Comic Strips

KPop Demon Hunters converted a lot of people, but I was listening to BTS and Blackpink before, and K/DA before them (an earlier cartoon K-pop group, associated with Riot Games, makers of League of Legends, though I've never played League, just enjoyed the music, and the anime series Arcane), and before that, Psy with Gangnam Style.

A lot of K-pop has English lyrics. Some more than others. It's a joy to listen to regardless.

I listen to a bunch of Japanese rock and I love the sounds of the words. If you think about rap, the hardest thing is finding words to rhyme. But, Japanese is a syllable-based language and most of their syllables are "open" (end in a vowel), so this makes Japanese rap really interesting. At the forefront of it, IMO, is Creepy Nuts, whose DJ played the Olympics when they were in Tokyo, and their MC won a bunch of rap battles. (With AirPods and the Android equivalent talking about real-time translation, I'd love to see this guy battle Eminem.) The fun doesn't stop there. Their song Yofukashino Uta inspired a manga, which got adapted into an anime, which featured a couple guys hitting on and being rejected by the main girl. These guys were based on, and in the Japanese dub, voiced by the Creepy Nuts guys. The song itself is absolutely wild, and if you look it up on YouTube and turn on the captions, you can see what they're saying, as it has an official translation. Song title translates to "Stayin' Up Lullaby" and the anime/manga is called "Call of the Night" internationally (both kinda mean the same thing).