The Idol Cast Project
Since my work has been getting some interest from people who may not have any context for either a) Asian idols or b) who I am, specifically, I thought it might be worth adding an addendum to the Mission Statement.
When I spoke with Money 4 Nothing Podcast, one of the hosts told me how much he’d been enjoying my boy group history series of episodes. It’s not that I thought he was being polite—obviously they’d invited me on the podcast so they clearly found something I’d been doing of interest—but I didn’t really understand why these episodes in particular over some of the other things I’ve done. And then this week while looking for something else, I stumbled across a boy band podcast which had done an “explainer” episode on BTS. I’m not going to name them because they seemed to have really tried their best to research BTS but the episode was a complete mess from top to bottom. They simply had no context at all for either Kpop or BTS. Things that I—and many fans—take as common knowledge, not ever worth discussing or mentioning, were sources of great confusion to these podcast hosts. Is Kpop from North or South Korea or both? Is the “Kim” in Kim Nam-Joon a first name or last name?
And it really hit home just how difficult it is to get any kind of grasp on idol or the idol industry, let alone the complex factors that go into making export K-Pop, when you are starting from a baseline of zero.
One of the things I have really tried to do here is to demystify Asian idol music and help outsiders make some sense of what they are seeing and learn to appreciate it on its own terms. This has gotten increasingly difficult in the years since BTS has hit the American market because one of the things that truly separates BTS from the pack is the way they’ve presented typical Kpop tropes and idol performance techniques to the media as somehow unique to BTS specifically. The boom in BTS-ology and BTS-fan journalism has greatly muddied the waters for anybody hoping to understand Kpop.
So, if you are curious and looking for a broad (very broad) overview of boy groups in Korea and Japan, let me direct you to my initial history series. It took me over a year to research, write, and record these and was something of a learning curve. If you don’t feel like listening, I believe the transcripts to the episodes are also posted. It starts here with Johnny Kitagawa and the Tigers and ends with Years of Transition in 2018, with the caveat that certain things in that last episode look a lot different looking back from 2022 than they did at the time in 2018. My recent episode 50 on the Rise and Fall of the Hip Hop Idol can be taken as kind of a parallel side quest to this series as can my episode on the Taiwanese Wave Dramas of the early 2000s and the episode on the backstory of Japan’s current top boy groups SixTones and Snow Man.
I’m also quite proud of the three part series I did on the history of Japan’s first real major idol group—the Tigers. It starts here with part 1, part 2, and part 3 and is again the product of years of research.
As I said in the Mission Statement and in various other places: I do this purely for my own enjoyment. I really do love this music and these idols and hope that by sharing what I’ve learned over the years, I can help others better understand it. I make no money from this project and have no intention to monetize in the future.
And for the true normies who have somehow wandered over to the idol side of the Internet, please enjoy a YouTube roulette selection of one of my favorites—click the link and be amazed!