In the fall of 2009, while rookie groups like BEAST and MBLAQ were going toe-to-toe, one mustn’t overlook the significant contributions from other artists that seemed to resonate with the beauty that comes along with the fall and winter seasons. I’m talking about the likes of Superstar K’s Seo-in-Guk, U-Kiss, Wheesung, Hwanhee, and Taeyang. Let’s get it.

This trend of releasing melodic sounds, it seems to carry over the years. The summer is full of club bangers and school anthems. But when the leaves start to brown and the wind turns chill, when the sweaters come out, that’s when the laid back hits start to wash over.

In the fall of 2009, several interesting things happened. First, this was around the time that I became a regular on a relatively new website devoted to kpop called Allkpop. These days, Allkpop is the standard by which everyone goes to for the latest and greatest news coming from South Korean entertainment. For the most part, it seems reliable and trustworthy… “seems”.

Back then, in 2009, I had to take it with a grain of salt. Allkpop was reliable when it came to publishing the release dates, the music videos, and teasers for my favorite artists. The downside, was that Allkpop was extremely biased back in the day and they know it. If you read my chapters about DBSK and Casseiopeia, then you’d understand. That fandom was real. And anyone who threatened the popularity of DBSK and SM Entertainment artists was a threat. That threat was none other than Big Bang.

Thus, if you go back and check out some of their articles released before 2009, you get a lot of trash talking where they’re straight up dissing Big Bang and YG artists. They may have deleted a lot of it, but I’m telling you it was real. Even when G-Dragon came out with his solo album that was undeniably good, the Allkpop author writing an article about it would give their two-cents where they’d give some credit, with backhanded criticism. Kind of like the news does with Pres. Trump these days. Where they’ll say, “Pres. Trump condemns white supremacists, but refuses to change gun laws…” He did something good…but he’s still bad. That effect.

4-MEN – Knock Knock Knock

However, Allkpop would get better as they came along. I think they took notice of the comments and how a lot of us were dissing the Allkpop writers for their unwarranted criticism of our favorite artists. Gradually, they realized that while DBSK had more fans internationally (out of the states), domestically and within the U.S., we mostly favored the sound of Big Bang and 2NE1. If you don’t want to lose readers, you gotta curb your hate and cater to them. So that’s what Allkpop did. Continue Reading