LMFAO Goes On Hiatus, Is Replaced By Less Insistently Ridiculous Korean Guy

Not sorry enough, it seems.

Have you ever watched a K-Drama? I'm not suggesting you should, or anything, it's just that the more Korean Wave stuff you're familiar with, the easier it is to understand why you might find PSY's "Gangnam Style" a little less annoying at wedding receptions in 2018 than LMFAO's own novelty pop, now that Rockwell's more successful younger brother and their nephew have, at least for the moment, returned to their home planet.

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Anyway, I haven't watched a lot of K-Dramas (and Korean romance movies), but I've seen enough to understand at least some of the appeal. First appealing fact: They aren't in English. A lot of the other things that make mainstream Korean pop culture appealing to people who don't enjoy mainstream American pop culture flow from our inability to understand it. Bad acting isn't quite so bad; bad writing is obfuscated by bad subtitle translations; potentially distracting nuance is gone, and you're left with the broad particulars of a guy and a girl who will never get along but are maybe secretly in love.

Related, second appealing fact: K-Drama characters appear, at least, to be completely sincere in their attempts to be goofy, or heartbroken, or whatever. I can imagine LMFAO making a video about doing a horse-riding dance. Here's the crucial difference: They could never just do a ridiculous horse-riding dance. They'd always be winking at you through their ridiculous sunglasses while they did it.

For a group that wrote songs whose topics ran the gamut from having anonymous sex to getting ready to have anonymous sex, there was something weirdly inhibited about LMFAO, which I guess is part of their appeal if you found them appealing. They never fully committed to their characters; they always--knowingly, I think--left the possibility that they were just slumming it, half as a gag. Theirs was misogyny and stupidity and vapidity prepackaged for people who weren't able to ironize other peoples' misogyny and stupidity and vapidity by themselves--like Ke$ha they partially digested all the worst parts of our pop culture and then spit it into our mouths in a pastiche that was even sleazier for its determined knowingness. Don't worry! all the goofy clothes and the press clippings about their family and their day-trading insist. We don't really like this either!

It's not that you have to take a K-Drama any more seriously than you would Gossip Girl or one of those romantic comedies where the main character is self-aware about being in a romantic comedy; you just have the option of existing in the moment with Dal-rae as she learns that Ji-hwan has lost one of his legs in a car accident right as they were about to confess their love for each other. (Spoiler alert.)