Explained is a new pop doc series from Vox and Netflix. Each episode is a mini 15 minute documentary covering pop culture, tech, science, and beyond. So on this week's You Can't Make This Up, we borrowed one of Vox's own to host today's episode. Sean Rameswaram hosts the hit podcast, Today, Explained. He's joined by Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers, the hilarious comedy duo and co-hosts of the pop culture podcast, Las Culturistas. Matt and Bowen watched K-POP, Explained, and are here to discuss the South Korean music phenomenon. There may or may not be singing.
Explained is a new pop doc series from Vox and Netflix. Each episode is a mini 15 minute documentary covering pop culture, tech, science, and beyond. So on this week's You Can't Make This Up, we borrowed one of Vox's own to host today's episode. Sean Rameswaram hosts the hit podcast, Today, Explained. He's joined by Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers, the hilarious comedy duo and co-hosts of the pop culture podcast, Las Culturistas. Matt and Bowen watched K-POP, Explained, and are here to discuss the South Korean music phenomenon. There may or may not be singing.
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Sean: Welcome to You Can't Make This Up. It's a new companion podcast from Netflix. My name's Sean Rameswaram. And every Monday to Friday you can find me hosting another podcast. It's called Today, Explained. It's a daily news explainer from Vox. But right now, I'm explaining this show. Each week on You Can't Make This Up we feature interviews discussing a different Netflix series or film with special guests. And like the best stories out there, all the stories you'll hear on this show are true. So, why am I here today? Fair question. Great news, in addition to explaining the news every day on Today, Explained, Vox just launched a show on Netflix. It's called Explained.
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Sean: This is the show's undeniably great theme music. Explained is a new pop doc series, 50-minute documentaries about pop culture, tech, science, and beyond. There are new episodes every Wednesday covering big ideas from monogamy and designer DNA, to cryptocurrency. And back on this show, You Can't Make This Up, we're bringing in comedians, podcasters, and journalists to watch different episodes of Explained and take us down the rabbit hole with them. So, for our first crossover episode, we're featuring a hilarious comedy duo, cohosts of the pop culture podcast, Las Culturistas, Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers. Bowen and Matt watched K-pop, Explained. It's an episode all about the South Korean music phenomenon, K-pop. But K-pop reaches way beyond South Korea. It's an international sensation. It's an entire culture. It's a lifestyle. Anyway, enough of me talking about K-pop. Let's hear Matt and Bowen talk about K-pop. Matt Rogers, Bowen Yang, go.
Matt: My name is Matt Rogers.
Bowen: My name is Bowen Yang.
Matt: And we just watched Explained, K-pop. It's interesting to watch this episode in light of the recent Billboard Music Awards where BTS performed. And I had never heard of BTS until I watched the—Billboard Music Awards, and then they were prominently featured in this episode. And then they showed the clips of them on Ellen, and Ellen explained, like, "It was like the Beatles showed up here when they came through LAX." And it's like, "That's like LAX," you know? That's an airport—that's one of our airports. So, there is a huge fandom here that I'm just not aware of that really isn't represented to me as a consumer. I think it's pretty cool. They were on the double music awards.
Bowen: Yeah. They performed their new song, Fake Love. I think—the buzz is, it's not what I'm saying, the buzz is that it may have potential to be song of the summer, early contender.
Matt: Well, how does it go?
Bowen: I can't...
Matt: Well, then, why don't we hear it?
Bowen: Why don't we hear it?
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Bowen: And I think the reason why Fake Love has so much potential in being this like big crossover hit that like breaks through is just the reason why so many K-pop songs are so catchy and such earworms that the episode talks about is that the lyrics are in English every now and then there's some like kind of random, non sequitur words thrown in every now and then. It's kind of funny. It's kind of...
Matt: "Shut your tongue."
Bowen: What's that front?
Matt: I don't know. That definitely was one, it was like, "Close your mouth. Shut your tongue."
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Bowen: That's fun. I'm going to start saying that to people.
Matt: "Shut your tongue."
Bowen: "Shut your tongue."
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Matt: I love it. See, look at that influence.
Bowen: There you go, K-pop influence. But for Fake Love, with the lyrics—the lyrics to chorus are so simple. It's, "I'm so sick of this fake love, fake love, fake love. I'm so sorry but it's fake love, fake love, fake love." Like, I don't know, how many words is that, like seven?
Matt: Not many.
Bowen: Seven words. Seven different words total. So easy, so simple, anyone in any country, continent can replicate that, sing along. And we've had this discussion with some friends of ours. There's this theory that if someone's too good a vocalist, it's kind of alienating to audiences who can't sing along and match that...
Matt: So, what we should do worldwide...
