The K-Popification of Kendrick Lamar

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The K-Popification of Kendrick Lamar

Welcome back to Fan Chant, a weekly column for K-pop fans, stans, and newbies alike. Today, I had to discuss my favorite trend of the week and the unexpected involvement of Kendrick Lamar. If you enjoy what you’re reading, feel free to subscribe to my companion newsletter to get Fan Chant delivered right to your inbox each week!

As any vaguely online K-pop fan can confirm, standom has its own language. Getting into K-pop can feel akin to jumping on Duolingo, at first — what is aegyo? Why are we calling a release a comeback if this group just dropped new music four months ago? Is maknae a member, and why is it a big deal that they ate first?

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Conversations in this niche are often incredibly silly, and one of my favorite things is whenever fans apply some of the cringier pieces of stan speak to non-K-pop artists to underscore just how ridiculous it can be. Anyone who has experienced the K-pop spiral will know the types of comments I mean; they’re found in Instagram Reels comment sections, cutesy corners of Twitter, and (shudders) YouTube comments. They’re the comments that sometimes lean so far into adorable territory that they end up infantilizing the artist they claim to love.

This week, fresh off his victory at the Grammys, like-minded fans are applying this bit to the one and only Kendrick Lamar.

The wildest part about this trend, which pops up again every now and then, is that these are genuinely all statements I’ve seen applied to real K-pop idols — paw prints for Suga of BTS, “nation’s prince” for any number of handsome singers. Inevitably and thankfully, whenever tweets like that get too much traction, I also see a number of people reminding the original poster that these are grown men, often well into their 20s (if not 30s!). As a result, I can’t get enough of these posts playing off of the cutie patootie nature of the rapper who bodied Drake to perhaps the point of no return.

To me, inside jokes like this — poking fun at our own, not any of the artists — are when K-pop fandom feels the most positive. No corner of standom is a monolith; there are Taylor Swift fans who can assess her work critically, and teenage girls who own AC/DC shirts because they can name more than three songs, thank you very much. And while there are certainly people on K-pop Twitter who posts things like this earnestly, I like to think that there are far more people who are able to support their faves in reasonable ways.

This is what we should be doing! Being deeply unserious is way more fun than fan wars, isn’t it? And, should they ever become widely available, I’ll go on the record as someone interested in a Kendrick photo card. Keep an eye out for the ending fairy during the Super Bowl this weekend.

Song Rec of the Week:

I recently watched RM’s lovely documentary about putting together this album. This song remains my favorite from the project.

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