Falling Down a K-Pop Rabbit Hole... Sorta

I don't think I'll ever be a "K-Pop Stan".

My love of Lee Jung-Hyun's music has been making YouTube recommend other K-Pop themed videos, and I've been noticing something...

The state of modern K-Pop is... not good. Sex scandals, contract scandals, cyberbullying scandals, relationship scandals, health scandals. Pick a K-Pop act that started in the last 15 or so years, and you'll uncover scandals.

However, I notice that these scandals rarely go back to the turn of the millennium. Maybe 1 or 2, like the "Coming of Age" scandal and the BabyVOX scandal, go back that far, but for the most part, they're pretty much relegated to more recent days.

And I think that's the charm of "1st-gen" K-Pop. And of those acts, I don't see a lot of them remaining relevant to the present day. Lee Jung-Hyun is the rare exception, as she's proven herself to be a woman of many talents even long after her most recent track came out in 2013. Singing and dancing, of course... but she is also a top-rate actress and, believe it or not, a skilled chef to boot.

It was a different world in the industry in those days, and i don't know if I could ever get into modern K-Pop as a genre knowing all the shit that now goes on behind the scenes.