Coming To a Stage Near You!

   There hasn’t been a whole lot of room for new girl groups this year with the hundreds of not so good boy bands that have debuted recently. There is hope though! All that is going to change next month when two of KPop’s well-known labels unleash new girl groups onto the KPop scene.

   GM Contents Media (sister label of Core Contents Media; home of T-ara and Davichi) is set to debut a new 7-member group called Gang Kids sometime next month.  Meanwhile, Pledis Entertainment, home of After School, K-Diva Son Dam Bi, and rookie boy band NU’EST, will launch the six-member Hello Venus on May 9th.
Both groups are already two of the most buzzed about of the year, and with their debuts both set for May, there’s going to be a lot of fun and friendly competition over which group does better, and which group actually is better.
So, let’s take a look at our two contenders!

 Gang Kids

   Our first contender is Gang Kids! Really?? Gang Kids? Well so far we know that the group is made up of three actresses, two models, and two trainees. They’re currently being overseen by CCM CEO Kim Kwang Soo, who you may know as the evil genius behind T-ara. They’re much older than your typical rookie group. Five of the girls' ages have been confirmed with the eldest coming in at 29, the youngest 22, and the other three three somewhere in-between.
Gang Kids’ first single is produced by Shinsadong Horang (Hit songs for B2ST, 4minute, T-ara), and CCM has made the hefty claim that the song is, “an upgraded version of Roly-Poly and Lovey-Dovey with a mature concept.” On top of the musical comparisons, the group will also follow in T-ara’s footsteps by releasing a ridiculously long music video for the song, which was shot with T-ara in Europe and comes in seven different parts. My gosh that's a lot of parts..
   There’s been a lot of criticism about the group’s name ‘Gang Kids’ since it was first announced, and they’ve already become a bit of a laughing stock across the KPop blogosphere. I despised the name at first too, but now it’s really grown on me, kind of. It’s not supposed to be taken so literally, and given the group’s bad girl, rough-around-the-edges look, I’d say that it’s just about capturing the rebellious nature of youth and never letting go of it — even when you’re pushing thirty like some of the Gang Kids are.
    Gang Kids have really caught my interest so far. There’s a big opening in the KPop market for more older female groups like Nine Muses and Brown Eyed Girls, so it’ll be nice to see some actual women debuting with a mature concept, rather than the typical young girls who like to play grown-up. I’m not expecting Gang Kids to be terribly talented on the music front given their backgrounds in modelling and acting, then again singers become actors and models later on, but I think they’ll follow T-ara by being very conceptually strong, which should definitely prove interesting.
    The biggest problem with Gang Kids is that they could end up being too similar to T-ara, just like EXO is to SHINee/Super Junior/TVXQ, so hopefully Kim Kwang Soo has something exciting up his sleeve to set them apart.

 Hello Venus

   Let’s take a look at Hello Venus (stylized HELLOVENUS). The six-member group has already been courting major media attention after being officially billed by Pledis as After School‘s ‘sister group’, as well as by unveiling a very eye-catching teaser photo. I have no idea what the exact image they’ll debut with will be, but the concept in their flowery teaser picture reminds me a bit of A Pink combined with BoA’s arty look for the Hurricane Venus album. It’s unique, distinctive, and I love it.
    So far we know that three of the Hello Venus members are 19-years-old, and that one is 24. Three of them were Pledis trainees who featured on After School’s Virgin album under the name Pre-School Girls (I always wondered who the hell the Pre-School Girls were!), and the other three are actresses from a different agency who were picked up by Pledis to join the group. Also, Hello Venus’ leader Ara, who was one of the Pre-School Girls, almost joined After School instead of E-Young at one point! She was featured on the After School’s Happy Pledis single-album back in late 2010.
    There’s no specifics details on Hello Venus’ first single yet, but according to reports, it’ll be a dance song helmed by a famous producer. Ooh interesting!
One of the most interesting aspects about both Hello Venus and Gang Kids is that half the members of each group are actresses, and not wannabe musicians, dancers, or artists like you’d expect. Given the huge success that T-ara has had by having half of their members being popular actresses, Eunjung, Jiyeon and Hyomin, it could be that many new groups are now trying to repeat the winning formula.

