crayon pop ilbe controversy

It wasn’t long ago when Crayon Pop, the goofy five-member girl band, seemed like the hottest new act in K-pop. Now they seem all but toast after its members got too cute with Internet hate speech. The controversy began to build up in June, when Way, one of the Crayon Pop singers, tweeted ''You know you guys were 'nomu nomu’ (very very) awesome today, right? We’re jealous of all your fashion sense. To our nomu cute fans, thank you and thank you.’’ And in an earlier television appearance, Choa was called by another member ''jjeolttuki’’ after coming to the stage dragging a foot. Neither ''nomu nomu’’ nor ''jjeolttuki’’ are commonly advised for everyday speech, definitely not when you’re talking to an Internet or television audience. In the language of ''Ilbe’’ (www.ilbe.com), an online message board dominated by people supporting ultra right-wing politics, these words are disrespectful nicknames for late former Presidents Roh Moo-hyun and Kim Dae-jung, the last liberal candidates to have reached Cheong Wa Dae. ''Jjeolttuk’’ is particularly discomforting because it can be translated as ''a cripple.’’ Kim spent the larger part of his life as a politician with a hitch in his walk after suffering from torture during the military dictatorship. The crisis might have been manageable if Hwang Hyun-sung, the CEO of Chrome Management, which launched Crayon Pop, hadn’t been implying so frequently that he and the singers read and enjoy the postings on Ilbe. Chrome Management officially issued an apology Wednesday over the trouble created by ''nomu nomu’’ and ''jjeolttuki,’’ but it seems to be a case of too little, too late. When entertainers are associated with a website as controversial as Ilbe, however loosely, advertisers will run screaming from them. Auction, the Korean service of eBay, yanked off all its commercials that featured Crayon Pop. Samsung disinvited them from a highly-anticipated music event it was sponsoring. Crayon Pop was expected to sing at halftime in a football match between FC Seoul and Jeonbuk Hyundai Motors next week, but the performance was scrapped after angry protests from fans. Way is in full denial. ''I don’t even know about this website. I just used the words I use all the time. A pig will only see pigs, while Buddha only sees Buddha,’’ she tweeted, leaving Internet readers wondering whether they were just called a hog. Hwang seems to be her equal in intellectual vapidity. In a recent tweet, he wrote ''While talking with a singer, I laughed at something she said, but then, suddenly the mood became all chilly. I realized that joke only works on Ilbe.” Hwang later explained that the singer wasn’t a Crayon Pop member, which was confounding because that’s the only group his company has. In an earlier tweet, he thanked Ilbe users for promoting Crayon Pop. This isn’t the first Ilbe-related controversy involving entertainers. Hyosung, a member of the sexy girl group Secret, stumbled into similar trouble earlier this year after telling a radio DJ ''we don’t do the democratization thing.’’ Between Ilbe users, “democratization” doesn’t mean “to make or become democratic” but something close to “uniformity” and “mob rule.” Hyosung recovered because her popularity in the first place was based on her being voluptuous. Crayon Pop, on the other hand, banked on likability and likability alone. Now it seems they have completely warmed out their welcome.