A Rookie K-Pop Idol That You Would Hate to Love

The only K-Pop Group that Korea doesn’t want the world to know 😂

“The number one idol group that we wish they'd only be popular in the domestic market.” 

“I’m so curious what international K-Pop fans would think of this.” 

“Why am I loving this song…? I’m so annoyed LOL.” 

Youtube | BbangSongKuk

These are the comments on a K-Pop Idol group’s MV with now 4.5M view counts. Wondering why people are expressing so much love-hate? The newest drop of the idol group Mad Monster, “MINE RUDOLPH”, is gaining the most attention in the K-Pop scene recently. If you hit that link and watch their MV yourselves, you’ll find out that something’s very VERY wrong in the first 30 seconds 😂 The two members, J-Ho and Tan have freakishly small doll-like faces and sharp jawlines 👽  Their fan club “Pokémons” have been waiting for this fourth digital single since last December when Mad Monster started trending on Youtube with a video that one of J-Ho’s fan uploaded. You can see in this video that MINE RUDOLPH was inspired by the fan, whose nose had gone red from waiting for him out in the cold 🥰

Sports Kyunghyang

Now let’s talk reality. These two men are actually Korean comedians Lee Chang-Ho and Kwak Bum, with a Youtube channel called BbangSongGuk. On the channel they’ve uploaded a comedy series called “Girlfriend Perspective” where they use an overly photoshopped face filter made from the Camera app SNOW (AOS | IOS). The concept was to act out hilariously handsome “boyfriend” characters in the borderline of romantic and cringe, for a supposedly heart-fluttering video. Trust me, this is all comedy and Koreans DO NOT find these men attractive 😂  After a few uploads, viewers ended up finding these cringe-inducing, witty clips make them hit that next episode button! Then one of the videos where they acted as a fictional K-pop idol group “Mad Monster,” went viral on social media very fast.

Ever since, viewers got engaged in this “Mad Monster universe” that was created, and started playing along by commenting as their fans. Comments like “love you J-Ho ❤️❤️❤️” “please upload more videos oppas” led to the two comedians creating a new series called “MadTV”, similar to a K-Pop Idol reality TV Show. In those videos, they showed us everything that a real idol group would do: TMI talks, read-fans’-comments, CQ magazine (parody of GQ magazine) interviews, and the recording process of their new digital single.

Instagram | madmonster_official

As the fan base grew and grew, they actually wrote the song MINE RUDOLPH and released it on music streaming platforms - you can find it on Spotify and Apple Music! The MV gained 1 million views within the first 21 hours of release, a record close to a real idol group's 👏 This song, although filled with auto-tune, is surprisingly enjoyable and quite catchy. Another thing to look for in the MV, is the glimpse of their real faces as the photoshop filter goes on and off 🤣 The popularity of these comedians/idols is huge in Korea, which can be proved by the numerous MV reactions, song covers and dance covers being upload even in this second. Mad Monster also did a collab project with the camera app SNOW, so you can now use the Mad Monster filter for your selfies! If you have the app, give a try yourself 👇

SNOW

Although we’re all loving these crack up idols, the minor concern that Koreans have is the fact that foreigners might think Mad Monster is a real K-Pop group, not realising it’s a comedy act 😂 Yesterday (14/05/21), Mad Monster had their comeback stage in M CountDown like every other K-Pop artists, making them look even more like a real group. Fingers crossed nobody would come across their stage and think “what in the world is happening with K-Pop..? 😅” 

I’ll finish off with some photos of our office team Pokémons! Sending love to our oppas Mad Monster xx Hope they’ll release more and more catchy auto-tune songs in the near future 😍