Asian Junkie Asian pop. Without discretion.
In a rough week for K-pop beating the racism allegations, KISS OF LIFE perhaps provided one of the more egregious examples yet, and it’s honestly just a baffling self-inflicted mess.
So this all started with member Julie and her birthday livestream, which came with a dress code of “old-school hip-hop vibes”. That probably should’ve been a red flag as it is, but whatever. Anyway, things went about as badly as you could’ve imagined as they came on basically dressed as and acting like racial stereotypes of Black people.
“ it was her bday theme” like is the theme for kpop this week just cosplay/stereotype black people? pic.twitter.com/dCH2zWHqZP
— nana(@luvr8hao) April 2, 2025
— n(@niksoooo) April 2, 2025
They took the livestream down, so I’m getting just bits and pieces and I’m sure there’s more, but it’s … a tough watch even as is.
——
In response to the backlash, S2 Entertainment released a statement basically taking the blame for them and saying the intent was to celebrate hip-hop culture or something.
We’d like to address the issues that arose from the content that was uploaded on KISS OF LIFE’s official Youtube yesterday (April the 2nd).
We sincerely apologize for causing discomfort to our viewers, the true purpose of the content was to celebrate hip hop culture where much of the musical inspiration for Kiss of Life comes from. We apologize for our shortcomings in recognizing the negative cultural implications that our content would be perceived as.
Our members and our team promise to approach cultural references with greater caution and respect moving forward and all related content has been removed from all of our channels.
Unsurprisingly, that is not winning anybody over, especially given that they seemed to at least have some doubts about it beforehand.
screenshots of bubble chat translation pic.twitter.com/cqDUGKnDYy
— momajune (@momajunee) April 2, 2025
It also doesn’t help that Julie has previously apologized for rapping the n-word in a song, so you’d think at least she would’ve used that to learn … I dunno, anything.
