In-depth analysis of CN Blue
If you thought that obscure Korean pop was beyond the remit of this blog then time to think again. CN Blue are a boy band that were brought to my attention by a number of my students who listed them as their ‘favourite stars’. Now, aside from the inherent wussyness of teenage boys liking boy bands, this intrigued me enough to find out more.
I’m glad I did – the band’s back-story is hilarious enough in itself.
See, they’re very deliberately named CN Blue. The CN part stands for code-name. I thought one of the basic principles of a code-name was that it had to be…you know…code for something, and not widely publicised. Seeing as the presumably real names of each band member are readily available via a quick Google search, there doesn’t seem to be much point in them having a code-name. But you know, let’s not quibble about trivial things.
Just kidding, let’s make that the sole purpose of this entire post/blog.
The obsolete ’codename’ prefix isn’t the funniest part of the band’s name though. They’re called ‘blue’ because that’s a handy acronym representing each band member’s personalities, ‘burning’ ‘lovely’ ‘untouchable’ and ‘emotion’.
Strange adjectives to define individual personalities by aren’t they? Plus ‘lovely’ isn’t really in keeping with the others, who are so intense their personalities can only be described by abstract concepts. Unless the ‘burning’ guy is always starting fires.
I mean ‘lovely’ is a bit too much a word that a grandmother would use to describe someone. I’d like to know if he protested at all when they were deciding on a name. ‘Aw man, lovely? Really? But you get to be ‘untouchable’, and you get to be ‘burning’! Can’t I be ‘lightning’? Or at least ‘likeable’?’ – No, you’re lovely and that’s that.
And ‘emotion’ sounds like a weak insult a school bully would give to a kid who cries all the time.
It’s also handy how the definitive attributes of each band member come together to make the word ‘Blue’, if I tried that with 4 of my friends the best I’d end up with is WDSP. Which is probably one of the reasons why I’m not a Korean pop star – the other reasons being that I’m not Korean and have no talent.
Also the ‘W’ stands for wanker.