 (Screenshot of Eungjung as Baekhee and Miss A's Suzy as Hyemi in Dream High)

   So many boy bands have debuted recently, and only a few like B.A.P. have actually impressed me, so it’ll be nice to get a break from all that with some new girls to listen to. Both Pledis and Kim Kwang Soo have put a lot of money into their respective new groups, as well as a lot of time and energy on pre-promotion, so I’m expecting BIG things next month. Especially since CCM seem to have learned from their prior mistakes with Co-Ed, 5dolls, and most recently, SPEED, not that I don't like them, they do have some good songs.
So, which group do you think will do better? And which one has captured your interest the most? Gang Kids or Hello Venus!

An Idol's Life

  The word 'idol' first meant an inanimate object of worship, but it has evolved to include modern celebrities. On the Korean pop music scene, 'idol groups' are bands consisting of boys or girls in their teenage years or early 20s. And in recent years they've dominated the music industry. But  these stars aren't built in a day. To become a member of one of these bands, young children go through years of grueling training - all without any guarantee of success in the end. Being an idol usually calls for tough schedules and dance practices, but many have revealed what they’ve done to go the extra mile and get that distinguished ‘oomph’ in their figure. How far do these idols go to obtain and maintain their sexy and fit bodies? 

Actor Lee Jung Jea ate ginseng chicken soup 3 times day for 4 months to help achieve his amazing core

    

   Remember Kim Ah Joong from 200 Pounds of Beauty? She has the sexy, most desired body of the post-surgery Kang Hanna. She, along with Oh Yoon A and Cho Han Sun jump rope about 3,000 times everyday! I don’t even think I can count or think straight once I get that high.

   To train for Ninja Assassin, Rain hired trainers who trained the actors of “300.” He trained eight hours a day for eight months! As for diet, he only ate skinless chicken breast, raw fish, potatoes and salad. If he wanted spice, he would add some black pepper. Occasionally he treated himself to beef cooked in plain water. He cut his body fat from 12% to 5%!

    After Secret’s Zinger showed off her V-line, netizens began looking for the “Zinger Diet.” A supposed diet plan stated, “Morning 1 piece of toast with fat free milk, afternoon 1 sweet potato, evening 1 cucumber.” The menu varied from apples or chicken meat but most of the foods had very little calories and supplements to an insufficient full day meal. Fortunately, Zinger posted these wise words on her minihompy, “The diet plan that was revealed through media is not my daily meal plan. I definitely did not diet that way. You could ruin your health with that diet plan so please don’t follow it. Please lose weight slowly with constant exercise and food intake control. Through hard practice and diet, I will work to be Zinger who shows her good side.”

Well said, Zinger!

    The Wonder Girls , the girl group whose debut became the first by any Korean musicians to make it onto the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 Singles chart, lost a member to the stress of idol life. Sun-mi announced she was leaving to focus on her studies. The 19-year-old's decision came during the group's U.S. tour in 2009.
 "It was such a happy and precious experience for me to be on the tour of 50 U.S. cities and perform on the stage, but I came to wonder, can I go on living like this?' Sun-mi said in a statement later released by the group's management agency JYP Entertainment.
   Sun-mi's announcement not only jolted fans, but also stirred up controversy about the pressure on idol performers - either yet a trainee aspiring to be an idol star or already such a one - to maintain a schedule some say is too hard for a teenager to bear.

    Korean entertainment agencies look out to create idols, which they then also manage, maintain well-ordered training programs. Prospective talents in music or acting register with an agency, then, if accepted, undergo four to five years, on average, of training before their debuts. During that process, the company may require the aspiring star to live in a boarding house with colleagues (or rivals), go on a strict diet with regular weight checks and put in more than 10 hours of practice a day. The trainees under the entertainment label of their choice don't exactly know when they will debut,if that ever arrives

   Jo Kwon(2AM) and Min(Miss A) go way back as they had trained under JYP Entertainment for 8-10 years