.
MRCH – Human Mechanism
I didn’t really care about this one either.
MRCH – Nostalgia
MRCH’s other song suggested is way better, this is prety nice actually, much better melody writing and a cruisy yet snappy feel, I can dig this.
Ahn Yeeun – Kingcarp
I skipped this originally because I thought nobody in their right mind would miss this fucking crap. Clearly I was wrong, you psychos wanted this in roundup for some reason. Enjoy your ear AIDS.
J.Fla – Alien
I liked the feel of this song but the bluesy verses were boring, the chorus was decent though. Overall not too bad.
CSL – Why I Live + 5k!
Absolute warbly poop, don’t waste your time, I wish I hadn’t.
New:ID – Ghost
A new boy group on Momoland’s label. Given what Daisy has spilled about her company, I can see why these below-average raps were greenlit, the song overall isn’t horrible though but it’s no Momoland beater.
Lee Paran – Tree, Forest, A Boy
I despise the vocal writing here. I wish some of that excessive ramble was outsourced to the instruments instead.
Summer Cake – I Got You
A really popular pick with readers, I guess it’s no worse than similar crap coming out of America or wherever.
Hayne – Sweetheart
Not awful but just kind of plodding and uninteresting. Yes she can sing, but being able to sing is never enough on its own, an interesting song has to be present.
FINAL BONUS RANDOM VIDEOS OF 2024
DPR IAN on how the “inhumane” K-pop industry intensified his dissociative identity disorder
Fancy putting “inhumane” in quotes. DPR IAN (who is also ex C-Clown) is charismatic and likeable as he talks about the general shittiness of the k-pop industry and how they don’t take mental health at all seriously. Importantly he says that he didn’t know much about what it was like going into it. Many, many people don’t. I’m sure that seems odd to some of you, but not everybody is like how always-online k-pop fans on social networking are, the details about the toxicity of the industry aren’t well known to many. That’s why this website still exists, that’s why I write books and do interviews, it’s why I always need to keep talking about this stuff! I’m trying to catch the DPR IANs of the world before they make the mistakes that hurt them, so they can just skip straight to the good parts of their careers!
Chodan 1993-Studio Photoshoot
Chodan is so fucking attractive, holy living fuck. Everyone talks about Magenta and she’s great too but she just has that generic Korean livestreamer look that I’m not really into, Chodan has a cuteness which is on a higher level. The photo session in the second half of this video is just melting my brain. One of the most interesting things about Chodan is that she has the most ridiculous body but she almost never flaunts it, because she knows that if she did it would destroy people’s lives. She’s always wearing baggy stuff, or stuff that’s styled like men’s clothes, it’s super cute and different, suits her really well and this video is a great example of that. Also, if she ever wore a midriff top more than once a year I’d never hear the end of people wanting a female abs category in the objectification survey because have you seen Chodan’s abs holy shit, if someone punched her in the stomach when they passed her by in the street for a prank or something she’d just laugh and keep walking.
241217 WONHO Dance Challenge – 2024 WONHO USA FAN MEETUP ‘WELCOME BACK, WENEE’ in San Francisco
Speaking of abs, of course Kpopalypse is an equal opportunity thirst zone so here’s Wonho, who is back in action. His personal YouTube channel doesn’t have much in the way of updates yet and who knows if he’ll get back into that or not, but he has been out there doing the important fan meets. This video is the most recent thing he’s done that seems to focus on some important areas so I thought it might be good to have a look at for some of you.
That’s all for this year! All picks are locked in for 2024 and the end of year survey is now closed! Any new releases from here onward are eligible for 2025 lists instead! The next big review posts will be the honorable/dishonourable mentions and favourites/worst songs of 2024! Stay safe, caonimas!
