I've been making myself angry by accident lately, and I have to let it all out in a post like this. I'm really sorry, but this is coming from a person who has been in choir and theater ever since elementary school. If you're the person who says or thinks that Lip Syncing is ok because the dance is too hard or it's too much moving around (even though most of the time for performance standards, it's not), then you never had to perform in front of an audience in your entire life before, have you?

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Yes, when you get started on learning both lyrics and dance at the same time, it is not easy because when you first start, not everyone has the stamina of people who you see on the stage. I don't think I ever had the "proper" performance experience until I got into musical theater in college. I was in one musical and I was required to sing and dance at the same time for almost every number I was in, and these were dances that not typical folks have to perform while hundreds of people are watching you. Did I end up doing it? Yes I did actually, and my professors have told me that I was one of the best on the stage because I could perform it without looking like I was breaking character or passing out. I was 21 years old. If you still don't believe me on Broadway singers are not real performers either notion, watch on stage performances of Hairspray, Annie, Oliver, West Side Story, Billy Elliot, Pippin, Chicago, Hamilton, and Oklahoma, then come back to me with your argument.

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Now, pop singers (idols in this case) are a different animal...sort of. While musical theater has pauses in between, dance pop music does not. While you are performing on a stage where thousands upon thousands are watching you, every move you make during a song is an extension of the artist. I feel like these past two generations of Kpop have really put more of an emphasis on dance, which is not bad on paper, but as we can see, they put so much emphasis on it, that by the time the groups have to perform live, they don't even sing live, it's just the vocal track playing over their performance. If I wanted to watch the music video again, I would just go on YouTube and watch the music video as many times I want. I know it's excited to be in the audience when your favorite group is performing, and trust me, I always wanted to do that, too, but how disappointing is it to arrive at a live performance only to see their bodies and mouths move and nothing else?

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I'm about to give a brief history lesson, and don't worry, there's no pop quiz after this. Popular music didn't start circulating profits until the invention of the record player, which was the phonograph in 1877 by Thomas Edison. Of course, more famous pop music of the olden times exploded in the 1910s and 1920s with the rise of the jazz movement. Without jazz, today's genres of pop would not even exist. Since then, the human race has involved music to new and experimental levels no one has ever seen before. You know how or why many songs from the olden days are still remembered today? People sing them. They sing them in private. They sing them in public. They share music with friends and family for entertainment and traditional purposes. Not just pop music but religious, holiday, and rhymes, too. Some of the most famous childrens' games are songs. Being able to project them to people with your own voice is the most powerful thing in the whole world. Some of the most memorable and powerful musical moments were done at live performances. Take Queen's return performance at the Live Aid concert in 1985. Freddie Mercury would never have gotten the entire audience to sing with him had the whole thing been lip synced and prerecorded beforehand, and this was WHILE THE MAN WAS DYING OF AIDS!

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But let's take it back to Kpop roots, hmm? As scammy as those reality competitions are, those competitors can't lip sync in order to get into a group, right? The Masked Singer? The competitors can't win if their vocals were prerecorded. May I remind you of this? Or how about this? I also highly recommend watching ONEUS's live performances because those boys are on another level. Actually, I'm going to use this video to show you what a perfect live performance looks like. The moment I heard the microphones popping, I knew this was real. Even with the stupid microphones, that doesn't stop the boys from sounding energetic and ready for the stage, and this is from The Show of all shows. The boys are on pitch, and they can stay on pitch while jumping around the way that they do. The dance is not overcomplicated, but me as an amateur dancer won't be able to dance and sing to this song on the first try. Now imagine that some boy groups can't even do this dance without lip syncing to it and some of them were even older than ONEUS is.

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But I bet all of you are going to use the argument of, "But what about the rookie groups? They haven't had a lot of experience yet, so they're not going to be as perfect as older groups." So, that begs the question, what do you mean by experience? The last time I checked, aren't idols trained under a company to sound somewhat perfect on stage? If these idols have been training for like five to seven years as people claim, why are groups still performing on stage with a lip sync? If the too hard of a dance is an excuse, the directors could've made an easier dance for them so they can help build the stamina later. Or better yet, how come they didn't get this stamina during trainee training? I was told that training as idol trainees was the most brutal process. Is that not true anymore because of how lazy these companies are being in making sure their idols are performing at their best against other groups? Perhaps this is adding to the problem of idol overworking, but is really making them focus on one aspect of performing going to make these idols perform better as a whole? No. It's only going to make their other aspects sound worse because their companies are basically saying, "Pfft! Ignore singing. Dancing is where it's at!" There is a reason why people always compare the newer gens to the older gens...the older generations were just trained better because the way Kpop was going was still fresh and new so people were working harder to make their idols better than how a lot of them are now. I know a lot of young people don't know much about Gen 1 or Gen 2 idols, but those who are still active in Kpop still sound better or just as great as they did when they first started because these idols knew that they were doing. A lot of the newer younger ones don't, and because of the lack in training and education, they still don't and probably never well.

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At the end of the day, if these people are going to get idols' hopes up by rewarding lazy or even uncoordinated performances, all it will do is nothing good for these idols careers in the future. How will this effect the idols who want to go solo? If they lip sync even in those stages, another Britney Spears controversy is going to happen here. How can they even prep for concert tours? Those require days upon days of doing the same thing and rehearsing over and over and over again. You can't lip sync a concert without fans getting pissed off. The only place I expect lip syncing is if it's a parade (like Macy's Thanksgiving) because there is no set up decent enough to make that sound good live (people have tried and failed). But if you are in a soundstage or a concert hall where the purpose is to create noise so that people can hear it, make your performers sing, please!