Bowen: ...and sing along.
Matt: ...is make sure that everyone's a mediocre singer and there's not a lot of words.
Bowen: There you go. So, I went into this, watching this episode, with like a pretty cursory understanding of K-pop. I—this is just my sort of cultural stubbornness as a Chinese person or as a person of Chinese background, because I have always grown up through my parents', sort of, discography being funneled down to me with like C-pop, technically—Chinese pop. So, I was just always kind of resistant to K-pop for a while. And then after that, once I got into anime, it was all into J-pop. So then, K-pop is this relatively new thing that like has basically been in my rotation since like 2010, we'll say. But a lot of the stuff that I learned from this episode was just all very, very new information.
Matt: Yeah. It was really eye-opening to watch. In terms of my own experience with K-pop, I know of it as a phenomenon. I also have several friends, American friends, who are absolutely obsessed with it. So, I know it's obsession worthy. I don't think I understood just how influential it is worldwide. And watching it, I couldn't help but thing, wow, there's just so much about the Eastern world that I do not know. So, I'm excited to learn more about it because I think while watching the episode, I realized that I love K-pop and I never realized it because I so enjoy and so enthusiastic about pop music, and it really is, kind of, the center of a lot of my walks through Midtown. Sometimes a friend will see me walking and they'll be like, "What are you listening to?" I'll get a text later. I'm like, "Well, that's embarrassing." And it's usually like gay boy pop, which has its roots firmly in K-pop, I'm realizing.
Bowen: It's like, with going off what you're saying, it's like the reason why you respond to that as a genre, like the trappings of K-pop included—someone described it in the documentary as this—it's pure optimism.
Matt: Yeah.
Bowen: There's no cynicism at all in anything that's being sung in K-pop or the presentation of it. So, I think that's why it's so appealing to everybody.
Matt: That was something I was really kind of interested in, just the content, the lyrical content of the music. How it started truly national...
Bowen: Patriotic.
Matt: ...and then celebrating like—yeah, patriotic, and celebrating the country of South Korea. And then to hear that when they would get emotional or when things would get a little romantic, it was considered super edgy. That's never been the case with American music, or at least not in the past 50 years. Even when it was vanilla, it was still discussing, you know, romantic situations and even sexual situations. And so, it was interesting to think about an entire genre of pop music or an entire subject of pop music that didn't discuss what it feels like every pop song is about here.
Bowen: Although, I would say that they're more advanced than we are, because they're able to craft a whole hook around just the concept of strawberry flavored things. There's a whole song that's called Red Flavor by this amazing group, Red Velvet. This has been—I've known about—I've been listening to this song since like last summer, I want to say. It's amazing.
Matt: Really?
Bowen: It's so catchy.
Matt: Is it a recent song?
Bowen: It's a recent song. It's by this one K-pop super group. They're called Red Velvet and they have a—their first big song was Russian Roulette, and there's a clip of that in the documentary.
Matt: I'd like to listen to that.
Bowen: Okay. Let's play it.
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Bowen: My favorite part of the episode was when, you know, there was just this whole segment, this whole run of these infographic clips, these graphs being animated. And that is Vox's penchant, we'll say, because they do these explainer videos. They sort of sort of invented the explainer video in a way. But for this one segment, they just sort of went into the song writing process behind actually Red Velvet, and linking it to, first of all, the Swedish group that sort of wrote the hook. And then they sold it to one group. They didn't end up using it, so then they sold it again to Red Velvet for the song, Red Flavor. And they threw in this little tiny, tiny, tiny, little accent that is an homage to ABBA, where it's from Dancing Queen where it's like, (singing) "Friday night and the lights are," and then it's sort of replicated in Red Flavor in (singing). I'm just mouthing syllables.
Matt: That's true. That is all you're doing.
Bowen: That's all I'm doing. But they just—it's like a...
Matt: It repeats.
Bowen: It's this whole, fun arpeggio with just a bunch of instrumentals.
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Bowen: It's really interesting to see that process. I love it when things sort of break down in those, when an explainer video sort of break it down into those terms. I thought that was just a beautiful visualization of all of that.
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Matt: One point that sticks out to me is when they discuss Psy's, Gangnam Style. And the fact that it was the first music video to reach a billion views, that it was a shock to him as well as everyone involved. And also, hearing that when they put that music video together, they had gone kind of further than they had ever gone with music videos. And it looks like they go pretty far. Like I was watching some of those videos and I'm like, "God, the choreography is insane." Like, they're so talented. And to see that, like this biggest effort that it seems like had been made in K-pop history also seemed to have the biggest impact. And just getting a little bit of a glimpse into what it felt like to be a part of that phenomenon for them, that was pretty cool.
