This is Part 1 of an ongoing series tentatively called, “My High School Experience Really F*cked Up My Identity And This Is My Attempt At Unpacking All Of It.” (Will think of a more eloquent and less offensive title in the meantime.)
Before I start, I should clarify that the sole reason why I’m writing this post is to piss off the entire JYJ fandom, and that as a fervent JYJ anti, I live for nothing else apart from the sheer diabolical pleasure I get from writing articles on the internet bashing a band for which I harbor an unspeakable hatred. And also for the page views.
The feels that I have about this release are many, but most of them are fairly incoherent and illogical…so for the sake of preserving my reputation as an intelligent human being capable of speaking in full sentences, I’ll keep this short.1
I ended up liking the MBC show the most because it was actually exciting to watch all the way through despite its lack of collaboration stages. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge sucker for collabs (hence why my favorite performance was the SHINee/f(x) collabo which was, in all honestly, kind of a dud), but I have a lot more respect for a show where all of the “regular” performances are remixes or special stages of some sort. I mean, wasn’t that what these end-of-year shows all used to be like? When did K-pop concerts and special programs become so boring? Like, who wants to sit through a five-hour long version of Music Bank with ten thousand repeats of the performances we’d seen all year? I would think that producers would be all over the opportunity to be creative and remix a well-loved song for a show that’s guaranteed to have high viewer ratings. The fact that nearly every single performance at the MBC Daejejeon was creatively respun just for this year’s show made the entire program so much more exciting and fun to watch…which is why this post is so long, haha. Even Teen Top and 100% (AKA Irrelevant and Irrelevanter) had a great special performance that made me actually care about them.
Disappointingly but not surprisingly, SM really dropped the ball for this year’s program. A 20-second clip of “O” before a run-of-the-mill performance of “Catch Me” does not a remix make. Why can I never count on you to do anything cool, SM????
Anyway, the MBC show was a ton of fun and I enjoyed it a lot! Some highlights below.
Nothing quite like ringing in 2013 after spending two straight days following these MARATHON year-end music shows. After three years of following year-end gayos, I think it’s safe to say that my standards are set way too high for these shows. I mean, this is literally the one thing I look forward to in K-pop for the whole year, but this is more due to the fact that I basically live for K-pop special stages….and the increasing scarcity of special performances on weekly music shows means that, well, beggars can’t really be choosers.
KBS was its usual snoozefest, MBC was great but SO LONG (which is why it will have its own recap, to be posted in the coming days), and SBS usually delivers every year but the entire show got sucked up by that ridiculous “Color of K-pop” spiel and left no room for anything else.
