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PiperBaron / KPopRepo

A project dedicated to providing translation and background to popular K-Pop songs and groups!
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Project Checkpoint 4: Research Question #15

Open PiperBaron opened 4 years ago

PiperBaron commented 4 years ago

We still need to hone-in on a research question for this project. To do so, I think it'd be helpful to first go over exactly what this project is and why it exists.

The intention of this project is to:

  1. Eliminate the mystery and misconceptions around K-Pop
  2. Give context about the most popular groups/songs, most used terms, what the lyrics are really saying, general way the industry functions, etc.
  3. Provide a wide array of differing groups, concepts, styles, genres, etc. to demonstrate the variety that's in K-Pop

Because translation/lyrical content is a big part of our project, we could ask: How are song lyrics different in Korean vs English? -- or really, how does the constraints of each language affect the way songs are written? Here's a very interesting Reddit post I saw the other day about why Korean lyrics often don't using conventional rhyming schemes that we could use and expand on if we go in this direction. We could also explore idioms, metaphors/similes, and cultural references in the Korean lyrics as well.

Alternatively, we could pivot more into the K-Pop industry and the culture surrounding it instead, and we'd discuss the various limitations (and freedoms) put on idols creatively. We could contrast groups like Stray Kids or Seventeen who have almost all creative control over what they do (they write/compose/produce their own music and choreograph every dance) to groups like Twice and GOT7 with very little (they're just given an already complete song and piece of choreo with no input). The fandom details (fandom names/colors, lightsticks, etc.) would be relevant here. (Side note: this would be a good place to breakdown and use the lyrics from EXO's Obsession, as it comments on obsessive fan culture. Read through the lyrics, they're kinda wild.)

Maybe there's a way to marry these two somehow. I'm not entirely sure which direction we should go, but we can discuss it here.

PiperBaron commented 3 years ago

I think, as a point of analysis, it'd be fun to do a study of line distribution for each song (I mentioned this in my proposal). Line distribution is a term used to describe how many lines in a song are sung/rapped by a given member, usually in comparison to other members. It's something talked about/discussed in the K-Pop fan community often, and I think it might be interesting to explore it here. It'd be best if we could have the visual analyses (pie charts maybe?) right next to each other, so we could show how different some distributions are to others.

Obviously for big groups, giving a fair amount of lines to everyone is difficult, but there's even variety there, too. Seventeen has 13 members, but is known to have a pretty even distribution for most of their songs. Compare that to NCT 127 (with 10 members), who are notorious for having rather unfair distributions for their lines. WinWin (of NCT 127) is famous for rarely getting to sing/rap at all, and most of his lines in Simon Says are shared lines/backing vocals for other members... There's a culture of favoritism and an inherent "unfairness" to K-Pop in general, so this might be an avenue where we can showcase that.