NEW YORK – The New York Times has announced it will cease its extensive coverage of the K-Pop scene it had long coveted without really knowing anything about, saying the relationship fizzled after a competing media outlet revealed embarrassing, intimate details of K-Pop’s private musings and extensive use of skin-whitening cream.
The Times said in a statement that it would now move on to the more culturally emboldened drippings of Indonesian dangdut music, Brazilian forró and Liberian gbema — each a “much better match” for the Times that will “fully support our news-hunting aspirations and unceasing quest to be at the vanguard of international stylings” while offering it an offbeat, quirky partner to balance out its staid and time-worn reputation.
A recent article by CNN on the K-Pop industry revealed that the South Korean government had demanded that K-Pop boy groups “stop acting and looking like white teenage girls, lip-synching and performing exactly the same repetitive dance steps concert after excruciating concert.”
CNN also found a private K-Pop diary saying that it “feels like we might be a fraud” and that it longed to express its individuality by maybe attending university, taking up a more challenging activity like wake-boarding, spending more time at home with its own family or adopting a shelter dog.
Although K-Pop admitted in its diary that it regularly ran through tubs of skin-whitening cream in order to appeal to a wider audience outside of Asia but not including Africa, the Middle East and most of South America, it had done so only because it had been pressured to do so by industry executives and foreign media outlets playing on its deepest insecurities.
In light of the CNN report, the Times said it now viewed K-Pop’s musical affectations as “jejune, uninspiring and fakey” and that it felt it had been taken advantage of by K-Pop due to its own propensity to fall into a deep and catatonic-like love for any foreign pop-culture offerings that promised it access to the hidden treasures of non-New York metropolitan area exotica.
“I know, right?” The Times statement said. “Like we should have known better? But The Times takes seriously its mandate to deliver to our core audience original, inspiring content, and we will continue to do so except just without G-Dragon, Jaejoong and Eunwoo.”
The Times said it would now switch focus to other vapid foreign musical genres that cater less exclusively to juvenilia and more to its evolving adult tastes. “We have had our eye on Indonesian dangdut music, in particular, for a long time now and feel like it might be the right time to commit,” it said. “We really like him.”