I’m sure you all are aware that many people harbor prejudice about kpop. One thing I can’t stand is how people pretend to be slow when it comes to interpreting very straightforward lyrics in kpop songs, often accusing a lyric of being stupid and low-effort when this better describes their own attempt to understand it.
I first noticed this last year with comments in a general pop sub about the lyrics of Jennie’s song Zen. Not just one or two, but several different commenters complained that the English lyrics were “gibberish,” citing as an example the line “can’t be two of one.” At this point, I felt like I was going crazy, because this lyric is not even confusing at first glance, much less after a second or two of thought. A thing that’s “one of one” is the only copy of that object in the world. “Can’t be two of one” = you can’t have two identical copies of something that’s unique = you can’t copy Jennie. You’d think I wouldn’t have to explicitly spell this out to people who seem to have no such trouble parsing lyrics from western pop songs that are at least as complex as those in Zen. But when the discussion turns to lyrics in a kpop song, every non-kpop fan involved begins operating on 30 fewer IQ points.
The illiteracy is usually deliberate. After a reactor who doesn’t normally react to kpop listened to aespa’s song Lemonade, there were countless non-kpop fans on Twitter mocking the chorus for being “nonsense.” When one commenter was asked why they thought the lyric “I’ll make it lemonade” was gibberish, they responded that if it’s referring to the English idiom “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade,” then the line should be “I’ll make them lemonade” to make sense. But the lyric is obviously not just an incomplete fragment of the idiom; if you look at the line that appears just before it in the song, you can see that it clearly refers to a singular noun. I’ve provided the lyrics below with the noun and the it it’s aligned with helpfully boldfaced for your convenience:
겁 없이 walk my way
던져 on my stage
I take my karma straight
I’ll make it lemonade
We can see that the noun being referenced by it is “karma,” which the song uses to represent the “lemons” life has given to aespa. The only way someone could screw up their interpretation of this relatively straightforward lyric is if 1) they didn’t bother listening to the line that comes right before the lyric in the song, 2) they’re just dumb as a fucking brick, or 3) they deliberately turn off their brain when talking about the lyrics of a kpop song because they assume the lyrics must be “nonsense” and not worth the exertion of bare minimum comprehension.
In summary, I hate that people act braindead while discussing lyrics in kpop songs because they assume that zero thought was put into the lyrics when, more often than not, zero thought was put into their own interpretation.
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