Kara Bakery -- Sweet-n-Flaky

I do like music, as the first post on this here blog somewhat indicates. I have a funny relationship with Korean pop music. When I first moved here I thought it was insipid and beneath contempt. Then I started to view it as more of a sport -- you have your favorites, your heroes and villians, you root for the ones you like and against those you don't like.

I tend to like girl groups. That is to say, I like Korean girls doing Korean pop music as opposed to the guys. So sue me. That's not to say I don't like any male K-pop artists or songs. But it's probably something like 80-20%, and I'm much more likely to dispise male K-pop artists. At least I'm in touch with my feelings on the matter.

One of the more popular groups going these days is Kara, who, say what you will, produced one of the catchiest songs of the year called Honey. I don't know what other foreigners think about Kara, because we don't talk about this sort of thing. By virtue of being Korean, all Koreans like all K-pop songs and artists, which is probably more the way it ought to be. But I'm a critical guy. I gots me opinions.

Kara are super cute. Sometimes the music jives with me and sometimes it doesn't. Honey is a great song, mostly because of the instrumentation, specifically the synth-washes. I also love the white/purity image they were running with at the time (note the sports metaphor). I say running because Kara changes it's image often, much to the dismay of some foreign bloggers.

So the big news is that Kara has opened its own bakery. As I understand it, the bakery is a TV show concept, but the bakery itself is real. It's part of the Crown bakery chain, the Wondergirls did a similar show/campaign a bit back. As far as Korean bakeries go, I'd place Crown at No. 4 or 5, which isn't very good considering there are about six in total.

So why is this worth posting about? Well, because they each did promotional videos and in this one you get to watch Hara dance around with a phallic, shake her 언덩이 and lick what looks like, um, frosting, off her fingers.



I suppose I could put myself on the couch and really get at my perceptions of gender, the hidden symbols of women in Korean pop music, and how this will play out in the Korean society of tomorrow, but frankly...that would be boring.