Bah. Part of the purpose of the previous post was to make sure I post something else soon, since having a post gushing over K-pop girl groups as my lead post is . . . a little embarrassing? And if these are the last posts of my life, maybe I should be posting more often. Although as my personal history has shown, these likely are not the last posts of my life, despite my immediate plans.

To be clear, I don't consider K-pop as having "artistic integrity" as I've traditionally snobbishly defined it. I like the stuff I do given its artistic limitations as pop music, and I take it for what it is — fun, catchy; I would argue well-written. And K-pop fandom has a lot to do with their cults of personality over consistent musical excellence, which is not in their hands anyway since they aren't the creators of the music.

Some K-pop groups have some say in their artistic direction, even less play any part in the creative process of writing music or lyrics. Or even defining their own roles. Last year, SNSD gave an interview to MTV in New York, and the American interviewer asked how, with nine members, did they decide who would sing what part, and the answer was a no-brainer. They matter-of-factly blurted out that they didn't decide that, their agency did. So I realize that most of these acts are corporate puppets.

Corporate puppets? So are they the artists they think they are? Well, sure, why not? It's part of my taking it for what it is. They think they're artists, they are working hard at it. It's a different artistic standard. My contradicting myself comes up, though, in that I still can't stand pop music as a genre from anywhere else.

Recently I've been testing my ability to even distinguish the difference between the sounds of various girl groups, and the failure is pretty total. I've dumped a lot of K-pop into my iTunes and so when a song that wasn't immediately recognizable from TV promotions comes up on shuffle, for most part I don't know what the song is or who does it, so I try to guess.

More often than not, I come up with a list of who it might be, and rarely can I identify the group just by the music or the voices. Usually a group on the list is right, but not always. Many of them, truth to tell, sound the same, and songs are likely interchangeable among the groups.

This is in contrast with Western rock acts that I've acquired in the past five years with entire collections of albums given to me on an external hard drive. I can name very few songs by The Killers, Stereophonics, Manic Street Preachers, Wilco, etc., but once I hear the sound or the voice, I can at least identify the band.

So strictly speaking, individual K-pop groups don't have a musical identity, and to me that equals no artistic integrity. And even though I've come to love the cults of personality of various groups and it's a little hard to put them down and say I think they have no artistic integrity, that assessment at least squares with my opinion of pop music in general.