SUPER JUNIOR T: How I learned to stop worrying and love Asian pop music

The entertainment industry in North America is protected by a nearly impenetrable language barrier. For the most part, we don't accept to music, movies, or television in other languages. We are the Anglo-world. If you want us to pay attention you have to speak English, and we have the buying power to reward you for your efforts. There are some exceptions to this, of course. Bruce Lee, Il Postino, La Bamba...but generally-speaking, we hold that anything not produced in English is second class. We send entertainment out to the huddled masses of the world, not the other way around.

A small country like Thailand can't afford to be so discriminating. Thailand has its own cadre of moviemakers, pop artists, and television channels - much of which it exports to neighbouring Cambodia and Laos. But it is also very open to foreign sources of entertainment. Thai academics are constantly complaining about the pervasive influence of Japanese cartoons on Thai youth. Of course they love to watch Hollywood movies, Chinese soap-operas, and Japanese game shows dubbed into Thai. But they also enjoy music from Britain, France, Korea, Philippines, Japan, in their original languages. I was flipping through the channels the other day and caught a music video from a Korean boy band called Super Junior T. It seemed strange to me that Thais would watch music videos in a different language. (Foreign languages are even more foreign when they're not English). Why would they watch a non-English music video when they couldn't understand the Korean lyrics?

But as I watched Lee Teuk, Shin Dong, (and their four bandmates) try to win the heart of a beautiful girl, act out their various shenanigans, and execute flawlessly choreographed dance moves in their matching shiny-sequined jackets, I forgot that songs even have lyrics. It was then that I realized the truth about the music industry: there's very little music in it. It's more about beautifully frosted Yu-gi-oh! hair, and a hip-hop rhythm, and an advanced pyrotechnics program in the background. Best of all, you can enjoy all these things no matter what language the performers sings. The fact that our own music industry is not so different should not be terribly surprising to anyone. After all, does anyone really care what Justin Timberlake or Christina Agurillera is singing about? We just want to watch them pop, lock, and jam.

Like all greater truths, I found this realization to be quite disturbing. But then I turned back to the video, where Shin Dong and his mates were popping out of a whack-a-mole game while a beautiful Korean girl tried to hit them each with a mallet. As I watched those lovable rascals driving a cardboard car and goofing off in a Confucian classroom environment, I forgot all about unintelligable lyrics, and everything was just...entertaining.