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Vice Blog

KPOP

Every once in a while on VGTE, we like to break up the heaviness of sewer dwelling children, international arms markets, and Russian mobsters with something that isn't going to make you want to drink a gallon of Forget Juice in order to get on with your day. This summer I went to South Korea to hang out with a boy band.

Boy bands, or more accurately, the K-Pop genre as a whole, is a massive and wildly lucrative industry in Korea. The country's fascination with their pop stars means that yes, you'll sell some records, but more importantly, your shiny, hyper-stylized little mug will appear on socks, water bottles, billboards and highly sought after collectible sticker packs across the country.

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And as with anything where fuck-off-forever money is at stake, it's highly competitive. I spent my time in Seoul with Teen Top, a band who had yet to make their proper debut at the time. It was made up of six adorable little Korean fellows who said a lot of funny and vaguely disturbing pre-programmed things like "I am cute in appearance but have a rascal reputation." The kids had been plucked out of grade school to enter a super intensive training program that was essentially a Jason Bourne style re-programming.

And in that respect, it's really not all that different from the States. I'm sure in Orlando right now there's some next-gen Lou Pearlman with a half-boner and a checkbook stylizing some 14-year-old boy's faux-hawk and promising him the world. It's just that the stakes in Korea are that much higher, and the training follows suit. They don't just practice the song and dance, they practice interview scenarios and facial expressions. It's an all-encompassing, 24-hour-a-day, 7-day-a-week regimen, with the kids essentially signing their lives over to the management companies in charge of manufacturing these groups.

Yeesh, I guess that wasn't really the smattering of haha's between heavy I meant it to be. Here, this'll do ya:

See? Haha, they look foreign and funny. All done here.

RYAN DUFFY