K-Pop. Really? No seriously.

I don’t know when it happened.

But somehow, K-Pop has taken over my home.

What’s K-Pop?

What indeed!

K-Pop is short for Korean pop.

No. I’m not Korean.

Why, then, has K-pop taken over your home, you ask?

I have no idea.

One day it wasn’t there, and the next it was.

I come home and K-Pop Tasty Road, or KCon (the K-Pop conference), or some other inane candy-colored show is on my beautiful 42″ Samsung.

Is that a Korean set? Hmmm…

Thinking back, K-pop has been creeping insidiously into my life for a minute.

It started with Iron Chef.

And then Smile Again Donghae.

Soon Tasty Road and Hello Pop were added to the mix.

Then came Mnet.

And my demise.

Mnet is everything K-pop.

Even though they play the same things over and over in an endless loop of dancing robotic young Asians, somehow I can’t seem to break its hypnotic grip.

I can’t tell one boy group from another.

GOT7, BTOB, TOPPDOGG, LunaFly, FT Island…

A bunch of androgynous boys clad in tight-fitting leather.

Very Boy George, the lot of them.

Girl groups are no different.

RunDevilRun, 2NE1, Girls Generation, Lip Service, 4Minute…

A stage full of six or seven gyrating automatons.

Singing or rapping their little hearts out.

I don’t get it.

Perhaps if I were a young Asian girl, I’d be all in.

But I’m not.

So I’m not.

I blame the wife.

She’s all into the crisp clean lines and manicured…well, everything.

There is something to be said about the highly stylized nature of K-pop content.

But the homogeneousness of it all makes it monotonous, quickly.

And since you really can’t tell one group member (much less one group) from another, I don’t get it.

Clearly though, there are millions that do.

Whatev.

Hopefully the kids will pick up Korean the way foreigners pick up English from watching tv.

I doubt it, but who knows.

What I do know is that since I’ve been paying attention, there are a number of new programs out there.

Far more than there were a year ago.

And this trend tells me that Kpop is here to stay.