Another day, another group getting flamed for sounding bad during an encore. A round of applause for Hearts2Hearts please.
I’ve seen various opinions on encores across the K-Pop subreddits—most of them saying that the singing in encores shouldn’t matter and that idols should just be allowed to have fun and celebrate their win—but I think these takes lack nuance because they don’t acknowledge why the quality of the singing in encores became such a heated discussion topic in K-Pop fandom in the first place.
The reason is because “live” performances on music shows (Music Bank, Inkigayo) and other platforms (Killing Voice, It’s Live) are not truly “live”. Curious fans who just want to know if a group can actually sing or not have to resort to watching encores because for some strange reason, encores are one of the only places left in K-Pop where we can hear what an idol’s raw, unfiltered vocals actually sound like.
To be specific, when you watch a music show performance, a survival show, an episode of Killing Voice, or go to an idol’s concert, etc. one or more of the following is happening to tune up an idol’s singing:
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Lip syncing to the studio recording (this one used to be common but is more rarely used today because it is too easy to identify and it gets you flamed online, so it’s been largely replaced by #2)
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Lip syncing to prerecorded vocals
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Melodyne/pitch correction
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MR so heavy it drowns out the idol’s voice
Even though die-hard fans may cite a Music Bank or a King of Masked Singer performance as evidence that their favs can sing, most people (who’s judgement hasn’t been clouded by fandom goggles) can implicitly hear that these performances have been doctored using one or more of the above techniques.
So this leaves us with encores. Ironically, the fact that encores were considered so unimportant that companies didn’t feel the need to shore up their artists’ vocals in them is what made them become so important that a group’s whole reputation can now be decided by one bad encore performance (looking at you LeSserafim).
In my years of being a K-Pop fan, I’ve personally seen “live” performances get less and less live to the point where the encore really is the only place where you get to hear an idol’s raw live vocals in a stage performance setting. I think it’s a shame because encores are actually not an ideal singing environment. Most of the time, the idols don’t have access to functioning in-ears, the volumes of the microphones are all over the place, a lot of them are emotional over getting a win, and these days there’s a lot of added pressure around sounding good during encores. It’s a perfect storm for disasterclass vocals, and it’s only going to get worse as more and more groups keep getting their encores scrutinized. But also, we have to acknowledge that all these other platforms for supposedly “live” performances aren’t close to being real demonstrations of live singing at all.
My solution is to give idols more opportunities to sing fully live. Especially on shows like It’s Live, there is no reason to pitch correct a performance that doesn’t even have choreography to that extent. The more idols practice singing live without the training wheels, the more comfortable and confident in their vocals they will be. And the more opportunities they have to show off their raw live vocals, the less “weight” there will be on the encore. And of course, fans need to give these idols grace for sounding imperfect!
submitted by /u/PinkGuavaFlower
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