Bowen: Yeah. And it's interesting—I thought that part was interesting, too, where no one sort of saw the success of Gangnam Style.
Matt: Because why would you?
Bowen: Why would you? But actually, the documentary touches on how the big three in K-pop, they're called, it's YG Entertainment, SM Entertainment, JYP Entertainment, these like monstrous factories—well, I'm not calling them monstrous because they're sort of sinister or whatever, but they're just these giant machines. And you'd think that they sort of pump out, crank out these manufactured things like willy-nilly, but the fact that they can have even sort of projected that is very interesting. I'm glad that the documentary touched on that because that is sort of the little undercurrent of controversy that's surrounding K-pop nowadays is like these young people are being placed in these crazy contracts.
Matt: Yeah. That was interesting to see that touched on as well. And it was something that I...
Bowen: Thirteen years.
Matt: Oh, 13-year contracts?
Bowen: Yeah.
Matt: Wow. And it was something that I thought of when they said that they were kind of farmed into these groups and cast in a way. Kind of reminded me of, you know, kind of—not for nothing, but all the horror stories you heard about, you know, Lou Pearlman and the way he would put his groups together.
Bowen: Sure.
Matt: Not necessarily the horror stories about how he put the groups together, but what would happen later on. And, you know, the sheen of that kind of pop phenomenon, like that there's kind of a dark underbelly to it, and especially in a nation where only recently are they becoming like emotionally independent, it feels like, at least in art. You have to wonder what the dark side of that is.
Bowen: Well, the dark side—I mean, to me it was very apparent. They sort of have this jedi-like, sort of forbidden—like they 're forbidden from being in relationships and publicly, sort of, displaying affection. That just seems—that just seems a little still antiquated. That's still like the last little vestigial thing from this culture where, like it might not be sort of outwardly expressed.
Matt: There was also that moment where they were talking about how, you know, as a member of a K-pop group you're really not to answer questions about your own romantic life or ascribe to any sort of lyric particularly to yourself. Like, you're performing it for the audience. Like, I thought that was a very interesting line in the episode where they said, you know, "As a member of a K-pop group, you are for the audience." You're almost like not for yourself or one other person. That was really interesting to me. Like that was very "we are products." And there's almost like an embracing of the fact that they're products that feels a little bit brainwashing to me. But also, I mean, I feel like maybe there's a little bit more of a sinister side to it and it's even more interesting when you think about, like, the positivity and the exuberance and the sheen of the whole operation. Not that I think or know it's evil, but that's something to think about, especially when you know better when you've heard from American artists and British artists.
Bowen: Okay. And if we had a K-pop group, what would it be called, Matt?
Matt: GAG would be fun.
Bowen: GAG is fun, and I think it's 35 people, everyone has jawlines of different definition.
Matt: Hm-hmm [affirmative]. I'm the lead singer.
Bowen: Matt's the lead singer. I'm the—I'm sort of like the—I'm the clipboard holder; that's my role. Because every purpose in a K-pop group is assigned a specific role. I'm the one who holds the clipboard.
Matt: Yeah, you hold the clipboard.
Bowen: I don't know what that means, but I just—it means I have a clipboard with me and I'm constantly referring to it. I'm constantly...
Matt: I think what it means is you're actually—you do do some basic choreography, but you are essentially the manager.
Bowen: I'm a talented manager. I'm a manager and I can like dance. I can do like basic B boy moves and like at live shows, at concerts, like in terms of stage picture, like I'm the one who's walking around doing the choreo, but I'm like sort of head boy. I'm like the principal's assistant. I'm just making sure everyone's accounted for. That's my specialty.
Matt: Well, I had a lot of fun watching this episode and I'm definitely a lot more interested than I ever knew I was in K-pop.
Bowen: Likewise. And I genuinely can't wait to keep watching these Explained.
Matt: They're really fun.
Bowen: Yes, they're really fun. So, hey, bye.
Matt: Bye. And listen to Las Culturistas, haha.
Sean: That was Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang from the pop culture podcast, Las Culturistas. K-pop, Explained is on Netflix right now. And you can catch all new episodes of Explained every Wednesday on Netflix. I Swear You Can't Make This Up, we're back in two weeks to talk about the new Netflix original docuseries, The Staircase, which looks super creepy and super good, and it's a super big bummer that I won't be here, but someone else great will be. You can find me anytime on Today, Explained. Listen on Apple podcast or Stitcher or Google Play or Spotify, all the places you can find You Can't Make This Up. Subscribe, rate, review, tell your friends, tell your mom. You Can't Make This Up is a production of Pineapple Street Media and Netflix. Our music is by Hansdale Hsu. I'm Sean Rameswaram, thanks for listening.
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