Four songs that help explain the world

This week’s show takes all four of our popular Elsewhere music segments and puts them together in one special episode! Zack, Jenn, and Alex take you through a range of different acts: pioneering K-pop artists, a dissident Turkish Marxist band, one of Zack’s favorite British indie artists, and a Nigerian spin on Childish Gambino’s “This is America.” They play a bit of each song and then talk about the important messages they contain about the country they hail from. It’s a little break from the headlines, and a chance to learn about international culture and politics from an angle that the show doesn’t usually take. The Suga song we played, “The Last 마지막” Check on Vox’s Netflix show, which has an entire episode dedicated to explaining K-pop. K-Pop stars are increasingly singing and talking about mental health. But it’s still unusual. Most K-Pop is sanitized after years of censorship. It’s fun, fluffy, romantic but chaste stuff, not things like, “I was afraid of people, so I hid in the bathroom and stared at myself.” Vox has all you need to know about BTS, the world’s chart-topping K-pop band. Suicide ranks as the top cause of death among those ages 10 to 39 in South Korea. Grup Yorum are longtime sympathizers of a Marxists terrorist group in Turkey, DHKP-C. Here’s the song we played a short segment from. Currently, 11 members of the band are in jail; two have sought asylum in France. In October, the lawyer defending the arrested Grup Yorum members in trial was himself jailed. “The Fall of Home” by Los Campesinos Falz’s adaptation of “This is America,” “This is Nigeria.” NPR did a deep dive on the song and discussed it with Nigerian scholars.